I Am Not Your Negro

Dir: Raoul Peck

2017

*****

Born in New York in 1924, James Baldwin was the eldest of nine. His mother left his father because of his drug abuse and James was left to look after his eight younger half-siblings. His stepfather, a Harlem preacher, was tougher on James than on his biological children and the persecution he suffered had a lasting effect on him. He found solace in a local library and by age fourteen, he knew he wanted to be a writer. At age ten, James was abused by a couple of New York police officers, something that was repeated a few years later as a teenager. He witnessed it happen to other young black men and decided to write about it in his first essay. His intelligence was recognised and encouraged at school and at the age of thirteen, he wrote his first article titled ‘Harlem – Then and Now’. His stepfather died in 1943 and his funeral was held on his nineteenth birthday and on the day of the Harlem riot of ’43. The day had a profound effect on James for many reasons and he wrote about it in the critically acclaimed essay ‘Notes of a Native Son’ in which he tried to find an answer, or at least explain, social and family rejection and to attain a sense of belonging and selfhood, which a consistent theme in his work. Baldwin wrote essays, novels and plays, most of which explore fundamental personal questions and dilemmas of fictional characters amid real complex social and psychological pressures thwarting the equitable integration not only of African Americans, but also of gay and bisexual men, while depicting some internalized obstacles to such individuals' quests for acceptance. His work, including; Notes of a Native Son (1955), Giovanni’s Room (1956), The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976) are now considered modern classics. In the mid-eighties Baldwin began writing Remember This House, a manuscript that was his own reminiscences of close friends and murdered civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr, as well as his personal observations of American history. Baldwin died in 1987 of stomach cancer, leaving the manuscript unfinished. Following Baldwin's death, his publishing company sued his estate to recover the $200,000 advance they had paid him for the book, although the lawsuit was dropped by 1990. Director Raoul Peck wanted had wanted to make a film about his hero for some time; the question was just what kind of film it would be. "We tried everything," “We tried different forms. I worked with a playwright. I worked with a screenwriter at one point. They were not bad ideas – they just weren't the monument I felt I had to do that would make Baldwin who he is and ensure that his legacy would stay forever. I knew that I had to find an incredible, original form that would be at the level of something that he could have done." Peck approached Baldwin’s estate a decade before work started on the film. "The strange thing is that I couldn’t say to them, 'Well, I do not want the option for one particular book. I want an option for the whole body of work and the option to the man, to the biography ... everything.'" It was rare for Baldwin’s estate to provide access to his archive, but he got approval because Baldwin's sister Gloria Karefa-Smart, the estate’s executor, had seen several of his previous films and liked them. "I just told the truth, I told them what he meant to me, why I wanted to do a film – but also that I did not know yet what the film would be. I said, 'I just need the time to work on it.'" Eventually it was decided that a feature documentary based on Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, that was just a collection of notes, letters and accounts of meetings, was the perfect and logical way of tribute. It took the best part of a decade to put together the narrative and to attain archive footage, by which point America had gone through some changes. The Black Lives Matter movement had become prominent in the news, as was a string of shootings of unarmed black men and women. Baldwin’s voice rang true once again and Peck explored present day with the history of America that Baldwin had spoken of to paint a broad picture of inequality. Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson in Baldwin’s voice, I Am Not Your Negro is a brutal account, through observation, of a history of troubled relations. Not only are the approaches of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr compared, but the nature of persecution is explored, through the effect that religion, teaching, media and film can have on society. While I wasn’t a huge fan of the way the documentary is structured, I do think that Peck gets across the overall message of Baldwin’s that in order to challenge such issues one needs to challenge oneself. It is easy for a white man like myself to proclaim that racism is about ignorance vs understanding, rather than Black vs white but I’ve never been persecuted or seen as less than human. Thirty years after his death, Baldwin’s words still ring true, hearing them inter-played with images of today come as an important and sobering reminder of not how far we’ve come but how far we’ve yet to go.