What was once termed James Baldwin’s forgotten decade – the years between 1961-1971, which he spent in Turkey – has in recent years homed more clearly into view. This year, to celebrate the writer’s centennial, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library (until February 28) explores this fertile period of his life. Taking its name from his simple claim that “Turkey saved my life!”, it features rarely seen images of Baldwin taken by his friend Sedat Pakay.
Baldwin discovered a Turkey that was still on the cusp of opening to Western ideas of politics and the public sphere. The nation’s entry into NATO a decade earlier was becoming a catalyst in the burgeoning Cuban Missile crisis, a function of its strategic proximity to Russia. Subject to import controls and still in the process of modernisation, Istanbul then was far smaller than the vast metropolis it is today, an interzone between fronts in the Cold War.
For Baldwin, Turkey as a place in-between worlds was most strongly felt in the country’s ambiguous cultural norms in which his masculinity and sexuality found space. Istanbul became a place where he was able to gain distance from politics riven by homophobia and racism which had dominated his life in the United States, and which continued to be the subject of his work – Baldwin was to finish Another Country from the shores of the Bosporus.
Yet Baldwin was no passive observer: as the curators put it, his engagement in Istanbul was one of “an ongoing collective liberation that he so bravely and uproariously led”. Alongside friends like Pakay – who captured Baldwin in the photographs that form the basis of this show – and the actors Engin Cezzar and Gülriz Sururi, Baldwin supported the city’s artistic and theatrical community.
Baldwin’s Turkish decade stands as a testament to the power of artistic exile not as escape but as one of revelation. For Baldwin, Turkey allowed confusion and ambiguity to become building blocks for a new form of community and understanding – rather than control and conformity – through subcultural creativity and friendship. It is perhaps these aspects that have made Istanbul’s contemporary queer community so resilient in the face of increasing government repression. As Baldwin put it, of his journey away from America, “I can’t breathe, I have to look from the outside.”
Berk Korkmaz
