Baldwin’s Soulmates

Michelle Santiago Cortés in conversation with Hilton Als.

While reading through the twelve essays that make up God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin, I lost count of the instances of twinning, mirroring, or—as the book’s editor, Hilton Als would call them in our conversation—soulmates, that animated the text. God Made My Face begins, not with the story of James Baldwin, but of the painter and queer elder, Beauford Delaney. The book encourages a reading so close that the author's own breath can be felt on the reader’s face. The instances of doubling are a reflex of good reading. Everyone who contributed an essay to God Made My Face is relaying a first-person account of deep, considered reading of the works of James Baldwin. They read beyond the icon, the celebrity, the figure and into the person who became the writer. That is where Als tells us we will find James Baldwin at his barest and truest.

While we’re typically discouraged from reading biography into a writer’s works of fiction, these essays manage to excavate the human writer from within the text. In doing so, each essay contributor—from actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste to director Barry Jenkins—discovers themselves reflected in James Baldwin’s writings.

Hilton Als: Tell me what you're thinking.

Michelle Santiago Cortés: About the book?

HA: Yeah. What's stimulating to you about this conversation? Why do you want to have the conversation? 

MSC: I've been a long time reader of your work and how you write profiles. You experiment with subjectivity and digest yourself through another figure, be it Prince or James Baldwin. And in reading this book I saw a lot of mirroring. Between Delaney and Baldwin, Baldwin and his biographer, and his biographer identified some kind of twinning or mirroring situation between Baldwin and his protagonists. So I'm just very curious about that dynamic.

HA: You know, it's crazy, Michelle. It takes people to point that out to me, that it's a theme that I go back to over and over again, this feeling of identification or twinning with someone. And I think it comes down to wanting a soulmate, right? That you want, not really so much specifically a twin, as much as you really want someone who has your back, and also has your feeling of soulfulness. That they carry your soul. 

And I think that that's really what the wish has been. A lot of my life has been this kind of desire to connect with someone on that level. And I think that one of the things that I have wanted to do in my writing is talk about the need or desire for that kind of connection. A lot of writers write from a sense of belonging already. And I think that for me, one of the things that is beautiful and interesting about Baldwin is his desire to connect, but also knowing that he was a quite separate person.

MSC: I feel that desire to connect, that moment when you're able to identify that "this person can carry my soul" or there's that moment of either identifying or realizing. I guess I'm curious if you experience it as a moment, or if it's a process, if it's something that manifests in your body in any way? I guess what we're talking about is abstract. And we're kind of banking on the fact that we each know it but I guess how do we render that in a way that is more concrete...

HA: For someone like Baldwin the rendering really happened when you find the language that best suits your interiority, whatever your interior life is. I think with writing there's an opportunity to articulate. It's just a question of sitting down at that desk every day and finding your way to a language that makes enormous sense to you. And makes sense to what you want to articulate about your interior life. 

I mean, all the writer has really is his experience and his interiority and Baldwin brilliantly combined those two things. And I think we're always sort of looking for reasons or how-comes of artists and I think it's just an artist sits down and they do it, you know, artists sit down and they live in the discipline of anguish and the anguish of writing, the anguish of being. So I think that one of the reasons I loved him or love him so much, is that he works to find a language to describe complexity and the anguish of being. It's the only thing a writer has, is this kind of feeling and willingness to articulate and find the language for something that is practically inexpressible, which is your soul?

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