October 15, 2004
Bluesfolk QA: Baraka on the writing life
by Cheo Tyehimba
It is only fitting that this column, which takes its name from Amiri Baraka's classic book on the music and cultural history of Africans in America, be relaunched with an exclusive interview with the man many regard as the "father of the Black Arts Movement." Baraka's works as a poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, and activist have left an indelible mark upon the cultural landscape of African America during the last century.
Born in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey and now nearly 70 years old, Baraka’s work is as relevant today as it was in 1964 when his play “The Dutchman” scorched the American stage. For example, in 2002, he was appointed New Jersey’s poet laureate. When his controversial poem “Somebody Blew up America,” in which he suggested that Israelis stayed home from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 because they had advance warning of the terrorist attacks, stirred a national backlash, New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey asked Baraka to resign. He refused, and when the governor later learned he had no authority to dismiss him, legislators moved to draft a bill abolishing the post entirely. Of course, this didn’t put a gimp in Baraka’s stride. It only made the poem and his views, more widely known.
Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoy Jones in Newark, New Jersey, on October 7, 1934. His father, Colt LeRoy Jones, was a postal supervisor; Anna Lois Jones, his mother, was a social worker. He attended Rutgers University for two years, then transferred to Howard University, where in 1954 he earned his B.A. in English. Baraka's numerous literary prizes and honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, the Langston Hughes Award from The City College of New York, and a lifetime achievement award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Since 1985 he has been a professor of African Studies at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. He is co-director, with his wife, of Kimako's Blues People, a community arts space.
On this 29th day of May 2004, Baraka is being feted at the African American Museum in Oakland in recognition of his body of work. The exhibit, “Baraka: Evolution of a Revolutionary,” includes dozens of original lithographs, photos, posters, magazine articles, pamphlets, recordings, etc. and a video documentary.
As the program gets underway, Baraka is up at the podium with a jazz trio. Reciting a poem, his voices lightly whistles and moans, as he signifies various modalities of black consciousness. Hunched over the microphone and conjuring up word-tones that sling out across the large hall like ignitable heat waves, he dodges in and out of bass lines and sax riffs, dropping each turn-of-phrase with his inimitable fire-wit and griot showmanship. He closes the set with “Somebody Blew Up America” to a standing ovation.
The next day, I caught up with Baraka across the bay in San Francisco at the “Power to the People: The Black Panther Party & the Art of Emory Douglas” retrospective at the African American Art & Culture Complex in the Fillmore. After viewing Douglas’ emblematic and visceral graphic representation of the Black Power Movement, we sat down to discuss the craft of writing in general and his work in particular.
Tyehimba: Do you recall the first poem you ever wrote?
Baraka: Nope. But the first published poem I wrote was when I went to New York. It was in a publication called “The Naked Ear” which came out of Taos, New Mexico. About a week later I got a note from Langston Hughes, who had read it. And I thought that was weird that he had actually read that in a magazine that was so obscure. But he sent me this postcard from Harlem, said, “Hey LeRoi, I understand you colored?” And that poem began my friendship with Langston Hughes. I had a short story published before that in high school, but that was the first poem I had published. The poem was called “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.”
Tyehimba: I’d like to touch on the importance of the oral tradition in our culture. Can you recount any familiar story your grandmother or any elders may have told you about black folks?
Baraka: They told me about my great uncle, who was the first black commissioner in South Carolina and was able to read and whatnot. His name was Enoch Archie. She used to tell me about that and used to tell me about white people in our family. My great grandmother used to tell me stories about the Arabian Nights.
Tyehimba: Who were some of the people you were reading in high school?
