Reviews - Va veni focul | The StoryGraph

Va veni focul by James Baldwin, Elena Marcu

6.57k reviews for:

“whose little boy are you”

i think james baldwin is an absolute genius, i really resonated with his criticism of the church as someone who grew up in one and later worked in one with my father being the pastor i was really able to relate with a lot of what he was saying. especially with how he was talking about being able to manufacture a spiritual moment.

korrick's review against another edition

5.0

Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present anymore than they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

There are books out there that are word for word more vast, more meaningful, more loving and more true than ten rewritings of [b:War and Peace|656|War and Peace|Leo Tolstoy|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1413215930s/656.jpg|4912783] by ten auspicious straight white male authors could ever be. Indeed, a major reason why I read the Russian behemoth in the first place was so I felt comfortable saying such things. Such amateur readings like mine, of course, will be questioned, and while I have neither a degree in literature (or any, for that matter) nor fluency in the Russian language, these gatekeeping quibbles mean very little indeed when placed alongside the literature of black US Americans. Some of those authors didn't have a college degree, all of them wrote in English, and yet the understanding and reverence and empathetic comprehension has carried into the life of US reality with much less fervor and acceptance than the 19th century text of a Russian aristocrat. In light of that, it is not the brain that should be held accountable in such matters of textual worth, but the heart.

To accept one's past—one's history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.

I started reading as a way to get out of my head, my head including the reality that impacts it and the thoughts that stem in response. Over time, I have gone from reading for entertainment, to reading for knowledge, to reading for self-knowledge, to reading for self-knowledge written by the so-called "other". At this most present point in time, I have come to the conclusion that reading will never fix my personal issues, and indeed during certain periods will exacerbate the effort of coping with myself immensely. Instead, I have found that what I deem toxic in myself is part mine, part ingrained into so many others by the special breed of genocidal hypocrisy that is the US American Dream in the hands of European descendants. Today, when I read, I look not for a cure for such toxicity, but the means in which craft an antidote on the solipsistic, private, public, and the levels of strangers I will never encounter but still affect through taxes paid and politics engaged. This work, in that respect, is invaluable.

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

What Baldwin does here is what has been done countless times in philosophy, in religion, in much fancier spreads of prose and much more esteemed levels of government, in cycles of feminist reclamation and revolutions of Marxist drive and every other thought experiment that aspired to a stake in human reality. Unlike the overwhelming majority, he has combined in these 141 pages pertaining to a very specific problem of a very specific region of a very specific time and place and immeasurable exactitude the guarantee of the end and the drive to carry on. Unlike most, Baldwin does not pretend that change does not have consequence, that progress will be universally achieved, that the standards of living exalted in his day and, indeed, in mine, are anything but the evolution of murderers and the aspirations of sadists. And, unlike those few who do accept this history of violence and see no other solution to it than more of the same, he insists on valuing the beauty that such a solution would ultimately break.

In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity—and in political terms, anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top.

No doubt I am guilty of some injustice here, but it is irreducible, since I cannot risk assuming that the humanity of these people is more real to them than their uniforms. Most Negroes cannot risk assuming that the humanity of white people is more real to them than their color.

This work is a warning that neither pulls its punches nor stems its heartbreak. It is one born of love and of fear in a time that had little inkling of the hyperconnection of my own, where the names of Mike Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and thousands, millions, billions of others continue to ring in my corner of the Internet and work themselves across highways and Fifth Avenues and the blood-filled veins of the military industrial complex I call home. I knew, when I read [b:Giovanni's Room|38462|Giovanni's Room|James Baldwin|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1389658936s/38462.jpg|814207], that this man had a work with my name on it, a work that would call for a revival and a reckoning. What I didn't know was that I would have already lost all faith in the institutions of my government, in the history of my heritage, and any and all facts beyond the simple truth that white people are no different from children bred for war and the pleasures of homicide on the bodies of the other. What I didn't know was Baldwin, despite overwhelming awareness of this hell on earth and what those who share my skin have wreaked and will continue to wreak on those who share his, placed his bet on love.

I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

Yes. That love.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One in responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

I'm gearing up for a return to academia with all its empty learning and valorization of old dead straight white men. It's taken me years filled with works such as this to get me to this point of seeing what I am being taught and how I should learn from it and, most importantly of all, the ways I will use it on the broader scheme of life. I will, in that respect, continue to take each and every work far too seriously as merited by most. However, looking back, such seriousness has served me well. It has led me to works like these that give me the will to continue, and that, at its heart, is what truly matters.

cerisique's review against another edition

4.0

Such an important and classic Baldwin text! Glad I finally read it

ekxv's review against another edition

4.0

challenging dark emotional funny informative inspiring reflective tense medium-paced

heburrows's review against another edition

5.0

Incredible. Feels just as relevant today as when it was written. Will be thinking about this for a while.

“And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.”

spark166's review against another edition

5.0

challenging dark hopeful inspiring reflective slow-paced

“How can one, however, dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power? … Perhaps one cannot ask for more. People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility.”