STRANGER IN THE VILLAGE

Baldwin's Stranger in the Village

Baldwin's Stranger in the Village

Introduction

Consideration of one of Baldwin's least overtly political essays, “Stranger in the village" attests to his significance as a democratic thinker. Written for Harpers magazine in 1953, the essay relates Baldwin's sense of radical dislocation in the “white wilderness” of alpine Switzerland, where he went to write in the early 1953 (Wilson p. 15). "From all available evidence," Baldwin begins, "no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came, not only is he a black man in a place where the villagers proudly report to him the number of Africans whose souls have been “bought” through their donations at church, but he is also a writer in a town where the only typewriter is his own.

Thesis Statement

Stranger in the Village presents Baldwin's observation of the habitual disrespect and racism of Whites towards the blacks

Discussion

"Stranger in the village” identifies two responses to this history, two themes that recur throughout Baldwin's essays. One response is what Baldwin calls “the rage of the disesteemed." The essay thus gives voice to the justified anger engendered by the experience of habitual disrespect. And it illustrates how such rage hobbles some citizens, thereby preventing interracial understanding and warping society as a whole. No matter how deeply felt, this rage must be dissembled if the “disesteemed” hope to survive. Baldwin's comment that such rage “is one of the things that makes history” indicates the nuance of his thinking. Neither does he accept the idea that the oppressed are completely powerless victims. Nor is he lured by the romance of a revolution in which the oppressed simply turn the tables on their oppressors (Baldwin's stranger, p. 52). The relationship between “the disesteemed" and those who humiliate them is, as Baldwin presents it, always more complicated. Far more devastating for the prospects of democracy is the second response to American racial history: innocence. By innocence Baldwin means a willful ignorance, a resistance to facing the horrors of the American past and present and their implications for the future.

In Baldwin's case displacement is a critical event in which not only is adaptation on the part of the displaced subject necessary, but radical transformation on the part of the politically and culturally dominant subject is also involved, resulting in a wider process of dislocation. The narrative of Baldwin's essay provides some meditations on American society at two critical points: the moment when economic contradictions highlight the hypocrisy of the system concerning slavery and the moment when that hypocrisy can he tolerated no more. Venture circumspectly suggests that American social organization is unfair: Baldwin openly exposes white America's genetic injustice. Their texts mark the process through which black-white relationships evolve, notwithstanding their fundamental diversity as to the authorial voice. Baldwin lavishly describes the main paths and by-roads of his thinking, filtering everything through his emotional experience. Yet, with all their differences, Baldwin's discourse has one of its historical sources in the former slave's speech ...