Baraka, Amiri 1934–

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Amiri Baraka 1934-

(Born Everett LeRoy Jones; also wrote under the pseudonyms LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amiri Baraka.) American playwright, poet, essayist, short story writer, and novelist.

For additional information on Baraka's career, see BLC, Ed. 1.

INTRODUCTION

Baraka is regarded as a controversial writer and prominent figure in the development of contemporary African American literature. His work explores themes of cultural alienation; racial tension and conflict; sexual, ethnic, and racial identity; and the necessity for social change through revolutionary means. Whether dealing with issues of race, sexual orientation, or institutionalized discrimination, Baraka is notorious for both infuriating and inspiring his readers. He is often viewed as a successor to the literary tradition of Richard Wright and James Baldwin and as a spokesman for the power of art as a means to enlighten and empower African American and oppressed peoples throughout the world.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Baraka was born in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey. After graduating high school at the age of fifteen, he enrolled at Howard University in 1952 and changed the spelling of his name to LeRoi. At Howard, he studied under such renowned black scholars as E. Franklin Frazier and Sterling A. Brown before flunking out in 1954. He served briefly in the U.S. Air Force and then moved to New York's Greenwich Village in 1957. Identifying with the Beat movement, Baraka married Hettie Roberta Cohen, a white woman of Jewish heritage, and founded Yugen, a journal of Beat poetry. Though he also attracted attention as a local jazz music critic, Baraka's initial critical recognition arose from his poetry collection, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961). Baraka began to incorporate a strong political element into his writing after being invited to Cuba by the New York chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in 1960. His essay "Cuba Libre," inspired by his trip, received the Longview Best Essay of the Year award in 1961. Baraka's transformation into a dedicated political activist occurred after the murder of Malcolm X in 1965. Divorcing his wife and moving to Harlem, he dissociated himself from whites and focused his attention on composing political essays and poetry that would expose discrimination and foster a strong sense of African American identity. To help create works that would speak to and inspire the African American community, he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. That same year, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and subsequently married Sylvia Robinson, a black woman, in 1966.

In 1968 he converted to the Nation of Islam, adopting their political stance of Black Nationalism and changing his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka, meaning "blessed spiritual leader." Another radical change occurred in 1974 when Baraka dropped the spiritual title of Imamu and declared himself a devout Marxist-Leninist. Baraka's new socialist beliefs caused him to reject Black Nationalism as a racist system of thought, and he likewise recanted his past anti-white and anti-Semitic statements. In 1979 he began teaching creative writing in the Africana Studies Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1981 he received the Poetry Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was awarded the Langston Hughes Medal for outstanding contribution to literature in 1989. Baraka was also appointed poet laureate of New Jersey in 2002, though the position was later abolished due to the outcry over his allegedly anti-Semitic poem "Somebody Blew up America," which deals with the September 11th terrorist attacks. Baraka lives in Newark with his family.

MAJOR WORKS

In Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Baraka satirizes post-World War II popular culture and reflects the detached perspective of the bohemian lifestyle. The essays in Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) highlight his concern with the marginalization of black artists as contributors to American culture. Dutchman (1964), a play detailing the sexual sadism inflicted upon a young black man by a white woman, is generally regarded as one of Baraka's masterpieces. Utilizing a minimalist structure and infused with symbolic references, Dutchman was recognized as the Best American Off-Broadway Play of 1964. The Toilet, another drama from the same year, is an example of Baraka's treatment of homosexuality. In typically gritty fashion, the play portrays the beating of a white homosexual boy by a group of black youths. A Black Mass (1966) is a play loosely based on the Nation of Islam's mythological explanation for the origin of black people and the devilish nature of whites. Baraka employed the basic tenets of this myth in his Faustian story of a black magician who accidentally unleashes white evil upon the world. The System of Dante's Hell (1965), Baraka's only novel, is widely considered the author's attempt to break away from the influence of the Beat poets. The narrative is loosely based upon Dante's Inferno and places a semi-autobiographical protagonist into an urban wasteland of racial oppression and sexual violence.

Baraka's views on the role of the black artist in contemporary society are outlined in Home: Social Essays (1966), which also displays the author's passionate identification with the Black Nationalist movement and includes the essay "Cuba Libre." Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1995) (1995) contains representative verse from every phase of the author's career. Reviewers contend that the collection exhibits Baraka's tendency toward introspection as well as his political consciousness. Funk Lore (1996) is comprised of previously uncollected poems dating back to 1984, many of which focus on Baraka's passion for jazz. The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (2000) offers three new short stories, The System of Dante's Hell, and a collection previously published as Tales (1967). Reviewers praise his innovative style in the stories of the volume, contending that it provides an insightful and alternative look at Baraka and his chief concerns of race, poverty, and sex. Continuing Baraka's quest for social justice, the essays comprising The Essence of Reparation (2003) explore themes of racism, oppression, self-determination, and colonialism and argue that making reparations to African Americans is a necessary step in the struggle for full citizenship and equal rights. That same year, Somebody Blew up America was published amidst controversy over his provocative poem, "Somebody Blew up America," which accused Israel of involvement in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. His latest collection of short fiction, Tales of the Out & the Gone (2006), includes stories written in the early 1970s through the turn of the century. Intermixing wordplay and psychological exploration, the stories reflect the evolution of Baraka's narrative style and thematic concerns.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

There has been a wide range of critical opinion on Baraka's body of work. Many critics have viewed him as a promising poet who evolved into a virulent racist and anti-Semite. Others have seen his political and philosophical evolution as a fascinating reflection of the political, cultural, and social evolution of modern America. Some critics have viewed Baraka as a champion of African Americans and have commended his intention to create literature that focuses on the real concerns of the African American community. Recent criticism has examined the role of the Nation of Islam and of anti-gay invective in his work. Both his use of free verse and his experimentation with poetic rhythm have been cited as significant contributions to postmodern literature, and his plays have found a permanent place in the repertoire of experimental theater. Although Baraka's controversial work has alienated many readers and critics, commentators agree that he has played a seminal role in the development of minority literature and remains a profound influence on generations of African American writers.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

A Good Girl Is Hard to Find (play) 1958

Yugen [editor and publisher] (journal) 1958-62

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note [as LeRoi Jones] (poetry) 1961

Blues People: Negro Music in White America [as LeRoi Jones] (essay) 1963

The Baptism: A Comedy in One Act [as LeRoi Jones] (play) 1964

Dutchman [as LeRoi Jones] (play) 1964

The Slave: A Fable [as LeRoi Jones] (play) 1964

The Toilet: A Play in One Act [as LeRoi Jones] (1964)

The System of Dante's Hell: A Novel [as LeRoi Jones] (novel) 1965

A Black Mass [as LeRoi Jones] (play) 1966

Home: Social Essays [as LeRoi Jones] (essays) 1966

Tales (short stories) 1967

Black Magic: Sabotage, Target Study, Black Art; Collected Poetry, 1961-1967 (poetry) 1969

Four Black Revolutionary Plays: All Praises to the Black Man [as LeRoi Jones] (plays) 1969

Afrikan Revolution: A Poem (poetry) 1973

AM/TRAK (poetry) 1979

The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (autobiography) 1984

Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1974-1979 (essays) 1984

The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (poetry) 1991

Transbluesencey: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1995) (poetry) 1995

Eulogies (poetry) 1996

Funk Lore: New Poems, 1984-1995 (poetry) 1996

The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (short stories) 2000

The Essence of Reparation: Afro-American Self-Determination & Revolutionary Democratic Struggle in the United States of America (essays) 2003

Somebody Blew up America and Other Poems (poetry) 2003

Tales of the Out & the Gone (short stories) 2006

CRITICISM

Greg Tate (essay date 2000)

SOURCE: Tate, Greg. "Foreword: Vicious Modernism." In The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, pp. vii-xviii. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2000.

