Amiri Baraka

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Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones on October 7, 1934, in Newark, New Jersey) is a American writer of poetry, drama, essays, and music criticism.

In 1957, he was discharged "undesirably" from United States Air Force service and moved to New York's Greenwich Village, where he rapidly became involved with the bohemian beat movement and became influenced by the styles of Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, and Charles Olson. In 1960, he went to Cuba, which initiated his transformation into a politically active artist; in 1961, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note was published. This was followed, in 1963, by Blues People: Negro Music in White America, to this day one of the most influential volumes of jazz criticism, especially in regard to the then-beginning Free Jazz movement.

Baraka has been a self-proclaimed communist since 1974, but given a history of questionable political leanings and activity, many on the Radical Left do not accept the legitimacy of this claim to the principles of Marxism. In 2006, David Horowitz included Baraka in his book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

1 Biography and Career Overview
2 Bibliography
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Biography and Career Overview

In 1967, LeRoi Jones adopted the Arabic name, Imamu Amiri Baraka, which he later changed to Amiri Baraka. Baraka studied Philosophy and Religious studies at Rutgers University, Columbia University, and Howard University.

In 1954, he joined the U.S. Air Force reaching the rank of sergeant. After an anonymous letter to his commanding officer accusing him of being a communist led to the discovery of Soviet writings, Baraka was put on gardening duty and given a dishonorable discharge for violation of his oath of duty. The same year, he moved to Greenwich Village working initially in a warehouse for music records. From this period stems his interest in jazz. At the same time, he came into contact with the incipient movement of Beat writers that was going to have a powerful influence on his early poetry. In 1958, Baraka founded Totem Press, which published such Beat icons as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In 1960, he married Hettie Cohen and, with her, became joint editor of the Yugen, a literary magazine (until 1963).

Blues People framed the rise of blues and jazz in the context of interactions between the post-slave Afro-American culture and the dominant white culture. Predating and predicting the growth of Afrocentricity, Baraka successfully traces the roots of the Charleston to slave society and the roots of blues to West Africa. In a sociological context of modern society he connects the rise of jazz in mainstream white culture with the rise of middle-class Negros in the north after WWII, maintaining an interpretation of history based on empiricism and an understanding of American culture. His ability to cross disciplinary boundaries and to relate cultural themes to individual histories conveys a colorful, nuanced and uniquely American and Afro-American interpretation of black music.

Clyde Taylor states in James B. Gwynne's book Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, "The connection he nailed down between the many faces of black music, the sociological sets that nurtured them and their symbiotic evolutions through socio-economic changes, in Blues People, is his most durable conception, as well as probably the one most indispensable thing said about black music."

His play, The Dutchman, premiered in 1964 and the same year he won an Obie Award for it. After the killing of Malcolm X, he broke with the Beat Poets, left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem because, at the time, he thought of himself as a black cultural nationalist.

In 1966, Baraka married his second wife, who later adopted the name Amina Baraka. In 1967, Baraka became a lecturer at San Francisco State University. In 1968, he was arrested in Newark, for illegally carrying a weapon and resisting arrest during riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and was subsequently sentenced to three years in prison; shortly afterwards an appeal court threw out the sentence. The same year his second book of jazz criticism, Black Music, was published, a collection of previously published music journalism, including the seminal Apple Cores columns from Down Beat magazine. In 1970 he strongly supported Kenneth Gibson's candidacy for mayor of Newark; Gibson was elected the city's first African American Mayor.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Baraka courted controversy by penning some strongly Anti-Semitic poems and articles, similar to the then stance of the Nation of Islam. In one poem, he writes, “Atheist Jews double crossers stole our [black people’s] secrets.... They give us to worship a dead Jew and not ourselves.... Selling fried potatoes and people, the little arty bastards talking arithmetic they sucked from the Arab's head.” Around 1974, Baraka distanced himself from black nationalism and became a self-proclaimed Third World Marxist and a supporter of anti-imperialist third world liberation movements. In 1980, he denounced his former anti-Semitic utterances, declaring himself an anti-zionist not an Anti-Semite.

In 1979, he became a lecturer at SUNY for its Africana Studies Department. The same year, after violent altercations with his wife, he was sentenced to a short period of compulsory community service. Around this time, he began writing his autobiography. In 1984, Baraka became a full professor. In 1987, together with Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, he was a speaker at the commemoration ceremony for James Baldwin. In 1989, he won an American Book Award for his works as well as a Langston Hughes Award. In 1990, he co-authored the autobiography of Quincy Jones, and, in 1998, was a supporting actor as a griot in Warren Beatty's film Bulworth.

In 2002, the state of New Jersey made him poet laureate— a position he was asked to resign in 2003, amidst controversy having to do with his 9/11 poem Somebody Blew Up America[1]. After Baraka refused to resign, then Governor Jim McGreevy attempted to fire Baraka, only to discover there was no legal provision for doing so. Governor Jim McGreevy then abolished the position.

Baraka has also been known for his controversial statements on the prospects for greater black-white societal reconciliation. A former lecturer at Yale University, he answered one female white student's question on how whites could help the situation with this response: "You can help by dying. You are a cancer. You can help the world's people by your death." <ref> The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones by Amiri Baraka pg. 285 </ref>

[edit] Bibliography

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1963
The Dutchman and The Slave, drama, 1964
The System of Dante's Hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
In Our Terribleness, with Fundi (Billy Abernathy), poems and photography, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Toward Ideological Clarity published in Black World 1974
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
"The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader" edited by William J. Harris 1991
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001