My Friend Jimmy

14 August 2026 - Zeynep Oral -

James Baldwin (1924–1987) was not only a masterful author, not only a  writer novelist who penetrated the depths of the human heart and questioned human relationships, he was also, for many of us a friend, a companion.

He loved Türkiye. He would often  say “Here, I can breathe freely.” He was devoted to Istanbul, the city of which he said, “This mysterious city gives me the urge to work.”

In the 1970s, I had the good fortune to be his friend, the luxury of working with him. He loved me, and I loved him. We remained friends until forever..

But at the beginning… Good Lord! he poured down upon me  all the anger of this world . an anger a thousand times more intense the  “ the fire  next  time”.  I was terrified; I didn’t know where to escape, where to hide …  But  Then… then…

Perhaps it is best to begin at the beginning.

X

The year was 1967 when I met him face to face. It was  autumn. I was in my very first days as a journalist.

I heard that the American writer James Baldwin had come to Istanbul, again! . I was very excited.

As a student,  I had known him through his books.  in 1964, the year I graduated from İzmir high school, and went to  university in Paris I read his book The Fire Next Time and  was deeply influenced by it.   In this book, Baldwin went down to the roots of his quarrel with his own country. It became one of the most important works in helping me understand the disgrace of racism. In my view, this book could also be a handbook for white people. Through memories and testimonies, pleading, protesting, issuing ultimatums, and showing the reasons, Baldwin sought in this essay to end “the nightmare of racism” and proposed “changing the history of the world.”

 (The book would only be  translated  published in Turkish  many years later.  in 2006) , (Bundan Sonrası Ateş, by Yapı Kredi Publications, like many of Baldwin’s other books.) While studying in Paris  I  h

When I heard that he was in Istanbul, I managed, , to obtain an appointment. We met at the Ahmet Vefik Paşa Library, in front of a window overlooking the Bosphorus, and I had a wonderful  interview. Everything went beautifully. I thanked him and left.

I went straight to the newspaper wrote my piece. The headline of my interview was: “I can  Breath  in this Country. After 6 decades a voice  would echo  from under the booths of a polisman…calling for help.  Repeating again and again “I can not Breath.”.   

The same evening , my husband and I we went  to a night cub.  Our friends Gülriz Sururi and Engin Cezzar  (very famous theatre people ) were there.

( You’ll hear a lot about them these fallowing days.  Engin and Baldwin have been friends since they had met in Actors Studio in N.Y. Engin and Baldwin- They were not only friends, they were blood brothers.   And Engin was Baldwins İstanbul connection.   … Anyway They said come and sit with us. James Baldwin  was also with them  We joined them. Just by coincidence. I was sited next to Baldwin. )

On the stage,there was a live orchestra playing  and  a young Turkish  singer was singing the blues. At one point, merely just to make  conversation, I said, “He isn’t bad at all”

At that instant, a fist came crashing down on the table. At that instant: storm, volcanos, , fire,  apocalypse! Everything started to move around me!  

“This… this is my music! The music of my ancestors! That man is murdering my music! He is disgracing it!”

His eyes seemed to leap out of their sockets. He was so  furious  and shouting, “You! How you dare to say this is not bad! The man is killing my music! He is killing my ancestors, He is killing me, This is… this is shit!”

He had risen from his seat and was facing me He held my shoulders and was shaking me! I wanted to die that moment .I did not know what to do, where to run.

As the people around us pulled him to one side and me to another, they tried to calm him and comfort me. He was a volcano, his face turning purple.  As  my husband and I were leaving the table,  he was shouting after me:

“I do not trust you! I do not trust you at all! I forbid you. You cannot write a single line about me, about what we spoke  today!

I had moved away from him, but his voice still reached me from behind: “You can never write a single line about me! I forbid you to write about me!!”

I was frightened. So frightened that I might well have decided never again to write—not only about James Baldwin, but about anything at all… But it was already too late. I had already submitted my article to the newspaper.

I did not sleep at all that night.

The next morning, my interview with James Baldwin covered half a page of the newspaper where I worked.

While I was trembling with fear, wondering what would happen next, the doorbell rang.

A small basket containing twenty-five roses. Among the roses, a card:“I take back everything I said. I apologize to you. I loved your article. Thank you.”

Signed: James Baldwin.

And that was how I first encountered James Baldwin—the writer I had known from his works in my student years, the writer who had helped me discover not only the identity of the Black people around me, but also the identity of my own whiteness;

Some time after this encounter, a message came from  Gülriz and Engin.  Could we meet at the Theatre? They wanted to speak with me about something.

