Amiri Baraka

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Image:Baraka.jpg Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones on October 7, 1934, in Newark, New Jersey) is an American writer of poetry, drama, essays, and music criticism. Baraka is today most widely known for the fact that in 2002 the state of New Jersey made him poet laureate, but forced him out of that position a year later because of his poem Somebody Blew Up America, which was widely interpreted to mean that Baraka believed Israelis were behind the attacks on the World Trade Center — a 9/11 conspiracy theory leading some to characterize him as an anti-Semite.

Baraka has been a self-proclaimed communist since 1974, but given several major instances of questionable political leanings and activity long before then and up to the present day, many on the Radical Left do not accept the legitimacy of this claim to the principles of Marxism. In the view of these same critics, it is somewhat ironic that, in 2006, controversial right-wing author and lecturer David Horowitz ranked Baraka 27th worst in his book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

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Biography

In 1952, he changed his name from LeRoi Jones. In 1967 he adopted the Arabic name Imamu Amiri Baraka, which he later changed to Amiri Baraka. Baraka studied Philosophy and Religious studies at Rutgers University, Columbia University, and Howard University without obtaining a degree. In 1954 he joined the U.S. Air Force reaching the rank of sergeant. After an anonymous letter to his commanding officer accusing him of being a communist led to the discovery of Soviet writings, Baraka was put on gardening duty and given a dishonorable discharge for violation of his oath of duty.

The same year he moved to Greenwich Village working initially in a warehouse for music records. From this period stems his interest in jazz. At the same time he came into contact with the incipient movement of Beat writers that was going to have a powerful influence on his early poetry. In 1958, Jones founded Totem Press, which published such Beat icons as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In 1960, he married Hettie Cohen and, with her, became joint editor of the Yugen, a literary magazine (until 1963).

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Career

In 1960 Baraka went to Cuba, a visit that initiated his transformation into a politically active artist. In 1961, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note was published, followed in 1963 by Blues People: Negro Music in White America—to this day one of the most influential volumes of jazz criticism, especially in regard to the then beginning Free Jazz movement. His play The Dutchman premiered in 1964 and the same year he won an Obie Award for it. After the killing of Malcolm X he broke with the Beat Poets, left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem because, at the time, he thought of himself as a Black cultural nationalist. Hettie Cohen, later, in her autobiography How I Became Hettie Jones (1990), claimed that Baraka had mistreated her during the time of their marriage.

In 1966, Baraka married his second wife, who later adopted the name Amina Baraka. In 1967, Baraka became a lecturer at San Francisco State University. In 1968, he was arrested in Newark, for illegally carrying a weapon and resisting arrest during riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and was subsequently sentenced to three years in prison; shortly afterwards an appeal court threw out the sentence. The same year his second book of jazz criticism, Black Music, was published, a collection of previously published music journalism, including the seminal Apple Cores columns from Down Beat magazine. In 1970 he strongly supported Kenneth Gibson's candidacy for mayor of Newark; Gibson was elected the city's first African American Mayor.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Baraka courted controversy by penning some strongly anti-Jewish poems and articles, similar to the then stance of the Nation of Islam. In one poem, he writes, “Atheist Jews double crossers stole our [black people’s] secrets.... They give us to worship a dead Jew and not ourselves.... Selling fried potatoes and people, the little arty bastards talking arithmetic they sucked from the arab’s head.”

Around 1974, Baraka distanced himself from Black nationalism and became a self-proclaimed communist and a supporter of anti-imperialist third world liberation movements. In 1980, he denounced his former anti-Semitic utterances, declaring himself an anti-zionist. However, critics have often charged that his inclinations towards Black nationalism have not changed fundamentally, particularly as evidenced by his more recent actions (see below).

In 1979 he became a lecturer at SUNY for its Africana Studies Department. The same year, after altercations with his wife, he was sentenced to a short period of compulsory community service. Around this time he began writing his autobiography. In 1984, Baraka became a full professor. In 1987, together with Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, he was a speaker at the commemoration ceremony for James Baldwin. In 1989, he won an American Book Award for his works as well as a Langston Hughes Award. In 1990, he co-authored the autobiography of Quincy Jones, and, in 1998, was a supporting actor as a griot in Warren Beatty's film Bulworth.

In 2002, the state of New Jersey made him poet laureate—a position he had to give up in 2003 surrounding controversy to do with his 9/11 poem Somebody Blew Up America. Some lines of this poem were, by some, interpreted to mean that Baraka claimed the Israelis were behind the attacks on the World Trade Center—a 9/11 conspiracy theory. In light of the poem, some have speculated that for all Baraka's claims to Marxism since 1980, perhaps he did not really distance himself from the more fundamental aspects of Black nationalism and the Nation of Islam after all. The most quoted lines of this accusation in critical articles were the following:

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed?
Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day?
Why did Sharon stay away? [1]

The New Black Panther Party began distributing propaganda around the country shortly after the attacks with an almost identical message: that 4,000 Israelis who worked at the World Trade Center were warned ahead of time by their government and called in sick the day of the attack. In December 2005, Baraka's poem was translated by Aharon Shabtai and Roy Arad to Hebrew and was published in Maayan, a poetry magazine.

Baraka has also been known for his controversial statements on the prospects for greater Black-white societal reconciliation. A former lecturer at Yale, he allegedly answered one female white student's question on how whites could help the situation with this response: "You can help by dying. You are a cancer. You can help the world's people by your death." Template:Citation needed

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Bibliography

  • Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
  • Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963
  • The Dutchman and The Slave, drama, 1964
  • The System of Dante's Hell, novel, 1965
  • Home: Social Essays, 1965
  • Tales, 1967
  • Black Magic, poems, 1969
  • Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
  • In Our Terribleness, with Fundi (Billy Abernathy), poems and photography, 1970
  • It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
  • Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
  • Hard Facts, poems, 1975
  • The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
  • Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
  • reggae or not!, 1981
  • Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
  • The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
  • The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
  • Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
  • Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
  • Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
  • Somebody Blew Up America, 2001

Film

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External links

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