Abstract
American poet and playwright Amiri Baraka in a police station, bloodied and in chains after being arrested during a riot in Newark, New Jersey on 14 July 1967. Jones had been arrested for allegedly carrying concealled weapons and was beaten while in custody; he was convicted of the crime, but the conviction was later overturned
CREDIT: Robert R. McElroy/Getty
Too often, however, his career is viewed through a series of sensationalist snapshots and out-of-context statements, reducing the history of US white supremacy to a mere background blur.
One of the architects of the Black Arts Movement that swept the USA, articulating a new sense of artistic and political self-determination, Baraka was a frequent target of state authorities.
William J Maxwell’s book, FB Eyes, provides detailed accounts of how FBI agents surveilled African-American writers through this period, acting as judges, censors, spies and de facto literary critics.
After years of such treatment, poet Ray Durem – a former member of the International Brigades later associated with the Umbra group – wrote the sarcastic epistle A Gold Watch To The FBI Man Who Has Followed Me For 25 Years.
In 1953, Paul Robeson presented to a petition to the UN entitled We Charge Genocide.
In the 1960s, as attempts were made to enlist black culture for the Cultural Cold War – state-sponsored tours by jazz musicians, CIA-fronted magazines – segregation, racial terrorism and underdevelopment continued.
Baraka’s grandfather had been driven from town having run for political office in Dothan, Alabama, and racial violence was never far from Baraka’s mind.
Growing up in Newark, New Jersey – a city with a large black population ruled by white politicians and plagued by mafia corruption – Baraka studied at Howard University before joining the air force (“error farce”), self-educating in texts from Finnegans Wake to The Communist Manifesto.
Relocating to New York, he befriended poets Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara, publishing the magazines Yūgen – with his first wife, Hettie – and The Floating Bear, with poet Diane di Prima.
Through the latter, he had his first major encounter with censorship.
In June 1961, The Floating Bear’s ninth issue published William Burroughs’s story Roosevelt After the Inauguration, a scatological attack in which Roosevelt appoints a baboon to the Supreme Court.
One of its subscribers happened to be a prison inmate, and prison censors reported the newsletter for obscenity to US postal authorities.
Baraka defended himself in court, “read[ing] all the good parts of Ulysses and Catullus aloud to the jury”.
The Floating Bear announced his acquittal with a quote from boxer Joe Louis: “Hello Ma, I Glad I Win!”
The case formed part of a rising tide challenging the repressive atmosphere of McCarthyism. Writers such as Burroughs, Ginsberg, O’Hara and John Wieners were publishing explicit queer texts at a time when homosexual acts were illegal, combining the traditions of the American left with radically open new modes of expression.
From 1962 to 1965, Ed Sanders ran Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts “Dedicated to Pacifism, Unilateral Disarmament, National Defence thru Nonviolent Resistance, Multilateral Indiscriminate Apertural Conjugation, Anarchism, World Federalism, Civil Disobedience, Obstructers & Submarine Boarders, And All Those Groped by J Edgar Hoover in the Silent Halls of Congress”, publishing Burroughs, Baraka and sexually explicit poets including Wieners and Lenore Kandel. Unsurprisingly, the authorities raided his Peace Eye Bookstore.
GINSBERG WAS PROSECUTED but acquitted at the Howl trial of 1957; Burroughs’s Naked Lunch was banned in Boston from 1962 to 1966p; and a 1964 production of Baraka’s play The Eighth Ditch was shut down by the NYPD.
Alongside these generally white writers, Baraka encountered the experimental and politically militant black poets of the Umbra Workshop, many of whom he met at the UN Building in New York in 1961 while protesting the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of the Republic of the Congo.
Umbra members, involved in the campaign for exiled self-defence advocate Robert F Williams and his comrade Mae Mallory, were themselves subject to police harassment.
Later, Umbra member Lennox Raphael was embroiled in a censorship case concerning on-stage nudity in his play Che!
