Pulling A James Baldwin

At the age of 24, James Baldwin left America and moved to France.

He wasn’t pursuing a long held dream. He didn’t search out French writers at his Harlem library when he was a child. He didn’t ask his mother if she could switch out the ice cream for crème brûlée.

At no point in Baldwin’s life did he harbor dreams of going to live abroad in any particular country.

He only knew he had to get out of America.

In an interview with the Paris Review, Baldwin explained his thinking

I didn’t know what was going to happen to me in France. But I knew what was going to happen to me in New York. If I had stayed I would have gone under

For Baldwin, being a Black, gay man in 1948 America was not survivable. Not physically, not emotionally.

I am obviously not James Baldwin. I don’t possess his genius. I’m also not a gay man and none of us are living in 1948.

Also, I’ve never shared Baldwin’s feeling that America was pulling me under.

But I was beginning to feel like it was preventing my rise.

America is my birth place. The nation is woven into my DNA. It’s the home to all kinds of beauty.

But lately?

Every day the chaos, the repugnant scapegoating, the hair-trigger-outrage, the disasters (environmental, political, economic, judicial), the increasingly frequent acts of political, xenophobic and racist violence…I couldn’t process it anymore. I was growing numb to things that should have enraged me, unmoved by the things that should have motivated me. And perhaps most acutely, if not most importantly, (and this is something I do have in common with Baldwin) I couldn’t figure out who I was or wanted to be as an artist in this chapter of my life.

If you haven’t noticed I’m speaking in the past tense. Not because I’ve figured everything out but because I’m no longer in America. At the end of April I packed up my things and moved to Lisbon, Portugal.

I can go on and on about all the things I love about Lisbon. In the month I’ve been here I’ve formed friendships with people from Hong Kong, Switzerland, Namibia, England, Brazil, Canada, Peru, Mexico, France and of course from all over Portugal. I can tell you about the unfamiliar lightness that comes when you move to a country that’s ranked the 7th safest in the world from a nation that is currently ranked 132nd. And of course I can tell you about the incredible food, the vibrant culture, the beauty, the thrill of finding a place for yourself in a completely new environment…and I will tell you about that in the weeks and months to come.

But right now what I appreciate the most about my new home is that I can hear myself think.

Portugal has it’s problems like everywhere else. Like Baldwin I didn’t come here looking for a utopia. I came here looking for me. Or at least parts of me that I still need to explore.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to me in Portugal.

But I’m really looking forward to finding out.