Amiri Baraka

Everett LeRoi जोन्स

Oct. 7, 1934-

Newark, New Jersey, United States

Nationality: American
Occupation: Poet, writer, professor

Amiri Baraka is one of the most controversial writers in recent history, one whose influence on African-American literature has been profound. Plays, poems, novels, essays, short stories, jazz operas, and music criticism are all included in his body of work, and all have served as vehicles for his outspoken social and political commentary. According to Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor James A. Miller, he is "a protean personality, fond of manifestos and vehement repudiations, [who] has shifted guises and discarded identities with such astonishing rapidity that critics have often been frustrated, suspended in the act of defining a man who is no longer there, while his admirers have been left abandoned or challenged to readjust themselves to his new position." Maya Angelou thinks has referred to Baraka as the world's greatest living poet.

Never Felt Comfortable in Academia

Born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, Baraka grew up in a family of distinctly middle-class aspirations. His parents, a housewife and a postal worker, encouraged Baraka to express himself through art and music. In an interview for Publishers Weekly with Calvin Reid, Baraka described a typical family gathering, "you had to sing or dance or tell stories or something. You couldn't just sit there, the old folks would think something was wrong with you. 'You can't sing boy?'" Baraka also recalled taking piano, drum, and trumpet lessons and drama and art school classes. One of a handful of blacks in his high school, Baraka loved sports and played baseball, basketball, football, and track. Baraka admitted to Reid, "If I had been a little bigger I would never have been a writer." Yet no matter what sports he joined or clubs he became a member of, Baraka was still seen by other students as an outsider. Baraka's parents took pride in the idea of their son succeeding at a mainly white school, but Baraka's unique status caused him tremendous feelings of alienation and isolation. Later in life he would mercilessly lampoon the values of assimilation his parents held dear.

Baraka won a scholarship to Rutgers University in 1951, but a continuing sense of cultural dislocation prompted him to transfer in 1952 to Howard University, a traditionally black college. He would eventually attack the school as the citadel of the black bourgeoisie he disdained, writing in an essay: "Howard University shocked me into realizing how desperately sick the Negro could be, how he could be led into self-destruction and how he would not realize that it was the society that had forced him into a great sickness." Despite his later criticism, however, Baraka benefitted greatly from his years at Howard. He studied philosophy, religion and literature and was exposed to the ideas of prominent black poets, music critics, and scholars. Baraka credited several of his teachers for providing a strong background in European classics as well as black American culture. In particular, he praises Sterling Brown for illustrating "the importance of the blues; that is was first a verse form and then the music flowed from that."

In 1954 Baraka left Howard without finishing his bachelor's degree, returned to Newark, and enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. Baraka served in Puerto Rico and Germany as a weatherman and gunner. He told Publishers Weekly, "it was the worst thing I could have done," but also explained that his years in the Air Force are where he got his real education. While stationed in Puerto Rico, Baraka was the base librarian. The library eventually became an informal meeting place where Baraka and several others would read and discuss various books, from Proust to Thomas Hardy to Kafka. Baraka was also writing poems during this time and sending them to several magazines such as The New Yorker and Kenyon Review.

Artistic Philosophy Influenced by the Beat Generation

Three years later Baraka returned to civilian life, after being discharged from the Air Force for having too many books—among them, The Communist Manifesto. "Someone said I was a Communist. As it turned out, 40 years later, now it's true," Baraka chuckled while describing this incident during his interview with Publishers Weekly. At the time, the social and artistic phenomenon known as the Beat Generation was just beginning to touch the consciousness of a complacent America. The Beats were challenging the stagnant literary establishment and the rigid moral code of the country; Baraka quickly aligned himself with them, seeing them as fellow outsiders. The ideal shared by the Beats and Baraka was to look beyond, or rise above, racial barriers. Baraka explained to David Ossman in The Sullen Art: Interviews with Modern American Poets: "I'm fully conscious all the time that I'm an American Negro, because it's part of my life. But I also know that if I want to say, 'I see a bus full of people,' I don't have to say, 'I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people.' I would deal with it when it has to do directly with the poem, and not as a kind of broad generalization that doesn't have much to do with a lot of young writers today who are Negroes."

Baraka took up residence in Greenwich Village, a center of the budding cultural revolution. He soon met and married Hettie Cohen, a young Jewish woman who shared his tastes in music and literature. Cohen worked for the Partisan Review, where Baraka's first published piece appeared in 1958. It was a defense of the innovations of Beat writing, declaring that young writers "must resort to violence in literature, ... to shake us out of the woeful literary sterility which characterized the '40s." Baraka and Cohen organized Yugen, a literary magazine showcasing the new poets. Baraka wrote a letter—on toilet paper stationery—to Beat poet Allen Ginsberg soliciting works and was rewarded with contributions from Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and other notables.

