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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.)
Baraka
Innovative Stylings
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.
To an adolescent eighth grader in 1959/60 just waking up
to literature Hughes was both a blessing and a foundation. After
Hughes nothing was too deep to tackle. Hughes gave me a sense of
self confidence as a budding Black writer. Before I realized
that there was such a thing as a literary ghetto, I was already
literally looking at the whole world.
<---
Baldwin Technically Awesome
At Carleton College--->
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update 3 May
2009 |