Baraka’s own reputation as a poet and jazz critic, and his Obie Award-winning play Dutchman (1964), drew him further into the public eye. He was poised to become the token black writer admitted to the literary establishment every generation “as if”, he remarked, “the door to the American Dream had just swung open”.
Instead, he moved to Harlem, spearheading the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BART/S). Partially funded with government “war on poverty” money, BART/S sponsored Black Nationalist readings, concerts and classes, calling for the overthrow of the government.
Baraka’s essay The Revolutionary Theatre was commissioned but turned down by The New York Times. Published instead in the anti-imperialist magazine Liberator, it proclaimed: “This is a theatre of assault. The play that will split the heavens for us will be called The Destruction of America.”
Baraka anticipated the response, saying: “American cops will try to close the theatres where such nakedness of the human spirit is paraded.”
Sure enough, the authorities closed BART/S down. Baraka left New York as LeRoi Jones and emerged in Newark as Amiri Baraka – Swahili-ised Arabic meaning “blessed prince”.
In 1967, rumours spread that Newark police had shot dead yet another unarmed black citizen. In the subsequent unrest, Baraka drove around picking up injured people from the street, and was himself arrested, accused of weapons possession, jailed, beaten and put on trial. When a notoriously racist judge read out to the (white) jury Baraka’s poem Black People!, recently published in the Evergreen Review, substituting the swearwords with the word “blank”, Baraka pointed out the absurdity, as if he were on trial for a poem.
The 5/1980 issue of Index on Censorship, the only one in which Baraka was published.
With supporting statements from old friends including Ginsberg and from Jean-Paul Sartre, he was acquitted.
Now a national political figure, Baraka drove Kenneth Gibson’s successful campaign to become Newark’s first black mayor. But Gibson turned back on his promises, and by the mid-1970s Baraka, under the influence of African revolutionaries such as Tanzanian exile Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu and “Black Bolshevik” Harry Haywood, moved to Pan-African socialism and then to communism.
His reputation with publishers soon soured. Putnam’s had commissioned a novel with a huge advance, expecting a black Godfather. Instead, they got Baraka’s political roman-a-clef, Six Persons, which remained unpublished for decades.
For several years, publishers wouldn’t touch his play The Sidney Poet Heroical for fear of libel trials. They were likewise wary of poems with titles such as Rockefeller is Yo Vice President, and Yo Mamma Don’t Wear No Drawers; Stop Killer Cops; and The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. There were also lines such as “We’ll worship Jesus/ When Jesus do / Somethin / When Jesus blow up / the white house / or blast nixon down”.
Meanwhile, Baraka warned of the USA’s rightward turn in his 1976 play S-1, concerning “a repressive Senate Bill that would negate several of the Bill of Rights”.
In 1979, police intervened in an argument between Baraka and his wife, the poet Amina. Witnesses were intimidated, a knife was planted, Baraka was sent to jail.
HIS ARTICLE ON the incident marks the only time he appeared in Index on Censorship. An editorial note points out that even if there may be “difficulty in identifying prisoners of conscience in a country [the USA] where there is no overt political imprisonment […] it is suspected that many people may be ‘framed’ on criminal charges because of their political activity or ethnic origin”.
Baraka’s article described the “ghetto-jailhouse wipeout syndrome” – what Angela Davis would later name the “prison-industrial complex” – as “a turnstile spinning [people of colour] in and out of the slam with a relentless mindlessness”.
Sentenced to 48 consecutive weekends in a halfway house, Baraka wrote his autobiography and, following his release, continued to do cultural and political work in Newark.
He ran poetry and music sessions in his basement, attended by the great and the good of Newark’s thriving jazz scene.
A respected figure and elder statesman, he spoke at James Baldwin’s funeral alongside Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou: his influence and standing were undeniable, even as he continued to be neglected due to his politics.
Baraka wrote the poem Somebody Blew Up America in October 2001, against the build-up to the “war on terror”: indiscriminate attacks on people of colour, and the rhetorical drumbeating of Fox News and the administration of president George W Bush.
