Amiri Baraka (born Everett Leroy Jones; October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014), previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the University at Buffalo and Stony Brook University. He received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone. Baraka's plays, poetry, and essays have been described by scholars as constituting defining texts for African-American culture.
Baraka's career spanned nearly 52 years, and his themes range from Black liberation to White racism. His notable works of criticism and poetry include "The Music: Reflection on Jazz and Blues", "The Book of Monk", and "New Music, New Poetry", works that draw on topics from the worlds of society, music, and literature.
Baraka's poetry and writing have attracted both high praise and condemnation. In the African-American community, some compare Baraka to James Baldwin and recognize him as one of the most respected and most widely published Black writers of his generation, though some have said his work is an expression of violence, misogyny, and homophobia. Baraka's brief tenure as Poet Laureate of New Jersey (in 2002 and 2003) involved controversy over a public reading of his poem "Somebody Blew Up America?", which resulted in accusations of antisemitism and negative attention from critics and politicians over his assertion that the US and Israeli governments had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks.
Baraka's son, Ras Baraka, is the current mayor of Newark, New Jersey.
Contents
Biography
Baraka was born in Newark, New Jersey, where he attended Barringer High School. His father Coyt Leroy Jones worked as a postal supervisor and lift operator. His mother Anna Lois (née Russ) was a social worker. Jazz interested Baraka as a child. He wanted to emulate Miles Davis: "I wanted to look like that too—that green shirt and rolled up sleeves on Milestones ... always wanted to look like that. And be able to play "On Green Dolphin Street" or "Autumn Leaves". ... That gorgeous chilling sweet sound. That's the music you wanted playing when you was coming into a joint, or just looking up at the sky with your baby by your side, that mixture of America and them changes, them blue African magic chants." The influence of jazz can be seen throughout his work later in life.
He won a scholarship to Rutgers University in 1951 but transferred in 1952 to Howard University. His classes in philosophy and religious studies helped lay a foundation for his later writings. While at Howard, he ran cross country. He subsequently studied at Columbia University and The New School without taking a degree.
In 1954, he joined the United States Air Force as a gunner, reaching the rank of sergeant. This was a decision he would come to regret. He once explained: "I found out what it was like to be under the direct jurisdiction of people who hated black people. I had never known that directly." This experience was yet another that influenced Baraka's later work. His commanding officer received an anonymous letter accusing Baraka of being a communist. This led to the discovery of Soviet writings in Baraka's possession, his reassignment to gardening duty, and subsequently a dishonorable discharge for violation of his oath of duty. He later described his experience in the military as "racist, degrading, and intellectually paralyzing". While he was stationed in Puerto Rico, he worked at the base library, which allowed him ample reading time, and it was here that, inspired by Beat poets back in the mainland US, he began to write poetry.
The same year, he moved to Greenwich Village, working initially in a warehouse of music records. His interest in jazz evolved during this period. It was also during this time that he came in contact with the avant-garde Black Mountain poets and New York School poets. In 1958 he married Hettie Cohen, with whom he had two daughters, Kellie Jones (b. 1959) and Lisa Jones (b.1961). He and Hettie founded Totem Press, which published such Beat poets as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In cooperation with Corinth, Totem published books by LeRoi Jones and Diane di Prima, Ron Loewinsohn, Michael McClure, Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, Frank O'Hara, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Ed Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer and Gilbert Sorrentino and an anthology of four young female poets, Carol Berge, Barbara Moraff, Rochelle Owens, and Diane Wakoski. They also jointly founded a quarterly literary magazine, Yugen, which ran for eight issues (1958–1962). Through a party that Baraka organized, Ginsberg was introduced to Langston Hughes while Ornette Coleman played saxophone.
Death
Amiri Baraka died on January 9, 2014, at Beth Israel Medical Center in Newark, New Jersey, after being hospitalized in the facility's intensive care unit for one month before his death. The cause of death was not reported initially, but it is mentioned that Baraka had a long struggle with diabetes. Later reports indicated that he died from complications after a recent surgery. Baraka's funeral was held at Newark Symphony Hall on January 18, 2014.
Controversies
Baraka's work has been criticized for being racist, homophobic, antisemitic and misogynist among others.
Anti-white sentiment
Baraka and his writings emanated extreme and hostile anti-white sentiment. He viewed blacks as morally superior than whites, whom he believed were innately evil.
In his 1984 autobiography, he wrote:
A woman asked me in all earnestness, couldn't any whites help? I said, you can help by dying. You are a cancer. You can help the world's people with your death.
The following is from a 1965 essay:Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank ... The average ofay [white person] thinks of the black man as potentially raping every white lady in sight. Which is true, in the sense that the black man should want to rob the white man of everything he has. But for most whites the guilt of the robbery is the guilt of rape. That is, they know in their deepest hearts that they should be robbed, and the white woman understands that only in the rape sequence is she likely to get cleanly, viciously popped.
