AS AN ADVOCATE of the Black Aesthetic / Black Arts movement, Jones/Baraka was quite prolific. It was during this period that he produced much of his work. The plays that he wrote during this period included Jello (1965), A Black Mass (1965), Experimental Death Unit #1 (1965), Madheart (1966), Slave Ship (1967), Great Goodness of Life (1966), Home on the Range (1966), The Death of Malcolm X (1966), Arm Yourself or Harm Yourself (1967), and Police (1967). A novel, The System of Dante’s Hell, was published in 1965. Tales, a collection of short stories, appeared two years later. Baraka also published several collections of poetry: Black Magic Poetry (1969), It’s Nation Time (1970), Spirit Reach (1972), and African Revolution (1973). He coauthored with the photographer Fundi a photo-essay, In Our Terribleness (1970). And with Larry Neal, he edited an anthology of Afro-American writing, Black Fire (1968), which became one of the seminal texts of the Black Arts movement, rivaled, I suspect, only by Addison Gayle’s collection The Black Aesthetic (1971), Stephen Henderson’s Understanding the New Black Poetry (1972), and Baraka’s earlier essay collection, Home (1966). African Congress (1972), which Baraka edited, contains the speeches and proceedings of a Pan-Africanist conference held in Atlanta in 1970. Finally, a second collection of social-political essays, Raise Race Rays Raze, was published in 1971.
During the height of the Black Arts movement, Baraka also was busy as the titular head of the movement. Besides creating institutions in Harlem and, later, Newark, Baraka traveled throughout the nation giving lectures and readings. He was a particularly popular speaker at colleges. On one occasion during school year 1968/69, Jones was invited by the University of Pennsylvania’s Society of African and Afro-American Students to give a lecture to open “Black Week” on the campus. In agreeing to the campus visit, Baraka demanded that the audience for his talk be racially segregated. Black students and other blacks would be seated in the balcony. White students could sit elsewhere. Jones also stipulated that he not be required to interact with whites face-to-face while on campus. Whites also were to be excluded from the stage when he spoke. While Jones’s theatrics were moronic, black militancy on campuses was such that a major Ivy League university complied with his demands.1
The various stipulations that accompanied the Imamu’s appearance were indicative of the petty irrationalisms that marked the black separatism of the late 1960s. The irrationality of mandating a black campus escort seems even humorous today. Are we to assume that the Imamu did not book seats on planes flown by white pilots or serviced by white flight attendants? Did he drink water cleaned by plants in which whites worked? Where did this behavioral attempt to divorce himself from all interactions with whites end? These black separatist antics were impotent campaigns to exert symbolic control over his life. By forcing various white institutions to agree to his conditions, Baraka may have momentarily felt that he was forcing whites to obey his commands. But by acting in a manner that supposedly indicated his disdain for whites, Baraka was actually exhibiting the limitations and impracticality of black separatism.
Baraka was an inspired performance artist. The excitement generated by his lectures and poetry readings was legendary. Insofar as he and other Black Arts artists privileged orality, the performance of poetry was one component of a broader strategy to reach a black mass audience. In her autobiography, poet Gwendolyn Brooks recalls the uproar generated by Baraka’s arrival at the Second Black Writers Conference at Fisk University in 1967. On one evening, Brooks was in the audience when Baraka performed “Black People,” the poem that had been wrongfully used against him at his trial following the Newark riots. The poem’s highly cathartic, violent imagery not only angered the judiciary but on occasion excited black listeners beyond the point of reason. Part of the poem reads:
you cant steal nothin from a white man, he’s already stole it he owes you anything you want, even his life. All the stores will open if you will say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall motherfucker this is a stick up! . . . We must make our own World, man, our own world, and we can not do this unless the white man is dead. Let’s get together and kill him my man.2
On that evening at Fisk, even the usually reserved Brooks succumbed to Baraka’s charismatic presence:
I was sitting beside a youngish white fellow. He had been very quiet. But when Baraka said at one point, “Up against the wall!” this man jumped to his feet and said “Yeah, yeah, kill ’em!” And here he was, ordering his own execution. That’s how electrified the atmosphere was. “Kill ’em all!” he said.3
In her own excitement, Brooks forgot that the white fellow knew that there would be no execution. I suspect that the young man’s ability to enter the poem vicariously on the “other side” was a testament to his imagination and Baraka’s talent. But someone should inform Brooks that the young man could not order his own execution if there was no executioner. Baraka was merely writing about being an executioner and writing precisely to and for those blacks who would never act. They knew this as well as Baraka did, thus Baraka’s cathartic appeal and vicarious power. The joke was on Brooks, for the white fellow knew that this was harmless catharsis. What else was there to do but join the fun?
The performance of poetry and the centrality of orality were thought to have had roots in indigenous black American and African cultures. The model for such performances was supposedly the unassimilated, “gut-bucket” black preacher who excelled in exhorting his congregation to fever pitch by using a “call and response” device.4 The ideal black audience was one whose spontaneous comments showed that the speaker had connected with them. The call and response device may have been distinctly black, but Baraka had been publicly performing his poetry since his days in Beat bohemia.5 Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Bob Kaufman were known for their theatrical poetry readings. According to Lorenzo Thomas, Ginsberg’s first public reading of “Howl,” at a San Francisco club in 1955, led Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth to respond, “What happened in San Francisco first and spread from there across the world was public poetry, the return of a tribal, preliterate relationship between poet and audience.”6 Rexroth’s assessment resembles the commentaries on Black Arts poetry readings. Baraka’s performance poetry thus cannot be traced solely to indigenous black American cultural practices. Nevertheless, one had to hear Baraka in order to experience the Imamu.
In 1969, Baraka’s Black Magic Poetry: 1961–1967 was published. It was his most extensive collection of poetry and consisted of three separate poetry collections: Sabotage (1961–1963), Target Study (1963–1965), and Black Art (1965–1966). Appearing during the height of the Black Arts movement, Black Magic Poetry contains many of Baraka’s most widely read and quoted poems. Many of the poems in Sabotage and Target Study had been published before Black Magic Poetry came out. By choosing to publish and republish these earlier poems in a single volume, Jones wants us to read the poems in Black Magic Poetry as a record of his progression from an entrapment in whiteness to an identification with blackness. The first two subdivisions of Black Magic Poetry document Jones’s outsider status in bohemia and his movement toward a racially assertive poetics. The final subdivision, Black Art, is a testimony to Jones’s arrival at a black nationalist sensibility. In chronicling his ideological shifts, the poems in Black Magic Poetry are equivalent to the nonfiction essays in Home.
Why would Baraka choose to publish Sabotage and Target Study in a 1969 collection, particularly in light of his admission that these earlier poems were examples of his former attachment to a dying and destructive white ethos? Maybe he had a contractual arrangement with Bobbs-Merrill to publish these earlier collections. Or perhaps his contract called for the publication of a collection larger than his Black Arts poetry alone would have been. It seems more likely, however, that Baraka was enamored with his own ideological development and wanted to make it clear to his readers, particularly those new to his work, that he had undergone a dramatic intellectual change. It was as if in admitting and displaying his former allegiance to a “white aesthetic,” Baraka could now be a more honest and committed black nationalist. Furthermore, he used the earlier poems in Sabotage and Target Study to buttress a hidden narrative in Black Magic Poetry in which his earlier selves contained the seeds of his present, hyperblack self. In so doing, he could show his nationalist skeptics that he had never quite been “at home” in white bohemia. Baraka skillfully diverted the reader’s attention from the earlier poems and directed it instead to the poet. Previous poetic incarnations of LeRoi Jones were useful, but only to the extent that they illuminated his current identity.