[In the following essay, Tate provides an overview of Baraka's short fiction, arguing that "for its complexity, invention, confessional recklessness, and biding contribution to complicating the African presence in American letters, the fiction of Amiri Baraka deserves a closer read from contemporary audiences."]

There are many great writers whose work, when imposed on the unsuspecting reader, will not suffer for lack of biographical details. The subject of this essay is not one of them. To read Amiri Baraka is to read someone who has written as romantically about his social passions, prejudices, and bodily functions as Joyce wrote of Bloom's. He is also a man who has led a public life full of political furor and controversy, and has never excluded those activities from the arena of his art. The juggling of avant-garde literature and grassroots rabble-rousing form the heart and marrow of his life, and might even be said to be his life. Though the performance has not always been graceful, the performer continues to intrigue those who've followed our good brother's progress since the sixties.

Like Bertolt Brecht, Baraka has strung the chewy "literary value" of his output around the harder nut of his theories about political art. Reading Baraka for pleasure requires that one swallow whole his hatreds, his poesy, and his sarcastic wit. One's gender category or ethnic group might turn one into the target of his ire, which has made many readers ask, Why should I bother?

But assessing Baraka's prowess as a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist without bringing his prejudices into the matter is akin to appraising a jazz musician's sense of harmony without considering his or her sense of rhythm, taste, and history. Baraka's literary forms are so rich and provocative because of his personality, not in spite of it. As could also be said of hip-hop MCs, Baraka's best art puts a premium on projecting his bad attitude.

* * *

In the matter of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, then, the facts are roughly these: born Everett Leroy Jones to a postal supervisor father and a social worker mother on October 7, 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, the future father of the Black Arts movement grew up lower middle class in an integrated neighborhood. He attended a high school heavily populated by Italians and Jews, excelled academically, played team sports, and graduated at the tender age of sixteen. He attended Rutgers for a year before transferring to Howard University, an institution he left after two years to join the Air Force and train as a bombardier (an experience he later portrayed as an "Error Farce"). After service he moved to New York and took up residence on the Lower East Side to pursue a writing career. In a short time he became a close friend and confidant of several leading lights of the American avant-garde, including but not exclusive to the Beat and Black Mountain groups. In 1958 he married his first wife, the former Hettie Cohen, a writer/editor/educator best known as the author of How I Became Hettie Jones, generally regarded as one of the better memoirs of the era. This union produced two daughters: Kellie, now an internationally known fine arts curator, and Lisa, an accomplished journalist and screenwriter, known for film adaptations of work by Toni Morrison, Dorothy West, and Terry McMillan and for the black feminist essay collection Bulletproof Diva.

Jones's first book of poems, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, published in 1961, was rapidly followed by The Dead Lecturer (1964) and Black Art (1966). Blues People, published in 1963, is now generally regarded as the most trenchant book of critical theory about African American musical history. Black Music, published in 1967, is an equally influential compilation of essays about sixties experimental jazz. In 1964 Baraka had three major plays produced: The Toilet, The Slave, and, most notably, Dutchman, which won that year's Obie award. Also to be reckoned with in this prolific period are Home (1966), a sharp-tongued volume of essays, and the legendary production of his play Slaveship (1967) by his company Spirit House Movers.

In 1965, propelled by the assassination of Malcolm X, Jones uprooted himself from his bohemian life downtown and moved to Harlem, leaving wife and children behind, to pursue a course of activism that estranged and alienated him from many of his white friends, admirers, and fellow travelers. By 1967 he had become the era's most vociferous black cultural nationalist, had taken the name Imamu Amiri Baraka (Swahili for "spiritual leader, blessed prince"), and embarked down a concomitant political and literary path.

Later that year, during the Newark riots of 1967 he was beaten bloody by Newark police, then arrested and charged with sedition. During his trial two poems were entered as evidence of his guilt. In 1970 he was instrumental in the election of Newark's first African American mayor, Kenneth Gibson. In 1972 he became a dedicated Marxist-Leninist, a move that alienated him from many of his friends, followers, and fellow travelers in the cultural nationalist camp. A few months before the Newark rebellions, Baraka married his second wife, dancer, painter, poet, and activist Amina Baraka (the former Sylvia Robinson). They produced five children, Obalaji, Ras (already a well-known poet and political activist), Shani, Amiri Jr., and Ahi. Together with Amina's two daughters from a previous marriage, Vera and Wanda, they composed the Baraka family.

In the ensuing decades Baraka has continued writing, lecturing, teaching, and organizing—most recently in support of his son Ras's campaign for mayor of Newark.

In the estimation of literary scholar Arnold Rampersad, Baraka is one of four major figures—the others being Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright—who have shaped the course of African American literature. Baraka has sustained his prominence outside mainstream American literary circles—a feat unto itself, since his writing and politics have at various points been unfriendly if not downright hostile toward Jews, gays, white men and women, and the black middle class. Yet his most popular works—the poems, Blues People, and Dutchman —have never long been out of print, and he continues to find receptive imprints for current work as well.

* * *

This collection unites the two known volumes of fiction in the Baraka canon, The System of Dante's Hell (1965) and Tales (1967), with four uncollected short stories and the never-before-published 6 Persons (1973-74). Baraka's narrative writing tends not to be as well known or as widely discussed as his essays, plays, poetry, and mercurial politics. Partly this is because fiction is the one medium where he didn't ignite and incite the core audience as volubly as he did those for drama, poetry, and music criticism. But in fiction Baraka has been at his most inventive, vulnerable, and self-critical. To be sure, these books are anything but light reading. As polemically charged as any of Baraka's other writing, they are also more taxing of a reader's time, patience, and powers of comprehension than even the more vaunted black experimental fictions of Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major. There is the added rub that while the average reader of experimental fiction may find much formally enticing about the books, he or she may also be turned off by the antiwhite, antigay, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic sentiments that pepper them liberally. For all but the most devoted Barakaphiles, these may be the least inviting of his major works, and so have come to reside in a kind of literary limbo. Their ideal readers are folks with equal admiration for the man's fearless black socialism and his restless assaults on literary convention.

The degree to which Dante's Hell, Tales, and 6 Persons read as a warped strain of autobiographical literature is the degree to which they yield the most pleasure. Céline, Miller, and Burroughs seem probable models here, as does the general twentieth-century trend of writing about cities as if they were protagonists, where the narrator figures both as topographer and as a character living in the head of the metropolis. This tendency, first seen in the poetry of Baudelaire, was further evolved by Joyce and Proust, adumbrated by Walter Benjamin, counter-acculturated by Samuel R. Delany in Dhalgren, and recently redirected at the field of urban planning by architect-theorist Rem Koolhaas.

Like those writers' texts, Baraka's fictions are unapologetically diaristic, demanding that we allow Baraka as much room for naked honesty, casual obser- vation, offhand brilliance, and utter human failure as any fictional character we may have ever loved or loathed. With the possible exception of Delany, no African American writer has laid as much of his sexual anxiety between covers. In "The Screamers" he contradicts any notion of him as a lifetime hipster with the confession that during slow dances "amateurs like myself, after the music stopped, put our hands quickly into our pockets and retreated into the shadows. It was as meaningful as anything else we knew."

It may indeed be the self-lacerating nature of Baraka's fiction that keeps readers who are hostile to his militancy as much at bay as sympathizers. Who wants to know about the angst of a militant black monster? But Baraka's fiction vitally demands that the ferocity of black rage and the fragility of the black individual's neuroses be given equal sympathy.

