The Essays of Amiri Baraka by Amiri Baraka

First published:Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963; Home: Social Essays, 1966; Black Music, 1967; Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965, 1971; Selected Plays and Prose, 1979; Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1984; The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, 1991 (edited by William J. Harris); The Essence of Reparations, 2003

Type of work: Essays

A Poet’s Politics

Amiri Baraka achieved early recognition as a talented poet among the Beat generation writers and found early fame as a playwright with the award-winning Dutchman (pr., pb. 1964), but his essays are also of major significance. These essays are not limited to literary concerns but comment incisively on music, cultural history, politics, and economics. They are clearly the work of a poet in both their language and their conceptual approach. Baraka’s political views, although controversial, are for the most part visionary. His is a poet’s politics.

Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones on October 7, 1934, in Newark, New Jersey. After attending public schools and graduating with honors, he attended Rutgers University and Howard University. He served in the U.S. Air Force. After his discharge, he moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1958 to pursue a career as a writer. In New York, Baraka and Hettie Cohen began to publish a literary magazine titled Yugen, which soon became influential as a showcase for poets associated with the Beat generation and in avant-garde art and music circles. Baraka’s associates included poet and Museum of Modern Art curator Frank O’Hara, painter and jazz musician Larry Rivers, and Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Diane di Prima.

In the early 1960’s, Baraka’s essays on literature and political issues began appearing in the avant-garde journal Kulchur (published by art patron Lita Hornick). When collected in book form, these controversial essays reached a large and diverse audience that reacted with varying degrees of enthusiasm and alarm. The essays present Baraka’s thoughts with a challenging directness, and his style of expression is eloquently colloquial and dramatic. The essays were timely when they originally appeared and remain important for the penetrating light they shed on the period and on the literary development of the author.

Themes and Concerns

Three major themes appear consistently in Baraka’s works. First is an antagonism toward mainstream American culture that begins as an expression of personal disillusionment in poems of Baraka’s Beat generation period (1958-1964) and is later developed during his Black Nationalist (1965-1973) and Marxist (after 1974) periods into a more directly political critique. Baraka persistently views mainstream culture as shallow and hypocritical. He is even harsher in his judgment of the African American middle class.

Influenced by Howard University sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s assessment of this group in Black Bourgeoisie (1957), Baraka finds the members of this group to be intimidated and unimaginative imitators of their white counterparts. This view is expressed in poems such as “Hymn for Lanie Poo” (1961) and “Poem for Half-White College Students” (1964) as well as in many of his essays. In the discussions of the African American middle class from his later Marxist period, Baraka seems to think of its members as mendacious rather than misguided. He adopts the word comprador, a term used in the Portuguese colonies in Africa to denounce a native who actively assisted the colonial authorities.

Baraka’s second theme, complementing this attack on supporters of the status quo, is the political potential of the alienated black masses, whose members are depicted both as victims of a racist society and as inheritors of an authentic vernacular culture rooted in surviving Africanisms. This thesis is developed in Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) and “The Myth of a Negro Literature” (1962), and it reappears in many later essays.

Finally, Baraka asserts the efficacy of art to inspire social and political change. In essays such as those collected in Black Music (1967) and “The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American Literature,” written a decade later, Baraka expands this idea into a declaration that it is the artist’s duty to work toward what he variously terms “Black nation building,” “Black liberation,” or “revolution.”

Much of the controversy attending Baraka’s essays may be the result of his own suggestion that they be read as an ongoing narrative of the author’s increasingly militant race consciousness and political radicalization. The essays in Home: Social Essays (1966), pointedly arranged in chronological order, present a dramatic record of Baraka’s intellectual development, prefaced by an alarming statement: “By the time these essays appear I will be even blacker.” The book is framed by the biblical metaphor of the prodigal son, which Baraka presents as the testimony of his own repentance. “Having read all of whitie’s books,” he writes, and as the victim of a racially dichotomized society, “I wanted to be an authority on them. Having been taught that art was ’what white men did,’ I almost became one.” He feels redeemed when he discovers that, as he states in Blues People, “Culture is simply how one lives and is connected to history by habit.”

