Another Country: Metaphors 7 key examples

Because Rufus is houseless and miserable, he feels the buildings surrounding him are oppressive and threatening, even “murderous.” Through this metaphor, Baldwin suggests that the city’s “weight” is a destructive force that’s trying to break Rufus’s spirit. New York City’s towering skyscrapers are symbols of success and cosmopolitanism for many New Yorkers, but for houseless people like Rufus, their grandeur only evokes the cruel systemic neglect they're subjected to. The city’s promises of opportunity and success have unraveled for Rufus. He is not welcome in any of the buildings he passes, no matter how huge they are.  The metaphor of the city’s crushing weight also reflects the relentless demands that late-20th-century life in New York placed on people from marginalized communities. Black New Yorkers almost universally had to work harder to succeed than their White counterparts and neighbors. Baldwin’s language frames the skyscrapers as physical representations of the forces that impose suffering on those they “tower” over. 

The metaphor of the skyscrapers “falling” every day also refers to this. In this metaphor, Rufus has to experience and re-experience the “fall” of his vision of idealized New York, as his disillusionment grows deeper with each new indignity he experiences. Rufus walks on through Manhattan not out of hope but resignation. The “crushing” force represents more than physical hardship; it 's also the psychological oppression that the city’s indifference to Rufus inflicts. Each day, the towers loom above him, oppressive reminders of the barriers Rufus cannot overcome.

Leona’s body is all white, here; she is a White woman, but Rufus sees her as almost supernaturally white, “milk-white” and “alabaster.” This isn’t the whiteness of her Caucasian skin tone, it’s a symbolic Whiteness which differentiates her from Rufus’s Blackness. Rufus’s fury with the inequalities of his world gets tangled up with his sexual urges in this scene. As he has sex with Leona he enjoys the fact that she begins to cry and that her “brow [is] wet” with sweat. He isn’t making love to her, he is “beat[ing] her with all the strength he ha[s].” He takes out his anger and frustration with Whiteness in general on Leona’s particular Whiteness.

This idea overcomes him so intensely that he treats his penis as a weapon to kill her with here; when he ejaculates he feels he is filling her with his “venom.” Rufus’s sexual violence is a retaliation against the violence he feels the world has inflicted on him. Although Leona—in this first instance—seems to consent to and even enjoy its intensity, he “curses” her as though he is forcing himself on her. He imagines that he is taking revenge against Whiteness writ large as he uses "his weapon between her thighs."

The bathroom of this bar is, to Rufus, the most unpleasant place he could ever imagine. The hyperbole in this passage is clear; the bathroom might be revolting, but it doesn’t actually contain the “tons of bile and vomit” from “thousands of travelers.” Rufus feels this way because he’s miserably unhappy and is under the impression that there’s no way out of being overwhelmed by his life in New York.  He is ashamed of having animal requirements and urges and that he has to “add his own stream” to the stinking ocean of refuse the city produces. He’s begun to hate himself totally, and he expresses that hatred toward his own penis here, the “most hated part of himself.”

There’s a brief and unpleasant moment in the scene just before this when Yves and Eric wonder if the town in France they have chosen is safe for them. They both feel a horrible sense of unease, which suddenly lifts. The anxiety is so intense that the author describes it with a metaphor of its own. It had been hanging over them like a “red, dangerous shadow,” which abruptly dissipates and leaves them in the “sleepy, beautiful” town. With that tension gone, Baldwin frames the desire they feel for one another as a natural force that draws them together without hesitation. It is as though they are caught in a river, and the “current” of their desire is pushing them irresistibly toward consummating their relationship.

Baldwin often shows how lonely and separate people feel by describing the minds of others as “another country” to each character. Vivaldo feels very cut off from Ida’s “country” in this moment, so much that he begins to worry whether it’s his own fault she cheated on him. He’s thinking of “love” as though it were a real place, a territory far outside those he knows. The metaphor of love being a place he could have visited points to how uncertain he feels. Vivaldo is now unsure whether he’s ever ventured beyond Manhattan and into “love” with Ida. 

Having made this realization, he also worries that he was only able to be vulnerable with Ida because she “would not dare despise him.” Vivaldo believed he held all the power in their partnership, as she is “not white” and he is. He wonders if he made her “the offering of himself” believing in some secret part of his mind that she couldn’t reject him.

Ida metaphorically turns all White people in America into a monolith here, telling Cass that they “keep” her in Black neighborhoods to control and subjugate her. The hyperbole she uses compares White America's self-satisfied, ignorant ideas about “freedom” to masturbation. In Ida’s mind, White people self-congratulate themselves about “freedom” while still subjugating their Black neighbors. What’s worse is that they expect Black people to do the same, but simultaneously want them to stay far away from White spaces. Whiteness, as she perceives it, exploits Black creativity and innovation while refusing any actual inclusion. This makes her so furious that she employs another hyperbolic metaphor, saying she wishes she could “grind this miserable country to powder” by turning into a “big fist.” Of course, this isn’t actually possible, but Ida is so angry that all she wants to do is destroy the systems that limit and hurt her.

As he stares into his coffee here, Vivaldo thinks to himself about how “black coffee” is really a shade of brown. He then broadens this observation to note that true blackness seldom appears, even in darkness like “night” or “the mines”. His attention to the fact that coffee is actually brown prompts him to question how rigid categories like Blackness and Whiteness might hide a great deal of important things. As he considers whiteness, he also observes that light, no matter how pale, contains “some hint of its origins in fire.” Whiteness is not solely whiteness, either, he realizes. The coffee is a metaphor for Vivaldo’s own confusion about the boundaries race and its politics have drawn between him and Ida. Spurred by the incorrect color designation of coffee, he’s reconsidering his rigid ideas about what constitutes Blackness.