My brother stands there beat and bleary eyes. His friends with him shambling, a rude group, a motion, a place in the universe. "We demand to be loved. We demand to be alive. We demand to be looked at like human beings. We demand that we are always so beautiful. And dirty. And bent. And drunk. And ignorant…. Our friend here is hurt. Is injured. Help him lady."
And he stands there with his opening of the sweater, and his droopy pants, and shows the stab wounds. The blood and tearing gap. His heart just beneath it, throwing the blood to the top.
("No Body No Place," p. 210)

Baraka's life has not been so atypical of other American bad boys who rerouted the national culture (especially those who lived to a ripe old age rather than burned out before age thirty)—early recognition for youthful genius and promise, an Oedipal period of rebellion, followed by rejection for vociferous public displays of social disruption. The intertwining of the private and public selves is perhaps matched in American letters only by Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer, who have also become bigger names in the public imagination than have any of their books. They are all also linked to the most explosive of sixties rhetoric, and through the activism of that time have come to signify three different responses to the gauntlet the decade threw down to writers of conscience and extreme charisma.

Many of the spiritual crises lined out in Dante's Hell and Tales have to do with Baraka's turmoil over whether thinking or feeling is a more honest and radical response to American society—particularly for the black outsider, who, whether deified or demonized by whites, is perpetually the victim of misunderstanding. Baraka's fiction is, if nothing else, a rebuke to the refusal to recognize the consciousness and complexity of African American culture's human by-products.

As history has shown, what he couldn't work out on his fiction's pages he would work out on the barricades. But the interior battles described in his fictional prose are acutely resonant of the times they were written in, when every value white America held as sacrosanct was being challenged and overturned, if not pillaged and burned. Because of the social history of his evolution into a writer and activist, Baraka had a unique vantage point on that burning question of the day: the role of the artist in the revolution. The fictions document his slow docking in the bay of self-consciousness and worldliness—his initial uncertainty about where he belonged in the struggle, and just who were His People, really?

* * *

Though earmarked early as a bright middle-class black boy headed for the Respectable Professional Negro track, Baraka jumped ship to seek out an earthier reality among the lumpen proletariat of Newark's ghettoes. It is this Diogenian search for truth in experience that fuels The System of Dante's Hell, a bildungsroman stylistically like no other in African American literature, but thematically not so different from those found in the most famous works of the Black Novel's big three—Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin. Not least of the similarities is the way each relates the torment visited upon young black men stuck between two worlds that had little use and few answers for their schizophrenic psyches.

In the chapter called "The Eighth Ditch (is Drama," the Jones of the sixties bickers with his adolescent predecessor. The cadence and mode of address is not so far removed from those found in Dutchman :

—What do you know? You sit right now on the surface of your life. I have, at least, all the black arts. The smell of deepest loneliness. (Moves his fingers on the other's shoulders) I know things that will split your face & send you wild-eyed to your own thoughts!

—Oh? I'm stronger than people think. I'm an athlete, and very quick-witted. Ha, I'll bet you wdn't play the dozen with me. (Looking up)

—No…. I wdn't do that. You'd only make me mad and I'd have to kick your ass. I want more than yr embarassment!
(p. 76)

Dante's Hell is the book whose creation Baraka credits with the cesarean birth of his singular voice. Joyce's Ulysses is an obvious influence on Baraka's experimen- tations, not just syntactically but in the obsession with viewing the folkways of his birthplace through a consciously artsy lens. The book also marks him stepping away from the influence of Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. In interviews Baraka has said Olson's theories of a Projective Verse encouraged his desire to write poetry that spoke about his life and didn't obey the patented gentility of the then-dominant New Yorker school. Duncan's early novels, as critic Robert Elliot Fox has pointed out, contain prose constructions and syncopations that read like textbook Baraka. The role of Dante, whose Inferno Baraka studied extensively at Howard, lies in providing a structural and moralistic grid Baraka purports to invert from the very outset:

I put The Heretics in the deepest part of hell, though Dante had them spared, on higher ground.
It is heresy, against one's own sources, running in terror, from one's deepest responses and insights … the denial of feeling … that I see as basest evil.
We are not talking merely about beliefs, which are later, after the fact of feeling. A flower, turning from moisture and sun, would turn evil colors and die.
(Contents, p. 17)

From there the book proceeds in ways that are maddeningly referential to the author's Newark upbringing, jumping back and forth in time between incidents, personalities, and social rituals. Some passages are little more than character sketches of folks Baraka encountered during what seemed to have been a convulsive rite of passage from childhood to adolescence.

The writing is lush in description, full of lyrical feeling in the more episodic moments, and displays a tendency typical of Baraka's work at this stage to collapse philosophical, carnal, poetic, and racial epiphanies into a litany of self-affirmation and self-loathing:

We danced, this face and I, close so I had her sweat in my mouth, her flesh the only sound my brain could use. Stinking, and the music over us like a sky, choked any other movement off. I danced. And my history was there, had passed no further. Where it ended, here, the light white talking jig, died in the arms of some sentry of Africa. Some short-haired witch out of my mother's most hideous dreams. I was nobody, now, mama. Nobody. Another secret nigger. No one the white world wanted or would look at.
(p. 108)

What the book captures in embryonic formation is Baraka's lifelong rage against bourgeois respectability. To some degree that battle is also against that most respectable of literary endeavors, the Negro Novel, which by the sixties had become a cornerstone of American race relations. Baraka's novel is, in its experimental bent and exploded views of mental minutiae, a sort of mockery of the prevalent notion that the job of the Negro novelist was to explain black men to white men. If this novel has an agenda it is to be so far up its own ass as to only be concerned with what one young black man has to say to himself. While for Ellison, the tradition of the novel wears the status of a national hero, Baraka's critical writing barely deems it worth examining at all. The exception is an essay included in Home in which he berates the state of so-called Negro writing. There is a degree to which Baraka is actually upholding a tradition of Oedipal infighting, initiated by Wright and brought to a boil by Baldwin and Ellison—of mainstream-approved black writers banishing their competing brethren and sistren to the land of the wannabes.

Reading that essay today reminds one that Baraka was once as much of an elitist as Ellison. The willful difficulty of Dante's Hell only shows just how precious he could get. Yet like Ellison, Baraka had no interest in writing that did not embrace his folkways and his bookish concerns. He seems bent on demonstrating to his white colleagues the ways in which being an African American allowed him to expand the provinces of American fiction. Baraka was not just mimicking his influences, but passionately inventing forms that addressed his readings in Western literature and philosophy as well as his abiding passion for black working-class culture. Eschewing racial polemics in favor of self-revelation, Baraka used his fiction, as he would his other mediums, to stab away at American middle-class existence as not just corny but sterile, moribund, and inhuman. Like Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin, Baraka reveals the existential dimensions of black Americanness—the mental anguish that evolved from trying to see oneself as fully human under American apartheid. The fondness and tenderness with which Baraka writes of whores, junkies, winos, and criminals is all about humanizing people whose capacity for intelligence and feeling belie the stereotypes. Dante's Hell magnificently illuminates the consciousness of America's ghettoes—all the deep thinking about Being and Nothingness hidden beneath the surface. The book demands to be read as a flow of verbal energy rather than as a linear narrative, though the last chapter, where his young seviceman incarnation encounters a willful and motherly prostitute named Peaches, settles so comfortably into straight narration as to seem calculated to quiet those who'd bark that he wrote experimental prose because he couldn't tell a story. Of course he could, and in his inimitable style, too.

