Nobody Knows My Name is an essay collection by James Baldwin that is phenomenal, and anyone even slightly interested should read it. Normally what I like to read is novels, and I stand by the fact that there is nothing better than curling up under covers with a good book. Until recently, I have rarely ventured out of that zone other than the occasional Pop non-fiction book. However, I can acknowledge the value found in essays and essay collections and have had that belief confirmed with my recent readings. This semester, I am taking a class on the writer and activist James Baldwin, and as a result, reading large swathes of essays and novels that he has written. I cannot say that I understand everything that he has said perfectly — reading something once will rarely get you there. But I think many people would benefit from reading this particular essay collection and pondering what he has to say.
Understanding that most people will never pick up a book just because someone told them it was worth it, I desire to explain what I took from Baldwin’s Essays. Their chief concern is with identity, what it is, and who defines what it is. He makes it clear that we cannot know anything about the world and its problems and their solutions until we know who we ourselves are. And that what we define ourselves as only exists in the context of other people that we have been surrounded by since birth. His own context for this exists in the civil rights era — before anything else, Baldwin knew that in America, he would be seen as a black writer before he would be seen as a writer. It is for that very reason he moved to Paris for a while. The essay collection is from the time he spent in France, and the distance from American society allows him to comment candidly on it. It is his realization in Paris that the only reason he was not discriminated against there was that he was seen as an American writer before being a writer. It became crucial to him that you cannot lump experiences together under one name, one house when every individual and every perspective by default is going to differ radically.
How individuals define their own experiences still ultimately relates to other people. There is simply no other way of going about it — my experience was bad because it was worse compared to yours, and so on. In one particular essay, Princes and Powers, Baldwin extrapolates his claims on identity by showcasing how being lumped together by appearance does not guarantee a shared identity. During his time, there was a Pan-African movement, where black people from around the globe were called to share an identity of being similar because some hundreds of years ago, they hailed from the same place. This ultimately failed because, as Baldwin points out, there is no unifying experience between the parts of Africa that had been colonized, the black Americans, black Europeans, etc. All of them had experienced radically different forms of oppression and struggle, yes because of their blackness, but for different reasons and in different contexts, which led to very little unification on actual solutions or goals. Different people want and need different things, and even in a conference full of other black people, they were defining each other by their race and origin first and what they could contribute separately. Baldwin’s perspective was ultimately saying that it’s a complicated issue; there cannot be one shared international identity because there is no shared international issue. And he ended up being correct as that movement soon died out for those exact reasons.
There is so much more than I alone can say and express, partly because I am not an expert and partly because there is just so much you can take from one essay of Baldwins, let alone an entire collection of them. However, the chief concern is identity, particularly his identity as a black man during the civil rights movement. I highly recommend that any curious individual read even one of his essays, as his way of writing holds any casual reader captive.
