User:ReJeanneSmith/Stranger In The Village

Stranger in the Village" is an essay by the African-American novelist and play write James Baldwin that was originally published in Harper's Magazine in 1953 and then included in his collection of essays Notes of a Native Son in 1955.

Notes of a Native Son

Cover of British edition

Title

"Stranger in the Village" is an essay by the African-American novelist James Baldwin that was originally published in Harper's Magazine in 1953 and then included in his collection of essays Notes of a Native Son in 1955. The essay is an account of Baldwin's experiences in Leukerbad, Switzerland. Baldwin declares that while he is a stranger in the village of Leukerbad, he is also feels like a stranger in the village of the United States of America as an African American.

Plot Summery

The essay is an account of Baldwin's experiences in Leukerbad, Switzerland. Leukerbad's residents were fascinated by Baldwin's blackness, according to Baldwin they had never seen a black man before. The village is almost four hours from Milan Italy. Because it is located in Swiss alps, it is extremely isolated. Baldwin being an African American is the only Black person the villagers have ever seen thus making him a stranger in the village. Baldwin was a stranger in Leukerbad, the Swiss village, but there was no possibility for blacks to be strangers in the United States, nor for whites to achieve the fantasy of an all-white America purged of blacks. This fantasy about the disposability of black life is a constant in American history.

Baldwin further goes on to explain the relationship between American and European history, by explicitly pointing out that American history encompasses the history of the Negro, while European history lacks the African-American dimension. Baldwin observes that in America the Negro is “an inescapable part of the general social fabric” and that “Americans attempt until today to make an abstraction of the Negro” (“Stranger” 125).

Leukerbad Switzerland

Baldwin argues that white Americans try to retain a separation between their history and black history despite the interdependence between the two. It is impossible for Americans to become European again “recovering the European innocence” through the neglect of the American Negro; the American Negro is a part of America permanently pressed and carved into an undeniable history

Baldwin relates his experiences in a small Swiss village composed of people who had never seen a black man before he arrived in the village in the summer of 1951. Baldwin describes a kind of naive racism: children who shout "Neger!" when they see him, unaware of the echoes he hears from his past when others shouted a more damning word ("Nigger!") in the streets of New York City; local Catholic residents (the main religion of the village) who donate money to "buy" Africans so that missionaries can convert those Africans to Catholicism, told to Baldwin with pride, again without realizing the ominous undertones of that practice for a man who is a descendant of African slaves. Yet there is also a more sinister racism, even in a remote village that has direct experience with only one Black man: men who describe Baldwin as "le sale negre" (the dirty Black man) behind his back and assume that he stole wood from them, or of children who "scream in genuine anguish" when he approaches them because they have been taught that "the devil is a black man"

The final sentence in his essay articulates a defiant claim by Baldwin and an understanding that the villagers' and white Americans' need to reach, losing thereby what Baldwin describes as "the jewel" of the white man's naivete - in other words, white Americans' willful desire to ignore white privilege and the effects of centuries of racism and systematic discrimination against Black Americans: "This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again." therefore as Baldwin put it “people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them” (119).

Form

Non-Fiction, Prose. Figurative Language

Baldwin appears to be telling the story of his experiences in that tiny Swiss village, he uses the story as a metaphor for the history of race relations in the United States, and he describes the power discrepancy between whites of European background and African-Americans who were forcibly brought to the U.S. as slaves.

Themes

American racism

Baldwin spoke of Racism in the United States of America and in Leukerbad, Switzerland. He would draw parallels between the two. This essay was autobiographical in nature as Baldwin spoke of his own experiences. Stranger in The Village in many forms was a protest against the racism in the United States of America for its treatment of African Americans by putting its racism on full display. In the essay Baldwin raised questions of his own identity and where how he fit into society in both the United States and in Leukerbad. His lover Lucien Happersberger’s family had a chalet in a village up in the mountains.

Reception and Influence

The Legacy of "Stranger In the Village" is tied to the legacy and reception of Notes of a Native Son, the book it was contained in. Notes of a Native Son is widely regarded as a classic of the black autobiographical genre. The Modern Library placed it at number 19 on its list of the 100 best 20th-century nonfiction books. Since Baldwin’s passing on December 1st, 1987, his writings have been published worldwide and are still known as essential emblems of the American canon.

Footnotes

In the summer of 1951, Baldwin almost suffered a breakdown and his partner, Lucien Happersberger, took him to Leukerbad, an established Swiss health-resort in the Valais Alps.