The Chiasmic Baldwin

In discussing such a painful topic as race in America, particularly at the time he was writing, Baldwin carefully manages "Stranger in the Village" to draw attention to its logic and objectivity, even as he relates personal and difficult experiences. In one of the highest points of tension during the essay, Baldwin states, "There are, no doubt, as many ways of coping with the resulting complex of tensions as there are black men in the world, but no black man can hope ever to be entirely liberated from this internal warfare--rage, dissembling, and contempt having inevitably accompanied his first realization of the power of white men" (162). Yet the essay functions as more than simply a 'way of coping with the resulting complex of tensions' for Baldwin; Baldwin's ability to control his rage makes it all the more potent, and yet accessible and informative to a large audience. It is clear throughout the essay that Baldwin is not speaking only to black American men; he is also speaking to white men--"by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man is"--as well as to Europeans (163). Baldwin's purpose is to tell his readers what a black man understands about white people through his experience that white people are too busy pretending to be innocent to know about themselves, as well as what an American knows about Europeans through the experience of their cultural inheritance. That the essay is rife with chiasmus is logical then, since Baldwin is illuminating the way structures have been transmuted from one group and imposed on another.

Some particularly potent examples of chiasmus from the essay:
"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them" (161).
"The villagers wonder less about the texture of my hair than they did then, and wonder rather more about me" (163).
"Thus it was impossible for Americans to accept the black man as one of themselves, for to do so was to jeopardize their status as white men" (166).
"At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself" (166-67).
"In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt by many future generations, the white man's motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity" (167).
"The cathedral of Chartres, I have said, says something to the people of this village which it cannot say to me; but it is important to understand that this cathedral says something to me which it cannot say to them" (167).
"But I must accept the status which myth, if nothing else, gives me in the West before I can hope to change the myth" (167).
These are instances of isolated chiasmus.

The essay also employs several brilliant paragraphs of extended chiasmus:
I thought of white men arriving for the first time in an African village, strangers there, as I am a stranger here, and tried to imagine the astounded populace touching their hair and marveling at the color of their skin. But there is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first black man to be seen by whites. The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me, people who have cost me more in anguish and rage than they will ever know, who yet do not even know of my existence. The astonishment with which I might have greeted them, should they have stumbled into my African village a few hundred years ago, might have rejoiced their hearts. But the astonishment with which they greet me today can only poison mine. (161)
In this selection, Baldwin compares the different baggage associated with a black stranger in a white village, vs. a white stranger in a black village, as a way of describing, eventually, his point about race relations in America, which is that black Americans can no longer be strangers in America. White men can never regain the "European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist" (167-8). Baldwin's very presence in the village is a reversal of the structure in which white men enter a village of brown men to colonize it, a figurative chiasmus which serves to heighten the altered power dynamic borne by the historical implications of this alternative encounter. While the scene he is relating is, figuratively speaking, a chiasmus, Baldwin also uses chiasmus to link his sentences together to give his essay an objective and logical flow. I have highlighted the chiasmus operating across sentences, and within sentences with many levels, in bold. In the cumulative sentence in particular, the alliteration of hard c-words is reflected across the levels of the sentences, their slight alteration serving to magnify the differences between the two experiences and make the conclusion of the sentence all the more affective when it breaks the pattern established by the previous clauses.