When he read the poem in 2002, after his appointment as Poet Laureate of New Jersey, the case hit national headlines.
Governor Jim McGreevey demanded his apology and resignation. Baraka refused, invoking the right to free speech. Unable to force him to quit, the state abolished the post.
Critiques of the poem were often tone-deaf, ignoring its formal and historical context. By contrast, Anthony Olszewski points out the poem’s systematic detournement of Vachel Lindsay’s racist poem The Congo for many years taught in literature departments without the blink of an eye.
Unleashing a catalogue of “the various forces of terror Afro-Americans and other oppressed people of the world have suffered: slavery, colonialism, imperialism, neo-colonialism, national oppression”, Baraka asks - to paraphrase - “who, both historically and in the continuing epoch of racial capitalism, are the real terrorists?”
He’s spot-on when he asks, “Who made Bush president / Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying”, or when he invokes the genocide of Native Americans, the persecution of US leftists (many of them Jewish), the Holocaust, the Atlantic slave trade and the afterlife of slavery.
Unfortunately, four lines pick up on 9/11 conspiracy theories suggesting an inside job of which the Israeli government had advance notice. Baraka stood by this passage, but few writers can be considered ideologically error-free, whether they admit it or not.
And whereas white writers – particularly white male writers – from Pound to Updike are let off the hook, writers of colour such as Baraka are singled out.
Schools and states across America have censored texts by black writers from Richard Wright to Alice Childress. And despite the marketing uptick of black culture following the George Floyd rebellion last year, black culture is still routinely ignored or denounced by white commentators.
Baraka’s earlier work of the 1960s contains misogynist, antisemitic and homophobic statements.
He was the first to admit this, and was sometimes his own harshest critic, as his essay Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite and autobiography reveal.
Criticised for misogyny and homophobia by black activists such as Angela Davis and Cheryl Clarke, Baraka listened and changed.
Both Baraka’s sister, Kimako, in the 1980s, and his daughter Shani, in the early 2000s, were murdered in homophobic attacks.
In a moving open letter, he condemned “not only the actual ignorant negro, homophobic, male-chauvinist, black-woman-hating murderer, as a person, but as an idea, a philosophy, an ideology, roaming though so many minds”.
Baraka’s writing is undeniably and deliberately abrasive. It had to be.
So too is the work of June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni. Jordan’s Poem About Police Violence asks:
Tell me something
what you think would happen
if everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop
you think the accident rate would
lower subsequently?
It’s a rhetorical question, and an unanswerable one: unanswerable, that is, within discourse that explains away the daily violence undergirding racial capitalism.
By reversing the rhetoric that enables killer-cops, vigilantes and domestic abusers to walk free, Jordan forces a conversation.
Readers may react with horror to the idea of revenge killing, but what of the horror at the fact that such murders happen in the first place?
Focusing on the rhetorical violence of Black Arts Movement writing – say, a poem’s imagined influence on “rioters” (itself a racist stereotype) as invoked in Baraka’s 1967 trial – lets white supremacy off the hook.
On being told by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly that he was a “dangerous man”, Baraka responded: “You’re more dangerous – you have a TV show.”
Throughout his life, Baraka forced the question of what it means when the freedom of speech of some is enshrined without thought, while others are continually silenced.
He spoke out against the silencing of dissidents from South Africa to South Korea, and against the continuing legacy of imperialism, Dixie and the KKK. The latest specimen of this was Donald Trump, whose presidency he didn’t live to see but about which he would not have been surprised.
One of his last poems, What’s That Who Is This In Them Old Nazi Clothes? Nazi’s Dead, ends:
This new anti-fascist war we must fight, against the rule of The corpses. The corporate dictatorship forming in front of Our eyes. It can no longer surprise. Get your pitch forks ready.
Strike Hard and True. You get them or they get you.
We ignore Baraka’s legacy at our peril.