Baraka, Amiri

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Amiri Baraka

Personal

Born Everett LeRoi Jones, October 7, 1934, in Newark, NJ; name changed to Imamu ("spiritual leader") Ameer ("blessed") Baraka ("prince"); later modified to Amiri Baraka; son of Coyette Leroy (a postal worker and elevator operator) and Anna Lois (Russ) Jones; married Hettie Roberta Cohen, October 13, 1958 (divorced, August, 1965); married Sylvia Robinson (Bibi Amina Baraka), 1966; children: (first marriage) Kellie Elisabeth, Lisa Victoria Chapman; (second marriage) Obalaji Malik Ali, Ras Jua al Aziz, Shani Isis, Amiri Seku, Ahi Mwenge. Education: Attended Rutgers University, 1951-52; Howard University, B.A., 1954; Columbia University, M.A. (philosophy); New School for Social Research, M.A. (German literature).

Addresses

Office—Department of Africana Studies, State University of New York, Long Island, NY 11794-4340. Agent—Joan Brandt, Sterling Lord Literistic, 660 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10021.

Career

State University of New York at Stony Brook, assistant professor, 1980-83, associate professor, 1983-85, professor of African studies, 1985—. Instructor, New School for Social Research (now New School University), New York, NY, 1962-64; visiting professor, University of Buffalo, summer, 1964, Columbia University, fall, 1964, and 1966-67, San Francisco State University, 1967, Yale University, 1977-78, George Washington University, 1978-79, and Rutgers University, 1988. Founded Yugen magazine and Totem Press, 1958; co-editor and founder of Floating Bar magazine, 1961-63; editor of Black Nation. Founder and director, Black Arts Repertory Theatre, 1964-66; director of Spirit House (black community theater; also known as Heckalu Community Center), 1965-75, and head of advisory group at Treat Elementary School, both in Newark; Kimako Blues People (community arts space), co-director. Founder, Congress of African People, 1970-76. Member, Political Prisoners Relief Fund, and African Liberation Day Commission. Candidate, Newark community council, 1968. National Black Political Assembly, former secretary general and co-governor; National Black United Front, member; Congress of African People, co-founder and chair; League of Revolutionary Struggle, member. Military service: U.S. Air Force, 1954-57; weather-gunner; stationed for two and a half years in Puerto Rico with intervening trips to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

Member

All-African Games, Pan African Federation, Black Academy of Arts and Letters, Black Writers' Union, United Brothers (Newark), Newark Writers Collective.

Awards, Honors

Longview Best Essay of the Year award, 1961, for "Cuba Libre"; John Whitney Foundation fellowship for poetry and fiction, 1962; Village Voice Best American Off-Broadway Play ("Obie" award, 1964, for Dutchman; Guggenheim fellowship, 1965-66; Yoruba Academy fellow, 1965; second prize, International Art Festival (Dakar), 1966, for The Slave; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1966; D.H.L. from Malcolm X College, 1972; Rockefeller Foundation fellow (drama), 1981; Poetry Award, National Endowment for the Arts, 1981; New Jersey Council for the Arts award, 1982; American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, 1984, for Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women; Drama Award, 1985; PEN-Faulkner Award, 1989; Langston Hughes Medal, 1989, for outstanding contribution to literature; Ferroni award (Italy), and Foreign Poet Award, 1993; Playwright's Award, Winston-Salem Black Drama Festival, 1997; appointed poet laureate of State of New Jersey (position abolished, 2003).

Writings

plays

(Under name Leroi Jones) A Good Girl Is Hard to Find, produced in Montclair, NJ, 1958.

(Under name Leroi Jones) Dante (one act; excerpted from novel The System of Dante's Hell; also see below), produced in New York, NY, 1961, produced as The Eighth Ditch, 1964.

(Under name Leroi Jones) Dutchman, (also see below; produced Off-Broadway, 1964; produced in London, England, 1967), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1967.

(Under name Leroi Jones) The Baptism: A Comedy in One Act (also see below; produced Off-Broadway, 1964, produced in London, England, 1970-71), Sterling Lord, 1966.

(Under name Leroi Jones) The Toilet (also see below; produced with The Slave: A Fable Off-Broadway, 1964), Sterling Lord, 1964.

Dutchman [and] The Slave: A Fable, Morrow (New York, NY), 1964.

(Under name Leroi Jones) J-E-L-L-O (one act comedy; also see below; produced in New York, NY, by Black Arts Repertory Theatre, 1965), Third World Press, 1970.

(Under name Leroi Jones) Experimental Death Unit #1 (one act; also see below), produced Off-Broadway, 1965.

(Under name Leroi Jones) The Death of Malcolm X (one act; produced in Newark, NJ, 1965), published in New Plays from the Black Theatre, edited by Ed Bullins, Bantam (New York, NY), 1969.

(Under name Leroi Jones) A Black Mass (also see below), produced in Newark. NJ, 1966.

Slave Ship (also see below; produced as Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant at Spirit House, 1967; produced in New York, NY, 1969), Jihad, 1967.

Madheart: Morality Drama (one act; also see below), produced at San Francisco State College, 1967.

Arm Yourself, or Harm Yourself, A One-Act Play (also see below; produced at Spirit House, 1967), Jihad, 1967.

Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show) (one act; also see below), produced at Spirit House, 1967; produced Off-Broadway at Tambellini's Gate Theater, 1969.

The Baptism [and] The Toilet, Grove (New York, NY), 1967.

Home on the Range (one act comedy; also see below), produced at Spirit House, 1968; produced in New York, NY, 1968.

Junkies Are Full of SHHH …, produced at Spirit House, 1968; produced with Bloodrites (also see below) Off-Broadway, 1970.

Board of Education (children's play), produced at Spirit House, 1968.

Resurrection in Life (one-act pantomime), produced as Insurrection in Harlem, NY, 1969.

Four Black Revolutionary Plays: All Praises to the Black Man (contains Experimental Death Unit #1, A Black Mass, Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show), and Madheart), Bobbs-Merrill (New York, NY), 1969.

Black Dada Nihilism (one act), produced Off-Broadway, 1971.

A Recent Killing (three acts), produced Off-Broadway, 1973.

Columbia the Gem of the Ocean, produced in Washington, DC, 1973.

The New Ark's A-Moverin, produced in Newark, NJ, 1974.

The Sidnee Poet Heroical, in Twenty-nine Scenes (one act comedy; also see below; produced Off-Broadway, 1975), Reed & Cannon, 1979.

S-1: A Play with Music (also see below), produced in New York, NY, 1976.

(With Frank Chin and Leslie Siko) America More or Less (musical), produced in San Francisco, CA, 1976.

The Motion of History (four-act; also see below), produced in New York, NY, 1977.

The Motion of History and Other Plays (contains Slave Ship and S-1), Morrow (New York, NY), 1978.

What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production? (one-act; also see below; produced in New York, NY, 1979), Anti-Imperialist Cultural Union, 1978.

Dim Cracker Party Convention, produced in New York, NY, 1980.

Boy and Tarzan Appear in a Clearing, produced Off-Broadway, 1981.

Money: Jazz Opera, produced Off-Broadway, 1982.

Song: A One-Act Play about the Relationship of Art to Real Life, produced in Jamaica, NY, 1983.

General Hag's Skeezag, 1992.

Also author of plays Police, published in Drama Review, summer, 1968; Rockgroup, published in Cricket, December, 1969; Vomit and the Jungle Bunnies, 1969; Revolt of the Moonflowers, 1969; The Coronation of the Black Queen, published in Black Scholar, June, 1970; Black Power Chant, published in Drama Review, December, 1972; Primitive World, 1991; Jackpot Melting, 1996; Election Machine Warehouse, 1996; Meeting Lillie, 1997; Biko, 1997; and Black Renaissance in Harlem, 1998.

Plays included in anthologies, including Woodie King and Ron Milner, editors, Black Drama Anthology (includes Bloodrites and Junkies Are Full of SHHH …), New American Library, 1971; and Rochelle Owens, editor, Spontaneous Combustion: Eight New American Plays (includes Ba-Ra-Ka), Winter House, 1972.

screenplays

Dutchman, Gene Persson Enterprises, Ltd., 1967.

Black Spring, Jihad Productions, 1968.

A Fable (based on The Slave: A Fable), MFR Productions, 1971.

Supercoon, Gene Persson Enterprises, Ltd., 1971.

poetry

April 13 (broadside), Penny Poems (New Haven, CT), 1959.

Spring and So Forth (broadside), Penny Poems (New Haven, CT), 1960.

Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, Totem/Corinth, 1961.

The Disguise (broadside), [New Haven, CT], 1961.

The Dead Lecturer (also see below), Grove (New York, NY), 1964.

Black Art (also see below), Jihad, 1966.

Black Magic (also see below), Morrow (New York, NY), 1967.

A Poem for Black Hearts, Broadside Press, 1967.

Black Magic: Sabotage; Target Study; Black Art; Collected Poetry, 1961-1967, Bobbs-Merrill (New York, NY), 1969.

It's Nation Time, Third World Press, 1970.

Spirit Reach, Jihad, 1972.

Afrikan Revolution, Jihad, 1973.

Hard Facts: Excerpts, People's War, 1975, 2nd edition, Revolutionary Communist League, 1975.

Spring Song, Baraka, 1979.

AM/TRAK, Phoenix Bookshop, 1979.

Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones, Morrow (New York, NY), 1979.

