(Everett LeRoi Jones)
Playwright, Poet, and Essayist
Born: Newark, New Jersey; October 7, 1934
LONG FICTION: The System of Dante’s Hell, 1965.
SHORT FICTION: Tales, 1967; The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 2000.
DRAMA: The Baptism, pr. 1964, pb. 1966; Dutchman, pr., pb. 1964; The Slave, pr., pb. 1964; The Toilet, pr., pb. 1964; Experimental Death Unit #1, pr. 1965, pb. 1969; Jello, pr. 1965, pb. 1970; A Black Mass, pr. 1966, pb. 1969; Arm Yourself, or Harm Yourself, pr., pb. 1967; Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show), pr. 1967, pb. 1969; Madheart, pr. 1967, pb. 1969; Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant, pr., pb. 1967; The Death of Malcolm X, pb. 1969; Bloodrites, pr. 1970, pb. 1971; Junkies Are Full of (SHHH ...), pr. 1970, pb. 1971; A Recent Killing, pr. 1973, pb. 1978; S-1, pr. 1976, pb. 1978; The Motion of History, pr. 1977, pb. 1978; The Sidney Poet Heroical, pb. 1979 (originally as Sidnee Poet Heroical, pr. 1975); What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production?, pr., pb. 1979; At the Dim’cracker Convention, pr. 1980; Weimar, pr. 1981; Money: A Jazz Opera, pr. 1982; Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Jazz Musical, pr. 1984, pb. 1997; The Life and Life of Bumpy Johnson, pr. 1991; General Hag’s Skeezag, pb. 1992; Meeting Lillie, pr. 1993; The Election Machine Warehouse, pr. 1996, pb. 1997.
POETRY: Spring and Soforth, 1960; Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, 1961; The Dead Lecturer, 1964; Black Art, 1966; A Poem for Black Hearts, 1967; Black Magic: Sabotage, Target Study, Black Art—Collected Poetry, 1961-1967, 1969; It’s Nation Time, 1970; In Our Terribleness: Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style, 1970 (with Fundi [Billy Abernathy]); Spirit Reach, 1972; Afrikan Revolution, 1973; Hard Facts, 1975; Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1979; Reggae or Not!, 1981; Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka, 1995; Wise, Why’s, Y’s, 1995; Funk Lore: New Poems, 1984-1995, 1996; S O S : Poems 1961-2013 (selected by Paul Vangelisti), 2014.
NONFICTION: “Cuba Libre,” 1961; The New Nationalism, 1962; Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963; Home: Social Essays, 1966; Black Music, 1968, 2010; A Black Value System, 1970; Strategy and Tactics of a Pan-African Nationalist Party, 1971; Kawaida Studies: The New Nationalism, 1971; Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965, 1971; Crisis in Boston!, 1974; The Creation of the New Ark, 1975; The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984; Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1984; The Artist and Social Responsibility, 1986; The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987 (with Amina Baraka); The Great Max Roach, 1991; Fearful Symmetry: The Art of Thornton Dial, 1993; Jesse Jackson and Black People, 1994; Conversations with Amiri Baraka, 1994 (Charlie Reilly, editor); Eulogies, 1996; Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, 2009; The Papers of Amiri Baraka, Poet Laureate of the Black Power Movement, 2012; Razor: Revolutionary Art for Cultural Revolution, 2012; Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn: The Collected Letters, 2014 (Claudia Moreno Pisano, editor).
EDITED TEXTS: The Moderns: New Fiction in America, 1963; Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, 1968 (with Larry Neal); African Congress: A Documentary of the First Modern PanAfrican Congress, 1972; Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women, 1983 (with Amina Baraka).
MISCELLANEOUS: Selected Plays and Prose, 1979; The LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka Reader, 1991; Madhubuti, Haki, et al, ed. Brilliant Flame!: Amiri Baraka: Poetry, Plays, & Politics for the People, 2018.
Achievements
One of the most politically controversial playwrights of the 1960s, Amiri Baraka is best known for his brilliant early play Dutchman and for his contribution to the development of a community-based black nationalist theater. Throughout his career, he has sought dramatic forms for expressing the consciousness of those alienated from the psychological, economic, and racial mainstream of American society. Even though no consensus exists concerning the success of his experiments, particularly those with ritualistic forms for political drama, his challenge to the aesthetic preconceptions of the American mainstream and the inspiration he has provided younger black playwrights such as Ed Bullins and Ron Milner guarantee his place in the history of American drama.
