Kai Wright: Hey, it's Kai. This is the final episode of our special series, Notes on a Native Son. If you're hearing it for the first time, don't worry, you're in for a great conversation about James Baldwin and the enduring power of his words. You should know there are many, many more conversations just like this one. You can find them in this podcast feed and at wnyc.org/baldwin. Recent episodes explore Baldwin's complexity, his courage, his compassion. We even hear from a few folks who knew Baldwin personally, including his biographer, David Leeming, and another literary icon, Nikki Giovanni. Anyway, I'm going to hand it over now to host Razia Iqbal for this last installment of Notes on a Native Son. Hope you enjoy.

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Razia Iqba: Hello, my name is Razia Iqbal. Welcome to episode 11 of Notes on a Native Son, a podcast about the writer James Baldwin. This year, 2024, marks the 100th birth anniversary of a man unique in American letters. James Baldwin was many things to many people. Novelist, essayist, seer, icon, activist. For Baldwin, though, such lists were meaningless. Who and what James Baldwin was and what is his legacy can't really be listed, but it can and perhaps should be found in his work. He refused any attempt to box him in.

This podcast tries to get close to the idea of getting to know Jimmy Baldwin through his work and for those who love his words to return to them. We've called it Notes on a Native Son after one of Baldwin's most famous autobiographical essays, Notes of a Native Son. That's an essay that powerfully clarifies what he is and what America is on his terms. In each episode of Notes on a Native Son, we invite a well-known figure to choose a special or significant James Baldwin passage. The conversation that ensues tells us as much about Baldwin's story as it does about the person who loves Jimmy, as he was known to all who loved him.

Our guest on this episode of Notes on a Native Son is the British writer and curator Ekow Eshun. He has been described as a cultural polymath, a man at the heart of cultural conversations and shaping them for decades. At a startlingly young age, 29, he was the first Black editor of a mainstream magazine, Arena, and continued to break new ground when he became the first Black director of a major cultural institution, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, a stone's throw from Buckingham Palace on The Mall in London.

These days, as chairman of the commissioning group for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, he leads one of the world's most famous and sometimes controversial public art projects, always worth a visit if you're in London. He's not only a writer of his own story, he also engages in issues relating to identity, popular culture, and masculinity. The latest exhibition he curated takes its title from James Baldwin, The Time Is Always Now. It is a landmark study of the Black figure and its representation in contemporary art. It opened in London and travels to multiple venues in the US, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

His choice of Baldwin's work is informed by a book he's written called The Strangers, which is about five prominent Black figures and their sense of isolation and exile. We met with Ekow Eshun at Princeton University, where he happened to find himself talking about art curation and, happily for us, Jimmy Baldwin.

Ekow Eshun: I'm Ekow Eshun, and the quote I've chosen is from James Baldwin's essay Stranger in the Village. Quote is, "People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them."

Razia Iqba: Ekow Eshun, thank you so much for joining us for this podcast. Why have you chosen that particular quote?

Ekow Eshun: For me, it encapsulates almost all of Baldwin's worldview in one line. It does the other thing which I think Baldwin is exceptional about, which is it stands for the personal, the particular, and the political all at the same time. It sits within the essay Stranger in the Village, which he wrote at the start of the 1950s. He's in the Swiss Alps, in this tiny village.

Razia Iqba: Loèche-les-Bains is the village between Milan and Lausanne.

Ekow Eshun: He's there with his lover, his partner. He visits that village on three occasions and reflects how despite going and coming and coming and going from there, he remains, as he describes it, a stranger in the village. The thing about Baldwin's version of that, it's a very nuanced understanding or reflection on what that can mean, what it means to be an outsider, to be judged an outsider, but also what it means to be able to look from the position of an outsider, both at the particularity of your circumstances in that village and then, more widely at Black presence in the West as a whole, Black diasporic, traveling and being. It does all of these things.

That line, "People are trapped in history, history is trapped in them," it's not at the beginning, it's not the end of the text. It's somewhere in the midst, somewhere in the first third when he just makes this reflection. It's such a great inflection point because it's a sudden moment of zooming out, both geographically. He's thinking about his presence on this mountain, thinking about Black presence in Europe and the West. Then he's also thinking temporarily as well. He's thinking across time, and he's thinking about the ways. He's thinking about what we carry with us into these different circumstances.

He's thinking about Blackness and whiteness simultaneously. He's thinking about these different positions that we occupy and what it takes to-- what the weight of holding those positions is, what it might take to unburden us from some of those, and wondering whether that's even possible at all.

Razia Iqba: It's interesting to me that Stranger in the Village is one of those essays, like his essays that he wrote from Paris, allow him to look at the experience of being a Black American, but through the lens of a European experience, which is for us today in the 21st century, maybe not that unusual. Many writers have done that since, but at the time, highly unusual.

