On James Baldwin's 'Giovanni's Room'

These two pages make up my favorite Baldwin passage of all-time.

On Books…

This past Sunday, I read an enchanting and wonderfully tender biography of the venerable James Baldwin. As the biography charted his fraught life and creative pursuits, I decided to follow my bio reading with a reread of my favorite Baldwin of all-time: Giovanni’s Room. The short novel, set in 1950s Paris, in my possession was covered in margin notes and observations from my time writing a long paper on it in an independent study in undergrad. Too, the novel felt good in my hands. Like coming home to the dramatics making us queer folx whole. While the entire book is masterful, there is a single passage that has stuck with me for years and years.

In the final third of the book, protagonist David and his beloved but scorned Giovanni are fighting within the room they’ve been living in for the better part of a summer. “The world is full of rooms—” Giovanni declares in an outburst of rage towards, not David, exactly, but their circumstances. “What kind of room do you think Giovanni should be living in? How long do you think it took me to find the room I have?”

Here, the “room” represents so much more than a room. Duh. The “room” is about comfort and coping, and the constructs that leave us in deep and emotional binds. It’s not until we turn the page, though, that we get to the meat of this fight. From David’s perspective: “I was was vividly aware that he held a brick in his hand, I held a brick in mine. It really seemed for an instant that if I did not go to him, we would use these bricks to beat each other to death.”

David’s observation on the scene goes on to be my favorite Baldwin graph of all-time, because it so effortlessly captures the condition of the Other. This is not simply about being queer. This is about being an outcast. The bricks these two lovers hold make up the room they are sequestered in—the symbolism is obvious, again. We are cogs in the machine of our oppression. We use the tools of our oppressors—the bricks, in this case—to oppress each other in an effort to try and escape our own misfortune. It never works. It’s always deadly.

In a standard Jamesian way, the notion of humanity is the saving grace of the passage. Only through recognizing the humanity in Giovanni, and Giovanni recognizing the humanity in David, does the fight end. Only in seeing each other for who we are, do we stop doing the work of the oppressor for them. It’s a brilliant literary moment that speaks, to this day, to a generation battered by circumstances out of their control. Reading these two pages has always caused a stir in my chest. James Baldwin knows how to tug at the strings of a person.

The lesson of this passage is such: Do not do the work of the oppressor. Do everything you can to remove their mark from your mind and your heart. Do everything you can to love. Such is the Jamesian way. Put the bricks down. Live life outside of the rooms established for us. Giovanni’s Room is at once a tragedy and a call to action. It is not Baldwin’s best book—that’s, probably, Another Country—but it is the book that remains most special to me.