Raoul Peck and the Straightwashing of James Baldwin
by Shannon Cain
I’m reading William J. Maxwell’s excellent compilation of the massive FBI file on James Baldwin. To hold in my hands the evidence that Baldwin’s apparently paranoid fears about intense government scrutiny against him were in fact justified — and that this scrutiny was so rabidly focused upon his sexuality — is astonishing and yet affirms everything we already know.
It is no wonder, then, given this government surviellance and after the summers of 1968 and 69, amidst a civil rights movement not particularly known for its examination of intersectionality — women were banished largely to the kitchen and queers firmly to the closet — that in 1970 James Baldwin exiled himself to the south of France, to a little village on the Cote d’Azur called Saint-Paul de Vence. From this international viewpoint he continued to write and publish, espousing nuanced ideas about racism that weren’t going over well with all sorts of factions from the NAACP to the Black Panthers. Baldwin didn’t carry cards of organizations and he rejected labels — including “gay” — on the grounds that important complexity was lost when one adopted a label or group stance.
This perspective irritated some people. Apparently it still irritates Raoul Peck, because his portrayal of James Baldwin in I Am Not Your Negro gives us a cisgendered, heterocentric, politically flattened version of the author that is not only antithetical to Baldwin’s teachings but misrepresents him to a degree detrimental to our current moment.
I’m a queer (white) feminist activist trained in the third wave tradition, and also a fiction writer who came to Baldwin in part for his celebration of nuance, his appreciation of ambiguity, and his embrace of deep ambivalence (see “Sonny’s Blues”). Intersectionality is the keyword for the coming revolution, and yet in his film, Peck drags us back into a one-sided conversation, ignoring the gray zones that Baldwin so fully inhabited.
As much as the marketing copy for his film would have you believe it was compiled entirely from the unpublished manuscript for Remember This House, the reality is that Peck was given unfettered access to Baldwin’s papers. He assembled the script, as he’s said in interviews, from a variety of these sources.
In other words, he picked and chose. Like a good documentarian, he edited. He thus assembled a certain version of James Baldwin. Peck’s version adheres to the virile civil rights hero stereotype, à la MLK and Malcolm X. He even substitues Baldwin’s formal intellectual high-register preacher’s cadence with the intense deep quiet voice of a hypermasculinzed Hollywood figure, who delivers his lines almost as though talking to himself. Samuel L. Jackson is brilliant in the role Peck made for him, but James Baldwin was an orator, and Jackson is no Baldwin.
Peck produced his film with the cooperation and endorsement of the Baldwin Estate. He speaks in interviews about his close relationship to Baldwin’s sister Gloria, its sole executor. As for the relationship between the Estate’s blessing of Peck’s documentary and the film’s erasure of Baldwin’s sexuality, not to mention the erasure of his decidedly nuanced views on race, one must do as Baldwin would have done and examine the evidence: one notices an Estate with a record of supressing their ancestor’s sexuality (see the Schomberg love letters, locked from public view for 20 years, copies of which survive despite the originals reportedly having been destroyed by Gloria); and one also notices an Estate which has actively blocked the reconstitution of Baldwin’s legacy as a international writer: for the past 10 years, they have prohibited numerous efforts to fulfill his wish that his house in France be made a writer’s colony. Evidence points to an executor who would prefer her brother be remembered simply as a righteously angry son of Harlem, rather than a righteously angry son of Harlem who was also queer and also international and intersectional and whose ideas weren’t always so popular, especially with his family.
The reinvention of a dead family member is nothing new. All of this reminds me of the wife of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who managed to reshape her husband, post-mortem, from an unappealing little man with an adolescent sense of humor into a tall elegant gentleman of breeding. Statues of the era give us the evidence. Garden-variety family homophobia and xenophobia isn’t what surprises or even angers me here: this stuff is as old as the hills. What gets my goat is Peck’s complicity. He either edited his film to suit the Estate’s desired version of Baldwin, or worse, didn’t consult the Estate and just went ahead and straightwashed him as an artistic choice.
One thing is clear: Peck has been a quiet but fierce opponent of the current project to save Baldwin’s villa in Saint-Paul de Vence, an effort I helped start a year and a half ago. He has subtly spread lies and misinformation about our effort, effectively chasing away important supporters. He has accused me personally of fraud, and co-signed a cease and desist letter with the Baldwin Estate, ordering the project to stop all activity. (Our attorneys have deemed this request to have no basis or merit.)
So far I’ve responded with silence, fueled by white guilt and confusion. But I’m a writer, after all. As James Baldwin might have reminded me, it’s my role to interrupt the peace. No longer, then, will I keep quiet as a powerful and famous man who believes his financial interests are being threatened accuses me of wrongdoing based on no evidence at all.
Instead I’ll ask for an explanation.
I don’t need an explanation from the Estate: I recognize old-school homophobia when I see it, and for that there’s no explaning. But from Raoul Peck? The director who gave us a flattened, mainstreamed, simplified Baldwin? For him I do have a question: did he sanitize Baldwin in order to make the movie, or did he make the movie in order to sanitize Baldwin?
The zeal between the lines of Baldwin’s FBI file becomes particularly acute — memos marked URGENT — as the subject turns to speculation on Baldwin’s sexual proclivities. “He’s a known pervert, isn’t he?” J. Edgar Hoover scrawled in the margin of one memo. This context is revelatory, relevant, and important. As long as Peck’s film is allowed to stand as part of the record on James Baldwin, as long as his misrepresentation goes unchallenged, as long as we accept as a valid editorial choice the erasure of Baldwin’s sexuality and of his insistence on a complex global understanding of racism, we are losing our chance to know the person and the prophet he was, and most importantly what he was trying to teach us.