What James Baldwin Can Teach Us About the World Today

Margarita Valpado (0:00)

Welcome to Intelligence Squared, the podcast about ideas that matter. I'm Senior Producer, Margarita Valpado. Why does James Baldwin's writing continue to resonate with readers 70 years after the publication of Giovanni's Room? Today's episode is from our recent live event with Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri and Jason Accondaye exploring the life, the work, and the enduring legacy of James Baldwin. They joined us at Kiln Theatre to reflect on Baldwin's extraordinary contribution to literature and his exploration of race, sexuality, love, and belonging.

Marking the 70th anniversary of Giovanni's Room, Okri examined how Baldwin challenged the conventions of his time, the influence of his writing on generations of authors, and why his ideas continue to speak to the world today. Let's join the discussion now live at Kiln Theatre.

Jason Accondaye (0:49)

Hello and welcome to this Intelligence Squared event. I'm Jason Accondaye and I'm delighted to introduce our esteemed guest this evening. Ben Okri is the Nigerian-born poet, cultural activist and author of 14 novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road and Astonishing the Gods, which was selected as one of the BBC's 100 novels that shaped our world, as well as collections of poetry, short stories, plays, and essays.

His work has been translated into more than 28 languages, and he is the fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has won numerous international prizes and been awarded many honorary doctorates. His most recent novel is Madam Societist and the Festival of the Broken-Hearted. So if we can just get a round of applause for Ben Okri here.

Ben Okri (1:36)

Thank you all very much.

Thank you all very much. Real pleasure to be here.

Jason Accondaye (1:46)

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of Giovanni's Room, Jane Baldwin's seminal novel about sexuality, race, and myth in America. And today I'm delighted to be here with Ben to reflect on the life, literature, and enduring legacy of one of the world's most loved writers. So I kind of want to begin this discussion with our initial encounters with Baldwin. So for me, I kind of came to Baldwin in a sort of unconventional place. I was studying sociology at university and I was looking into sort of sexuality and black gay identity in the United States. And I found this sort of interview series that Baldwin had done with Richard Goldstein, who is the editor of The Village Voice, in which he talks quite openly and quite explicitly about the condition of being an African American gay man.

And I wonder, for you, what was your kind of first encounter with Baldwin? And at what kind of age did you encounter him as well?

Ben Okri (2:42)

Well, as a writer, Baldwin... First of all, I really want to say what a pleasure it is to be here.

And also a real honor to be able to talk about a great literary figure who's enriched and haunted our lives in beautiful ways. Baldwin, as a writer, Baldwin always feels like he's been part of my consciousness. But when I track it down very accurately, I would say I encountered Baldwin in the 80s, or even the late 70s. I'd come to England to write, ostensibly, and I was at that time studying journalism, before I went, later on, went to study literature. And I was living in New Cross, and close by were a couple of mates who were studying with me, all Nigerians. And we'd get together in the evenings, and we'd drink and we'd talk, and we'd talk politics, and we'd talk what it is to be black in the world, and in Britain and Nigeria and all of that stuff. And Baldwin always came up. All the writers around me, they were all, they were reading Baldwin, they discovered Baldwin for the first time. They discovered him first through his essays. And we'd get together, we'd read an essay like Fire Next Time, Notes of a Native Son, and we wouldn't talk about the book, we would just swap lines. Because the thing about Baldwin is that not only was he a kind of very elegant writer, but he was a very pungent aphorist. I think someday someone should do a selection of his wisdoms, as it were, like they do with Oscar Wilde, because his books are peppered with them. And we would just swap lines and share lines, and then we'd read the novels and we'd talk about them. He became a great subject of interest for us. The one thing that threw my fellow Nigerians at the time was when they discovered that he was gay.

Around the same time they read, I think it was Elbridge Cleaver's essay, Solar Nice, where he talks about Baldwin in a very spiky way.