Giovanni's Room and the Question of Identity

I have been intending to read some James Baldwin, but picked up "Giovanni's Room" only recently. I suppose what particularly fascinates me about Baldwin is the fact that he emigrated to France but continued to write about United States. There was undeniable love for his homeland (and I don't think he tried to hide it), but the love is only able to live outside of the soil of this land.

(Side note: I recently read some fluffy article on the implied differences among words of similar meaning: White people who move to another country are called expatriates, but nonwhites are immigrants or, worse, migrants. They forgot the term reserved for intellectuals: the exiled. But then what exactly are the differences?)

Back to Baldwin.

A debatable element in Giovanni's Room is that the narrator, "I" (David), is a white American man in Paris, not black like the author. Sure, white men have written mountains of books in the voice of nonwhite men and all colors of women, but a black author writing in the voice of a white man makes everyone uncomfortable.

Actually a lot of the character traits in David are counterfactual to Baldwin's own. For example, David has no mother but a doting and possibly alcoholic father who loves him. Baldwin himself had a stepfather who abused him in childhood.

On some level I have felt a kinship to Baldwin before I read anything he wrote. Besides the realization distance is necessary to allow for love and understanding to survive, I also sensed his ambivalence about identity: American or European, hetero- or homosexual, black or white, here or there. Or both and all of them. The ambivalence can be tormenting, but it can also be delicious. More important, it carries a promise of freedom, which is far more urgent and necessary to those who have less of it.

When one has one or more identities that are not dominant in his milieu, be it black, gay, foreign, poor, or any kind of outsideness, he gets to taste a multitude of feelings, because one does not lose the yearning for a sense of belonging and insideness. But standing a little away, sometimes, also allows for a better and more realistic view of things, a bigger picture. Why? Because we do also identify with the dominant and the powerful. Who hasn't read "Pride and Prejudice" and identify with Mr. Darcy or his "lucky" wife? Who hasn't gone on the adventures of the Fellowship of the Ring? Who hasn't slayed dragons and flown X-wing fighters and blown up Death Stars? (Yes, girls too!) So that part is universal. And everything outside of the dominant identity, we can acquire through experience or empathy.

Giovanni's Room is, in some way, about of self-loathing. Making David white focuses our attention on the hatred brought by one's desires. It's also a story about running away, away from home so that one can be at home with oneself.