In the Tradition: For Black Arthur Blythe, Jihad, 1980.

Reggae or Not!, Contact Two, 1982.

Transbluency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1995), Marsilio, 1995.

Funk Lore: New Poems, 1984-1995, Sun & Moon Press, 1996.

Beginnings and Other Poems, House of Nehesi (Fredericksburg, VA), 2003.

essays

Cuba Libre, Fair Play for Cuba Committee (New York, NY), 1961.

Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Morrow (New York, NY), 1963, reprinted, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1980, published as Negro Music in White America, MacGibbon & Kee (London, England), 1965.

Home: Social Essays (contains "Cuba Libre," "The Myth of a 'Negro Literature,'" "Expressive Language," "The Legacy of Malcolm X, and the Coming of the Black Nation," and "State/meant"), Morrow (New York, NY), 1966, Ecco Press (Hopewell, NJ), 1998.

Black Music, Morrow (New York, NY), 1968.

Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays since 1965, Random House (New York, NY), 1971.

Strategy and Tactics of a Pan-African Nationalist Party, Jihad, 1971.

Kawaida Studies: The New Nationalism, Third World Press, 1972.

Crisis in Boston!, Vita Wa Watu People's War, 1974.

Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1974-1979, Morrow (New York, NY), 1984.

(With wife, Amina Baraka) The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, Morrow (New York, NY), 1987.

Jesse Jackson and Black People, 1996.

The Essence of Reparation, House of Nehesi (Fredericksburg, VA), 2003.

Contributor of essays to Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun; and The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1995.

editor

January 1st 1959: Fidel Castro, Totem, 1959.

Four Young Lady Poets, Corinth, 1962.

(And author of introduction) The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, 1963, published as The Moderns: New Fiction in America, 1964.

(And co-author) In-formation, Totem, 1965.

Gilbert Sorrentino, Black & White, Corinth, 1965.

Edward Dorn, Hands Up!, Corinth, 1965.

(And contributor) Afro-American Festival of the Arts Magazine, Jihad, 1966, published as Anthology of Our Black Selves, 1969.

(With Larry Neal and A. B. Spellman) The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution, Jihad, 1968, published as Trippin': A Need for Change, New Ark, 1969.

(And contributor, with Larry Neal) Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, Morrow (New York, NY), 1968.

A Black Value System, Jihad, 1970.

(With Billy Abernathy under pseudonym Fundi) In Our Terribleness (Some Elements of Meaning in Black Style), Bobbs-Merrill (New York, NY), 1970.

(And author of introduction) African Congress: A Documentary of the First Modern Pan-African Congress, Morrow (New York, NY), 1972.

(With Diane Di Prima) The Floating Bear, A Newsletter, Nos. 1-37, 1961-1969, McGilvery, 1974.

(With Amina Baraka) Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women, Morrow (New York, NY), 1983.

other

The System of Dante's Hell (novel; includes the play Dante), Grove (New York, NY), 1965.

(Author of introduction) David Henderson, Felix of the Silent Forest, Poets Press, 1967.

Striptease, Parallax, 1967.

Tales (short stories), Grove (New York, NY), 1967.

(Author of preface) Black Boogaloo (Notes on Black Liberation), Journal of Black Poetry Press, 1969.

Focus on Amiri Baraka: Playwright LeRoi Jones Analyzes the 1st National Black Political Convention (sound recording), Center for Cassette Studies, 1973.

Three Books by Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (contains The System of Dante's Hell, Tales, and The Dead Lecturer), Grove (New York, NY), 1975.

Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, Morrow (New York, NY), 1979.

The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Freundlich, 1984, Lawrence Hill Books (Chicago, IL), 1997.

(Author of introduction) Martin Espada, Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hand, Curbstone Press, 1990.

(Author of introduction) Eliot Katz, Space, and Other Poems, Northern Lights, 1990.

LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991.

Thornton Dial: Images of the Tiger, Harry N. Abrams (New York, NY), 1993.

Jesse Jackson and Black People, Third World Press, 1994.

Shy's Wise, Y's: The Griot's Tale, Third World Press, 1994.

(With Charlie Reilly) Conversations with Amiri Baraka, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 1994.

Eulogies, Marsilio Publishers (New York, NY), 1996.

The Fiction of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, foreword by Greg Tate, Lawrence Hill, 2000.

Works represented in anthologies, including A Broadside Treasury, For Malcolm, The New Black Poetry, Nommo, and The Trembling Lamb. Contributor to Black Men in Their Own Words, 2002; contributor to periodicals, including Evergreen Review, Poetry, Downbeat, Metronome, Nation, Negro Digest, and Saturday Review.

Baraka's works have been translated into Japanese, Norwegian, Italian, German, French, and Spanish.