* * *

If The System of Dante's Hell is Baraka's Ulysses,Tales is his Dubliners, a loose collection of short narrative vehicles that display Baraka's capacity for sociological introspection to great advantage. "The Alternative" details the harassment of two gay men by students in an all-male dorm in Howard University in the fifties. Like the Eighth Ditch chapter of Dante's Hell, it is a play thinly dressed up in fictional trappings. More conventional stories—"Salute," "Uncle Tom's Cabin: Alternate Ending," and "Heroes Are Gang Leaders" —work his time in the Air Force and the Village into driving, suspenseful scenarios rife with deft character descriptions and incisive dialogue. Some are little more than thumbnail sketches for Baraka to show how brilliant he can be conducting a jam session with his own pen. As in his poetry, there are lines that scream their origins from Baraka's singular sense of wit, syntax, and life-affirming sarcasm. They remind one of Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis in their commitment to an elliptical, disjunctive, darting attack, one very much at odds with the verbose rhythmic cascade generally asociated with the so-called jazzy writing of Jack Kerouac. Just as jazz musicians converted stentorian Western concert instruments into vessels of spontaneous broken rhythms and lightfooted virility, Baraka used short prose to resonantly capture his most fleeting sense-impressions.

The most outstanding piece of Tales is "The Screamers," a story many critics and readers consider to be Baraka's best piece of short fiction. It is certainly a masterpiece of concision; in six pages Baraka reports of a riot that jumped off during a rhythm and blues performance in fifties Newark while simultaneously providing an anthropological precis on the ritual importance of fashion, gesture, music, and manners in a roughneck urban juke joint. The prose itself is a wonder of cinematic detail, sociological revelation, music criticism, and poetic illumination. As in many a Baraka work, the language is the protagonist, though the central story in this instance would be compelling in the hands of a hack. Baraka the adult sophisticate and Baraka the virgin explorer of forbidden spaces converge to create a pungent hybrid:

The dancers ground each other past passion or moved so fast it blurred intelligence. We hated the popular song, and any freedman could tell you if you asked that white people danced jerkily, and were slower than our champions. One style, which developed as Italians showed up with pegs, and our own grace moved towards bellbottom pants to further complicate the cipher, was the honk. The repeated rhythmic figure, a screamed riff, pushed in its insistence past music. It was hatred and frustration, secrecy and despair. It spurted out of the diphthong culture, and reinforced the black cults of emotion.
(p. 184)

Tales is arranged in two sections, which demarcate Baraka's life and thinking in bohemia versus what it was becoming after the move to Harlem and the adoption of cultural nationalism. Two pivotal stories from the latter portion are "Words" and "Answers in Progress." The former is most notable for the meditative instructions it concludes with—an eerie Afro-Zen contemplation of Black militancy as a form of spiritual asylum.

We do not need to be fucked with.

We can be quiet and love the silence.

We need to look at trees more closely.

We need to listen.
 

          (p. 194)

"Answers" juxtaposes alien tourists and Harlem Mau Mau in a manner that now seems typical of spaced-out sixties radicalism. The story's concluding lines carry a Baraka trademark—revolutionary prophecy lyrically combined with mundane sensuality:

White came in with the design for a flag he'd been working on. Black heads, black hearts, and blue fiery space in the background. Love was heavy in the atmosphere. Ball wanted to know what the blue chicks looked like. But I didn't. Cause I knew after tomorrow's duty, I had a day off, and I knew somebody waitin for me at my house, and some kids, and some fried fish, and those carrots, and wow.
That's the way the fifth day ended.
(p. 222)

* * *

6 Persons, written after Baraka's conversion to Marxist-Leninism, is a fascinating contribution not only to his fictive oeuvre but to his autobiographical writings as well. More frenzied and stylistically daring than The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, it is a freewheeling (if not cartwheeling) examination of his evolutionary arc—from the fanciful childhood fan of comic books and radio plays to the teenage urban drifter and bebop aficionado to studious college boy to displaced Air Force pilot to aspirant New York intellectual to Black Power advocate to Black Marxist. For Baraka followers, the record of changes won't seem revelatory, but the telling is an extraordinarily artful and mercilessly sarcastic attack on his own past. Of his feeble attempts at becoming a regular college Lothario, he recalls,

You were outside on the balcony with this Delta pledgee, an art student, with short wavy dirty blond hair, and lightskinned bumpy complexion. She was weird tho. And then, you kept drinking, LJ, and you cdn't drink then, going back into the kitchen for more. And you and this babe were mated off by the others, and you were getting dizzy, LJ, and it seemed to you you were really getting over, and you had on a brand new Brooks Brothers grey flannel vine, rich white boy style, and suddenly LJ, the pretty babe was drifting, drifting, away … and then, my man, hey cat, you were drunk and on the floor and vomiting all over everything….
You remember that, LJ?
(p. 262)

Of his stumble through the prevailing currents of progressive American cultural politics of the late fifties and early sixties he writes:

Anglo-Germanic rebellion was called Blk Mountain. Also crammed in its juicier times with Monk and Sonny Rollins. Pound vs Whitman was what it came down to. The same king of jazz, this time with a beard and boyjones. For the immigrants to rally behind. Pound right back to Germanic Anglo correct vision and version. The fact that Pound was a fascist made him the true object of niggers' worship. The fact that he sd outright he hated them made him the object of fond regard. Damn, how pure can they get?? These particular niggers here whose story this is. Anything totally esoteric they dug. And even the fact that Pound was s'posed to have thot niggers simple barbarians. There was even dudes like light-skinned Steve J in Bostown who was absolutely Poundian and wrote exactly, even letters, like him, and echoed the same exact anti-nigra tone.
(p. 322)

For its complexity, invention, confessional recklessness, and abiding contribution to complicating the African presence in American letters, the fiction of Amiri Baraka deserves a closer read from contemporary audiences. Distant from the furor that surrounded the author when the stories were first published, today's readers should be able to give these major works the copious attention they have always deserved.

Meta DuEwa Jones (essay date 2003)

SOURCE: Jones, Meta DuEwa. "Politics, Process, & (Jazz) Performance: Amiri Baraka's ‘It's Nation Time.’" African American Review 37, nos. 2-3 (2003): 245-52.

[In the following essay, Jones underscores the importance of considering Baraka's poetry within the context of his performance of the piece, focusing in particular on the controversial poem "It's Nation Time."]

Politics

In a recently published book, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual, the scholar Jerry Watts invokes Baraka in iconic fashion. He prefaces the book with the following admonition:

In the best of worlds, it would be unwise to call out the name Amiri Baraka in a crowded hall of black intellectuals. To bring up Baraka in a symposium on art and politics is to bring a conversation to a standstill. One of the most controversial Afro-American intellectuals of the last forty years, Baraka is admired, hated, feared, dismissed, adored, and despised.
(x)

The recent broil over Baraka's recital of the poem "Somebody Blew up America" has only served to intensify the poet's controversial status. With calls by some state and local officials to force Baraka to resign from his post as New Jersey's poet laureate, one could add to Watts's alliterative list of verbs the darkly descriptive dethroned.

But Watts's perspective on Baraka's position as an intellectual is of lesser relevance, for this essay's purposes, than is Watts's position on Baraka's poetry. Of his second poetry collection, It's Nation Time, Watts opines:

None of the three poems [in the book] is impressive. The redundancy and tendentiousness of the themes make it appear as if Baraka had run out of ideas…. [He] may have done himself a disservice in trying to force his strong polemical impulses into a poetic form. His didactic intentions overwhelm his artistic sensibilities and make the poetry abysmal.
(236-37)

Watts diametrically opposes the polemic and didactic to the artistic and the poetic, rendering Baraka's form as distinctly separate from—instead of an extension of—verbal content. Watts's critique highlights the timeworn division drawn between art and politics (as opposed to art as politics), and his method for critical analysis entails focusing on the semantic substance of the poems on the page. Thus, he disregards the poems' formal structure and the performance environment in which they emerged and through which Baraka planned to articulate them. This neglect of the potential presentation context leads to what might seem to some to be a well-founded dismissal of Baraka's poetry, especially work penned during his prolific outpouring in the 1970s such as It's Nation Time.

