The digital clones of our long dead
Ennui and jouissance in the archive
It’s Malcom X’s birthday as I write this, a year ahead of his centennial, and we’re in James Baldwin’s centennial year. In many ways they are brothers so it makes sense they were born a year apart. I’m reading Jimmy’s 1972 article about being hired by Columbia Pictures to write a script for a Hollywood film on Malcom only five years after Malcolm was murdered in Harlem, on Nina Simone’s birthday. Baldwin explains that he absconded the project because he didn’t want to be a party to a second assassination of his friend Malcolm. Now that I’m a writer myself, unlike when I first read this article and I was a student of writers longing to become one professionally; now that I’ve crossed over into the most ecstatic version I can locate of professionalism ( I play too much on purpose to keep it ecstatic) what Baldwin describes about abandoning the film had to have been less flippant than the corner of a sentence he lends it. There’s something cryptic in the half-recountment that no archive or record by way of evidence or hearsay can reconcile, though the Spike Lee film on Malcolm does help Baldwin make his point. Cinematic objectification of a black hero turns him into a pin-up, all countenance no substance and leaves him dangling there like a beautiful orphan. Did you bring him home?