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graysonhester 's review for:
Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I only rate this 4.5 stars because of my familiarity with Baldwin’s later, and slightly more focused and incisive and wrenching, works, but, compared to the lion’s share of other writers — American, Black, queer, anyone, anywhere — it is a full five, a towering classic.
There is much to be said, but the thread onto which I hang, like an explorer suspended above a gnawing ravine, is the power beyond power, the strength unspeakable, of queer love — to confer dignity, to fashion within a body broken a soul endurant, to be both the sodden floor upon which one is lain one low and the tender voice, standing above them, toward which one claws their way back up.
It was not so much the supernatural conversion that guided Baldwin’s life — if we are to take this novel autobiographically, which I believe it is intended to be — but instead the preternatural love, the unquenchable desire, the God-in-us ability to embrace one another in totality, that set before him his path. The conversion was the ecstasy; the desire was the discipleship. The theology and the divinity would later fall from Baldwin’s vision — but the love remained. Elisha, as conduit for carnality, avatar for affection, rescued John in all the ways a person can be rescued. And one can’t help but wonder who, for Baldwin, Elisha was, and how he sparked within a young Black boy in Harlem in the 1930s a fierce softness, an indefatigable relent, a nascent queerness enough to devote the rest of his life to the pursuit of its truth, the sculpting of its abstraction.
It was not, in the end, the altar or the sacrament or the shouting or the praying or the Devil or even God that hurled John into the light-kissing darkness. It was John, was Baldwin’s, own norm-shattering, boundary-breaking talent for seeing enfleshed in Elisha, in other men, the infinitude of love and the integrity of a life spent, however imperfectly, pursuing it, chasing it, wanting it, reciprocating it, trying, trying, trying to make it incarnate. To sing of it from the rooftops, to, oh so appropriately, tell of it on the mountain.
This is the story of the gospel according to Baldwin, the account of his road to Damascus. It is a journey upon which he discovered and insisted upon his own self, which, in a world hellbent on denying you of it, is the queerest, bravest, holiest act one could ever take — evidence of a faith that could move
mountains, or, at the very least, drape one’s arm upon another as they walk, damned and divine, down a sun-dappled avenue and into a waiting world.
There is much to be said, but the thread onto which I hang, like an explorer suspended above a gnawing ravine, is the power beyond power, the strength unspeakable, of queer love — to confer dignity, to fashion within a body broken a soul endurant, to be both the sodden floor upon which one is lain one low and the tender voice, standing above them, toward which one claws their way back up.
It was not so much the supernatural conversion that guided Baldwin’s life — if we are to take this novel autobiographically, which I believe it is intended to be — but instead the preternatural love, the unquenchable desire, the God-in-us ability to embrace one another in totality, that set before him his path. The conversion was the ecstasy; the desire was the discipleship. The theology and the divinity would later fall from Baldwin’s vision — but the love remained. Elisha, as conduit for carnality, avatar for affection, rescued John in all the ways a person can be rescued. And one can’t help but wonder who, for Baldwin, Elisha was, and how he sparked within a young Black boy in Harlem in the 1930s a fierce softness, an indefatigable relent, a nascent queerness enough to devote the rest of his life to the pursuit of its truth, the sculpting of its abstraction.
It was not, in the end, the altar or the sacrament or the shouting or the praying or the Devil or even God that hurled John into the light-kissing darkness. It was John, was Baldwin’s, own norm-shattering, boundary-breaking talent for seeing enfleshed in Elisha, in other men, the infinitude of love and the integrity of a life spent, however imperfectly, pursuing it, chasing it, wanting it, reciprocating it, trying, trying, trying to make it incarnate. To sing of it from the rooftops, to, oh so appropriately, tell of it on the mountain.
This is the story of the gospel according to Baldwin, the account of his road to Damascus. It is a journey upon which he discovered and insisted upon his own self, which, in a world hellbent on denying you of it, is the queerest, bravest, holiest act one could ever take — evidence of a faith that could move
mountains, or, at the very least, drape one’s arm upon another as they walk, damned and divine, down a sun-dappled avenue and into a waiting world.