BlackOnBlackRhyme.com :: Amiri Baraka

*Amiri Baraka

"After the Ball"

The magic dance
of the second ave ladies,
in the artificial glare
of the world,
silver-green curls sparkle
and the ladies' arms jingle
with new Fall pesos,
sewn on grim bracelets
the poet's mother-in-law thinks are swell.
So much for America,
let it sweep in grand style
up the avenues of its failure.
Let it promenade smartly
beneath the marquees of its despair.
Bells swing lazily
in New Mexico ghost towns.
Where the wind celebrates afternoon,
and left over haunts stir a little
out of vague instinct,
hanging their messy sheets
in slow motion against the intrepid dust
or the silence
which they cannot scare.

BLACK ON BLACK RHYME HISTORY SERIES

NAME : Amiri Baraka
b: 1934

- African American writer, playwright, and political activist.

Baraka is a prolific writer who has worked across a range of genres: poetry, drama, novels, jazz operas, and nonfiction. He also played a crucial role as an organizer, editor, and promoter of the avant-garde literary movements of the 1950s and early 1960s and the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Born Everett Leroy (later LeRoi) Jones in Newark, New Jersey, Baraka attended Newark public schools and studied chemistry at Howard University in Washington, D.C., before turning to literature and philosophy. In 1954 he left Howard and joined the United States Air Force. He became increasingly interested in literature, immersing himself in the work of American poet Ezra Pound, Irish novelist James Joyce, and other modernists.

Discharged from the Air Force in 1957 for possessing allegedly communist literary journals, Baraka moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and established relationships with members of the avant-garde Beat, Black Mountain, and New York School literary movements. He published his acclaimed book of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), and coedited the poetry journals Yugen and Floating Bear with his wife Hettie Jones and poet Diane Di Prima, respectively.

Baraka began distancing himself from the bohemian literary scene after a trip to Cuba. Influenced by the artists of the newly revolutionary country, as well as the Civil Rights Movement and black political figures such as Malcolm X, his work became more politically and socially committed.

His plays Dutchman and The Slave (both 1964) combined the nonrealistic staging of early-1960s experimentalist theater with militant and often violent assertions of black pride. The poems collected in The Dead Lecturer (1964) are similar; their violent imagery and fragmentary style and syntax provide a vivid record of the black intellectual and artist in torment and transformation.

Baraka was also influenced by African American musicians such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and Sun Ra New Jazz players of the late 1950s and early 1960s who demonstrated that it was possible for black artists to produce avant-garde art rooted in African American cultural traditions (see Free Jazz).

A series of shorter essays that helped introduce the New Jazz to a wider audience was collected in Black Music (1968). His history of jazz, Blues People (1963), was one of the first books to trace the social and political development of African American music.

While Baraka became increasingly involved with militant political organizations in the mid-1960s, the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 led to his final break with the predominantly white bohemian world. Shortly thereafter, Baraka abandoned his family and moved to Harlem, New York, where he was instrumental in creating the Black Arts Repertory Theatre, whose impetus was to create a well-defined black aesthetic. Although short-lived, it provided the blueprint for similar theaters across the country and helped develop the cultural corollary to black nationalism, the Black Arts Movement.

Although Baraka left Harlem after a year for his native Newark, he continued to serve as a Black Arts Movement and Black Power leader (see Black Power in the United States). With poet Larry Neal, Baraka edited the important nationalist-tinged anthology of African American writing Black Fire (1968).

Baraka's poetry, while often retaining something of his earlier fragmentary style, was crucial in establishing a connection between African American vernacular forms and literature.

In addition to his importance as an artist, Baraka figured in national African American political events, such as the 1972 Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, as well as in local Newark politics, where he was active in the election of the first black mayor, Kenneth Gibson, in 1970.

Heavily influenced by black nationalist Maulana Karenga (from whom he received the name Amiri Baraka), Baraka was an advocate of an Afrocentric doctrine of separatism, self-determination, and communal African American cultural and economic self-development.

Seeing the weaknesses of Black Nationalism, in the early 1970s he adopted Marxism-Leninism, which he felt better addressed the interrelated problems of racism, national oppression, colonialism, and neocolonialism. The Motion of History (1978), Reggae or Not! (1981), Daggers and Javelins (1984), and The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (1984) were published during this time.

Baraka has taught at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, Columbia University in New York City, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

"Baraka, Amiri." Microsoft® Encarta® Africana Third Edition. © 1998-2000 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

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