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Razia Iqbal: Hello, my name is Razia Iqbal. Welcome to Notes on a Native Son, a podcast about the writer James Baldwin. This year, 2024, marks the 100th birth anniversary of a man unique in American letters. He was many things to many people, novelist, essayist, activist, seer, icon. For Baldwin, though, such lists were meaningless. Who and what James Baldwin was and what his legacy is can't be listed, but it can and perhaps should be found in his work.

He refused any attempt to box him in. This podcast tries to get close to the idea of getting to know Jimmy Baldwin through his work and for those who love his words, to return to them. We have called it Notes on a Native Son after one of Baldwin's most famous autobiographical essays, Notes of a Native Son. That essay powerfully clarifies what he is and what America is on his terms. In each episode of Notes on a Native Son, we invite a well-known figure to choose a special or significant James Baldwin passage.

The conversation that ensues tells us as much about Baldwin's story as it does about the person who loves Jimmy, as he was known to all who loved him.

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Razia Iqbal: Our guest on this episode of Notes on a Native Son is the Libyan writer Hisham Matar. He was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo, and has lived much of his adult life in London. Hisham trained to be an architect, and I can only imagine he would have been brilliant at it, as his eye and sensibility are so finely tuned and honed. That he chose to use words instead of bricks and mortar is no less sublime.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for his profound and painful memoir, The Return, which chronicles his return to Libya after the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi, a man who dominated the country, and Hisham's family story. Gaddafi had his father, Jaballa Alleh Matar, kidnapped and thrown into jail, never to be seen again. This has haunted Hisham Matar's life and work, an overshadowing that he has transformed into books of extraordinary power and beauty.

His first novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and his third novel was longlisted for the same prize. Every year he teaches a literature class at Barnard College in New York. While Hisham has always loved the work of James Baldwin, unusually for this podcast, he didn't choose words from a book, but an extract from a famous appearance James Baldwin made on US Television.

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Hisham Matar: "You are asking me to do something impossible. You're asking me to take the will for the deed. I don't know what most white people in this country feel. I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don't know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian church which is white and a Christian church which is Black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it, the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday.

That says a great deal to me about a Christian nation. It means I can't afford to trust most white Christians and certainly, I cannot trust the Christian church. I don't know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me. That doesn't matter, but I know that I'm not in their unions. I don't know if the real estate lobbies against Black people, but I know the real estate lobbies keep me in the ghetto. I don't know if the Board of Education hates Black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools that we have to go to.

Now, this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children, on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen."

[applause]

Razia Iqbal: Hisham Matar, thank you so much for taking part in the podcast. Tell us first why you chose this. Listening to you read it, I can hear Baldwin's cadences in how he's saying it, but tell us first why you chose it.

Hisham Matar: I remember the first time I saw it and heard that interview and how it seemed to me that there was this beautiful man caught against the most insurmountable series of hurdles in front of him, and he was trying to push through. It's really interesting to watch it because a lot of what is said is not through the words. Baldwin is dressed in a black suit with a black tie. He looks quite small and folded onto himself, and he's constantly smoking.

He's got this animated face as Dick Cavett tries to put the question to him in the beginning, saying, "Isn't it over now? Aren't Negroes doing much better? We have a Negro mayor, and even in commercials now, you have Black people."

Razia Iqbal: Civil rights legislation had been passed and so on.

Hisham Matar: Yes. Baldwin just waits. I can sense the tremor in his chest as he's waiting. It's a very difficult thing to do, to wait like that, and then even more difficult to do what he does next, which is he smiles and Dick Cavett says, "Well, I'm glad that you find it funny." He was worried. Of course, Dick Cavett wasn't worried at all. Then Baldwin says, "The Problem is with the language."

Razia Iqbal: It's so interesting, isn't it, that the second guest and the quote that you chose is in response to the other guest in the show, a philosophy professor.

Hisham Matar: A philosophy professor who was Dick Cavett's professor at Yale.

Razia Iqbal: Exactly.

