Orig. Negative African American Amiri Baraka Founder Black Arts Movement Poetry

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Seller: memorabilia111 ✉️ (808) 100%, Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, Ships to: US & many other countries, Item: 176284773299 ORIG. NEGATIVE AFRICAN AMERICAN AMIRI BARAKA FOUNDER BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT POETRY. A FANTASTIC 4X5 INCH VINTAGE ORIGINAL NEGATIVE OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LEGEND AMIRI BARAKA, ONE OF THE ORIGINAL FOUNDS OPF THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT,  GIVING A SPEECH AT AN UNKNOWN LOCATION Amiri Baraka, previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the University at Buffalo and Stony Brook University.


Amiri Baraka, a poet and playwright of pulsating rage, whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others, died on Thursday in Newark. He was 79. His death, at Beth Israel Medical Center, was confirmed by his son Ras Baraka, a member of the Newark Municipal Council. He did not specify a cause but said that Mr. Baraka had been hospitalized since Dec. 21. Mr. Baraka was famous as one of the major forces in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which sought to duplicate in fiction, poetry, drama and other mediums the aims of the black power movement in the political arena. Among his best-known works are the poetry collections “The Dead Lecturer” and “Transbluesency: The Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1961-1995”; the play “Dutchman”; and “Blues People: Negro Music in White America,” a highly regarded historical survey. Mr. Baraka, whose work was widely anthologized and who was heard often on the lecture circuit, was also long famous as a political firebrand. Here, too, critical opinion was divided: He was described variously as an indomitable champion of the disenfranchised, particularly in the racially charged political landscape of Newark, where he lived most of his life, or as a gadfly whose finest hour had come and gone by the end of the 1960s. In the series of alternating embraces and repudiations that would become an ideological hallmark, Mr. Baraka spent his early career as a beatnik, his middle years as a black nationalist and his later ones as a Marxist. His shifting stance was seen as either an accurate mirror of the changing times or an accurate barometer of his own quicksilver mien. He came to renewed, unfavorable attention in 2002, when a poem he wrote about the Sept. 11 attacks, which contained lines widely seen as anti-Semitic, touched off a firestorm that resulted in the elimination of his post as New Jersey’s poet laureate. Over six decades, Mr. Baraka’s writings — his work also included essays and music criticism — were periodically accused of being anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobic, racist, isolationist and dangerously militant. But his champions and detractors agreed that at his finest he was a powerful voice on the printed page, a riveting orator in person and an enduring presence on the international literary scene whom — whether one loved or hated him — it was seldom possible to ignore. Editors’ Picks I Had My First Child at 45. Here’s What I Learned. ‘The Right to Sex’ Thinks Beyond the Parameters of Consent Cairo’s Antique Elevators, Glorious and Glitchy, Are Scenes of Love and Fear Continue reading the main story “Love is an evil word,” Mr. Baraka, writing as LeRoi Jones, the name by which he was first known professionally, said in an early poem, “In Memory of Radio.” It continues: Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean? An evol word. & besides who understands it? I certainly wouldn’t like to go out on that kind of limb. Image Mr. Baraka at home in Newark in 2007. He was a lecturer and poet whose words were celebrated by some, but considered hateful by others. Mr. Baraka at home in Newark in 2007. He was a lecturer and poet whose words were celebrated by some, but considered hateful by others.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Saturday mornings we listened to Red Lantern & his undersea folk. At 11, Let’s Pretend/& we did/& I, the poet, still do. Thank God! Among reviewers, there was no firm consensus on Mr. Baraka’s literary merit, and the mercurial nature of his work seems to guarantee that there can never be. Writing in The Daily News of New York in 2002, Stanley Crouch described Mr. Baraka’s work since the late 1960s as “an incoherent mix of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, black nationalism, anarchy and ad hominem attacks relying on comic book and horror film characters and images that he has used over and over and over.” In contrast, the critic Arnold Rampersad placed Mr. Baraka in the pantheon of genre-changing African-American writers that includes Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston. Everett Leroy Jones was born in Newark on Oct. 7, 1934. His father, Coyette, was a postal supervisor; his mother, the former Anna Russ, was a social worker. Growing up, young Leroy, as he was known, took piano, drum and trumpet lessons — a background that would inform his later work as a jazz writer — and also studied drawing and painting. After studying briefly at Rutgers University in Newark, he entered Howard University. During this period, partly in homage to the African-American journalist Roi Ottley (1906-60), he changed the spelling of his name to LeRoi, with the emphasis on the second syllable. Though by all accounts a brilliant student, he came to regard the university’s emphasis on upward mobility for blacks as distastefully assimilationist — “an employment agency” where “they teach you to pretend to be white,” he later called it. Losing interest in his classes, he was expelled before graduating. He joined the Air Force. “It was the worst period of my life,” Mr. Baraka told Essence magazine in 1985. “I finally found out what it was like to be disconnected from family and friends. I found out what it was like to be under the direct jurisdiction of people who hated black people. I had never known that directly.” To stave off loneliness and misery, he read widely and deeply, stocking the library on his base in Puerto Rico with books — philosophy, literary fiction, left-wing history — the likes of which it had almost certainly never seen. After three years, he was dishonorably discharged: Some of his reading material had made the Air Force suspect that he was a Communist. The irony, he later said, was that he did become a Communist, but not until long afterward. He moved to New York, where he took an editorial job on a music magazine, The Record Changer, and settled in Greenwich Village amid the heady atmosphere of the Beat poets. Image Mr. Baraka on his way to court in Newark with second wife, Sylvia, left, in 1968. He had periodic brushes with the law throughout his adult life. Mr. Baraka on his way to court in Newark with second wife, Sylvia, left, in 1968. He had periodic brushes with the law throughout his adult life.Credit...Neal Boenzi/The New York Times He befriended their dean, Allen Ginsberg, to whom, in the puckish spirit of the times, he had written a letter on toilet paper reading, “Are you for real?” (“I’m for real, but I’m tired of being Allen Ginsberg,” came the reply, on what, its recipient would note with amusement, was “a better piece of toilet paper.”) In 1958 LeRoi Jones married a colleague, Hettie Cohen. Together they founded a literary magazine, Yugen, which published his work and that of Mr. Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac. With the poet Diane di Prima, he established and edited another literary magazine, The Floating Bear. He also started a small publishing company, Totem Press, which in 1961 issued his first collection of verse, “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.” In the volume’s title poem, he wrote: Nobody sings anymore. And then last night, I tiptoed up To my daughter’s room and heard her Talking to someone, and when I opened The door, there was no one there ... Only she on her knees, peeking into Her own clasped hands. His early poems were praised for their lyricism and for the immediacy of their language — throughout his career, he said, he wrote as much for the ear as for the eye. Mr. Jones considered himself a largely apolitical writer at first: Like that of many Beats, his poetry was concerned more with introspection. But he was radicalized by traveling to Cuba in 1960, the year after Fidel Castro came to power, to attend an international conference featuring writers from an array of third world countries. As a result, he later said, he came to believe that art and politics should be indissolubly linked. His political awakening was soon manifest in his work. His first major book, “Blues People,” published in 1963, placed black music, from blues to free jazz, in a wider sociohistorical context. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, the folklorist Vance Randolph said, “The book is full of fascinating anecdotes, many of them concerned with social and economic matters,” going on to commend its “personal warmth.” Mr. Jones came to even greater prominence in 1964, when his one-act play “Dutchman” opened Off Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theater in the Village. Experimental, allegorical and unabashedly angry, “Dutchman” was set aboard a New York City subway train. There, Lula, a young white woman, strikes up a conversation with Clay, a young middle-class black man. As the play unspools, she goads him, with apparent liberal righteousness, into releasing the anger that, as a black man, he must surely be harboring. When Clay finally explodes, Lula stabs him to death as other riders passively look on. After disposing of his body with casual impunity, she sits back, smiles and, as another black man boards the train, makes pointed eye contact with him before the curtain falls. “Dutchman” won the Obie Award, presented by The Village Voice to honor Off and Off Off Broadway productions, as the best American play of 1964. Image Mr. Baraka with the poet Maya Angelou in 1991 in Harlem during an event at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Mr. Baraka with the poet Maya Angelou in 1991 in Harlem during an event at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.Credit...Chester Higgins, Jr./The New York Times Mr. Jones’s other early plays include “The Slave,” a violent, futuristic fable about an American race war, and “J-E-L-L-O,” a farcical reworking of Jack Benny’s television show in which Mr. Benny and his friends are assaulted and robbed by Rochester, his newly militant black valet. For all the acclaim that followed “Dutchman,” Mr. Jones largely disdained his newfound celebrity, turning down the scriptwriting