The meaning of this statement is explored in all of Baraka’s essays on literature and music. He extends this investigation into areas of politics ranging from the election of city councilmembers to global concerns. If the status of the African American is less than equal, if “the black man in America has always been expected to function as less than a man,” then Baraka offers African American art as a lever to counter this inequality. Similarly, in “The Legacy of Malcolm X, and the Coming of the Black Nation” (1965), Baraka sees the slain minister as a figure who confronted the status quo primarily through the dignified and fearless assertion of his personal manhood and his behavior as a role model for others.

Essays of the Early 1960’s

Home contains a number of eloquent and provocative essays. “Cuba Libre,” first published in Evergreen Review in 1960, is an account of Baraka’s journey to Havana, under the auspices of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, to inspect the cultural results of Fidel Castro’s revolution. With insight and humor as well as righteous indignation, Baraka reports both changes in Cuba and the emergence of his own nascent self-criticism.

“Cuba Libre” and other essays of the early 1960’s are grounded in the same critical view of middle-class America that was the impetus for the poetry of the Beat generation writers. These writers thought that the peaceful image projected during the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower masked persistent social problems and deep-seated racial resentments that erupted in full force during the 1960’s. On his visit to Cuba, Baraka became aware of the marginality of American literary protest and recognized that what the Beats thought of as social rebellion was, when compared to the political commitment of Latin American writers, rather mild. “The rebels among us,” he wrote, “have become merely people like myself who grow beards and will not participate in politics.” As a result of his experience in Cuba, Baraka’s thought and writings became more politically engaged.

In “The Myth of a Negro Literature,” Baraka writes that early African American writers were even less effective than the Beat protesters. In “A Dark Bag,” Baraka reviews several anthologies and collections of African and African American poetry and complains that

one will find poems that tell us the black man has been oppressed and generally misused, usually by the white man. Very few of these poems, however, tell us what that is like, at least very few do with even the intensity of Kipling telling us what it is like to do the oppressing, or know people that do.

Baraka redefines his own quest as both poet and critic as an attempt accurately to describe oppression from the victim’s viewpoint, with an intensity that will mobilize resistance to it.

Music Criticism

In the early 1960’s, Baraka found the intensity that was lacking in African American literature, which was hampered in expression by African American authors’ acceptance of middle-class concerns. The missing intensity was vibrantly expressed in jazz, blues, and gospel music. Black Music (1967), a compilation of magazine writings on jazz, displays Baraka’s considerable talent as an advocate of the racially conscious and artistically advanced art of musicians such as Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, and Ornette Coleman.

“Jazz and the White Critic” (1963) argues that the desire of African American intellectuals to be accepted in middle-class American society had prevented them from seriously studying the music, thereby consigning the field to misinterpretation. Baraka’s own Blues People is a major critical history that offered an innovative thesis. Blues People and Baraka’s subsequent essays on African American music explicitly interpret jazz as the product of the African American masses and as constituting a historical record of their experience as outcasts from mainstream American society. This definition of vernacular art traditions, though controversial, would have an influence on academic critics such as Addison Gayle, Jr., Stephen E. Henderson, and Houston A. Baker, Jr., in their discussions of black aesthetics and African American expressive culture during the next two decades.

Baraka argues in Blues People that the art of an oppressed people cannot take the place of freedom and cannot be discussed merely in aesthetic terms. In the place of classical aesthetics, he advocates learning how art expresses either the actual or the desired social condition of those who produce it. In this sense, although the artistic production of slaves might profoundly affect American culture, that art must still contain the protest of its creators and also reflect their vision of how society must be changed to accommodate them. Baraka attempts to identify such values in African American folk and popular music and to trace them to an older set of African survivals and an inherited style of cultural adaptation.