Black Art, the last subsection of Black Magic Poetry, explicitly conveys the political implications of Baraka’s Black Arts era poetry. “SOS,” the first poem, is a rallying call for black people to join the nationalist struggle and was widely read at public events:
Calling black people
Calling all black people, man woman child
Wherever you are, calling you, urgent, come in
Black People, come in, wherever you are, urgent, calling
you, calling all black people
calling all black people, come in, black people, come
on in.7
The collection also hints at the death and destruction of all white people. “Black Art,” the poem from which the subtitle of the collection’s last subdivision is derived, is one of Baraka’s most widely recognized poems. In “Attention Attention,” Baraka intensifies his appeal for black engagement. But now, instead of poems that kill, Baraka pleads for blacks who are willing to kill whites. Worse, he advocates genocide against whites:
Attention Attention
Attention Attention
All greys must be terminated immediately
Project cutoff date moved up Fifty Years
End of species must be assured. (Repeat)
End of species must be assured.8
In the poem “The Deadly Eyes are Stars!” Baraka lambastes the narcissism of the “white man” who is “in love with him self, at everybody else’s expense.” He concludes the poem in demagogic fashion:
. . . Why don’t
somebody kill the motherfucker? Why don’t somebody jam his head
in his own shit? Why are all you chumps standing around
doing nothing? Letting this creep tapdance on your dreams.9
Among these “death-to-white-people” poems are his various anti-Semitic tracts such as “For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet”:
. . . Smile jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew. I got
something for you . . .
. . . I got the extermination blues jewboys. I got
the hitler syndrome figured . . .
So come for the rent, jewboys, or come ask me for a book, or
sit in the courts handing down yr judgments, still I got something
for you, gonna give it to my brothers, so they’ll know what your whole
story is, then one day, jewboys, we all, even my wig wearing mother
gonna put it on you all at once.10
Baraka’s “For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet” is so morally perverted that it is difficult to accept it as serious poetry. It reveals the degree to which Baraka’s hatred of whites and specifically Jews had overwhelmed his ability to focus on blacks’ freedom struggle. Furthermore, if he was so immersed in anti-Semitism to state publicly that he had the “extermination blues”—his consciousness so entrapped in a desire for revenge—he could not have possibly projected an emancipatory vision for black people.
Baraka continues his anti-Semitic attack on Jews in the poem “The Black Man Is Making New Gods.” It contains another obscene trivialization of the Holocaust:
Atheist jews double crossers stole our secrets crossed
the white desert white to spill them and
turn into wops and bulgarians
The Fag’s Death
they give us on a cross. To Worship. Our dead selves
in disguise. They give us
to worship
a dead jew
and not ourselves
chained to the bounties
of inhuman
mad chains of
dead jews
and their wishes
and their escape
with our power
with our secrets and knowledge
they turn into loud signs
advertising empty factories
the empty jew
betrays us, as he does
hanging stupidly
from a cross, in an oven, the pantomime
of our torture,
so clearly, cinemascope the jews do it
big, hail the whiteness of their
waking up unhip
now
. . . the little arty
bastards talking arithmetic they sucked from the arab’s
head
Suck your pricks. The best is yet to come. On how
we beat you
and killed you
and tied you up.
And marked this specimen
“Dangerous Germ
Culture,” And put you back
in a cold box.11
A blasphemous and demonic poem, Baraka accuses Jews of having stolen knowledge from Africa (“arithmetic sucked from the arab’s head”) and transporting it to Europe (“crossed the white desert”) where they became white (i.e., “wops and bulgarians”) and claimed the stolen knowledge as their own. Jesus is referred to as both the “fag” and “the dead jew” who, other Jews have falsely convinced us, was God. Baraka argues that Jesus was essentially a Jewish scam on Christians. Why he absolves Christianity of the responsibility for creating Jesus is somewhat baffling. Baraka’s anti-Semitism reverses traditional anti-Semitic Christian narratives. Instead of condemning Jews because they did not accept Jesus as the Messiah, Baraka condemns them for tricking the world into falsely accepting him. All along, Jews presumably knew that such claims were nonsense. What makes the poem utterly despicable is Baraka’s claim that “the empty jew / betrays us, as he does / hanging stupidly / from a cross, in an oven, the pantomime / of our torture”(my italics). On what basis could the murder of Jews in Nazi ovens be considered “the pantomime of our torture”? The indecency of bringing up images of Auschwitz is superseded only by his embrace of the Nazi genocidal image of Jews as a people who embody a “dangerous germ culture.”
Baraka’s racial essentialism that led him to view blacks as morally superior to innately evil whites permeates this collection. Everything whites create or casually touch is spoiled by their evil nature. In “A School of Prayer,” Baraka writes
. . . We are all beautiful (except white
people, they are full of, and made of
shit)
Do Not obey their laws
which we are against God
believe brother, do not
ever think any of that
cold shit they say is
true . . .
. . . Their “laws”
are filthy evil, against
almighty God . . .
. . . they are against
beauty.12
This detestable characterization of all things white is pathetic. Undoubtedly, Baraka perceived it as a valid criticism of Western culture and whites. But paradoxically, the infantile and overblown condemnation of whites undermines the credibility of the juxtaposition of praise that he lavishes on blacks.
In the autobiographical meditation “leroy,” Baraka provides a metaphorical will for the dispersal of his spiritual assets following his death. He describes his consciousness as part black and part white, racial designations for the moral and immoral aspects of his being. “When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to black people. May they pick me apart and take the useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave the bitter bullshit rotten white parts alone.”13
The collection also contains numerous poems that criticize and revile blacks deemed to be racially obsequious to white America. In “cops,” Baraka ridicules by name his former Newark playmates who now were on the Newark police force:
Bowleg Otis played football but was always a prick
he made detective by arresting a dude he knew all his life,
he waited in the cold counting white folks’ smiles . . .
. . . Leon parkd in front of the city hospital
bullshitting, but he’d split yr head. He was a bad catcher w/
Baxter Terrace, you slide home head first you get messed up
strong as a bitch . . .
. . . you wanna stand in front of a bar, with a gun
pointed at you? You wanna try to remember why you liked somebody
while the bullet comes. Shit14
As a black nationalist, Baraka must have felt betrayed by blacks who willingly did the bidding of the corrupt and racist white power brokers in Newark. Yet he knows that his nostalgia for the days when he played sports with these guys cannot be allowed to make him forget that his friends are now cops.
Black flunkies of the racist power structure were not confined to the ranks of the police department. In “Civil Rights Poem,” Baraka berates the head of the national NAACP, Roy Wilkins. Because of his passive demeanor and desire to be inoffensive to whites, Wilkins was a favorite whipping boy of the 1960s black nationalists.
Roywilkins is an eternal faggot
His spirit is a faggot
his projection
and image, this is
to say, that if i ever see roywilkins
on the sidewalks
imonna
stick half my sandal
up his
ass15
During this era when heterosexual machismo was thought to be synonymous with the revolutionary male ethos, no image could have better captured the idea of an obsequious racial weakling than that of the “faggot.” Such slurs as “faggot” were common in the black nationalist community. They not only embraced a homophobic stereotype but also conveyed an aggressive dislike for gay men.
The collection also contains the requisite poetry-of-praise to black womanhood, “Beautiful Black Women”:
Beautiful black women, fail, they act. Stop them, raining.
they are so beautiful, we want them with us. Stop them, raining.
Beautiful, stop raining, they fail. We fail them and their lips
stick out perpetually, at our weakness . . .
. . . Ladies. women. We need you. We are still
trapped and weak, but we build and grow heavy with our knowledge. Women
come to us. Help us get back what was always ours. Help us, women. Where
are you, women, where, and who, and where, and who, and will you help
us, will you open your bodysouls, will you lift me up mother, will you
let me help you, daughter, wife/lover, will you16
To call this poem trite would be to point out the obvious. Yet such poems flourished during the Black Arts era. Nothing was considered more indicative of a revolutionary black male’s commitment to black people than his publicly professed reverence for black women.
