Missiles and Missives
NewsThis week on the Chronic we look at a record of concerns, loves, conflicts and the imagination as documented in the personal letters of James Baldwin, Bessie Head, Albert Luthuli and one Mr A. Toffee.
More than just a nostalgic glimpse into the archive, these missives allow us to collapse time, to fold ourselves and the radical poetics of our imagination into one moment; now.
In an “intensely private encounter” with the personal letters of James Baldwin, Ed Pavlić uncovers various selves – writer, lover, brother, son – and the copious and conflicted record of the author’s creation over decades.
“I paused at a letter from 10 March 1968. King was still alive. In fact, Baldwin would see him in Los Angeles the next week at a fundraiser for the Washington Poor People’s Campaign hosted by Marlon Brando. In the letter, addressed to David and his sister Paula, both living in London at the time, Baldwin listed titles of Aretha Franklin songs as they played on the record player. It was 3am in Palm Springs; he was poolside and running out of cigarettes. He’d taken a break from his work on the script for a film about Malcolm X for Columbia Studios. From the titles and their order, I realised he was playing side 2 of Aretha Arrives. I played the album myself. Listening over Baldwin’s shoulder, I heard a response to “speechlessness in the most total sense of the word”, to the view west from Gorée Island, the historical view Baldwin had imagined across the Atlantic in 1962. Baldwin marvelled at Aretha’s ability to voice a condition at once historical and personal. What she sang was artistic and private, but also revolutionary and public. This wascoherence. He wanted to learn to write like that, he told David and Paula.”
Pieces, notes really, fragmentary speculations,remnants, a sense of the feminine under assault, and the drive to love…. Along with her novel A Question of Power, Bessie Head‘s letters and correspondences pose the toughest, most vital questions concerning race, class and gender, the troubled paths of the poetic imagination, and on the tangled, fraught (and yes, magical) ways that fiction saves its maker.
The struggle for freedom is a reckless, foolish and sacrosanct adventure – so believed Albert Luthuli, the first president of the African National Congress. A devout Christian, a man deeply committed to land and community, Luthuli saw the relationship between a nation and its ideals as founded on shared values, not the ingratiated construct that beleaguers the nationalism playing out in South Africa today. Jon Soske delves his unpublished notebooks
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