Hisham Matar: He's his favorite professor who comes on and basically says, "Yes, I heard some Mr. Baldwin had said, most of which I disagree with." He then says that the real question should not be about race or religion or any of these divisions, that there is something essential about what it is to be a man, and how do you realize your potential in society is a universal question. That's really what's really interesting here, and that bonds should be found on sensibilities or professions and so on.

"You're a Black author. You have more in common with a white author than you would maybe with somebody else." Baldwin, again, manages himself very carefully. Immediately he goes down to the foundations, and he starts from there. He starts trying to reveal to this man the reality of being himself. He doesn't do it by trying to win him over. That's what's really quite powerful and moving to me about it. He does it simply by going at him in a very strong way.

He makes it clear right from the beginning that "The problem isn't to do with me. It isn't to do with what is the state of the Black man or the Black person in America today, because that question matters to me," he says, "But that isn't really the most interesting question. The question is, what does it say about America?" He immediately asserts what has always seemed to me the truth about these things, these situations that such structural prejudices say much more, of course, about the powers that enact them than about the minorities. He uses you to Dick Cavett over and over.

He says, "You have placed me in this position. You have decided that this is the reality for me. You assume that I want the things that you want, when all I really want is to be left alone." To me, it's unimaginable, this assault on him in such a short space of time. What's really phenomenal is how he manages to turn it all, how he waits, waits, waits, and then, like Muhammad Ali, really strikes at the right moment, and it's phenomenal.

His rhetorical gifts are, of course, incredibly famous, but here he wields them in such a way that he manages to do several things at once. He lists some of the aspects of what it means to be Black in the society, and then he says, "Well, here's the evidence. Actually, it's you who's being disengaged from reality. It's you who is being a romantic. It's not me because it's that reality that binds me to my experience." He's risking so much there because he's not-- That's what I mean by the fact that he's not appealing.

He's not trying to say, "Well, this is a great nation." He's not making the Obama argument, "Here's our better self, rise up to it." He's saying, "Well, actually, there are deep problems with you, and I have no faith in your moral character."

Razia Iqbal: Which is one of the hardest things to hear, I guess.

Hisham Matar: Particularly for America. For anybody, but I think particularly for America.

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Razia Iqbal: What was your relationship with James Baldwin on the page? Have you read him for a long time? Can you remember when you first encountered him?

Hisham Matar: Yes, he was one of my very early love affairs. I read those novels when I was very young, in my late teens, early 20s, and found myself in them. Although my experience was very different. I'm a North African boy living between London and Egypt and Tripoli, but I found myself in those books because I think one of the things that he's writing about is that he's very interested in what it might mean to be misgotten and how that can absent you somehow.

Anybody that has lived between cultures or anybody that comes from a culture about which there are many derogatory notions in the host country, if you're Arab or Muslim and you live in Britain, if you're Black, if you're a woman, if you're gay, it doesn't matter what it is, you're constantly at risk. Baldwin really puts his finger on that. He's also aware that the injustices and the prejudices to which he and his people have been subjected are a symptom of societal illness.

It really, to him is not a Black problem. To have arrived at that under these conditions, to me seems like one of the great acts of genuine heroism. Yes, he's always been very close. In fact, thinking about this interview and at that moment, to me, really, it's those eyes and the way that they're constantly refusing to give up but also constantly refusing to forget the gesture of love.

When you see the full interview, even after he speaks with such power and anger, he, in the silences, looks across to Paul Weiss with genuine human tenderness. That's where Baldwin really shines because for him, love is really the prize here, not to lose it, how to find it, how to exercise it. Thinking about this, there was a couple of lines from Giovanni's Room that in a sense, I think, shine a light on this, if I could read them.

Razia Iqbal: Please.

Hisham Matar: "People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their deceptions are not really decisions at all. A real decision makes one humble. One knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named, but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.

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Razia Iqbal: So, so beautiful. The spirit of Baldwin is something that I've carried with me since I first started reading his novels. As you were talking about what those novels meant to you as a teenager, I was thinking about Baldwin being in this room and hearing you talk about the impact of those novels, because one of the things that was so important to him was that he wanted people to really see him as a novelist.