Ironically, Watts's censure of "It's Nation Time," and concurrently Baraka's poetics, occurs in the same chapter, "Amiri Baraka as Black Arts Poet and Essayist," which readily acknowledges, first, Baraka's talent and popularity as a performance artist, particularly during the Black Arts Movement (BAM), and, second, the importance of performance (poetry and drama were the favored genres of Movement participants) as one of the political strategies Baraka and other Black Arts artists employed to reach a black mass audience. Indeed, Watts proclaims, "One had to hear Baraka in order to experience the Imamu," or spiritual leader (237). Yet Watts's inattention to the dynamic effects of Baraka's speaking voice when he recites his poetry amounts to a mishearing and, consequently, a misreading of his corpus. More specifically, I contend that, through the arena of performance, a dimension of Baraka's poetics emerges that counters a one-dimensional interpretation of his poetry as appallingly flattened by his political motivations. As the poet and critic Charles Bernstein justly observes, "… performance, in the sense of doing, is an underlying formal aesthetic as much as it is a political issue in Baraka's work" (7). If a primarily page-based analysis of Baraka's poetics leads to its underestimation, then a formal audio and visual analysis of Baraka's poetry-in-performance can potentially enrich our appreciation of his poetics.

As this essay will demonstrate, Baraka's additions to and alterations of verses, his shifts from speech into song, and his imitations of the sounds of instruments while performing his poems all suggest that, in a performance context, his work engages in a process of revision modeled upon the improvisatory ethos of jazz. The essence of Baraka's jazz-influenced poetry, like its counterpart, jazz music, is in the performance. Visual representations of Baraka's poems on the page alone do not sufficiently define the forms of his art or aesthetic. Thus my analysis emphasizes the improvisatory interaction that occurs between Baraka and accompanying musicians in recorded jazz-and-poetry performances. I will focus on two moments of Baraka's vocal delivery of the title poem in the book Watts critiques—It's Nation Time. Considering "It's Nation Time" within the context of performance takes into account an implicitly political aspect of his writing; that is, the local—and historical—context in which his verse emerges. It also suggests, in contrast to Watts, that the political can inform and enrich the poetic, and vice versa.

How do sites of performance extend the possibilities of poetic form? What is the significance of discrepancies between the performed and printed versions of Baraka's poems? Do recitals of jazz-influenced poems remain consistent irrespective of the performance venue, or do they change over time and under different circumstances? My method of examination engages the above questions.

Process

Baraka's stated philosophy for his method of reading and performing signals a critically appropriate method for discerning his poetics. "You have to start and finish there … your own voice … how you sound," he declared in a statement on poetics included in the New American Poetry anthology (Baraka, "How?" 16). When reciting his poems, he marshals his voice in a manner which reveals that he deliberately uses his vocal chords as an instrument to be played. He employs a wide variety of tonal registers and often emphasizes dissonance or euphony in particular verses by varying the intensity of speed and volume while reading. The spontaneity and continual alteration so highly valued in jazz translates to Baraka's poetry when it is performed. He does not read the same poems in the exact same manner in different contexts. His is an intentional inconsistency that results from what the scholar and poet Nathaniel Mackey refers to as Baraka's "exaltation of process," of "the doing, the coming into being," of an artistic product. As Mackey astutely observes, "the closeness of improvised music to the primacy of process is the quality Baraka strives for in his poems" (32). Baraka is a process artist (Harris xv) for whom the process of creating a poem possesses an artistic value which is superior to the actual poem produced—what he calls the "artifact." "Even the artist," Baraka avows,

is more valuable than his artifact, because the art process goes on in his mind. But the process itself is the most important quality because it can transform and create, and its only form is possibility. The artifact, because it assumes one form, is only that particular quality or idea. It is, in this sense, after the fact, and is only important because it remarks on its source.
(qtd. in Mackey 32)

Baraka's belief that the "artifact" is limited to "one form" is revealing. His desire to explore multiple possibilities in the form of his poetic compositions engenders this hierarchy between process and product. Furthermore, he draws an analogy between this creative process and the "at the time" characteristic of "live music." He contends that its particular value lies in the listener's ability to contemplate "the artifact as it arrives," to listen "to it emerge." Baraka's practical application of this process-based poetics is manifest in his divergent deliveries of the hallmark poem "It's Nation Time."

The charismatic characteristic of Baraka's performance style is exemplified in his two different recorded recitals of "It's Nation Time." "What time is it?—Nation Time" became a catch phrase artists and activists alike used during the peak of the Black Arts/Black Power period in the early to mid-seventies. The poet and critic Kalamu ya Salaam maintains that Baraka's poem, which riffs on the phrase, served as a virtual anthem of black cultural nationalism (21). The poem's anthem-coining qualities and circulation value are apparent in the politician Jesse Jackson's recollection of his frequent use of the phrase at national political assemblies:

I had drawn much of the strength of Nationtime from a poem written by LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka at that time. The sense of people saying, "What's happening?" … Say, … "It's Nationtime, it's time to come together. It's time to organize politically … It's time for blacks to enter into the equation."
(qtd. in Woodard 209)

Jackson's remarks—as we shall see shortly—strikingly resemble, almost verbatim, the opening lines of Baraka's poem. One could, of course, argue that this re- semblance is not remarkable, since the poem's propagandistic phrasing captured the common political sentiments of the time. ya Salaam, in fact, is one of many critics who have commented on the doctrinaire aspects of Baraka's poetry, and indeed they are evident in "It's Nation Time." ¹ Yet, I want to highlight the manner in which Baraka's performance reveals elements of the poem's jazz inflection while also potentially deflecting some of its didacticism.

The poem begins and ends with the slogan "It's Nation Time." Baraka chants it at varied intervals throughout the poem's narrative. "It's Nation Time" also functions as an invocation in his reading of the poem on the It's Nation Time: Visionary Music recording he made with musical accompaniment (Baraka). Idris Muhammed immediately follows Baraka's statement of the phrase by initiating a clamorous drum roll that lasts for nearly six seconds. As the drum roll subsides, a group of African drummers play a softer beat as background while Baraka recites:

Time to get

together

time to be one strong fast black energy

    space

        one pulsating positive magnetism,

    rising

time to get up and

be

come

be

come, time to

        be come

        time to

        get up be come
 

black genius rise in spirit muscle …
 

          ("Nation Time"   240)

Baraka's method of reciting "time to be one strong fast black energy space / one pulsating positive magnetism, rising" enacts the lines' meaning; an energetic pulse marks his rapid delivery. Yet he controls this vigor, inserting a slight half-second's pause between "be come" each time he repeats the fragmented word. Baraka's diction, if not elegant, is precise. He emphasizes the long vowel in the e in become and pronounces the word come with a clipped attack on the consonant c. His arrangement of "be come" on separate lines suggests that the visual shift marks a space for a slight silence to occur during his performance.