Although Baraka’s poems in Black Art are formulaic harangues against whites and whiteness and celebratory invocations of parochial blackness, they are, by and large, the best poems that Baraka wrote as a black cultural nationalist. What remains striking about his Black Arts verse is that it is overwhelmed by a turgid and all-pervasive ideology. Baraka no longer manifests the ambiguities that made much of his earlier poetry so engaging. Indeed, Black Art would have benefited from the self-interrogation central to Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note and The Dead Lecturer. Certainly there was nothing intrinsic to black nationalist politics that made identity angst obsolete. In Baraka’s mind, though, his religious-like devotion to a doctrinaire black nationalism resolved the contradictions in the two-ness of black identity. The black identity paradoxes that had once fueled his creativity were now deemed politically inappropriate, and as a result, his poetry was severely diminished.
Though published in 1967, Tales consisted of short stories that had been previously published between the early and middle 1960s. Topically, the collection chronicles Jones’s evolution from Beat bohemian to black nationalist. Yet, most of the stories center around the identity ambivalences, angsts and alienations of Jones, a thematic unity that was reminiscent of his bohemian writings. Critics vary widely on their assessments of the artistic value of Tales, particularly Jones’s attempt to experiment with form. Whether it is “The Alternative” (a description of the bourgeois mindlessness and homoerotic voyeurism of Howard University students), “Going Down Slow” (the hypocritical response of Jones to one of Hettie’s affairs), “The Death of Horatio Alger” (a verbally adept young man’s inability to physically defend himself against a less verbally adept young man), or “The Salute” (an incident describing the mindless deference of military practices), these short stories appear to be little more than descriptions of events. Tales is far less political than Jones’s poetry and other fictional writings and thus is of lesser concern to this study.
During the early 1970s, Baraka published two collections of poetry, It’s Nation Time and Spirit Reach, as well as In Our Terribleness, a coauthored photo-essay that also contained poetry. Consisting of three poems, It’s Nation Time was only twenty-four pages long. Its title comes from a popular refrain heard throughout black urban America during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For example, a politicized and/or somewhat hip black person might end an informal street conversation with a “black handshake” and the rhetorical question “What time is it?” whereupon the other conversant would respond, “It’s nation time.”17 The refrain was also part of the routine for black nationalist political speakers. They would often exhort the crowd to fever pitch with the chant “What time is it?” and the crowd would roar, “It’s nation time.” Jesse Jackson used in this particular call and response device at the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana. The invocation of nation referred to a black nation of unified blacks and contained an assertion of black agency.
The first poem in It’s Nation Time, “The Nation Is Like Ourselves,” is both a description of the mental afflictions that keep blacks from being able to construct a unified nation and a plea to these wayward Negroes to “get their act together.” The poem begins as a matter-of-fact statement about our social and political reality. We—that is, black people—are no better or worse than we make ourselves out to be.
The nation is like our selves, together
seen in our various scenes, set where ever we are
what ever we are doing, is what the nation
is
doing
or
not doing
is what the nation
is
being
or
not being18
Following this mundane statement of the choices facing black people, Baraka begins to berate those blacks who are not participating in the struggle for a black nation. Clearly, he believes that too many blacks are “not doing” and “not being” and mocks them by referring to them as niggers. It is no accident that he singles out black professionals for criticism.
doctor nigger, please do some somethin on me
lawyer nigger, please pass some laws about us.19
Baraka’s disdain for his black contemporaries who were part of the counterculture movement with its emphasis on drugs, bell-bottom pants, “free love,” and indifference to racial identity is evident. Blacks like the singer Sly Stone were probably foremost in Baraka’s image of misguided counterculture blacks:
please mister liberated nigger love chil nigger
nigger in a bellbottom bell some psychodelic wayoutness
on YO People, even while you freeing The People, please
just first free YO people, ol marijuana jesus I dug your last
record
Even bourgeois black writers are not spared criticism.
if the rastafarians don’t kill you please mr vacationing writer
man
write some heavy justice
about black people
we waiting
we starved for your realness
you are our nation sick ass assimilado
please come back
like james brown say
please please please20
After pleading with those Negroes who have used various strategies to avoid confronting their collective plight in racist America, Baraka ends the poem on a funny note by invoking the lyrics of “Please, Please, Please,” a hit song by James Brown. The poem can easily be imagined as eliciting laughter and excitement from an audience of black college students.
None of the three poems in It’s Nation Time is impressive. The redundancy and tendentiousness of the themes make it appear as if Baraka had run out of ideas. Note the following trite lines from “Sermon for Our Maturity”:
you need to get better uh
you need to experience better times Negro
We love you negro Love you betta
if you got betta
Love yrself betta
if you got betta.
You can dance Nigger I know it
Dance on to freedom
You can sing Nigger sing
Sing about your pure movement21
The final poem in It’s Nation Time resembles the first poem in the collection, “The Nation Is Like Ourselves”:
when the brothers strike niggers come out
come out niggers
when the brothers take over the school
help niggers
come out niggers
all niggers negroes must change up
come together in unity unity
for nation time
it’s nation time22
Baraka may have done himself a disservice in trying to force his strong polemical impulses into a poetic form. His didactic intentions overwhelm his artistic sensibilities and make the poetry abysmal.
In 1972, Spirit Reach was published by Baraka’s own Jihad Press. Its poems resemble those in Black Art. For instance, in “Deranged Gutbucket Pigtongue Clapper Heart,” Baraka offers his usual admonishments to Negroes who seem too closely wedded to white folks:
cracker you may be wood
and fire is what you need
to change your wooden ways
nigger you might be fire
and need to burn some wood
to live real bright and strong
like you should . . .
but
maybe
may be you wood too-nigger slick butt
turned around blonde twist on yo ass
and here you are bein
wood
steada something
good. Well you get burned too
or if you fire and wont burn wood you might just
burn yourself23
Using the word wood, as in peckerwood, to refer to whites, Baraka rephrases one of his overused Black Arts themes.24 Perhaps the distinctive element of Spirit Reach that is not present in his other Black Arts poetry collections is Baraka’s presentation of himself as someone who has integrated higher spiritualism into black nationalism. In the poem “Study Peace,” Baraka tells us why he is the Imamu.
Out of the shadow. I am come in to you whole a black holy man
whole of heaven in my hand in my head look out two yeas to ice
what does not belong in the universe of humanity and love. I am
the black magician you have heard of, you knew was on you in you
now25
In the poem “All in the Street,” he also alludes to his higher moral consciousness. Now he has become a medium through which Allah speaks.
Listen to the creator speak in me now. Listen, these words
are part of God’s thing. I am a
vessel, a black priest interpreting
the present and future for my people
Olorun- Allah speaks in and
thru me now. . . . He begs me to pray for you—as I am doing—He
bids me have you submit to the energy.26
It is astonishing that Baraka tried to use verse to legitimate his leadership status in the black community. Perhaps he really did believe that he had reached a higher form of wisdom that was inaccessible to most. But even if he did believe this, it is difficult to understand why he thought that conveying this in his poetry would have been convincing. We can only wonder why such poetic proclamations were not viewed as the bombast of an ego-maniacal writer. Baraka’s concern for aesthetic innovation was hampered by his belief that he was a bearer of superior wisdom. Any writer who is intimately conversant with God need not trifle with mundane concerns like poetic craft.
In 1970, Baraka’s In Our Terribleness was published, a text that defies easy description. It is not, strictly speaking, a collection of poetry. Instead, it is a mixture of poetry, polemic, photography, and prose. The book was jointly created with Fundi (Billy Abernathy), a photographer. Baraka’s textual partnership with Fundi’s photography is somewhat reminiscent of the partnership between Langston Hughes and photographer Roy DeCarava that gave birth to Sweet Flypaper of Life.
In Our Terribleness takes its title from the reversals in word meaning often found in urban black American idioms. In such a reversal, a fat person might be referred to as “slim” or “tiny.” Likewise, the term bad has come to denote something good or positive. To refer to someone who is better than good or something that is stronger than positive, one might borrow James Brown’s strategy and use the term superbad. In much the same way, Baraka accentuates bad by invoking the term terrible.
Since there is a “good” we know is bullshit, corny as Lawrence
Welk On Venus, we will not be that hominy shit. We will be,
definitely, bad, bad, as a mother-fucker..
