In light of various mainstream press
obituaries, I've taken the liberty of sending out this introduction to
Amiri Baraka that I had the honor to deliver just a few months ago...
Introduction for Amiri Baraka at
the Cape Ann Museum, October 19, 2013
If performance, image, object and
sound-making are forms of knowledge, then what we now call art gives a unique
view of how things in the world are or are not responded to.
In 1944, the great Martinican poet
Aimé Césaire wrote “Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific
knowledge” AND “what presides over the poem is not the most lucid intelligence,
the sharpest sensibility or the subtlest feelings, but experience as a whole.”
That same year, Césaire’s student,
Frantz Fanon, perhaps aspiring to also become a writer, found himself in
Algeria as a French soldier, and was horrified by what he experienced; it would
lead him to become one of the 20th century’s most innovative
psychiatrists, its most important theorist of race and colonization, and an
Algerian revolutionary.
On this side of the Atlantic, in
the only hemisphere so thoroughly dispossessed that, up until very recently,
not one single state used a native language officially, Bebop had already come
into being, a phenomenon that Jack Kerouac called “the language of America’s
inevitable Africa” expressing the “enormity of a new world philosophy.”
In 1944 Kerouac met Allen Ginsberg
and poet Robert Duncan published “The Homosexual in Society,” announcing a new
doctrine of human liberation that would also insure his continued
UN-recognition as one of the century’s greatest poets. In 1944, alerted to
changes in US policy in which Nazis and war criminals got filtered through the
OSS and State Department to become key policy makers and scientists, Charles
Olson resigned from his post at the office of War Information in the Roosevelt
Administration to become, of all things, a poet.
Just some months before that, in a
trial in Alabama over his status as a conscientious objector, Herman Poole
Blount, known as Sonny, and later Sun Ra, did the unthinkable and unheard of:
he told a white judge, in the deep south, that if he was forced to learn how to
kill “he would use that skill without prejudice, and kill one of his own
captains or generals first. The judge said: ‘I’ve never seen a nigger like you
before,’ to which Sonny replied, ‘No, and you never will again,’ a response
that immediately landed him in jail.” His psychiatric report echoed those of
Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and so many others,
in which he was described “as a psychopathic personality,” but also as a
“‘well-educated colored intellectual’” who was subject to neurotic depression
and sexual perversion.” (John F. Szwed, Space is the Place, pp. 44, 46)
These are the over and
undercurrents of the world Amiri Baraka grew up in. Born Everett LeRoi Jones in
Newark, NJ (the city his son Ras is now running for Mayor in), in 1934,
Baraka’s importance and multiple legacies are truly mammoth.
In a review of a book about Billy
the Kid, Charles Olson wrote:
“what
strikes one about the history of sd states, both as it has been converted into
story and as there are those who are always looking for it to reappear as art —
what has hit me, is, that it does stay, unrelieved.”
This sense of the “unrelieved” and
the pressure that brings to bear on what poet Ed Dorn called “this permissive
asylum,” is enormous, and we know that the past cannot simply disappear. Given
the circumstances of destroyed languages and peoples, slavery, and layered
diasporas, we have a human, political, and cultural amalgam on this continent
that is as dense and complicated as any the world has ever known.
The explosion of expression
following World War II — Bebop, Abstract Expressionism, the New American
Poetries, the Black Arts Movement, Free Jazz, Afro-Futurism and a host of other
groupings and labels — is a massive response to this complexity, and represents
an era of creativity that measures up to any known age of accomplishment we can
think of. At the same time—facing the academic, ideological, and political
straightjackets of the Cold War—these artists were first and foremost thinkers,
and their work constitutes a vast realm of hardly explored concepts about the
world we actually live in.
Amiri Baraka is one of a handful of
the remaining key representatives of this era, and his personal, artistic, and
political life cuts through almost every significant intersection of the age.
There are no other living American writers able to traverse the traditional
generic trio of poetry, prose, and drama, then move into the realms of essay,
criticism, autobiography, and scholarship, while making an authoritative mark
in each form. In fact, if we take the great British scholar Gordon
Brotherston’s definition “that the prime function of a classical text is to
construct political space and anchor historical continuity,” then Amiri Baraka
is one of our truly CLASSICAL writers.
His disruptive and political practice refuses to
conform to style or manner, allowing imagination to roam between the placard
and the eulogy, between eyewitness reports stating facts and cosmic journeys
reinstating the kinship of souls. He has both been “anchoring historical
continuity” and redrawing the political boundaries of time and space, first in
Newark, New Jersey, then in New Ark, out and gone, an otherworldly place
through which he channels radio shows, movies, street banter, memories,
diatribe, drama, scholarly study, fable, fiction, science fiction,
investigative poetics, calculated public rhetoric, and on-the- spot reporting.
He is a fantastic witness both to the astonishing un-reality of the daily real
and an example of what can be done to answer it.
He has constantly exposed himself and his ideas to
public scrutiny, even attack, opening a window into participation in the
amalgamation of selves and ideas that form the creative, political subject.
Amiri’s example has served as a constant reminder that such selves, ideas,
forms, even communities, are won through struggle and confrontation with
oneself and the world. They are not cheaply packaged and exchangeable things to
pick up or drop for personal gain or according to dictates of fashion. Finally,
though, this clarity of purpose rests in a stance, a position, a place one has
to come to in consciousness and over which there can be no negotiation. The
visibility of such a stance, bound to a real historical context, is itself a
call to action, to activate those parts of one’s own consciousness and meet
such a challenge in like terms. In recent years, Amiri has been quite explicit
about the need to emphasize and carry on his diverse legacies. He has been
extraordinarily generous in working with the Lost & Found Project; this
began with a small collection of letters between him and Ed Dorn, finally
resulting in the complete correspondence, due out from the University of New
Mexico, edited by Claudia Moreno Pisano. Most recently, Amiri has lent his
support to Il Gruppo, a gathering of
writers initially convened to debunk a recent book claiming that Charles Olson
was an exemplar of US imperialism, and that “Projective Verse” was based on a
military paradigm. Amiri actually published “Projective Verse,” so if Olson is
a big imperialist, perhaps, by association, Amiri is a small one. Without
further ado, let’s give it up for Amiri Baraka.
—Ammiel Alcalay
[APPLAUSE, which should continue…]
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