Hisham Matar: Yes, absolutely. Also, I think towards the end of his life, when he'd made that move to France, he intimated that he has a regret that he didn't spend more time writing novels. I've always seen Baldwin, if I am to be honest about this, as also an example of how to be, but also of how not to be because as much as I-- It's ironic that I'm choosing to talk about an interview because I've always gone to his essays and his interviews with great caution because as a novelist, I saw them as distractions.

That, in other words, Baldwin was both heroic, but he was also burning. That it worked. The great painful truth about systematic structural prejudice is that it works. It breaks people. In that interview, you could see the placid stillness of Dick Cavett's face and the animated, unsettled, troubled terrain of Baldwin's face. That takes a lot of will and takes a lot out of you.

Razia Iqbal: Resistance to the things that are designed systematically to keep you in your place.

Hisham Matar: Yes.

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Razia Iqbal: We'll take a short break. More from Hisham Matar when we come back. This is Notes on A Native Son with me, Razia Iqbal.

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Razia Iqbal: You're listening to Notes on A Native Son with Razia Iqbal. I can see parallels between you and Baldwin in your relationship with writing, rather than the specificity of themes or any of those other things or even craft. It isn't about that. It's about your relationship with the act of writing. With Baldwin, it seems to me that the pigeonholing of him is absurd in some ways, because his writing, the actual writing in the novels, defies all of that because he comes at it from a position of having read Dickens, Dostoevsky, the King James Bible, et cetera, et cetera.

The man's literary references were both broad and deep and granular, and he cared about culture, he cared about literature. It seems to me that there is that in your sensibility. I wonder what you see in the way in which he was as a writer that relates to the way that you are as a writer.

Hisham Matar: Yes. I think that he's not behaving as though, "I'm going to impress you by showing my credentials about the things that you already know about, but I'm actually going to bring things that you don't know about and perhaps you might want to think about." I feel that very much. To me, it's outrageous that I live in a literary culture that has no awareness of Al-Jahiz or Abu Ala Al Ma’arri. That's like living somewhere where people have never heard of Milton or Shakespeare.

They are figures on that level. Summoning up all of that and that's what I love about what he does, is that he brings with him Ray Charles-

Razia Iqbal: Bessie Smith.

Hisham Matar: -and Bessie Smith.

Razia Iqbal: He mentions her in the Dick Dick Cavett interview.

Hisham Matar: He brings everybody with him. That's something that actually I find deeply inspiring and also that I find that I learn from, and I feel very close to that. In these situations, what if you do bring everybody with you? Everybody, and your definition of what everybody is?

Razia Iqbal: It expands the everybody every time, doesn't it? In each person.

Hisham Matar: Yes.

Razia Iqbal: I'm also intrigued by the possibility of at least some connection when it comes to exile because Baldwin actively placed himself in exile by going to Paris.

Hisham Matar: That's right.

Razia Iqbal: He mentions it in the interview.

Hisham Matar: He does.

Razia Iqbal: "I went off to Paris. $40 in my pocket." It's the thing he talks--

Hisham Matar: On the streets of Paris.

Razia Iqbal: On the streets of Paris, exactly. You had exile imposed on you?

Hisham Matar: Yes. I also went to Paris with--

Razia Iqbal: You also went to Paris.

Hisham Matar: -something like $40 in my pocket, but yes. It's a very strong parallel, and it's for very different reasons or maybe not. For political reasons, and then have to find a way to survive, really, but also finding that freedom that he talks about. He says that he really believed that nothing could happen to him there that would be worse than what happened to him at home. That's sadly the case with me, at least then. He also speaks about the social terror, to be free of the social terror that he felt.

He means it about literally, society's terrifying power over him, but in my case, it was a regime's power over me, but the way that that terror can enter all of your social moments.

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Razia Iqbal: I wonder also Hisham, about the idea of-- It's connected to what we were talking about before, the centrality of love for Baldwin, because it sits alongside compassion, which in the context of the 1950s and '60s in the United States, felt absent in the political rhetoric on both sides. I wonder if there are parallels to be drawn in the current moment that we find ourselves in, where people are unwilling to really listen to the other person informed by compassion or love and speak over each other or shout at each other.

