Ana Marie Bell, Fall 2009
Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, in his essay “Today, the Balance of Stories,” advocates the telling of “hitherto untold stories, along with new ways of telling” as a means of healing the trauma of cultural dispossession and advancing a “universal conversation” that respects the validity and vitality of all human stories (Achebe 82). Achebe, whose writing career spanned Nigeria’s reclamation of independence from the United Kingdom, put forth the idea that when one voice dispossesses another in the articulation of a peoples’ experience of the world, there is a loss of identity that utterly debilitates the dispossessed. He writes that “the act of dispossession and its continuing aftermath of cultural loss and confusion can usher in ‘a season of anomy’” (Achebe 80) that results in a “badly damaged sense of self” (Achebe 81). At its core, dispossession is a matter of identity as cultures depend on unique and fully developed awareness of one’s own self, adjusted over time to accommodate idiosyncrasies; any dominating interloper, with a different point of view and different culture, threatens to unseat the inner lives of the people who have shaped and been shaped by their self-scripted culture. While Achebe speaks in particular about the dispossession of Native people from their cultures at the hands of colonizers, we can use his ideas to understand the struggles of James Baldwin’s homosexual protagonist David within the patriarchal, homosexual culture that backdrops his novel Giovanni’s Room, and also to begin to understand the importance of Baldwin’s “re-storying” of this silenced culture.
On the surface, David appears to be of a “dominant culture,” hard to relate to Achebe’s silenced Nigerian people but clearly identifiable with their possessors. David describes himself as a descendant of people who once “conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains” (Baldwin 1) and were capable of doing so again; an American ex-pat in Paris in the new post-War world of the late 1940s, he is a man whose identity is inseparable from people who can persevere and triumph even against death. Internally, however, David is vulnerable; juxtaposed with his legacy of ancestral victory is the very first image we have of him, where he has “a drink in [his] hand, […] a bottle at [his] elbow” and a conscious lack of care that he “may be drunk by morning” (Baldwin 1) as he awaits the death of the man he loves. His forefathers killed men and defied death, and here is David acting as an anomaly, in love with a man and terrified to see him die. His provenance gives him a community, but on the night of his desperation there is no person to watch with him and take from him his whiskey, because the nature of his tribulation puts him outside of that community, dispossesses him from the culture that runs according to a different script than the one written by his experiences.
David grew up in a world where a man was at his best “handling all […] men as though they were his brothers” and “strutting like a cock” before women who flirt with them and are watchful (Baldwin 12). These men and women marry and set up families where wives and sisters are “at the mercy” of husbands (Baldwin 125), and fathers and sons know each other at a “merciful distance” (Baldwin 17). In this way it is a script at once commitment-bound and lacking candor, functional and routine and subsequently not prone to upheaval. As David moves through the world, he finds the script a constant, deep-rooted and universal; he hears it from the lips of his Italian landlady, who assures him that he will find happiness when he goes to “find [himself] another woman, a good woman, and get married, and have babies” (68); it stares him down through history from the old wallpaper in a small Parisian apartment, where a “lady and a hoop skirt and a man in knee breeches perpetually walked together, hemmed in by roses” (86). The solidity and security that the script offers inveigle society into promoting and perpetuating it; David himself, even when in a homosexual relationship, yearns for the prescribed woman who will “be for [him] a steady ground, like the earth itself, where [he] could always be renewed” (104). He and others who strive for these models respond to their safety but fail to recognize how their heterosexual delineations dispossess many people from any identity within them. The focus on “men,” and “ladies,” children, goodness, and happiness leaves little to interpret who the players and what their stories might be; they provide no vocabulary for any alternative.
These are the cultural narratives that are always running below the surface of David’s seminal society, hinted at in relational patterns, but described like a web of safety, not a menace to peoples’ sense of self. The rigidness of its heterosexual norming doesn’t come to light unless it is challenged; though David grew up hearing his father thundering, “all I want for David is that he grow up to be a man. And when I say a man […] I don’t mean a Sunday school teacher” (15), he never hears such statements qualified any further, nor does he encounter the dispossessing power of these suggestions until his very first homosexual encounter with his adolescent friend, Joey. David’s own experience of their night together is characterized by love and a conviction of rightness; he feels that “a lifetime would not be long enough for [him] to act with Joey the act of love” and that they “gave each other joy that night” (Baldwin 8). However, it isn’t long before the implications that lie heavily within his father’s speech begin to pollute his rendering of the event, and he begins to feel ashamed and afraid. Joey’s body, which in his sight had been “the most beautiful creation [he] had ever seen” (Baldwin 8), suddenly seems to present “the black opening of a cavern” that teems with “rumor, suggestion, of half-heard, half-forgotten, half-understood stories, full of dirty words” (Baldwin 9). What David was innocently wont to describe as something joyful and beautiful becomes fearful to him, a black cavern in which he would “be tortured till madness came” and “lose his manhood” (Baldwin 9). How David might define joy or dirtiness has no bearing on the possibility of his relationship with Joey, because love and the expectations of manhood have already been defined for him. David fears contradicting them because doing so is stepping into treacherous blackness. Short of contradicting them, however, his only option is to allow himself to be dispossessed, and keep up appearances by stifling his identity, choking down a personal telling that could couple innocence and homosexuality.