Sidelights

Amiri Baraka, who published under his birth name LeRoi Jones until 1967, is known for his strident social criticism and an incendiary style that has made it difficult for some audiences and critics to respond with objectivity to his works. Baraka's art stems from his African-American heritage. Throughout his career his method in poetry, drama, fiction, and essays has been confrontational, calculated to shock and awaken audiences to the political concerns of black Americans during the second half of the twentieth century. Baraka's own political stance has changed several times, thus dividing his oeuvre into periods; a member of the avant garde during the 1950s, Baraka became a black nationalist, and more recently a Marxist with socialist ideals. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, bombings of the World Trade Center, Baraka was accused of adding anti-Semitism to his political outlook when in his poem "Somebody Blew up America" he suggested that New York's Jews had been warned in advance not to enter the doomed buildings on that fateful day; public outcry became so great that the State of New

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Jersey took action to abolish the position of poet laureate Baraka then held. Baraka, for his part, threatened legal action.

Throughout his career Baraka has stirred controversy, some praising him for speaking out against oppression and others arguing that he fosters hate. Critical opinion has been sharply divided between those who feel that Baraka's race and political stance have created his celebrity, and those who feel that Baraka stands among the most important writers of the twentieth century. In American Book Review, Arnold Rampersad counted Baraka with Phyllis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison "as one of the eight figures … who have significantly affected the course of African-American literary culture."

Conventional Middle-Class Upbringing

Baraka did not always identify with radical politics, nor did he always channel his writing into use as their tool. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, and enjoyed a middle-class education. During the 1950s he attended Rutgers University and Howard University. Then he spent two years in the U.S. Air Force, where he was stationed for most of that time in Puerto Rico. When he returned to New York City, he attended Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. Baraka lived in Greenwich Village's lower east side, where he made friends with Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, and Gilbert Sorrentino. The white avant garde—primarily Ginsberg, O'Hara, and leader of the Black Mountain poets, Charles Olson—and Baraka believed that writing poetry is a process of discovery rather than an exercise in fulfilling traditional expectations of what poems should be. Baraka, like the projectivist poets, believed that a poem's form should follow the shape determined by the poet's own breath and intensity of feeling. In 1958 Baraka founded Yugen magazine and Totem Press, important forums for new verse. His first play, A Good Girl Is Hard to Find, was produced at Sterington House in Montclair, New Jersey, that same year.

Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, Baraka's first published collection of poems, appeared in 1961. M. L. Rosenthal wrote in The New Poets: American and British Poetry that these poems show Baraka's "natural gift for quick, vivid imagery and spontaneous humor." The reviewer also praised the "sardonic or sensuous or slangily knowledgeable passages" that fill the early poems. While the cadence of blues and many allusions to black culture are found in the poems, the subject of blackness does not predominate. Throughout, rather, the poet shows his integrated, Bohemian social roots. For example, the poem "Notes for a Speech" states, "African blues/ does not know me … Does/ not feel/ what I am," and the book's last line is "You are/ as any other sad man here/ american."

With the rise of the civil rights movement Baraka's works took on a more militant tone, and he began a reluctant separation from his newly adopted bohemian milieu. His trip to Castro's Cuba in July of 1959 marked an important turning point in his life. His view of his role as a writer, the purpose of art, and the degree to which ethnic awareness deserved to be his subject changed dramatically. In Cuba he met writers and artists from Third-World countries whose political concerns included the fight against poverty, famine, and oppressive governments. They felt he was merely being self-indulgent, "cultivating his soul" in poetry, while there were social problems to solve in America. In Home: Social Essays, Baraka explains how he tried to defend himself against these accusations, and was further challenged by Jaime Shelley, a Mexican poet, who had said, "'In that ugliness you live in, you want to cultivate your soul? Well, we've got millions of starving people to feed, and that moves me enough to make poems out of.'" Soon Baraka began to identify with Third-World writers and to write poems and plays with strong ethnic and political messages.

