|
Books by Amiri
Baraka
Tales of the Out &
the Gone
/
The Essence of Reparations /
Somebody Blew Up
America & Other Poems
/
Blues People
Autobiography
of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka /
Selected Poetry of
Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones
/
Black Music
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Amiri
Baraka
(LeRoi Jones)
Poet, Dramatist, Music Critic
A Brief Bio
Amiri Baraka, born in 1934, in Newark, New Jersey,
USA, is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music
history and criticism, a poet icon and revolutionary
political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on
cultural and political issues extensively in the USA, the
Caribbean, Africa, and Europe.
With influences on his work
ranging from musical orishas such as Ornette Coleman, John
Coltrane, Theophilus Monk, and Sun Ra to the Cuban Revolution,
Malcolm X and world revolutionary movements, Baraka is renown as
the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s
that became, though short-lived, the virtual blueprint for a new
American theater aesthetics. The movement and his published and
performance work, such as the signature study on
African-American music, Blues People (1963) and the play Dutchman
(1963) practically seeded “the cultural corollary to black
nationalism” of that revolutionary American milieu.
Other titles range from
Selected
Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979), to The Music
(1987), a fascinating collection of poems and monographs on Jazz
and Blues authored by Baraka and his wife and poet Amina, and
his boldly sortied essays, The Essence of Reparations
(2003).
The Essence of Reparations is Baraka’s first published collection of
essays in book form radically exploring what is sure to become a
twenty-first century watershed movement of Black peoples to the
interrelated issues of racism, national oppression, colonialism,
neo-colonialism, self-determination and national and human
liberation, which he has long been addressing creatively and
critically. It has been said that Amiri Baraka is committed to
social justice like no other American writer. He has taught at
Yale, Columbia, and the State University of New York at Stony
Brook.
Somebody Blew Up America
& Other Poems is Baraka’s first collection of poems
published in the Caribbean and includes the title poem that has
headlined him in the media in ways rare to poets and authors.
The recital of the poem “that mattered” engaged the poet
warrior in a battle royal with the very governor of New Jersey
and with a legion of detractors demanding his resignation as the
state’s Poet Laureate because of Somebody
Blew Up America’s provocatively poetic inquiry (in a few lines of
the poem) about who knew beforehand about the New York City
World Trade Center bombings in 2001.
The poem’s own detonation
caused the author’s photo and words to be splashed across the
pages of New York’s Amsterdam News and the New York
Times and to be featured on CNN--to name a few US city,
state and national and international media.
Baraka lives in Newark with
his wife and author Amina Baraka; they have five children and
head up the word-music ensemble, Blue Ark: The Word Ship and
co-direct Kimako’s Blues People, the “artspace” housed in
their theater basement for some fifteen years.
His awards and honors
include an Obie, the American Academy of Arts & Letters
award, the James Weldon Johnson Medal for contributions to the
arts, Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts
grants, Professor Emeritus at the State university of New York
at Stony Brook, and the Poet Laureate of New Jersey.
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Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka
studied philosophy and religious studies at Rutgers
University, Columbia University and Howard
University without obtaining a degree. In 1954 he
joined the US 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 Poets 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. The same
year he married Hettie Cohen and with her became
joint editor of the Yugen literary magazine (until
1963).
In 1960 he 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 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. [Read Baraka Changes
African Nationalist Political Climate]
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Amiri Baraka, born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New
Jersey, on October 7, 1934, Amiri Baraka is today a beloved
poet, an elder statesman of the African-American community.
Presently, politicians in New Jersey are using legislation to
remove him from the appointed position of Poet Laureate of New
Jersey. He wrote a poem entitled "Somebody
Blew Up America" and caused a rather hostile reaction by
the Ant-Defamation League (ADL). This right-wing Zionist
response is thus being supported by conservative New Jersey
senators in order to court the Jewish vote.
