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Razia Iqbal: My name is Razia Iqbal. Welcome to our podcast, Notes on a Native Son about James Baldwin because 2024 marks the 100th birth anniversary of a man unique in American letters, novelist, essayist, activist, prescient about race and racial politics in America, but also those connecting ideas, the idealized notion of the American dream, and what it means to be an American. Who and what James Baldwin is and his legacy can't be listed and can be found in his work. Also, any attempt to box him in is counter to what Baldwin might say about himself.

James Baldwin: I was called all kinds of names. I had all kinds of labels on me before I was 19 years old. You had to tell the world, I'm not your label. The label belongs to you. It doesn't belong to me. I have nobody to answer to. I had to defeat the world's intentions, and the only way I could do that was to make it very clear that I am not at all what I seem to be to you. I know what you are seeing, but I'm not that person. I will make you know it that I'm not that person. I'll make you know that I'm Jimmy Baldwin.

Razia Iqbal: This podcast tries to get close to the idea of getting to know Jimmy Baldwin through his work and those who love his words. We've called it Notes on a Native Son, after one of Baldwin's most famous autobiographical essays, Notes of a Native Son. That essay clarifies with profound power what he is and what America is on his terms. In each episode, 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 is the novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt. Born in Minnesota to an American father and Norwegian mother, she got her first degree in Bergen in Norway and her PhD at Columbia University. She is a writer of uncommon elegance and thoughtfulness, informed by her scholarship and interest in the connections between the humanities and science. These include the studying of philosophy, psychiatry, and neuroscience. She is the author of six award-winning novels, three collections of essays, and a book of poetry, and she teaches a class in psychiatry at Cornell University.

When I first invited Siri to take part in the podcast, it was in what turned out to be the last few weeks of her husband's life. Her husband was the writer Paul Auster. A few weeks after her husband's passing, Siri contacted me, saying she was ready to do the recording. A love of Baldwin was something she and Paul Auster had in common, and rereading Baldwin, talking about Baldwin would, she felt, somehow be a balm, a way of reconnecting after the profound loss of her husband.

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Siri Hustvedt: "In overlooking, denying, evading complexity, which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves, we are diminished and we perish. Only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, dishunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves."

Razia Iqbal: Siri Hustvedt, welcome to our podcast. Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with us. Tell us first why you've chosen this James Baldwin quote from everything that he has written.

Siri Hustvedt: This was written very early. I think it's 1949. He was only 26 years old. It's quite a brutal but passionate piece. I chose this quote because the idea recurs in Baldwin, and I think of it as a philosophical idea. People who ignore the philosophical roots of Baldwin, I think, miss the point. He here is talking about, as he says, complexity. Then he turns it inward and says that complexity is in ourselves, and if you deny it, that ambiguity, that strangeness, I think, of being a person in the world, you are doing harm to yourself.

Now, in a racist culture, this is particularly vital, I think, to understanding Baldwin. As we know, he was attacked by both white people on the right and people in the Black power movement on the left. He found himself sandwiched in part as gay or queer or whatever you want to call him at the time, man. I'm very interested in thinking about Baldwin as a philosophical writer about ambiguity and complexity, and that's why I chose it.

Razia Iqbal: Tell me why it's important to you to look at Baldwin through the lens of philosophy, as opposed to any number of categories that one could read Baldwin.

Siri Hustvedt: The rigor of Baldwin's thought lies in this idea that there are no simple answers. He resists over and over and over again the idea of categories delimiting human lives. We run into this, I think, every single day. There is no human thought without category. Category is a principle that we need to live to express ourselves, but it can also be profoundly harmful to human beings. We see this, of course, in what is now called the intersections of race, gender, class, ability. You can make a very long list. If we just take Baldwin, this idea is very important to me, that we do not treat other human beings through these static categories, but we understand them as becoming as opposed to being right.

My favorite philosopher of biology, John Dupre, likes to say, "Organisms are not things, but processes." I deeply believe that Baldwin thought exactly that, that human life is a trajectory of becoming and not a fixed entity, a thing that we can treat. This is a problem in political life, and therefore, I think Baldwin is a tonic to ideas of essentialist identities, for example. That can happen on both extremes of the right and left. He says over and over again, male or female, Black or white, he really means it.

Now, I know that he has been referenced in relation to Kierkegaard, one of my favorite philosophers, who, of course, wrote about the single individual. Now, even if Baldwin didn't read Kierkegaard, which he may well have done, he moved to France in the late 40s, a time when Kierkegaard was so deeply influential in French thought that you really didn't have to read him. He came to you, if you will, translated through existentialism, through the ideas of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. All of this was in the air, and he was hanging out with intellectuals in Paris of that period.

Razia Iqbal: It doesn't surprise me in the least that that aspect of him, that dimension of him is something that resonates with you. Since you are a writer who is deeply invested in looking at both ambiguity and complexity. I want to go back a little and ask you, when you first started reading Baldwin, when did you first encounter him?

