The latest New Yorker features a reprint of a piece by James Baldwin, whose relentlessly limpid truth-telling grabs readers by the bones. If a sorcerer were to offer to slice away everything about my writing that stutters and then stitch part of Baldwin’s voice to my own, I would not hesitate to open my mouth wide to the scalpel and needle…
…My tongue now has two different regions, each a different color, separated by an elegant curving scar where my surgeon stitched that flap from my wrist to the native tongue. My eloquence hasn’t improved as a result of the surgery; but reading Baldwin’s Letter From a Region in My Mind, written in 1962, transports me to [when I was working on my unpublished novel]. Baldwin’s prose opens, in me, the desire to make my words scorch the page, this time.