I Am Not Your Negro (2016): The Importance Of Witnessing

It seems almost like destiny that the legacy of James Baldwin would one day be preserved in the form of a documentary. He was, after all, the kind of man who documented much of everything that happened. More importantly, Baldwin knew the value of documenting life, or what he called, “witnessing.”

And witness is what both Baldwin and I Am Not Your Negro does.

Early in Raoul Peck’s Academy Award nominated documentary, Samuel Jackson narrates the beginnings of a never published novel by Baldwin. The novel was Baldwin’s documentation of the events surrounding the life and death of three prominent Black men that he knew: Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.

Though Baldwin never finished that novel, the legacy of Baldwin’s brilliant thoughts live on in Raoul Peck’s own witnessing of the events that have followed Baldwin. The thing about “witnessing” here is that it is a navigation of temporality and the way it affects meaning. Ultimately, I Am Not Your Negro functions as a love letter to those who witness; those who in spite of the particular danger of misinterpretation and misrepresentation continue to investigate events. I Am Not Your Negro is an ode to those who witness in order to keep the past and the present consciously engaged with the future.

Though it appears impossible to make a film about James Baldwin without addressing race politics, Peck’s documentary takes on a rather artistic approach of making Baldwin the narrator of his own story — it’s almost an autobiography somehow given posthumously. Hearing Baldwin’s words with images from both the past and present immediately creates a temporal tension that is sometimes missing from nonfiction narratives. That is to say, I Am Not Your Negro never decides to back away from making conjectures about the way Baldwin’s words play a role in the time beyond even his imagination.

The fluidity of the way Baldwin’s words are not stuck in any one time period is best expressed by the scene in which Peck recounts Baldwin’s words about the possibility of a Black president after meeting with the late Robert Kennedy. Baldwin, rightfully so, appeared to feel that Kennedy’s attitude was a bit dismissive with his assertion that only with the passing of time would a Black president ever become a possibility. The film then cuts to the inauguration of that very thing that seemed impossible — the swearing in of the first Black President.

This scene, while it definitely has the mark of tension, ultimately reveals that even if Baldwin had never said with certainty that he could foresee such a thing, it was important to show that Baldwin’s words needed to be placed in a time beyond his own. The reveal is ultimately that nothing in time exists on its own: perhaps if not for Baldwin’s bitter feelings toward Kennedy’s comments, the work could have never began toward Obama’s rise to the White House. More importantly, however, this tension between the past and the present reveals how every event in history is connected.

Furthermore, whether loosely or directly, the connection cannot be engaged without the witness. In this case, both Peck, and by proxy Baldwin, are the witnesses. They are the people that can reveal the way incidents do not exist without connection and concern outside of their respective time periods.

The role of the future is always shrouded in mystery. I Am Not Your Negro ends with Baldwin’s explanation of how he could never be a true pessimist due to the mere fact that he’s determined to live his life. He has no choice but to live. This marks the way that the future is engaged in this progression of events over the course of the film. While this appears to be an answer for how to proceed in the future, Peck expertly makes it a question with the images he chooses to follow. The images are of Baldwin’s living relatives and the generations that followed. The look on their faces unfortunately do not suggest that everything continued to get better after his death. Instead, their images function as a question of what kind of future his family will have when it seems Baldwin’s fears and anguish are still relevant to the present day’s events.

The question’s answer will likely vary from person to person, but there will certainly be no answer without someone to witness.