Baraka has won a number of awards and fellowships, particularly for his poetry and drama (such as Italy’s Ferroni Award and Foreign Poet Award in 1993 and the Playwright’s Award at North Carolina’s Black Drama Festival in 1997). He won the Longview Best Essay of the Year award (1961) for his essay “Cuba Libre” and the John Whitney Foundation Fellowship for poetry and fiction (1962). Dutchman won an Obie Award for Best American Off-Broadway Play and was granted a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He received second prize at the International Art Festival of Dakar (1966) for his play The Slave; a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1966); a doctorate of humane letters from Malcolm X College in Chicago (1972); appointment as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in drama (1981); a National Endowment for the Arts poetry award (1981); a New Jersey Council for the Arts award (1982); and the American Book Award (Before Columbus Foundation) for Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women (1983). In 1984 he received an American Book Award, and in 1989 he won a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He has also founded or supported numerous journals (such as Yugen magazine), theater groups (such as the Black Arts Repertory Theatre), and other cultural organizations, especially in the African American community, and he has edited several important books on black culture, such as Black Fire. In 1989, Baraka was given the Langston Hughes Medal for outstanding contribution to literature. His work has been translated and published in a number of other languages and countries.
Biography
Amiri Baraka, as he has been known since 1967, was born Everett LeRoi Jones into a middle-class family in Newark, New Jersey. An excellent student whose parents encouraged his intellectual interests, Jones graduated from Howard University of Washington, D.C., in 1954 at the age of nineteen. After spending two years in the United States Air Force, primarily in Puerto Rico, he moved to Greenwich Village, where he embarked on his literary career in 1957. During the early stage of his career, Jones associated closely with numerous white avant-garde poets, including Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, and Dianne DiPrima, with whom he founded the American Theatre for Poets in 1961. Marrying Hettie Cohen, a white woman with whom he edited the magazine Yugen from 1958 to 1963, Jones established himself as an important young poet, critic, and editor. Among the many magazines to which he contributed was Downbeat, the jazz journal where he first developed many of the musical interests which were to have such a large impact on his later poetry. The political interests that were to dominate Jones’s later work were unmistakably present as early as 1960 when he toured Cuba with a group of black intellectuals. This event sparked his perception of the United States as a corrupt bourgeois society and seems particularly significant in relation to his later socialist emphasis. Jones’s growing political interest conditioned his first produced plays, including the Obie Award winning Dutchman (1964), which anticipated the first major transformation of Jones’s life.
Separating from Hettie Cohen and severing ties with his white associates, Jones moved from the Village to Harlem in 1965. Turning his attention to direct action within the black community, he founded the Black Arts Theatre and School in Harlem and, following his return to his native city in 1966, the Spirit House in Newark. After marrying a black woman, Sylvia Robinson (Amina Baraka), in 1966, Jones adopted his new name, which means “Prince” (Ameer) “the blessed one” (Baraka), along with the honorary title of “Imamu.” Over the next half dozen years, Baraka helped found and develop the Black Community Development and Defense Organization, the Congress of African Peoples (convened in Atlanta in 1970), and the National Black Political Convention (convened in Gary, Indiana, in 1972). As a leading spokesman of the Black Arts movement, Baraka provided support for young black poets and playwrights, including Larry Neal, Ed Bullins, Marvin X, and Ron Milner. During the Newark uprising/riot of 1967, Baraka was arrested for unlawful possession of firearms. Although he was convicted and given the maximum sentence after the judge read his poem “Black People!” as an example of incitement to riot, Baraka was later cleared on appeal.
Baraka supported Kenneth A. Gibson’s campaign to become the first black mayor of Newark in 1970, but he later broke with Gibson over what he perceived as the bourgeois values of the administration. This disillusionment with black politics within the American system, combined with Baraka’s attendance at the Sixth Pan-African Conference at Dar es Salaam in 1974, precipitated the subsequent stage of his political evolution. While not abandoning his commitment to confronting the special problems of African Americans in the United States, Baraka came to interpret these problems within the framework of an overarching Marxist-Leninist-Maoist philosophy. In conjunction with this second transformation, Baraka dropped the title “Imamu” and changed the name of his Newark publishing firm from “Jihad” to “People’s War.”
Baraka has continued to teach, lecture, and conduct workshops, and he is noted not only for his writings but also for his influence on young writers and social critics. He is the editor of Black Nation, the organ of the League of Revolutionary Struggle, a Marxist organization. His influence extends far beyond African American culture and politics to embrace other people of color. Native American writer Maurice Kenney, for example, credited Baraka for teaching ethnic writers how to open doors to important venues for their writing, to “claim and take” their place at the cultural forefront.