Black Music extends the argument into explicitly political terms and also contains one of Baraka’s most important explications of his aesthetic and political philosophy. “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music)” presents themes that appear throughout Baraka’s work in all genres. Slavery in the Americas, he contends, not only eliminated African languages but also destroyed the formal artistic traditions of the captives’ native cultures. African American music, therefore, represents a form created in lieu of the older traditions. Baraka suggests that this art form was nurtured primarily in the black church and, among the most alienated masses of African Americans, was extended into secular adaptations such as rhythm and blues.

Baraka goes on to compare rhythm-and-blues musicians to contemporary jazz artists, noting that the sophisticated, avant-garde musicians value the African American vernacular tradition more highly than the European artistic approach they have learned. Finally, Baraka attacks the way the commercial music industry coopts and exploits African American musical styles, enriching white performers and producers at the expense of the originators of the art form. The musicians themselves, he says, are very much aware of the political implications of their creativity and resent the socioeconomic situation in which they are forced to work. Baraka’s own contribution is to call for the development of a “unity music” that will combine the political and artistic advancement of avant-garde jazz musicians with the authentic African-derived traditions of popular rhythm and blues and thereby affirm the cultural values that he believes are the legacy of African American history.

In 1965, Baraka moved from Greenwich Village to Harlem and renounced his former art world associations. Along with Black Nationalist artists such as Larry Neal, Steve Kent, and Askia Muhammad Touré, he established the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. This group vigorously avowed the principle that African American art should be used in the service of political empowerment or, at the very least, consciousness raising. The school was also the unofficial flagship of a loose nationwide network of similar community-based art centers and political activist organizations. By 1970, in Newark, Baraka was deeply involved in a successful campaign to elect that city’s first African American mayor. His essays from this period often focus on literary and aesthetic issues but also reflect an increasing political engagement.

The Political Essays of the Late 1960’s and 1970’s

Raise Race Rays Raze (1971) contains essays that are essentially polemical and are so much addressed to their specific moment that they have not been collected in later editions of Baraka’s work. These essays reflect Baraka’s adoption of the Kawaida philosophy articulated by Maulana Ron Karenga, leader of the militant Los Angeles-based group US. Kawaida, described by Karenga as a black value system, is based on seven moral principles known as the Nguzo Saba and is the basis of the popular year-end holiday called Kwanzaa, which many African Americans embrace as an alternative to increasingly commercialized Christmas celebrations. Baraka’s essays of this period have a sort of religious fervor. They discuss the tactics of grassroots political organizing more often than they engage the political effects of music and poetry. Such grassroots organizing culminated in the National Black Political Convention held in Gary, Indiana, in 1972.

By the middle of the 1970’s, Baraka had abandoned Black Nationalism and electoral politics and had begun describing himself as a Third World Marxist-Leninist. The political essays included in Daggers and Javelins (1984) confront global issues and anticolonial revolutions in the developing world and are written from a perspective that Baraka admits has “all the fervor of a recent convert.” The collection’s literary essays reflect the same viewpoint and attempt to discern a revolutionary tradition in African American culture that might parallel anticolonial political struggles. Many of these pieces are relatively brief hortatory speeches, ideological lectures, or book reviews. The volume does, however, include important essays such as “The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American Literature,” “Notes on the History of African/Afro-American Culture,” and “Afro-American Literature and Class Struggle.”

“The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American Literature” covers much the same ground as Richard Wright’s “The Literature of the Negro in the United States,” from Wright’s White Man, Listen! (1957). It reiterates pejorative judgments of early writers found in Baraka’s 1962 essay “The Myth of a Negro Literature.” Baraka’s assessment, with its high regard for folk and vernacular expression, is opposed to Wright’s views. The attempt to trace an enduring left-wing political voice in African American poetry seems awkwardly forced. The style of this and other essays in the collection is a simple, almost textbook prose lacking the clever and entertaining allusiveness of Baraka’s best writing.

“Notes on the History of African/Afro-American Culture,” written for a seminar at Yale University, begins from the premise that one must understand both African and African American culture in order to understand either one. Unlike the history presented in Blues People, this essay defines culture in terms of the economic organization of societies inhabited by African people and the effects of the slave trade on these systems. Baraka’s sources here are the theoretical writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Among the most effective statements of Baraka’s own revised view of cultural history is “Afro-American Literature and Class Struggle” (1979), which applies his theories to contemporary writers as well as to those included in the African American literary canon. This essay also underscores Baraka’s unwavering belief that aesthetics cannot properly be discussed without reference to the economic structures of society that affect both the production and the appreciation of art.

From his earliest practice of poetry, influenced by Charles Olson and Robert Creeley’s assertion that “form is never more than the extension of content,” Baraka continued to see literature and art as a process of discovery and instruction. In “The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American Literature,” he chastises Harlem Renaissance writers such as James Weldon Johnson for their adherence to Eurocentric or bourgeois aesthetic concepts. Baraka prefers a “people’s art” of collective and communal participation similar to that of jazz music. Until such an art is made possible by a society that will nurture it, Baraka sees the role of the artist as oppositional both to the value system of the status quo and to those who benefit from an economic system that he believes exploits African Americans.

Work in the Twenty-First Century

In 2000, Baraka published The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. This collection of the author’s fiction collects the contents of two previous volumes, The System of Dante’s Hell (1965) and Tales (1967), as well as four short stories and the previously unpublished novel Six Persons. His fiction, like his essays, provides an unapologetic look at African American consciousness. The collection is autobiographical, in that it traces Baraka’s development from a young advocate uncertain about his role in the struggle into a conscious social critic and activist. The short fiction dates from 1958 to 1974, and all but one story in the collection portrays Baraka’s Black Nationalist ideology. The single piece that does not is Six Persons, written after he became a Black Marxist. Six Persons represents an intense look at contemporary African American culture, as well as a documentation of his ideological development.

In 2003, Baraka published The Essence of Reparations, which provides a detailed discussion of reparations for African Americans. He corrects the misconception that reparations would be a kind of paycheck, positing them instead as a means of social, political, and economic reform. Baraka outlines the oppressing and damaging history that reparations would work to reverse not only by rebuilding African American communities but also by empowering all oppressed peoples worldwide. Being true to his interpretation of Malcolm X, Baraka calls for all working-class and oppressed people to ally themselves against their common capitalist, imperialist, and white supremacist enemies.

Baraka has a remarkable Web site, where, in addition to a short biography, a book list, and visual and audio materials, he has posted full-text essays. The posted essays include the powerful “I Will Not Apologize, I Will Not Resign,” which is a response to the attacks he received on his poem “Somebody Blew Up America.” “On Teddy Harris’s Work,” “The Slavemasters’ Bloody Banner,” “A Knowers Survey,” “The Revolutionary Theatre,” and the poetic essay “Joseph to His Brothers” are also included on the official Baraka site.

Bibliography

Baraka, Amiri. Preface to Home: Social Essays. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1998. Baraka’s preface to the 1998 edition summarizes the chronological progression of the writer’s thought over the decades and situates this 1966 collection within the context of his Black Nationalist period.

Brown, Lloyd W. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A critical biography of the author.

Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage Books, 1972. Includes a review of Blues People that questions Baraka’s interpretation of African American music and culture.

Harris, William J. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. Critical study of Baraka’s ideas as reflected in his poetry.

Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Thorough discussion of Baraka as poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist. Includes an excellent bibliography.

Tate, Greg. “Growing Up in Public: Amiri Baraka Changes His Mind.” In Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Opinionated overview of Baraka’s political ideas, as reflected in his poetry and prose.

Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Massive, comprehensive examination of Baraka’s aesthetic and political work and their mutual imbrication.