Sets New Course with Dutchman

Dutchman, a play of entrapment in which a white woman and a middle-class black man both express their murderous hatred on a subway, was first performed Off-Broadway in 1964. The one-act play makes many references to sex and violence and ends in the black man's murder. While other dramatists of the time were using the techniques of naturalism, Baraka used symbolism and other experimental techniques to enhance the play's emotional impact. Lula, the white woman, represents the white state, and Clay, the black man in the play, represents ethnic identity and non-white manhood. Dutchman is an emotionally charged and highly symbolic version of the Adam and Eve story, wherein a naive bourgeois black man is murdered by an insane and calculating white seductress, who is coldly preparing for her next victim as the curtain comes down. Baraka's play is one of mythical proportions, a ritual drama that has a sociological purpose: to galvanize his audience into revolutionary action. The play's major characters force the audience to examine their prejudices through the violence of the dramatic action. Baraka makes the audience face and confront the violent reality of the subconscious hatred buried in its psyche. He clearly challenges the audience to recognize that it makes the moral standards by which it chooses to live. Certainly, Baraka wants his viewers to see Clay and Lula as real people; at the same time, however, these characters must be understood to be character types. Dutchman is set in a New York City subway car in which Clay and Lula are riding beneath the city. The action of the play thus takes place in the heart, the very infrastructure, of the city; the setting thus seems emblematic of the sociopolitical structure of the United States. As the dramatic action evolves, it is possible to see the "true" feelings of the characters as demonstrated by their language and gestures. It seems obvious the action is intended to represent the class struggle going on in society. Clay wants to be a man, but Lula hatefully attacks his attempts toward manhood; she asks him, accusingly, "What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard." Racial stereotypes are revealed in the play's dialogue; Lula, for example, remarks on the black male's supposed sexual ability. Dutchman proved to be an important element in the black drama of the 1960's, both mirroring and fostering the black militancy of the time. The play established Baraka's reputation as a playwright and has been often anthologized and performed. Considered by many to be the best play of the year, it won the Village Voice Off-Broadway Award in 1964. Later, Anthony Harvey adapted it for a film made in Britain, and in the 1990s it was revived for several productions in New York City. Darryl Pinckney commented in the New York Times Book Review that Dutchman survived the test of time better than other protest plays of the 1960s due to its economic use of vivid language, its surprise ending, and its quick pacing.

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The plays and poems following Dutchman expressed Baraka's increasing disappointment with white America and his growing need to separate from it. He wrote in Cuba Libre that the Beat generation had become a counterculture of drop-outs who did not generate very meaningful politics. Baraka felt there had to be a more effective alternative to disengagement from the political, legal, and moral morass the country had become. In The Dead Lecturer Baraka explored the alternatives, finding no room for compromise: if he identified with an ethnic cause, he would find hope of meaningful action and change; but if he remained in his comfortable assimilated position, writing "quiet" poems, he would remain "a dead lecturer." The voice in Cuba Libre is more sure of itself, led by a "moral earnestness" that is wedded to action, Baraka wrote in a 1961 letter to Edward Dorn. Critics observed that as Baraka's poems became more politically intense, they left behind some of the flawless technique of the earlier poems. Nation review contributor Richard Howard wrote: "These are the agonized poems of a man writing to save his skin, or at least to settle in it, and so urgent is their purpose that not one of them can trouble to be perfect."

To make a clean break with the Beat influence, Baraka turned to writing fiction in the mid-1960s, penning The System of Dante's Hell, a novel, and Tales, a collection of short stories. The novel echoes the themes and structures found in his earlier poems and plays. The stories, like the poems in Black Magic, also published in 1967, are "'fugitive narratives' that describe the harried flight of an intensely self-conscious Afro-American artist/intellectual from neo-slavery of blinding, neutralizing whiteness, where the area of struggle is basically within the mind," Robert Eliot Fox wrote in Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Post-Modernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/ Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. The role of violent action in achieving political change is more prominent in these stories. Unlike Shakespeare's Hamlet, who deliberates at length before taking violent action, Baraka sought to stand with "the straight ahead people, who think when that's called for, who don't when they don't have to," as he explained in Tales. The role of music in black life is seen more often in these books, also. In the story "Screamers," the screams from a jazz saxophone galvanize the people into a powerful uprising.

Chronicles Black Social History

Baraka's classic history Blues People: Negro Music in White America, published in 1963, traces black music from slavery to contemporary jazz. The blues, a staple of black American music, grew out of the encounter between African and American cultures in the South to become an art form uniquely connected to both the African past and the American soil. Finding indigenous black art forms was important to Baraka at this time, as he was searching for a more authentic ethnic voice for his own poetry. From this important study Baraka became known as an articulate jazz critic and a perceptive observer of social change. As Clyde Taylor stated in Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, "The connection he nailed down between the many faces of black music, the sociological sets that nurtured them, and their symbolic evolutions through socio-economic changes, in Blues People, is his most durable conception, as well as probably the one most indispensable thing said about black music."

Baraka will also be long remembered for his other important studies, Black Music, which expresses black nationalist ideals, and The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, which details his Marxist views. In Black Music John Coltrane emerges as the patron saint of the black arts movement after replacing "weak Western forms" of music with more fluid forms learned from a global vision of black culture. Though some critics have maintained that Baraka's essay writing is not all of the same quality, Lloyd W. Brown commented in Amiri Baraka that Baraka's essays on music are flawless: "As historian, musicological analyst, or as a journalist covering a particular performance Baraka always commands attention because of his obvious knowledge of the subject and because of a style that is engaging and persuasive even when the sentiments are questionable and controversial."

