BALDWIN, STYRON, AND ME

A multiplicity of being.

The daughter of a Tunisian father and Québécoise mother, Abdelmoumen grew up in Montreal and lived in France between 2005 and 2017 before returning to Canada, where she has continued her career as a writer, scholar, and editor of a literary journal. In this insightful memoir, the first of her books to appear in English, Abdelmoumen reflects on race, ethnicity, cultural appropriation, and her own multiple identities. The relationship between James Baldwin and William Styron is central to these reflections: In France, reading Baldwin for the first time, she was surprised to discover that he and Styron had been lifelong friends. Styron, the grandson of slave owners, and Baldwin, the grandson of a slave, “were both consumed with the problem of racial inequality.” When Styron expressed interest in writing a novel about the rebel slave Nat Turner, Baldwin encouraged the project. The Confessions of Nat Turner won a Pulitzer Prize but incited fierce objections from some prominent Black writers. A white man, they claimed, could only promulgate “white southern myths, racial stereotypes, and literary clichés.” Baldwin disagreed, but he, too, later came under censure for not being “Black enough.” Abdelmoumen considers other efforts by white men to portray Black experience: John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, Ron Stallworth’s Black Klansman, and Abel Meeropol’s song about lynching, “Strange Fruit.” The idea of cultural appropriation, which has become an incendiary issue, seems to Abdelmoumen misguided. “Mistaking an ethnic checklist for a person’s identity is problematic,” she asserts, “as is the ensuing assumption that a person with a certain identity is necessarily knowledgeable about all related topics.” Diversity, she claims, should describe not minority status, but a society that acknowledges the complexity “that comes from all the different facets” of each person’s identity.

A thoughtful, timely contribution to a controversial debate.