March 2021

Favorites of the month: Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
and The Magical Language of Others: A Memoir

Early in Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. confesses that his is “a strange book.” “It isn’t biography, although there are moments when it feels biographical,” he writes; “it is not literary criticism, although I read Baldwin’s nonfiction writings closely; and it is not straightforward history, even though the book, like Baldwin, is obsessed with history.” Through Begin Again, Glaude instead offers what might be described as a combination of all three – a visually stunning triptych of biography, literary criticism, and history, with powerful modicums of memoir and political analysis, seeping in from every corner, crevice, and fold. With passion and insight, he positions Baldwin as a descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a poet-prophet who “[drew] us with love and terror,” unlocking the “chains” of American trauma while bearing powerful witness to our shared but shrouded and sanitized history. In doing so, he elevates Baldwin as a voice that is still not only relevant, but critically essential to navigating the heartbreak of our own post-2016 “after times.” 

In almost every book or class about James Baldwin, it is almost always argued that Baldwin “lost his way” as he got older – that he allowed the vitriol of the 1960s and 70s to “corrupt” his writing, mutating his voice from one of Emersonian transcendence to one of sycophantic and myopic reduction. As Baldwin mingled with (and debatably kowtowed to) the Black Panthers, argues Henry Louis Gates, “we lost his skepticism, his critical independence.” — “Baldwin found impersonating a black writer,” echoes Hilton Als, “more seductive than [actually] being an artist.” In his own book, even Glaude, a Baldwin superfan, confesses an early confusion around Baldwin, which lasted through his graduate school years: “Baldwin seemed, at least to me back then, to leave the ground scorched. He told the truth, but anger dripped from the page…I could not reconcile his rage with his talk of love.”

Through writing Begin Again, Glaude responds to his earlier skepticism, delivering a stunning defense of Baldwin in which he positions the writer’s politics as not a corrupting pollutant but rather a means of necessary – and stylistically consistent – renewal. In all of Baldwin’s writings, there is a continuity, seamlessly connecting Baldwin’s interrogation of our history with his rejection of certain American myths and illusions. There is also a cohesive leveraging of politics as a creative tool and a source of purpose – as both a stage and an audience through which Baldwin could reenact his singular and defining confrontation of American pain.

In line with this confrontation, Glaude not only certifies but beautifully resounds Baldwin’s summons to wait and linger in our own after times. It is so tempting to want to “hurry through” or dismiss the pain of current events as a rare and immaterial exception to our own “exceptionalism.” But as Glaude tells us, such denial only keeps us captive, setting us up for what will surely be “another nightmare.” Certainly, it is only through slowly excavating the depths of our pain that we can “begin again” and “create ourselves anew”; it is only through patiently grappling with “the lie” that we can replace our inheritance with our dreams, freeing ourselves from the shackles of categorization to embrace the messy but sacred “essence of who we are” as human beings. Manichean retrenchment into old, recycled, and socially constructed identities will be our continual downfall —as Baldwin reminds us, “complexity” is “our only safety.”

As a reader, what I found most illuminating about Baldwin – and by extension, Glaude– is that neither ever loses hope. While some critics malign Baldwin as a corrosive and self-contradictory yes-man who was forever fearful of irrelevance, Glaude offers a much more nuanced view, maintaining that “Baldwin never gave up on the possibility that all of us could be better” or the hope that the American dream would come to its full and intended fruition. With courage, conviction, and masterful writing, Glaude reiterates this hope. “The American lie is irredeemable,” he tells us. “But that does not mean we are too.”

When poet and translator Eun Ji Koh was fifteen years old, her parents moved to South Korea — the place they were both born and raised — for an enticing job offer, leaving Koh and her brother behind in California. Though Koh’s parents acknowledged the separation would be difficult, the offer was irresistible: “Two luxury cars, a condo in a skyscraper, shopping sprees at the company-owned department store,” all bundled in a delicious and exciting profusion of “new stuff.” The kids, Koh’s parents reasoned, would be fine. After all, “it was better to pay for your children than to stay with them. That was how it had always been.”

In her beautiful coming-of-age memoir, The Magical Language of Others, Koh tells the story of this abandonment, which she shares in interspersed and symbiotic alternation with the letters her mother sent her while abroad. For years, Koh could not decipher her mother’s letters, as they were written in Korean – a language Koh did not understand until adulthood. Finding them both linguistically and emotionally impenetrable, she hid them away in a box, only to uncover a number of them – forty-nine, to be exact – later as a young adult. Throughout her book, Koh intermixes her mother’s letters with a piercing retelling of her and her family’s story, describing her experiences growing up in Irvine and traveling to Korea and Japan; her maternal grandmother Jun’s years of heartbreak in Daejeon; and her paternal grandmother Kumiko’s childhood on JeJu Island – a “mystical” Eden of azaleas, cherry blossoms, and golden canola, rendered ashen and bloodstained during the horrific JeJu Island Massacre of 1948. Showcasing her mother’s signature penmanship and cartoons (and sometimes stained by Koh’s tears), the forty-nine letters serve as both the foundational crux of Koh’s story and a redemptive portal into her family’s past, their number meaningfully signifying the number of days in Buddhist tradition that a soul wanders the earth seeking for answers as they prepare for the afterlife.

With every one of Koh’s translated letters and chapters, each neatly structured to feel both expansive and yet accessible, Koh applies her story as a lens with which to examine the various identities we must erase, remold, or even self-generate in order to feel whole and safe: How do we know who we are if our background reflects a varied international patchwork? How do we define who we are if our appearance withholds the full story, or belies the truth altogether? And how do we determine where our ancestors’ stories end and ours begin? Certainly, Koh is a master at showing the ways in which various wounds can be transferred from one generation to another; she knows intimately the ways in which such wounds can be inherited, even if they aren’t experientially shared.

As she struggles to ascertain who she is and to unpack her family’s legacy of trauma, Koh offers a provocative treatise on the connection, versatility, and limits of language. Just as her translation of her mother’s letters opens up a window to familial understanding and reconciliation, Koh also learns that language is as much about what is said as what is left unsaid. “I learned to isolate myself through language – from English to Korean to Japanese,” Koh writes. “It was so effective it was frightening, as if I could guard myself against others like a spy. Where I could hardly open my mouth before, it now seemed that no one could speak to me.” Surely, as Koh tells us, languages have the potential to “open you”; but they “can also allow you to close.”

Koh’s prose is clear, moving, and incisive, though, as a reader, I sometimes yearned for more explication. Throughout her book, there is an unmistakable sense of “unspokenness”: Her retellings are implicit and sphinxlike, compelling us to dissect every word and “read between the lines.” But perhaps therein lies Koh’s intention. In many ways, The Magical Language of Others can be read as a poem, its pages filled to the brim with gorgeous words – isshokenmei, umareru, haenyeo – that each serve to transport and transcend. As one of Koh’s former professors once told her,

“One word has references from history, culture, language – your own experiences and the rest of the world. A single word is a story…When we read a poem, we’re not reading one story. We’re reading every story at once.”

Countless magical words, each engendering countless magical stories. That is Koh’s The Magical Language of Others.