Although covered in varying degrees of detail by his biographers (most fully by David Leeming, who became Baldwin’s assistant after meeting the author in Istanbul, walking in on him as he was literally writing the final words of Another Country), Zaborowska’s study is the first to focus completely on Turkey and the impact that living in a country “not east or west” had on the author’s work. Zaborowska envisions Istanbul as a “nurturing authoritorial lair where Baldwin could exorcise and embrace his traumatizing material from a safe distance.” As she writes, exploring Baldwin’s “Turkish sojourn helps us to embrace more fully the transnational dimension of mid-twentieth century black literary culture.” There may also have been other, more personal reasons for his extended stays as well: “Baldwin’s sense of the positive ‘energy’ of Turkey….also had something to do with the personal freedom he experienced there as a man who loved other men. In a culture that drew the lines of gender and sexuality strikingly differently, he did not stand out; he was not vilified; he was not questioned about his boyfriends; he was left alone.”

http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/nonfiction/01/21/james-baldwins-turkish-de... ( )