offers that poured in from Hollywood. (A film version of “Dutchman,” with a screenplay by Mr. Baraka and starring Shirley Knight and Al Freeman Jr., was released in 1967.) He turned instead to academia, teaching at Columbia, Yale and elsewhere. At his death he was emeritus professor of Africana studies at Stony Brook University on Long Island, where he had taught since 1979. Mr. Jones was further radicalized by the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. Soon afterward, having come to believe that marriage to a white woman was ideologically untenable, he left his wife and their two daughters and moved to Harlem. (In 1990 his former wife would publish “How I Became Hettie Jones,” a memoir of their time together.) In Harlem, Mr. Jones founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater, which staged many of his plays, and an associated theater school. By the late ’60s, after the theater and school had folded, he had moved back to Newark, converted to Islam and adopted the Bantuized Arabic name Imamu (“spiritual leader”) Ameer (“prince”) Baraka (“blessed”), which he would later alter to Amiri Baraka. Some critics felt that Mr. Baraka’s work from then on was the worse for his radicalism. In his 1970 essay collection “With Eye and Ear,” the poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth wrote that Mr. Baraka “has succumbed to the temptation to become a professional Race Man of the most irresponsible sort,” adding, “His loss to literature is more serious than any literary casualty of the Second War.” By Mr. Baraka’s own later acknowledgment, his writings from this period contained elements of unvarnished anti-Semitism. In “For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet,” published in his book “Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961-1967,” Mr. Baraka wrote: “Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew,” continuing: “I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured.” In 1980 Mr. Baraka, who had by then renounced black nationalism as exclusionary and become, in his words, a “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist,” repudiated those views in an essay in The Village Voice titled “Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite.” But the issue came sharply to the fore again in 2002. That September, shortly after he was appointed the New Jersey poet laureate, Mr. Baraka gave a public reading of “Somebody Blew Up America,” a poem he had written in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. In it, he suggested that Israel had prior knowledge of the attacks: Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day Why did Sharon stay away? Mr. Baraka was roundly criticized, and New Jersey’s governor, James E. McGreevey, called on him to step down. He declined. Image Mr. Baraka with Reggie Workman on bass during a performance of the New York Art Quartet at the South Street Seaport in 1999. Mr. Baraka with Reggie Workman on bass during a performance of the New York Art Quartet at the South Street Seaport in 1999. Credit...Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times In 2003, after it was determined that the state Constitution had no provision for firing the poet laureate, the New Jersey General Assembly voted to abolish the position outright. Mr. Baraka sued. In 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that New Jersey officials were immune from his suit; later that year, the United States Supreme Court declined to review the case. That court battle echoed Mr. Baraka’s periodic brushes with the law throughout his adult life. In 1967, he was found guilty of illegal weapons possession during the racially charged Newark riots that year; he later won a new trial, at which he was acquitted. After divorcing his first wife, Mr. Baraka married Sylvia Robinson, a poet later known as Amina Baraka. In 1979, during an altercation with Ms. Baraka in New York, Mr. Baraka was arrested and charged with assault and resisting arrest. Sentenced to 48 weekends in a halfway house, he used the time to work on a memoir, “The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones,” published in 1984. Mr. Baraka’s pugnacity was again in the news in 1990, when Rutgers, where he also taught, denied him tenure in its English department. In a widely reported public statement, he indicted unnamed members of the department as “Klansmen” and “Nazis.” His ire over the years was scarcely reserved for whites. Calling them “backward,” he castigated a series of black mayors in Newark, where he continued to live, for what he saw as overly accommodationist policies, starting with Kenneth A. Gibson, the city’s first, who took office in 1970, and extending to Cory A. Booker, who held the office until he became a United States senator in October. Mr. Baraka’s life was marked by great loss. In 1984 his sister, Sondra Lee Jones, who called herself Kimako Baraka, was stabbed to death in her New York apartment. In 2003 Shani Baraka, Mr. Baraka’s daughter with his second wife, was shot to death in Piscataway, N.J., along with her partner, Rayshon Holmes. James Coleman, also known as Ibn El-Amin Pasha, the estranged husband of Shani’s half-sister, Wanda Wilson, was convicted of murdering Ms. Baraka and Ms. Holmes. In addition to his wife and his son Ras, survivors include three other sons, Obalaji,  Amiri Jr. and Ahi;  four daughters, Dominique DiPrima, Lisa Jones Brown, Kellie Jones and Maria Jones; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Among Mr. Baraka’s many honors are the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was seen in a small role as a homeless sage in Warren Beatty’s 1998 political satire, “Bulworth.” Despite a half-century of accusations that he was a polarizing figure, Mr. Baraka described himself as an optimist, albeit one of a very particular sort. “I’d say I’m a revolutionary optimist,” he told Newsday in 1990. “I believe that the good guys — the people — are going to win.” Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones; October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014), previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka,[1] was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the University at Buffalo and Stony Brook University. He received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone.[5] Baraka's career spanned nearly 52 years, and his themes range from black liberation to white racism. Some poems that are always associated with him are "The Music: Reflection on Jazz and Blues", "The Book of Monk", and "New Music, New Poetry", works that draw on topics from the worlds of society, music, and literature.[6] Baraka's poetry and writing have attracted both high praise and condemnation. In the African-American community, some compare Baraka to James Baldwin and recognize him as one of the most respected and most widely published black writers of his generation.[7] Others have said his work is an expression of violence, misogyny, and homophobia.[8] Regardless of one's viewpoint, Baraka's plays, poetry, and essays have been described by scholars as constituting defining texts for African-American culture.[9] Baraka's brief tenure as Poet Laureate of New Jersey (in 2002 and 2003) involved controversy over a public reading of his poem "Somebody Blew Up America?", which resulted in accusations of anti-Semitism and negative attention from critics and politicians.[10][11] Contents 1 Biographical information 1.1 Early life (1934–1965) 1.2 1966–1980 1.3 1980–2014 1.4 Death 2 Controversies 2.1 Homophobia and alleged bisexuality 2.2 White people 2.3 September 11 attacks 3 Honors and awards 4 Legacy and influence 5 Works 5.1 Poetry 5.2 Drama 5.3 Fiction 5.4 Non-fiction 5.5 Edited works 5.6 Filmography 5.7 Discography 6 References 7 External links Biographical information Early life (1934–1965) Baraka was born in Newark, New Jersey, where he attended Barringer High School. His father Coyt Leroy Jones worked as a postal supervisor and lift operator. His mother Anna Lois (née Russ) was a social worker.[12] Jazz was something Baraka became interested in as a kid. He wanted to be just like Miles Davis. "I wanted to look like that too — that green shirt and rolled up sleeves on Milestones...always wanted to look like that. And be able to play "On Green Dolphin Street" or "Autumn Leaves" ... That gorgeous chilling sweet sound. That's the music you wanted playing when you was coming into a joint, or just looking up at the sky with your baby by your side, that mixture of America and them changes, them blue African magic chants." The influence of jazz can be seen throughout his work later in life.[13] He won a scholarship to Rutgers University in 1951 but transferred in 1952 to Howard University. His classes in philosophy and religious studies helped lay a foundation for his later writings. He subsequently studied at Columbia University and The New School without taking a degree. In 1954, he joined the United States Air Force as a gunner, reaching the rank of sergeant. This was a decision he would come to regret. He once explained: "I found out what it was like to be under the direct jurisdiction of people who hated black people. I had never known that directly." This experience was yet another that influenced Baraka's later work.[14] His commanding officer received an anonymous letter accusing Baraka of being a communist.[15] This led to the discovery of Soviet writings in Baraka's possession, his reassignment to gardening duty, and subsequently a dishonorable discharge for violation of his oath of duty.[15] He later described his experience in the military as "racist, degrading, and intellectually paralyzing".[16] While he was stationed in Puerto Rico, he worked at the base library, which allowed him ample reading time, and it was here that, inspired by Beat poets back in America, he began to write poetry. The same year, he moved to Greenwich Village, working initially in a warehouse of music records. His interest in jazz evolved during this period. It was also during this time that he came in contact with the avant-garde Black Mountain poets and New York School poets. In 1958 he married Hettie Cohen, with whom he had two daughters, Kellie Jones (b. 1959) and Lisa Jones (b.1961). He and Hettie founded Totem Press, which published such Beat poets as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.[17][18] In cooperation with Corinth, Totem published books by LeRoi Jones and Diane di Prima, Ron Loewinsohn, Michael McClure, Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, Frank O'Hara, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Ed Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer and Gilbert Sorrentino and an anthology of four young female poets, Carol Berge, Barbara Moraff, Rochelle Owens, and Diane Wakoski. They also jointly founded a quarterly literary magazine, Yugen, which ran for eight issues (1958–62).