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A personal reflection on 'Sonny's Blues' - a short story by James Baldwin.
There are some stories that take us on a journey into what it means to be alive. They shake us, they can explode our worldview, put new ideas, or very old ones, in front of us and force us to reckon with the meaning we make of our lives. Sonny’s Blues is one such story.
Using music as a metaphor, James Baldwin takes us to the limits of what we can express in words. Like Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, or Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, Baldwin explores what is possible with language. He consistently takes us to the brink and shows us that there is a landscape of emotion beyond the power of articulation. There is a world of failure and loss, joy and triumph that flows subterraneous to what we can say.
His story is of two brothers attempting to reach into each other’s worlds. This story is our story. The story of miscommunication, of unintended impositions. Often when I read this story in groups, Those people who know the pain of being unheard in the world go very silent and nod. “That’s it” they say “that’s how it feels” as if the need to express oneself, the desire to be heard has been momentarily removed by the beauty of Baldwin’s words.
Many things happen in the story: imprisonment, death and drug abuse, but the primary pain of which all these things are symptomatic is something that everybody can understand. The inability to translate your experience for the understanding of other people.
‘If only they could understand how I feel’, one thinks, then they could forgive me. As if this one simple artefact of connection could redeem the lost, could set a new emotional foundation on which to build a new self. If you witness someone else understand and love you, then you may have a model with which to understand and love yourself.
The tragedy of the story is our tragedy, that the brothers cannot understand each other in conversation. It is like looking through two lenses set to different focal points. One brother, creative, musical, sensitive, atmospheric, impulsive, non-conformist the other cerebral, sensible, duty-bound, loyal, responsible, offer us two ways of seeing the world. If these ways of seeing are not totally opposed, then they’re at least disconnected. It is a disconnection that we feel keenly, whichever side of the fence we feel ourselves to be on. The same question haunting both: “why can’t he understand how I feel?”
Why can’t they understand how I feel? That is the question isn’t it? For us I mean, for all of us in relationship. It is what lies at the heart of most if our complaints. If they could understand how I feel, then what? They would be able to give me what I need.
In relationship stress our expectations of the other person rise, and the more we feel misunderstood, the more serious and total the accusation against the other “You never listen”, or as Sonny puts it in the story “I hear you, but you never hear a thing I say.?
So what happens when we fail to hear each other? We become louder, more effusively describing what the world is like from the focal point of our lens. Sometimes completely dismissing the validity of the other focal point, sometimes mercilessly ridiculing the other.
In the story Sonny’s brother relents. Not, in the end, for the sake of his brother. It doesn’t feel eventually like he has bitten his tongue and agreed to hear Sonny’s perspective out of some resentfully negotiated move towards progress.
In the end Sonny’s brother seems to recognise the value for him in taking on the other point of view.
“I understood at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen.”
Whenever one is bound up in the righteousness of one’s position then freedom will appear as an opposing point of view. It is an indication that we have swam too far out, become too invested in ourselves, our personal sense of injustice. The perspective of the other, whatever that perspective is, is an invitation to come back, to loosen up, to see our way forward, only for ourselves.
For this reason it is not reliant on the other doing the same thing. Our salvation is our business, it is not conditional on what the other does. Sonny’s brother does not need Sonny to see his perspective before he will admit that there is something that he can gain from Sonny’s way of looking at the world.
Empathy, in the end is not for the other, it is for one’s growth, for one’s own salvation.
You can download Sonny's Blues by James baldwin here...
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