To be bad is one level
But to be terrible, is to be
badder dan nat27
In Our Terribleness was an apt name for a photo-essay book celebrating black urban life during the late 1960s and early 1970s. After the title page is a single page of aluminum paper with a cardboard backing. In the middle of this aluminum page is the phrase “in our terribleness.” This aluminum page is supposed to function as a mirror for readers, presumably black, to see themselves and recognize their own “terribleness.”
Fundi’s photographs are quite forceful. He was able to capture moods and situations in black urban life without sentimentalizing them. The black-and-white film offers a starkness to the backgrounds and landscapes of the photographs. Unfortunately, Baraka’s accompanying texts too often get stuck in sentimentalism and romanticism. He is so adamant about celebrating black urban life that he attributes profound meanings to every gesture and scene captured in the photographs. For instance, a photograph of a black man at work who has a toothpick in his mouth inspired Baraka to write:
Like this blood with the tooth pick. . . . Transformed
wood. A wand. Transmutation. The dumb wood now
vibrating at a higher rate. With the blood. His
mouth wand. The toothpick of the blood is his
casual swagger stick. Sho is hip . . .
As was the male practice during the era of Black Power, black women are referred to as fine, beautiful, strong, and loving. Accordingly, below a photograph of a black woman, Baraka writes, “Hey, man, look at this woman. She is fine. Fine. I cant say nothing else. We need to give her something.” Written alongside another portrait of a “sister,” Baraka’s platitudes become far more expansive: “I love you black perfect woman. Your spirit will rule the twenty first century. That is why we ourselves speed to grace.” His professed love of black woman should be interpreted as neither an affirmation of her gender equality nor an indication of respect for her intrinsic value as a human being. Rather, Baraka could see black women only through a hypersexist, black male heterosexual gaze. His Kawaidan philosophy of life endorsed the black male domination of black women. He thus deems a group portrait of female members of the Nation of Islam a “pure image of the black woman.” Not surprisingly, this “pure image” is an image of submissiveness. On the page following this photograph, he declares that black women as well as black children must be taught by black men, who must teach themselves. Beautiful but brain-dead, worshiped but denigrated, black women await guidance from real black men who, presumably, might resemble the Imamu.
In In Our Terribleness, Baraka’s poetry and prose are sometimes comical, usually overstated, and always doctrinaire in their advocacy of Kawaida. The text is replete with mysticism and symbolic invocations of the black man’s unique and potentially unique relationship to God. In Our Terribleness strives to be a spiritual text. Insofar as it is too celebratory of the commonplace in black life, it may have been incapable of elevating the consciousness of blacks beyond the confines of their actual lives.
It’s Nation Time, Spirit Reach, and In Our Terribleness are sometimes referred to as minor collections, and many literary critics and scholarly students of Baraka have chosen not to analyze them. Or they are described as collections of poems that were supposed to be performed. I do not doubt the theatricality of Baraka’s performance when reading such poems. But should we expect less from those poems intended for the so-called average blood than those poems written for whites in the Village? Is poetry that was written to be performed intrinsically more hackneyed than poetry written on a printed page to be read? Baraka’s Black Arts poetry is frequently so aesthetically uninspiring that it sometimes appears to be a parody of “poetry for the masses.” It was as if he did everything in his power to expose blacks to his worst poetry while claiming that such banal verse was nourishment for black minds intent on liberation. If black liberation included the ability to think critically and reflectively, Baraka’s poetry for the black masses can only be construed as antithetical to the black freedom struggle. My hunch is that Baraka typically performed these poems before audiences of black activists or black college students, all of whom participated in his vicarious construction of the “average blood” as being one mental stage removed from that of an idiot.
In 1969, at the height of his involvement with Karenga, Baraka wrote the extended essay “7 Principles of US: Maulana Karenga & the Need for a Black Value System” in which he presented Karenga’s doctrine of Kawaida.28 The essay was issued as a pamphlet which subsequently received widespread circulation in black nationalist circles, including large numbers of black college students.29 In 1972, Third World Press published Baraka’s collection of essays, entitled Kawaida Studies: The New Nationalism, which included “7 Principles” and five other essays. A year earlier, five of these six essays (including “7 Principles”) were included with numerous others in his Random House essay collection, Raise Race Rays Raze.
The initial essay in this collection describes the scene inside a Newark municipal courtroom in 1966. Entitled “Newark Courthouse–’66: Wreck: (Nigger Rec Room),” the essay is an informal courtroom ethnography. As an observer, Baraka was able to describe graphically the social interactions among the arresting police; Narol, the white judge; the accused blacks; and their white lawyers. He imagined the Newark courtroom as a microcosm of the racial divide in the United States. What makes the essay compelling is Baraka’s ability to maintain a stoic, matter-of-fact, understated tone when describing the absurd racist humiliations and punishments routinely visited on the blacks accused by a legal system that gave racist judges and police the power to dispense “justice.”
Early in the essay, Baraka informs us that he was in the courtroom because he had been arrested the previous night because he dared to ask two Newark policemen why they had stopped and arrested his two friends who were, at the time, driving to the store in Baraka’s car. The cops claimed that the two men looked suspicious. That is, two black men riding in a car were arrested because they were two black men riding in a car. In black urban parlance, they were guilty of DWB—“driving while black.” Simply for asking why his friends were arrested, Baraka was also taken into custody and charged with “disturbing the peace.” Such wanton acts of arbitrary repression by white police have long been the norm in black inner-city neighborhoods. Anyone who has visited municipal courtrooms in any large American city can testify that the charge of “disturbing the peace” is frequently invoked to legitimate the arrest of blacks who have committed no crime. “Resisting arrest” is another charge often similarly used.
Using the ludicrousness of his arrest as a backdrop, Baraka comments on a litany of cases that he witnesses while waiting for his case to be called. One black man has been arrested for getting into an argument while waiting at a bus stop. The black man claims that while “minding his own business,” a cop approached him and started “talking rough.” He responded in similar fashion. The white arresting cop testifies that he approached the man because he looked suspicious. The judge dismissed the case but told the black man to “watch who you’re talking to.” There was no admonishment of the arresting white cop. Next Baraka describes the perfunctory “trials” of two different black men, each of whom, while drunk, had fallen asleep in the Newark railroad station. Both men were quickly sentenced to fifteen days in jail. Two weeks earlier, Baraka had watched the same judge presiding over the trial of another black man. When this black fellow mistakenly thought that the proceedings were over, the judge, with obvious disdain, stated, “What, you’re a wise guy” and then sentenced him to ten days in jail for the misunderstanding.
Baraka’s scorn is also aimed at a black husband and wife who enter the courtroom because of her complaint of domestic violence. He surmises that the white judge and the other white court officials are amused by the spectacle of black-on-black marital discord. Angered at the public display of this “ethnic” dirty linen, Baraka is unable to recognize the gender implications of domestic violence and the court’s trivialization of such complaints. Instead, he perceives only racial self-degradation and thus equates the attacking male with the attacked female. The most dramatic episode in Baraka’s reportage is a black “33 year old nigger boy name Julius” who was accused of violating his parole. Julius was quickly led in and out of the courtroom as the judge, without ever looking up at the human being standing before him, sentenced him to six months in jail. This mechanical dispensation of justice is perhaps the best example of the routinized injustice confronting black people. Judge Narol has no respect for any of the accused blacks and even patronizingly asks one sixty-year-old black man, “You gonna be a good boy?”
The essay highlights a wretched reality of urban life for blacks. But Baraka’s writing is irritating, for in his attempt to describe the legal system’s contempt for blacks, he routinely uses ethnic slurs in his descriptions of various white authority figures.
9:45 Judge jew is still not in. The few cops in the mostly empty court sit smoking. The youngest, the black haired ginnie-stereotype (too punkish to be Mafioso . . . smokes a long prestige cigar . . .
Redfaced Oirishmens & swarthy Italians make up the bulk of the force.
