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when the New Jersey judge cited a line from Jones’ poetry (“Up against the wall, motherfucker!”)

when sentencing him to prison, few liberals did not experience mixed feelings over the matter

 

 

 

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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LeRoi Jones: Pursued by the Furies 

A Review of Home on the Range

 By Paul Velde

 

The blacks may not be the only ones who want to chuck the whole of Western civilization and start over again, but they seem to be the only ones the majority of whites are willing to believe, or at least to make a good pretense at it.  LeRoi Jones, for instance, is taken literally when he calls for the death of all white devils, or whatever.  The question with Jones is just how one should take him.  To take him seriously as a racist, but not as a poet, is the usual reaction, but that is too easy, and perhaps dangerous as well.

The most recent Jones sally against the devils was his piece for voices and music which played in an East Village theater to a mixed audience of blacks and whites attending a benefit for the jailed leaders of California’s Black Panther Party.  The piece was both a proto-liturgy for black raciality and, more interestingly, an attempt to get back to the origins of blackness.  Rather, one should say that Jones tried to evoke those beginnings,  or any beginnings that promised to work.  On the most obvious level, the effect of the performance was to raise the tension between the blacks and whites to a point that at times seemed close to combat.

Jones calls his piece “Home on the Range,” which apparently drops with sarcasm on the right ears.  It begins with a long stretch of electronic mix, soul sounds rather effectively blended with what seemed to be African and Arabic influences, “Black,” says a male voice, repeating the word at intervals, then alternating it with “blackness.”  As the intervals become shorter, the voice takes on a chanting quality: “black, blackness, blackness, black.”  At this, one settles back on the seat, hopefully for the duration.  Gradually other elements are introduced.  One line, “older than time,” seemed particularly suggestive, and gives a fair idea of the direction and tone of the earlier parts of Jones’ “Range.”  

Other lines had to do with truth and sex, all asserting in one way or another the mystique and  mystery of blackness.  Up to this point, however, the reference is only to color.  The chanting is followed by a litany of attributes, “black is beautiful” on through ultimates of being, time, creation, godhead, arriving, presumably, at an ontological wonder of blackness.  The color is no longer an attribute, but being itself.  Despite the blatant hocus pocus of the manipulation, and the language which was nothing special, the overall result was a quite moving recitation that curiously did seem to touch the chords of racial history.

Unfortunately for Jones’ purpose, he is trapped by his reliance on English.  In the end, it is the racial drama of the West, not of Africa that he traverses with his thesaurus categories.  Perhaps this accounts for the certain pathetic quality of all superlatives.  For if national and cultural histories have to do with exploits, defeats and accomplishments, racial histories with their primordial expansions and contractions carry the weight of the sheer misery of existence.  They are creations, too, for race is one of the excuses for necessity in life, whether told in the woe of the Jews or the Manichaean luminations of Jones.  

To have sat through an an hour or so of Home on the Range  is truly to be home again, with the terrorized voices of Masters’ Spoon River when the grave is closing in.  Finally, the piece gets to dealing with whites specifically and in terms hardly recommended for sensitive souls.  Jones had made the same points in a talk earlier in the evening, that blacks are more natural, more creative than whites, who are imitative and who basically want to be like blacks.  “Blacks are naturally superior; the whites will submit,” was the message.

Jones shares the poverty of the West, its dreadful absolutes, and its hysterical drive to cut the Gordian knot.  Whether this inheritance will be sufficient to liberate him and his black brothers from racial servitude is uncertain.  It all depends on what is meant by liberation.  But at this stage of Jones’ investigations into blackness, the result appears to be a militant form of black racism.  Inasmuch as he is a poet laboring in English and a product of a literary tradition that prides itself on its essential humanism and its moral stance as critic of society, this has been more disconcerting to whites, educated or not, than the rhetoric of Malcolm X, or the earlier Marcus Garvey.

Indeed, when the New Jersey judge cited a line from Jones’ poetry (“Up against the wall, motherfucker!”) when sentencing him to prison, few liberals did not experience mixed feelings over the matter.  Under normal circumstances Jones would have been a cultural hero, on principle if not out of personal preference.  He is a cultural hero to blacks, and to some whites for reasons that are not necessarily masochistic.  (His up-against-the-wall line was what Columbia students shouted at police over the barricades, some quite non-violent types have been known to sense the poetry of the line.)  

But for most liberals the New Jersey scene was a sorry business best forgotten.  Judge Learned Hand, whose eloquent defense of the Smith Act was once set up as a model of responsible liberalism, but which few remember now, would undoubtedly have known better than to hold Jones’ poetry against him.  But it is still a sorry business to see a poet go to jail.  Some argue, however, that Jones is not a very good poet.  Maybe a national poetry commission could be established to do to Jones what the boxing commission did to Muhammad Ali.

But if Jones is still to be regarded as a poet, then it only makes sense that he be allowed the same complexity of position and statement that his fellow poets are.  That implies in part the recognition that he cannot safely skip over the difficult parts of his development, or that the final outcome of his investigations into his human condition should be anymore known to him than ours is to us.

If Jones commanded black legions marching on the country with guns, this might be a different story.  But as it happens, the only legions Jones commands are in his imagination and in ours.  There is an imaginary battle going on between blacks and whites in this country, not unlike the chess battles fought by Chinese generals in lieu of a real slaughter.  Nobody seems to want to get killed, though clearly a lot of people want to do some killing.  

The black community so far has managed to confine their slaughter to a mental action.  The same cannot be said of the whites with their gun-wielding police.  However, if the fullness of the actual event is not necessary to resolve the racial conflict in America, then the liberal celebrators of the American experience can for once say that this country has matured.

At this point the outcome is very much in doubt.  Jones and the whole problem of racism in the country calls upon whites to truly use their imaginations.  Jones is performing the minimum Western ritual to bring this about, possibly because he is in no position to do otherwise.  But it is an indication of the fear and immaturity he faces that a New Jersey judge mistook a line of poetry for a gun in hand.  The same literal-minded approach fills the communications media everyday.  

This is not to say that Jones is not perfectly capable of using a gun.  But then neither side has yet been compelled to go the full route of race war.  If racists do their work with fire and steel, then perhaps it is not very useful to see Jones as a racist.  Because Jones works on the head.  There is a difference, even though some fail to see it.  Poetry has its uses.

Paul Velde, a former assistant editor of Commonweal, wrote on the new media for The Nation, The Village Voice and others.

Source: Commonweal  ·  28 June 1968 

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AALBC.com's 25 Best Selling Books


 

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#19 - John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism by Keith Gilyard

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#25 - Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class  by Lisa B. Thompson

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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America

By Melissa V. Harris-Perry

According to the author, this society has historically exerted considerable pressure on black females to fit into one of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the Matriarch or the Jezebel.  The selfless Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.     

Professor Perry points out how the propagation of these harmful myths have served the mainstream culture well. For instance, the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for black females to feel a maternal instinct towards Caucasian babies.

As for the source of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their own bodies during slavery given that they were being auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless, it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate indiscriminately.

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Salvage the Bones

A Novel by Jesmyn Ward

On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost

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The White Masters of the World

From The World and Africa, 1965

By W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)

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Ancient African Nations

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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan  The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll  Only a Pawn in Their Game

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery / George Jackson  / Hurricane Carter

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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg

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update 17 January 2012

 

 

 

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Related files: Black Man as Victim   Pursued by  Furies