(by Francesca Pierleoni Today with social media "anytime, any idiocy can be taken up by your political opponents and spread endlessly. How can your heart not explode due to the fact that it can start on nothing, not on the plausible, but on the absolute false anything. How do you survive? How do you not hide from the world? How do you still manage to speak? Many of my colleagues know this, in fact they don't speak, today I rightly say. Years ago you would have heard me say that they were very bad at keeping quiet. Instead they save their lives and do well. I I didn't survive and I hurt myself". It's a reflection by Roberto Saviano during 'Like James Baldwin', the meeting dedicated to the great New York writer (author of masterpieces such as Giovanni's Room and If the Street Could Talk, who died in 1987 in only 63 years old), of which he was the protagonist at Libri Come, the Book and Reading Festival held in Rome.
It is a passionate journey, that of Saviano, in the life and literature of the African American writer who also became a symbol of the fight for civil rights, a friend of Martin Luther King and Malcolm
The author of Gomorrah opened, smiling, with a joke: "It's a joy to be at an event in Rome... they haven't arrested me yet... they're trying."
Baldwin, born in 1924, the first of nine children, raised in Harlem, at home in France since he was 24, although he continued to return to the United States, "was read by Martin Luther King and Malcolm
He also participated in the 1963 Washington march, "but King decided not to let him speak from the stage, as they had asked him, because it was feared that his dialectic characterized by an angry engagement could create incidents, and Baldwin understood".
Already with his first book, Shout Out Loud (1953) "the strength of a writer emerges who talks about Harlem and the African-American condition, also comparing and contesting what had been his master Richard Wright" who for Baldwin "saw only victims in Afro-Americans".
The author of Giovanni's room said instead that he did not want to talk about conditions "but about human beings".
For Badwin "it was not about being the voice of the dispossessed, but about a writer being the voice of all those who produced him, needing him, as the only witness in terms of language against the anonymity of their condition".
Among the sorrows of his life was the accusation he received from Eldridge Cleaver, leader of the Black Panthers, of being a 'traitor to the cause' for having also spoken of homosexuality (Baldwin never hid his own) in the black community. Baldwin 'wants to give with his literature give people a tool to avoid feeling judged" underlines Saviano. "For him, politics was like religion.
Because to understand morality you have to associate with scum, stay outside the temple.
There must be an encounter with the other, the possibility of knowing.
The prayer of this practice is kindness, understood as openness, which does not exclude anger". The kindness "of which Baldwin speaks is the one that makes you see that it is not right to suffer and you have to choose".
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