Amiri Baraka

Playwright

• Born: October 7, 1934
• Birthplace: Newark, New Jersey
• Died: January 9, 2014

Baraka used a variety of literary genres, most prominently theater, to shock complacent white Americans into action during the Civil Rights movement. An uncompromising advocate of black pride, Baraka produced incendiary works that expressed African Americans’ anger and feelings of disenfranchisement.

Early Life

Although Everett LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka (ah-MIH-ree bah-RAH-kah), was born at the height of the Great Depression, his upbringing was comfortably middle-class. His father worked for the post office and his mother was a social worker. They worked diligently to raise their son without the complications of race, encouraging him to explore creativity and self-expression through art and music. Baraka attended a predominantly white high school, where he mastered a variety of instruments, including piano, drum, and trumpet. He also excelled in theater and played a number of varsity sports.

A brilliant student, Baraka was awarded a full scholarship to nearby Rutgers University. By then, however, he had begun to wrestle with his racial identity. After only one year, he transferred to Howard University, a predominantly African American college near Washington, DC. That environment dramatically changed Baraka—he came to understand the cost of assimilation and saw as a sickness the need African Americans felt to be part of white America. He read widely in philosophy, political theory, comparative religion, existential literature, and most prominently music, particularly jazz as a defining voice of the African American experience.

Unable to abide the strictures and regimen of academic study, Baraka left Howard in 1954, less than a semester away from completing his degree. He returned to his hometown in New Jersey and, feeling the need to expand his horizons beyond the industrial Northeast, enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. He eventually was stationed in Puerto Rico. Although he struggled against the strict structure and discipline of military life, his years as a base librarian gave him access to a wide variety of literature. He later credited his dedication to writing to those years in the library. It was during that time that Baraka sent off his first poems, which focused on themes of death and suicide, reflecting his troubled relationship with his racial identity. In 1957, Baraka, by then a sergeant, was dishonorably discharged from the Air Force—in his massive private library were titles that reflected an interest in communism. Confronted with the charge that such reading material violated his loyalty oath, Baraka declined to defend himself and accepted the discharge.

Life’s Work

Baraka moved to New York City, to Greenwich Village, then the epicenter of the burgeoningBeat movement. Baraka was particularly drawn to the free jazz movement, in which innovative African American musicians audaciously redefined tempo and melody in free-flowing, improvised exercises that upended conventional notions of music. He also absorbed the Beats’ avant-garde poetry, with its strikingly original sonic effects, its wide-open musical feel, and its uncompromising drive to challenge the complacency and materialism of the 1950s. Baraka began to write impassioned essays that defended the Beat sensibility as one that promised cultural harmony as it sought to bring Americans from all walks of life—rich and poor, black and white, educated and uneducated—into a spiritual, transcendent oneness.

A trip to communist Cuba in late 1960, however, altered Baraka’s artistic vision. He began to question the Beats’ concept of social harmony and argued rather that white America itself was an oppressive construct that had to be changed through violent confrontation and revolutionary action. No work more clearly expresses that anger than Baraka’s incendiary one-act play Dutchman (1964), which won lavish critical praise and an Obie Award for best Off-Broadway drama.

When Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, Baraka left his wife (a white woman) and moved to Harlem to signal his allegiance to expressions of black culture. He won a Guggenheim fellowship for drama and performance art that same year. In Harlem, he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater, a short-lived but influential theater that supported promising new African American playwrights, musicians, actors, and poets whose work was grounded in the expression of the black experience. During this time he wrote several plays and screenplays, including the screenplay for Dutchman (1967). He also published several volumes of poetry, including Black Art (1966), Black Magic (1967), and A Poem for Black Hearts (1967).

Baraka became increasingly militant and called for a revolution against white America. When the theater experiment ended, he returned to Newark and became involved in efforts to elect the city’s first African American mayor, Kenneth Gibson, in 1970. During this time, Baraka discovered the Kawaida religion, an African variation of Islam. In keeping with the religious rigor of Islam, at times his writings took on an anti-Semitic and homophobic tone, which Baraka later disavowed. Determined to define himself through Kawaida, he changed his name to Imamu Ameer Baraka, which means “spiritual leader and blessed prince” in Bantu, and became a kind of leader for a commune in Newark known as Spirit House. He later shortened his name to Amiri Baraka.

