One Must Say Yes: Poetic Acts of Affirmation in Works by Baldwin, Fanon, and Ellison

Abstract

I the above quotation from James Baldwin and Richard Avedon’s photoessay portfolio, Nothing Personal (first published in 1964), Baldwin, writing during a consequential moment in the fight for civil rights, offers a resounding imperative to his reader to say “yes” and embrace life. The basis Baldwin offers for why one must say “yes” is rooted in both memory and a kind of existentialism. Baldwin recalls a formative childhood experience in which his parents, amidst the terrors of racism, did not just bear life but affirmed it (60). Because he witnessed this affirmation, Baldwin maintains that he can affirm life too, and hence, the next generation, by witnessing him, can do the same. The “yes” in this passage is thus a speech act par excellence: It performs in its annunciation an act of affirmation, thereby making possible the survival of oneself and one’s progeny.1 It also calls to mind other resonant “yes” statements in works that similarly address the concern of how to live in and resist racist worlds: “Man is a yes that vibrates”, Frantz Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks (2), while Ralph Ellison’s protagonist, the invisible man unseen by anti-Black society, vows to “affirm, say yes” as a guiding principle (579). These “yes” statements, all offered by authors committed to the liberation of the Black experience, suggest that asserting “yes” constitutes an anti-racist strategy. But while these “yeses” clearly convey more than quotidian affirmation (e.g. “Yes, I hear you”), it is not clear what role they play within their authors’ anti-racist projects. A question arises: What purpose do these “yeses” serve for three authors who, though writing distinct projects, are all committed to creating what Aaron Ngozi Oforlea calls a “space where they are free to define themselves or articulate their subjectivity in any way they choose” (2)?