Analysis: Short Fiction
Amiri Baraka’s literary career has had three distinct periods. In the first period—the late 1950s and early 1960s—he was influenced by, and became a part of, the predominantly white avant-garde Beat movement in the arts. By the mid-1960s, Baraka had become a black nationalist (indicated by his rejection of the name LeRoi Jones), and many of his better-known plays, such as Dutchman, reflect his confrontational racial views from this period. Since the 1970s, Baraka has continued working as a political activist and writer, but his writing has increasingly encompassed a Marxist economic analysis in addition to his strong racial views. Nearly all of Baraka’s short stories—although they continued to be reprinted into the 1980s and 1990s—first appeared in his earlier black nationalist period in the 1960s and reflected both the literary experiments of his Beat period and the increasingly political attitudes of his black nationalism. While many of these stories hold mainly historical interest today, the best are still compelling examples of how radical political views and experimental prose styles could be fused in the 1960s, when a number of writers, both white and black, were trying to merge their art and their politics.
“The Screamers”
Reprinted at least a half dozen times since its appearance in Tales, generally in collections of African American fiction, “The Screamers” is by far Baraka’s best-known short story. The narrative covers one night in a black jazz nightclub in Newark (probably in the early 1950s) from the perspective of a young man listening to “Harlem Nocturne” and other popular dance tunes. What makes this night unique is the performance by saxophonist Lynn Hope, who in an inspired moment leads the musicians through the crowd and out into the streets. “It would be the form of the sweetest revolution, to hucklebuck into the fallen capital, and let the oppressors lindy hop out.” The police arrive and attack the crowd, a riot ensues, and the marchers “all broke our different ways, to save whatever it was each of us thought we loved.” The story has a number of elements common to Baraka’s fiction: the positive depiction of African American cultural forms (including a kind of “bop” jazz language), the conflict between this culture and white oppressors, and the metaphor of black art—here it is music, but it could as easily stand for writing—as an inspirational cultural form which, while it cannot finally overcome white oppression, at least achieves a moment of heightened consciousness for the people (here called “Biggers,” in reference to the central character, Bigger Thomas, of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son) listening to the music and moved by it.
“The Death of Horatio Alger”
The titles of Baraka’s stories—such as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Alternate Ending” or “A Chase (Alighieri’s Dream)”—often carry the larger meaning of the work, even when the story makes no further reference to it. In the case of “The Death of Horatio Alger,” the tale seems a fairly simple description of a childhood fight. The narrator of the tale, Mickey, is playing dozens—a black word game of insults aimed at participants’ parents—with his best friend, J.D., and in front of three white friends. J.D. misunderstands one of the insults and attacks Mickey, and then they both attack the three white boys (who do not understand the black word game to begin with). The story is thus about communication and its failure, but also about the Horatio Alger myths of equality and freedom and about the alienation Baraka’s protagonists often experience. As Lloyd Brown accurately writes of the story, “In stripping himself of insensitive white friends and Horatio Alger images of American society, Mickey is putting an end to his alienation from his black identity.”
Analysis: Poetry
Amiri Baraka’s importance as a poet rests on both the diversity of his work and the singular intensity of his Black Nationalist period. During this period, Baraka concentrated on exposing the unstated racist premises of Euro-American art and developing an alternative “Black Aesthetic.” In part because he had demonstrated mastery of Euro-American poetic modes, Baraka’s Black Nationalist philosophy commanded an unusual degree of white attention. Coming from an unknown poet, his militant poetry might well have been dismissed as a naive kind of propaganda. It did, in fact, alienate many of his earlier admirers, who came to see him as an embodiment of the civil disorders of the mid-1960s. On a more profound level, however, he spurred many to ponder the complex logic of his transformation and to reassess the political implications of their own aesthetic stances.
Baraka’s poetry falls into three distinctive periods, each reflecting an attempt to find a philosophy capable of responding adequately to a corrupt culture. The voice of each period is shaped in accord with a different set of assumptions concerning the nature of the cultural corruption, the proper orientation toward political action, and the poet’s relationship with his audience. During his early period, Baraka built an essentially aesthetic response on premises shared primarily with white poets and intellectuals. Although Baraka always recognized the importance of his racial and economic heritage, the intricate philosophical voice of the early period sounds highly individualistic in comparison with his later work. During his middle Black Nationalist period, Baraka shifted his emphasis to the racial dimension of American culture. The associated voice—much more accessible, though not nearly so simple as it first appears—reflects Baraka’s desire to relate primarily to the African American community. During his third Marxist-Leninist-Maoist period, Baraka adopted a less emotionally charged voice in accord with his stance as a scientific analyst of capitalist corruption. The diversity of Baraka’s work makes it extremely difficult to find a vocabulary equally relevant to the complex postmodernism of Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, the militant nationalism of Black Magic, and the uncompromising economic analysis of Hard Facts.