A vital relationship with Ginsberg developed. Baraka recalled in The Village Voice: "We talked endlessly about poetry, about prosody, about literature and it is clear to me that my poetry would not have evolved as it has without A. G.'s ideas. He let me in on poetry as a living phenomenon, a world of human concern, and literature as a breathing force in one's life, the task of a lifetime. I absorbed and grew because of these ideas, and even in resisting some of Ginsberg's other ideas, I still grew and developed because of contact with them." Baraka's association with Ginsberg, his editorship of Yugen, and his establishment of Totem Press quickly made him one of the leading figures of the Greenwich Village scene. He began to write prolifically, contributing poetry and reviews of books and music to the important smaller magazines of the day.

Visit to Cuba Encouraged More Aggressive Social Activism

But even as he was becoming a key member of the Beat Generation, Baraka was drifting away from the movement. His fellow poets were, for the most part, apolitical. They criticized the system but had no agenda for changing it. Baraka felt a growing sense of dissatisfaction with this kind of passivity. In 1960 he reached a turning point in his life when he visited Fidel Castro's Cuba. There he encountered many forceful, politically committed young artists and intellectuals who challenged him to abandon the Beat preoccupation with the soul and to tackle society's problems in a more aggressive fashion. Baraka did not change overnight; he did, however, return from Cuba with a new sense of political mission and a stronger identification with artists of the Third World than with those of the white vanguard. Though he remained a resident of Greenwich Village, he became increasingly involved in the social life of Harlem.

During the early 1960s Baraka seemed to regard himself as a bridge between the black and white worlds. He wrote two of his most serious works of fiction at this time, The System of Dante's Hell and Tales. Both reflect his struggle to pull away from Greenwich Village. He told Kimberly Benston in Boundary 2, "I was really writing defensively. I was trying to get away from the influence of people like [Robert] Creeley and [Charles] Olson. I was living in New York then and the whole Creeley-Olson influence was beginning to beat me up. I was in a very closed circle ... and I felt the need to break out." Still, he continued to work closely with Beat writers; in 1961 he and poet Diane di Prima founded another important underground magazine, Floating Bear. The two were also instrumental in organizing the American Theatre for Poets. Baraka ridiculed the notion of a separate black society in his essay "Black Is a Country," insisting that "America is as much a black country as a white one. The lives and destinies of the white American are bound up inextricably with those of the black American." He clung to his belief in a world free of color lines even as he sought to establish for himself a stronger ethnic identity.

Dutchman Exposed Disillusionment with Integration

Eventually Baraka's writing revealed the slow disintegration of his faith in racial harmony. In the poem "Black Dada Nihilismus" he ponders the many nonwhite cultures destroyed by Western civilization and concludes by calling on the African god Damballah for help in the destruction of the West. In his most well-known and highly praised play, Dutchman, he depicts a subway encounter between Lula, a white, Bohemian woman, and Clay, a young, middle-class, black man. At first Clay seems to represent the aspects of black life Baraka harshly criticized in his earlier works, while Lula appears to embody the values the author prized. Lula taunts Clay about his repressed identity, urging him to release his true black self. When he finally does, it pours forth as a violent tirade against Lula and the larger white world. At the drama's conclusion Lula calmly stabs Clay to death and sits back to await her next victim.

Dutchman "merges private themes, mythical allusion, surrealistic techniques, and social statement into a play of astonishing power and resonance," stated Miller. It won the 1964 Obie Award for best American play, was performed internationally, and propelled its author into a whirlwind of lectures, panel discussions, readings, and teaching assignments at liberal universities. Years after the play's debut Darryl Pinckley wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "[Baraka] is a highly gifted dramatist. Much of the black protest literature of the 60s now seems diminished in power, even sentimental. But 'Dutchman' immediately seizes the imagination. It is radically economical in structure, striking in the vivacity of its language and rapid shifts of mood."

By mid-1964 Baraka had completely rejected the cultural and political values of the Beats and had begun verbally attacking his Greenwich Village friends, white liberals, and the white community in general. His anti-bourgeois stance had been transformed into a militant black nationalism inspired by Malcolm X. An integrated society was not only impossible, he now believed, but undesirable. Ironically, Baraka's diatribes against the white world boosted his popularity even further—at least temporarily. For a time he was swamped by invitations to hip, white New York City high-society parties. But he meant what he said about turning his back on that world. "Now there could be absolutely no ties with whites, and certainly not any intimate ones," he later wrote. "These in themselves, we reasoned, would make us traitors." By the end of 1965 he had ended his marriage to Hettie Cohen, broken his ties with the white literary establishment, and moved to Harlem.

