James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile

Abstract

Reviewed by: James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile Robert J. Corber (bio) Zaborowska, Magdalena J. James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Throughout his career, James Baldwin resisted construction as an expatriate African American writer. He thought that such a construction depoliticized his reasons for emigrating to Paris in 1948, which he understood as a form of self-imposed exile. As a gender and sexual non-conforming black man, he worried that remaining in the United States would endanger his physical and psychological wellbeing. He also hoped that living abroad would enable him to grasp more fully the specifically American forms of racism and homophobia he experienced while growing up in Harlem. At the same time, he discovered somewhat painfully that geographic distance did not dissolve his identity as an African American, and he remained intensely focused on American society's racial and sexual politics. In the documentary James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, made by Turkish filmmaker Sedat Pakay in 1973 about Baldwin's life in Istanbul, where he settled in 1962, Baldwin emphasized the impossibility of overcoming his vexed relation to the United States as a gay black man living in exile: "Perhaps only someone who is outside of the States realizes that it's impossible to get out. American power follows one everywhere. . . . . One sees [American society] better from a distance, from another place, from another country" (qtd. in Zaborowska 35). Although scholars influenced by Paul Gilroy's groundbreaking work on the "black Atlantic" have emphasized the importance of locating twentieth-century African American cultural production in a transnational context, they have not shown much interest in Baldwin as a writer whose life in exile profoundly shaped his understanding of American racial and sexual formation. In James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile, Magdalena J. Zaborowska attempts to rectify this omission in Baldwin studies by meticulously reconstructing the writer's life in Istanbul during the 1960s. Zaborowska conducted extensive interviews with the Turkish artists and writers who formed Baldwin's social and professional circle in the Turkish capital, including the actors Engin Cezzar and Gulriz Sururi, the journalist and translator Zeynep Oral, and the poet and critic Cevat Capan, which enables her to provide a fascinating glimpse into Turkish intellectual life during a period [End Page 1030] of social and political tumult. Zaborowska mostly wants to establish that Baldwin's experience of Turkish society marked a turning point in his understanding of the complicated nexus of race and sexuality by provoking him to rethink racial and sexual identities in a transnational context. Her chapter on Baldwin's 1969 production of a Turkish version of Canadian playwright John Herbert's controversial drama about prison homosexuality Fortune and Men's Eyes (translated into Turkish as Dusenin Dostu) makes an especially important contribution to Baldwin studies. Her investigation into the production, which was both a critical and a commercial success, recovers a forgotten chapter of the writer's career and argues provocatively that it enabled him to challenge gender and sexual norms more openly than his fiction did. Zaborowska's analysis of the impact of Baldwin's exile on his work builds on recent scholarship located at the intersection of critical race theory and queer studies. This scholarship has revived interest in Baldwin, whose reputation as a writer began to decline in the late 1960s. Despite the enormous success of his extended essay on race relations in American society, The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin's performance of male femininity, which many interpreted as a sign that he was homosexual, undermined his authority as a racial spokesman, especially after the emergence of the Black Power movement, which marked a masculinist turn in American anti-racist struggle. A new generation of African American public intellectuals associated black liberation with the militant expression of heterosexual masculinity, and writers such as Eldridge Cleaver and Amiri Baraka viciously attacked Baldwin as an Uncle Tom who allegedly conspired with white leaders to emasculate black men. Baldwin, who throughout his career challenged the myth of black male sexual prowess, threatened their project of reclaiming an injured black masculinity, and they marginalized him by pathologizing homosexuality as a...