Music
To speak with a black voice, Baraka must present a variety of shifting surfaces, both to defend against and to attack the predatory forces of his environment. These shifting surfaces are extremely elusive, deriving their meaning as much from audience as from speaker. Using musical forms and images as primary points of reference, Baraka explores this relationship between group and individual voices. His music criticism frequently refers to the primacy in African American culture of the “call and response” mode of work songs and spirituals. Playing off this dynamic, many of Baraka’s nationalist poems identify his individual voice with that of a group leader calling for an affirmative response from his community. “Three Movements and a Coda,” for example, concludes: “These are songs if you have the/ music.” Baraka can provide lyrics, but if they are to come alive as songs, the music must be provided by the participation of a responsive community. The conclusion of “Black Art” makes it clear that this music is more than a purely aesthetic response: “Let the world be a Black Poem/ And Let All Black People Speak This Poem/ Silently/ or LOUD.” If the world is to be a poem for the black community, a political response must accompany the aesthetic one.
Violence
Frequently, Baraka pictures violence in graphic images of “smashing at jelly-white faces” or “cracking steel knuckles in a jewlady’s mouth.” Given the unqualified intensity of these images, it hardly seems surprising that many white and less militant black readers dismiss the Baraka of this period as a reverse racist forwarding the very modes of thought he ostensibly rejects. In essence, they take the call which concludes “A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand” on a literal level. When Baraka asks “Will the machine gunners please step forward,” they respond that a military race war can end only in catastrophe for both races.
As the title of the poem suggests, however, the call should not be interpreted simplistically. To be understood, it must be seen in the context of Baraka’s view of the historical response of African Americans to racist oppression. Describing a society in which “the wheel, and the wheels, wont let us alone,” he points out that blacks have “awaited the coming of a natural/ phenomenon” to effect a release. Only after repeating “But none has come” three times does Baraka summon the “machinegunners.” The call sounds Baraka’s response to what he sees as the traditional passivity of the African American community. Recognizing that practically all black experience involves direct contact with psychological racism tied to economic exploitation, Baraka treats these shared experiences hyperbolically in order to shake his community into political action. Placed in a social context where violent group rebellion has been the exception, there is much less chance than most white readers believe that his words will be acted on literally. The use of this aesthetic of calculated overstatement demonstrates Baraka’s willingness to use the tradition of masking for a new set of political purposes. Where the form of most African American masks has been dictated by their relationship to white psychology, however, Baraka shapes his new masks to elicit response from blacks. Far from oversimplifying his awareness in the nationalist period, Baraka demonstrates his developing sense of the complexity of poetry designed to function in a real social and political context.
The contextual complexity, however, adds a new dimension of seriousness to attacks on Baraka’s use of anti-Semitism and racism as rhetorical strategies. Baraka negotiates extremely treacherous territory when and if he expects readers to concentrate on his desire to “Clean out the world for virtue and love” in the same poem (“Black Art”) that endorses “poems that kill . . . Setting fire and death to/ whitie’s ass.” A similar apparent paradox occurs in “Black People!” which says both “Take their lives if need be” and “let’s make a world we want black children to grow and learn in.” Baraka’s aesthetic approach, which vests ultimate authority in the authenticating response, raises the problematic possibility that the audience’s real social actions will authenticate the destructive rhetoric rather than the constructive vision.
Black Nationalism
Baraka attempts to diminish this possibility by developing his constructive vision in celebratory nationalist poems such as “It’s Nation Time” and “Africa Africa Africa,” which introduce a new musical/chant mode to his work. Exhortations such as “Black Art,” which, like Baraka’s earlier work, manipulate punctuation and syntax to express fully the urgency of an emotional experience, also anticipate the chant poems by introducing oratorical elements reflecting participation in communal ritual. “A Poem for Black Hearts,” for example, varies the opening phrase “For Malcolm’s eyes” to establish a focal point for audience response. “For Malcolm’s words,” “For Malcolm’s heart,” and similar phrases provide a kind of drumbeat for Baraka’s meditation on the fallen leader.
In “It’s Nation Time” and “Africa Africa Africa” this drumbeat, clearly the constitutive structural element, often sounds explicitly: “Boom/ Boom/ BOOOM/ Boom.” Writing primarily in short lines echoing these single drumbeats, Baraka uses reiteration and rhythmical variation to stress his vision of Pan-African unity. The first thirteen lines of “Africa Africa Africa” include no words other than “Africa” and “Africans.” Anticipating Baraka’s developing interest in reggae music, these poems call for the transformation of the old forms of African American culture into those of a new Pan-African sensibility. “It’s Nation Time” phrases this call: “get up rastus for real to be rasta fari.” Baraka rejects those “rastus” figures content to wear the passive masks imposed on Africans unaware of their heritage, and celebrates the rastafarians, a Caribbean sect associated strongly with reggae.