In 2009, he was again asked about the quote, and placed it in a personal and political perspective:
Those quotes are from the essays in Home, a book written almost fifty years ago. The anger was part of the mindset created by, first, the assassination of John Kennedy, followed by the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, followed by the assassination of Malcolm X amidst the lynching, and national oppression. A few years later, the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. What changed my mind was that I became a Marxist, after recognizing classes within the Black community and the class struggle even after we had worked and struggled to elect the first Black Mayor of Newark, Kenneth Gibson.
Misogyny and advocacy of rape
Baraka advocated for the rape of white women by Black men, believing that it was a politically legitimate act. Baraka objectified white women, believing that they served as a location of racial struggle rather than as human beings. He implied that white women would enjoy being raped by black men, experiencing the rape as "sexually exhilarating—a God-like gift that no white man could give to her". If she did not, and she instead perceived her rape by a black man as a "beast-like violation", then she was racist. Author bell hooks commented on Baraka's misogyny in her book Ain't I a Woman?:
Ironically, the "power" of black men that Baraka and others celebrated was the stereotypical, racist image of the black man as primitive, strong, and virile. Although these same images of black men had been evoked by racist whites to support the argument that all black men are rapists, they were now being romanticized as positive characteristics.
Homophobia
Baraka frequently denounced homosexuality in his writing. He employed homophobic slurs in his writings (e.g. faggot), usually against white men, but also against black men he disagreed with. Some critics have alleged Baraka's homophobia to be suppressed homosexual desire.
Antisemitism
In the 1967 poem "The Black Man is Making New Gods", Baraka accused Jews of having stolen knowledge of Africa, transporting it to Europe, where they became white and claimed it as their own. He wrote of Jesus as a "fag" and as "the dead jew" who, Baraka argues, was a Jewish scam on Christians. Baraka embraces Nazi genocidal depictions of Jews, who embody a "dangerous germ culture".
His 1972 essay collection Raise, Race, Rays, Raze refers to people as "jew-slick", "jeworiented revolutionaries", and also "cohen edited negro history".
In 1980 Baraka published an essay in the Village Voice that was titled Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite. Baraka insisted that a Village Voice editor titled it and not himself. In the essay, Baraka went over his life history, including his marriage to Hettie Cohen, who was Jewish. He stated that after the assassination of Malcolm X, he found himself thinking: "As a Black man married to a white woman, I began to feel estranged from her ... How could someone be married to the enemy?" He eventually divorced Hettie and left her with their two bi-racial daughters. In the essay, Baraka went on to sayWe also know that much of the vaunted Jewish support of Black civil rights organizations was in order to use them. Jews, finally, are white, and suffer from the same kind of white chauvinism that separates a great many whites from the Black struggle. ... these Jewish intellectuals have been able to pass over into the Promised Land of American privilege.
In the essay, he also defended his position against Israel, saying: "Zionism is a form of racism." Near the end of the essay, Baraka stated the following:
Anti-Semitism is as ugly an idea and as deadly as white racism and Zionism ...As for my personal trek through the wasteland of anti-Semitism, it was momentary and never completely real. ... I have written only one poem that has definite aspects of anti-Semitism...and I have repudiated it as thoroughly as I can.
The poem Baraka referenced was "For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet", which contained lines including:
...Smile jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew. I got something for you ... I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured ... So come for the rent, jewboys ... one day, jewboys, we all, even my wig wearing mother gonna put it on you all at once.
Honors and awards
Baraka served as the second Poet Laureate of New Jersey from July 2002 until the position was abolished on July 2, 2003. In response to the attempts to remove Baraka as the state's Poet Laureate, a nine-member advisory board named him the poet laureate of the Newark Public Schools in December 2002.
Baraka received honors from a number of prestigious foundations, including the following: fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Langston Hughes Award from the City College of New York, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, an induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Before Columbus Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
A short excerpt from Amiri Baraka's poetry was selected to be used for a permanent installation by artist Larry Kirkland in New York City's Pennsylvania Station.
Carved in marble, this installation features excerpts from the works of several New Jersey poets (from Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, to contemporary poets Robert Pinsky and Renée Ashley) and was part of the renovation and reconstruction of the New Jersey Transit section of the station completed in 2002.