Hisham Matar: Yes, absolutely. I think that's very true. I think another word for it perhaps would be attention. I think there are really interesting connections between the quality of attention and questions of justice or even just understanding that, in other words, if you were determined to cause somebody harm, you'd do very well not to pay them any attention. The more you know about them, the more complicated it will become for you to damage them.

It's not for nothing that most of Israeli media has not covered the bombing of Gaza in any detail. That you have to go out of your way, if you live in Israel, to really know what's happening there and it's just down the road because if he did know, it would become more difficult to do it. I think this question of love, attention is so central to this moment because the way here in Britain we talk about the refugees or not talk about them is also to do with this--

If you were to give them names, if you would tell me the woman that was on the boat that arrived last week, what her name was, and what is her favorite book or favorite color, it becomes a little bit more complicated to do to her the things that are done to her. Not impossible, but more complicated. I think Baldwin sits right at the heart of this question of what you give your attention to and what you don't give your attention to has huge consequences, and it does have to do with this question of love. This subject is actually quite prevalent. It's all around.

Razia Iqbal: Interesting. It's so interesting. You're an American, or at least you have an American past.

Hisham Matar: Yes.

Razia Iqbal: I wonder how you think about the way in which America tells stories to itself about itself and this whole. The interview on the Dick Cavett Show, the way in which African Americans have continued to be treated, all of that is part and parcel of the mythologies that have been absorbed in the firmament of America and how it sees itself. Whether it's that they threw off the shackles of empire and therefore that allows them to stop thinking about the genocide against Native Americans or that they are exceptional, God's own country. The way in which Ronald Reagan in particular--

I suppose in the context of this interview Baldwin is talking about Reagan being the governor of California, who of course, goes on to become the president of the United States and changes the economy of the United States in a very particular way and direction. It's such a significant moment, this.

Hisham Matar: It is.

Razia Iqbal: Baldwin looking at Reagan and what Reagan is doing in California is a portent for what is to come, but I wonder, as somebody who lives and works in the US for part of the year, how you think about it and your place in that society.

Hisham Matar: There's several, I think, really extraordinary things about it. It is at once very, very large, extremely rich and powerful, disparate, so many different Americas and very young. Everybody does. Families won't survive without myths, but countries definitely need their myths. With such a young country that is all of those things at the same time, and a superpower has affected us all. We grew up on American culture. No matter where you are in the world, you know something about American culture.

A T-shirt with the word Chicago would be very appealing to you, even though you might not know anything about Chicago and the music and the film, of course, and so on. Changing now, but that's been the case for a long time. It means that the myth-making has to be on steroids and you have to work very fast. The myths are, in a sense, quite bold and naked, you know. I think that's why these figures were needed by history, Malcolm X and Baldwin, and also why what he says that disagrees with the main myths of America is very, very upsetting and challenging.

It's very brave, but also must feel very lonesome. That's the other thing about the interview. It's an incredible portrait of a very aggressive state of solitude because the genuine state of solitude is not when I am on my own, but when, no matter what I'm telling you, you cannot see what it's like to be in my position. Of course, Paul Weiss and Dick Cavett both don't give any sign that they actually saw anything at the end. Paul Weiss is all spread over his armchair and he's making these gestures of, "Yes, but--"

Dick Cavett just can't get rid of this feeling that "But it can't possibly be this bad. It can't possibly be this bad." In some way, they were reflecting, I think, what a great number of Americans feel or must feel about themselves. There is a story, and the story needs to be kept up. What's interesting about this moment, though, is that it's really, for the first time that you can see, at least to this extent, the mask slipping.

America is having to contend, really, with things that it has found very difficult to even talk about before, such as the fact that this repeated refrain of the best country in the world starts to ring hollow. It's also an odd way to proceed in the world to keep repeating to yourself that you're the best. Why is that--

Razia Iqbal: Why is that important?

Hisham Matar: I remember once sitting with an American ambassador. This is something that happens a lot with me. I said to him-- because it was a convivial gathering, so I felt I could speak freely. I said, "What's this peculiar thing about what was going on about your-- Isn't it odd? Imagine I'm walking around saying I'm the best whatever. The best cook, the best writer. Maybe you should aspire to be the second best. That's more interesting." He was genuinely offended by it. It's as though I was saying to a believer that God doesn't exist. I was really hitting something very deep in him.