Embraced Black Nationalism, then Marxism

In Harlem he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School. It was a short-lived but highly influential project that revolutionized black theater in the United States. Contemporary dramas shaped by black nationalist philosophy were performed there and institutions modeled after it sprang up all over the country. The theater—which was funded with federal money—was shut down by police in 1966, allegedly because an arms cache had been discovered there. Returning to his birthplace, Newark, Baraka dropped the name LeRoi Jones in favor of the Bantu Muslim appellation Imamu (meaning "spiritual leader," later dropped) Ameer (later changed to Amiri, meaning "blessed") Baraka ("prince"). He also married Sylvia Robinson, who changed her name to Amina Baraka. The couple opened the Spirithouse to help Newark both culturally and spiritually. In the essay "state/meant" he summarized his new sense of purpose: "The Black Artist's role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it. His role is to report and reflect so precisely the nature of the society, and of himself in that society, that other men will be moved by the exactness of his rendering and, if they are black men, grow strong through this moving, having seen their own strength, and weakness; and if they are white men, tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be drenched with the filth of their evil."

As the dominant black theorist and artist of the late 1960s, Baraka was responsible for shifting the focus of black literature from an integrationist art that conveyed a raceless and classless vision to a literature rooted in the black experience. The era over which he presided is considered the most important in black arts since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. And despite Baraka's rejection of the ideal of an integrated world, his work affected all races. As Native American author Maurice Kenny wrote in The Kaleidoscopic Torch, "He opened tightly guarded doors for not only Blacks but poor whites as well and, of course, Native Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans. We'd all still be waiting for the invitation from the New Yorker without him. He taught us all how to claim it and take it."

As a black nationalist political leader, Baraka was a key figure in the organization of the Congress of African Peoples in 1970 and the National Black Political Assembly in 1972. But by 1974 he had undergone yet another reassessment of his cultural and political orientation. In a dramatic turnabout he rejected black nationalism and proclaimed himself a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. He stated in The New York Times: "It is a narrow nationalism that says the white man is the enemy.... Nationalism, so-called, when it says 'all non-blacks are our enemies,' is sickness or criminality, in fact, a form of fascism." Since 1974 Baraka has produced a great deal of socialist poetry and essays and names the destruction of the capitalist state and the creation of a socialist community as his goal. William J. Harris quoted him in The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka as saying: "I think fundamentally my intentions are similar to those I had when I was a Nationalist. That might seem contradictory, but they were similar in the sense that I see art as a weapon, and a weapon of revolution. It's just now that I define revolution in Marxist terms.... I came to my Marxist view as a result of having struggled as a Nationalist and found certain dead ends theoretically and ideologically, as far as Nationalism was concerned and had to reach out for a communist ideology." Nonetheless, Baraka's many philosophical shifts are far from capricious, attested Arnold Rampersad, who wrote in The Kaleidoscopic Torch: "His change of heart and head is testimony to his honesty, energy, and relentless search for meaning.

Baraka, though continuing to create works to encourage, strengthen, and enlighten his community, began to teach as well. In addition to teaching at the New School for Social Research, he also taught at San Francisco State College, Yale, and George Washington University. He began a teaching career at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (SUNY). He started as an assistant professor, making his way to professor of African studies in 1985.

Controversial Poem Created Backlash

In 1999, after twenty years of teaching at SUNY, Baraka retired but remained an activist, frequently accepting reading and speaking engagements. As the political climate in the United States became increasingly more conservative, Baraka's work has managed to retain its revolutionary ardor. Soon after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Baraka composed his provocative poem, "Somebody Blew Up America" which was essentially focused on American imperialism but was also partly inspired by several conspiracy theories including the theory that George Bush and the Israeli government had previous knowledge of the attack. The poem was online weeks after the attack and Baraka read the poem at several venues including college campuses.

