Love, Black, Gay and Providence

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	• Just Above My Head James Baldwin Delta, 2000 - 592 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A reader

From the moment I read the first page, I have loved this novel. I have read it several times and each time the characters come to life and I find myself caring about them. Hall has to deal with so many issues--least of all, is Ruth the woman he truly loves or should he be with the evangelist? Arthur-the gay gospel singer who sometimes would just as well have a drink or a man than sing the gospel, but who sang it so well when he chose to. Then there are the complex lives of their friends and parents that seem so real and yet so tragic. Baldwin created a masterpiece!

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An artist of words

Probably one of the more underappreciated novels in American literature. It is unfair to charecterize Baldwin as merely a social critic of the civil rights era. He stands alongside Dickens as one of the great writers of any era, with the ability to articualte an understanding of human nature that trancends any era and stands second to none.

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One of my favorites

This is one of my favorite Baldwin novels. Only someonle with Baldwin's background could so poignantly express who Arthur was and how he felt about his music. An excellent piece and a must read!

Love, Black, Gay and Providence

This novel is a testament in a way, the testament of a man who has lived long and well, too much even and too hard, in the world. A testimony too. Every single event in this novel about a black man who became a gospel singer and then a blues singer is the crystalisation of the whole history of Afro-Americans in the USA, the whole history of each character that is living the event through, the whole past and future of a present that is both crooked and promising. That is the very dilemma of this book, a dilemma that we feel and sense everywhere, on every page. Each moment in the life of these characters is the condensation of the cosmic, historical and human past of the individual and the sublimation of all possible wishes, desires, potentialities that this individual has developed in his situation and with his heritage. The novel may appear as very pessimistic because one cannot evade their heritage. But it is tremendously optimistic because one can always choose to realize their dreams, even if the situation around limits the possibilities and the chances to succeed. The aim of life is not to succeed, but it is not to fail, hence to move forward a few steps, and that one can always do it, even if it entails a lot of suffering and a lot of pain. Baldwin is also very optimistic about the world, about human beings, about Afro-Americans because he believes and tries to demonstrate that this forward progress of the pilgrims we are is fuelled by the happiness one gets from life, and that happiness comes from one's effort to accept what may provide happiness, no matter what that is, and the first thing to accept is love, no matter what form it may take. Yet there is a limit for Afro-Americans, a limit and a contradiction : they have great difficulties thinking in other terms than racial terms. They have been the victims as a « race » of deportation, slavery, discrimination, in a word a holocaust, and they cannot differenciate between the whites who are responsible for that fate, those who have made a direct profit out of it, even if many others have been able to enjoy some improved conditions thanks to the exploitation of black slaves, and the whites who have no responsibility in this historical process. How can we put on the same level, in the same boat the slave owners, the slave traffickers on one side, and the serfs that could only survive between famines, and the workers who were exploited too in the factories, and still are ? How can we put in the same bag the pharmaceutical firms that let Africans die because they don't want generic drugs to be produced and the workers of these pharmaceutical firms who are exploited just the same, even if in another way : the research and the patents the bosses want the poor to pay at the highest price, and in this very case most of these firms are American in the world, have been produced by workers who should be considered as the owners of their work and are, too often, paid a pittance when compared with the riches their bosses get out of this work. That's James Baldwin's dilemma. He hardly can discriminate between the white corn and the white chaff, and the white chaff is the workers, those who create the riches of the white corn. Some chapters become extremely poignant when this issue is brought up here and there and when Black Arthur cannot accept to love and be loved by white Guy, just because Guy is white and considered by principle as an accomplice of what the lords of the white « race » have done in history. And one of James Baldwin's concluding thoughts is : « To undo the horror, we repeat it ». And not to repeat the horror of the killing of a black man by some whites (like Peanut for instance), Baldwin makes his Arthur die in London, in a pub where he is the only black man, and by falling in a state of amazed drunkness on the stairs leading to the restrooms in the basement, at a moment when love had been slightly roughened by life into a distance that could have been avoided if love had not gone through a storm in what appears like nothing but a glass of water, the glass of water of everyday life.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

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Best Baldwin

This book is the best book I have ever read in my life. Its emotionally naked grappling with what race and violence has done to our country is painfully acute and brutally honest. Every American should read this.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this novel with a stunning, unforgettable experience. Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the homosexual passion of Giovanni's Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work. Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses--and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land.

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