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What place is there, then, for a black American in this “Tower of Babel”? Your quest proves to be greater than you anticipate, Jimmy, extending beyond your particular case as an American citizen of color. It now encompasses the behavior of other migrants, and their way of life, but above all else, it encompasses France’s attitude toward this juxtaposition of people washed up on its shores, each with his own motive, each with his own past. .
In Paris, the African students you meet live “. . in groups together, in the same neighborhoods, in student hotels and under conditions which cannot fail to impress the American as almost unendurable.”91
Far from being alienated from himself, an African man does not harbor the same fear of rootlessness as an American man of color, even though he has endured history’s injustice, and, unlike an American man of color, has not, “all his life long, ached for acceptance in a culture which pronounced straight hair and white skin the only acceptable beauty.”92
On the contrary, Africans have the self-confidence — perhaps even an exaggerated one — of coming from a continent of clearly defined borders, from a supposedly sovereign nation, which they dream deep in their hearts will be emancipated, unchained from the bonds of dependence on colonial power. In this respect, they share a common heritage with other immigrants whose lands are still under French control.
Black Americans, on the other hand, have to seek out their identity. The product of a historical rape and a ruinous voyage, they want to retrace the steps of the crossing that cast them out of their native continent, Africa, into the cotton fields where strains of gospel rang out between cracks of the whip and the barking of guard dogs. Americans cannot forget the desire to rebel, or the leg cut off after an escape attempt, or the ropes of the gallows. Nor do young girls forget the vicious Master’s abuse of power that would produce an entire line of bastard children.
In America, as Frantz Fanon points out, “the negro struggles and is opposed. There are laws that disappear, piece by piece, from the Constitution. There are decrees that forbid certain types of discrimination. And rest assured those things did not come as gifts. There are battles, defeats, cease-fires, and victories.”93
Black Americans ran aground in a land that was not their own — the New World. This land of refuge reduced them to a status so low that they do not participate in the decisions of this nevertheless multi-racial nation, dominated by whites with a heavy hand. With this in mind you declare, “It is entirely unacceptable that I should have no voice in the political affairs of my own country, for I am not a ward of America; I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores.”94
In short, while Africans are naturally attached to Africa, black Americans for their part mythologize it, spin legends about it, dream of it as a promised land, as if it represented the ultimate and absolute freedom. They long to return to the birthplace of their ancestors. Their Africa is, as a result, a kind of “dreamland.”
Meanwhile, Africans want to change their land, their “real countries,” to reclaim from the colonizers the power to decide the fate of their own people, to put an end to the exploitation of the wealth of their natural resources. It is a fight for freedom, a struggle to regain territory. Africans want to drive out the colonizers; black Americans are fighting simply to be recognized as full citizens.
And yet, black Americans and Africans are strangers to one another. Africans have a clear idea of Africa which involves them regaining control of the fountainhead, a fountainhead from which they believe all of the lost children — the so-called blacks of the diaspora — will one day come back to drink. Blood is thicker than water, after all.
Black Americans do not have a clear idea of Africa, but they do have certain ideas of Africa that situate them on one side of an unbreachable gap between myth and reality. There is the myth of their ancestors, torn from the continent; the reality is the battle they fight for acknowledgement and identity in their new homeland.
The uneasiness between Africans and black Americans is even more apparent when it comes to intellectual debate.
From the 19th to the 22nd of September 1956, the first literary congress of black writers and artists convenes at the Sorbonne in Paris, under the initiative of Alioune Diop, founder of the journal Présence Africaine. You are enlisted to cover the event for Preuves et Encounter, and you watch closely the birth of the Negritude movement by Aimé Césaire, Léon Gontran Damas and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Instead of drawing you closer to Africa, this encounter heightens your feeling of confusion. You consider the congress to be a true disappointment. The representatives of the Negritude movement are disconnected from reality, and when they express themselves — in France, in the French language, the language of their colonizers — their approach to the issues at hand is biased, in the sense that it is Franco-French leaning, and drowns the fundamental questions in theoretical posturing.
Negritude remains a vague and empty notion that seems separate from you. Certain African intellectuals — such as Manthia Diawara — do not attempt to hide their reservations on the subject. Diawara is not convinced that having a mutual “white adversary” creates a shared culture. And when Senghor, in a poetic speech, praises Richard Wright’s Black Boy, you realize that the Senegalese poet has not yet understood the scope of the total misunderstanding that characterizes relations between Africans and black Americans. Senghor’s interpretation of Black Boy in fact underlines Richard Wright’s African heritage. Yet what Richard Wright authored in truth was an American autobiography that one cannot comprehend outside of the context of his personal experience as a black man in America, and all of the struggle, repression, denial and displacement that entails. In reality, the African intellectuals’ takeover of this 1956 congress demonstrates their desire to appropriate the personal experiences of black Americans into the concept of Negritude in order to give the latter the appearance of being more open, of having a broader base.95 Your uneasiness with this surfaces when, three years after the congress, you would confide the following to the historian Harold Isaacs: “[Africans] hated America, were full of racial stories, held their attitudes largely on racial grounds. Politically, they knew very little about it. Whenever I was with an African, we would both be uneasy. . The terms of our life were so different, we almost needed a dictionary to talk.”96
7. the years of fire
Your essay, “The Fire Next Time,” is published in 1963.
This text calls into question the structure of American society, which is deaf to the claims of minorities. In the same year, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is assassinated as he begins his re-election campaign. This tragedy is a major blow to the progress of civil rights. Kennedy was fighting against racial segregation that was still common in some states, despite the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed it. He offered his support to Martin Luther King, Jr., and had received the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in the White House.
During this time, concerned about not participating in the fate of your country, you leave France temporarily. You are not a simple spectator, and certainly not merely a witness to history. Your voice is now counted among those at the center of the black community. It is your duty, first as a citizen, but also as a writer, who is seen henceforth as the spokesman of the voiceless. You could have uttered as your own the potent words of Aimé Césaire upon returning to his own homeland: