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I was reading James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on The Mountain on my phone in a ‘Double M’ bus, stuck in Nairobi traffic when I received the news. Months earlier, a writer friend had sent me a prompt to apply for the four-week Maison Baldwin Residency, fashioned after the Black American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin, and aimed at Black writers across the world “who wrote in the spirit of James Baldwin’’. I had long admired Baldwin and so I obviously applied. Now I couldn’t believe my luck. I would spend a month at Saint-Paul de Vence, a commune in the South of France where Baldwin had lived for the final seventeen years of his life.
After stints of living in Turkey, Switzerland, and Paris, Baldwin had finally moved to Saint-Paul de Vence. In an interview with the Paris Review, Baldwin mentions why he could no longer stay in America. I knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew it was going to happen to me. My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail. I was going to kill somebody or be killed. In Saint-Paul, Baldwin steered through bigotry to become almost a local, who learned to speak French fluently. And now, as I contemplated my stay in Saint-Paul, Baldwin’s extraordinariness stood between me and my effort to imagine a connection with him. Baldwin had been canonised, through his stories, his ideas, his conversations; he’d been lifted from a position of ordinary humanity to one of eternal commemoration.
There was a little back and forth between myself and the French embassy in Nairobi before I was finally handed my visa-approved passport and told to—without fail— report back to the embassy within two weeks of my return from France, to confirm I was no longer in Saint-Paul.
I flew from Nairobi to Nice, through Zurich, then took an Uber to Saint-Paul. The sun-tanned, chatty Uber driver, who waited on me despite my phone having switched off, flurried his hand in a distinctly French gesture when I asked him what he loved about the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region. “C’est magnifique!” he said. “We have the mountains and we have the sea. What more do you need?” He dropped me at the entrance to Saint-Paul beside the lavoir (a public washbasin). Behind me, at the footstep of a knoll shrouded with cypress and limestone houses was the Chapelle Sainte Claire, tiny, white, with a big bell on its head. I was met by Shannon, the Maison Baldwin Residency facilitator, who showed me the visiting artist’s house, where I was to live.
The small roughly-plastered stone building stood on an unwieldy ground a few metres below the fortressed town of Saint-Paul. The compound was unkempt, with bits of what seemed to have been, at one point, ornate sculpture. Abandoned for a while, it had only been recently claimed by the municipality to host visiting artists. Inside was the living room with a couch and a wooden dining table, the kitchen had a tiny fridge, a coffee maker, and a microwave, and beside my bed was a small shelf with countless James Baldwin books in their original jackets.
As soon as I was alone, I picked a stick and poked the soil outside, curious to see if it was the evenly-grained red loam of my hometown in Iten, in Kenya’s Rift Valley. What came out was clayey, dark and oozy. I threw the stick away and stared at the ants skittering about instead, cheekily wondering if they felt a privilege over ants in Kenya, considering they would actually be European (if such a classification could spill over to the insect world). At night, I was plagued by a nightmare in which I was rolling down a steep hill and never reaching its bottom. So I stepped out to the veranda to relax and look up at the night sky, and acknowledge, like an English friend said I would, that “you have to travel and look at other skies to know none compares to an African one.”
It became my habit to sit outside in the morning with a can of cold ginger beer with an obscure French name, watching the sunrise from the wrong side and never becoming fully warm. I read the available Baldwin books. I remember reading Fire Next Time, that heart-rending letter Baldwin wrote to his nephew: Big James, named me—you were a baby, I was not here—here you were: to be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against a loveless world. I marvelled at how deeply Baldwin cared for his extended family. It was obvious that he was already self-assured, certain of who he was in the world and how he wanted it restored.
The magnificent ramparts of Saint-Paul de Vence loomed behind the house. The fortressed mediaeval town rose up the hill it perched on and ended with the L’Eglise Collégiale, a 13th century Church, at its summit. Beside the artist’s house was a road descending from Saint-Paul’s main road, down to a rill watched over by the ruins of a Roman aqueduct, and going up to the other side to James Baldwin’s former house, or what remained of it. It was being demolished—I heard—by a developer keen to put up a series of condos. Somewhere along that road and hidden from view was a kindergarten, its presence signed by the laughter and shouts from playing children.
I imagined Baldwin in his house with the larger-than-life personalities he hosted: Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Marlon Brando, Ray Charles, Josephine Baker, Maya Angelou, Harry Belafonte… one afternoon, I was hailed at the gate by an elderly lady who introduced herself as a neighbour. When I told her I was here as a Maison Baldwin fellow, she tilted her head and gasped, “Oh, dear Jimmy! He called you here?” We chatted for a while and she told me how Baldwin used to walk down the road to his house singing, tipsy and carefree, fearless.
I would also try to imagine Baldwin as I sat outside reading him, not his face or even his ubiquitous voice, but his boldness, his ability to bend a conservative village to respect and even love him. But I couldn’t sleep at night. Saint-Paul was uncannily silent during the day, let alone at night, and the fence around the artist’s house seemed low and flimsy.
I hardly saw anyone like me around, and when I did, like the Black waitress I saw one day in one of the restaurants sprinkled on Saint-Paul’s terraces, it was a moment for both of us to pause and hold gazes, to feel a bond that stretched across a difficult history in a single ephemeral moment. Saint-Paul was safe I was told. Hardly any cases of public violence were ever reported to the police. Yet I felt monitored, observed; I yearned to be soundless each time I opened the shower, ran a tap, used the microwave. I read Baldwin to justify why I was here; after all, it was his desire that people like me would come here and write.
The necessary routines of life took me out of the compound. For coffee and my favourite crêpe au poulet, I walked through the Porte de Vence, a wide passage that winded under Saint-Paul’s ramparts, leading to the heart of the town. At an eatery on its end corner, I would pick and choose a flavour of ice-cream as I waited for my crêpe au poulet to be ready. To do my laundry, I would walk through the town, up any cobbled-stone path to the L’Eglise Collégiale. Opposite the church was a 17th century stone cottage where the residency’s office was situated; and down its poorly-lit basement, a rickety washing machine. Every three days or so, I took a bus to Vence to stock up on my yoghurt, bread, granola, ginger beer and fruits.
I started walking through the mediaeval town with unbridled curiosity. I was mystified by its ancient feel: the narrow alleyways overlooked by centuries-old storied buildings, some with marvellous ivy-espaliered walls; the drinking fountains at random junctions, one shaped into a floating urn, another one carrying a beautiful symbol of a fish; the cemetery where the artist Marc Chagall was buried, located on an anvil-shaped piece of land jutting off Saint-Paul’s wall, with its set of grand tombstones overlooking a valley bounteous with oranges. There was the wonder of walking on the rampart itself, staring at the land, all the way down to Nice and the Mediterranean Sea. There were pictures to be taken and sent home to friends and family, so they could be similarly wowed.
Hélène Roux, a friend and supporter of the residency, invited me for dinner. Her family had owned and operated Saint-Paul’s La Colombe d’Or Hotel and Restaurant, a business renowned for its collection of original paintworks ranging from Picasso to Matisse, across generations. After a delicious fish dish, and over coffee and red wine, she told me how Jimmy was a close friend to her mother (the character Tish in the book If Beale Street Could Talk is named after Hélène’s mother Clementine). One day Hélène went to watch Walt Disney’s adaptation of The Jungle Book and later told Jimmy how she loved the music. A disappointed Baldwin had to sit her down and tell her what a disaster Disney had done with his interpretation of the novel, and how Disney was damaging young children’s brains by reducing nuanced European fairy tales into flat synthetic storytelling. Baldwin’s lecture, which matched what he wrote in his book The Devil Finds Work, opened Hélène’s eyes to the distortions and flaws of Hollywood cinema and since that day, she had never watched any other Disney film.
Bertrand, a friend of Hélène and a sparkling conversationalist, told me how he used to pick Baldwin’s telegrams from the post office and translate them from French to English. His was a fascinating life of anecdotes. Bertrand owns the oldest (and prettiest) antique and jewellery shop in Saint-Paul, along the Rue de Grande. One day, a young and timid-seeming American man walked into his shop and looked around. The man shyly walked over to Bertrand and asked if he—Bertrand—could recommend him a good hotel in the neighbourhood. Naturally, Bertrand recommended La Colombe d’Or. The next day, Bertrand bought the local daily and was surprised to see a picture of the young man in his shop splashed on the headline. Leonardo DiCaprio had checked into La Colombe.
I told Hélène, Shannon and Bertrand about myself, how I grew up in Kenya, about the work I was doing at the residency. I was surprised at how I limited any definition of who I was to being Black and African, and at most Kenyan. I feared I would falter in translation if I went any further, and risk being misunderstood. I didn’t say I was Catholic or Kalenjin. I didn’t say I was a Keiyo man from Irong’ location in Elgeyo Marakwet County and that our clan’s totem was the moon. I repressed the urge to speak about the rituals that had brought me into my belonging, inasmuch as they flared at the back of my mind; how at one point in my youth women in my community had sung and cried, plying my head with oil. Kongoi wee, Kiprop, komkomi tikayenyu! That evening, alone in my house in Saint-Paul, I felt content to have accessed Baldwin through the actual memories of people who had been around him and saw him as an elder and a friend.
I endlessly came across art when I walked through Saint-Paul: flamboyant paintings and glossy sculptures peered through glass-walled galleries that stood low against narrow cobbled streets; at every turn there were countless kiosks selling homemade candles and colourful jewellery; arched bridges crisscrossed between the buildings, high above streets that were randomly patterned with a colourful mosaic of stones. One day, I came across an open space in the town with an installation by one of Saint-Paul’s renowned land-artists, Kim Cao. This was a cocoon-shaped weaving of bamboo threads, suspended like a cloud over a pool of dark water. I felt displaced looking at it. I was no longer in a physical location but in a surreal place of naked beauty that strong art takes us to.
I learned from Saint-Paul’s tourism information office, which was near the entrance to the town with a conspicuous banner, that there were more of Kim Cao’s bamboo installations inside Saint-Paul’s backwoods. I picked a map, eager to trace them. I walked down Saint-Paul’s back road which was lined with yellow-leaved croton trees to its end, where I took a sharp turn to a road leading through farmed land. I saw a woman in gumboots cutting Napier grass. I saw a man weave a fallen passion fruit vine back to its supporting stake. I saw banana plants heavy with fruit and chickens clucking below them, picking the ground. Other than the grape bowers (and the largest horse I had ever seen that calmly passed me by with its rider), life here mirrored Iten’s. But of course theirs were shaped by completely different historical realities. The country folk here, I imagined, were self-defined, sure their ancestors had faced the brutalities of wars and conquest but nothing on the scale of Kenya. Their enemies had always been a bit familiar, their worldviews fairly understandable. No one had come from the unknown, speaking a foreign language, telling their ancestors who they were, how they had to dress, how they were to begin worshipping.
At the end of this stretch of road, I saw a gate with the most grotesque-looking doll hung on its hooks, a caricature of an old witch with a large wart-filled nose. I turned away from the road, stepped over a stream and entered the forest. In time, all I saw were large trees and the familiar sounds of any forest: an endless buzz of insect shrills, birdsongs, wind and dripping water. It was easy to imagine I was back in Iten, inside Sing’ore forest, waiting to see men chatting in Keiyo as they cut fettles and firewood. As isolating as the forest was, I also felt most at peace. I let go of that anxious feeling of being observed. Here, I was just a person walking amongst trees. I didn’t have to explain myself.
Kim Cao’s installation came to me by surprise, a weave-work of bamboo lying amid trees like a giant fallen nest, as if built through primal instinct and not by human hands. It blended with the surrounding wildness to the point of being invisible and later I learned this was Kim Cao’s aim: to unify his bamboo installations with the forest, where they would be left to lie and disintegrate. Once again, his artwork took me to a place of utter comfort, a dwelling cosier than home. Finding Kim Cao’s bamboo works ended my nightly anxieties. My recurring nightmare stopped.
***
Being Black in Kenya is secondary to other signifiers of identity, like ethnicity, class or even the general fact of being African. My Blackness has never been central to my description as it was to Baldwin. Racism in my country, more often than not, is the collective experience of anti-Black, colonially-informed institutions and foreign policies that demean us, and outside of establishments catering to tourists, not a personal encounter. So, I was not trained to defend myself the way Baldwin did, to adequately feel the rage that came along with the cruel history of people of our skin tone being mistreated. Baldwin was also in Europe as an American, speaking its acknowledged and socially-elevating form of English. I was here as an African at a time when Europe was already expressing its discomfort at an influx of African immigrants. Yet my senses couldn’t immediately denote micro-aggressions, so when I faced slights, I was left puzzled, wondering if I had unluckily walked into an ugly situation with a rude person or crude system, as so often happens in life, anywhere, even in Kenya; or whether the incident had unfolded so because I was Black.
In Paris, as I held a map in the subway trying to cram the various stops where I would change trains in order to get to the Sacré-Cœur, I saw a Black, barefoot and obviously mentally-challenged woman pass by, muttering to herself. A mass of officers frothed into the subway, after her. Some of the officers tore from the swarm and moved around, asking us—including me—to show our subway tickets. Only that they demanded this from Black and Arab-looking persons. White people walked by without being stopped; it was as if they were not even noticing what was happening, completely outside our disturbed reality.
In the evening, as I walked around Paris with a Rwandan friend looking for a nightclub, people crossed the street upon our sight, some actually ran. In Vence, a man with an obviously open food truck told me he was not yet open and muttered a string of foul-seeming French words under his breath as I walked away. In Nice, after a long walk across the Promenade des Anglais, I couldn’t figure out the right bus stop to Saint-Paul. I politely asked a lady leaning against a stand if that was the stop and she shook her head, said she wasn’t sure and plugged back her earphones. I frantically searched on a Google that was determined to hold onto French till I confirmed I was at the right stop. The lady boarded the same bus as me and at Saint-Paul, alighted ahead of me. She had known all along.
Another day, I was among a crowd of people waiting for a bus to Nice to arrive at Saint-Paul’s bus stop. After a long wait, the bus came over and two Korean women in front of me tried to get in, only to find themselves blocked by a white American woman who placed her arm across the door. The lady said she got there first with her group of American tourists and wouldn’t let the two ladies in till everyone in the group got in. The two women waited by the side as if nothing had happened and kept chatting in Korean. I sat across them in the bus, rattled by the incident, wondering if they were similarly troubled. They chatted on in what seemed to be utter peace and at one point one of them even fell asleep. The American tourists alighted before we arrived in Nice, and I watched the face of one of the Korean ladies, as she, herself, looked at the American lady who had blocked her from entering the bus pass by. I was surprised by the absence of anger in her eyes. I couldn’t denote any sense of irritation. If at all she had been slighted, it had happened to her in another world that she no longer belonged to.
I met S—, a West-African man in Saint-Paul, whose job it was to open, close and maintain the L’Eglise Collégiale and also to ring the bell from its belfry at the appointed times. I had once walked into the church alone and had stared, in fascinated horror, at the dark nave, at the frescoes and stained glasses with images of saints who looked angry and alive, at the gated altar with old wooden statues of prayerful men. It felt to be a place where time could easily ruffle and unravel to a mediaeval age without me noticing. So, I was surprised to find out the municipality didn’t hold onto my robust imagination of the place, leasing it out for conferences, workshops and weddings so they could make some money. I became motivated to attend a Sunday service, being a good Catholic and also eager to partake in the French sacrament. I was the fourth person in the congregation, and the only Black person, other than the priest and S—, who served as the priest’s assistant. After the service, one of the congregants called me over to meet the priest.
The priest was a tall burly man from Burkina Faso with an overwhelming smile and a firm, slightly painful handshake. He told me he was very familiar with Kenya and feeling an impetus to match his energy, I told him that I was similarly familiar with Burkina Faso, only that the single detail I could mention to him about his country of origin was the name of its erstwhile revolutionary president, Thomas Sankara. The priest became brusque, and cutting through my excited spiel, told me there were few priests in Europe and he was in a rush to get to the next mass. I was left slighted and disoriented. I stumbled out of the church, unsure of myself, feeling deceived by a moment that had hinted at a connection between two Africans, all by themselves in Saint-Paul de Vence.
Granted, there were many lovely people and moments. One day, as I walked through Saint-Paul, the mad Sirocco wind blew, picking hats off gentlemen’s heads and beating rooftops like drums. An elderly lady rushed to pick the laundry she’d hung to dry on lines across the street. The naughty wind waited for her to take off the pegs before lifting her clothes high in the air, upon which it danced with them animatedly. I laughed my heart out and so did the elderly lady. She kept giggling as she threw a shawl over my face, telling me to stop. I met a young Mexican lady by a bus stop who told me she was here to learn French and her aim was to eventually learn all the Romance languages. A man whose face successfully hid from the billow of smoke of his two cigarettes helped me read bus hours at a stop and told me how near Monaco was (just 20 minutes from Nice) and asked me to check it out. On Nice’s famed Castle Hill, overlooking the French Riviera, an African American couple asked me to pause like Usain Bolt after I asked them to take a photo of me.
I moved around as much as I could, absorbing Côte d’Azur’s geography, making it familiar. I walked to the Chapelle Du Rosaire in Vence, which was entirely designed by Henri Matisse—everything that is—from its stained windows to the priestly vestments to the candlesticks; Matisse took the work so seriously, inspired by Monique Bourgeois who had joined the chapel’s Dominican Order and had, at one time, been his nurse. Inside, Henri had created such a wondrous texture of blue and yellow light, of shadow and architectural lines, that after the visit, I had to sit at the garden, as did the other visitors, all of us stunned. I visited the Fondation Maeght and was enamoured by its outdoor sculptures, and the array of paintings and stone-works inside. I climbed up Vence Cathedral and at Vence’s tourist office, everyone gasped in pleasant cheer when I told them I was from Kenya.
I fondly remember walking past the Promenade Des Anglais and the manicured squares where men arduously played pétanque, to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, where I admired how its tranquil water divided into various shades of blue along straight lines. I imagined Africa on its other side. I picked smooth pebbles around my feet and flew some back to Nairobi, where I placed one on top of a broken pillar on a lonely street, saying I was adding to it a piece of Europe.
***
I got to know about Tourrettes-Sur-Loup during my last week at the residency. It was another mediaeval town, about five kilometres away from Saint-Paul, similarly perched on a rock, but as Shannon said, “less Disneyfied.” I decided to hike to it through a network of routes in Saint-Paul’s backwoods marked by yellow lines painted onto trees. I had often hiked to Vence for my shopping and I was familiar with the beginning part of the route. Only now that I didn’t cross the bridge across Malvan River (which would have led me straight on to Vence) but climbed against it, following the direction of a wooden balise. It led me into a thick forest, where immense shadows lay still against tall trees. My imagination took over and I pictured a bear stalking me, and not an ordinary modern-day bear, but something larger and furrier, straight from the Pleistocene Ice Age. I passed this section of forest to a sparsely wooded glade, delightfully following my map till it led me to a brick wall. Someone had claimed a section of the route as their property. I moved back and sat on a log of wood, distraught that my map was no longer reliable. Still, I told myself to just sit and wait: someone was destined to show up and direct me on where I was to go next.