In 2002 Baraka was named poet laureate of New Jersey, a position that has been challenged by many individuals and groups, including the Anti-Defamation League. James Haba, a poet who was on the committee to choose a new poet laureate told The New York Observer, "He is clearly a major literary figure. Every anthology of American literature in the 20th century will include some mention of him, or some of his work. He was born in New Jersey and lives in New Jersey. On what grounds don't you nominate him?" In September of 2002, Baraka read "Somebody Blew Up America" at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in front of 2,000 people. Afterward, the poem came under heavy criticism which led Governor McGreevey to ask for Baraka' apology and for him to step down from his appointment as poet laureate. Baraka wrote a lengthy statement defending his poem, explaining the irony of Bush's war on terrorism, that blacks in America have been victims of political and cultural terrorism for centuries. Needless to say, Baraka refused to apologize and refused to resign as poet laureate. On the contrary, as Stanley Crouch, a columnist for the New York Daily News pointed out, "I do not think he should resign or be asked to step down. Those people in New Jersey chose a buffoon, and now they should experience the embarrassment of having been so naíve.... It seems to me that part of democracy means that you periodically—or often—have to hear things you disagree with. Part of democracy means enduring people not like yourself."

In his statement regarding "Somebody Blew Up America" Baraka said, "No, I will not apologize, I will not resign. In fact I will continue to do what I have appointed to do but still have not been paid to do.... We feel that this state and indeed this nation and this world is desperately in need of the deepest and most profound human values that poetry can teach." However, on January 29, 2003, the New Jersey Senate voted to abolish the poet laureate position. As in the past, this will not deter him. Amiri Baraka has shown tremendous courage in bringing forth change in not only the black community of Newark, New Jersey, but for many throughout the African diaspora.

July 1, 2003: Baraka sues the New Jersey state assembly "for violating his First Amendment rights and for slander" following their vote to abolish the position of poet laureate. Source: The Associated Press, http://customwire.ap.org, July 1, 2003.

December 7, 2004: Baraka was featured on the second episode of the four-part documentary The First Amendment, produced by the Sundance Channel and Court TV. The episode, "Poetic License," recounts the controversy surrounding his tenure as the poet laureate of New Jersey. Source: The New York Times, www.nytimes.com, December 7, 2004.

January 16-February 24, 2007: Bill Duke directed a revival of Dutchman at the Cherry Lane Theatre, where it first premiered. Source: Cherry Lane Theatre Web site, (accessed January 26, 2009).

November 13, 2007: The U,S. Supreme Court refused to hear Baraka's First Amendment case related to the elimination of the New Jersey poet laureate position. Source: NJ.com,

Awards

John Hay Whitney fellowship, 1960-61; Longview Award for best essay of the year, 1961, for "Cuba Libre"; Obie Award, 1964, for Dutchman; Guggenheim fellowship, 1965-66; Yoruba Academy fellow, 1965; second prize at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar, Senegal, 1966, for The Slave; Doctorate of Humane Letters, Malcolm X College, 1972; Rockefeller Foundation fellow, 1981, 1989; National Endowment for the Arts poetry award, 1981; New Jersey Council for the Arts award, 1982; Before Columbus Foundation award, 1984; American Book Award, 1984; Drama Award, 1985; Langston Hughes medal, 1989; Ferroni award, Italy, and foreign poet award, 1993; Playwright's award, Black Drama Festival, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1997; University of Connecticut Wallace Stevens poetry prize, 1998; One Hundred Black Men, Rutgers University, 1998. James Weldon Johnson Medal, James Weldon Johnson Foundation and the Schomburg Center, 2001; Lifetime Achievement Award, Los Angeles Pan African Film Festival, 2001; appointed poet laureate of State of New Jersey (position abolished, 2003).

Further Reading

Books

• Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, edited by James B. Gwynne, Steppingstones Press, 1985.
• Baraka, Amiri, The Autobiography of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Freundlich, 1984.
• Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask, edited by Kimberly A. Benston, Yale University Press, 1976.
• Benston, Kimberly A., Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1978.
• Black Theatre, U.S.A., edited by James V. Hatch, Free Press, 1974.
• Brown, Lloyd W., Amiri Baraka, Twayne, 1980.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 1, 1973, Volume 2, 1974, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 5, 1976, Volume 10, 1979, Volume 14, 1980, Volume 33, 1985.
• Cook, Bruce, The Beat Generation, Scribner, 1971.
• Dace, Letitia, LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka): A Checklist of Works By and About Him, Nether Press, 1971.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 5: American Poets Since World War II, 1980, Volume 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, 1981, Volume 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, 1983, Volume 38: Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, 1985.
• Fox, Robert Elliot, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Post-Modernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Baraka, Ishmael Reed and Samuel R. Delany, Greenwood Press, 1987.
• Harris, William J., The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic, University of Missouri Press, 1985.
• Hudson, Theodore, From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works, Duke University Press, 1973.
• Lacey, Henry C., To Raise, Destroy, and Create: The Poetry, Drama, and Fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Whitson, 1981.
• Ossman, David, The Sullen Art: Interviews with Modern American Poets, Corinth, 1963.
• Sollors, Werner, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist Modernism," Columbia University Press, 1978.

