Book Review: ‘Baldwin, Styron and Me’ a valuable contribution to current debates about DEI
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/03/2025 (370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
The new book “Baldwin, Styron and Me” is an intellectual reflection that serves as a valuable contribution to the current debates about race, equity and identity.
Author Mélikah Abdelmoumen is the daughter of a Tunisian immigrant father and Québécois mother who uses the lens of her background to examine the complex relationship between American writers James Baldwin and William Styron.
“Baldwin, Styron and Me” is the first book to appear in English by Abdelmoumen, a scholar and editor of a literary journal in Quebec. It was translated by Catherine Khordoc, a professor in the Department of French and Indigenous and Canadian Studies at the Carleton University in Ottawa.
Abdelmoumen seems to identify with Baldwin, always feeling like an outsider in her native Quebec, where people who looked like her didn’t always feel welcome. She writes that amid the nationalism that surrounded her growing up, she often felt like a stranger, an extraterrestrial.
Baldwin, the African American essayist, lived in France for years to escape rampant racism in the United States. After his initial return to the U.S., he read the early drafts of Styron’s controversial novel “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” a fictional first-person account of an 1831 slave rebellion near Styron’s own Southern birthplace.
Some Black intellectuals criticized the book’s portrayal of Turner and slavery in general, accusing Styron of racism and historical inaccuracies.
More than six decades after Styron’s Pulitzer-winning book was published, Abdelmoumen revisits the questions that he and Baldwin discussed over the course of their unlikely friendship. Long evenings were spent talking about race and identity over several months in 1961, when Baldwin stayed at Styron’s guest house.
Abdelmoumen says that such dialogues are critical to understanding, and that stories such as theirs should not be seen only as history, but as tools to understand the present. She criticizes radical views, instead encouraging dialogue and empathy among people with differing backgrounds and views.
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