David sees the larger dispossession that follows these unbalanced voices when he goes abroad in search of a less restrictive culture. In the gay community that he flirts with in Paris he finds the manifestation of the half-understood words and rumors from home, depicted in a grotesque parody of human relationships. As David describes the silenced souls who haunt his new community, “one could never be sure […] whether they were after money or blood or love. They moved about the bar incessantly […] with something behind their eyes at once terribly vulnerable and terribly hard” (Baldwin 26). Though the men of this community follow a different script than the one of David’s past, their culture is but a response to the overarching one that he fled. They are presented to society in comparison to the heterosexual model, presented alternately as fools and cowards, who buy one another and use one another; they are described as shameful, contemptible, and always dirty, “all of them, low and cheap and dirty” (Baldwin 105). The dominant script has relegated theirs to a space where relationships are commodified and all their actions pre-defined as dirty. This leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of dispossession because, as a decrepit veteran of le mileu insists, “if you think of [gay relationships] as dirty, then they will be dirty […] because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and [your lover’s]” (Baldwin 57). David experienced this firsthand after his encounter with Joey and goes through it again with Giovanni: unable to assert his own voice over the dirty words of his culture, he drew silent and let society’s condemnation color his experience, though his only hope of lifting up his experience to be accepted in society lies in his own conviction of its worthiness.
This is the loss of self-identity that Achebe’s Nigerian people contended with before their liberation, the same inability to articulate one’s own experience and shape one’s own culture over the verdicts of a dominant voice. The outside script creates confusion and despair within the people who cannot fit themselves into it, as it does in David’s when he cannot define his love-affair with Giovanni except in the restrictive terms society has given him. When, emboldened by his new love to ignore the voice of society, David’s heart speaks for itself, he says that “our life together held a joy and amazement that was newborn every day” (Baldwin 75). Here again we see David describing a homosexual love that is worthy and natural, but it is a love that culture has decreed futureless. Already ingrained in David is the opinion that “men cannot be housewives” (Baldwin 88), that two men cannot have a functional life together; though he loves and is loved by Giovanni, time wears on and society does not countenance any expression of a life as he would have it; and so it dispossesses him from his self-identity once again, forcing him to surrender any future with his love until he can articulate a story that can hold out against the overriding script.
Though within the book, our narrator never seems to come to a point where he begins to “re-story” himself, to reclaim his power to make his own declarations against the script of his society, by writing David’s story, Baldwin begins to lay down an avenue where such declarations are possible. His telling exposes the scripts that are otherwise manifest only when they are contradicted. Where David struggles with society, we see that his experience does not align with that which has been prescribed; David’s incompatibility with both the mileu and the patriarchy of his homeland raises the question of there being a third script that needs to be written — not Giovanni’s Room, necessarily, but a story that comes from the inside, one that addresses the intricacies of homosexual identity and lays the framework for a new exploration of a homosexual culture that can coexist with the heterosexual one without giving the latter the power to dispossess it. As Achebe saw Nigeria claim independence in his lifetime, so did Baldwin witness the beginnings of a culture that allowed more open homosexual expression towards the end of his. However, repossessing one’s culture, as Achebe describes the processes, is ongoing; culture is renewed or threatened every time it comes up against a conflicting voice. Baldwin’s work in writing David’s story is significant because it takes the stifled voice of one person and makes a bid for a third script that can showcase it– and in so doing, it promotes scripts of unchecked quantity, however many necessary to ensure the balanced, universal conversation that allows all people to possess their own identity as David never could.
Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua. “Today, the Balance of Stories.” Home and Exile. New York: Anchor Books,
2000. 73-105.
Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room. New York: Dell, 2000.