On Amiri Baraka: 'Mystification was the least of it'

For Rain Taxi, Richard Oyama considers the life and career of Amiri Baraka. Oyama's take is a complicated one: "I write this not with any real delight, but rather with the regret one feels at lost possibilities...."

And mystification was the least of it. From “Black Dada Nihilismus”: “Rape the white girls. Rape / their fathers. Cut the mothers' throats.” Assume Baraka’s poem is an anti-art gesture that extends Andre Breton’s statement: “The simplest Surrealist act consists of . . . firing blindly . . . into the crowd.” Still, the imperative form could be inflammatory in an inflammatory time. What Baraka touted as “EXPRESSION” could degenerate into feeling for feeling’s sake, validating spoken-word/sound performances sometimes more cathartic for the maker than the listener.

In 1975, Baraka rejected cultural nationalism, proclaiming himself a Communist. At benefit readings for an anthology of Asian American poets at Basement Workshop, an arts organization in Manhattan, Baraka read recent work including the poem “Dope.” The performative skills were intact, but these pamphleteering poems evidenced decline. One poem included a nasty Uncle Tom slur against novelist Ralph Ellison, ignoring Ellison’s Invisible Man as a vital contribution to American literature. The mean-spiritedness was palpable.

In the end, Baraka’s work suffered because he preferred ideology over art, forgetting the latter outlasts us all. The conclusion to his Autobiography was marred by Marxist rhetoric. His post-9/11 poem “Who Blew Up America?” was construed as anti-Semitic, resulting in the defunding of New Jersey’s Poet Laureate post that he held. Its paranoid logic is impeccable: “Who killed Princess Di?” Huh?

LeRoi Jones once meant a lot to me. But Baraka’s career came to represent a cautionary tale of the worst “tendencies” of the 1960s—the alienating rejections, the fanatical self-righteousness, the impulse toward separatism and Stalinist repression versus multi-racial/class coalition-building.

Read it all at Rain Taxi.