Baraka's father, Colt LeRoy Jones, was a
postal supervisor; Anna Lois Jones, his mother, was a social
worker. He attended Rutgers University for two years, then
transferred to Howard University, where in 1954 he earned his
B.A. in English. He served in the Air Force from 1954 until
1957, then moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There he
joined a loose circle of Greenwich Village artists, musicians,
and writers. In 1958 he married Hettie Cohen and began
co-editing the avant-garde literary magazine Yugen with
her. That year he also founded Totem Press, which first
published works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others.
In 1961, Baraka published his first volume
of poetry, entitled
Preface to a
Twenty-Volume Suicide Note.
From 1961 to 1963 he was co-editor, with Diane Di Prima, of The
Floating Bear, a literary newsletter. During this period
Baraka began his growth in racial consciousness which was
reflected in two plays, The Slave and The Toilet,
both written in 1962.
The following year (1963), Baraka published
the much respected
Blues People: Negro Music in White America
and also published and introduced an edited volume entitled,
The
Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America. On March
24, 1964, his controversial play Dutchman was
produced at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York. His reputation
as a playwright gained greater credibility when the Dutchman won
an Obie Award (for "best off-Broadway play") and was
made into a film.
Baraka reached a crisis in his life in 1965
with the assassination of Malcolm X. His marriage also ended. He
moved to Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory
Theatre/School. This group produced plays that emphasized a
cultural blackness and directed toward consciousness raising of
a black audience. Because of the lack of needed support this
group soon dissolved. and Baraka moved back to Newark. In 1967
he married African-American poet Sylvia Robinson (now known as
Amina Baraka). That year he also founded the Spirit House
Players, which produced, among other works, two of Baraka's
plays against police brutality: Police and Arm Yrself
or Harm Yrself.
In 1968, he co-edited with Larry Neal
Black
Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing
and his
play Home on the Range was performed as a benefit for the
Black Panther Party. That same year (1968--the year of the
nationwide rebellion that followed the assassination of Martin
Luther King, Jr.) he became a Muslim, changing his name to Imamu
Amiri Baraka. ("Imamu" means "spiritual
leader.") He assumed leadership of his own black Muslim
organization, named 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 fifteen 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.
A Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Preface to a
Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961)
The Dead
Lecturer (1964)
Black Art (1969)
Black Magic:
Collected Poetry 1961-1967 (1969)
It's Nation Time
(1970)
Spirit Reach
(1972)
Selected
Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979)
Confirmation: An Anthology
of African-American Women (1983)
The Leroi Jones/Amiri
Baraka Reader (1991) ed. William J. Harris
Wise Why's Y's:
The Griot's Tale (1995)
Transbluesency:
The Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones (1961-1995)
(1995)
Funk Lore: New
Poems (1984-1995) (1996)
Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems (2003)
Prose
Black Music
Home: Social
Essays (1966)
Black Fire: An
Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1969)
Raise, Race,
Rays, Raze: Essays Since 1965 (1971)
Daggers and
Javelins: Essays, 1974-1979 (1984)
Autobiography of
LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1984)
The
Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (1987)
Conversations
with Amiri Baraka (1994)
Eulogies (1996)
ed. Michael Schwartz
Jesse Jackson
& Black People (1996)
Drama
Dutchman and The
Slave: Two Plays (1964)
The Baptism and
The Toilet (1967)
Arm Yrself or
Harm Yrself (1967)
Home on the
Range (1968)
Police (1968)
The Death of
Malcolm X (1969)
Rockgroup (1969)
Four Black
Revolutionary Plays, All Praises to the Black Man (1969)
Junkies Are Full
of (SHHH...) (1970)
Jello (1970)
BA-RA-KA (1972)
Black Power
Chant (1972)
The Motion of
History, and Other Plays (1978) includes Slave Ship: A
Historical Pageant and S-1
Selected Plays
and Prose of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979)
The Sidney Poet
Heroical, in 29 Scenes (1979)
General Hag's
Skeezag (1992)
Fiction
The System of
Dante's Hell (1965)
Tales
(1967)
Three Books by Imamu Amiri Baraka
(Leroi
Jones) (1975)-- includes The System of Dante's Hell,
Tales, and The Dead Lecturer.