Siri Hustvedt: I didn't read him until I was 17. I was in Norway, and I found his books at the University of Bergen bookstore and just started reading them. I read the novels first. Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, and Another Country. I read those all at the same time, and then I started reading the essays. I have returned to Baldwin over time. Interestingly, my husband, who is now dead, he died on April 30th, Paul Auster, was also a great fan of Baldwin's. We would say to each other, "Why don't people talk about James Baldwin? What's wrong with him?"

Of course, he lived to see Baldwin resurrected in a big way now. I mean, he's quoted all over the place. Actually, at the Union Market, which is a supermarket in my neighborhood, there's a big James Baldwin quote in the window.

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Razia Iqbal: I want to ask you about whether you see this, everything you've described about Baldwin, seeing him through a philosophical lens or the lens of philosophy, whether you think this relates to both his essays and his novels. I mean, your novels are novels of just fantastic storytelling, but also ideas. They're full of ideas. I wonder whether you think that Baldwin is also a writer who has done this in both forms, in essays as well as novels.

Siri Hustvedt: Yes. I've read some very harsh critiques of his novels, and I intended, I will tell you this, Razia. I intended to reread some of those novels for this conversation, and my husband died, and I couldn't. I love them, and I think what I love, too, and he shares this with Kierkegaard, is the urgent, passionate tone of his essays. Sometimes some of the early essays, the urgent, passionate tone is a little over the top. I think Everybody's Protest Novel is one of those. When you look at the urgency of his mid period and some of the later essays, for example, they are so beautifully written, and he is so alert to the music and rhythms of his prose.

I do think this is present in the novels as well. I was possessed by those novels when I read them. I was young. I wasn't-- I had read a lot of books for a young person, but I was hardly deep into philosophical waters at that time. Nevertheless, the honesty, rawness of those books took me by storm.

Razia Iqbal: In the essay that you have chosen the quote from, Everybody's Protest Novel, there is, at the heart of it, something that really upset people. The idea that he contends that people often forget that both the oppressor and the oppressed are bound together by the same beliefs. That, of course, caused real controversy, but in a way, it goes to the heart of what you are saying, which is that this complexity, the ambivalence, the ambiguity that exists in all of us is something that is shared regardless of the power structures or the relationships within power structures.

Siri Hustvedt: It's very interesting because Audre Lorde, and I'm not going to get the quote exactly right, but she said something similar, which is that it's easy to look out at the world and identify the oppressor and the oppressed, but what's really difficult is to identify the oppressor inside ourselves. I think she and Baldwin shared that. In some way, we always find our self-consciousness, our ability to reflect on ourselves through another person. I think Baldwin deeply recognized that.

In the frame of white supremacy and the horrors of slavery that he never turned his face away from and its legacy, the profound relationship between oppression and the oppressed it's a loop. It's a loop rather than two separate entities. We live in a neoliberal culture, and it's really hard for people to get that we exist between the self and the other. We find ourselves in the face of others. This applies to political life, social life, and just our personal lives inside our families.

Baldwin was really good at telling the story of himself and his returning to childhood, returning later to his early adulthood, his formation as a human being. I never get enough of reading Notes of a Native Son. Baldwin has come shooting back, I think, because of the political turmoil in the United States that we are living through, and it's a period that is like many others in American history. We have a tendency to think that, "Oh, it's so new." It's not so new.

There have been these moments of brutal violence and race tension, but I think Baldwin believed what I have said over and over again, race is a fiction made real by history. That is, I deeply believe, something everyone should keep in mind. No one is responsible for his, her or their birth. Come off that way.

Razia Iqbal: I'm interested that you recognize and are articulating the place that Baldwin occupies in contemporary society. People return to Baldwin in all kinds of ways, but there is also this notion that popular culture is very often seen as sloganeering, and Baldwin is used in that context, too, so that his message becomes reductive.

Siri Hustvedt: That's right. I think the quoting of Baldwin everywhere is using him in the way that Martin Luther King, for example, has been used as a kind of saint, the saint of a movement. Oh, now we look back on James Baldwin and we forget that Eldridge Cleaver hung him out to dry, and the Black power movement was accusing him of whiteness, while at the same time, he was considered a radical by white liberals. Poor man.

On top of that, he was gay. His sexuality that he was very open about from early on became one of the identity markers that wounded him over and over again. Yes, I am against using Baldwin in a simplistic way and for approaching his philosophical thinking and some of his limitations openly, but that takes considered discourse, not just quoting him and assigning him a saintly role.

Razia Iqbal: We'll take a short break. More from Siri Hustvedt when we come back. This is Notes on a Native Son with me, Razia Iqbal. You're listening to Notes on a Native Son with Razia Iqbal. I want to turn to the form of the essay. We've talked a little bit about it, not least because the quote you chose comes from a very early Baldwin essay, but you are both a novelist and an essayist. I want to just ask you about that form and what it allows you to do and what it allows you to do that has resonated with you and what Baldwin did with it because your concerns in your essays have been very different.

