Amiri Baraka - Author, Poet, Activist

Amiri Baraka

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Amiri Baraka is one of the most prolific African American writers of the 20^th century. He is an acclaimed poet and the Obie-winning playwright of Dutchman. His long list of writing credits includes: Blues People; Home; Social Essays; Black Fire; Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones and Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones. He continues to be active in the struggle against racism and capitalism, to organize artists, and tp participate in the struggle for Black Liberation. He is currently teaching classes on Pan-African literature at Sony Brook College at the State University of New York and at Columbia University.

Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing
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Editors: Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal

ISBN 13: 978-1-57478-039-0
677 pp., $24.95
First published: 1968; Black Classic published date: 2006

While many texts are readily available chronicling the Black Power Movement, the same cannot be said for its “aesthetic and spiritual sister,” the Black Arts Movement. Black Fire is a rare exception that documents and captures the social and cultural turmoil of the period.

Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, co-editors and contributors to this volume, saw Black Fire as a manifesto to bring about change in Black thought and action, generated from a Black aesthetic. Often considered the seminal work from the Black Arts Movement, Black Fire is a rich anthology and an extraordinary source document, presenting 178 selections of poetry, essays, short stories and plays from cultural critics, literary artists and political leaders. Many of the contributors became prominent, nationally and internationally. Others receded into the cultural landscape, even before Black Fire’s first publication in 1968. Included in this groundbreaking volume are essays by John Henrik Clarke, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Harold Cruse, and A.B. Spellman; poetry by Askia Toure, Sonia Sanchez, Gaston Neal, Stanley Crouch, Calvin C. Hernton, and surprisingly Sun-Ra; fiction by Julia Fields and drama from Ed Bullins. Sixty-three additional contributors round out this comprehensive work.

Excerpt
These are the wizards, the bards, the babalawo, the shaiks, of Weusi Mchoro. These descriptions will be carried for the next thousand years…

…We are being good. We are the beings of goodness, again. We will be righteous and our creations good and strong and righteous, and teaching. The teaching and the descriptions. The will and the strength. Songs, chants, “bad sh*t goin down,” rendered as the light beam of God warms your hearts forever. Forget, and reget. Reget and forget. Where it was. This is the source, Kitab Sudan. The black man’s comfort and guide. Where we was we will be agin. Tho the map be broke and thorny tho the wimmens sell they men, then cry up hell to get them back our here agin. In the middle of my life, In the middle of our dreams. The black artist. The black man. The holy holy black man. The man you seek. The climber the striver. The maker of peace. The lover. The warrior. We are they whom you seek. Look in. Find yr self. Find the being, the speaker. The voice, the back dust hover in your soft eyeclosings. Is you. Is the creator. Is nothing. Plus or minus, you vehicle! We are presenting. Your various selves. We are presenting from God, a tone, your own. Go on. Now.

Amiri Baraka
From the Foreword

Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems
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ISBN: 0913441619
Format: Paperback, 83pp
Pub. Date: January 2003
Publisher: House of Nehesi Publishers

The Essence of Reparations
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ISBN: 0913441600
Format: Paperback, 44pp
Pub. Date: January 2003
Publisher: House of Nehesi Publishers

St. Martin (2003)—The Essence of Reparations and Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems, by controversial America author Amiri Baraka have just been published here by House of Nehesi Publishers.

The Essence of Reparations is Baraka’s first collection of four daring essays looking at reparations for African-Americans, for the crimes of slavery, linking reparations to greater political, economic and social development, and the writer’s ideas about democratic transformation in the USA.

The fact that reparations could be the watershed movement for Black peoples in the 21^st century and that scholars from Harvard to the University of the West Indies (UWI) and from Haiti to Nigeria are exploring, among other features, the moral and legal issues like never before, will not endear Baraka any more to his detractors who are still up in arms about his explosive poem “Somebody Blew Up America.”

In fact, the jointly-published Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems headlines the 9-11 poem in which Baraka questions “who,” other than those identified as terrorists, knew beforehand about the New York City World Trade bombings on September 11, 2001.

The poetic inquiry detonated a fiery storm of its own, leading to a battle royal with the very governor of New Jersey, Baraka’s native state, which had not long before appointed him as its poet laureate. The government asked Baraka to resign over the poem that mattered.