Jewish lawyers come in. (Still connected to us by that desert experience; they follow niggers with wet sucking nozzles stuck in the niggers’ throats. The jews love us so.)30
Baraka’s spits rhetorical venom at Newark’s finest, regarding them as the scum of the earth and referring to them as “debased lower animals who think themselves God.” His feelings about racist Italian American and Irish American cops is understandable. After all, antiblack racism was the norm for the overwhelmingly white Newark police force. White supremacists in uniform were allowed to roam the streets with the legal right to determine life and death for any black they chose to stop. Thus they patrolled knowing that the legal system existed to defend their actions against black people, even if they included murder.
Baraka’s willingness to employ ethnic slurs is troubling despite his justifiable anger at the white racist police. The Irish cops are depicted as drunkards with red noses. Italian American cops are always potential mafioso. Worse, Newark policemen of Italian American ancestry are referred to as ginnie cops and wopcops. This use of ethnic slurs may stem from Baraka’s own sense of powerlessness in the face of the real power of these white police. But instead of confronting them in real life, he calls them wopcops on the printed page and in this way shows his contempt for them. Perhaps he believes that he is demeaning them in a way similar to their demeaning treatment of him and other blacks. Nonetheless, ethnic aspersions directed toward Italian American cops and Jewish lawyers do not mitigate Black Powerlessness.
In addition, Baraka violates an implicit ethic when he uses ethnic slurs against even racist whites. Such words are offensive because they are intended to deny or diminish the humanity of others. Why would Baraka want to use words that carry historical memories of the subjugation of other peoples? In denying white police their humanity, Baraka simplifies the world in order to reinforce his Manichaean racial categories.
As the title suggests, the essay “Work-Notes–1966” is about what black communities must do if they are ever going to be able to wage a viable struggle for freedom. Baraka believes that even the necessity of having to work for white men in order to earn a living makes demands on black male psyches that undermine the ability of black men to rely on one another (black females are not mentioned). Blacks, he argues, look at one another through lenses that have been filtered through racist images acquired from whites. Consequently, blacks do not trust other blacks. Even though blacks are disgusted with whites, they still look to them for answers. Instead, Baraka proposes: “We must submit to ourselves. and understand the beauty of our own necessity. It is there. We must submit to each other, and let one of us, as specialists in particular fields, go on out with the rest following. We must see that work gets done.”31
In pursuit of “getting work done,” blacks from all classes must be educated in leadership. They should read, study, and engage in critical discussions with one another. They should not only write and distribute books and pamphlets but do so as cheaply and quickly as possible. Because radio is dominated by whites and television even more so, blacks need to find other ways of disseminating information. Baraka believes that it is possible to produce written words that “have the speed of the electronics media.” These quickly written and produced books and pamphlets would allow blacks to distribute information about current events. Baraka’s desire for a strategy that would allow blacks to circumvent their lack of power over the electronic media is fine, but he naively assumes that black Americans would read pamphlets just as readily as they would watch the evening news.
Several essays in Raise Race Rays Raze deal with black art and the Black Arts movement. “Poetry and Karma” is the most extensive of these essays and exemplifies Baraka’s condemnation of white American poetry. Concealed in this is his attempt to specifically denigrate the creativity and creations of those white poets who were once his friends and mentors. There could be no greater insult to poets like Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg than to be linked to the mainstream of American mass culture. At some level, the essay must have been an attempt at self-cleansing. Baraka condemns Ginsberg, but he does not tell us why. Perhaps Ginsberg is guilty of being white. To support his assertions, he makes the rather uncontroversial claim that the poetry of a people is a reflection of their spirit.
Denying any singularity to white individuals, Baraka makes white poets the reified embodiments of all white people who, in turn, are granted sole responsibility for America’s debased character. In effect, white poets are artistic failures because of their association with whiteness. Earlier, Baraka taught us that white folks lacked humanity, emotional depth, and spirituality and were alienated from themselves and God. The vacuousness of white poetry rivals the vacuity of white music. Baraka notes that “no life has existed in that music for centuries. Perhaps never.”32
Recognizing their estrangement from God and the accompanying lack of inner spirituality, those few white poets who are devoted to creativity must “masquerade as captive niggers.”33 Other whites (undoubtedly the majority) who are incapable of coping with the superior spirituality of black poetry try to ignore it. Such was the case, Baraka implies, when Donald Allen included only LeRoi Jones among the poets he collected in New American Poetry, 1945–1960:
. . . Only LeRoi Jones in New American Poetry, 1945–1960.
The Negro! Whose poetry then, only a reflection what
the rest of that E-X-C-L-U-S-I-V-E club was doing.
You mean there was no other poetry, you mean there
were no other spooks, &c. I pass.34
Baraka’s criticism is significant for what it omits. He is trying to rewrite history. First, he probably knew before its publication that he would be the only black represented in Allen’s collection. Why then, did he consent to being a racial token? More important, how does Baraka explain that when he edited a volume of the “new prose writing” three years after the Allen collection, he too included only one black writer, himself. Shouldn’t Baraka examine the underlying thinking of LeRoi Jones to figure out why he maintained such an “E-X-C-L-U-S-I-V-E club?” Baraka also does not mention The Moderns,35 for it would undermine his insinuation that white Americans were uniquely incapable of acknowledging black creativity. Perhaps black bohemians also could not contend with the black creative ethos.
“What the Arts Need Now,” a short essay first published in Negro Digest in 1967, is an example of the short prescriptive tracts concerning the responsibilities of black intellectuals that were frequently published by Black Arts advocates. It is simultaneously a call to arms for the black artist and a commemoration of black people. The essay begins “What’s needed now for ‘the arts’ is to get them away from white people, as example of their culture (of their life, finally, and all its uses, e.g. art) and back where such strivings belong, as strong thrusts of a healthy people.”36 Being a healthy people, as opposed to diseased whites, blacks need to realize that they can and have to create an art that reflects their dynamic humanism. Such art celebrates black life. Much like his calls for poems “that kill,” Baraka advocates writing plays that attack whites and whiteness. That is, black playwrights need to write plays that inform and inspire blacks to
stop bogus so-called urban renewal, which be nigger removal. . . . But at the time of, and at the place of. In the street, at the spot where such disarming is taking place. Have your actors shoot mayors if necessary, right in the actual mayor’s chamber. Let him feel the malice of the just. Let the people see justice work out repeatedly.37
Black playwrights need to begin to think of the theater as a mechanism for addressing social issues at the time and place that issues arise. Baraka encourages blacks to write plays about the police department or even “Jew plays” (whatever that means). The duty of the black playwright is to show blacks their enslavement and to let “them see the chains fall away.”
In “Black Art, Nationalism, Organization, Black Institutions,” Baraka defends the natural spiritualness of black people that will become evident once they are conscious of their blackness. The idea of black people’s divinity or near divinity is a recurring theme in this essay, as it is in many of Baraka’s Black Arts polemics. He proclaims a belief in God, but it is God as a perfected man (undoubtedly a perfected black man). Black creators must strive for this perfection, however unattainable it might be. Baraka contends that black nationalism is the only way that black individuals can get in touch with their true divine-like selves because it is the means for becoming conscious of the glories of black people as a group. As a black nationalist dogmatist, Baraka wished to deny ideological freedom to black artists.
Art without Nationalism is not Black. . . . The Negro artist who is not a nationalist at this late date is a white artist, even without knowing it. . . . What he does will not matter because it is in the shadow, connected with the shadow, and will die when the shadow dies.38
Baraka deliberately links black consciousness with the powers of the universe, asserting a metaphysical link among blackness, creativity, and the universe. Unlike the antinationalist black artist, the black nationalist artist is a creator. More specifically, he is “The Creator.” Given such a claim, it is not surprising that Baraka uses a mystical discourse on black nationalism:
Nationalism . . . is important because it is a basic creative function of the universe. If we deny it. We cannot progress or evolve . . . who ever has the value system strong enough to define and develop and defend the essence of their existence will be master of the Planets, Uniters of The Solar System, The Lord Of The Worlds.39
Despite the benefits of nationalism to blacks, many still refused to join the nationalist struggle. Instead, they devised numerous lame excuses for remaining uncommitted. In Baraka’s mind, political commitment to any program other than black nationalism was the equivalent of being uncommitted. “Lying niggers everywhere. The reason I aint in the program is this, or that, or some other bull shit. Die lying niggers. You fulla shit. Doctors and pimps niggers same ol same ol saying the same jive line. Why they aint. Be somethin for once.”40 Baraka is enormously frustrated by blacks that appear to be content, discontent but passive, too tired to struggle, or too self-absorbed to merge their individual energies with those of other blacks in a collective enterprise. Organizations must be created that in turn will give rise to institutions. Blacks, he believes, should stop fantasizing about freedom. Only through work, the creative enterprise, can the new black reality come into being.
