Translation of a monograph essay published by The Steidz (Paris), 2021.
Reading Baldwin again and again, I am struck to see how often this nagging issue comes up. It isn’t just about love transforming people, making life easier or lighter, giving wings, that is, all those clichés whose banality and truthfulness we have all experienced. It’s more than that: love would be able to put who we are aside, suspend social classes and identities. Love would indeed have the power to contradict the maxim introducing one of the writer’s short stories: ‘You can take the child out of the country […] but you can’t take the country out of the child.’[1]
Antoine Idier, “Love, Domination,” in Soufiane Ababri – La Rose donne naissance à une épine et l’épine à une rose (Paris), 2021, pp. 94-96, excerpt.
[1] James Baldwin, ‘A Fly in Buttermilk,’ in Nobody Knows My Name, 1961; reprinted by New York: Vintage International, 1993, p. 56.