The poet refused. And a few months ago the New Jersey state legislature practically outlawed the laureate post. Baraka has since taken the state government to court and Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems may very well end up as “witness” for the plaintiff and the defense.

Baraka, 69 (b. 1934], has written over 40 books of poetry, plays and music history and criticism. His works have been translated all over Europe and he remains renown as the father of the Black Arts movement in the USA in the 1960s.

Author and Bob Marley scholar Kwame Dawes states in his rather comprehensive introduction to Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems that one thing is for sure: Baraka needs no introduction.

Yet House of Nehesi sees these two books also as an introduction of Amiri Baraka to the Caribbean, said its projects director Lasana M. Sekou. It could very well be the first time that a major US author has been published in the region.

Equally world renown author/poet/historian Kamau Brathwaite at NYU credits Baraka as one of the few American authors to feature the Caribbean critically in their works and is certain about the place and appearance of Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems as, “one more mark in the development in modern Black radical & revolutionary cultural reconstruction.”

Already available at www.amazon.com, www.spdbooks.org and other online bookstores, it can be argued that there is no way either of these new titles will only be read in the Caribbean given the US and international reach of Baraka’s work.

Take the complexity of his position in The Essence of Reparations, “One does not have to agree with his ideological framework to appreciate the timeliness and urgency of his case for reparations,” states Dr. Rupert Lewis, professor of Political Thought at UWI. And in the book’s introduction, a virtual international reparations reportage, former Nigerian diplomatic officer Fabian Badejo pointed out that Baraka is basing the struggle for reparations “on facts, in a scientific manner.”

It has been said that Baraka is committed to social justice like no other American author. He is certainly a revolutionary thinker whose political activities and creative growth has taken him from Black nationalism in the 1960s to Marxism-Leninism—without ever turning his literature into dogma or being an apologist for any movement or ideology.

In The Essence of Reparations and Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems www.houseofnehesipublish.com the indomitable American who dares to challenge the times is once again fresh and fearless.

They say its some terrorist,
some barbaric
A Rab,
in Afghanistan
It wasn't our American terrorists
It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads
Or the them that blows up nigger
Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row
It wasn't Trent Lott
Or David Duke or Giuliani
Or Schundler, Helms retiring

—excerpt from the poem Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems by Amiri Baraka

Blues People: Negro Music in White America
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ISBN: 0313225192
Format: Library Binding, 244pp
Pub. Date: August 1980
Publisher: Greenwood Publishing Group, Incorporated

"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music -- through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."

So says Amiri Baraka in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America -- not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.

Title: Transbluesency: Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1995)
Author: Amiri Baraka, Paul Vangelisti (Editor)
Publisher: Marsilio Publishers
Date Published: October 1995
Format: Trade Cloth

Title: Last Poets on a Mission: Selected Poetry & a History of the Last Poets
Author: Abiodun Oyewole, Amiri Baraka, Umar Hassan, Abiodun Oyewold
Publisher: Henry Holt & Co., Inc.
Date Published: September 1996
Format: Trade Paper

The Last Poets were born on May 19, 1968, at a birthday celebration for Malcolm X, and became the revolutionary force for many African Americans, expressing the plight of black people in their music. In nearly 50 poems, their lyrics advocate revolution through economic empowerment, self-love, personal growth and spiritual kinship. Through it all, The Last Poets have successfully managed to create light with words, power with music and substance with soul. Photos.

Title: The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones
Author: Amiri Baraka
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books
Date Published: March 1997
Format: Trade Paper

Title: The Dutchman & the Slave
Author: Amiri Baraka
Publisher: William Morrow & Company, Incorporated
Date Published: May 1976
Format: Trade Paper

These plays are literally shocking in ideas, in language, in honest anger, as they introduce a new playwright.

Title: Eulogies
Author: Amiri Baraka,Michael Schwartz (Editor)
Publisher: Mouton de Gruyter
Date Published: June 1996
Format: Trade Cloth

This compilation of more than 30 years' worth of elegiac prose and oratory by dramatist, poet, and commentator Amiri Baraka is dedicated to such figures as James Baldwin, Miles Davis, Kimako Baraka, and Dizzy Gillespie, as well as other inspiring African-American, community activists, musicians, artists, and citizens. Always eloquent, heartfelt, and purposeful, this collection exalts and honors great lives, and preserves the contributions of elders as living spirits to encourage and inspire.

Related Links

Amiri Baraka Website
http://www.amiribaraka.com