Books by Marvin X
Love and War: Poems /
In the Crazy House Called America /
Woman: Man's Best Friend /
Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality
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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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Marvin X Reviews
Somebody Blew Up
America & Other Poems
By
Amiri Baraka
| who killed the most
niggers
who killed the most Jews
who killed the most
Italians
who killed the most Irish
who killed the most
Japanese
who killed the most
Latinos….
Who/ Who/ Who/
Who own what ain't even
known to be owned
Who own the owners that ain't the real owners… |
Not since "Howl" has a poem rocked
America like Baraka's “Somebody Blew Up America,” a
catalogue of American imperialism without ever naming the
perpetrator, although it caused controversy when it questioned
whether Israelis showed up for work at the world trade center on
9/11.
|
Who knew the World Trade
Center was gonna get
Bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli
workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why
did Sharon stay away?
Who, Who, Who/
|
Firstly, one should recognize it as a great
poem with or without the controversial lines, they do not make
or break the poem. As any great poem must, it forces us to think
and think hard about the causes of 9/11 and to search deeper
into the American psyche to decipher why a people can be so
delusional to think that what goes around will never come
around.
Great poets change stylistically and Baraka
is no different, actually, he is a guy in constant change, style
and otherwise, especially politically, but he began among the
beat poets of New York's Greenwich Village, abstract, sounding
very white even, his wife would say, until he came under the
influence of African American poets like Yusef Rahman and Askia
Toure.
Then he changed, not only style but a more
black nationalist content, also as a result of associating with
Malcolm X and then the pain and torture of his assassination
rocked Baraka one more time, and with the closing of the Harlem
Black Art's Repertory Theatre/School, he returned to Newark, NJ.
"A Poem For Black Hearts" could sum up this period.
But time passes, things change in the politics of Newark, a
black mayor is elected with critical support from Baraka's
political machine.
Disillusionment set in, black power remained
white power in black face, climaxing in the Gary convention of
1972—seen by Baraka and others as a betrayal of the grassroots
by the black elected officials. He turns from black nationalism
to communism, joining Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul
Robeson, Richard Wright, and others who saw no other way out of
our morass. Has Communism destroyed his creativity and/or
spirituality? Absolutely not. He showed me a video of his
performance at Harlem's Schomberg Library.
When I saw him literally transform from mere
poet to prophet/preacher, I demanded he stop the tape—that I
had seen enough, that he was a Communist fake (yes, I assaulted
him in his house, in his bedroom, with his wife, assaulted her
too) because the video revealed more spirituality than most
black preachers. And if you want Africanity, check Baraka on
that David Murray CD, no African is more African than Baraka on
this album.
|
My brother the king
Sold me to the ghost
When you put your hand on
your sister and made her a slave
When you put your hand on
your brother and made him a slave
Watch out for the ghost
The ghost go get you
Africa
At the bottom of the
Atlantic Ocean
Is a railroad of human
bones
The king sold the farmer to the ghost….
|
What horn player is without
Coltrane's or Parker's touch? Now if one is politically afraid
or economically afraid to be associated with Baraka, say so. But
to say his poetry suffered, became mere propaganda, is simply
untrue. Some poets negate him to placate their masters, even
reject any comparison to him, when we know no African American
poet is without Baraka's touch, or shall we say Baraka's ghost?
Baraka's poetry reflects
the moment and his moments are in constant change, always
searching for the right note that puts him in harmony with his
people, that is the search, that is the reason for his season.
His recent use of Ebonics suggests an attempt to reach the hip
hop audience as well as assault, debase and desecrate the King's
English, not that he spares the King.
|
Who the biggest only
Who the most goodest
Who do jesus resemble
Who created everything
Who the smartest
Who the greatest
Who the richest
Who say you ugly and they
the good lookingest
(from Somebody Blew Up America)
|
His search is to create poetry digging into
the history and myth of our blackness in this land and
throughout Pan Africa, to dig into the history and myth of
humanity and make it plain, as plain as Joseph Campbell's
myth/ritual lectures.
The poems are thus history lessons, cultural
explanations and explorations, education for a people lost in
darkness or whiteness, uplifting, smashing ignorance, for
example “Why Is We Americans” is as powerful as “Somebody
Blew Up America,” and of course the real power is seen or
heard in his public readings. But within the poetry itself is
the mind of a wise man teaching constantly, integrating jazz,
blues, and sounds unheard into the heard so the blind, deaf, and
dumb can see, hear, and understand.
|
Why Is We Americans
but how is we then, by
that
Americans? by what….
by burn
by scar
by slavery
by ghetto and darkness in
the
night of pain
for race a dumb idea, to
be a
thing that is bet upon
How we be then them. How
we
be that say
why is we, then, they who
it is
you say, Americans.
was they them Americans
with us in the fields. Not
as
bush one or two. To say
Work
nigger work. Was they
there,
any. Who felt the pain of
whip
and still was hip. How is
we
americans. we never lived
with
they. |
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*
The controversy over “Somebody Blew Up
America” at first reveals the utter hypocrisy of
constitutional freedom of speech. I maintain, with or without
the US constitution, a poet can say whatever the fuck he wants
to say, anytime anywhere. And yes, we know poets, writers, and
journalists are murdered throughout the world for this very
reason, because they are determined to speak the truth as they
see it, to deliver the truth to their people, not for money, but
for truth, which clearly distinguishes revolutionary poets from
commercial vipers, pimps, whores, pharaoh's magicians who dumb
down the people for a mess of pottage.
Would you tell Picasso what colors to paint,
Miles what tunes to play, then don't tell poets what they can or
cannot say, write. After all, what do you know about language,
words, poetry? What do you know about profanity and
obscenity—has it ever occurred to you that your life is
profane and obscene simply because you accept it as such without
protest? What is more profane and obscene than wage slavery?
Persecution is worse than slaughter, says Al Qur'an. See Claude
McKay's “If We Must Die.”
Baraka's beauty is in his ability to respond
to his critics with a high level of
intellectuality, the man is simply not the dummy that can
be sent into the other room. He is too bright, too well read,
well traveled for this, maybe some dumb rapper would crumble and
be silent, but Baraka has stood his ground throughout the
matter, essentially, the attempted silencing of a black man who
is, yes, a smart nigguh who refuses to shut up, no matter what
the price, even the murder of his daughter, that may or may not
have been the result of domestic violence, it could very well be
political.
These devils will murder and eat dinner in
the same instant. After all, this is not the first time the
Baraka family has been terrorized by America. Remember, he was
beaten bloody, teeth knocked out, on the streets of Newark
during the 60s National Guard riot. Meanwhile, his wife, Amina,
and children were terrorized in their home by police and
national guard.
Anyhow, this recent collection will let you
enjoy a poetic moment with Malcolm and Betty, a praise song to
Kwame Toure, and my favorite “Why Is We Americans,” a poem
every American must read, and the book ends with the now classic
“Somebody Blew Up America.” We thank the brothers from the
Caribbean for publishing this collection.
posted 20 December 2003
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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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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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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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
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 30 November 2011
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