James Baldwin- sonny's blues

[same damn lo sweater]

http://swcta.net/moore/files/2012/02/sonnysblues.pdf

read this, it'll knock your socks off

 

[Black smoke and cac jokes]

James Baldwin - The Fire Next Time

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

“Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”

You gotta read the book, James Baldwin is easily one of the best authors ever...check out the youtube clips too

 

[zerozero]

you know I've never read fiction from him

will check

 

[Walt]

I've read The Price of the Ticket from cover to cover multiple times, which is his collected non-fiction. His fiction is brilliant too. No one writes like James Baldwin.

 

[The Real]

 

[zerozero]

read it.

This was the last time I ever saw my mother alive. Just the same, this picture gets all mixed up in my mind with pictures I had of her when she was younger. The way I always see her is the way she used to be on Sunday afternoon, say, when the old folks were talking after the big Sunday dinner. I always see her wearing pale blue. She'd be sitting on the sofa. And my father would be sitting in the easy chair, not far from her. And the living room would be full of church folks and relatives. There they sit, in chairs all around the living room, and the night is creeping up outside, but nobody knows it yet. You can see the darkness growing against the windowpanes and you hear the street noises every now and again, or maybe the jangling beat of a tambourine from one of the churches close by, but it's real quiet in the room. For a moment nobody's talking, but every face looks darkening, like the sky outside. And my mother rocks a little from the waist, and my father's eyes are closed. Everyone is looking at something a child can't see. For a minute they've forgotten the children. Maybe a kid is lying on the rug, half asleep. Maybe somebody's got a kid in his lap and is absent-mindedly stroking the kid's head. Maybe there's a kid, quiet and big-eyed, curled up in a big chair in the corner. The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frighten the child obscurely. He hopes that the hand which strokes his forehead will never stop-- will never die. He hopes that there will never come a time when the old folks won't be sitting around the living room, talking about where they've come from, and what they've seen, and what's happened to them and their kinfolk.

But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will remember the children and they won't talk anymore that day. And when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he's moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It's what they've come from. It's what they endure. The child knows that they won't talk anymore because if he knows too much about what's happened to them, he'll know too much too soon, about what's going to happen to him.

 

[Walt]

read it.

Do yourself a favor and read his essays. He's the most under-read and under-taught luminary of the past 100 years, and his keen analyses of America as an incoherent culture of bottomless confusion are as applicable today as they were all the decades ago that he wrote them - if not more so.

 

[zerozero]

Do yourself a favor and read his essays. He's the most under-read and under-taught luminary of the past 100 years, and his keen analyses of America as an incoherent culture of bottomless confusion are as applicable today as they were all the decades ago that he wrote them - if not more so.

yeah I read Notes of a native son in high school... forgot most of it though. will go through it again

 

[2Quik4UHoes]

Yall need to listen to the discussion between him and NOI Malcolm, shyt is just . So much brilliance in both arguments. I've known about Baldwin for awhile but sadly I've never read any of his works, I've listened to his commentary on youtube but I've had The Fire Next Time bookmarked on amazon to cop.

 

[Guess Who]

One of the most underrated writers in history...one of the most underrated human beings in history. Dude was truly truly brilliant and low-key helped save America during the most volatile times in the civil rights era.

 

[kermit da hustla]

Brilliant writer.

 

[Soymuscle Mike]

Yall need to listen to the discussion between him and NOI Malcolm, shyt is just . So much brilliance in both arguments. I've known about Baldwin for awhile but sadly I've never read any of his works, I've listened to his commentary on youtube but I've had The Fire Next Time bookmarked on amazon to cop.

James Baldwin is one of the reasons Malcolm started steering away from the NOI, in fact JB said he ALWAYS knew Malcolm was smarter than that NOI shyt.

 

[86\*/98]

Do yourself a favor and read his essays. He's the most under-read and under-taught luminary of the past 100 years, and his keen analyses of America as an incoherent culture of bottomless confusion are as applicable today as they were all the decades ago that he wrote them - if not more so.

Baldwin is one of my favorite authors. I was pleasantly surprised when I typed his name into the search bar, and this thread popped up; which is sad considering how talented this man was. It turns my stomach when I mention him to one of my well-read friends, and get a "who?" in response.

Anyway, I just ordered his essays off of amazon and can't wait to jump into them.

to everyone in this thread, and rep to the OP.

 

[tmonster]

Do yourself a favor and read his essays. He's the most under-read and under-taught luminary of the past 100 years, and his keen analyses of America as an incoherent culture of bottomless confusion are as applicable today as they were all the decades ago that he wrote them - if not more so.

I agree 1000%

 

[tmonster]

a collection of my favorite Baldwin quotes

All I can think of looking at that pic


link below
from 3:36-7.30 (but you should watch the whole thing)

"....And if I discover that those songs the darkies sang and sing were not just the innocent expressions of a primitive people but extremely subtle and difficult, dangerous and tragic expression of what it felt like to be in chains, then by one’s presence, simply by the attempt to walk from here to there, you begin to frighten the white world

they’ve always known that you were not a mule!

they’ve always known that no one wishes to be a slave!

they’ve always known that the bales of cotton and the textile mills and entire metropolises built on black labor, that the black was not doing it out of love he was doing it under the whip

the threat of the gun and even more desperate and subtle threats of the bible"

James Baldwin from the Baldwin's ****** speech of 1969

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.”
― James Baldwin

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. ”
― James Baldwin

“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”
― James Baldwin

because
“The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.”
― James Baldwin