MARTIN POUSSON
CSUN
Professor of English, Author of “Black Sheep Boy,” 2017 PEN Center USA Fiction Award Winner
If someone wanted to learn more about your field of expertise, which book would you recommend?
“Another Country” by James Baldwin. For anyone dreaming of a new United States, in “Another Country,” James Baldwin virtually invented intersectionality with a novel featuring interracial romance between men whose points of intersection multiply beyond race to include social class, sexual orientation and political ideology. Along the way, characters embrace each other against all odds. Baldwin calls on “conscious whites” and “conscious blacks” to “like lovers…end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country,” declaring “love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” “Another Country” offers a battle plan and a troubled valentine for those who wish to counter our current reality.
What's your favorite reading you assign your students?
“Another Country” by James Baldwin. Since I teach creative writing with an emphasis on fiction, selecting a single book is Solomon-esque. I suddenly feel like the abducted child in the story, torn between two mothers. However, the mother of this moment in fiction is, hands down, James Baldwin, so, again, I’d choose “Another Country.” For Baldwin, past is prologue, and prologue is provocation. With his second novel, he knows no rules, countering not only a master narrative of white patriarchy but also a subordinated narrative of cisgender black masculinity. He writes not to comfort and console, but to provoke and perturb, knowing that change requires fire and that fire requires striking a match or throwing a thunder bolt. For all the beautifully diverse and boldly dissenting students in my class, I’d say: begin with Baldwin, then go beyond.
If you could take only one book with you to a deserted island, which would you take?
“Another Country” by James Baldwin. How could I not do as I advise my creative writing students to do? For a trip to a deserted island, James Baldwin’s “Another Country” is already in the bag. But I'd smuggle one more: Baldwin's nonfiction follow up, “The Fire Next Time,” the match he struck 40 years ago that still burns today.