I ran there at once. Gülriz and Engin were there. James Baldwin was there too.

We had barely begun exchanging greetings  Baldwin interrupted: “Keep it short, please, let us come straight to the point.” He cut off the small talk. Then, taking both my hands and looking straight into my eyes, he said:

“Will you assist me? Will you be my assistant director?”

He was going to stage Ian Herbert’s play “Fortune and Men’s Eye” (Düşenin Dostu in Turkish) . He wanted me as his assistant. Would I accept?

I was just saying that I needed to think before answering, when he asked, “What is there to think about?”

Of course I could not say, “I am afraid of your temperament, of your anger.” What if he became angry  and was on fire again”? On the other hand, I had a strong feeling that it would be a magnificent adventure. Caught between the two, I began to mumble something like, “Well… I wonder whether my knowledge of theatre would be enough…” But he interrupted again:

“Well, bravo. So you have knowledge of theatre! I have none. Every time I learn something new about theatre  , I understand how little I know.”

His voice was beginning to rise when suddenly he stopped.

Then,  with in a voice  very soft,  very sincere, and warm, he added:

“I am not telling you this will be easy. It will be difficult. We will have to learn many things starting from zero…  We will fight a great deal. You will be very angry with me. But still, perhaps we might try…”

He was looking deep into my eyes…. I said…. YES..

                                                                       xxx

Before moving on I must tell you  a bit about  his İstanbul Years  before I met him. The Istanbul Years

James Baldwin’s love of Istanbul went back long before I knew him. That love was rooted in his friendship with Engin Cezzar.  They  met  at the Actors  Studio  in New York in 1957. One was  training  to become  a playwright, the other an actor. their friendship endured  till their last day… Baldwin’ died in 1987. Engin died in 2017.

Theirs was a friendship nourished by frequent meetings, by dreams, by dreaming, by disappointments, by work on shared projects, by common struggles, and by endless love; a friendship fed by literature, theatre, cinema, acting, directing, new plans, creativity, and producing together.

The years 1961 to 1971 were James Baldwin’s Istanbul years. At first he came often on holiday; gradually, he began to stay for longer periods. Here, he could “breathe freely,” and he found the working environment he wanted.

When I asked him why he did not choose to settle in İstanbul permanently, he would always say to me, “Oh, how much I would love to. But that would be an escape.” He had ideals he needed to realize in his own country.

As we worked on Düşenin Dostu, our friendship and our trust in each other grew.

Produced by Gülriz Sururi, with roles performed by Engin Cezzar, Ali Poyrazoğlu, Bülent Erbaşar, Aydemir Akbaş, and Erden Alkan, we began a wonderful team effort that lasted nearly three months.

During rehearsals and performances, our a friendship deepened; days and nights were woven with invaluable moments.

Throughout that entire period of work, we fought a great deal, and we understood each other a great deal.

Outside the work, there were times when he laid his head on my shoulder and cried, and I became his confidante and companion in sorrow; times when I tolerated his whims; times when we laughed and had fun like children.

From then on he was  Jimmy for me.

My dear friend Jimmy—all his friends called him Jimmy—was a person who, when angered, seemed fearless and terrifying, yet he had a very delicate soul. He was afraid of hurting anybody. He was infinitely emotional, quick to feel empathy, often in love, and often suffering the pains of love.

James Baldwin was Black. He was an American.  He was homosexual. These realities made life endlessly difficult for him in his own country and in so many places and other countries  he went.    In Istanbul, however, as he himself said, he “could breathe freely.”

That was how it was then. In the  60’s and 1970s , no one’s sexual preference was thrown in their face; no one was humiliated for it.

The fact that he did not have to hide or cover up either his Blackness or his homosexuality turned Istanbul into a refuge for Jimmy. Istanbul provoked his writing, his creativity.

XXX

I remember that for the first three weeks we worked only around the table. The play took place in prison, examining human relationships in that environment, and it had a very harsh language. The prisoners were played by Engin Cezzar, Ali Poyrazoğlu, Bülent Erbaşar, and Erden Alkan; the guard by Aydemir Akbaş.

Jimmy would call out to them in Turkish, “Çocuklaaa”—“Children”—unable to pronounce the r’s. Until he obtained the performance he wanted from them, he would persuade them with words of affection, with tenderness, with the power of conviction, without anger, without raising his voice, until he made them accept his interpretation.

But let someone turn his attention, his interest, elsewhere—oh, what trouble! At such moments he would immediately grow angry; before his anger became words and struck his tongue, lightning would flash from his eyes and rain down upon us.

