Arts and Letters

Amiri Baraka had many names, wrote in many genres, weathered many controversies, and suffered more rebuffs (political, critical) than most writers. Yet he never stopped learning, evolving, working.

Born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 he became Leroi Jones in 1963, then Imamu Amear Baraka after visiting Black Islamists in California. Later, simply: Amiri Baraka.

He was a personal friend since our days on the campus of Howard University and even then he was a personality and thinker to be reckoned with.

Among the genres he worked in I am persuaded that his theatre work shaped generations of Black playwrights and poets, beginning with Dutchman in 1964. Without it it is impossible to understand or appreciate African American theater. Baraka's contribution to the intellectual and artistic life of blacks and whites is compelling and unquestionable. Often forgotten was the man, the scholar, the publisher, poet, essayist, and playwright.

He taught at SUNY Stony Brook and Rutgers University as well as visiting faculty at Columbia University.

Among his published works as early as 1963 his Blues People: Negro Music in White America is perhaps the most influential in launching the Black Arts movement, which he and others founded. Among the six plays he wrote, along with the seminal Dutchman, are The Slave and A Black Mass.

Along with Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note and The Dead Lecturer Baraka published ten more books of poetry. Accompanying praise for his work were loud critiques that diminished him as a provocateur chained to politics. “Political” is often a term of dismissal for writers (unless it is Shakespeare or Sophocles) as is the designation “activist and revolutionary,” terms that pull the reader or audience away from a work’s theme, technique, linguistic power—even beauty. These labels, such as the term “polarizing” in the headline of the New York Times obituary, are still heaped on Amiri Baraka, obfuscating, with few exceptions, perceptive criticism.

Certainly he curried, even created much of the controversy surrounding him, and weathered the consequences: denial of tenure, obliterating his position as Poet Laureate of New Jersey. Yet it is interesting that a man married to a Jewish woman with whom he had two daughters is consistently noted for anti-Semitism. Even more interesting that a man condemned for homophobia had a proudly lesbian daughter whom he loved. Equally interesting for a man accused of misogyny to co-author with his second wife, Amina, the first anthology of Black women writers.

It is difficult to find a contemporary artist more dedicated, innovative, and influential than Amiri Baraka. The range of his work spans six decades and tracks like a laser the changes within those decades—from his association with the Beatniks of Allen Ginsberg et al, the launch of the Black Arts movement, the birth of Cuban revolution, etc. And it’s easy to forget his loathsome articulation of anti-Semitism was not so loathsome in the sixties to the members of private clubs in New York or the elite resorts in Florida. And it's equally easy to forget that homophobia has been the norm in this country not just in the sixties but for centuries.

Baraka was as much a reflection of his decades as a vocal critique of them. I repeat, He never stopped learning, evolving or working. He is missed and mourned by his family and friends of course, but his passing leaves a void in our cultural life not easily closed. Nevertheless, lines from one of his poems are carved in marble in New York’s Pennsylvania Station.

I have seen many suns
use
the endless succession of hours
piled upon each other…