Siri Hustvedt: It's true, and at the same time, I think Baldwin influenced my essay writing. Starting to read his essays for the first time at 17, this voice has been in my head, of course, along with other voices. I think both the novel and the essay are great forms of exploration, great forms of trying, essayez, that should not be locked down. He never locked himself down in that way. He pursued a kind of freedom, and, of course, some of these pieces he worked on for a very long time, and some of the novels, too, ten-year periods returned to them.

He was very careful about his work. He knew when he was on, he knew when he was blocked. He suffered writing, as we all do. I think he's one of the plural, to use that word, voices in my head that have been important and sometimes defining.

Razia Iqbal: I'm so struck by your collection of essays on motherhood and fatherhood and being a daughter and the interconnectedness that you have spoken about. In many ways, Baldwin is also talking about that interconnectedness. He never loses sight of the connection between people.

Siri Hustvedt: No, I was rereading Freaks and American Ideal of Manhood, which is a late essay. It's 1985, and he's talking about androgyny, which was a word I grew up with and was very interested in. He says, here's a beautiful quote. "All of the American categories of male and female, straight or not, Black or white, were shattered, thank heaven, very early in my life. Not without anguish, certainly, but once you have discerned the meaning of a label, it may define you for others, but it does not have the power to define you to yourself."

That's a pretty deep comment, I think. He really goes after the stupidities of gendered violence in the United States and the anxiety that accompanies that. I really like that essay and the idea of the label, which, of course, is rampant at the moment. People get pushed very hard into categories. Again, part of this, I think, is algorithms. That algorithms, in order to organize the data that are used in machine learning or these algorithmic systems, you have to do something. I love the language. You have to clean your data. That means that you have to get rid of all the outliers in your data, things that don't fit. It's deep.

My point is always this. What if those outliers are really important? Then we end up just regurgitating the information from cleaned, purified data that is ridding us of all the creativity that comes from the single individual and certain collectives that don't fit into clean data. Baldwin is an antidote to that. "In overlooking, denying, evading complexity, which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves, we are diminished and we perish. Only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, dishunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves."

Razia Iqbal: It takes us back, quite neatly, really, to the quote that you chose, that evading the complexity, which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves, we are diminished and we perish. I mean, the fact that he says we perish is quite something. I mean, he really does see this as a danger.

Siri Hustvedt: Yes, I think for him, it's existential that if you get trapped inside these simplistic categories, in some sense, you die. You are then under their power. I think this is true of the culture in many ways. That we have to ask of ourselves to not be lazy, and because so many of those categories are unconsciously instated in all of us. I certainly do not exempt myself, which is why I mention Lorde and Baldwin as people who can expand my consciousness, take me into a position that I have not lived. That's why reading is important. You get to be plural. You get to have these other voices and human experiences inside you that you could never have had if you hadn't read them. This is, I think, really important.

Razia Iqbal: Did you ever meet him?

Siri Hustvedt: No, no. I remember when he died, I was a kind of-- I think because it started when I was so young, I really am a fan. I would have probably fainted.

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Siri Hustvedt: Oh, my God.

Razia Iqbal: It's really interesting. You have obviously read him very deeply, and his work resonates with you on all sorts of different levels, and yet I completely and utterly agree with you that-- I did see him speak once in London, and it is a memory that I hold really very dearly. I remember a question being asked from the audience. A young man stood up and he said, "Mister Baldwin, what advice would you give to somebody who's starting out to write?" Just picture the scene. It's in a theater in London at a time in 1984, 1985, when everyone smoked inside.

The entire room just had this kind of pall of smoke, and he took a great big drag from his-- he's a diminutive man, really tiny man. Drag from his cigarette and said, "Young man, read. Just read." I will never forget that. I think it was the best advice that you could give anyone who's setting out to write.

Siri Hustvedt: Yes. I think it's true. I think he was at Harvard, and someone asked him about the Negro problem, which was the kind of general term at the time. Baldwin said, "It's not the Negro problem. It's the white problem. I'm only Black because you think you're white." Baldwin claimed that the task of the poet or the writer is, "To defeat all labels and complicate all battles." I think he's right. There's nothing about skin color, for heaven's sakes, that has anything to do with essential categories. It's not ontology.

It's as desperately as the ongoing eugenics story, which became the story of genetics. Oh, yes, there are finally racial differences, blah, blah, blah. This is still published in media. It is utter nonsense, biologically utter and complete nonsense. Baldwin understood that very deeply, even though he wasn't studying biology.

Razia Iqbal: Siri Hustvedt, thank you so much for Joining us to talk about James Baldwin.

Siri Hustvedt: Thank you, Razia. I loved it. Thank you very much.

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Razia Iqbal: This has been Notes on a Native Son and podcast about James Baldwin. In the next episode, we'll hear from the writer and essayist, Darryl Pinckney. This podcast is brought to you by WNYC Studios and sponsored by the School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. It is a Sea Salt And Mango production produced by Tony Phillips. The researcher is Navani Rachumalu. The executive producer for WNYC Studio Studios is Lindsay Foster Thomas, and Karen Frillman is our editor. Original music is by Gary Washington. The sound designer and engineer is Axel Kacoutié. Special thanks to Dean Amaney Jamal of Princeton University.

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