Harmony Holiday's Open Letter to Critics of Amiri Baraka

Tiny shards of text material from the latest issue of the Chicago Review (59:03) are being published online; and standing out among them at the moment is this open letter from Harmony Holiday, "On Amiri Baraka." An excerpt follows, starting from the top.

Dear Bosses and Tastemakers commenting with kid gloves on Amiri Baraka’s SOS: Poems 1961–2013:

The recent, posthumous collection of Amiri Baraka’s ruthlessly beautiful and piercing and visceral poetry, edited by Paul Vangelisti and published last year by Grove Press, opens with an air of urgently festive exclusivity: the title track above beseeches union, revival meeting, impromptu festival—a true point of entry into the nature and texture of Baraka’s work, his life, and his legacy. Dwight Garner’s January 2015 review of the work fails to take into account the intensity of Baraka’s commitment to this love call. Baraka’s intentions, as a writer and as a man, are clear and unflinching: his first fidelity is to those whom he considers his people, including all people—especially but not only black people—beleaguered by the incessant struggle for equality against the obstacles that race and/or class jut out in front of them. He was loyal to this purpose even at the expense of his own ego. The consequence, from mainstream critics like Garner and establishment papers like the Times, is the tacit effort to undermine his work and message by way of too much hype and emphasis on his politics. The myopic focus here is always on statements Baraka made or ideas he championed or deployed as bait, particularly when he was a young man, without recognizing their origin in his frustration with the failure of the American promise, or their role in his active search for the equilibrium and the wisdom of experience to assuage that frustration. To honor the work presented throughout SOS is to review it with as much candor as Baraka himself had, and to remain as mercilessly eye-to-eye as he was, in the precarious and self-effacing stance he needed to enter to create the work, to be as generous as he was in that way.

SOS is the collection of poems I wish I had encountered on a syllabus as an undergraduate at Berkeley, where instead I was asked to read the most polite black poets in the canon, or even in high school, when I scoured the canon for any semblance of a black-and-tan fantasy I could identify with. As Baraka knew too well, academic institutions are still often devoid of truly vanguard or rebellious black voices: or when they include them, they do so in murmur only.

The review Holiday references is at The New York Times, here (it's also where we snagged the photo of Baraka, above, taken by Anthony Barboza in 1975). Read on at CR.