[19] Through a party that Baraka organized, Ginsberg was introduced to Langston Hughes while Ornette Coleman played saxophone.[20] Baraka also worked as editor and critic for the literary and arts journal Kulchur (1960–65). With Diane di Prima he edited the first twenty-five issues (1961–63) of their small magazine The Floating Bear.[9] In October 1961, the U.S. Postal Service seized The Floating Bear #9; the FBI charged them for obscenity over William Burroughs' piece "Roosevelt after the Inauguration".[20] In the autumn of 1961 he co-founded the New York Poets Theatre with di Prima, the choreographers Fred Herko and James Waring, and the actor Alan S. Marlowe. He had an extramarital affair with di Prima for several years; their daughter, Dominique di Prima, was born in June 1962. Baraka visited Cuba in July 1960 with a Fair Play for Cuba Committee delegation and reported his impressions in his essay "Cuba Libre".[21] There he encountered openly rebellious artists who declared him to be a "cowardly bourgeois individualist"[22] more focused on building his reputation than trying to help those who were enduring oppression. This encounter led to a dramatic change in his writing and goals, causing him to become emphatic about supporting black nationalism. In 1961 Baraka co-authored a "Declaration of Conscience" in support of Fidel Castro's regime.[23] Baraka also was a member of the Umbra Poets Workshop of emerging Black Nationalist writers (Ishmael Reed and Lorenzo Thomas, among others) on the Lower East Side (1962–65). His first book of poems, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, was published in 1961. Baraka's article "The Myth of a 'Negro Literature'" (1962) stated that "a Negro literature, to be a legitimate product of the Negro experience in America, must get at that experience in exactly the terms America has proposed for it in its most ruthless identity". He also stated in the same work that as an element of American culture, the Negro was entirely misunderstood by Americans. The reason for this misunderstanding and for the lack of black literature of merit was, according to Jones: In most cases the Negroes who found themselves in a position to pursue some art, especially the art of literature, have been members of the Negro middle class, a group that has always gone out of its way to cultivate any mediocrity, as long as that mediocrity was guaranteed to prove to America, and recently to the world at large, that they were not really who they were, i.e., Negroes. As long as black writers were obsessed with being an accepted middle class, Baraka wrote, they would never be able to speak their mind, and that would always lead to failure. Baraka felt that America only made room for white obfuscators, not black ones.[24][25] In 1963 Baraka (under the name LeRoi Jones) published Blues People: Negro Music in White America, his account of the development of black music from slavery to contemporary jazz.[26] When the work was re-issued in 1999, Baraka wrote in the Introduction that he wished to show that "The music was the score, the actually expressed creative orchestration, reflection of Afro-American life ... That the music was explaining the history as the history was explaining the music. And that both were expressions of and reflections of the people."[27] He argued that though the slaves had brought their musical traditions from Africa, the blues were an expression of what black people became in America: "The way I have come to think about it, blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives."[28] Baraka (under the name LeRoi Jones) wrote an acclaimed, controversial play titled Dutchman, in which a white woman accosts a black man on the New York City Subway. The play premiered in 1964 and received the Obie Award for Best American Play in the same year.[29] A film of the play, directed by Anthony Harvey, was released in 1967.[30] The play has been revived several times, including a 2013 production staged in the Russian and Turkish Bathhouse in the East Village, Manhattan.[31] After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Baraka changed his name from LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka.[32] At this time, he also left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory/Theater School (BARTS) since the Black Arts Movement created a new visual representation of art. However, the Black Arts Repertory Theater School remained open for less than a year. In its short time BARTS attracted many well-known artists, including Sonia Sanchez, Sun Ra and Albert Ayler.[33] The Black Arts Repertory Theater School's closure prompted conversation with many other black artists who wanted to create similar institutions. Consequently, there was a surge in the establishment of these institutions in many places across the United States. In December 1965[34] Baraka moved back to Newark after allegations surfaced that he was using federal antipoverty welfare funds for his theater.[35] Baraka became a leading advocate and theorist for the burgeoning black art during this time.[26] Now a "black cultural nationalist", he broke away from the predominantly white Beats and became critical of the pacifist and integrationist Civil Rights Movement. His revolutionary poetry became more controversial.