Rutgers University Press

Chapter Title: AMIRI BARAKA [LEROI JONES] (b. 1934)

Book Title: The New Anthology of American Poetry

Book Subtitle: Postmodernisms 1950-Present
Book Editor(s): Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, Thomas Travisano
Published by: Rutgers University Press. (2012)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bj4sjv.33

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 AMIRI BARAKA (LEROI JONES)
b. 1934

A prolific and controversial author who is equally at home in many

genres—including drama, music criticism, fiction, essays, and autobiography—
Amiri Baraka has written poetry marked by an inimitably jazzy, profane, free-
wheeling, ironically charged, and transgressive style that mixes jagged rhythms
with edgy wit in support of serious cultural and political aims. His career as a
writer can be defined, at least partially, by a series of major shifts in aesthetics,
ideology, and personal, racial, and political identity, developments that Baraka
himself describes as “my own changing and diverse motion, of where I have
been and why, and how I got to where I was when I next appeared or was heard
from.” Radical as these changes have been, Baraka has never disowned his past,
seeing each stage as an essential step in a process of individual and cultural be-
coming. In his comprehensive LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader, Baraka and
co-editor William J. Harris divide Baraka’s career into four phases: “The Beat
Period (1957–1962),” “The Transitional Period (1963–1965),” “The Black Nation-
alist Period (1965–1974),” and “The Third World Marxist Period (1974–).” Baraka
acknowledges, however, that “the typology that lists my ideological changes
and so forth as ‘Beat-Black Nationalist-Communist’ has brevity going for it, and
there’s something to be said for that, but, like notations of [the jazz pianist The-
lonious] Monk, it doesn’t show the complexity of real life.”
Even as the poet’s work has gone through a series of meaningful mutations,
so too has the poet’s name. Baraka was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1934 as
Everett LeRoy Jones, the son of a postal employee and a social worker. Jones
started college with a scholarship to Rutgers University in 1951, and he began
using LeRoi as his first name in 1952. That same year, he transferred to his-
torically black Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he worked with
noted black scholars and with the venerable black poet Sterling Brown. But he
failed to complete a degree because, as he later said, “the Howard thing let me
understand the Negro sickness. They teach you how to pretend to be white.” He
served in the Air Force from 1954 to 1957, then settled in Greenwich Village,
where he absorbed the influences of such avant-garde poets as Charles Olson,
Allen Ginsberg, and Frank O’Hara. There he began to publish his own work,
founded the Totem Press, and edited the literary magazine Yugen with his first
wife, Hettie Cohen. National recognition came in 1964 when his controversial
play Dutchman received an Obie award.
Baraka’s early Beat phase is reflected in such examples as “Political Poem”
and “A Poem for Speculative Hipsters.” Following the assassination of Malcolm

278

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 Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) Ø 279

X in 1965, he moved from Greenwich Village to Harlem, where he declared

himself a Black Nationalist, divorced Cohen, and founded the Black Arts Rep-
ertory Theatre. He would soon change his name from LeRoi Jones to Imamu
Amiri Baraka (“blessed spiritual leader”), though he ultimately dropped the
Islamic prefix Imamu. He married his second wife, Sylvia Robinson, in 1966.
Baraka helped to found the Black Arts movement and energetically promoted
it through his writing and organizing efforts. Poems from his Black Nationalist
period include “leroy” and “Return of the Native.” However, by 1974, Baraka an-
nounced his rejection of Black Nationalism, because he had come to feel that
the movement’s often anti-white and sometimes anti-Semitic rhetoric—which
he too had practiced—was in itself racist and was not addressing the core prob-
lems of poverty and discrimination. Baraka would later say that “Nationalism,
so-called, when it says ‘all non-blacks are our enemies,’ is sickness or criminality,
in fact a form of fascism.”
Identifying Black Nationalism as “bourgeois” and concluding, in a radio in-
terview with David Barsamian, that “skin color is not a determinant of political
content,” Baraka began to advocate socialism as the way forward for the poor
and culturally disenfranchised worldwide, and he became a supporter of the
global economic perspectives of Third World Marxism, a viewpoint that led to
the sardonic cultural critique in such poems as “A New Reality Is Better than a
New Movie!”
Along with his writing, Baraka has had an extensive teaching career, serving
as a professor at the New School of Social Research, San Francisco State Univer-
sity, Yale University, George Washington University, and finally (from 1980 on)
at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He remains a highly individu-
alistic, inventive poet and a provocative and controversial advocate for political
and social change.

further reading
Amiri Baraka. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. Revised edition. Chicago: Lawrence Hill &
Co., 1995.
————. The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris with Baraka. New York:
Basic Books, 1999.
————. Transbluesency: Selected Poems. Ed. Paul Vengelisti. New York: Marsilio Publishers,
1995.
W. J. Harris. The Poetry and Politics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. Columbia, MO.:
University of Missouri Press, 1985.
Charlie Reilly et al., eds. Conversations With Amiri Baraka. 1994.
Jerry Watts. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York
University Press, 2001.
Komozi Woodard. A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power
Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

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280 Ø Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

Political Poem
(for Basil)

Luxury, then, is a way of

being ignorant, comfortably
An approach to the open market
of least information. Where theories
can thrive, under heavy tarpaulins
without being cracked by ideas.