“Negro Theater Pimps Get Big off Nationalism” was originally published as the introduction to Baraka’s play Jello. The essay is an unfocused condemnation of any and all tendencies within the black theater world that were opposed to a black nationalist political and aesthetic project. Baraka proclaims that any non–black nationalist theater must be white oriented. Because they are white oriented, these black theaters are supported by white foundations intent on turning the black public away from theaters associated with the Black Arts.
The essay opens by criticizing the antinationalist politics of Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers. He refers to Cleaver as a modern-day Yacub who has tried to resuscitate the viability of white humanity. Worse, he accuses Cleaver of rejecting nationalism because of his love for his white female lawyer. Baraka also castigates Cleaver and the Black Panthers (“niggers in French hats”) for raising the thoughts of Marx and Lenin “from the tomb again.”
In much the same way that Cleaver’s willingness to engage in interracial coalition politics undermined the unity of black nationalist politics, some Negroes in the theater world were intent on opposing black nationalist drama. However, in order to proclaim the black nationalist theater as the norm and not a deviant tendency, Baraka is forced to grant himself a centrality to the New York theater world. “When The Black Arts Theater jarred slick newyork and slickamerica thinking about art and reality, many of us who were admittedly jewhypnotized and white committed cut all that jive loose, and made our true move to Home and light.”41 According to Baraka’s self-serving narrative, his Harlem theater school generated fear in the white powers that be. In response to BART, powerful whites decided to fund a counterrevolutionary Negro theater that aspired to be white-like.
The devil had to make his move. . . . He got some niggers, some whiteflesh addicts, to make smoke-dust storms . . . in the name of a negro theater still committed to the same ol same ol . . . whiteness. . . . Like they were in black face, these nigger robots, made homage to . . . and at this very moment, make homage to, Europe, its life, its rule, its degeneracy, and its death; in actuality such theater like white life itself, is part of that death.42
This assault is targeted at the most prominent practitioner of Negro Pimp Art, the Negro Ensemble Theater.43 Not only does Baraka claim that they are white-like, but he calls them inferior artists. Indeed, it is their artistic inferiority that supposedly is responsible for their white support. Baraka even names some of these whitenized Negroes: playwrights Charles Gordone, Lonnie Elder, and Douglas Turner Ward; and actors James Earl Jones and Cleavon Little.
The Imamu is enraged by these individuals and their theater because they rejected black nationalism and thus, by extension, his intellectual and artistic leadership. Worse, they were supposedly supported by whites in order to undermine black cultural nationalism. Surprisingly, these Negroes rejected black nationalism at the very time that their existence depended on it. Foundations, Baraka believes, would have had no use for Negro theater pimps had there not been a nationalist dramatic thrust that they found so threatening and in need of subversion.
Like most of Baraka’s essays of this period, this one is a mixture of sense, nonsense, and dogmatic exhortations. First, how can he criticize any black theater that obtains financial support from white foundations when his so-called hyperradical Black Arts Repertory Theater had survived as a beneficiary of the federal government’s riot pacification program? Second, Baraka overstates his own significance in the New York art world. On what basis could he honestly claim that his Black Arts Theater/School “jarred the New York art world?” Finally, there was no reason to think that Baraka had any greater claim to authentic blackness than did Douglas Turner Ward, Lonnie Elder, or any of the other accused playwrights and actors. The more that one reads Baraka’s essays in this volume, the more one senses that he was an extraordinarily narcissistic writer who was intent on projecting his own neuroses onto all blacks. He writes as if all blacks who associated with whites were governed by the same mentalities that shaped his actions when he associated with whites.
Baraka’s “The Need for a Cultural Base to Civil Rites & Bpower Mooments” first appeared in Floyd Barbour’s 1967 edited collection, The Black Power Revolt. The essay defines Black Power and discusses the centrality of black cultural nationalism to Black Power. Like many others in the collection, this essay is a rehash of many of the ideas that Baraka became famous for championing during the late 1960s.
He begins by claiming that the error of the Civil Rights movement lay in its lack of a black cultural nationalist perspective. Black supporters of civil rights were trapped in a self-defeating fantasy.
The civilrighter is usually an american, otherwise he would know, if he is colored, that the concept is meaningless fantasy. Slaves have no civil rights. On the other hand, even integration is into the mobile butcher shop of the devil’s mind. To be an american, one must be a murderer. A white murderer of colored people.44
Negroes who think of themselves as Americans are implicated in the United States’ assault on colored peoples throughout the world. Such misguided Negroes are themselves examples of murdered colored people. The foundational aspiration of Black Power is the power of blacks “to control our lives ourselves.” Black people in control of themselves will inevitably create a peaceful world. By their very nature, blacks are lovers of peace and universal humanity. Moreover, the black man “is a spirit worshiper as well. The religious-science and scientific-religion is the black man’s special evolutionary province.”45 Black power is ultimately rooted in the nature of black people who are, in essence, spiritual beings.
Following a routine denunciation of bourgeois blacks, Baraka appears to throw them a political olive branch. Although he views bourgeois Black Power as the desire of middle-class blacks to mimic the actions of powerful whites, he does not believe that bourgeois blacks actually share the same interests as bourgeois whites. Instead, he discerns in bourgeois black nationalism a way to realize black empowerment:
Of course the form of Bourgeois black power can be harnessed for heavier ends. The control by black people for their own benefit CAN BE set up similar to bourgeois black power, but if the ends are actually to be realized, you are talking again about nationalism, nationalization.46
To the extent that bourgeois blacks aspire to black control of black people or even the black servicing of black people, Baraka thinks that they can be used to facilitate his black separatist political agenda. Baraka’s blindness to the significance of class differences becomes evident here. Even in a black nationalist community, class distinctions would reflect an unequal distribution of power and influence. But in Baraka’s mind, the only truly significant division in the world is between blacks and whites, therefore bourgeois blacks who stand against whites are allies.
This essay also foregrounds racial separatism as an intrinsic component of Baraka’s black nationalism. Blacks and whites can never live as equals in the same geographical space, for whites would never allow this to happen. To be white is to dominate others. Consequently, anyone who advocates Black Power without endorsing blacks’ separation from whites is merely pretending. When Baraka begins to specify the ways that the nature of blacks differs from that of whites, he engages in quasi-mystical descriptions of the black consciousness necessary for the emergence of true Black Power. “Black power cannot be complete unless it is the total reflection of black people. Black power must be spiritually, emotionally, and historically in tune with black people, as well as serving their economic and political ends . . . the seekers of black power must know what it is they seek.” The emergence of blacks into established positions of power does not itself constitute Black Power. After all, the election of a black sheriff in Alabama is fine but only if that sheriff is authentically black and thus the bearer of values different from those of his white predecessors. Senator Edward Brooke, the only black in the U.S. Senate, cannot be construed as embodying Black Power. According to Baraka, “He is, for all intents and purposes, a white man.”47
Many of the blacks who supposedly advocate Black Power are actually frauds.
There are people who might cry BlackPower, who are representatives, extensions of white culture. So-called BlackPower advocates who are mozartfreaks or Rolling Stones, or hypnotized by Joyce or Hemingway or Frank Sinatra, are representatives, extensions, of white culture, and can never therefore signify black power.48
While there were certainly many frauds in the Black Power enterprise, I doubt whether many of them were “mozartfreaks” or “hypnotized by Joyce.” Again, we might wonder whether Baraka isn’t exorcising his past. Is he, once again, guilty of projecting his own autobiographical journey onto the lives of other black people?