Ekow Eshun: Yes. Baldwin begins the essay with an assertion which I have no necessary way of proving one or the other. I don't know whether it's fact or not. He begins the essay suggesting, saying that there's no Black person that's ever visited this village before. He describes it as a tourist village in the summer. They may well have been, for all we know, but in Baldwin's assessment, this is the case. He's the first Black person ever in this village. As a consequence, then. He's speaking about the isolation that comes with that, the outsideness and sense of alienation that comes with that.

Then he's thinking about that more broadly in terms of the weight and the cost and the psychic burden of walking as a Black person in the world, in Switzerland in this case, but also in Europe, because he's in France, he's later in Istanbul, but also, obviously, in America as well. He's thinking about all of these things at the same time.

Razia Iqba: He writes in the essay that the villagers were told that he was an American, but they believed him to be African.

Ekow Eshun: Yes, because they couldn't conceive of there being such a thing as an African American. Actually, in a way that's interesting as well, because, obviously, the denomination African American isn't in common parlance anyway in America. Anyway, this is also the case in American terms. The essay, anyway, talks about the experience of being a Negro, of being described by the young children in the village as a Negger, as he calls it. He's thinking, yes, again, you have this thing, so they can't see him as an American. He's also conscious that America historically continues to struggle with the presence of Black people within that country.

Then he's wondering about where he stands in relation to all of this, where he stands as a stranger in the village and as someone who's voluntarily put himself in that position repeatedly because he's been in that village for three times.

Razia Iqba: To hear the N-word uttered by children running in his midst, of course, he talks about that as they have no idea what echoes sound in his, almost in his body, he's feeling the echoes of that word. One of the things that I find so interesting about this, and I wanted to ask you about it specifically that their curiosity resulted in them wanting to touch his hair and rub his skin to see if the Black came off. I mean, that again, is not an uncommon experience. I wonder how you reflected on that specifically, because I've certainly encountered that. I went to Bucharest to do a story and had a massage and the woman was rubbing my skin and saying, "What do you use? This doesn't come off." That wasn't that long ago.

Ekow Eshun: I think one of the significant things about Baldwin is that whatever time he's writing, the work remains-- the word isn't even relatable. It's so deeply empathic. He's able to speak with an emotional depth and honesty that connects across time, so yes. The great thing when he describes that in there is that he has a number of different points of view on that. He describes these children chasing after him and shouting the N-word at him. First of all, that's a phenomenon that he's just describing.

Then secondly, he talks about that as something that he tries to reflect on and understand and reflect that they don't mean anything, that for them it's just a word that they have just picked up and inherited. Then he also reflects that at times he can't be sympathetic, he can't be open-hearted, he can't meet them with the open curiosity that they have. At times he's brusque because he's thinking about the history of that word. He's thinking about the burden of that word. Again, all of this comes back to the personal.

Yes, look, in my growing up as a child in London, it's exactly the same thing. Kids plucking up my skin or my hair. I'm not terribly sympathetic to that as a memory because I feel at some point you got to know better. At some point, you got to say, "Look, how do we get to human here? How do we get to parity?" In a way, those incidents, those episodes, I feel like they don't leave you. They become part of how. I guess I'm speaking for myself. They become part of how I see the world.

Razia Iqba: I was going to ask you about that because in your memoir you do refer to an episode where you yourself try to change your skin because of the pain of what you're experiencing.

Ekow Eshun: Yes, yes, yes. I remember going home as a child and trying to rub this color off my skin in the bathroom mirror, which is I'm embarrassed, really, to talk about that now.

Razia Iqba: With a scouring pad.

Ekow Eshun: Yes, yes, yes. Like I said, I'm embarrassed to speak about that right now, but I wanted to write about it because I feel it's important to go to those places. I feel it's important to speak of how we live, how we're seen, and how that act of being seen has an impact on how we see ourselves.

Razia Iqba: That very thing that you've just said, visiting that place, which can feel dark, embarrassing, discomforting for all kinds of very obvious reasons, go to the heart of what Baldwin as a writer was about, which is that you make yourself vulnerable in order to either be expansive in your love for humanity and the world, or you make yourself vulnerable in order to reflect on a broader meta political point, I guess.

Ekow Eshun: Yes. That's why he remains so valuable as a writer. I was trying to think. I was trying to just ask myself this morning, "When did I first start reading Baldwin?" It would have been my late teens. I was about 17, 18.

