April is National Poetry Month!
Let's celebrate by examining the work of an American poet.
The Academy of American Poets highlights Amiri Baraka.
In 1968, he co-edited Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing with Larry Neal and his play Home on the Range was performed as a benefit for the Black Panther party. That same year he became a Muslim, changing his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka. ("Imamu" means "spiritual leader.") He assumed leadership of his own black Muslim organization, Kawaida. From 1968 to 1975, Baraka was chairman of the Committee for Unified Newark, a black united front organization. In 1969 , his Great Goodness of Life became part of the successful "Black Quartet" off-Broadway, and his play Slave Ship was widely reviewed. Baraka was a founder and chairman of the Congress of African People, a national Pan-Africanist organization with chapters in 15 cities, and he was one of the chief organizers of the National Black Political Convention, which convened in Gary, Indiana, in 1972 to organize a more unified political stance for African-Americans.
In 1974 Baraka adopted a Marxist Leninist philosophy and dropped the spiritual title "Imamu." In 1983, he and Amina Baraka edited Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women, which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and in 1987 they published The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka was published in 1984.
Amiri Baraka's numerous literary prizes and honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, the Langston Hughes Award from The City College of New York, and a lifetime achievement award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He has taught poetry at the New School for Social Research in New York, literature at the University of Buffalo, and drama at Columbia University. He has also taught at
San Francisco State University, Yale University and George Washington University. Since 1985 he has been a professor of Africana Studies at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. He is co-director, with his wife, of Kimako's Blues People, a community arts space. Amiri and Amina Baraka live in Newark, New Jersey.
Clearly, based on his numerous awards and honors, Baraka is truly a national treasure.
For decades, Baraka has taught at the State University of New York in Stony Brook.
Not familiar with Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones?
Learn more about Amiri Baraka. His website offers some of his enlightening works. Here's an example--
Somebody Blew up America
(Excerpts)
They say its some terrorist, some
barbaric
A Rab, in
Afghanistan
It wasn't our American terrorists
It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads
Or the them that blows up nigger
Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row
It wasn't Trent Lott
Or David Duke or Giuliani
Or Schundler, Helms retiring
It wasn't
the gonorrhea in costume
the white sheet diseases
That have murdered black people
Terrorized reason and sanity
Most of humanity, as they pleases
They say (who say? Who do the saying
Who is them paying
Who tell the lies
Who in disguise
Who had the slaves
Who got the bux out the Bucks
Who got fat from plantations
Who genocided Indians
Tried to waste the Black nation
Who live on Wall Street
The first plantation
Who cut your nuts off
Who rape your ma
Who lynched your pa
Who got the tar, who got the feathers
Who had the match, who set the fires
Who killed and hired
Who say they God & still be the Devil
...Who made Bush president
Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying
Who talk about democracy and be lying
WHO/ WHO/ WHOWHO/
Who the Beast in Revelations
Who 666
Who decide
Jesus get crucified
Who the Devil on the real side
Who got rich from Armenian genocide
Who the biggest terrorist
Who change the bible
Who killed the most people
Who do the most evil
Who don't worry about survival
Who have the colonies
Who stole the most land
Who rule the world
Who say they good but only do evil
Who the biggest executioner
...Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?
...Who make money from war
Who make dough from fear and lies
Who want the world like it is
Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national oppression and terror
violence, and hunger and poverty.
Incredible, isn't it?
Baraka was the poet laureate of New Jersey, until the state legislature eliminated the position entirely. That move was taken because Baraka refused to resign at the request of Governor Jim McGreevey. As of July 2, 2003, patriot Baraka was no longer New Jersey's poet laureate (P.L.2003, c.123).
Tax dollars pay his salary at SUNY - Stony Brook.
Tax dollars, through the National Endowment for the Arts, subsidize Baraka's "art."
Unbelievable.
HAPPY NATIONAL POETRY MONTH!
4 comments:
I've read a few thing by Amiri Baraka but never the poem you posted...very interesting.
--RC of strangeculture.blogspot.com
Baraka undoubtedly overstates his case - often, it seems for shock effect. 'Somebody blewup america' is in many ways an incoherent poem - baraka descends into conspiracy theories about 9-11, which obscures the valid point he is making about American imperialism and the excuse of terrorism it uses for its territorial expansion.
"thinking people
oppose terrorism
both domestic
& international…
But one should not
be used
To cover the other"
A valid point, I think.
As an aside, I suspect that, as with many cases of censorship and moral outrage, both in the US, and the UK, where I hail from, the most vociferous critics of the works they loudly condemn haven't really looked into them at all. They'll see this one poem by Baraka and use it to condemn his entire oevre, quote a few lines (without considering that poetry cannot always be reduced to straight propositional meaning that can be quoted in little data-snippets as 'proof' of a point), and dismissing him entirely. For an intersting analysis of the poem (not uncritical at all, but giving a fair and balanced-view), follow this link: http://www.uberhippy.com/when_baraka_blows_his_horn.shtml
Here is one of the major points of that essay: "The major portion of Somebody Blew Up America is the production of a "print" using Vachel Lindsay's The Congo as the negative. This 1914 one man minstrel show manages to put on stage every false stereotype of both Africans and African-Americans. To offset Lindsay's pyrotechnic racist rant, Baraka gives us a panoramic display of White atrocities. Sadly, for the most part, these Western barbaric acts are facts. Baraka ruins his own case by extending the argument into the realm of conspiracy theory."
Do let me know what you think.
Personally, I don't care for Baraka's work.
His poetry and his politics are inseparable.
There are sins in America's past and present. I don't deny those.
What bugs me about America bashers is the way they disgrace the service and sacrifice of so many selfless, heroic Americans.
My relatives have fought and died for freedom in America as well as for freedom abroad since the American Civil War.
It's not inappropriate at all to address the sins of the past, nor is it wrong to hold people accountable for their choices and behavior in the present.
I don't fault Baraka for that.
However, on an emotional level, I'm offended by his disrespect for my ancestors, my loved ones.
It's difficult, no, impossible for me to analyze Baraka's work on a purely scholarly level.
Yes, Baraka doesn't really seem to encourage any separation between his politics and his art, which can make it quite hard to swallow if you disagree with him (or, as many do, find his views actually abhorrent). It's questionable whether such overt political engagement is the right course in literature, yet it does stand as a valuable corrective to much that is wrong in the academic circles (as brilliantly satirised in his poem 'The Academic Cowards of Reaction'); and, of course, if you happen to agree with many of his views, you'll think that what he says should be said.
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