In contrast to many of Baraka's poems of this period, whose peripheral (and often parenthetical) words provide explicit recital cues, Baraka appears to embed performance directions within the printed text of this poem. Thus, at the moment that Baraka says, "sun man get up rise," he drastically—and breathlessly—increases the speed and volume of his vocal delivery. Consequently, his pace makes his speech nearly indecipherable when he recites the lines

… heart of universes to be

future of the world

the black man is the future of the world

be come

rise up

future of the black genius spirit reality

move

from crushed roach back

from dead snake head

from wig funeral in slowmotion

from dancing teeth and coward tip

from jibberjabber patme boss patme

    smmich
 

          (240)

One could argue that, textually, the poem's verbal content does not merit deciphering, since it is fairly transparent up until the lines' surrealist imagery in "crushed roach back," "dead snake head," and "wig funeral in slowmotion." On the page, the poem may not seem so visually compelling, but Baraka's reiteration of bald pronouncements develop the poem orally and aurally. His structurally varied repetition in phrases such as "Time to get, Time to be one, Time to get up, Time to be come" and "future of the world," "the black man is the future of the world" moves the poem along rhythmically and musically in the performance. Baraka's characteristic phrasal repetition, Nathaniel Mackey claims, "gives the sense of wrestling with definition, a sense of anxiety regarding the possibility of arriving at a stable sense of what these phrases mean" (44). Thus, Baraka's reiteration of the lines "black energy space," "black genius rise in spirit muscle, and "the black man is the future … of the black genius spirit reality" potentially destabilize more than codify a fixed notion of "blackness," even as these same phrases, regrettably, limit the conceptual notion of racial authenticity in masculinist terms.

(Jazz) Performance

Baraka's use of anaphora and repetition—his "changing same"—also indicates that a jazz aesthetic structurally influences the poem's form. Repetition and riffs are crucial within jazz improvisation. As the ethnomusicologist Ingrid Monson attests, in jazz performance, "frequently an exchange will begin with the repetition of a particular musical passage or a response with a complimentary musical interjection." Jazz musicians' bring repetition into play in performance to help to create "a participatory musical framework against which highly idiosyncratic and innovative improvisation can take place" (Monson 89). Likewise, Baraka's reiteration enables the percussionist that accompanies him to punctuate and puncture his reading rhythm. Baraka's reading style concurrently encourages and mimics musical interaction. For instance, he recites the following lines in a swift and percussive manner:

It's nation time
 

Boom

Booom

BOOOM
 

Dadadadadadadadadadad

Boom

Boom

Boom

Boom

Dadadadad adadadad
 

          (240)

Baraka's use of repetition in a visual depiction of scatting in the above passage, at its worst, is typographically and syntactically ineffectual. In the realm of what Stephen Henderson called the "cold technology of the printed page" (30), it fails to connote meaning or even an intentional irrationality. But as Mackey observes, in Baraka's poetry, "the use of repetition is almost purely musical, in that sound seems to take precedence over sense" (44). And the sounds do make sense—they function logically and dialogically—within the context of Baraka's recitation to percussive musical accompaniment. The verses' aural aspects pinpoint the poem's power. Baraka's onomatopoetic approximation of a drumming chorus counterpoints the drummer, Idris Muhammed, who interjects and echoes his utterances. Moreover, after finishing the phrase "Dadadadad adadadad," Baraka departs from the printed words on the page and engages in an intense impromptu dialogue with the saxophonist. He begins a series of high pitched yells—"OW! OW! OW!" is the closest textual approximation—that function as a call which summons the saxophonist's response. Instead of trading solos, they trade screams. As the pitch of Baraka's screams increases, the saxophonist parallels his tonal evocation by playing a series of correspondingly shrill notes. Baraka's extratextual vocalizations suitably fit within jazz improvisational standards, where "the musicians are compositional participants who may ‘say’ unexpected things or elicit response from other musicians. Musical intensification is open-ended rather than predetermined and highly interpersonal in character—structurally far more similar to a conversation than to a text" (Monson 81). Baraka and the saxophonist converse, using the words, music, and sheer sound as the combined ingredients for their joint performance.

A culturally politicized component exists in Baraka's performative iterations in "It's Nation Time." The vocal and instrumental "screams" put in practice the ethos underpinning Baraka's improvised interjections. Mackey maintains that, "as a deliberate affront to the dominant culture's canons of musicality, ‘honking’ [or screaming] challenges and delegitimates that culture's distinction between music and noise, its imposition of hegemonic expectations as to what constitutes acceptable sound." Honking strikes a deliberately discordant note. According to Mackey, honking's "recourse to what would otherwise be thought of as noise" reflects a racial discord because symbolically it "marks the divide between black and white, accenting the dissonant relations within a white-supremacist society, the discrepant rift between racist practices and professed democratic ideals" (29). Baraka's remarks on "honking" among rhythm and blues saxophonists suggest that their unconventional musical gestures cued his performance style. "The point" of these instrumental peals, Baraka notes, "was to spend oneself with as much attention as possible, and also to make the instruments sound as unmusical, or as Non-Western, as possible. It was almost as if the blues people were reacting against the softness and ‘legitimacy’ that had crept into black instrumental music with the advent of swing" (qtd. in Mackey 29). Baraka's intentionally unmusical, discordant notes possess a unique and parodic music as he moves in his delivery of "It's Nation Time" through speech, scream, and song.

The difference between Baraka's two distinct performances of the penultimate and final stanzas of "It's Nation Time" illuminate his bridging the boundary between speech and song. The recorded performance of "It's Nation Time" took place at the Congress of African Peoples in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1970. The significance of the historical and political context for Baraka's reading cannot be overestimated. In his study of Baraka's pivotal role in the organizational development of black cultural nationalism, Komozi Woodard explains that the Congress was one of "four national organizations" which led to the "birth of a black national political community" (160). Woodard also notes that 1970 marked the beginning of a period during which the politics of black cultural nationalism reached its zenith. As one of the key conveners of the Congress, Baraka was an instrumental figure, in multiple senses of the word. When he delivered his poem before the throng of Congress attendees, he recited the lines:

It's nation time eye ime

It's nation ti eye ime

            chant with bells and drum

it's nation time²

And he sang the word time and protracted his enunciation of the i with a pronounced vibrato, mimicking the sound of a saxophone (Baraka, I'll Make Me a World ). His stylization of this phrase suggests that jazz inflection can be present in a poem whose content does not ostensibly indicate any relationship to that tradition. This indicates the reason that examining the performances is essential to a more comprehensive appreciation of jazz-influenced poetry. Paradoxically, the "eye" spelling in the lines signals a visual instead of a musical emphasis. Yet "chant with bells and drum" reflects Baraka's recurrent phrasing of "it's nation time" and the accompaniment of a saxophonist and a drummer in his performance on the It's Nation Time: Visionary Music album.

Baraka's reading of this particular stanza gestures in a direction different from his previous reading at the Congress of African Peoples. He still protracts the i in time, but his pronunciation seems deliberately disharmonic. He utters "t-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-me" in a raspy tone with a stuttering effect and repeats this several times, varying the length of the I each time. Unlike his mellifluous delivery of the poem at the Congress, his speech-song seems taut, even anti-melodic, grating the ear instead of pleasing it (It's Nation Time ). The divergence between Baraka's readings in different contexts points to the variety of his performance approach. For example, in the published version of the poem's last stanza, Baraka states:

It's nation time, get up santa claus
 

      (repeat)
 

it's nation time, build it

      get up muffet dragger

      get up rastus for real to be rasta farari

      ras jua

      get up got here bow
 

              It's Nation

                 Time!
 

          (242)

However, in both recitals, on two different recordings, Baraka inserts additional addressees, departing from the printed phrase "get up santa claus," and expanding it to include "get up roy wilkins, get up diana ross, and get up dione warwick." Moreover, the line "get up got here bow" is transformed into "get up nigger, come over here, take a bow, brother" (Baraka, I'll Make Me a World and It's Nation Time ). These alterations highlight the immediacy, fluidity, and theatricality of the performance.

