The power of writing: the will the "change the narrative"

Change the Narrative, Change Your Destiny: How James Baldwin Read His Way Out of Harlem and into Literary Greatness

“You’re playing the game according to somebody else’s rules, and you can’t win until you understand the rules and step out of that particular game, which is not, after all, worth playing.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

When Margaret Mead and James Baldwin sat down for their remarkable public conversation in the summer of 1970, the transcript of which was eventually published as A Rap on Race (public library), the seven and a half hours of generous genius that flowed between them covered such wide-ranging issues as race and gender, power and privilege, capitalism and democracy, and a wealth of nuanced human concerns in between.

One of the most poignant portions of the conversation looks at why real change becomes possible only when we change the cultural narrative. Baldwin recounts how, as a child, he read his way out of his own culturally-imposed narrative of possibility, which allowed him to go beyond what Kafka believed books could do for us — serve as “the axe for the frozen sea inside us” — and go further, turning books into an axe for the frozen sea between us.

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And he said:

"I used to tell my mother, when I was little, 'When I grow up I’m going to do this or do that. I’m going to be a great writer and buy you this and buy you that.' And she would say, very calmly, very dryly, 'It’s more than a notion.' That kind of dry understatement which characterizes so much of black speech in America is my key to something, only I didn’t know it then.

Then I started reading. I read everything I could get my hands on, murder mysteries, The Good Earth, everything. By the time I was thirteen I had read myself out of Harlem. There were two libraries in Harlem, and by the time I was thirteen I had read every book in both libraries and I had a card downtown for Forty-Second Street… What I had to do then was bring the two things together: the possibilities the books suggested and the impossibilities of the life around me… Dickens meant a lot to me, for example, because there was a rage in Dickens which was also in me… And Uncle Tom’s Cabinmeant a lot to me because there was a rage in her which was somehow in me. Something I recognized without knowing what I recognized."

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Read more here:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/04/10/a-rap-on-race-james-baldwin-reading/