(I have not seen the earth for years

and think now possibly “dirt” is
negative, positive, but clearly
social. I cannot plant a seed, cannot
recognize the root with clearer dent
than indifference. Though I eat
and shit as a natural man. (Getting up
from the desk to secure a turkey sandwich
and answer the phone: the poem undone
undone by my station, by my station,
and the bad words of Newark.) Raised up
to the breech, we seek to fill for this
crumbling century. The darkness of love,
in whose sweating memory all error is forced.

Undone by the logic of any specific death. (Old gentlemen

who still follow fires, tho are quieter
and less punctual. It is a polite truth
we are left with. Who are you? What are you
saying? Something to be dealt with, as easily.
The noxious game of reason, saying, “No, No,
you cannot feel,” like my dead lecturer
lamenting thru gipsies his fast suicide.
1964

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 leroy Ø 281

A Poem for Speculative Hipsters

He had got, finally,
to the forest
of motives. There were no
owls, or hunters. No Connie Chatterleys1
resting beautifully
on their backs, having casually
brought socialism
to England.
Only ideas,
and their opposites.
Like,
he was really
nowhere.
1964

leroy
I wanted to know my mother when she sat
looking sad across the campus in the late 20’s
into the future of the soul, there were black angels
straining above her head, carrying life from our ancestors,
and knowledge, and the strong nigger feeling. She sat
(in that photo in the yearbook I showed Vashti) getting into
new blues, from the old ones, the trips and passions
showered on her by her own. Hypnotizing me, from so far
ago, from that vantage of knowledge passed on to her passed on
to me and all the other black people of our time.
When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to
black people. May they pick me apart and take
the useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave
the bitter bullshit rotten white parts
alone.
1969

1. Protagonist of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).

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282 Ø Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

Return of the Native

Harlem is vicious
modernism. BangClash.
Vicious the way its made.
Can you stand such beauty?
So violent and transforming.
The trees blink naked, being
so few. The women stare
and are in love with them
selves. The sky sits awake
over us. Screaming
at us. No rain.
Sun, hot cleaning sun
drives us under it.

The place, and place

meant of
black people. Their heavy Egypt.
(Weird word!) Their minds, mine,
the black hope mine. In Time.
We slide along in pain or too
happy. So much love
for us. All over, so much of
what we need. Can you sing
yourself, your life, your place
on the warm planet earth.
And look at the stones

the hearts, the gentle hum

of meaning. Each thing, life
we have, or love, is meant
for us in a world like this.
Where we may see ourselves
all the time. And suffer
in joy, that our lives
are so familiar.
1969

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 A New Reality Is Better Than a New Movie! Ø 283

A New Reality Is Better Than a New Movie!

How will it go, crumbling earthquake, towering inferno,1 jugger-
naut, volcano, smashup,
in reality, other than the feverish nearreal fantasy of the capitalist
flunky film hacks
tho they sense its reality breathing a quake inferno scar on their
throat even snorts of
100% pure cocaine cant cancel the cold cut of impending death
to this society. On all the
screens of america, the joint blows up every hour and a half for
two dollars an fifty cents.
They have taken the niggers out to lunch, for a minute, made us
partners nigger Charlie) or
surrogates (boss nigger) for their horror. But just as superafrikan
mobutu2 cannot leop
ardskinhat his
way out of responsibility for lumumba’s3 death, nor even with his
incredible billions
rockefeller4
cannot even save his pale ho’s titties in the crushing weight of
things as they really are.
How will it go, does it reach you, getting up, sitting on the side
of the bed, getting ready to go to work. Hypnotized by the ma-
chine, and the cement floor, the jungle treachery of
trying
to survive with no money in a money world, of making the boss
100,000 for every 200
dollars
you get, and then having his brother get you for the rent, and if
you want to buy the car
you

1. The Towering Inferno, a big-budget Hollywood 4. Nelson Rockefeller, former governor of New
disaster film (1974). York and grandson of John D. Rockefeller, the
2. Mobutu Sese Seko, authoritarian ruler of the billionaire founder of Standard Oil. In 1974,
Republic of the Congo from 1965 to 1997. His following President Nixon’s resignation, Rock-
trademark was a leopardskin hat. efeller had been chosen under the Twenty-fifth
3. Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected Amendment to serve as vice president by Nix-
prime minister of the Republic of the Congo. on’s successor, Gerald Ford, a nomination later
He was deposed by a coup organized by Mobutu confirmed by Congress.
in 1961 and later executed by a firing squad.

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284 Ø Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

helped build, your downpayment paid for it, the rest goes to buy
his old lady a foam
rubber
rhinestone set of boobies for special occasions when kissinger5
drunkenly fumbles with her blouse, forgetting himself.
If you don’t like it, what you gonna do about it. That was the
question we asked each
other, &
still right regularly need to ask. You don’t like it? Whatcha
gonna do, about it??
The real terror of nature is humanity enraged, the true
technicolor spectacle that
hollywood
cant record. They cant even show you how you look when you
go to work, or when you
come back.
They cant even show you thinking or demanding the new so-
cialist reality, its the ultimate
tidal
wave. When all over the planet, men and women, with heat in
their hands, demand that
society
be planned to include the lives and self determination of all the
people ever to live. That is the scalding scenario with a cast of
just under two billion that they dare not even whisper. Its called,
“We Want It All . . . The Whole World!”
1975

5. Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford from 1973 to 1977.

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