Socialist Voice
No simple aesthetic analysis suffices to explain either Baraka’s new poetic voice or his difficulty in calling forth an affirmative response from either the artistic or the working-class community. Lines such as “This is the dictatorship of the proletariat/ the total domination of society by the working class” can easily be dismissed as lacking either the intellectual complexity or the emotional power of Baraka’s earlier work. Such a dismissal, however, risks avoiding the issue of cultural conditioning, which Baraka now sees as central. Arguing that capitalist control of the media deforms both the proletariat’s image of itself as a revolutionary force and its response to a “pure” socialist art, Baraka attempts to shatter the psychological barriers through techniques of reiteration similar to those used in the nationalist poetry. His relationship with the proletariat audience, however, generates a new set of political and aesthetic problems. While the nationalist voice assumed authority only insofar as it was validated by the experience of the African American community, the socialist voice must take on the additional burden of convincing the proletarian audience that its interpretation of its own experience had been “incorrect.” If the community does not respond to Baraka’s voice as its own, the problem lies with a brainwashed response rather than with a tainted call (the source of the problem in “Leroy”). As a result, Baraka frequently adopts a “lecturer’s” voice to provide the “hard facts” that will overcome resistance to political action by proving that capitalism deceives the proletariat into accepting a “dictatorship of the minority.”
Analysis: Drama
Working with forms ranging from the morality play to avant-garde expressionism, Amiri Baraka throughout his career has sought to create dramatic rituals expressing the intensity of the physical and psychological violence that dominates his vision of American culture. From his early plays on “universal” alienation through his Black Nationalist celebrations to his multimedia proletarian pageants, Baraka has focused on a variety of sacrificial victims as his central dramatic presences. The dominant type in Baraka’s early plays are passive scapegoats unaware of their participation in ritual actions who condemn themselves and their communities to blind repetition of destructive patterns. Their apparent mastery of the forms of European American cultural literacy simply obscures the fact of their ignorance of the underlying reality of oppression. Responding to this ironic situation, Baraka’s Black Nationalist plays emphasize that the new forms of consciousness, rooted in Africa rather than in Europe, needed to free the African American community from the historical and psychological forces that enforce such blind repetition. Inverting the traditional moral symbolism of European American culture, Baraka creates rituals that substitute symbolically white scapegoats for the symbolically black victims of his earlier works. These rituals frequently reject the image of salvation through self-sacrifice (seen as a technique for the pacification of the black masses), insisting instead that only an active struggle can break the cycle of oppression.
Because the rituals of Baraka’s Black Nationalist plays frequently culminate in violence directed against whites, or symbolically white members of the black bourgeois, or aspects of the individual black psyche, numerous critics have attacked him for perpetuating the violence and racism he ostensibly criticizes. These critics frequently condemn him for oversimplifying reality, citing his movement from psychologically complex ironic forms to much more explicit allegorical modes in his later drama; the most insistent simply dismiss his post-Dutchman plays as strident propaganda, lacking all aesthetic and moral merit. Basing their critiques firmly on European American aesthetic assumptions, such critics in fact overlook the central importance of Baraka’s changing sense of his audience. Repudiating the largely white avant-garde audience that applauded his early work, Baraka turned almost exclusively to an African American audience more aware of the storefront preacher and popular music groups such as the Temptations than of August Strindberg and Edward Albee. In adopting a style of performance in accord with this cultural perception, Baraka assumed a didactic voice intended to focus attention on immediate issues of survival and community or class defense.
The Baptism
Baraka’s early plays clearly reflect both his developing concern with issues of survival and his fascination with European American avant-garde traditions. The Baptism, in particular, draws on the conventions of expressionist theater to comment on the absurdity of contemporary American ideas of salvation, which in fact simply mask a larger scheme of victimization. Identified only as symbolic types, Baraka’s characters speak a surreal mixture of street language and theological argot. While the slang references link them to the social reality familiar to the audience, their actions are dictated by the sudden shifts and thematic ambiguities characteristic of works such as Strindberg’s Ett dromspel (pb. 1902; A Dream Play, 1912) and the “Circe” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).
The play’s central character, named simply “the Boy,” resembles a traditional Christ figure struggling to come to terms with his vocation. Baraka treats his protagonist with a mixture of irony and empathy, focusing on the ambiguous roles of the spirit and the flesh in relation to salvation. Pressured by the Minister to deny his body and by the cynical Homosexual to immerse himself in the profane as a path to the truly sacred, the Boy vacillates. At times he claims divine status; at times he insists, “I am only flesh.” The chorus of Women, at once holy virgins and temple prostitutes, reinforces his confusion. Shortly after identifying him as “the Son of God,” they refer to him as the “Chief Religious jelly roll of the universe.” Given these irreconcilable roles, which he is expected to fulfill, the Boy’s destiny as scapegoat and martyr seems inevitable; the dramatic tension revolves around the question of who will victimize him and why. Baraka uses a sequence of conflicting views of the Boy’s role, each of which momentarily dominates his self-image, to heighten this tension.