Shifting Political Philosophies

After Black Muslim leader Malcolm X was killed in 1965, Baraka moved to Harlem and became a black nationalist. He founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem and published the collection Black Magic. Poems in Black Magic chronicle Baraka's divorce from white culture and values and also display his mastery of poetic techniques. As Taylor observed, "There are enough brilliant poems of such variety in Black Magic and In Our Terribleness to establish the unique identity and claim for respect of several poets. But it is beside the point that Baraka is probably the finest poet, black or white, writing in this country these days." There was no doubt that Baraka's political concerns superseded his just claims to literary excellence, and the challenge to critics was to respond to the political content of the works. Some critics who felt the best art must be apolitical, dismissed Baraka's

newer work as "a loss to literature." Kenneth Rexroth wrote in With Eye and Ear that Baraka "has succumbed to the temptation to become a professional Race Man of the most irresponsible sort…. His loss to literature is more serious than any literary casualty of the Second War." In 1966 Baraka moved back to Newark, New Jersey, and a year later changed his name to the Bantuized Muslim appellation Imamu ("spiritual leader," later dropped) Ameer (later Amiri, "blessed") Baraka ("prince").

A new aesthetic for black art was being developed in Harlem and Baraka was its primary theorist. Black American artists should follow "black," not "white" standards of beauty and value, he maintained, and should stop looking to white culture for validation. The black artist's role, he wrote in Home: Social Essays, is to "aid in the destruction of America as he knows it." Foremost in this endeavor was the imperative to portray society and its ills faithfully so that the portrayal would move people to take necessary corrective action.

By the early 1970s Baraka was recognized as an influential African-American writer. Randall noted in Black World that younger black poets Nikki Giovanni and Don. L. Lee (later Haki R. Madhubuti) were "learning from LeRoi Jones, a man versed in German philosophy, conscious of literary tradition … who uses the structure of Dante's Divine Comedy in his System of Dante's Hell and the punctuation, spelling and line divisions of sophisticated contemporary poets." More importantly, Rampersad wrote in the American Book Review, "More than any other black poet … he taught younger black poets of the generation past how to respond poetically to their lived experience, rather than to depend as artists on embalmed reputations and out-moded rhetorical strategies derived from a culture often substantially different from their own."

After coming to see black nationalism as a destructive form of racism, Baraka denounced it in 1974 and became a Third World socialist. Hatred of nonwhites, he declared in the New York Times, "is sickness or criminality, in fact, a form of fascism." Beginning in 1974 he produced a number of Marxist poetry collections and plays, his newly adopted political goal the formation of socialist communities and a socialist state. Daggers and Javelins and the other books produced during this period lack the emotional power of the works from the black nationalist period, contended many critics. However, some reviewers agreed with his new politics. Exiled Filipino leftist intellectual E. San Juan, praising Baraka's work of the late 1970s, wrote in Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch that Baraka's 1978 play Lone Ranger was "the most significant theatrical achievement of 1978 in the Western hemisphere." Joe Weixlmann responded in the same book to the tendency to categorize the radical Baraka instead of analyze him: "At the very least, dismissing someone with a label does not make for very satisfactory scholarship. Initially, Baraka's reputation as a writer and thinker derived from a recognition of the talents with which he is so obviously endowed. The subsequent assaults on that reputation have, too frequently, derived from concerns which should be extrinsic to informed criticism."

Recognition of Baraka's impact on late twentieth-century American culture have resulted in the publication of several anthologies of his literary oeuvre. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader presents a thorough overview of the writer's development, covering the period from 1957 to 1983. The volume presents Baraka's work from four different periods and emphasizes lesser-known works rather than the author's most-famous writings. Although criticizing the anthology for offering little in the way of original poetry, Sulfur reviewer Andrew Schelling termed the collection "a sweeping account of Baraka's development." A Choice contributor also praised the volume, calling it "a landmark volume in African American literature." Transbluency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1995), published in 1995, was hailed by Daniel L. Guillory in Library Journal as "critically important," and Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, commended the "lyric boldness of this passionate collection."

If you enjoy the works of Amiri Baraka

If you enjoy the works of Amiri Baraka, you may also want to check out the following books:

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955.

Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 1968.

Nikki Giovanni, Racism 101, 1993.

While Baraka's legacy as a major poet of the second half of the twentieth century, as well as his importance as a cultural and political leader, remained widely acknowledged, the changing political climate during the late 1990s and into the next century found the iconoclastic poet increasingly out of step with black Americans. Following the events of September 11, 2001, Baraka's anti-Semitic pronouncements and his 2003 poem "Somebody Blew up America" regarding the complicity of Israeli politicians in the terrorist attacks against the United States did much to diminish his continued relevance or impact. As Cedric Johnson noted in Monthly Review: "Though he was as witty and defiant as ever, Baraka's latest publicity lacked the popular resonance and critical edge of his historical work. Unlike his black power activism which was intimately linked to mass mobilizations that sought to challenge domination and transform public institutions into more democratic and responsive bodies, this latest fiasco was more media circus than movement." Such reaction does not discredit the fact that during an earlier era Baraka's influence on younger writers was significant and widespread, and as a leader of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s he did much to define and support black literature's mission into the next century. His experimental fiction of the 1960s is yet considered some of the most significant contribution to black fiction since that of Jean Toomer, who wrote during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Writers from other ethnic groups have credited Baraka with opening "tightly guarded doors" in the white publishing establishment, noted Murice Kenney in Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, adding: "We'd all still be waiting the invitation from the New Yorker without him. He taught us how to claim it and take it."

Biographical and Critical Sources

books

Allen, Donald M., and Warren Tallman, editors, Poetics of the New American Poetry, Grove (New York, NY), 1973.

Anadolu-Okur, Nilgun, Contemporary African American Theater: Afrocentricity in the Works of Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, and Charles Fuller, Garland (New York, NY), 1997.

Baraka, Amiri, Tales, Grove (New York, NY), 1967.

Baraka, Amiri, and Larry Neal, editors, Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, Morrow (New York, NY), 1968.

Baraka, Amiri, Black Magic: Sabotage; Target Study; Black Art; Collected Poetry, 1961-1967, Bobbs-Merrill (New York, NY), 1969.

Baraka, Amiri, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Freundlich Books, 1984.

Baraka, Amiri, and Charlie Reilly, Conversations with Amiri Baraka, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 1994.

Benston, Kimberly A., editor, Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1976.

Benston, Kimberly A., editor, Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1978.

Bigsby, C. W. E., Confrontation and Commitment: A Study of Contemporary American Drama, 1959-1966, University of Missouri Press, 1968.

Bigsby, C. W. E., editor, The Black American Writer, Volume II: Poetry and Drama, Everett/Edwards, 1970, Penguin (Harmondsworth, England), 1971.

Bigsby, C. W. E., The Second Black Renaissance: Essays in Black Literature, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1980.

Birnebaum, William M., Something for Everybody Is Not Enough, Random House (New York, NY), 1972.

Black Literature Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1991.

Brown, Lloyd W., Amiri Baraka, Twayne (New York, NY), 1980.

Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, Volume 1: The New Consciousness, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), 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 (New York, NY), 1971.

Dace, Letitia, LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka): A Checklist of Works by and about Him, Nether Press, 1971.

Debusscher, Gilbert, and Henry I. Schvey, editors, New Essays on American Drama, Rodopi, 1989.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), 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.

Dukore, Bernard F., Drama and Revolution, Holt (New York, NY), 1971.

Elam, Harry Justin, Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1997.

Ellison, Ralph, Shadow and Act, New American Library (New York, NY), 1966.

Emanuel, James A., and Theodore L. Gross, editors, Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, Free Press (New York, NY), 1968.

Fox, Robert Elliot, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Post-modernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Baraka, Ishmael Reed and Samuel R. Delany, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1987.

Frost, David, The Americans, Stein & Day, 1970.

Gayle, Addison, editor, Black Expression: Essays by and about Black Americans in the Creative Arts, Weybright & Talley, 1969.

Gayle, Addison, The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America, Anchor/Doubleday (New York, NY), 1975.

Gwynne, James B., editor, Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, Steppingstones Press, 1985.

Harris, William J., The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic, University of Missouri Press, 1985.

Haskins, James, Black Theater in America, Crowell (New York, NY), 1982.

Henderson, Stephen E., Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech, and Black Music as Poetic References, Morrow (New York, NY), 1973.

Hill, Herbert, Soon, One Morning, Knopf (New York, NY), 1963.

Hill, Herbert, editor, Anger, and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States, Harper (New York, NY), 1966.

Hudson, Theodore, From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works, Duke University Press, 1973.

Inge, M. Thomas, Maurice Duke, and Jackson R. Bryer, editors, Black American Writers: Bibliographic Essays; Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1978.

Jones, LeRoi, Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Morrow (New York, NY), 1963.

Jones, LeRoi, The Dead Lecturer, Grove (New York, NY), 1964.

Jones, LeRoi, Home: Social Essays, Morrow (New York, NY), 1966.

Keil, Charles, Urban Blues, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1966.

King, Woodie, and Ron Milner, editors, Black Drama Anthology, New American Library (New York, NY), 1971.

Knight, Arthur, and Kit Knight, editors, The Beat Vision, Paragon House, 1987.

Kofsky, Frank, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music, Pathfinder, 1970.

Lacey, Henry C., To Raise, Destroy, and Create: The Poetry, Drama, and Fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Whitson Publishing Company, 1981.