By 1974, however, Baraka had grown disillusioned with the Black Nationalist movement as another dead end whose agenda, like that of the Beats, he found too narrow and idealistic. As part of his intellectual evolution, he publicly embraced Marxism, citing its radical call for economic equality and its withering critique of capitalism as the most appropriate vehicle for authentic social change. In the late 1970s, Baraka began a mission to bring enlightenment and direction to youths; although approaching fifty, he began a career as a university professor, lecturing at numerous universities, including Columbia University, Yale University, and Rutgers University. In 1980 he joined the faculty at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he remained until his retirement in 2000.

During his academic career, Baraka published poetry and essays on a wide variety of topics, many of them autobiographical, in which he explored his complex intellectual evolution. He edited several landmark anthologies of African American literature and spoke out tirelessly on the necessity of black writers exploring that identity. In 1984, his anthology on contemporary black women writers was recognized with an American Book Award. In 1989, he was accorded the Langston Hughes Medal, which recognizes work that represents the most distinguished expression of the African American mind.

After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Baraka published a lengthy reaction in verse, “Somebody Blew Up America,” that claimed in one brief passage that the attack was coordinated by the Bush administration in cooperation with Israel as a way to launch an all-out war to destroy Israel’s enemies. The poem further suggested that African Americans had for centuries been victims of white American terrorism. In the ensuing backlash, Baraka was labeled anti-American. He refused to apologize and continued to read the poem at public events. In 2002 the New Jersey legislature named Baraka the state’s poet laureate, a largely symbolic appointment. However, reaction to his controversial poem was so extreme that the state senate voted in early 2003 to abolish the office entirely. Afterward, Baraka’s writings returned increasingly to his interest in jazz. Those writings reflect his lifelong interest in the innovations of the genre and how it explores political, economic, and cultural issues.

Baraka died on January 9, 2014, in Newark, New Jersey. He was seventy-nine years old. Survivors include his second wife, Amina Baraka; his sons, Ras, Obalaji, Amiri Jr., and Ahi; his daughters Dominique Di Prima, Lisa Jones Brown, Kellie Jones, and Maria Jones; as well as several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his sister, Kimako Baraka (Sondra Lee Jones), and his daughter Shani Baraka, both of whom were murdered in separate incidents.

Significance

Deliberately provocative, Baraka saw literature as a means to stir an audience to anger and thus effect change in society. He explored a variety of political and artistic viewpoints over more than four decades and emerged as an uncompromising voice for social justice, offering in a prolific career of poetry, plays, essays, and narratives a striking vision that transcends race and class and endeavors to recognize the integrity and worth of every African American within the social and economic construct of white America. His most notable contributions are his brief directorship of the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem and his later work as the editor of anthologies of black literature, each expressions of a career-long campaign to encourage African American artists to engage with their racial identity. His example—unapologetic, vitriolic—offered to black America emerging from the civil rights era a significant counterpoint to the passive nonviolent resistance that marked the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Baraka challenged the value system of white America and its right to define the black experience.

Bibliography

“Amiri Baraka.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2015. Web. 22 Sept. 2015.

Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. 1984. Reprint. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997. Commemorative edition of Baraka’s provocative autobiography that explores his upbringing, assimilation into white America, and his eventual disavowal of that assimilation.

Elam, Harry Justin, Jr. Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. A rare study of Baraka’s literary work that does not examine his polarizing personality, this provocative reading of Baraka’s experimental theater pieces of the 1960’s analyzes the pivotal role of the audience and the interactive nature of the theater works.

Fox, Margalit. “Amiri Baraka, Polarizing Poet and Playwright, Dies at 79.” New York Times. New York Times, 9 Jan. 2014. Web. 22 Sept.2015.

Harris, William J., ed. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. New York: Basic Books, 1999. The best introduction to Baraka’s career; includes a helpful introduction that traces Baraka’s evolution from the Beats through black nationalism to Marxism. Includes poetry, essays, and short plays.

Reilly, Charlie, ed. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994. The best way to approach a figure so defined by his own rhetoric is to read his considerable interviews. A comprehensive collection, complete with photographs, that focuses largely on his ideas about black nationalism and the arts.

Watts, Jerry. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. Albany: New York University Press, 2001. Sweeping appraisal of Baraka’s view of the relationship between literature and political activism. Focuses primarily on Baraka’s writings during the 1960’s and early 1970s. Highly critical of Baraka as a performance artist who relied too much on apocalyptic rhetoric.