Responding to the Homosexual’s insistence that “the devil is a part of creation like an ash tray or senator,” the Boy first confesses his past sins and demands baptism. When the Women respond by elevating him to the status of “Son of God/ Son of Man,” he explicitly rejects all claim to spiritual purity. The ambiguous masquerade culminates in an attack on the Boy, who is accused of using his spiritual status to seduce women who “wanted to be virgins of the Lord.” Supported only by the Homosexual, the Boy defends himself against the Women and the Minister, who clamor for his sacrifice, ostensibly as punishment for his sins. Insisting that “there will be no second crucifixion,” the Boy slays his antagonists with a phallic sword, which he interprets as the embodiment of spiritual glory. For a brief moment, the figures of Christ as scapegoat and Christ as avenger seem reconciled in a baptism of fire.
Baraka undercuts this moment of equilibrium almost immediately. Having escaped martyrdom at the hands of the mob (ironically, itself victimized), the Boy confronts the Messenger, who wears a motorcycle jacket embellished with a gold crown and the words “The Man.” In Baraka’s dream allegory, the Man can represent the Roman/American legal system or be a symbol for God the Father, both powers that severely limit the Boy’s control over events. The Boy’s first reaction to the Messenger is to reclaim his superior spiritual status, insisting that he has “brought love to many people” and calling on his “Father” for compassion. Rejecting these pleas, the Messenger indicates that “the Man’s destroying the whole works tonight.” The Boy responds defiantly: “Neither God nor man shall force me to leave. I was sent here to save man and I’ll not leave until I do.” The allegory suggests several different levels of interpretation: social, psychological, and symbolic. The Boy rejects his responsibility to concrete individuals (the mob he kills, the Man) in order to save an abstract entity (the mob as an ideal man). Ultimately, he claims his right to the martyr’s death, which he killed the mob in order to avoid, by repudiating the martyr’s submission to a higher power. Losing patience with the Boy’s rhetoric, the Messenger responds not by killing him but by knocking him out and dragging him offstage. His attitude of boredom effectively deflates the allegorical seriousness of the Boy’s defiance, a deflation reinforced by the Homosexual’s concluding comment that the scene resembles “some really uninteresting kind of orgy.”
The Baptism’s treatment of the interlocking themes of sacrifice, ritual, and victimization emphasizes their inherent ambiguity and suggests the impossibility of moral action in a culture that confuses God with the leader of a motorcycle gang. Baraka’s baptism initiates the Boy into absurdity rather than responsibility. If any sins have been washed away, they are resurrected immediately in pointless ritual violence and immature rhetoric. Although he does not develop the theme explicitly in The Baptism, Baraka suggests that there is an underlying philosophical corruption in European American culture, in this case derived from Christianity’s tendency to divorce flesh from spirit. Increasingly, this philosophical corruption takes the center of Baraka’s dramatic presentation of Western civilization.
Dutchman
Widely recognized as Baraka’s greatest work in any genre, Dutchman combines the irony of his avant-garde period with the emotional power and social insight of his later work. Clay, a young black man with a highly developed sense of self, occupies a central position in the play analogous to that of the Boy in The Baptism. The central dramatic action of the play involves Clay’s confrontation with a young white woman, Lula, who may in fact be seen as an aspect of Clay’s own self-awareness. In both thematic emphasis and dramatic structure, Dutchman parallels Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story (pr., pb. 1959). Both plays focus on a clash between characters from divergent social and philosophical backgrounds, both comment on the internal divisions of individuals in American society, and both culminate in acts of violence that are at once realistic and symbolic. What sets Dutchman apart, however, is its intricate exploration of the psychology that leads Clay to a symbolic rebellion that ironically guarantees his real victimization. Clay thinks he exists as an autonomous individual struggling for existential awareness. Baraka implies, however, that this European American conception of self simply enforces Clay’s preordained role as ritual scapegoat. As the Everyman figure his name suggests, Clay represents all individuals trapped by self-deception and social pressure. As a black man in a racist culture, he shares the more specific problem of those whose self-consciousness has been determined by white definitions.