Periodicals

• American Theater, May 2000; January 2002.
• Black American Literature Forum, Spring 1980; Spring 1981; Fall 1982; Spring 1983; Winter 1985.
• Booklist, September 15, 1996; January 1, 1997; February 15, 1999.
• Boundary, Volume 2, Number 6, 1978.
• Chicago Defender, January 11, 1965.
• Chicago Tribune, October 4, 1968.
• Detroit Free Press, January 31, 1965.
• Detroit News, January 15, 1984; August 12, 1984.
• downbeat, January 2, 1964; August 1987.
• Ebony, August 1967; August 1969; February 1971.
• Esquire, June 1966.
• Essence, September 1970; May 1984; September 1984; May 1985.
• Jet, January 16, 1975; July 23, 1984.
• Modern Drama, February 1971; Summer 1972; September 1972; June 1974; Spring, 1997.
• Ms., September 1983.
• Nation, October 14, 1961; November 14, 1961; March 13, 1964; April 13, 1964; January 4, 1965; March 15, 1965; January 22, 1968; February 2, 1970.
• Negro Digest, December 1963; February 1964; August 1964; March 1965; April 1965; March 1966; April 1966; June 1966; April 1967; April 1968; January 1969; April 1969.
• New York Daily News, October 22, 2002.
• New York Review of Books, January 20, 1966; May 22, 1964; July 2, 1970; October 17, 1974; June 11, 1984; June 14, 1984.
• New York Observer, October 21, 2002.
• Newsweek, March 13, 1964; April 13, 1964; November 22, 1965; May 2, 1966; March 6, 1967; December 4, 1967; December 1, 1969; February 19, 1973.
• Publishers Weekly, October 7, 1996; December 30, 1996; May 1, 2000;
• Record, October 17, 2002; October 18, 2002; October 20, 2002.
• Saturday Review, April 20, 1963; January 11, 1964; January 9, 1965; December 11, 1965; December 9, 1967; October 2, 1971; July 12, 1975.
• Star-Ledger, October 14, 1999; February 25, 2002; October 1, 2002; November 4, 2002.
• Studies in Black Literature, Spring, 1970; Volume 1, Number 2, 1970; Volume 3, Number 2, 1972; Volume 3, Number 3, 1972; Volume 4, Number 1, 1973.
• The Associated Press, January 30, 2003.
• The New Yorker, April 4, 1964; December 26, 1964; March 4, 1967; December 30, 1972.
• The New York Times, April 28, 1966; May 8, 1966; August 10, 1966; September 14, 1966; October 5, 1966; January 20, 1967; February 28, 1967; July 15, 1967; January 5, 1968; January 6, 1968; January 9, 1968; January 10, 1968; February 7, 1968; April 14, 1968; August 16, 1968; November 27, 1968; December 24, 1968; August 26, 1969; November 23, 1969; February 6, 1970; May 11, 1972; June 11, 1972; November 11, 1972; November 14, 1972; November 23, 1972; December 5, 1972; December 27, 1974; December 29, 1974; November 19, 1979; October 15, 1981; January 23, 1984; October 18, 2002.
• New York Times Book Review, January 31, 1965; November 28, 1965; May 8, 1966; February 4, 1968; March 17, 1968; February 14, 1971; June 6, 1971; June 27, 1971; December 5, 1971; March 12, 1972; December 16, 1979; March 11, 1984; July 5, 1987; December 20, 1987.
• The Village Voice, December 17, 1964; May 6, 1965; May 19, 1965; August 30, 1976; August 1, 1977; December 17-23, 1980, October 2, 1984.
• Time, December 25, 1964; November 19, 1965; May 6, 1966; January 12, 1968; April 26, 1968; June 28, 1968; June 28, 1971.
• Washington Post, August 15, 1968; September 12, 1968; November 27, 1968; December 5, 1980; January 23, 1981; June 29, 1987.
• Washington Post Book World, December 24, 1967; May 22, 1983.

Online

• Academy of American Poets Web site, (July 25, 2006), "Amiri Baraka."
• Amiri Baraka Home Page, (Accessed January 26, 2009).
• Books and Writers Web site, (Accessed January 26, 2009).

Source

Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2009. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2009. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC

Contemporary Black Biography, Volume 38. Edited by Ashyia Henderson. Gale Group, 2003. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center