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Burling Library Author Exhibit
Fall 2009
  
Amiri Baraka
American writer of poetry, drama, essays, and music criticism.
1934-
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A controversial writer who rose to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Baraka is considered a seminal figure in the development of contemporary black literature. According to some scholars, he succeeds W. E. B. Du Bois and Richard Wright as one of the most prolific and persistent critics of twentieth-century America. His works, which cover a variety of literary genres, concern the oppression of blacks in white society. He received worldwide acclaim for his first professional production, Dutchman (1964), and his subsequent work for the theater has provoked both praise and controversy. Having rejected white values and white society, Baraka strives to create art with a firm didactic purpose: to forge an African-American literature that reflects the values of the black community.
Born in 1934 as Everett LeRoy Jones in Newark, New Jersey, Baraka spent his early childhood creating comic strips and writing science fiction. At school Baraka excelled in his studies, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen. He enrolled in Howard University in 1952 and just before beginning his first year, started spelling his name LeRoi. At Howard, Baraka studied with such noted black scholars as E. Franklin Frazier, Nathan A. Scott, Jr., and Sterling A. Brown who is regarded as the patriarch of African-American literary critics. Despite these exceptional teachers, Baraka found Howard University stifling and flunked out in 1954. He then joined the United States Air Force. In 1957, after being dishonorably discharged, he moved to New York's Greenwich Village and became part of the Beat movement. That same year he married Hettie Roberta Cohen and together they founded Yugen, a magazine forum for Beat poetry. During the next few years, he also established himself as a music critic, writing about jazz for downbeat, Metronome, and the Jazz Review. Baraka first received critical acclaim as a poet, for his collection Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note. . . . , which was published in 1961. In 1960, Baraka was invited to Cuba by the New York chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Baraka began to make it his life's work to incorporate his political, social, and spiritual beliefs into his writing. No longer content with art for art's sake, Baraka would use poetry and drama to teach people, opening their eyes to reality as he saw it. Following the murder of Black Muslim leader Malcolm X in 1965, Baraka divorced his white, Jewish wife and moved to Harlem. He dissociated from white people and dedicated himself to creating works that were inspired by and spoke to the African-American community. This same year, he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem. He married Sylvia Robinson (she later changed her name to Amina Baraka), a black woman, in 1966. Around this time, Baraka's hatred of whites peaked. When a white woman asked him what whites could do to help blacks, he retorted, "You can help by dying. You are a cancer." In 1968 he converted to Islam and changed his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka, meaning "blessed spiritual leader." In 1974, in another radical shift, Baraka dropped the spiritual title of Imamu and declared himself an adherent of Marxist-Leninist thought. Rejecting Black Nationalism as racist in its implications, he now advocated socialism as a viable solution to the problems in America. He also repudiated his past anti-Semitic and anti-white statements. He concluded: "Nationalism, so-called, when it says 'all non-blacks are our enemies,' is sickness or criminality, in fact a form of fascism." In the fall of 1979, he joined the Africana Studies Department at State University of New York at Stony Brook as a teacher of creative writing. In 1979, as reported by William J. Harris in his 1985 retrospective study of Baraka and his work, "[Baraka] was arrested after two policemen allegedly attempted to intercede in a dispute between him and his wife over the price of children's shoes." While serving his sentence at a Harlem halfway house, Baraka wrote The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (1984). Since then he has written "Why's/Wise" (1985), an epic poem; The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (1987) with his wife Amina Baraka; and "Reflections" (1988), a poem published in the periodical Black Scholar.
In 1960, after reading Baraka's poem "January 1, 1959: Fidel Castro," the New York chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee offered Baraka an invitation to visit Cuba. In The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (1984), he referred to this visit as "a turning point in my life," noting, "Cuba split me open." While there he met Third World political artists and intellectuals who forced him to reconsider his art and his apolitical stance. They attacked him for being an American and labeled him a "cowardly bourgeois individualist." He tried to defend himself in "Cuba Libre" (1961), an essay reprinted in Home: Social Essays (1966), by writing: "Look, why jump on me? ... I'm in complete agreement with you. I'm a poet ... what can I do? I write, that's all, I'm not even interested in politics." Mexican poet Jaime Shelley answered him: "You want to cultivate your soul? In that ugliness you live in, you want to cultivate your soul? Well, we've got millions of starving people to feed, and that moves me enough to make poems out of." Finally, Baraka came to realize the futility of his unpolitical art and began forsaking his life as a literary bohemian to embrace black nationalism. During this transitional period he produced some of his best-known works, including an analysis of contemporary black music, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), and a second volume of poetry, The Dead Lecturer: Poems (1964).