The stage directions for Dutchman emphasize the link between Clay’s situation and the decline of European American culture, describing the subway car where the action transpires as “the flying underbelly of the city . . . heaped in modern myth.” Lula enters eating an apple, evoking the myth of the Fall. Together, these allusions contribute a literary dimension to the foreboding atmosphere surrounding the extended conversation that leads to Clay’s sacrifice at the hands of Lula and the subway riders, mostly white but some black. Throughout, Lula maintains clear awareness of her symbolic and political intentions, while Clay remains effectively blind. Lula’s role demands simply that she maintain the interest of the black man until it is convenient to kill him. Meanwhile, Clay believes he can somehow occupy a position of detachment or spiritual superiority. Changing approach frequently, Lula plays the roles of temptress, intellectual, psychologist, and racist. Clay responds variously to these gambits, sometimes with amusement, ultimately with anger and contempt. Consistently, however, he fails to recognize the genocidal reality underlying Lula’s masquerade, unwittingly assuming his preordained role in the controlling ritual of black destruction. Much like the legendary ghost ship for which it was named, the Dutchman, Baraka implies, will continue to sail so long as blacks allow the white world to control the premises of the racial debate.
This rigged debate reflects Baraka’s reassessment of his universalist beliefs and his movement toward Black Nationalism. Clay resembles the early LeRoi Jones in many ways: Both are articulate natives of New Jersey with aspirations to avant-garde artistic success. Dutchman implies that both are subject to fantasies about the amount of meaningful success possible for them in the realm of European American culture. Lula alternately reduces Clay to a “well-known type” and condemns him for rejecting his roots and embracing “a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by.” During the first act, Clay stays “cool” until Lula sarcastically declares him the “Black Baudelaire” and follows with the repeated phrase “My Christ. My Christ.” Suddenly shifting emphasis, she immediately denies his Christ-like stature and insists, “You’re a murderer,” compressing the two major attributes of the Boy in The Baptism, this time with a specifically social resonance. The sudden shift disrupts Clay’s balance. Ironically restating and simplifying the thesis of Ralph Ellison’s universalist novel Invisible Man (1922), Lula concludes the opening act with an ironic resolution to “pretend the people cannot see you...that you are free of your own history. And I am free of my history.” The rapid movement from Clay as Christ and murderer—standard black roles in the fantasy life of white America—to the pretense of his freedom underscores the inevitability of his victimization, an inevitability clearly dictated by the historical forces controlling Lula, forces that Clay steadfastly refuses to recognize.
Admitting his hatred for whites, Clay claims a deep affinity with the explosive anger lying beneath the humorous surface of the work of the great black musicians Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker. Ridiculing Lula’s interpretation of his psychological makeup, Clay warns her that whites should beware of preaching “rationalism” to blacks, since the best cure for the black neurosis would be the random murder of whites. After this demonstration of his superior, and highly rational, awareness, Clay turns to go. He dismisses Lula with contempt, saying, “we won’t be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.” Immediately thereafter, Lula kills him. The murder is in fact the final act of the real pageant, the ritual of black sacrifice. Seen from Lula’s perspective, the entire conversation amounts to an extended assault on Clay’s awareness of the basic necessities of survival. Seen from Baraka’s viewpoint, the heightened racial awareness of Clay’s final speech is simply an illusion, worthless if divorced from action. Clay’s unwilling participation in the pageant of white mythology reveals the futility of all attempts to respond to white culture on its own terms. Regarded in this light, Baraka’s subsequent movement away from the theoretical avant-garde and from European American modes of psychological analysis seems inevitable.
Other Literary Forms
Amiri Baraka is an exceptionally versatile literary figure, equally well known for his poetry, drama, and essays. In addition, he has written an experimental novel, The System of Dante’s Hell, which includes numerous poetic and dramatic passages. Baraka’s critical and political prose has been collected in Home: Social Essays, Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965, Selected Plays and Prose, and Daggers and Javelins: Essays. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka was published in 1984.
Bibliography
Baker, Houston A., Jr. The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Baker sees Baraka’s transformation as groundbreaking, pivotal in the development of a “Black Aesthetic” that would define itself apart from the Western white canon. The reader must use the index to find references to Baraka, as the chapters are organized historically rather than by authors considered.
Banfield, William. “Black Artistic Invisibility.” Journal of Black Studies 35, no. 2 (November, 2004): 195-210. Discusses the work of Baraka and other authors who examine the relationship between mainstream American culture—especially musical culture—and African American musicians.
Baraka, Amiri. “Amiri Baraka.” http://www.amiribaraka.com/. Accessed September 1, 2005. Baraka’s site has information about his recent activities, articles, reviews, lists of his publications, photos, video and audio clips, and a few of Baraka’s own drawings.
__________. “Amiri Baraka Analyzes How He Writes.” Interview by Kalamu Ya Salaam. African American Review 37, nos. 2/3 (Summer, 2003): 211-237. An interview with Baraka that reveals the poet’s thoughts in writing and choosing the title of his poem “A System of Dante’s Hell.” Baraka also discusses his personal relationship to the poem.
