He walks along the Seine in Paris, he doesn’t know the language, the money is not enough for anything, and at the same time he stands out with this prancing, flippantly challenging gait. Why does he do this to himself? As a black American, three years after the Second World War in Paris. Here of all places, in this isolation, here he wants to start anew with life, with writing? Yes here, because the here is no place. The forced and yet self-chosen exile is a way of life – for James Baldwin the condition of his intellectual, emotional, political independence. He will repeat the exile, in Turkey, in Switzerland, in order to be able to love and act politically in a self-determined way, according to his own taste.
Of free men: Together with the performers, director Jasco Viefhues searches for the contours of this independence. In Baldwin’s sentences and thoughts, in the movement of his thinking. Of free men is a performative experimentation, a tasting of foreign words as a search for one’s own, self-determined taste.
James Baldwin is one of the most important American writers of the 20th century and, if one does not take into account his youth, spent most of his life in exile. France, Turkey, Germany, Switzerland, but above all France. Diaspora is the condition of his survival and writing. On the reasons for his first self-exile in the 1940s, he writes: „All my countrymen had to offer me in those 24 years I tried to live in the country was death – a death, moreover, to their taste.“ In 1965 Malcolm X is assassinated, three years later Martin Luther King; Baldwin goes into exile again, for the rest of his life. James Baldwin is among the most important queer-diasporic, Black writers.