Although Baraka wrote a number of plays during this period, Dutchman is widely considered his masterpiece; Norman Mailer , for example, acknowledged it as "the best play in America." The play received an Obie Award for best Off-Broadway play and rocketed Baraka into the public eye. Dutchman centers on a volatile encounter involving Lula, an attractive, flirtatious white woman, and Clay, a young, quiet, well-dressed black intellectual. While on a New York subway, Lula mocks and taunts Clay mercilessly for trying to act white: "You middle-class black bastard"; "You liver-lipped white man"; "You ain't no nigger, you're just a dirty white man." Clay, in a fit of rage, explodes: "I sit here in this buttoned-up suit to keep myself from cutting all your throats. If I'm a middle-class fake white man--let me be. The only thing that would cure my neurosis would be your murder." Feeling justified, Lula stabs Clay to death, and as the play ends, she calmly turns to another black man who has just entered the subway. While some critics praised Dutchman for its "power," "freshness," and "deadly wit," others were outraged by its language, its perpetuation of interracial hostility, and its portrayal of whites. Baraka countered: "Lula ... is not meant to represent white people--as some critics have thought--but America itself ... the spirit of America.... The play is about the difficulty of becoming and remaining a man in America.... Manhood--black or white--is not wanted here."
Baraka's next plays, The Slave (1964) and The Toilet (1964), also met with mixed reviews. The latter play, about a white homosexual boy who gets beaten up by a gang of black boys, was described by one reviewer as an "obscene, scatological, bloody confrontation of the races in a school lavatory." Critic C. W. E. Bigsby called it "a barely stageable homosexual fantasy in which the setting is a urinal and the theme the sexual nature of violence and the degradation of the white world." Like The Toilet, The Slave concerns the theme of racial conflict. This time it revolves around a black revolutionary leader and his discourse with his ex-wife and her husband, both of whom are white. Critics suggest that the protagonist in this play represents Baraka himself as he tried to move away from his role as a mediator between blacks and whites and towards an anti-white, pro-black stance. "The Slave," Baraka remarked, "was really the last play where I tried to balance and talk to blacks and whites.... [I] began to focus on my own identity about that time and came to the conclusion that it was the black community I must direct myself to--we've tried talking to the white society and it's useless." In 1965 Baraka divorced his white wife, deserted the white literary colony of Greenwich Village, and moved to Harlem. Completely dissociating himself from the white race, Baraka dedicated himself to creating works that were inspired by and spoke to the black community. With increasingly violent overtones, his writings called for blacks to unite and establish their own nation. Experimenting with ritual forms in his drama, he wrote Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant (1967), a recreation of the passage of slaves into America. Other works written during his black nationalist period are The System of Dante's Hell (1965), his only novel, and Tales (1967), a collection of short stories. Around this time Baraka also became more vocal about his hatred of whites; when a white woman approached him one day and asked what whites could do to help blacks, he retorted, "You can help by dying. You are a cancer." Although some people, especially his white friends, were shocked and upset over his violent outbursts, he continued to denounce all things "white." Hoping to withdraw even further, he approved of his name change in 1968 to Imamu Amiri Baraka, meaning "blessed spiritual leader." According to critic Floyd Gaffney, Baraka's marriage to black woman Sylvia Robinson in 1966 also signaled his "complete commitment to the black cause." Baraka's complex, symbolic plays Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show) (1967), Madheart: A Morality Play (1967), and Police (1968), Gaffney continued, are further examples of Baraka's new "sociopolitical consciousness."
By 1974 Baraka dropped the spiritual title Imamu, and in a dramatic reversal of his earlier nationalist stance, declared himself an adherent of Marxist-Leninist thought. Categorically rejecting black nationalism, he now advocated socialism, stating: "It is a narrow nationalism that says the white man is the enemy.... The black liberation movement in essence is a struggle for socialism." Explaining his decision to change philosophies, he told an interviewer in 1980: " ... I came to my Marxist view as a result of having struggled as a Nationalist and found certain dead ends theoretically and ideologically, as far as Nationalism was concerned, and had to reach out for a communist ideology." During his socialist period he wrote Hard Facts: Excerpts (1975), a volume of poetry, and produced the plays S-1 (1978), The Motion of History (1978), and The Sidnee Poet Heroical: In 29 Scenes (1979).
In his 1985 retrospective study of Baraka and his work, Harris observed that assessment of Baraka has fallen into two general camps: "The white response ... has been either silence or anger--and, in a few cases, sadness.... One general complaint is that Baraka has forsaken art for politics.... Another common accusation holds that Baraka used to be a good poet before he became a virulent racist. The reaction to Baraka in most of the black world has been very different from that in the white. In the black world Baraka is a famous artist. He is regarded as a father by the younger generation of poets; he is quoted in the streets--a fame almost never claimed by an American poet.... " Whatever the reaction to Baraka, no one is left unaffected by his works. People bristle at his depictions of "white America," critics assert, because he mirrors the ugly and hideous facets of American society. Called by one critic the "Malcolm X of Literature," Baraka's most important contributions may be his influence on other black writers and his "championing" of black people.
For more information visit his page at Contemporary Literary Criticism Select online...
Prepared by Matt Horowitz '10
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