Legacy and influence
Despite numerous controversies and polarizing content of his work, Baraka's literary influence is undeniable. His co-founding of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s promoted a uniquely black nationalist perspective and influenced an entire literary generation. Critic Naila Keleta-Mae argues that Baraka's legacy is one of "saying the unsayable", a course that likely damaged his own literary reputation and canonization. For example, Baraka was left out of the 2013 anthology Angles of Ascent, a collection of contemporary African-American poetry published by Norton. In a review of the anthology, Baraka criticized editor Charles H. Rowell's hostility towards the Black Arts Movement, calling Rowell's "attempt to analyze and even compartmentalize" contemporary African-American poetry as "flawed". Indeed, Rowell's introduction to Angles of Ascent references the "fetters of narrow political and social demands that have nothing to do with the production of artistic texts", evincing a political/apolitical dichotomy where the editor considers overly political works of lesser artistic value. Critic Emily Ruth Rutter recognizes the contribution to African American literary studies of Angles of Ascent yet also proposes adding Baraka and others to ensure students do not "unknowingly accept" the notion that Baraka and writers like him were somehow absent from influencing twenty-first century poetry.
In Rain Taxi, Richard Oyama criticized Baraka's militant aesthetic, writing that Baraka's "career came to represent a cautionary tale of the worst 'tendencies' of the 1960s—the alienating rejections, the fanatical self-righteousness, the impulse toward separatism and Stalinist repression versus multi-racial/class coalition-building. ... In the end, Baraka's work suffered because he preferred ideology over art, forgetting the latter outlasts us all."
Baraka's participation in a diverse array of artistic genres combined with his own social activism allowed him to have a wide range of influence. When discussing his influence in an interview with NPR, Baraka stressed that he had influenced numerous people. When asked what he would write for his own epitaph, he quipped, "We don't know if he ever died", evincing the personal importance of his own legacy to him. NPR's obituary for Baraka describes the depths of his influence simply: "...throughout his life – the Black Arts Movement never stopped". Baraka's influence also extends to the publishing world, where some writers credit him with opening doors to white publishing houses which African American writers previously had been unable to access.
Works
Poetry
1961: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
1964: The Dead Lecturer: Poems
1969: Black Magic
1970: It's Nation Time
1980: New Music, New Poetry (India Navigation)
1995: Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones
1995: Wise, Why's Y's
1996: Funk Lore: New Poems
2003: Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems
2005: The Book of Monk
Drama
1964: Dutchman
1964: The Slave
1967: The Baptism and The Toilet
1966: A Black Mass
1968: Home on the Range and Police
1969: Four Black Revolutionary Plays
1970: Jello
1970: Slave Ship
1978: The Motion of History and Other Plays
1979: The Sidney Poet Heroical, (published by I. Reed Books, 1979)
1989: Song
2013: Most Dangerous Man in America (W. E. B. Du Bois)
Fiction
1965: The System of Dante's Hell
1967: Tales
2004: Un Poco Low Coup, (graphic novel published by Ishmael Reed Publishing)
2006: Tales of the Out & the Gone
Non-fiction
1963: Blues People
1965: Home: Social Essays
1965: The Revolutionary Theatre
1968: Black Music
1971: Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965
1972: Kawaida Studies: The New Nationalism
1979: Poetry for the Advanced
1980: "Confessions of a former Anti-Semite." The Village Voice, December 17, 1980
1981: reggae or not!
1984: Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974–1979
1984: The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka
1987: The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues
2003: The Essence of Reparations
Edited works
1968: Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (co-editor, with Larry Neal)
1969: Four Black Revolutionary Plays
1983: Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women (edited with Amina Baraka)
1999: The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader
2000: The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka
2008: Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2 (Audio CD)
Filmography
The New Ark (1968)
One P.M. (1972)
Fried Shoes Cooked Diamonds (1978) ... Himself
Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement (1978) ... Himself
Poetry in Motion (1982)
Furious Flower: A Video Anthology of African American Poetry 1960–95, Volume II: Warriors (1998) ... Himself
Through Many Dangers: The Story of Gospel Music (1996)
Bulworth (1998) ... Rastaman
Piñero (2001) ... Himself
Strange Fruit (2002) ... Himself
Ralph Ellison: An American Journey (2002) ... Himself
Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed (2004) ... Himself
Keeping Time: The Life, Music & Photography of Milt Hinton (2004) ... Himself
Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow (2005) ... Himself
500 Years Later (2005) (voice) ... Himself
The Ballad of Greenwich Village (2005) ... Himself
The Pact (2006) ... Himself
Retour à Gorée (2007) ... Himself
Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (2007)
Discography
It's Nation Time (Black Forum/Motown, 1972)
New Music - New Poetry (India Navigation, 1982) with David Murray and Steve McCall
Real Song (Enja, 1995)
With Billy Harper
Blueprints of Jazz Vol. 2 (Talking House Records, 2008)
With the New York Art Quartet
New York Art Quartet (ESP-Disk, 1965)
With Malachi Thompson
Freebop Now! (Delmark, 1998)
with David Murray
Fo Deuk Revue (Justin Time, 1997), "Evidence"
with William Parker
I Plan to Stay a Believer (AUM Fidelity, 2010)