Razia Iqba: Can you remember the book or can you remember the--

Ekow Eshun: Actually, I have a strong sense that it probably was The Fire Next Time. I mean, the two essays in it. They speak so clearly this desire to be heard in one's fullness, complexity, delicacy, pay, possibility, all of these things. I think after that, I pretty much read everything. I pretty much read. You know what? Certainly, I used to do that as a kid.

I read--

Razia Iqba: You love something, you go to it again and again.

Ekow Eshun: I was reading every Baldwin book. I mean, I haven't even chiefly been bad to them hugely since then, because in a way, the larger thing that then comes out is the presence of Baldwin. Every time you think of Baldwin. Every time I think of Baldwin, you see his face, don't you?

Razia Iqba: Exactly.

Ekow Eshun: You see his face, you see the eyes, you see the teeth, you see the smile. Then you see the fierce concentration. You see his ability to play with words and to pull them out of the air and to turn them into something magisterial tapestry that he can weave in the moment. You see all of that. You see Baldwin, he's kind of small. He might have a cigarette, he might be lounging in a chair, he might be in a cafe in Paris.

Razia Iqba: Sunglasses.

Ekow Eshun: Sunglasses, sunglasses. This is--

Razia Iqba: He is the model of cool in addition to being all those other things.

Ekow Eshun: Yes, yes. He's all of those things. Baldwin's not a good-looking man necessarily, except he makes himself look good, and you know that. You know that. You know he's really aware of his presence in front of the camera. He can hold presence, he can hold cool. He understands the drama of standing, the drama of delivering. He understands how to present himself. He understands himself as a poetic consciousness. He understands that. He understands his worth for America, for the world, for people of color, all of these things. The joy of that is you live with Baldwin in your head. He's in there.

Razia Iqba: How much of that was present for you as the person who ran a really prestigious arts institution in London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, being an editor of magazines, writing about contemporary culture in the moment in which you were doing it? How much of a companion was Baldwin then for you?

Ekow Eshun: That's a really good question because one of the things that happens if you are in significant positions in the culture, generally speaking. Generally speaking, you're on your own as a person of color. You're on your own in the room. More than that, you're on your own in terms of that status, which comes with power, but it also comes with vulnerability, comes with visibility, comes with all sorts of things.

Razia Iqba: And scrutiny.

Ekow Eshun: Yes, yes, yes.

Razia Iqba: When you were in those positions, you were very much a pioneer in lots of different arenas.

Ekow Eshun: Yes, yes, yes. The first person to run a major cultural institution. Even before that, then the first person to edit a major mainstream magazine. All of this is what, I don't know, it's like in the 1990s, it's in the 2000s, it's going back some. I was really conscious of the worth of a Baldwin is that he offers a model for how to be, for how to hold yourself. It's not that I wake up every day and thought, "What would Jimmy Baldwin do?" The thing is, when you look back, you can see it's a really interesting combination of effort and ease that he manages, because physically he looks at ease, he looks elegant. Yet what he says always speaks of the struggle.

He's always really clear about what it takes to be in a given moment, about where we've come from, and what the cost of that journey is. That's the inspiration point because there's another model of success attainment which says, "Let's glory in the position we're at, and isn't it wonderful? It's great. Let's celebrate our success," blah, blah, blah. That's all fine, but the reality of it is it's more complicated. The reality of it is that if you are in any position of significance, then mostly what you're doing is negotiating with other people in order for you to be seen on your own terms.

Doesn't matter where you are. That still remains a significant aspect of the struggle. It's a personal struggle, but it fits within these larger journeys that we've taken to be heard and understood and seen. You're playing out one version of that.

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Razia Iqba: We'll take a short break. More from Ekow Eshun when we come back. This is Notes on a Native Son with me, Razia Iqbal.

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Razia Iqba: You're listening to Notes on a Native Son with Razia Iqbal.

Ekow Eshun: I'm Ekow Eshun, and the quote I've chosen is from James Baldwin's essay Stranger in the Village. Quote is, "People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."

Razia Iqba: We're talking in Princeton, which is where I teach now and which is where you are temporarily. I mention that because, to go back to that essay, Stranger in the Village, it is so clear to Baldwin that although he can recognize that there is this long, long history in Europe and the engagement between Europe and its colonies and those that were colonized is one thing, but that however much Americans see themselves as being exceptional and different, in the end, what he's also saying in that essay is that America isn't that different, and that until it embraces Black history inside its own country, as perpetrated and shaped by the majority white people, that they will not understand themselves.

In that respect, he is, for me at least, a kind of quintessentially American thinker, as opposed to being an African American intellectual, an African American writer. I wonder what you think about that as something that he absorbs and understands long before he left America but actually it's clarified while he's in Europe.