The first person who did spoke little English. We did what we could, hopelessly audio-translating our conversations through our phones and only getting more confused as we went on. Finally, I nodded along, pretending I was satisfied so I could let them be on their way. The second person was an English woman grazing three giant horses (why are horses in Kenya not as huge?). She sat beside me on the log and poured me a cup of tea from a thermos she retrieved from her bag, then instructed me in a clear manner how I was to reach Tourrettes-Sur-Loup…go straight and you will meet a road barrier, turn left before it and walk down to the river, continue uphill on the other side and just follow the hiking route till you reach the tarmac road… that’s exactly what I did.
I walked on, past the dry river bed and up its other side. I thrust through an endlessness of shrubs, marvelling how I was all alone in the forest. I felt a mischievous thrill that I was an African walking by myself in the wilds of Europe. But the forest was deceiving and tiring, leading me to what seemed to be its end, only to repeat itself, more trees, more winding paths to walk through.
Finally, I saw a windmill and an old house and I walked to it. Past it was the tarmac road, which was wide and seemed to lead on and on and definitely not to Tourrettes-Sur-Loup. I walked along it till I discovered a footpath that ran against it to a section of rundown houses with goats tied outside and chickens clucking about. I looked up and saw Tourettes-Sur-Loup, rising with postcard-picture gloriousness on a jutting piece of rock, with a wondrous, fairly complete Roman aqueduct reaching towards it from the valley beside the rock.
But I couldn’t, for the life of me, see a path that would lead me to it. I retraced my steps and meandered about, hoping I had enough of a repository of French to ask for directions. I saw a woman step out of her gate and I shouted a bonjour at her, followed by a request, in halting and obviously terrible French, on how I could get to Tourrettes-Sur-Loup. She froze and stepped back inside her gate, closing it. I wondered if she was scared of seeing a Black man as a number of people had generously been in one Parisian night. But then she opened the gate and walked out with a tall Black man with long greyed locks of hair.
The man walked to me and said he spoke little English, gesturing negatively with his hands. We tried what we could once more, speaking over our phones, which marvellously failed with the translations. A young girl of secondary school age (and presumably the woman’s daughter) walked over. She said she was now learning English in school and could listen to me better. But she was yet to learn enough English to direct someone lost outside her home and wanting to get to Tourrettes-Sur-Loup. Finally the man gestured the act of turning on the engine to a bike and said, repeatedly, “Scooter! Scooter!” I nodded avidly and minutes later I was behind him on his scooter as he winded up the tarmac road, round and round till we reached the rocky rampart where the passage leading inside Tourettes-Sur-Loup stood. He parked his scooter and pointed at the town, saying, in English, “This is what you want!”
The man folded his hands and stepped closer, asking me where I was from. His hair was grey but he looked youthful and fit; he seemed beyond age, as if, as we say in Kenya, he had “eaten life” enough to stand outside its silly timelines. I told him I was from Kenya and he asked if I had heard of Martinique and said that was where he was from. He paused, before gesturing a sign of openness with his hands and told me the fact that I was Kenyan and he from Martinique didn’t matter. We are African! Black people! (and, lifting one finger) One country! He stretched out his hand at me.
Later, I walked through Tourrettes-Sur-Loup and had a chocolate crepe and coffee. I bought a book from a secondhand shop from an Australian woman eager to fly back to Australia and avoid an oncoming European winter. At a boulangerie, where I bought a small can of coca cola, a man passing by pointed at the aproned shop attendant and made a joke that had a young lady buying bread blushing and laughing. The man then turned to me, noticing I didn’t understand French and translated to me the joke: he was recommending the shop attendant to the lady, asking her to choose him, not only because he could bake but also because he had the best dick she could expect to find in Tourrettes. I got lost again as I followed the main tarmac road to Saint-Paul and had to rely on a man watering his garden and a teenager fixing his bike for directions. But before all these events unfolded, I looked back at this man from Martinique and shook with emotion. He was the first person in the South of France to greet me, with a double-clasp handshake and a hug.
