Black bodies keep falling at the hands of police officers and civilians alike –new names are tallied daily (seems like hourly). There is all manner of disregard, disrespect and erasure on the part of government officials and fellow citizens, many whom refuse to honor even the idea of black citizenship or humanity, and it is maddening. Quiet as it’s kept, it is literally driving people mad.
The need to pull sense from senselessness leads us to wordsmiths whose prescience was and is chilling, but whose love for blackness provides some measure of shelter or relief, some reassurance to keep keeping on when all seems futile. James Baldwin is a touchstone, of course, and so is Toni Morrison. And there are countless others (Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, June Jordan) whose work fulfills that need. And there is also Amiri Baraka (1934-2014), a poet, playwright, novelist, activist, griot, and unapologetic race man.
His was one of the literary voices that changed the definition of possibility – how you might live, how you might be a citizen, how you might be an artist. He was, as they say, problematic politically, and many who might naturally have followed him instead found themselves feeling marginalized by him. Others navigated and negotiated their way through his limitations and took what they needed from what he offered. (In this way, and many, many others, he set the stage for hip-hop – its political thrust, the machismo and limitations of its gender and sexuality politics, and the way audiences mapped their way to it all.) Here is his classic early poem, “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note”:
Lately, I’ve become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus…
Things have come to that.
And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.
Nobody sings anymore.
And then last night I tiptoed up
To my daughter’s room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there…
Only she on her knees, peeking into
Her own clasped hands
The literary site LitHub recently gathered four esteemed poets – Evie Shockley, Danez Smith, Harmony Holiday, and Thomas Sayers Ellis – to ruminate on his legacy, on why his written words and in-the-trenches activism cannot be separated, on why he matters in the here and now.
Here are excerpts from each poet’s tribute.
Evie Shockley:
“Amiri Baraka loved his people. Loved us romantically, paternally, loyally, protectively, proudly, fiercely. This deep, intelligent love—uncompromising and impatient, sacrificial and bottomless—is the wellspring of all his poetry (indeed, of all his work, literary and otherwise)…. Because vast power and wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very few, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of your being part of the masses of people he claimed and wrote to, about, and for…”
Danez Smith:
“Here is where I want to say something about the anti-Semitic, misogynist, and homophobic aspects of his writing, to try at writing something that accounts for his complicated history with whiteness & gender & queerness, but can’t…. I can attempt to imagine a landscape and time that takes a Newark boy to being a young, Black, queer ex-military man married to a White Jewish woman in the Village to the founder of the Black Arts Movement whose merit is often overshadowed by his prejudices. But what the hell could I say that means anything?”
Harmony Holiday:
“To form the word political the citizen must trouble the Greek program until it shatters into disciplines sure enough of the strength and charisma of their auras to be called art. It’s nauseating the way we take Baraka’s immense and untamable body of work, and attempt to divide it neatly, into personal and political, as though one cannot write about the world critically in a intimate and tender way that transcends those categories…”
Thomas Sayers Ellis:
“I am saying Amiri Baraka believed in Black People for no reason, for any reason, for every reason—even as he knew we were surrounded by “ghosts” and “the worst Negroes in this nightmare.” He believed, didn’t make-believed, in Black People.”
Read all the essays HERE.
Ernest Hardy is a Sundance Fellow whose music and film criticism have appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, Vibe, Rolling Stone, LA Times, and LA Weekly. His collection of criticism, Blood Beats Vol. 1: Demos, Remixes and Extended Versions (2006) was a recipient of the 2007 PEN / Beyond Margins Award.
