DEAR JAMES BALDWIN,
I've been crazy for you all semester. By about this time next week, I will have read the majority of your fiction and essays and written about eight papers on you. Before, I had never been able to get into Giovanni's Room, which had been recommended to me almost six times over the past year. When I finally read it this October, though, I was struck down by how much I loved it, how much it stirred me up. And your essays-- somehow you give the reader a kind of confidence that allows one to feel as if one shares, in some small capacity, a gram of your wit and intelligence.
The problem is that I'm kind of going nuts with all of this, though, because the way that I feel about your writing defies my own academic analysis every time. There are so many things I want to say, and I've read so much of your work, that it would seem quite obvious that I would write my 20 page thesis paper on you, but I'm terrified of burning out. I don't want to burn out. I want to be able to do this, rather, and just tell you how it is for me. The academic writing style, where the I is smothered by the unmistakable inference that it is correct, does not suit this endeavor on my end, at all. I suppose what I mean here is that it would be so much easier for me to tell you what theories I surmise to be true about your ideas of gender and identity, but I don't want to tell it like it's a sleight of hand, like I know exactly what you were getting at. I am, in short, feeling myself in the rather uncomfortable pigeon hole of "Baldwin scholar."
So, please forgive me these things: that I will continue to quote you, paraphrase you, and tack theories of subjectivity to your work, that the only copies of your books in my possession are American Library editions with bible-thin paper and indices full of your every move, that I have loved you since about the moment I read Go Tell it on the Mountain and Nobody Knows My Name, that I understand our relationship as white girl studying black author requires my constant attention, and indeed that I am careful not to love you in the particular ways that may frighten one. And forgive me my 20 page thesis, if it lies; I will not lie for your sake, or about you, but the semester has been long and fraught and I will return to my more careful affections by the end of next week.
Yours,
Sarah E.S.
I've been crazy for you all semester. By about this time next week, I will have read the majority of your fiction and essays and written about eight papers on you. Before, I had never been able to get into Giovanni's Room, which had been recommended to me almost six times over the past year. When I finally read it this October, though, I was struck down by how much I loved it, how much it stirred me up. And your essays-- somehow you give the reader a kind of confidence that allows one to feel as if one shares, in some small capacity, a gram of your wit and intelligence.
The problem is that I'm kind of going nuts with all of this, though, because the way that I feel about your writing defies my own academic analysis every time. There are so many things I want to say, and I've read so much of your work, that it would seem quite obvious that I would write my 20 page thesis paper on you, but I'm terrified of burning out. I don't want to burn out. I want to be able to do this, rather, and just tell you how it is for me. The academic writing style, where the I is smothered by the unmistakable inference that it is correct, does not suit this endeavor on my end, at all. I suppose what I mean here is that it would be so much easier for me to tell you what theories I surmise to be true about your ideas of gender and identity, but I don't want to tell it like it's a sleight of hand, like I know exactly what you were getting at. I am, in short, feeling myself in the rather uncomfortable pigeon hole of "Baldwin scholar."
So, please forgive me these things: that I will continue to quote you, paraphrase you, and tack theories of subjectivity to your work, that the only copies of your books in my possession are American Library editions with bible-thin paper and indices full of your every move, that I have loved you since about the moment I read Go Tell it on the Mountain and Nobody Knows My Name, that I understand our relationship as white girl studying black author requires my constant attention, and indeed that I am careful not to love you in the particular ways that may frighten one. And forgive me my 20 page thesis, if it lies; I will not lie for your sake, or about you, but the semester has been long and fraught and I will return to my more careful affections by the end of next week.
Yours,
Sarah E.S.
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