Baraka contends that civil rights and Black Power organizations have failed to attract a widespread following because they do not address the totality of black culture and black consciousness. The Nation of Islam is the only group that he believes has succeeded in addressing this totality. This concern for the total black person lies behind the Nation’s success in developing a large mass following.49 Baraka’s belief in the need for a total institution may explain his attraction to Karenga’s US and Kawaida doctrine. Yet we must be skeptical when reading Baraka’s endorsement of the Nation of Islam’s program. As a black nationalist who was comfortable with bourgeois black nationalism, black male supremacy over black women, the goal of black separatism, and a belief in the innate immorality of white people, Baraka should have found the Nation of Islam a welcome home. But he never seriously considered joining the organization. I suspect that the total commitment demanded by the organization would have been too constrictive for him as a black writer, even though he constantly demonized whites and deified blacks. Baraka may have agreed with the Nation’s doctrines, but he certainly would not have felt comfortable relinquishing control of his creativity to the dictates of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Baraka wanted to be a Malcolm X type of leader, and there was no room for such a figure in the Nation of Islam.
This essay reveals the suffocating insularity of Baraka’s black nationalist vision. His notion of blackness is nothing less than an attempt to retard the “modernization” of black people. Because blacks were becoming increasingly diversified and differentiated in this industrial/postindustrial social order (by economic class, education, religion, region, occupation, tastes, sexual orientation, and leisure practices), Baraka viewed black identity as being threatened. His black nationalism was thus an attempt to hold the dike in place, to keep blacks from pursuing their various individual desires. Baraka always viewed individualism as a major deterrent to the realization of authentic blackness. This aversion to individualism was directed to other blacks. Baraka, the Imamu, was singularly individualized.
Baraka’s distaste for other blacks’ individualism was also extended to creative artists whose unique styles and ambitions precluded the development of a mass black audience. The only valid black artists were those who attempted to reach the broader black community, even if their art had no political content. This new populist, anti-individualist ethic led Baraka into a conceptual wasteland. In “The Fire Must Be Permitted to Burn Full Up: Black ‘Aesthetic,’” he wrote:
Jr. Walker’s music is superior to Ayler’s or that that Ornette’s making now, simply because of the world weariness, and corny self consciousness (which is white life hangaround total-ie what you get for being wit dem). Jr. Walker’s music existed then and now, as a force describing purity. Ornette and Albert now describe bullshit so are bullshit.50
This condemnation of avant-garde black musicians for creating an explicitly self-conscious art speaks volumes about the aesthetic decline of Baraka’s writing during this period.
“November 1966: One Year and Eight Months Later” offers brief reflections on the impact of Malcolm’s murder on Afro-American life. The essay was written, as the title suggests, one year and eight months after his assassination. It is a blend of anguish, longing, and, ultimately, hope: “His murder, not only critically ruptured American Black connections with the Third World, but crippled his own organization, and turned great numbers of Black People away from The Nation of Islam. There were no black Nationalist or Black Revolutionary organizations that were not affected.”51 According to Baraka, this rupture, this destruction of continuity, was precisely what whites had intended by assassinating Malcolm. Following Malcolm’s murder, black America entered a “deep period of reaction.” Writing this essay during the winter of 1966, Baraka states that whites are assuming that the cold weather will quell black rebellious energies, at least until the next “long hot summer.” He postulates a correlation between the dissipation of white fears of black rioting and the recent failure of Congress to pass a civil rights bill. Nonetheless, he maintains that had this bill become law, life for black people would not have substantially improved. The defeat of even this disingenuous and symbolic response to blacks indicates the new temper of the times. Worse, this moment of black quietude has provided the opportunity for a new generation of Booker T. Washingtons to come to the forefront. These new advocates of accommodationism included Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Whitney Young. Baraka also cites Martin Luther King Jr., although he considers him a bit more shrewd than the others, given King’s refusal to join them in signing an advertisement in the New York Times denouncing Black Power. Equally troubling is the success that whites have recently had on the international scene. Here Baraka cites the fall of Nkrumah and Sukarno, “two giants.”
Certainly, black politics was drastically transformed by the assassination of Malcolm, as his murder was directly implicated in SNCC’s decision to become exclusively black. But it is not as clear as Baraka would have us think that Malcolm would have endorsed black separatist politics. The Malcolm who was killed is the Malcolm that Baraka chose to ignore. By the time of his murder, Malcolm had rejected the Manichaean racial typologies that Baraka continued to embrace. Baraka distorts the historical record when he argues that Whitney Young, Martin Luther King Jr., and the others had come to prominence in the vacuum left by Malcolm’s murder in 1965. A Philip Randolph had been an outspoken radical and prominent black labor leader before Malcolm was even conceived. Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, and Roy Wilkins reached the height of their prominence while Malcolm was alive.52
The title of the essay “Nationalism Vs Pimp Art” might lead the reader to think that it follows the same argument as “Negro Theater Pimps Get Big off Nationalism.” It doesn’t. Instead, this short essay offers specific denunciations of the Black Panthers and the white “counterculture” movement. At a more general level, it is a diatribe against any political activity that, while opposing black nationalism, markets itself as beneficial to blacks.
Baraka portrays the white counterculture movement as frivolous and without any real benefit to the black struggle. Regardless of what these young white folks may say about peace and loving their neighbors, they are still white and thus the enemies of black emancipation. Baraka mocks this movement as an effort that will “make Allen Ginsberg and/or Fulton Sheen comfortable with John Bull’s grandson.” He refers to this cultural front as “a vague, integrated, plastic, homosexual rEVolUTion . . . a conglomerate of words, degeneracy and fake pseudo ‘act.’”53 The strange spelling of the word revolution is supposed to indicate the decadent whiteness inherent in the scam radicalism of Ginsberg’s so-called revolutionary aestheticism. Baraka’s description of the counterculture as a degenerate movement of nakedness, homosexuality, and dope reveals his deep-seated homophobia and is a specific attack on the gay Ginsberg. By condemning drugs, nakedness, and homosexuality, Baraka tries to exorcise from his public identity those bohemian practices that had been central to his life during his days in the Village. Despite his overblown parochialisms toward whites in general and the counterculture specifically, Baraka does make the important point that the counterculture movement was akin to a leisurely act of rebellion (an adolescent rite of passage) for many white youth on their way into the racist mainstream of America. In his essentialist world, white youth—even rebellious white youth—were no different from their immoral white parents or even their evil white grandparents. Whites were white were white.
In Baraka’s mind, the Black Panthers did not grasp this simple reality of American life. Because they advocated forming coalitions with progressive whites, the Panthers were really integrationists. “Frankly the Panthers, no matter the great amounts of sincere but purposefully misled brothers, getting shotup because some nigger was emotionally committed to white people, are extreme examples of PimpArt gone mad.”54 Baraka’s assumption that the Panther gun cult stemmed from “some nigger’s emotional commitment to white folks” is foolish. As he does elsewhere in this volume, Baraka asserts that the embrace of a leftist ideology by any black person is an accommodationist act. Once more, the culprit is Cleaver. Predictably, Cleaver’s thoughts are again attributed to his love of a white woman. “And the love of Beverly Axelrod has left terrible Marx on the dirty Lenin Black people have been given by some dudes with some dead 1930s white ideology as a freedom suit. Instead of ol’ swishy Bayard Rustin now we get violent integrationists. Wow!”55 Violent integrationists? Baraka is forced to revise his long-held assumption that only weak blacks (e.g., homosexuals like the “swishy” Bayard Rustin) advocated integrationism. Moreover, he collapses all distinctions among political ideologies into the reductionist typology of nationalist versus integrationist. Integrationists can come in the guise of Marxists, supporters of welfare-state capitalism, followers of Milton Friedman, or even fascists. Whatever their ideology, the only thing that matters to Baraka is that they are sufficiently misguided to work with whites politically.
Any attempt by blacks to follow a white man’s theories will ultimately serve the interests of whites. Only “a Black Ideology of change” can free black people.
Lenin, Marx and Trotsky, or O’Neil, Beckett, and the Marat-Sade dude, are just the names of some more “great white men.” There are other dudes who will give you other lists like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, or Paul McCartney, Cream, Grateful Dead, or Mozart, Pinky Lee and the fag with the health tv show. They are just lists of white people.
Baraka claims that he is receptive to being taught by anyone, including, if need be, President Richard Nixon. That is, although he can learn from whites, he will not allow their thoughts to take root in his core identity. The true black man knows that Karenga is correct when he states that “Black is Color, Culture and Consciousness.”56
According to Baraka, the Panthers are misguided not only because they have romanticized the “pick up the gun” rhetoric but also because they are trapped in the same degenerate values of the slave master. Baraka’s condemnation of the Panthers’ gun fetish is not an antiviolence statement but a criticism of the Panthers’ willingness to use guns before they had developed an emancipatory ideology. This critique of the Black Panthers reflects Karenga’s doctrine. The Panthers do not seem to understand that the distinctiveness of black culture is the basis of the black nation. Baraka quotes from Fanon to support the contention that the concepts of nation and culture are inseparable. Yet we can only wonder whether Baraka had actually read Fanon. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon’s discussion of the “pitfalls of national consciousness” could have served as a powerful corrective to Baraka’s entire black nationalist agenda.
Once again, Baraka recites his commitment to a religious black nationalism. Once again, Baraka denounces others for tendencies that were once peculiarly his. Once again, this antimodernist demagogue voices his opposition to all differentiation in black America. Perhaps it is easy to understand Baraka’s association of integrationism with assimilationism. It is a polemical ploy to construct integrationism as race suicide. But Baraka’s political writings rarely, if ever, transcended crude polemic, and he never offers a sustained critique of the limitations of liberal integrationism or a rigorous defense of black nationalism. In the place of rational argument, Baraka substitutes denunciations, slurs, and slanders, all of which solidify his status as a demagogue. Is it therefore surprising that this “thinker” ends this essay by claiming that blacks who criticize black nationalism as a form of racism do so because they are sleeping with whites? Once again Baraka transfers his own neurosis to others. After all, whose psyche was more saturated with the images, fears, and memories of desired white females than that of the hyperblack Imamu?
After this appallingly anemic Raise Race Rays Raze appeared, it is amazing that in black nationalist intellectual and artistic circles, Baraka maintained his status as a seminal thinker. His abdication of critical judgment confirmed the absence of any pretense to intellectual/artistic standards in the black intellectual formation that had become mesmerized by the sound of its own political voice. Because Raise was written by the Imamu, many black readers and reviewers may have been lulled into an intellectual reenactment of the emperor’s new clothes. Larger than life, by the end of the 1960s, Imamu Amiri Baraka was probably the most influential single figure in the black American intelligentsia. Who among black intellectuals was willing to admit that Baraka had become a parody of a serious thinker? Who among those few willing to tell this truth would have been heard? Once heard, who could have retained their ethnic legitimacy as black intellectuals or artists? And how should we regard those black intellectuals who celebrated Raise as a major text?
In June 1971, Jan Carew, a prominent West Indian intellectual who was at the time teaching in the United States, reviewed Raise Race Rays Raze in the New York Times Book Review. Carew was impressed with the collection, particularly “Newark Courthouse–’66 Wreck (Nigger Rec Room).” He writes that Baraka’s courtroom observations give “us vivid and chilling insights into a city’s lower depths—black accused and white accusers locked in the throes of a primordial drama.”57 For Carew, the courtroom essay foreshadows the entire collection. Besides this essay, Carew discusses only one other in detail. In deciding not to mention the numerous ill-conceived pieces such as Baraka’s essay on the righteousness of black male domination of black women, Carew may have revealed the limitations of his own political vision. Amazingly, he finds Baraka’s musings on black art to be stunning and compares them with Yoruba philosophy. The review concludes,
What is interesting about these collected essays is that they expose the speciousness of the romantic image of Imamu Baraka as a nihilist in a black limbo of his own creation. He emerges, despite some short and incomplete pieces, as a gifted writer with a finely tuned ear. At his best he can make words ignite and burst into flame.58
Carew’s celebration of such a mundane collection is striking. Maybe he actually thought that he was in the presence of a master essayist. Perhaps he did not want to use the “white” forum of the New York Times Book Review to offer serious critical assessments of a self-professed black revolutionary. Whatever the case, it seems apparent that Baraka was deemed a figure worthy of exaltation by those critics who were sympathetic to black nationalist politics.
Addison Gayle, the foremost proponent of a “Black Aesthetic” and a prominent black literary critic, viewed Raise Race Rays Raze as one of the most important books written by a black in the twentieth century:
Look back at the volumes of essays since The Souls of Black Folk. All have been footnotes to Du Bois’ monumental work. This is as true of Notes of a Native Son and White Man, Listen as it is of The Black Situation and Home. None of these essayists had managed to improve on Du Bois’ vision; each had merely in some way complemented it. . . . Raise Race, however, moves beyond The Souls of Black Folk and in so doing, becomes its logical successor. Once and for all, the old question of identity and the conflict of the dual psyche is ended. Salvation for Blacks lay outside the Western orbit! Images, symbols, and metaphors of Blacks are not to be found in the mirrors of Western man.59
Gayle evidently believed (or wanted to believe) that the burden of a black double-consciousness as defined by Du Bois and amended by numerous others could be resolved once and for all by merely declaring it to be resolved. Baraka says we are whole, so lo and behold, we are. Hurray for the Imamu! As if to substantiate Baraka’s resolution of the black double-consciousness problematic, Gayle quotes directly from Raise Race Rays Raze. Baraka had written,
We have our music. We have our art. We have our athletes. We have our religions. We have our black science, older than any on the planet. We have our beautiful people able to do anything and make anything and bring anything into being. . . . We will make cities . . . beautiful thrones of man and testaments to the ecstatic vision of the soulful.60
How could Gayle be so enraptured by this hollow excerpt from Raise? The language is ordinary and the ideas are pedestrian. Besides, Baraka the essayist was not an innovative stylist. Perhaps Gayle was trapped in a quasi-religious devotion to the black cultural nationalism symbolized by Baraka. Perhaps he was attracted to Baraka’s intellectual and personal charisma. Charismatic and/or religious-like allegiances allow people to confuse foolishness with profundity and the grotesque with the beautiful. Gayle even invoked religious sentiments when he claimed that Raise Race “has the distinction of being the literary Koran, the philosophy of the moral and the just, the Ten commandments calling a people to sacrifice, struggle and success.”61
By the late 1960s, Home, Baraka’s first essay collection, had become a canonical text in black activist and intellectual circles. Its essays reflected the various attitudinal and political changes in Baraka’s life. Because of his example as a black artist who rejected establishmentarian recognition for greater involvement in the black freedom struggle, Home was revered as a vehicle for understanding the growth of LeRoi Jones into Amiri Baraka. Raise never achieved equal prominence, as it was burdened with the ever-present shadow of Home. On its own merits, Raise is not as engaging a collection. Its author is more settled and dogmatic in his political, literary, and social beliefs. The personal identity anxieties and unresolved literary tensions that made some of the essays in Home so compelling are absent in Raise. An insular text, Raise is premised on a religious-like advocacy of black nationalism. The essays rarely construct arguments. Instead, Baraka appears to be writing as if the truth has been revealed to him. All that remains is for him to bear witness to it.
As Baraka became more politically engaged, he became increasingly dogmatic. This dogmatism was accompanied by exaggerated articulations of anger and hatred, the same tendencies that had diminished the later essays in Home. Baraka’s fury against the myriad racist injustices faced by blacks may even have been honorable, but he failed to discover a literary form and authorial voice that would allow him to convey his anger without losing his literary sensibilities. A 169-page primal scream, Raise is important because it reflects the political thoughts of a major black intellectual during the height of his intellectual and political influence. Unfortunately, however, screaming is not good writing.