Admittedly, this sense of immediacy is illusive, since these performances are mediated through the realms of videotape and vinyl. Nevertheless, the performance environment does allow for flexibility in the form and tone of his verse unrealizable in the printed version of "It's Nation Time." The poem in print does not provide Baraka the opportunity to alter the poem's potential aural effect or to add and extract words in different verses. Despite Baraka's movement away from solely print-bound possibilities in his poetry, Harryette Mullen observes that the videotape of poets such as Baraka emphasizes "the poet reading the text." These readings are, according to Mullen, "unlike the oral composition of the griot or the free improvisations of the jazz musician" in that they "highlight the African-American poet's performance of the written, transforming wordscript into ‘soulscript’" (10-11). Accordingly, the video clip of Baraka performing at the Congress of African Peoples captures Baraka's downcast eyes while he flips the poem's pages—even though he recites the last stanza while directly facing the audience.

Does the presence of the page, a poet's use of his or her written text in a public reading negate the possibility for improvisation to enter the work, as Mullen seems to suggest? If so, then the label "jazz-inspired" only accurately refers to the poem in print but not in performance—even for a poet as dynamic and spontaneous as Baraka. I would argue that for a poet such as Baraka, who is so thoroughly immersed in the jazz tradition, improvisation enters the work at the level of composition—regardless of whether printed versions of his poems are a present feature in his live and recorded performances. Baraka has consistently and continually moved, metaphorically and literally, from the page to the stage in his poetic delivery. As I have briefly demonstrated in this essay, this movement should be considered in aesthetical and political terms. Baraka's performance methods—including the noisy wailings of his jazzed texts—formally express a key element of his aesthetic agenda, namely, engaging the power and the politics of sound. Scholars of Baraka's poetry should heed his early call "to start and finish there," with the sounds of his voice deployed dynamically in performance, to ensure a more comprehensive criticism of his aesthetics.

Notes

1. See for example, Henry Lacey's discussion of the Marxist "sloganeering" that, according to Lacey, mars Baraka's otherwise laudable evocation of Coltrane in his poem "AM/TRAK" (21).

2. Baraka, "It's Nation Time," Amiri Baraka Reader 242. Note that this citation is of the poem as it appears in the Reader. In the performance he reads the line "It's nation ti eye ime" three times.

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. "How You Sound?" Baraka, LeRoi 16-17.

———. I'll Make Me A World: A Century of African American Arts. Evening 3, Hour 5. Videocassette. Prod. Denise A. Greene. PBS Video, 1999. 60 min.

———. "It's Nation Time." 1970. Baraka, LeRoi 240-42.

———. It's Nation Time: Visionary Music. LP. Black Forum Records. B-457L, 1972.

———. The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. New York: Thunder's Mouth P, 1991.

Bernstein, Charles. Introduction. Close Listening. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 7.

Harris, William J. Editor's Note. Baraka, LeRoi xv.

Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References. New York: Morrow, 1973.

Lacey, Henry. "Baraka's ‘AM/TRAK’: Everybody's Coltrane Poem." Obsidian II 1.1-2 (1986): 12-21.

Mackey, Nathaniel. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Monson, Ingrid. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Mullen, Harryette. "A Beat for Which There Is No Notation." The American Poetry Archives Videotape Catalogue. San Francisco: American Poetry Archives/The Poetry Center, 1991.

Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York UP, 2001.

Woodard, Komozi. A Nation Within A Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999.

ya Salaam, Kalamu. "Why Spoken Word Rules." Black Issues Book Review Mar.-Apr. 1999: 21.

Joseph Heithaus (essay date 2003)

SOURCE: Heithaus, Joseph. "‘Hunting Is Not Those Heads’: The Jones/Baraka Critic as Taxidermist." African American Review 37, nos. 2-3 (2003): 365-69.

[In the following essay, Heithaus analyzes Baraka's poetic language and technique.]

Everything mortal dies, beautiful

language is easily broken.

Dead words shall live

and live words shall die,

and only the mouths of men can decide,

only what's said is said

and therefore alive.
 

          (Horace, "The Art of Poetry")

I always had to learn to run fast, because (laughing) you'd say certain things to people you didn't know would provoke them to such an extent. You have to get in the wind.
(Baraka, qtd. in Reilly 194)

"Error Farce," "Air Force" (Autobiography); "raise," "race," "rays," "raze" (Raise Race Rays Raze); "wise," "why's," "Y's" (Wise Why's Y's). Repeat these sequences aloud to understand the difference between what LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's homonyms are on the page and what they are "in the wind." Aloud, his words bring a fusion and confusion of sound and beat and meaning. Read silently, they bring intellectual delight. The title of this essay is "‘Hunting is Not Those Heads’: The Jones/Baraka Critic as Taxidermist," but it could just as easily be called "Baraka Wails/Whales," because when I say Amiri Baraka wails/whales I'm talking about giant living forces in constant motion, I'm talking about music, I'm talking about hunting a white enigmatic beast, and I'm talking about something that, if it isn't handled right, can wash up on the beach and start to smell. The critic and reader of Baraka must understand that the inherent ambiguity of spoken words like /wl/ or /rs/ is only a small part of the subtle word play Baraka employs to exploit the tension between the spoken and the written word. Many of Baraka's poems can be read as actions that reach far beyond the limits of the page. They are self-conscious efforts to thwart the confinement of written language and its semantic limits. Indeed, the expansive and elusive quality of the language performed and written by this "wailing" and "whaling" poet is intrinsically connected to the living man who has continually refused the certainty of staying in a single place or identity.

In his 1964 essay "Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall," Baraka (then Jones) makes clear what would be a constant in his aesthetics throughout his opus—art is action, verb, hunt (Home 173-78). Art is founded in "thought" which, he states, "is more important than art" and certainly more important than artifact (173). He implies that the aesthete, the academician, is like a deist worshiping the art, the static thing, without understanding that the thing is a function of its creation by a creator. Jones writes:

The artist is cursed with his artifact, which exists without and despite him…. The academic Western mind is the best example of the substitution of artifact worship for lightning awareness of the art process…. The process itself is the most important quality because it can transform and create, and its only form is possibility. The artifact, because it assumes one form, is only that particular quality or idea. It is, in this sense, after the fact, and is only important because it remarks on its source.
(173-74)

When I think of these words and the metaphor of the title "Hunting Is Not Those Heads," I imagine the academy not as a deist's temple, but as a taxidermist's shop, with the scholar as the taxidermist. It is our job to handle dead things. We do taxidermy, which means we arrange skin; we try to put the appearance of life back into what was destroyed in the hunt. If we play out the metaphor further, we can assume some artists, some poets are excellent shots who leave us with an abundance of skin to shape—and others are not. Some poems seem bludgeoned on the page while others seem still to be brimming with life.

The reason that we are celebrating Baraka in the new millennium is that he is a poet who not only knows how to hunt, who shoots straight to the heart, but who also understands that the poems he gives us are only glimpses of something that has already happened. It is he, often within the very poems themselves, who challenges us to look to the source, to see the process and not the product, to see that the "only form is possibility."

Baraka's poems live, or seem to live, because of his keen and constant awareness of their potential to be dead. From his earliest poems, his use of ellipses, unclosed parentheses, white space, homonyms, and puns make reference to a place off the page always alive and without limits or, as in "A Poem for Willie Best," to an undefinable place "neither / front nor back" (Transbluesency 63). In the final gesture of that poem, Baraka enacts a number of these techniques to refuse closure, and in so doing plays out the tension between confinement and freedom that inheres in both the form and meaning of the poem. The poem both identifies with Willie Best, confined by the white stereotype of "sleep-'n'eat," and undermines the limits of that confinement. The last word and phrase of the poem—" (Hear?"—in the sense of the poem enacting the dialect of "sleep'n'eat," places us inside that stereotyped identity by having us voice the simple word that punctuates his speech. But through typography, syntax, and the semantic play of the homonym, the poem becomes a conduit into a space that is in unlimited motion. We are neither "Hear"/here nor there. We are asking a question in an aside that refuses to end. We are called to listen to the speaker, while asking to "hear" ourselves.