Ekow Eshun: While you were speaking, a line came to me from The Fire Next Time, in fact. Actually, the last line or one of the last lines in The Fire Next Time. He says something like, "They can't be free until we are free." He's talking about white America. It's such a brilliant inversion because I'd say conventionally, you'd say we can't be free until-- but he's talking about them freeing their minds from all the associations around race, from all the fictions around race that they live within.

One of the reasons he's so good at talking about America is, yes, he understands racial dynamics. He also understands whiteness. He also understands the power dynamics involved with whiteness and the illusions and the seductions, the notion of white superiority.

Razia Iqba: I think he says in the essay America can never be white again.

Ekow Eshun: Yes, exactly, exactly, exactly. He's recognizing that. Okay, look, the American adventure, the American experiment. How can it successfully resolve itself? Only through freedom, but that freedom isn't simply just to do with freeing of Black people. Because also when he's writing Strangers in the Village, this is the early '50s. This is way before the kind of apogee of the civil rights struggle. He's also able then to articulate this broader condition which is the trap that white people have positioned themselves in.

We're back again to this thing about people being trapped in history. This notion, settler colonialism, really, we talk about it now, but this is really the condition that he's very good at describing. He's very good at describing the ways that white people can talk themselves, become ugly upon themselves, within themselves, create a system that holds, that confines everyone. That's part of what he does.

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Razia Iqba: When you think about James Baldwin, does he give you comfort?

Ekow Eshun: Let me ask, why do you choose comfort as a--

Razia Iqba: Because I think part of what you said right at the beginning about your choice of this particular quote, you said that it was personal and political. I'm thinking really about solidarity.

Ekow Eshun: Yes, look, I was talking earlier about one of the things that comes if you occupy certain positions in society is that they can be very isolated positions. One of these I think about in relation to Baldwin is that he provides a model for just how to continue, how to persevere, but how to do so with a certain knowingness and elegance. Like I said, I have in my head in one way or another, I'm always talking to Baldwin. He's not necessarily answering. I'm always talking because he offers this example of how you can be, what it takes to remain as a figure, alive, command in space, continuing to create, continue to ask questions, to do so, apparently with this kind of joy that you often saw with him.

I like the idea of Baldwin not as a idealized figure, but actually as someone who's really honest about the complexities of being, very honest about his own struggles within there. Who can find a way to put that into words. You can find a way to do this merging the personal, the political, and so on. He's really useful in all of those terms. As a reminder that it's possible to be.

Razia Iqba: I once took my really quite young children to St. Paul de Vence, which is where Baldwin ended his life. They asked me why, and I said, I just want to walk where he walked. I've been reading and rereading him for years. But that physicality and being in the same space, being in the same air that he had breathed, felt-- it just felt significant. It didn't feel-- I wasn't investing it with too much, but I just wanted to do it.

Ekow Eshun: You know what's so interesting is that Baldwin wasn't a poet, which is the most insane thing imaginable, because pretty much everything he does is rendered poetically. The way he walks, the way he talks, how he writes. When I think about Baldwin, one of the things that comes to mind. If you're a person of color, I would suggest you hold a long history in your head. You hold 400 years of oppression, subjugation. You hold the history of violence in your head. It's part of who you are. It's very difficult to live outside that.

Also, for me, I'm not even trying to live outside that. I'm interested in what it takes to hold that consciousness and then to live, and in my case, to write or to curate. With that consciousness in mind, Baldwin is an amazing example of what that looks like, of how it might be to hold the long history in place, and then to have that as part of how you make the world on your terms. It's such a beautiful conjunction that he manages. He's not a contradictory figure. He's a complex figure. He managed to do all of that with a poetry of being that is a joy and a puzzle, and you want to be around it somehow.

Razia Iqba: Throughout this conversation, Ekow, we've referred to different bits of Baldwin that resonate with you. Was it difficult to choose the quote that you did choose?

Ekow Eshun: In fact, it wasn't difficult at all because I've had that quote on my mind for a while. As it turns out, I've just written a new book which is about Black presence in the world. To put it simply, that quote is the epigraph of the book. It's at the front of the book. I've had it in my mind for some time because I feel it sums up the world.

Razia Iqba: Ekow Eshun, thank you so much for speaking to us about James Baldwin.

Ekow Eshun: Thank you.

Razia Iqba: Ekow Eshun speaking to me, Razir Iqbal. This has been Notes on a Native Son, a podcast about James Baldwin. It's brought to you by WNYC Studios and sponsored by the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. It is a sea salt and manga production produced by Tony Phillips. The researcher is Navani Rachumallu. The executive producer for WNYC Studios is Lindsay Foster Thomas. Original music is by Gary Washington and the sound designer and engineer is Axel Kacoutie. Special thanks to Dean Amani Jamal of Princeton University.

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