During this period, James Baldwin had rented an apartment in Ayazpaşa. After rehearsal, we would go either to his place, or to Gülriz’s, or to our home, which was very close to the theatre. I could never get enough of his conversation. When he was in high spirits, he would raise his palm in the air and say “Give me five!”—and create a wind of happiness that locked hands with the person before him. He had very beautiful hands. He always used his hands when he spoke. His laughter multiplied happiness. And when he was carried away by joy, he danced magnificently.

Behind this cheerful, lively appearance lay a sensitivity as fine and fragile as a butterfly’s wing. He was tender-hearted.

He was one of those rare people who know how to communicate and understand without needing words.

During those three months, we shared days and nights, joys and sorrows.

And when I say sorrows… First and foremost, Jimmy’s pains of love. When we saw that he was burning with longing for his lover in France, we brought the lover from France. If the lover’s heart began to incline toward someone else, then Jimmy would lay his head on my neck and cry, while I tried to find words of consolation.

Our greatest joy, however, came through the music for the play. By chance, one of the great figures of the jazz world, Don Cherry, happened to be in Istanbul. He was vacationing with his family when we rushed him into the studio and had him compose the background music for the play. It was magnificent.

And at last we said, “Curtain!”

The result, in my opinion, was wonderful. The play received very good reviews. Yet the right-wing and conservative press began a campaign: “What is this disgrace? What are these obscenities?” As if prisoners in our own prisons never swear!

I remember that during the run of the performances, Ali Poyrazoğlu lost his father, and that very night he went on stage and continued to play the prisoner nicknamed “Princess.” The rule: “The show must go on.” For days, Jimmy would act like a father to him.

The beloved Bülent Erbaşar, who left us at a very young age, had the nickname “Mona Lisa” in the play. Both Bülent’s “Mona Lisa” and Aydemir Akbaş’s magnificent portrayal of the guard have never left me.

The performances were going ahead at full speed. At one point, Jimmy’s brother, the actor David Baldwin, came to visit and admired the play. The play was being performed every night to full houses when bad news arrived from the United States:

Baldwin’s book Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, which he had written in Istanbul in 1967, was being banned and confiscated in America. The reason given was this: “This work belittles Americans.” As an example, they cited the following sentence from the book: “My countrymen impress me only for one reason: for being the most unpleasant, the ugliest, the emptiest people in the world.”

Jimmy was terribly angry about this. This was the work of the years when he had said, “Istanbul has brought me peace.”

Within two years, the book had entered the bestseller lists in the United States. It had received excellent reviews. Critics spoke of his “poetic language” and of “his power to persuade the reader of the world he had created.” The book had been translated into German and Italian and published in Germany, Italy, and England. It was about to be published in France.

“The ban cannot prevent this success!” he kept shouting. As he shouted, Jimmy’s face turned purple.

“This is why I cannot stay in America! Here, at least, I can breathe freely,” he kept saying.

The performances were continuing with great success. James Baldwin had returned to the United States to discuss the issue of his book’s banning when—

In my beloved Turkey… A denunciation, a complaint… Our  plays banned!

Well, there you are! One must not breathe too freely after all.

Court, trial, the play’s release once again… The footsteps of March 12 were rapidly approaching. Istanbul, too, was now beginning to feel too narrow for Jimmy. From then on, he would content himself with visiting Turkey from time to time. First he went to the American South for the books he was working on, then settled in the south of France, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.

XXX

“I am here every ten years. But here, too, every ten years the military seizes power!” he said. It was November 1981.

We were in the south, on the Bodrum peninsula, in Zeytinli Kahve cove, which at the time was completely empty. He and Engin Cezzar had a new project: to make a film of Nemci Gürmen’s novel Kılıç Uykuda Vurulur. Jimmy was writing the screenplay.

I visited him several times in Bodrum.

His jet-black, long, slender, beautiful fingers moved back and forth over the keys of the typewriter. The brightness of his heart rivaled the brightness of the southern sun.

When the news of his death reached us in 1987, the first sentence that lodged itself in my heart was: “Who put out the moonlight?” It was a line from the screenplay he had been writing.

The Turkish shepherd asked the Greek fisherman: “Who put out the moonlight?”

James Baldwin, who knew injustice and discrimination so well—who had lived them, felt them—never gave up struggling against every form of discrimination throughout his life, in the United States and everywhere in the world.

On the day Obama was elected President of the United States, I raised my glass to my dear friend James Baldwin.

In my heart, I called out to him:

Dear Jimmy… The man whose father was refused service in a restaurant sixty years ago has today been elected President of that country. I know how great your share is in this, my dear friend.