__________. “Philistinism and the Negro Writer.” In Anger, and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States, edited and with an introduction by Herbert Hill. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. This essay is useful to the student of Baraka as an articulation in prose of the commitments that were being made simultaneously in the poetry. The tone is rather quiet and reasoned, relative to Baraka’s later rhetoric, but the radical central theme is clear: “The Negro writer can only survive by refusing to become a white man.”
Benston, Kimberly W., ed. Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978. Benston, who has also written the full-length work Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask (1976), brings together essays that shed light on various aspects of his poetry and drama. Includes a bibliography.
Brown, Lloyd Wellesley. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne, 1980. By a scholar who specializes in African, African American, and Western Indian literary studies, this is the standard critical piece on Baraka’s poetic achievement. Provides a bibliography and an index.
Fox, Robert Eliot. Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Post-modernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Chapter 2 is a discussion of Baraka’s novel and the stories collected in Tales, in a comparative study of “three of the most important and gifted American authors to have emerged in the tumultuous period of the 1960s.”
Gwynne, James B., ed. Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch. Harlem, N.Y.: Steppingstones Press, 1985. This collection of essays hails Baraka as torchbearer for all racial and ethnic minorities.
Harris, William J. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. Discusses Baraka’s significance as the creator of a new artistic movement and his influence on African American artists. Includes selected bibliography and index.
Harris, William J., and Aldon Lynn Nielsen. “Somebody Blew Off Baraka.” African American Review 37, nos. 2/3 (Summer, 2003): 183-188. Examines the controversy surrounding Baraka’s selection as poet laureate of New Jersey and the criticisms of his poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” whose references to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, angered many.
Hudson, Theodore. From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1973. This sympathetic work provides a biographical chapter based on interviews with Baraka and his parents. Other chapters examne his works, philosophy, and styles. Notes and an index are provided, along with a bibliography that lists primary and secondary works through the early 1970s.
Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Places Baraka in the tradition of Negritude and credits him as having “for the most part established the style of Cultural Nationalist poetics in the period between 1960 and 1970—for an entire generation of writers.” There is no chapter devoted to Baraka, so the reader must consult the index.
Kumar, Nita N. “The Logic of Retribution: Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman.” African American Review 37, nos. 2/3 (Summer, 2003): 271-280. A thorough discussion of Baraka’s rejection of white sensibilities in Dutchman, his most highly regarded play.
Lacey, Henry C. To Raise, Destroy, and Create: The Poetry, Drama, and Fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1981. Unlike other studies, which separate the works by genres, this volume divides Baraka’s life into a Beat period, a transition, and a rebirth symbolized by taking on a new name. Also discusses Baraka’s dramatic work in context with his writing in other genres. Supplemented by an index and a list of Baraka’s works.
Oyigbenu, Amirikpa. Racism, Citizenship and Identity Politics in African-American Drama: Celebrating Amiri Baraka and August Wilson. Ahmadu Bello UP Limited, 2013. A detailed study by a Nigerian writer.
Reilly, Charlie, ed. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Offers insights into the black experience through Baraka’s experiences during the turbulent later half of the twentieth century. Baraka critiques and elucidates his works and underscores his belief in the connection between art and social criticism. Includes chronology and index.
Shannon, Sandra G. “Evolution or Revolution in Black Theater: A Look at the Cultural Nationalist Agenda in Select Plays by Amiri Baraka.” African American Review 37, nos. 2/3 (Summer, 2003): 281-300. Presents Baraka’s argument against technology as it appears in his play Home on the Range.
Simanga, Michael. Amiri Baraka and the Congress of African People: History and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Contains thirteen chapters on such topics as Baraka’s leadership, the Black Arts Movement, women, revolution, Marxism, and others.
Smethurst, James. “Pat Your Foot and Turn the Corner: Amiri Baraka, the Black Arts Movement, and the Poetics of Popular Avant-Garde.” African American Review 37, nos. 2/3 (Summer, 2003): 261-270. A good analysis of the Black Arts movement and its impacts on the construction of American identity and mainstream perceptions of African Americans.
Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. In Chapter 7 of this early study, Sollors examines the themes and forms of Baraka’s lone novel, his dramatic works, and his short stories. Other chapters provide detailed analyses of his plays. Good photograph section of production stills. Bibliography and index.
Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press, 2001. This immense volume criticizes Baraka for his political oversimplification and polemicism, at the same time outlining his influence on other writers and contrasting him with other black activists and political figures.
Woodard, K. Komozi. A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Revises the common view of Baraka as an extremist, arguing that he became a seasoned political veteran who brought together divergent black factions.