A Long and Influential Career
Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones) is a leading African American poet who has also written essays, short stories, a novel, a major study of American jazz, plays, a musical drama, and an autobiography. He has founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater-School, edited seminal anthologies and journals of avant-garde and African American writing, received major scholarly fellowships and awards, taught at several major American universities, and been an influential political and cultural leader in the African American community. Baraka’s life, achievements, and writing have reflected—and have often helped determine—the evolution of African American thought in the last half of the twentieth century and beyond. The philosophical and political developments in Baraka’s thinking have resulted in four distinct poetical periods: a 1950’s and 1960’s involvement with the Greenwich Village Beat scene, an early 1960’s quest for personal identity and community, a phase connected with Black Nationalism and the Black Arts movement, and a Marxist-Leninist period.
Everett LeRoi Jones was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1934. His father was a postal worker; his mother was a college dropout who became a social worker. Graduated with honors from Barringer High School in 1951, Jones first attended Rutgers University on scholarship and transferred to Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1952, only to be expelled in 1954 for failing grades. He immediately joined the U.S. Air Force, attaining the rank of sergeant, but he was discharged “undesirably” in 1957 for having sent some of his poems to purportedly communist publications. Upon his release, Jones moved to Greenwich Village; became friends with such avant-garde poets as Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and Charles Olson; and married Hettie Cohen, with whom he edited a literary journal.
Political Awakening
In 1960, Jones—along with several other important “Negro writers”—was invited to visit Cuba, where he met Fidel Castro. He witnessed Cuba’s socialist infancy firsthand and realized how political poetry could be. The success of his play Dutchman (pr., pb. 1964) and the murder of Malcolm X in 1965 convinced Jones that Greenwich Village’s white Beat poetry scene and his white Jewish wife contradicted his interests in African American communities and issues. Consequently, he moved initially to Harlem and then back to Newark. During this period, Jones—along with Larry Neal, Hoyt Fuller, Don L. Lee, and others—initiated the Black Arts movement, a cultural embodiment of Black Nationalism. He also married Sylvia Robinson (Amina Baraka) and in 1967 changed his name to Imamu Ameer Baraka, meaning “spiritual leader and prince who is blessed.” He later simplified the name to Amiri Baraka.
Throughout the 1960’s and into the 1970’s, Baraka’s major interests were the Black Power movement, Black Muslim philosophy and politics, Maulana Ron Karenga’s Kawaida cultural revolutionary doctrine, and pan-Africanism. In 1974, however, Baraka became convinced that these “cultural nationalist positions” were too narrow in their concerns and that class, not race, determines the social, political, and economic realities of people’s lives. For this reason, he shifted his focus in writing and politics to Marxist-Leninist thought.
Post-World War II avant-garde Greenwich Village poetry represented a break from what Baraka considered the impersonal, academic poetry of T. S. Eliot and the poetry published in The New Yorker . When Baraka read Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl,” it was a turning point in his poetic life. Baraka says “Howl” moved him because “it talked about a world I could identify with and relate to. . . . I now knew poetry could be about some things that I was familiar with. That it did not have to be about suburban birdbaths and Greek mythology.” In “How You Sound??” Baraka wrote: “MY POETRY...
(This entire section contains 399 words.)
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is whatever I think I am. . . . I CAN BE ANYTHING I CAN. I make a poetry with what I feel is useful & can be saved out of all the garbage of our lives.” He came to believe not only that any observation, experience, or object is appropriate for poetry but also that “There must not be any preconceived notion ordesign for what the poem ought to be. . . . I’m not interested in writing sonnets, sestinas or anything . . . only poems.”
The Politics of Personal Experience and Popular Culture
What interests Baraka is his own experience, popular American culture, and the struggle between the seemingly contradictory black and white worlds in which he dwells. A number of Baraka’s early poems published in Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) express a yearning for a more orderly and meaningful world that he associates with radio. He calls this yearning “A maudlin nostalgia/ that comes on/ like terrible thoughts about death.” In “In Memory of Radio,” Baraka compares the wisdom of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and the Shadow to his own lack of insight into the evil that “lurks in the hearts of men.” Meanwhile, “Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today” contrasts the certainty of radio’s imagined worlds to the real world, in which, Baraka realizes, “nobody really gives a damn” and “All the lovely things I’ve known have disappeared.” Almost despairingly, he wonders, “Where is my space helmet, I sent for it/ 3 lives ago . . . when there were box tops. . . . THERE MUST BE A LONE RANGER!!!” Neither the Lone Ranger nor his other radio companions come to the rescue. The poet is left alone and forlorn, “My silver bullets all gone/ My black mask trampled in the dust.”
