Stranger in the Village

"Stranger in the Village" is an essay by African-American novelist James Baldwin about his experiences in Leukerbad, Switzerland, after he nearly suffered a breakdown. The essay was originally published in Harper's Magazine, October 1953, and later in his 1955 collection, Notes of a Native Son.

In the summer of 1951, Baldwin almost suffered a breakdown, for which his partner, Lucien Happersberger, took him to an established Swiss health-resort in the Valais Alps, known as Leukerbad. Baldwin declares that, while he is a stranger in the village of Leukerbad, he also feels like a stranger in the village of the United States of America as an African American.





== Summary ==



Baldwin relates his experiences in Leukerbad, a small, isolated Swiss village, in the summer of 1951. Residents of Leukerbad were fascinated by Baldwin's blackness; according to Baldwin they had never seen a black man before, thus making him a stranger in the village."

Baldwin describes a kind of naive racism within the villagers: for example, children who shout "Neger!" when they see him, unaware of the echoes he hears from his past when others shouted a more damning word ("Nigger!"). The village has even ritualized an overt control of Blacks with their custom of "buying" Africans in the attempt to religiously convert them.

There is also a more sinister racism, even in a remote village that has direct experience with only one Black man: men who describe Baldwin as "le sale negre" ('the dirty Black man') behind his back and assume that he stole wood from them, or of children who "scream in genuine anguish" when he approaches them because they have been taught that "the devil is a black man."

This fantasy about the disposability of black life is a constant in American history.

Baldwin further goes on to explain the relationship between American and European history, by explicitly pointing out that American history encompasses the history of the Negro, while European history lacks the African-American dimension. Baldwin observes that in America the Negro is “an inescapable part of the general social fabric” and that “Americans attempt until today to make an abstraction of the Negro.”: 125 

Baldwin argues that white Americans try to retain a separation between their history and black history despite the interdependence between the two.