|
Books by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi
Jones)
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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T
Two new books by Amiri
Baraka
St.
Martin (2003)—The
Essence of Reparations and
Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems, by
controversial America author Amiri Baraka have just been
published here by House of Nehesi Publishers.
The
Essence of Reparations
is Baraka’s first collection of four daring essays looking
at reparations for African-Americans, for the crimes of slavery,
linking reparations to greater political, economic and social
development, and the writer’s ideas about democratic
transformation in the USA.
The fact that reparations could be the
watershed movement for Black peoples in the 21st
century and that scholars from Harvard to the University of the
West Indies (UWI) and from Haiti to Nigeria are exploring, among
other features, the moral and legal issues like never before,
will not endear Baraka any more to his detractors who are still
up in arms about his explosive poem “Somebody Blew Up
America.”
In fact, the jointly-published
Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems headlines the 9-11
poem in which Baraka questions “who,” other than those
identified as terrorists, knew beforehand about the New York
City World Trade bombings on September 11, 2001.
The poetic inquiry detonated a fiery storm
of its own, leading to a battle royal with the very governor of
New Jersey, Baraka’s native state, which had not long before
appointed him as its poet laureate. The government asked Baraka
to resign over the poem that mattered.
The poet refused. And a few months ago the
New Jersey state legislature practically outlawed the laureate
post. Baraka has since taken the state government to court and
Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems may very well end up
as “witness” for the plaintiff and the defense.
Baraka, 69, has written over 40 books of
poetry, plays and music history and criticism. His works have
been translated all over Europe and he remains renown as the
father of the Black Arts movement in the USA in the 1960s.
Author and Bob Marley scholar Kwame Dawes
states in his rather comprehensive introduction to
Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems that one thing is for
sure: Baraka needs no introduction.
Yet House of Nehesi sees these two books
also as an introduction of Amiri Baraka to the Caribbean, said
its projects director Lasana M. Sekou. It could very well be the
first time that a major US author has been published in the
region.
Equally world renown author/poet/historian
Kamau Brathwaite at NYU credits Baraka as one of the few
American authors to feature the Caribbean critically in their
works and is certain about the place and appearance of
Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems as, “one more mark
in the development in modern Black radical & revolutionary
cultural reconstruction.”
Already available at
Amazon.com, and
other online bookstores, it can be argued that there is no way
either of these new titles will only be read in the Caribbean
given the US and international reach of Baraka’s work.
Take the complexity of his position in
The
Essence of Reparations “One does not have to agree
with his ideological framework to appreciate the timeliness and
urgency of his case for reparations,” states Dr. Rupert Lewis,
professor of Political Thought at UWI. And in the book’s
introduction, a virtual international reparations reportage,
former Nigerian diplomatic officer Fabian Badejo pointed out
that Baraka is basing the struggle for reparations “on facts,
in a scientific manner.”
It has been said that Baraka is committed
to social justice like no other American author. He is certainly
a revolutionary thinker whose political activities and creative
growth has taken him from Black nationalism in the 1960s to
Marxism-Leninism—without ever turning his literature into
dogma or being an apologist for any movement or ideology.
In
The
Essence of Reparations and
Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems the indomitable American who dares to challenge the times is
once again fresh and fearless.
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The publication
of Amiri Baraka's Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems
makes one more mark in the development in modern Black radical
& revolutionary cultural reconstruction.
--Kamau Brathwaite,
CowPastor, Barbados; Comparative Lit., New York University
Baraka sees the
struggle for reparations not as end in itself but as part of a
wider struggle for full citizenship and equal rights in a
program for genuine democratic transformation in the United
States. In this context he poses issues that go way beyond the
challenges of reparations. One does not have to agree with his
ideological framework to appreciate the timeliness and urgency
of his case for reparations.
--Rupert Lewis, Professor
of Political Thought, University of the West Indies
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Contact:
Lasana M. Sekou / 011(599) 559-9262
/ Nehesi@sintmaarten.net
/http://www.houseofnehesipublish.com/baraka.html |
