Letter to Jimmy
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Written on the twentieth anniversary of James Baldwin’s death, Letter to Jimmy is African writer Alain Mabanckou’s ode to his literary hero and an effort to place Baldwin’s life in context within the greater African diaspora.
Beginning with a chance encounter with a beggar wandering along a Santa Monica beach—a man whose ragged clothes and unsteady gait remind the author of a character out of one of James Baldwin’s novels— Mabanckou uses his own experiences as an African living in the US as a launching pad to take readers on a fascinating tour of James Baldwin’s life. As Mabanckou reads Baldwin’s work, looks at pictures of him through the years, and explores Baldwin’s checkered publishing history, he is always probing for answers about what it must have been like for the young Baldwin to live abroad as an African-American, to write obliquely about his own homosexuality, and to seek out mentors like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison only to publicly reject them
later.
As Mabanckou travels to Paris, reads about French history and engages with contemporary readers, his letters to Baldwin grow more intimate and personal. He speaks to Baldwin as a peer—a writer who paved the way for his own work, and Mabanckou seems to believe, someone who might understand his experiences as an African expatriate.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Originally written on the 20th anniversary of James Baldwin's death in 1987, this book by Mabanckou (Memoirs of a Porcupine) addresses Baldwin in the second person. Much of the first half recounts Baldwin's biographic details, illuminating the pre Civil Rights Movement Harlem in which Baldwin was raised or the sense of artistic and personal liberation he would find in France. Precisely because of the use of the second person, the format of the prose can feel a bit stilted; Mabanckou is ostensibly telling Baldwin about his own life: "During your childhood, you have countless opportunities to witness the extent to which your father distrusts the white man, whoever he may be ." Once the rhythm of the text becomes more established, however, Mabanckou displays more clarity on the cultural and political context that Baldwin both represented and contrasted. Eventually, as Mabanckou explores correlations between Baldwin's ideas and the contemporary world, the book really comes into its own. For instance, Mabanckou questions whether some of the "Rwandan genocide" literature echoes Uncle Tom's Cabin: "If we are not careful, an African author will be able to do nothing but await the next disaster ." One of the most influential and fearless writers of the 20th century, Baldwin deserves this celebration of his life, so that readers may encounter, in a new light, the fortitude of this true revolutionary.