Baraka: I used to love to read science fiction. I was reading weird people like Bradbury, [Robert] Heinlein, and [AE] van Vogt. Not any kind of [one] literary influence but the whole genre was an influence. But I had read Richard Wright, you know Black Boy, and later Native Son. I also read Frank Yerby [a largely forgotten black writer of best-selling historical novels in the '40s, '50s and '60s]. I had always read Langston as a kid because he was published in the Black newspapers (in Newark) The Afro and The Herald. Then my grandmother used to do these white women’s hair, up in the suburbs. She would come back with these things, she said the women gave her these books. It was like Dickens, H. Rider Haggett, Kipling. I like Edgar Alan Poe when I was a kid. Although I was kind of upset by “The Black Cat”. The fact that he had the Negro in there as his stooge. It was interesting. I rejected that story. I read Edgar Alan Poe for those kind of spooky stories but I wouldn’t read “The Black Cat”. That’s out ain’t it. But I read Poe. My favorite one was called “The Cask of Amontillado” where he is going to get revenge on this dude and you never know why. It just begins…(Baraka dramatically recites opening monologue from memory) The thousand ills of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured on insult, I swore revenge. I said, that’s some bad stuff. Because to me the ability to use language like that was impressive. I really dug that, because I’d take that out on the playground in a minute.
Tyehimba: That actually takes me into my next question, which has to do with craft and form. I read somewhere that Ellison, once he’d decided to be a serious writer, leaving the jazz thing behind, that he had taken T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and copied it word-for-word to kind of learn something about form. And that process has been questioned. But what is your approach to craft?
Baraka: See, Ellison and I always had this problem about that. Because I never thought of craft as a thing, you know what I mean. I always thought of it as a verb. Craft meant you shaped something. It was a verbal quality, not a thing into which you put your sentiments into. Even though Eliot was one of my early influences. Because in the fifties, man, Eliot, Pound and them, that was being mashed on everybody. That was the whole period. The whole reactionary period, not only McCarthyism and the Korean War but the whole dissociational kind of literary critics, you know, seven types of ambiguity and all of that. And you know coming up in that, I went through that. You know, I sent poetry to the Sewanee Review, the Southern Review, the Partisan Review, etc. They would all come back in three or four days. But I studied that stuff. I read all of that corny stuff.
Tyehimba: How did it help you?
Baraka: It helped me by arming me against it. I remember reading this poem by the editor of the New Yorker. I was in Puerto Rico. I was in the service. And he wrote this and I was sitting there crying saying I know I can’t write no bullshit like this. Even its references, you know, he’s talking about he’s on the commuter train going back to, you know, wherever that was from New York where he worked. Talking about he’s going to have a martini after work. He was going to go see the birdbath on his lawn and tell them he was home. I said, damn, when I look out my window I don’t see no birdbath. I see a couple of prostitutes…but it just made me know that what I wanted to do had to be different. That if you wanna write it’s gotta be some writing I think up. It can’t be no bullshit that relates to some stuff like that because I don’t know nothing about that. And even Pound and Eliot, when I was reading them, a lot of that stuff was corny, I mean not corny in the sense that I couldn’t read them but that when they would talk bad about black people or other people, I felt uneasy about that. They would talk bad about Jews too. I mean Pound was important to me in terms of understanding different things about literature. Mostly I learned terms, names and images meant about certain things. But in terms of form I always felt that it was something real, it was something you made. But Ellison and I had public arguments about that. And then he came out with that book (Ellison’s Shadow and Act, published in 1964, right after Baraka’s Blues People, publ. 1963 ) and say, “‘Blues People’ give the blues the blues.” Yeah, I went over to his house but his wife wouldn’t let me in. They had a dog at the door…Woof, woof, woof! And I say, “I’d like to see Mr. Ellison, Please.” I had one of my boys with me and we had come from the Black Arts [in 1965, Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS)], which was up in Harlem and he lived on the West Side, maybe about 40 blocks away. Actually it was an act of fealty. I wasn’t trying to do nothing but say “How you doing Mr. Ellison. I don’t really agree with you about my book but (laughs)…” He said the book was too sociologically focused, ya dig? But I said, wait a minute, How you gonna play music and not have nothing in there about the people who actually made the music? How you gonna say that the music coming out of my mouth don’t have nothing to do with me or my life? You mean if I’m a slave the fact that I’m a slave don’t have nothing to do with the music I make? You mean if I was a rich man living up on a mountain and I was a slave I would make the same music? That don’t seem logical. So that was our thing. But what Ralph and them were trying to do was disconnect themselves from “niggerness,” you know what I mean? That would be too pitiful for a black person to be talking about they life. And then it would be too royal for you to say that this music is great, that even though you are a slave you can make great music like this, and its great because it comes out of your life. But that’s the truth. What do the slaves say, I may be wrong, but I won’t be wrong always.