In making popular culture the focus of his poetry, Baraka reflects the poetic shift from mythological and literary icons (which he considers bourgeois, academic, and dead) to the vitality of the everyday. Baraka and his circle looked to Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and the Surrealist painters to help them create a new American poetic tradition. The personal “I,” so important to the whole body of Baraka’s poetic works, also began to develop during this period, which is characterized by direct and even confessional poems such as “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.” In that poem, Baraka writes, “Lately, I’ve become accustomed to the way/ The ground opens up and envelopes me/ Each time I go out to walk the dog.” This personal voice expresses the confusion the poet feels living in both the black and white worlds. “Hymn for Lanie Poo” juxtaposes images from 1950’s New York with images from Africa and laments the capitulation of the poet’s schoolteacher sister to white values. She is, he says at the end of the poem, happy in
the huge & lovelesswhite-anglo sunofbenevolent stepmother America.
In the volume’s final poem, “Notes for a Speech,” Baraka writes, “African blues/ does not know me.” He gives voice to feelings of alienated from his racial heritage:
They shy away. My owndead souls, my, so calledpeople. Africais a foreign place. You areas any other sad man hereamerican
He thus ends Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note by expressing confusion over his identity, his place, and his voice.
Such confusion contributed to Baraka’s split with his wife, his move from Greenwich Village to Harlem and eventually to Newark, and his quest for personal and racial identity captured in his second book of poetry, The Dead Lecturer (1964). Baraka describes “trying to puncture fake social relationships and gain some clarity about what I really felt about things.” In his autobiography, Baraka remarks of the poems of this period, “again and again they speak of this separation, this sense of being in contradiction with my friends and peers.” In “A Poem for Willie Best” (an African American film actor who performed demeaning, stereotypical roles), Baraka wrestles with his estrangement in the world:
A face sings, aloneat the topof the body. Allflesh, all song aligned. For hell is silent[. . .]It was your own deathyou saw.
Forced to act in a way contrary to his nature, to dance a dance that “punishes speech” and to speak words that are not his own, Willie Best is able “to provoke/ some meaning, where before there was only hell,” so that those who come after him may “Hear,” as the last line of the poem insists.
Baraka also creates Crow Jane in this poetry collection, a “white Muse appropriated by the black experience.” She embodies for Baraka a rejection of the white Western aesthetic. Baraka describes her as “Dead virgin/ of the mind’s echo. Dead lady/ of thinking, back now, without/ the creak of memory”; in the last poem of the series, he implores, “Damballah, kind father,/ sew up/ her bleeding hole.” Transformed by African culture and the African American experience, the muse may live again.
During this period of racial and political unrest, Baraka says, “I was struggling to be born. . . . I was in a frenzy, trying to get my feet solidly on the ground, of reality,” a fact that rings out in poems such as “I Substitute for the Dead Lecturer.” He asks,
What kindnessWhat wealthcan I offer? Exceptwhat is, for meugliest. What isfor me, shadows, shrieking phantoms.
Somehow, he feels destined to give a new “lecture” on the horrors of American reality: “The Lord has saved me/ to do this” despite his fear of failure. He invokes in another poem “black dada nihilismus,” a black god, to destroy all vestiges of white culture and to assume its own righteous power. During his second period, then, Baraka posed tough questions regarding identity, integrity, and society without knowing the answers. He negated what was but was hard-pressed to offer positive alternatives. He searched for his self, though he was not sure who that would turn out to be. As he says in “The Liar,” “When they say, ’It is Roi/ who is dead?’ I wonder/ who will they mean?”
Baraka’s Black Nationalist Period
Not until he involved himself with the Black Power movement, the Nation of Islam, the West Coast Kawaida revolution, and the Black Arts movement did Baraka come to see himself and his art clearly. In Cuba, Baraka had come to see that politics and poetry could work together; in his Black Nationalist period, he successfully joined the two. In his essay “The Legacy of Malcolm X, and the Coming of the Black Nation,” Baraka declares, “The Black artist . . . is desperately needed to change the images his people identify with, by asserting Black feeling, Black mind, Black judgment”; in “State/meant,” he says: “The Black Artist must draw out of his soul the correct image of the world.”
In the poem “Black Art,” Baraka insists that art should be intimately connected with the real world, not an exercise in abstraction. Art must reflect and change that world: “We want ’poems that kill.’/ Assassin poems, Poems that shoot/ guns.” In the final stanza, he writes: “We want a black poem./ And a/ Black World.” His poems call for separatist Black Nationalism. In “Return of the Native,” he imagines a completely African American world, “where we may see ourselves/ all the time.” His tribute to Malcolm X, “A Poem for Black Hearts,” celebrates the contributions of the “black god of our time” and looks to his memory to transform those who follow. “Poem for HalfWhite College Students” is a warning to black students whose words, gestures, and values are compromised by the white academic world. “Ka’Ba” honors the beauty of blackness: “We are beautiful people/ with african imaginations/ full of masks and dances and swelling chants.” Baraka calls for the African tradition evoked by Black Nationalism to supply meaning, self-affirmation, and order in an alien land.
