James Baldwin's 1970 Turkish Interviews: “The American Way of Life” and the Rhetoric of War from Vietnam to the Near and Middle East

Abstract

On the ninth and tenth of May 1970, the American writer James Baldwin agreed to do a videotaped interview in Istanbul with an aspiring young Turkish film maker Sedat Pakay.1 The two had first met at Robert College, now Bogazici University, in Istanbul, Turkey, where Pakay had been a student in the early 1960s.2 Though readers are more familiar with Baldwin’s years abroad in France in the late 1940s and 1950s, beginning in 1961 the writer maintained semiresidency in Istanbul for nearly eight years.3 He had first come to Istanbul with his friend, the Turkish theater actor Engin Cezzar, whom he had met at the Actor’s Studio in New York. He then would come and go, often staying for months at a time. From the fall of 1966 to the summer of 1967 he would rent the Vefik Pasha Library, a Romantic nineteenth-century villa surrounded by gardens and towering pine and plane trees looking out over the Bosphorus Straits toward the Asian continent. His direct neighbor was the fifteenth-century fortress of Mehmet the Conqueror. It was from here that the Turks conquered the Byzantines in 1453. Constantinople would then become Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire for the next four hundred years. Though much less populated than it is today, in 1970 Istanbul was a vibrant, cosmopolitan metropolis. Baldwin would live at the Vefik Pasha Library with his brother David and his friend and assistant, the young Robert College English professor David Leeming. In his 1994 biography of Baldwin, Leeming recalls “the simple daily routine” at the villa: