of them brutally imposing it. Nor is it easy for me, when I try to examine the world in which I live, to distinguish the right side from the wrong side. I share, for example, the ideals of the West—freedom, justice, brotherhood—but I cannot say that I haveoften seen these honored; and the people whose faces are set against us have never seen us honor them at all.
But finally for me the difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject—his key and ours to his achievement. Nothing, I submit, is more difficult than deciphering what the citizens of this time and place actually feel and think. They do not know themselves; when they talk, they talk to the psychiatrist; on the theory, presumably, that the truth about them is ultimately unspeakable. This thoroughly infantile delusion has its effects: it is contagious. The writer trapped among a speechless people is in danger of becoming speechless himself. For then he has no mirror, no corroborations of his essential reality; and this means that he has no grasp of the reality of the people around him. What the times demand, and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one
be
—not seem—outrageous, independent, anarchical. That one be thoroughly disciplined—as a means of being spontaneous. That one resist at whatever cost the fearful pressures placed on one to lie about one’s own experience. For in the same way that the writer scarcely ever had a more uneasy time, he has never been needed more.
(1959)
From
Nationalism, Colonialism, and the United States: One Minute to Twelve—A Forum
This talk was given on June 2, 1961, at a forum hosted by the Liberation Committee for Africa on nationalism and colonialism and United States foreign policy.
· · ·
B OBBY K ENNEDY recently made me the soul-stirring promise that one day—thirty years, if I’m lucky—I can be President too. It never entered this boy’s mind, I suppose—it has not entered the country’s mind yet—that perhaps I wouldn’t want to be. And in any case, what really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro “first” will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.
I can only speak about my own country, because I know this country; I think I know it pretty well. In this country now—and I have to preface everything I am going to say with this—all terms without exception mustbe revised. I dare anyone in this room or in the streets to define for me today a “literate” man, or an “educated” man, or to tell me precisely what you mean when you call someone an historian, to say nothing of a novelist. Now this may seem frivolous, but it is very important, because when all these terms have no meaning, then we have the populace that we have today, and we have the press that we have today, and impenetrable speeches from high places, from people who should know better, but who clearly don’t.
Now one of these terms is “nationalism.” Let us try to strip this term of all the rhetoric that now surrounds it. The term means, as I understand it, that a certain group of people, living in a certain place, has decided to take its political destinies into its own hands. I don’t think it means anything more than that, and I know it doesn’t mean anything less than that. I know the time has come for some extremely harsh words. And if I could make them harsher, and if this were another audience, if it were possible to penetrate the unconsciousness—because it is not simply wickedness, which would be easy to deal with, but the apathy, the sleep, the unwillingness to know what is going on, not only in Cuba, which is ninety miles away, not only in Mississippi, which is closer, but up the street in Harlem, which has been there quite some time. The white racist has ruled the world for a long time, and the