Error +972: Moonlighting Love
Love does not make the world go round, nor is it the one thing human hearts learn to do regardless of its exhaustion. James Baldwin posits a political love to us, one that ignores Bell Hooks and points to a relationship with a family member we would not be friends with in another world. Love, in Baldwin’s work, bridges the historical narrative of white innocence with their obliviousness towards their complicity in the pain of Black Americans. It is an act of survival and resistance in a “loveless world”. He goes as far as attributing his nephew’s survival to the love their family were able to hold on to. Baldwin has a way of making you believe — in this political love, and its ability to hold a mirror up to white people. Yet, his rhythmic verbosity meets its inevitable end, and you’ve got to look up at the world again. I have the hope Baldwin speaks of, but how do we even begin to use it?
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In evoking the image of a brother (I am willfully ignoring the “younger” here — I’ve been to an event organised by the LSE Law Department so I know ignorance does not escape the aged), Baldwin explains the complication of this love with such ease. Brothers, and perhaps later uncles, fathers, grandfathers and friends, have an affinity for being people. What I mean by this is, their failure to become the people you need (or wish) them to be compels you to understand them beyond their relation to you. The instinct to dig deeper doesn’t exist with a disposable relationship. A cruel friend warrants a severance of ties ; a cruel brother begs the question “why?”. In this pursuit, we come to understand them as people first, as products of their environments and maybe a larger rot that is no direct fault of their own. By this measure, we see the little boys they once were, and the events which made them the men they are. Only after we do this, can acceptance truly happen. Baldwin’s love is an altar for the humanity in all — even the most cruel of beasts.
The pain, cruelty and bigotry of racism dehumanises the oppressor and oppressed. Only when we are stubborn about choosing to see the oppressor as human can there ever be a future that looks different. Yet, this is an incredibly annoying idea to grapple with. Why should I love you?It is here that I grasp the extent of radicality in Baldwin’s love, because a stranger who hurts me like a brother will never receive my empathy or understanding. I am compelled to look at ethno-religious states operating under apartheid — how shall we forget your glee at the slaughter of innocent natives? What table has Baldwin conjured, which has him eating dinner with the man who killed his brother? Baldwin is right, I know, but for today I cannot love a cruel other.
