Just Above My Head

Rating:
Summary: A stirring work...
Review: Highly recommended...This is an "intense" read...and you will find yourself going back and re-reading certain pages to make sure that you absorbed everything from the page. A stirring story of two brothers desperately seeking to find themselves and a true identity outside of the religious world they had been so immersed in...

Rating:
Summary: A stirring work...
Review: Highly recommended...This is an "intense" read...and you will find yourself going back and re-reading certain pages to make sure that you absorbed everything from the page. A stirring story of two brothers desperately seeking to find themselves and a true identity outside of the religious world they had been so immersed in...

Rating:
Summary: A Literary Wonder
Review: James Baldwin's voice creates a rich portrait to accompany the tale of a family atmosphere and all the forces that converge on them as friends, lovers, and kin. The cast of characters speak through their actions, allowing you to feel the "holy ghost" that the child-turned-preacher Julia could send through a church as well as the vocal harmony of a group of young black men who go on a singing tour of the south in a time where lynching was a pasttime of small town racists. I read this for the first time a mere seven years ago, and since then have read it again and again for the simple fact that you can pick up so much direct and indirect emotions, actions, and premises by hearing the main cast--Arthur, Julia, and Hall, as well as those they come into contact with as they all make their way towards finding a balance between the small line between existence and nonexistence historically for Afro-Americans. "Just Above My Head" reads like an almanac of people, places, and things that get lost in the romantic "good old days" that too many of our literary genius are guilty of promoting while ignoring the "have nots" of society. This book is a staple for me, and I know I'm not the only one, so if you haven't read it, then do so.

Rating:
Summary: An artist of words
Review: Probably one of the more underappreciated novels in American literature. It is unfair to charecterize Baldwin as merely a social critic of the civil rights era. He stands alongside Dickens as one of the great writers of any era, with the ability to articualte an understanding of human nature that trancends any era and stands second to none.

Rating:
Summary: Wish I could rate it 6 stars
Review: This is one of the best written, most beautiful books I've ever read. If any one book could be said to distill James Baldwin's entire life, this could be it, at least among his fiction. The sense of love, compassion, and empathy Baldwin has for his characters is tangible. Many of the passages are poetic in their power; Baldwin excels at finding the nuance, the meanings in a gesture, a glance, a touch. Baldwin was a black gay man but I believe that in this book he has transcended both race and sex, and is writing about something more basic and yet more complex: relationships between *human beings*. For those who grew up in the 1960s and 70s, it's impossible to overstate the impact Baldwin had on many of our lives (even in my case, and I'm Caucasian).

I was lucky enough to hear Baldwin lecture 20 years ago; Just Above My Head had been out for about a year and I was able to get my copy autographed and personalized. He was as arresting a speaker as he was a writer.

In the short list of the most deeply felt, most moving, most powerful books written in the 20th century, this has to come near the top.

Rating:
Summary: Love, Black, Gay and Providence
Review: This novel is a testament in a way, the testament of a man who has lived long and well, too much even and too hard, in the world. A testimony too. Every single event in this novel about a black man who became a gospel singer and then a blues singer is the crystalisation of the whole history of Afro-Americans in the USA, the whole history of each character that is living the event through, the whole past and future of a present that is both crooked and promising. That is the very dilemma of this book, a dilemma that we feel and sense everywhere, on every page. Each moment in the life of these characters is the condensation of the cosmic, historical and human past of the individual and the sublimation of all possible wishes, desires, potentialities that this individual has developed in his situation and with his heritage. The novel may appear as very pessimistic because one cannot evade their heritage. But it is tremendously optimistic because one can always choose to realize their dreams, even if the situation around limits the possibilities and the chances to succeed. The aim of life is not to succeed, but it is not to fail, hence to move forward a few steps, and that one can always do it, even if it entails a lot of suffering and a lot of pain. Baldwin is also very optimistic about the world, about human beings, about Afro-Americans because he believes and tries to demonstrate that this forward progress of the pilgrims we are is fuelled by the happiness one gets from life, and that happiness comes from one's effort to accept what may provide happiness, no matter what that is, and the first thing to accept is love, no matter what form it may take. Yet there is a limit for Afro-Americans, a limit and a contradiction : they have great difficulties thinking in other terms than racial terms. They have been the victims as a « race » of deportation, slavery, discrimination, in a word a holocaust, and they cannot differenciate between the whites who are responsible for that fate, those who have made a direct profit out of it, even if many others have been able to enjoy some improved conditions thanks to the exploitation of black slaves, and the whites who have no responsibility in this historical process. How can we put on the same level, in the same boat the slave owners, the slave traffickers on one side, and the serfs that could only survive between famines, and the workers who were exploited too in the factories, and still are ? How can we put in the same bag the pharmaceutical firms that let Africans die because they don't want generic drugs to be produced and the workers of these pharmaceutical firms who are exploited just the same, even if in another way : the research and the patents the bosses want the poor to pay at the highest price, and in this very case most of these firms are American in the world, have been produced by workers who should be considered as the owners of their work and are, too often, paid a pittance when compared with the riches their bosses get out of this work. That's James Baldwin's dilemma. He hardly can discriminate between the white corn and the white chaff, and the white chaff is the workers, those who create the riches of the white corn. Some chapters become extremely poignant when this issue is brought up here and there and when Black Arthur cannot accept to love and be loved by white Guy, just because Guy is white and considered by principle as an accomplice of what the lords of the white « race » have done in history. And one of James Baldwin's concluding thoughts is : « To undo the horror, we repeat it ». And not to repeat the horror of the killing of a black man by some whites (like Peanut for instance), Baldwin makes his Arthur die in London, in a pub where he is the only black man, and by falling in a state of amazed drunkness on the stairs leading to the restrooms in the basement, at a moment when love had been slightly roughened by life into a distance that could have been avoided if love had not gone through a storm in what appears like nothing but a glass of water, the glass of water of everyday life.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU