Imagine James Baldwin occupying the same mythical space as John Wayne. Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro takes strides to place him within that realm. Actually, it’s Baldwin’s own words that create that proximity. When he walked this land, his world was inundated with pale-faced heroes. The great American author, essayist, and critic talks often of the Western narrative and its place in the American consciousness – the violence and the heroism, the vengeance and the power – yet since the time cameras began to record, black Americans have seen their own likenesses as subservient, and at worst, brutalized. I Am Not Your Negro is a film, to borrow a phrase, about buried corpses beginning to speak.
Baldwin’s final and unfinished novel, Remember This House, is the lifeblood of the film. Structured around the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., he was to give a fictionalized first-person account of race and American history. He died before the work was completed. Yet from just the few pages that had been written, Peck constructs a vital Baldwinian document which rages into the modern day. The Haitian-born director proves himself an able historian and critic, linking today’s continued racial struggles with the past. He’s interested in re-narrativizing America. At one point, footage of Baldwin is shown saying that a legend had been made out of a massacre, in reference to the genocide of Native Americans. So just as those violent accounts have been sanctified within American, i.e. white, history, Peck assumes Baldwin’s mantle and traces the imperialist bent inherent within the country’s racial strife.
Baldwin’s own text serves as a spiritual guide, and thusly Peck crafts a document that is wholly about black experience. Samuel L. Jackson narrates the film, a role he was surely born to play. His command of language is both forceful and gracious, as if Baldwin was in his bones and had reign over his tongue. Peck gives limbs to the text through a collage of media, from interviews with Baldwin himself to photo stills of American incidents, footage of modern-day Times Square and swampy bayous to recordings of riots past and present.
There’s an aggressive, sinewy feel to the endeavor. Raw blues standards initiate cuts. Portraits of beaten black bodies reverberate off the screen. And when he’s shown, Baldwin’s own composed ferocity levels criticism after damning criticism. The film represents the consciousness of an exhausted, beaten blackness that America has continually crushed underfoot. Each cut and juxtaposition builds into an intelligent, raging vision of what has been and the reckoning yet to come.
Baldwin tells of how he was compelled to move back to America after a long stay in France. Tensions were rising in American communities, so black leaders emerged; he followed suit. We know the stories of the populist civil rights leaders: the Everses and Malcolms and Kings. Yet it’s a man like Baldwin that knew better than most how to tie together the threads of history and truth. He could unite ideologies as starkly different as Malcolm’s and Dr. King’s. He could point to the American cowboy and find the cracks in his mythical foundation. And he could command an entire classroom of white faces with his eloquence, his grace, and his acumen. But it’s hard to avoid just how much the images of typical (or typified) blackness represented him. He could not transcend the narrative in which he was caught. Those perpetuated images of battered and bruised African-Americans included him as well.
Tragedy seemed to have loosed him from hope. Despite his command, he always appeared wearied, on the verge of darkness. It’s obvious much of his work, while for the people, obliged to convince his own self that things could progress. Maybe it was the poet, the critic, the sensitive in him that separated him from the movement’s most prominent leaders. But if Peck is to be believed – and I think he is – Baldwin is as true and steady a voice as any. Better yet, his is the one our age is most in need of.
The true arc of I Am Not Your Negro is its insistence on the reconstitution of image-making. Peck establishes and constantly reinforces how the image of blackness in America has always been one of enslavement, subservience, and oppression. And he ties that to Baldwin’s iterations about John Wayne and Western heroes. If Westerns and their visions of white manifest destiny are the true American myths, in what capacity do black lives matter? Where do they factor into the narrative of freedom? The film ends with Baldwin issuing a reckoning to white America: we invented this construct of blackness and it is up to us to figure out why.