I Am Not Your Negro: An Afterthought
“The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.”
These words are said in the documentary film towards its end; their meaning, however, is expressed again and again, throughout the film, much before they actually appear. ‘I am not your Negro’ is then the story of America and its ways. Written by James Baldwin as an unfinished 30-page manuscript, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, the manuscript is artfully rendered, by Raoul Peck, in the form of a film. The film is a grim collage: featuring Jackson’s narration over Baldwin’s lectures on racial ideology, his letters, his anecdotes, his FBI memorandums. Posting commentary on the popular culture of Baldwin’s lifetime; the yesteryear’s music, cinema, and television — both the advocating and the lamenting (racism) kind, all mâché-ed together, so dramatically, that it appears to be tinged in Van Gogh’s most melancholic yellow.
Jackson’s narration of Baldwin’s manuscript starts off (and remains) saddening and morbid. And weak. The kind of voice you hear from parents when they remark on their child’s repetitive self-destructive behavior — when the child keeps checking in and out of correctional facilities regularly. Until eventually, one day, the parents give up, and decide to take a chance; let fate take over. Let it end with obliteration, of either them or the child. Baldwin, in the first exhibited interview, is asked what he believes will become of the Negroes in America. To this he answers that the real question is what will happen to America itself; “You cannot lynch me, keep me in the ghettos, without becoming something monstrous yourself”.
In these thirty pages, Baldwin speaks of his reasons for his return to the United States from his life in Paris. He speaks of homesickness and longing. A longing, for family, his people, fried chicken and music, and the style; “that style possessed by no other people in the world”. Remarking that this journey back was for him inevitable; by returning, he was just “paying his dues”.
He starts at the beginning. He speaks of kindness, and how he experienced it in unexpected places — a smile from a stranger in a store, a teacher who cared too much. And of unkindness, and how he experienced it everywhere he looked. In and around him, everywhere: in the street, in music, and in cinema. And how this unkindness invaded everything that he was.
Baldwin speaks of his coming to terms with his existence, his state, his position in the hierarchy of American life; the colour of his skin. The representation (or rather mis-) of his people in popular culture, and how it would highlight, play the devil, the already apparent differences.
Baldwin speaks of the three men-turned-Prometheus; Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, who came from different spheres of the American ways — fought racism in its different forms, in different ways, with different ideologies, and how all that was left after they were rightly punished was the fight: “I want these three lives to bang against and reveal each other, as in truth, they did and use their dreadful journey as a means of instructing the people whom they loved so much, who betrayed them, and for whom they gave their lives”.
He speaks on people, his terror of the moral apathy shown by fellow Americans. How a fire can rage in a neighbour’s house and they can mindlessly, without another thought, tend to their own garden: “White people are astounded by Birmingham. Black people aren’t. White people are endlessly demanding to be assured that Birmingham is on Mars. They don’t want to believe, still less to act on the belief that what is happening in Birmingham is happening all over the country. They don’t want to realise that there is not one step morally or actually between Birmingham and Los Angeles”.
He says some unpalatable things. Things that to some would say are too bold to be true: bluntly stating how the White man, who shows how he thinks by the state of his institutes, thinks that Negroes have long ceased to required in the new American way of life; they now simply remain ‘wards’.
For me, the film has hit home despite living in a polar opposite location from America. The oppression, the disregard for human life, the unkindness, is all too familiar. The narrative, by the ‘others’, that this very oppression is both a delusion and an exaggeration has become so repetitive that at times even I, most sincerely believe it — as must the Negro. I see this ‘everything’ around me too. I too understand that the easiest way out would have been if I too were one of the ‘others’ — as must the Negro.
I had long ago decided to not think about the differences, and instead focus on the similarities. But what can you do when the ‘other’ looks at you and sees: an Alien! An outsider, an anomaly, a maligned stranger? What do you do when the ‘others’ become too many? Do you follow Martin or do you become Malcolm? Do you offer your head on a plate or raise your arms to shield it?
Baldwin urges us to introspect by saying “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced”
