Baldwin, Styron, and Me

An unlikely literary friendship from the past sheds light on the radicalization of public debate around identity, race, and censorship.

In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron's guest house. They wrote during the day, then spent long evenings confiding in each other and talking about race and identity in America. During one of those memorable evenings, Baldwin is said to have convinced Styron to write, in the first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner near Styron's own Southern birthplace. Styron followed his friend's advice, and The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968--also creating outrage in part of the African American community.

More than sixty years later, the debates and controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonate. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers Baldwin and Styron's surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman, born in Canada to a Tunisian father and Québécois mother, and torn by the often unidimensional versions of her own identity put forth by today's politics, media, and society. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and censorship, and, especially, the means by which public debate around these topics is increasingly radicalized, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen--even in disagreement.

M?likah Abdelmoumen was born in Quebec in 1972. Between 2005 and 2017 she lived in Lyon, France. She holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Montreal and is the author of many articles and short stories, as well as a dozen novels, nonfiction books and essays, among which Les d?sastr?es (VLB ?diteur, 2013) and Douze ans en France (2018). Baldwin, Styron et moi won the 2022 Pierre-Vadeboncoeur Essay Prize. She is editor in chief of the Quebec literary magazine Lettres qu?b?coises. Baldwin, Styron, and Me is the first of her books to be translated to English.

Catherine Khordoc is a translator and professor in the Department of French and the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.