More broadly, Baker’s adoptive family was both the extension and the apotheosis of her more politically charged adoption of France as an alternative to the United States. Baker’s commitment to fighting publicly against segregation and racial violence in the U.S. led her to reject one nationalism in favor of another; she became a French citizen by marriage in 1937, adopting the nation that made her famous. Indeed, in a speech addressed to a French military audience in the early 1960s, Baker revised her signature song, “J’ai deux amours” [I have two loves], transforming it from a celebration of transatlantic dual citizenship into a rejection of the United States and a panegyric to her adoptive homeland: “Je n’ai qu’un seul amour,” she claimed: I only have one love. Baker, unlike Garry Davis or the Surrealists, did not reject nationalism or nations; she instead cast her lot with France, maintaining her patriotism and attachment to De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic throughout the Algerian War and the events of May 1968.
Baker’s allegiance to French nationalism in the midst of colonial warfare reveals, at best, her naïveté toward French politics and, at worst, the ideological proximity of the rainbow tribe to the assimilationist tactics of French colonialism. Yet Baker’s insistence—at least through 1969—on the significance of Les Milandes’ location on French soil was as much rhetorical and strategic as it was heartfelt or rooted in ideological fealty. For one, Baker’s patriotism was, especially after she began adopting children, as instrumental as her international fame: her voluminous correspondence with French authorities, now housed in Emory University’s special collections library, attests to her efforts to secure state support for Les Milandes and for the College of Brotherhood she hoped to establish there.