Marxism-Leninism
Baraka has observed that “all nationalism finally, taken to any extreme, has got to be oppressive to the people who are not in that nationality.” Recognizing the constrictive effect of Black Nationalism led Baraka to adopt a Marxist-Leninist perspective. Baraka has attributed the change in his thinking to his realization that “skin color was not determinant of political content.” Furthermore, he has stated, “I see art as a weapon, and a weapon of revolution. It’s just now that I define revolution in Marxist terms.” In his poem “When We’ll Worship Jesus,” for example, Baraka criticizes Christian America for its failure to help people in any substantive way: “he cant change the world/ we can change the world.” He insists, “throw/ jesus out yr mind. Build the new world out of reality, and new vision.”
In “A New Reality Is Better than a New Movie!” Baraka envisions the old, unequal, capitalist world being consumed in an inferno. What is captured on film pales in comparison to the revolutionary reality to come: “The real terror of nature is humanity enraged, the true/ technicolor spectacle that/ hollywood/ cant record.” Such outrage will lead, Baraka predicts, to a demand for “the new socialist reality . . . the ultimate tidal/ wave” that will change the world. In poems such as “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat” and “Das Kapital,” Baraka presents a poetic articulation of socialist ideology.
In his 1982 poem “In the Tradition,” Baraka moves beyond strict Marxist concerns to address African American culture, providing a tribute to the contributors to that tradition: “We are the composers, racists & gunbearers/ We are the artists.” He wants American history and culture to “get out of europe/ come out of europe if you can.” Were scholars to look for truly American culture, he maintains, “nigger music’s almost all/ you got, and you find it/ much too hot.” Baraka’s long poem “Why’s/Wise” (later published as part of Wise, Why’s, Y’s, 1995) also focuses on the life and history of African Americans, though Baraka is still committed to his Marxist vision.
A lifework of more than three decades of poetry, Transbluesency was published in 1995 as a body of poety and knowledge that captures the ideological transformations of Baraka from avant-garde bohemian to cultural nationalist to international socialist. The book takes its name from a 1946 Duke Ellington composition that means “a blue fog you can almost see through.” Transbluency reveals the extent to which Baraka—from his 1961 publication of Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note to Wise, Why’s, Y’s in 1995—has consistently sought allegiance between what is radical or subversive politically and what is avant-garde poetically. It is a revelation of both the transformation of Baraka’s consciousness and the poet’s effective use of art as a weapon of revolution.
Baraka’s Funk Lore: New Poems, 1984-1995 (1996) represents a poetic exploration of the concepts of “funk” and “lore” and their expansive gamut of meanings. The denotative definition of “funk” was transformed by popular usage during the 1960’s, from something that either stank or was coarse or indecent into a particular body of knowledge (lore) characterized first by a slow, mellow groove and later by the hard-driving, insistent rhythm characteristic of sexual intercourse. In the same way, Baraka treats a broad range of topics, from popular culture to the politics of history, as he demonstrates his continued mastery of tone and performance. From the stench of the “bovine fecal sauce mixture,” which to Baraka constitutes the ingredients of his “Fusion Recipe” to the academic lore of history in“Othello Jr.,” “Black Reconstruction,”and“Tom Ass Clarence,” among other poems,Baraka’s intense groove and rapid-fire expressions of the lore of funk is also a tribute of gratitude to such jazz greats as Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughn, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane.
In 2003, Baraka’s Somebody Blew Up America, and Other Poems appeared as an unorthodox response to the tragedy of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The book, like its infamous title poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” is a scathing indictment of whiteness as diabolical, dangerous, and terroristic. It is a declaration of aesthetic war on U.S. imperialism and European hegemony. As an incendiary work, the poem blames white supremacy for putting Eastern European Jews into ovens yet implicates the state of Israel in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Other poems in the book reveal other aspects of the invidious nature of whiteness. From the demand for reparations in the poem “Why Is We Americans?” to the ugly thing floating on the backs of black people in “In Town,” Baraka portrays the legacy of white supremacy as one of tragedy and terror.
The poetry of Amiri Baraka is wide-ranging in content and style. He continues to work, to grow, and to influence other poets. As critic Gerald Early observes, Amiri Baraka has been “the most influential black person of letters over the [late twentieth century], particularly influential among young blacks,” and he has had “a striking ability to communicate to people who [have] never read his books. It is not likely that any black writer or intellectual will generate a similar power any time in the near or foreseeable future.”