Tyehimba: Your play “The Dutchman” was a searing indictment of the racist fabric inherent in American society. What was your inspiration for that play?
Baraka: Dutchman? I was married to a white woman (laughs). That must have been something to it. It was a combination of relationships that I had seen in the village, obviously, of relationships I had seen between white and black people. But white women, black men, black women, white men. What is this “No Man’s Land” between the peoples who obviously are related to each other. I mean, Americans are related to each other. I don’t want to shock nobody but Americans have been fucking for a long time (laughs) and making babies who can choose to be white or choose to be black. You know what I’m saying? They choose. They say, “No I’m gonna be white, I can’t take that shit.” And the other one says, “No, I’m gonna be black. I’m not gonna run a way from my heritage. But the heritage is [both], it’s the same thing, its black and white, you know? It’s a question of how do you bring that skewed and painful history together in any kind of rational way? You try to leave this white person because you are [both] white and black. You try to leave this white America. You understand what I mean? You say “Ok white America, fuck you. I’m not going to do what you want me to, I’m getting out of here. White America will kill you or at least talk bad about you, say that nigga there ain’t shit. But really there they same people, there brothers and sisters, they in the same family.
Tyehimba: In terms of your writing and your development as a writer, who were your role models?
Baraka: It changes. At first I was into all those dead people, but then when I was in school I got hold of Lorca (Spain’s great poet Fredrico Garcia Lorca) and a huge translation of Gypsy Ballads [The Gypsy Ballads of García Lorca, Bloomington, 1953]. I thought that was grand thing, Gypsy Ballads, a grand thing.
Tyehimba: Your work seems informed by a kind of affinity for the supernatural embedded in the folkways of blackfolks. Henry Dumas, the incredibly talented black poet and fiction writer who was known for his story “Ark of Bones,” among many others, also invoked the power of the unseen into his stories. Did he have any influence on your work?
Baraka: Henry Dumas, man, took a latent kind of mythology that black people always related to – you know, you heard the black stories, spooky stories, ghost stories, weird negro stories – that’s what Dumas did. He went into that. He come from a place called “Sweet Home.” He took all of that stuff and raised that up. When you look at those stories, they all spooky because they all colored. Like that story “Fon.” But you know who was really influenced by him was Toni Morrison. She was his editor, because she worked for Random House.
Tyehimba: You are considered the “father of the Black Arts Movement.” How do you feel about that?
Baraka: Well, I been a father a lot of times (laughs) so that ain’t nothing new. I got nine kids, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild. The only thing about that that bothers me is the Black Arts Movement is a recurrent thing. We always trying to stand up and talk and talk about ourselves in the midst of this kind of holocaust that we in. Whether you’re talking about William Wells Brown or David Walker or Fred Douglass, you understand? People ask me why my stuff is so political. Look at our tradition. Only the corny people are not [political]. Look at the tradition of Afro American literature, tell me someone who is not political? DuBois? Baldwin? Uh huh. Now if someone like Ellison come out and talk some squat about he aint political, that’s cool with me. But that mean that he ain’t in the goddamn tradition then. Lorraine Hansberry? Marvin Walker? Langston Hughes? You understand. Who ain’t political? Sterling Brown? That’s our tradition.
Tyehimba: What are the sons and daughters of the Black Arts Movement, the so-called Hip Hop generation doing right? What do we need to work on?
Baraka: Well, all work is the same, man. There’s good, bad, and indifferent. A little good, a little bad, and most of it in the middle. I don’t know. That’s just what it is. The only thing is I prefer rap. My son Ras, told me that hip hop includes break dancing, dressing, graffiti…see I don’t know anything about that but rap that’s another thing. Because rap come from this (starts to drum on his chair’s wooden armrest) beating that drum, that’s rap. And the record is called the log. There’s always good bad and indifferent.
Tyehimba: Any advice to young black writers?
Baraka: Find out what happened before you, find out what’s happening with you, the people around you, your peers, and keep up with the state of the art in all the genres. What’s the most advanced form of dance, music, everything. What did Richard Wright say? Stay at the height of the century. In other words whatever is developed at the grandest level – know about that. Understand it.
Posted at October 15, 2004 10:05 AM