Razia Iqbal: If one is open to the idea of standing in someone's shoes or being in their head over a sustained period of time, the reading of novels helps us do that. I suppose part of why I'm bringing that up is because, in a way, there's a tiny part of me that wants to champion on Baldwin's behalf, 100 years after he was born, that what he was was a great novelist.

Hisham Matar: He was. He was a great novelist but for very different reasons. Like Jean Rhys, like Ivan Turgenev, he was not a fully realized novelist. It's hard not to feel, reading those novels, that there was more. This is not for a moment, to not be impressed and thankful to him, and grateful that he produced these incredible novels that we have, but I think he was right. He sensed he had more.

Razia Iqbal: If his energies were taken up in this other connection--

Hisham Matar: Exactly. This was such a big question in my mind when I was growing up in a very political atmosphere, how do you sing in a war? How do you do that? Also, I used to think this around the ages of 12, 13, 14, because I was surrounded by lots of people who were very committed to a cause, and it was a noble cause of democracy and the rule of law in Libya and so on. I used to think who is most occupied? The person who's working night and day to undermine the dictatorship or the person working night and day to serve the dictatorship.

I used to think it's a bit of a silly question, but over time, it's proven its worth to me. To put it in a different way, the question is about true liberation, but the problem is, what is the point of your liberation when your people are enslaved? What's the point of that? I think that's where, when it comes to novels-- I'm not saying that the novels will serve the cause because that will also subjugate them, but I like to think that the novels will do something, will disrupt the narrative without even you trying to do it deliberately.

Something about the way novels work, the way they're interested all the time in men and women running against their own hearts in the possibility of being someone else.

Razia Iqbal: The unsayable, the untranslatable.

Hisham Matar: Yes, all of that.

Razia Iqbal: I'm also really interested in something that you said about loyalty. I was reading about this notion of the affiliations one has to a country because Baldwin, in that interview, is talking very much about how, of course, he is an American, but it's a different America for him compared to the America that Dick Cavett and Paul Weiss are telling him exists.

That dream doesn't apply to him, but one of the things that you said that I was so taken by, you said, "I have in my blood, we all do, the noble and the fallen. Our ancestors are murderers and people of exceptional brilliance and generosity. Virginia Woolf and Mussolini are literally my brothers and sisters, and that's a complicated thing about being a human being.

Hisham Matar: Yes, I think that's true. I think one of the things that-- I don't, by the way, always think that what I said is true. [laughter] I think that one is true.

Razia Iqbal: That's why you're the best writer, you're the best cook. It's fine. I'm absorbing it all. [laughter]

Hisham Matar: I think I'll stand by that one. Also, it's what Baldwin is working towards in the interview because he does say to Cavett that, "You think America is a democracy, but I don't. I don't think it's a democracy." I think one of the things that he's advocating is a place where all the voices can find expression. The reason you want them to find expression, not only on grounds of whatever it is, ethics, morality, whatever judgment, but I think the reason you want them to find expression is because you acknowledge this incredible inheritance that we have, this amazing event of being a human being, which means that you're in the aftermath.

You're born after the event. You're born into the story. How do you attend to that story? Do you take one side of it and condemn the other or do you acknowledge what seems to me evidently true, that all the sides run in your veins? All of them do. How do you work with that?

Razia Iqbal: Hisham Matar, thank you so much for speaking to us.

Hisham Matar: My pleasure. Thanks.

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Razia Iqbal: This has been Notes on a Native Son, a new podcast about James Baldwin. In the next episode, we'll hear from the British Ghanaian art curator and writer, Ekow Eshun. This podcast is brought to you by WNYC Studios and sponsored by the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. It is a Sea Salt and Mango production produced by Tony Phillips. The researcher, Navani Rachumallu. The executive producer for WNYC Studios is Lindsay Foster Thomas.

Original music is by Gary Washington. The sound designer and engineer is Axel Kacoutié. Special thanks to Dean Amaney Jamal of Princeton University.

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