god made my face edited by Hilton Als

A few months ago, on my most recent trip to Toronto, my lover and I had a baby shower for out forthcoming child. While this was being set up, we sloped off to hit up a coffee shop, a couple of vintage stores and the nearest branch of the bookstore Type.

Although Type is a very serious independent bookstore selling new, beautiful books, they do often have a little section (or cart!) of books on sale or heavily reduced. During my (hopefully first rather than only) long term period spent off my hated, despised, abhorred native island (whatever they’re calling England now), I used to regularly buy books from this section, as it often features beautiful books of poetry or strange indie press books that the store is overstocked with.

Sometimes, though, this little shelf or trolley (“cart” in Brutish British English) also features something even more magical: beautiful and important coffee table books reduced due to mild superficial damage… god made my face, edited by Hilton Als, is an example of that.

A beautiful book. A magical book. An important book.

And it cost me next to nothing.

A book about James Baldwin. Like many of the best books are.

What a luxury. What a treasure. What a magical thing to have.

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I’m presuming everyone who has clicked onto this link already knows who Hilton Als is, but just in case you don’t I can quickly explain.

Hilton Als is basically one of those “public intellectuals” that we don’t really have in England (any more?) but somehow seem to still exist in many other countries, even in America. Als is an essayist, a writer, a critic, an academic etc, but he’s also someone who’s famous.

This book was produced by the Brooklyn Museum as a follow up to an exhibition and a symposium about Baldwin that Als ran, and it features high quality images of artworks (stills from videos and images of sculptures, as well as photography, paintings etc.) from that exhibition, essays read at the symposium, as well as essays related to the topic, to the theme… the intention of the whole is to create a portrait of James Baldwin, or at least of an idea of James Baldwin.

The artworks include portraits of Baldwin and Baldwin’s peers, of course, but they also include images and ideas related to the great themes of Baldwin’s work: not only race and the civil rights movement, but also love, romance, selfhood, queer identities, art, literature and politics and fame and legacy and travel and internationalism and all the other ideas and realities that Baldwin, big James Baldwin, wrote about in detail…

Some of these essays were produced for this book/symposium, while others are reprints from other sources, for example that great Teju Cole piece about going to the Swiss village that Baldwin writes about possibly being the first Black person to ever enter.

There’s a great piece by a critically acclaimed Black British actor about returning to the UK to perform in a prominent production of one of Baldwin’s plays after having moved to the United States a decade or so earlier to escape the racism of the British film and TV industry …

There’s a short bit of writing by Barry Jenkins about adapting If Beale Street Could Talk and the importance of Baldwin to his artistic development…

In fact, there’s a lot of this (aside from one very cold piece that just feels like an academic chasing a word count rather than an original argument, which is frustrating as it promises a comparison between Baldwin and another hugely important cultural titan of the period but is ultimately contentless), this idea that reading Baldwin, discovering Baldwin, re-reading Baldwin or reading deep into Baldwin was a key moment in an artist’s life.

And I get that, I feel that. And it totally makes sense…

There are other writers who wrote, have written and are writing texts that are like some of the texts that Baldwin wrote.

There are people who speak like him, people who orate like him, people who live like him and people whose novels and people whose essays are like his.

But there’s no one – yet, maybe there will be one day – who is able to do all of these disparate types and styles of writing with such heft.

Baldwin’s books – even though the later ones are considered less important, more preachy, more confused (whatever, they’re still better than most writers’ best works and I think some of the negativity is over-stated (i.e. I really liked Just Above My Head but did think that The Evidence of Things Not Seen didn’t succeed on its own terms, but didn’t fail so badly it deserves to be excluded from BOTH the Collected and Uncollected Baldwin non-fiction collections that exist)) – are masterful, are important, are unforgettable.

These essays collect thoughts of people who knew Baldwin, people who were inspired by Baldwin and people who have studied Baldwin at length, producing a genuine and real-feeling (if not necessarily totally filled in) portrait of both the person and the artist.

It’s a great and beautiful book, just as Baldwin was a great and beautiful person. It’s always a pleasure, a joy, a significant experience, to think about Baldwin.

I still have a few of his texts to experience for the first time. I should probably do that, soon. I should probably do that.

Highly recommended for the Baldwin fan, especially if you can get hold of this at a fraction of the cover price due to superficial damage, like I did. Any left, Type Books?

A pleasure. Thank you, Hilton Als.