I have a confession: up until this year the only James Baldwin novel I had read was If Beale Street Could Talk. I’d read The Fire Next Time three times over and studied many of Baldwin’s essays for class, but I was a complete newcomer to his fiction works. So, one of the things I promised myself I’d do in my first post-grad year was read all of his novels (in chronological order of course). In April I picked up Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin’s second novel and one I’d heard much about. Giovanni’s Room is heartbreaking and beautifully written, with a subtle profundity that characterizes Baldwin’s prose.
Whenever I’m reading a book I keep a journal on hand that I fill with quotes, thoughts and questions about the text. In the section of my little notebook dedicated to Giovanni’s Room, one quote is underlined three times. It’s a short passage that occurs midway through the novel when David, the American protagonist who is abroad in Paris, spots a sailor walking towards him. He thinks:
“He seemed–somehow–younger than I had ever been, and blonder, and more beautiful, and wore his masculinity as unequivocally as he wore his skin. He made me think of home–perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
Just for some context, Giovanni’s Room is about a young, white, American man in Paris running away from himself. He is running away from the truth about his sexuality, an act that is made impossible when he meets Giovanni, an Italian immigrant, whom he falls in love with. David’s inability to face himself, to face his truth, has disastrous consequences for all involved (and that’s all I’ll say because I don’t want to spoil the book).
Knowing this, what does David mean when he muses on what home really is? The stranger doesn’t remind David of a geographical location so much as he reminds him of an interior feeling. The blonde, masculine sailor reminds David of home because he reminds him of shame, reminds him of all the ways he has “failed” at being a man according to America’s standards. Home is not a particular place but a feeling he carries with him because of what he has experienced and what he is afraid to face.
Baldwin explores the idea of home extensively in both his fiction and non-fiction. How could he not, as a Black man born in America? Can you ever really call a place home that has made it so obvious you are unwelcome, unwanted and worth nothing? Despite the country’s clear disdain for its Black citizens, (which Baldwin would argue is really just white Americans’ disdain for themselves) Baldwin could never really rebuke the US, even while he was living in France. One of my favorite interviews is a conversation between him and Maya Angelou in 1975. Roughly 7 minutes in, the pair begin discussing home and Angelou remarks that Black people are America. Baldwin agrees and goes on to say that that’s why he can never delude himself into thinking it is possible to leave.
“You can’t leave home. You carry it with you.”
You can move states, cross oceans, even change hemispheres, but you can never escape home because you bring it with you, within you.
Hip-hop, like Baldwin, is fascinated with the idea of home. When you hear a new artist one of the first things you want to know is where they’re from. Your ears instinctively search to hear that city in a musician’s delivery or the beat of a song. From Nas’ Illmatic to Kendrick’s good kid, m.A.A.d city, hip-hop has a long lineage of albums that capture the sound and stories of a musician’s life in a specific community. The genre’s interest in home runs much deeper than just zip codes. Hip-hop artists demonstrate the ways that our external geographies map onto us and shape us, consequently creating that internal home and “irrevocable condition” that Baldwin explores in Giovanni’s Room.
At the same time that I was reading Giovanni’s Room, Vince Staples released his album Ramona Park Broke My Heart (which is, without a doubt, in my top 5 albums of 2022 so far). The album is about Staples’ hometown, Long Beach, CA, his experiences growing up in the coastal city, and the way it molded him, for better or for worse. If Giovanni’s irrevocable condition is that of shame then Staples lets listeners know that his is disillusionment–disillusionment arising from the realization that the city he loved, and still loves, doesn’t love him, because if it did he would have never been subjected to so much violence and loss so early on.
Staples’ statement reads:
“I am often told the lie that life is what you make it. For over a decade, most of my work has been an anthology of what I believed to be home. Now I've realized that it reaches beyond location. I have been exploring the utility of home. Security. Comfort. Meaning. The answer. The excuse. To outgrow is to love blindly no longer. Ramona Park Broke My Heart is the story of that growth.”
This is not a track by track review and analysis of RPBMH but I do think the album’s closing song, “The Blues”, encapsulates what Baldwin meant when he described the inescapable quality of home. Staples raps:
I’m never lonely
Even my daydreams is haunted
Keep getting smaller houses but I won’t find peace ’til the Lord allows it
It’s telling that the album ends with the revelation that no matter where he lives or where he goes, Staples is haunted by home.
Fellow California rapper, Westside Boogie, expresses similar sentiments on “Stuck”, the second song on the rapper’s sophomore album More Black Superheroes. The song details how despite making it out, Boogie is still ‘stuck’ in the hood. He symbolizes this with lyrics like “still put chips up in the sandwich 'cause it's shit you can't escape”, quotidian imagery that shows how difficult it is to fully leave home behind.
Yet, for all the anguish that home has brought Boogie, the song’s chorus (and title) lets us know that he still longs for it, still cares about it:
It's somethin' 'bout the hood, I love it, I ain't goin', no, I'm stuck
So if you can’t escape home, what can you do? If Giovanni’s Room is any indication, Baldwin argues that the only thing you can, and must, do is face it. David spends the entire novel running from home, and by extension himself, leading to an inevitably tragic end for everyone around him. Albums like Ramona Park Broke My Heart and More Black Superheroes are examples of what it means for individuals to face the idea of home, the multitude of ways that home has shaped you, and how that condition cannot be outrun or evaded, even if you physically make it out.
In the introduction to his book of essays Nobody Knows My Name, Baldwin writes about his time in Europe:
“In America, the color of my skin had stood between myself and me; in Europe, that barrier was down. Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. It turned out that the question of who I was was not solved because I had removed myself from the social forces that menaced me– anyway these forces had become interior, and I had dragged them across the ocean with me. The question of who I was had at last become a personal question, and the answer was to be found in me.”
Perhaps hip-hop’s obsession with home is rooted in a desire to face the truth. Putting pen to paper and lyrics to melody, the genre’s artists are facing their experiences, and grappling with them, in order to begin defining the self beyond what they have carried and internalized from ‘home’.
Thanks for reading and talk soon,
-Yeaye
Marginalia
Marginalia is just a fancy word for the notes people write in the margins of their books. This section will be related links and addendums that go with the official post!
If you want to read a really thoughtful review of Ramona Park Broke My Heart I highly recommend this one by Andre Gee
More Black Superheroes is a phenomenal album and if you’re not listening to Westside Boogie…you should start
Last, but certainly not least, I want to give a big thank you to my brother Nyemah for designing the logo and banner for It’s Lit! This is his Instagram, feel free to contact him for any of your graphic design needs :)
This was beautifully written. I love how you connected the novel to music--very modern music at that. I'm looking forward to reading more from you as this had me all the way locked in.