Baldwin

Another Country by James Baldwin is startling, intense, graphic, and beautiful. The characters are intricately drawn out as a reflection of Baldwin’s own conflicted personalities; almost as though he were trying to solve his own crisis of identity through the different personalities within his novel. Even before I found out that Baldwin was a gay African American writer, I had a sense just from reading the character descriptions that the author was gay. I don’t mean this in a discriminatory way, there are just clues that I picked up in the way the male characters describe the female characters versus how they describe the male characters.

When Baldwin describes a woman in the novel, whether it be Cass, Ida, Leona, or any number of random bar bunnies, he doesn’t linger on the aspects of the female form that heterosexual men would typically make a point to accentuate. When focusing on Cass, he usually describes the style of her hair-emphasizing its buttery yellowness or the way it’s pinned relative to whom she’s around (pinned back around her husband, Robert, let loose around her lover, Eric). He mentions her trimness, he mentions her eyes briefly, but there really was no mention of her figure, the length of her legs, the sway of her hips, the curve of her lips. When describing Leona, it’s more of a description to point out her smallness, her paleness, her face that was always just shy of being pretty, and the other details that made her a contrast to Rufus. Ida’s beauty gets the most description out of all three, but it’s a very basic sort of cut out description as though the author were following a connect the dots on how to describe a woman’s beauty. The writing felt more forced when Baldwin was describing the women and their different attributes whereas the writing involved describing the male characters seemed to have more passion and life. He captures the intimate details of the male form down to the curl of chest hair springing from beneath a shirt to the scent of their sweat. Baldwin seemed to be writing more from experience, more from the thoughts that were going through his mind while describing the male form. Reading over the way Eric describes Yves was enough to convince me that Baldwin was gay-there’s beauty and sensuality apparent in this description that you don’t find anywhere else throughout the novel. Perhaps this is why Yves and Eric are the only couple really left on solid ground by the end of the book.

The complicated relationships in the novel were fascinating to untangle. I think it was the lack of the characters understanding of their own identities that sank all of the relationships. When looking at Rufus and Leona and Ida and Vivaldo, the characters on their own seemed to have a pretty solid grasp of who they were as individuals. On their own, they were able to function in society without being questioned as to what they were doing or who they thought they were, but it was when they became a part of a controversial relationship that their identity as part of that relationships began to cause them harm. The individual members of the couples lost their identity when they became part of the relationship, they didn’t know who they were as a part of that relationship and when you don’t know who you are, how can you understand anyone else? I think that is the underlying message of the entire novel.