Lewis, Allan, American Plays and Playwrights, Crown (New York, NY), 1965.

Littlejohn, David, Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes, Viking (New York, NY), 1966.

Magidson, Mark, Baraka: A Visual Journal, St. Ann's Press, 2000.

O'Brien, John, Interviews with Black Writers, Liveright (New York, NY), 1973.

Olaniyan, Tejumola, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

Ossman, David, The Sullen Art: Interviews with Modern American Poets, Corinth, 1963.

Rexroth, Kenneth, With Eye and Ear, Herder & Herder, 1970.

Rosenthal, M. L., The New Poets: American and British Poetry since World War II, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1967.

Sollors, Werner, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist Modernism," Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1978.

Stepanchev, Stephen, American Poetry since 1945, Harper (New York, NY), 1965.

Watts, Jerry Gafio, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual, New York University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Weales, Gerald, The Jumping-off Place: American Drama in the 1960s, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1969.

Whitlow, Roger, Black American Literature: A Critical History, Nelson Hall (New York, NY), 1973.

Williams, Sherley Anne, Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature, Dial (New York, NY), 1972.

Woodard, Komozi, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1999.

periodicals

African-American Review, summer-fall, 2003, special Baraka issue.

American Book Review, February, 1980; May-June, 1985.

Atlantic, January, 1966; May, 1966.

Avant Garde, September, 1968.

Black American Literature Forum, spring, 1980; spring, 1981; fall, 1982; spring, 1983; winter, 1985.

Black Issues Book Review, Robert Fleming, "Trouble Man," p. 22.

Black World, April, 1971; December, 1971; November, 1974; July, 1975.

Booklist, January 1, 1994, p. 799; February 15, 1994, p. 1052; October 15, 1995, p. 380.

Book Week, December 24, 1967.

Book World, October 28, 1979.

Boundary 2, number 6, 1978.

Callaloo, summer, 2003, Matthew Rebhorn, "Flying Dutchman: Maosochism, Minstrelsy, and the Gender Politics of Amiri Baraka's 'Dutchman,'" p. 796.

Chicago Defender, January 11, 1965.

Chicago Tribune, October 4, 1968.

Commentary, February, 1965.

Contemporary Literature, Volume 12, 1971; winter, 2001, Michael Magee, "Tribes of New York," p. 694.

Detroit Free Press, January 31, 1965.

Detroit News, January 15, 1984; August 12, 1984.

Dissent, spring, 1965.

Ebony, August, 1967; August, 1969; February, 1971.

Educational Theatre Journal, March, 1968; March, 1970; March, 1976.

Esquire, June, 1966.

Essence, September, 1970; May, 1984; September, 1984; May, 1985.

Jazz Review, June, 1959.

Journal of Black Poetry, fall, 1968; spring, 1969; summer, 1969; fall, 1969.

Library Journal, January, 1994, p. 112; November, 1995, pp. 78-79.

Los Angeles Free Press, May 3, 1968.

Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1990.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 15, 1983; March 29, 1987.

Monthly Review, December, 2004, Cedric Johnson, "Black Radical Enigma," p. 42.

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; November 18, 2002, Art Winslow, "Prosody in Motion," p. 11.

Negro American Literature Forum, March, 1966; winter, 1973.

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.

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.

New York, November 5, 1979.

New Yorker, April 4, 1964; December 26, 1964; March 4, 1967; December 30, 1972; October 14, 2002, Nick Paumgarten, "Goodbye, Paramus."

New York Herald Tribune, March 25, 1964; April 2, 1964; December 13, 1964; October 27, 1965.

New York Post, March 16, 1964; March 24, 1964; January 15, 1965; March 18, 1965.

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 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; February 9, 1991.

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.

New York Times Magazine, February 5, 1984.

Salmagundi, spring-summer, 1973.

Saturday Review, April 20, 1963; January 11, 1964; January 9, 1965; December 11, 1965; December 9, 1967; October 2, 1971; July 12, 1975.

Skeptical Inquirer, January-February, 2003, Kevin Christopher, "Baraka Buys Bunk," p. 8.

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.

Sulfur, spring, 1992.

Sunday News (New York, NY), January 21, 1973.

Time, December 25, 1964; November 19, 1965; May 6, 1966; January 12, 1968; April 26, 1968; June 28, 1968; June 28, 1971.

Times Literary Supplement, November 25, 1965; September 1, 1966; September 11, 1969; October 9, 1969; August 2, 1991.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), March 29, 1987.

Village Voice, December 17, 1964; May 6, 1965; May 19, 1965; August 30, 1976; August 1, 1977; December 17-23, 1980; October 2, 1984.

Washington Post, August 15, 1968; September 12, 1968; November 27, 1968; December 5, 1980; January 23, 1981; June 29, 1987.