Books by Kalamu ya Salaam

The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement  /   360: A Revolution of Black Poets

Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology  /  From A Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets

Our Music Is No Accident   /  What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self

My Story My Song (CD)

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two: what Langston did (contd.)

After Baldwin came Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka. Baraka I dug because of his iconoclastic and boldly innovative stylings. He is always at his best breaking ground, making you go "damn" at the way he has hooked something up with the sarcastic aloofness of a hard bop hipster. Clearly, as the quantity and quality of his earliest work demonstrates, Baraka worked hard at being off the cuff. Like a great jazz musician, he had sheded (i.e. "woodshed," jazz parlance for practice and serious study) heavy so that whenever the time came to blow, he was able to blow with confidence and make his work sound effortless. Baraka also projected a cocky air of being ahead of the curve, always in the know, always the first one to arrive on the set wondering what took the rest of us so long to arrive. That appealed to the machismo in my adolescent male psyche.

            But what most appealed to me is that Jones too was struggling in the White world, struggling to define and claim his persona as a Black man. Additionally, Jones was deep into the music, especially jazz and blues. Through Jones I also started to experience poetry as self revelation.

            Jones' own personal life experiences, conundrums, confusions, dreams and aspirations were at the center of his poetry. On the stylistic surface, Jones' poetry was nothing like Hughes, but yet, underneath it, there was a deep blues, a blues for the lost Black man, the man unsure of what being himself meant, the "dead lecturer". That title of Jones second book of poetry said it all.

            A lot of Jones I didn't understand, couldn't understand, and even if I had understood would never have really related to, but what attracted me, I think, to Jones before he became Baraka, as well as attracted me to Baldwin, was the way they confronted the White world and also confronted their complicity and love of that world; the way they articulated and embraced with critical consciousness their love of White literature which directly correlated with my own less ambivalent, but not totally uncontradictory feelings about what I was learning in school. Much of what they spoke about resonated in my experience.

            Anyone who has not experienced it will find it nearly impossible to understand the schizophrenia that mainstream education engenders in working class black people, right down to the root of rejecting one's mother, which is the embodiment of rejecting one's culture. This is why Black studies was so immediately latched onto by students and so instantly rejected by the petit bourgeois oriented colored professors, and why afro-centricism is often strongest in predominately White institutions of higher education. At no other time in one's life will the intellectual challenge to and intellectual oppression of Black people be as clear as when you are a Black student in a predominately White school precisely because in higher education there are few, if any, status quo revered Black intellectual authority figures -- and almost all of them are either conservative or seemingly apolitical.

            On the other hand, there was no way for a sane person to reject learning, to reject intelligence. I wanted to embrace my people, embrace myself and the world I grew up in, but there was a conflict between the two. The wannabes stumbling and fleeing toward the status quo invariably would put down the blues folk, put down their ignorance, their uncouthness, their illiteracy, their blues essence. In what is easily perceived as a rejection of intellectual values, rather than a rejection of self abnegating intellectualism, blues people seemed to be so short sighted, so self destructive and so incorrigible.

            Hughes did not speak to this conflict as cogently nor as consistently as Baldwin and Jones/Baraka did. There is a detachment in Hughes writing that maintains the privacy of the witness even as Hughes focuses almost exclusively on his people. Baldwin and Baraka, on the other hand, even with Whites intimately involved in their lives, focus much more on the contradictions of being a Black man in White America as a personal rather than an observed experience.

            Hughes' reticence about his personal life was an alienating factor for me. Hughes had written two autobiographies, and, by the early sixties, neither Baldwin nor Baraka had written autobiographies, yet readers knew more about each of their personal lives than about Hughes' personal life. This is a line of demarcation. In later years I would develop my theory about the use of the "personal" but at that time I simply did the most expedient thing: I loved both approaches, the detachment of Hughes and the personal involvement of Baldwin/Baraka.

            Baldwin and Baraka wrote in a modern intellectual style and that appealed to me. Yet, neither Baldwin nor Baraka had that element of blues based, holisticness that was the most marvelous quality of Langston Hughes, a writer so huge that his collected works define literature. Prose, fiction, poetry, drama, journalism, criticism, editing, it's all there, plus Hughes presented his work to the whole world, work which focused almost exclusively on Black people. Hughes was a "simple" Black writer who went around the world.

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