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|
Amiri Baraka
The Politics and Art of a Black
Intellectual
By Jerry Watts
Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi
Jones, became known as one of the most
militant, anti-white black nationalists
of the 1960s Black Power movement. An
advocate of Black Cultural Nationalism,
Baraka supported the rejection of all
things white and western. He helped
found and direct the influential Black
Arts movement which sought to move black
writers away from western aesthetic
sensibilities and toward a more complete
embrace of the black world. Except
perhaps for James Baldwin, no single
figure has had more of an impact on
black intellectual and artistic life
during the last forty years. |
 |
In this
groundbreaking and comprehensive study, the first to
interweave Baraka's art and political activities,
Jerry Watts takes us from his early immersion in the
New York scene through the most dynamic period in
the life and work of this controversial figure.
Watts situates Baraka within the various worlds
through which he travelled including Beat Bohemia,
Marxist-Leninism, and Black Nationalism. In the
process, he convincingly demonstrates how the 25
years between Baraka's emergence in 1960 and his
continued influence in the mid-1980s can also be
read as a general commentary on the condition of
black intellectuals during the same time.
Continually using Baraka as the focal point for a
broader analysis, Watts illustrates the link between
Baraka's life and the lives of other black writers
trying to realize their artistic ambitions, and
contrasts him with other key political intellectuals
of the time. In a chapter sure to prove
controversial, Watts links Baraka's famous misogyny
to an attempt to bury his own homosexual past.
A work of
extraordinary breadth, Amira Baraka is a powerful
portrait of one man's lifework and the pivotal time
it represents in African-American history. Informed
by a wealth of original research, it fills a crucial
gap in the lively literature on black thought and
history and will continue to be a touchstone work
for some time to come.
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 |
Daggers and Javelins:
Essays, 1974-1979
By Amiri Baraka
The
essays and lectures collected in Daggers
and Javelins: Essays, 1974-1979
represent Amiri Baraka’s vigorous
attempt to identify an African American
revolutionary tradition that could
parallel anticolonial struggles in Third
World countries of Africa, Asia, and
South America. Baraka applies a Marxist
analysis to African American literature
in these essays.
Having become disappointed with the
progress of the Black Power movement and
its emphasis on grassroots electoral
politics, Baraka came to Marxism with
the zeal of a new convert. |
“The essays of the earliest part
of this period,” he writes, “are overwhelmingly
political in the most overt sense.” While some of
the essays in Daggers and Javelins address
jazz, film, and writers of the Harlem Renaissance,
all of them do so with the purpose of assessing what
Baraka calls their potential to contribute to a
revolutionary struggle.
In “The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American
Literature,” Baraka distinguishes between the
authentic folk and vernacular expression of African
American masses and the poetry and prose produced by
middle-class writers in imitation of prevailing
literary standards. Considering the slave narratives
of Frederick Douglass and others as the beginnings
of a genuine African American literature, he
criticizes works that promote individualism or are
merely “a distraction, an ornament.” Similarly,
“Afro-American Literature and Class Struggle” and
other essays consider how the economic structure of
society affects the production and the appreciation
of art. “Notes on the History of
African/Afro-American Culture” interprets the
theoretical writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels and draws parallels between colonized African
societies and the suppression of African American
artistic expression by the American cultural
mainstream.
Broadening his
scope in essays on African and Caribbean authors,
Baraka suggests that figures such as the Kenyan
novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the poet Aimé Césaire
from Martinique can provide models for how African
American artists can escape being co-opted into an
elite that supports the status quo and, instead,
produce art that offers a “cathartic revelation of
reality” useful in promoting social change.
Source:
Enotes
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updated 1 October 2007 / updated 23 February
2008 |