This early poem from Dead Lecturer shows how Baraka's use of the open forms of modernism and the avant-garde of the fifties undergoes what William J. Harris calls "Jazzification" in his seminal book The Jazz Aesthetic. Baraka's sheer virtuosity of language and technique allows him to "invert this white form" and move the poem into "postwhite" space (Harris 92-93).

* * *

The first time I heard Amiri Baraka read his work was in New Jersey at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in 1986. This is what I remember: My friend and I had been to a number of readings already. It was late afternoon and under a large tent a very forgettable white poet mumbled his poems and I began to fall asleep, and then my friend nudged me when a small black man stood up behind a podium. That man wailed. He performed a poem found in Eulogies called "Wailers" as an elegy for Larry Neal and Bob Marley. In this poem the sounds /wl/ and /wlêer/ repeat continually. Baraka's reference to Melville in the poem's seventh line sets up the homonym that carries the poem on its big whale back. On the page the word "w - h - a - l - e" appears only once, but the notion of "confronting the white mad beast," of killing whales, of being "w - h - a - l - e - r - s" is implied in every "w - a - i - l" shouted out.

It is perhaps the homonym, the sound that sends us in several directions at once, the pun that leads to a reevaluation of the word, that is most central to Baraka's poetic. Surely he is not alone in his use of the homonym, but in the titles and phrases I quote above, it is apparent that Baraka is a particular virtuoso of this kind of verbal play, where a single sound or phrase can become, with Baraka's writing or uttering it, what Stephen Henderson almost forty years ago called in a slightly different context a "mascon—a massive concentration of black experiential energy" (44). Say this poem aloud:

Hey, Bob, Wail on rock on Jah come

    into us as real vision and action

Hey, Larry, Wail on, with Lester and

    the Porkpie, wailing us energy

for truth. We Wailers is all, and on past

    that to say, wailing for all

we worth. Rhythm folks obsessed with

    stroking what is with our

sound purchase.
 

          (Eulogies   21)

It is this "sound purchase" that is so much a part the subtle depth of Baraka's play. It is, of course, a wonderfully potent phrase when we realize that the root of "purchase" is chase. So a "sound purchase" might be a perfect pursuit, a sensible chase, a solid hunt, as well as an economic exchange—"a wailing for all we worth," for sound, itself, the very stuff of poetry and song. And it is a chase for a measurement of depth as well.

Baraka tells us that he and Larry Neal and Bob Marley and perhaps all we readers purchase rhythm and sound to get to depth, vision, action, and truth. You "hear"? Speaking and thinking about these poems in certain ways helps us to discern their purchase. To see the chase. To make the sound become something more than sound, but reality and action.

Baraka does, of course, what many great African American writers do, he destroys the language—"razes" it, as it were, and then builds it back up again in a new way—he "raises" it. The dead skin we are trying to arrange and stuff is both a symbol of that destruction and a living, breathing animal performance of the rebuilding.

* * *

I turn now to what can be perceived to be the "deadest" of Baraka's work, the poem "It's Nation Time," which appears in The Jones/Baraka Reader but is absent from Transbluesency. This poem, so embedded in Baraka's early Black Nationalist phase, seems in some ways bound intensely to the context that produced it. I quote only one or two words from the poem. And that's the crux—is it one word or two?

be

come
 

          (It's Nation   21)

This phrase, we can call it a kind of ad hominem homonym, appears five times in the poem, several times in a row toward the beginning, and Baraka builds on it as he repeats "come out" later in the poem. The poem calls me to do something I personally can't do—"be come / black genius rise in spirit muscle." In 1970 when this was published I was a seven-year-old white boy riding my bike through my white suburb of Cincinnati totally unaware of any black world around me—downtown or back east in Newark or New York. Nevertheless, this poem, bound deeply in time and race, still has this potent phrase that tells me, a white "taxidermist" in the new millennium, that it is also about "home" and about the movement toward home. The poem is about the present and the future. It is in some ways a dead poem because that present is in the past, but that future, that will "come, come, come out," is still happening. The poem, it turns out, isn't as dead, or wrong-headed, or agit-prop, as one might argue. It is that piece of language split in two that is the mantra for the birth of a nation to "BE," and it remains powerful for what it "BE COMES"—a signifier in which a single word is destroyed, razed, to be come a word that builds and raises.

* * *

I conclude with a train and not a whale, a reference to a fellow Ohioan, John Parker, and not a dead old skin one can get caught in and caught up in, but a jail. In each "Y's" of the Griot's Song Wise, Why's, Y's, we find a parenthetical reference to musical accompaniment.

In "History-Wise #22" it is the "Black Mountain Blues" of Bessie Smith (famous in Baraka's opus for what Clay says she's saying when she sings). There in Bessie's song about Black Mountain, we find the jail (and we also find in the very title, "Black Mountain Blues," a reference to a poetry movement which was, in a way, a jail from which LeRoi Jones sprang). And in the fourteenth line of the poem we find John Parker, a fearless engineer on the underground railroad, and it doesn't take much thought to figure out what t-r-a-i-n(s) / t-r-a-n-e(s) we might be riding. This is just one more poem where we see in the poem its own making. We can see what happened before the poem in the white space and the history referred to, and in the words and their form; we can see the poem's history and process and performance.

Now, imagine Bessie Smith singing about a horrible upside down place. A place where everything is violent and terribly wrong,

Back in Black Mountain

a child will smack your face.

Babies crying for liquor

and all the birds sing bass.
 

          (Cole in Harry's Blues Lyrics)

while the poet transforms the poem into a train:

           The

           real

           sub

           way

           Ms. "Moses" Streamliner

           John Parker's Darker

Sparker
 

          (83)

The underground railroad is put on the rails and hurtles along the tracks. But the most amazing thing about the poem is the way it ends. The poem ends with one of the biggest "Why's" of all: W-H-Y-Y-Y-Y-Y is wailed out as only a train can. It is a profound wail of agony, questioning, and celebration. It is a poem easily made alive by any taxidermist. It is a poem in constant motion. It is a poem of slavery, a poem about getting out of prison, but, most importantly, a poem that asks profoundly: Why the prison? why the train? at all.

* * *

And what is the taxidermist's purchase in all of this? It is that Baraka's poetry, when discussed and written about, involves arranging skin, seeing and being the hunter and the hunted, understanding that the name of the man who wrote the poem has changed and changed and changed again. That the poem is simply the artifact of a process still in motion. That when reading Baraka's work, we must take perhaps the most potent play of language he's given us to heart. Imamu suggests, "I'm am You"—Imamu—"I'm am You." Whether we are white, black, brown, red, or yellow, we must read his work as if we wrote it, say it like we mean it, and sing it like we think it should be sung.

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones). Home: Social Essays. New York: Morrow, 1963.

———. It's Nation Time. Chicago: Third World P, 1970.

———. Transbluesency. New York: Marlilio, 1995.

———. Wise, Why's, Y's. Chicago: Third World P, 1995.

Cole, H. "Black Mountain Blues." Harry's Blues Lyrics & Tabs Online. 21 Jan. 2002. http://blueslyrics.tripod.com/lyrics/janis_joplin/black_mountain_blues.htm

Harris, William J. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1985.

Horace. "The Art of Poetry." Trans. Burton Raffel. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David Richter. New York: St. Martin's P, 1989. 69.

Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry. New York: Morrow, 1973.

Reilly, Charlie, ed. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994.