At the opening of a new exhibit celebrating writer James Baldwin, a star-studded lineup — including Baldwin’s former assistant — made sense of exactly why the time he spent in Istanbul was so significant. 

Novelist Elif Batuman reads her essay on the links between James Baldwin and literary historian Erich Auerbach, both expats in Istanbul. Photo: Jack Delaney

By Jack Delaney | jdelaney@queensledger.com

As James Baldwin’s centennial year comes to a close, hundreds gathered in the Grand Lobby of the Brooklyn Public Library’s main branch last week for the opening of an exhibit about his time in Istanbul. 

The exhibit, titled Turkey Saved My Life, will run until the end of February 2025, and centers on a collection of rare photographs by Baldwin’s friend and collaborator, the filmmaker Sedat Pakay. The title, drawn verbatim from a quote of Baldwin’s, underscores the importance that this often-overlooked chapter of his life held for the writer — and speakers throughout the evening grappled with just why Istanbul was such a place of creative ferment for him.

After visitors were given an initial half hour to amble around and “encounter Baldwin’s close circle of friends, his observations of Turkish society, and the moments of quiet solitude that fueled his fearless writing,” the event started in earnest with a reading by novelist Elif Batuman of an essay she’d written for the occasion.

Teeing the reading up, Linda Johnson, BPL’s president and CEO, briefly introduced the speakers and set the tone for the exhibit as a whole. “Turkey Saved My Life provides insight into how Baldwin shaped both his writing and his unflinching commitment to civil rights,” she said. “James Baldwin’s work continues to resonate as powerfully today as it did during his lifetime, and we are honored to celebrate his legacy and vision of justice.”  

Batuman foregrounded the fact that Baldwin finished two of his most influential books about America, Another Country (1962) and No Name on the Street (1972), while living in Turkey, and also directed a Turkish production of John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1970), despite not speaking the language. In this sense, Batuman suggested, he was straddling two continents and hoping each could help explain the other. 

Next came an essay by critic Tavia Nyong’o, which put this theme even more succinctly: “Baldwin had to leave America to continue to write about it,” he wrote, “and he had to be an outsider in Istanbul to reveal something essential about that city’s soul.” Whether or not the latter observation is hyperbolic, Baldwin did achieve celebrity in Turkey, and after first visiting in 1961 he returned periodically for over a decade. 

On the second floor of the library, earlier in the night, Pamela Fraser had stood over a glass case, peering at a photograph of Baldwin at a dinner party. She had pointed to another figure in the foreground: it was her husband, David Leeming, who had been Baldwin’s assistant in Istanbul. 

In speaking with Fraser, I had assumed that Leeming had long passed. In fact, he was not only alive and well but gearing up to speak at the event. Leeming wasn’t the only attendee with a personal connection to the exhibit — Baldwin’s brother Trevor was in the crowd, as was Pakay’s widow, Kathy. Yet he did have a special role to play in the second portion of the program, as part of a three-person panel that discussed the acclaimed author’s ‘Turkish years’ at length. 

Leeming, Zoborowska, and Reid-Pharr discussed James Baldwin and his life in Turkey. Photo: Jack Delaney

Leeming was joined on the panel by the scholars Magdalena J. Zaborowska of the University of Michigan, who wrote the monograph “James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade,” which was referenced repeatedly over the course of the conversation, and Robert Reid-Pharr of NYU. 

“Why did he come to Turkey? This is a question that people ask me all the time,” Leeming said, and it’s a question I asked him, and which he talked about quite a lot.”

“Basically, he didn’t know — except for the fact that he said, ‘I came for the same reason you did. I needed to get away. I needed to see something different and do something different,’” Leeming quotes Baldwin as saying. “And Jimmy was a born adventurer, so when he came to Turkey, it was not just to find a quiet place to work, although that was it too. It was to insist that he learned something about the culture, to learn something about the people there, and to be excited by them, which he was.”

Reid-Pharr met Baldwin at a book talk at UNC-Chapel Hill when the author was in the last year of his life, after he had stopped traveling to Istanbul. Instead, he recounted the first time he encountered one of Baldwin’s novels, as a 14-year-old boy in North Carolina. 

“It was basically a bunch of white kids and me,” Reid-Pharr remembered, explaining that he was attending a statewide junior historians event at a local college, “and there was a group of people that came dressed in rebel gray and red. So I was like, I’ve got to get out of here. I went to my first ever college bookstore, and my mother had given me $5 — this was a long time ago, so that was something. And so I went into the bookstore, and I saw for the first time ever a book with a picture of a black person on it. And I thought, I’m going to buy this book. It was ‘Go Tell It On the Mountain.’”

Zaborowska, who originally read Baldwin while in graduate school, having grown up in Poland, Baldwin’s time in Istanbul illustrated his desire to learn more about the world he inhabited, no matter the dangers that entailed.

“Think about this man as a polymath,” she suggested. “Yes, he was terrible at math, but he was a polymath as a humanist, as an artist, as somebody who was greedy for experience, for doing things, for creativity.”

Leeming agreed with Zoborowska’s sentiment. “The other thing [Baldwin] taught me,” he said, “was that the greatest sin is the sin of safety, the sin of living your life to be safe, to not take the risk that you have to take in order to be fully human. And Turkey provided him, and me too, with the possibility of living a life that maybe wasn’t quite so safe, and that involved pain, that involved difficulties, but led us, I think, both, to a fuller understanding of who we are.”

The exhibit was co-curated by Atesh M. Gundogdu as part of the  BPL Presents series, and supported by the Mellon Foundation.