[9] A poem such as "Black Art" (1965), according to Werner Sollors of Harvard University, expressed Baraka's need to commit the violence required to "establish a Black World".[36] Baraka even uses onomatopoeia in "Black Art" to express that need for violence: "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ... tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuht ..." More specifically, lines in "Black Art" such as "Let there be no love poems written / until love can exist freely and cleanly", juxtaposed with "We want a black poem. / And a Black World", demonstrate Baraka's cry for political justice during a time when racial injustice was rampant, despite the Civil Rights Movement.[37] "Black Art" quickly became the major poetic manifesto of the Black Arts Literary Movement, and in it, Jones declaimed, "we want poems that kill", which coincided with the rise of armed self-defense and slogans such as "Arm yourself or harm yourself" that promoted confrontation with the white power structure.[7] Rather than use poetry as an escapist mechanism, Baraka saw poetry as a weapon of action.[38] In April 1965, Baraka's "A Poem for Black Hearts" was published as a direct response to Malcolm X's assassination, and it further exemplifies the poet's uses of poetry to generate anger and endorse rage against oppression.[39] Like many of his poems, it showed no remorse in its use of raw emotion to convey its message.[40] It was published in the September issue of Negro Digest and was one of the first responses to Malcolm's death to be exposed to the public.[41] The poem is directed particularly at black men, and it scoldingly labels them "faggots" in order to challenge them to act and continue the fallen activist's fight against the white establishment. Baraka also promoted theatre as a training for the "real revolution" yet to come, with the arts being a way to forecast the future as he saw it. In "The Revolutionary Theatre", Baraka wrote, "We will scream and cry, murder, run through the streets in agony, if it means some soul will be moved."[42] In opposition to the peaceful protests inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., Baraka believed that a physical uprising must follow the literary one. Baraka's decision to leave Greenwich Village in 1965 was an outgrowth of his response to the debate about the future of black liberation.[43] 1966–1980 In 1966, Baraka married his second wife, Sylvia Robinson, who later adopted the name Amina Baraka.[44] The two would open a facility in Newark known as Spirit House, a combination playhouse and artists' residence.[35] In 1967, he lectured at San Francisco State University. The year after, he was arrested in Newark for having allegedly carried an illegal weapon and resisting arrest during the 1967 Newark riots. He was subsequently sentenced to three years in prison. His poem "Black People", published in the Evergreen Review in December 1967, was read by the judge in court,[45] including the memorable phrase: "All the stores will open if you say the magic words. The magic words are: "Up against the wall motherfcker this is a stick up!"[46] Shortly afterward an appeals court reversed the sentence based on his defense by attorney Raymond A. Brown.[47] He later joked that he was charged with holding "two revolvers and two poems".[42] Not long after the 1967 riots, Baraka generated controversy when he went on the radio with a Newark police captain and Anthony Imperiale, a politician and private business owner, and the three of them blamed the riots on "white-led, so-called radical groups" and "Communists and the Trotskyite persons".[48] That same year his second book of jazz criticism, Black Music, came out. It was a collection of previously published music journalism, including the seminal Apple Cores columns from Down Beat magazine. Around this time he also formed a record label called Jihad, which produced and issued only three LPs, all released in 1968:[49] Sonny's Time Now with Sunny Murray, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Lewis Worrell, Henry Grimes, and Baraka; A Black Mass, featuring Sun Ra; and Black & Beautiful – Soul & Madness by the Spirit House Movers, on which Baraka reads his poetry.[50][51] In 1967, Baraka (still LeRoi Jones) visited Maulana Karenga in Los Angeles and became an advocate of his philosophy of Kawaida, a multifaceted, categorized activist philosophy that produced the "Nguzo Saba", Kwanzaa, and an emphasis on African names.[7] It was at this time that he adopted the name Imamu Amear Baraka.[1] Imamu is a Swahili title for "spiritual leader", derived from the Arabic word Imam (إمام). According to Shaw, he dropped the honorific Imamu and eventually changed Amear (which means "Prince") to Amiri.[1] Baraka means "blessing, in the sense of divine favor".[1] In 1970 he strongly supported Kenneth A. Gibson's candidacy for mayor of Newark; Gibson was elected as the city's first African-American mayor. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Baraka courted controversy by penning some strongly anti-Jewish poems and articles with a stance similar to the stance at that time of the Nation of Islam. Historian Melani McAlister points to an example of this writing: "In the case of Baraka, and in many of the pronouncements of the NOI [Nation of Islam], there is a profound difference, both qualitative and quantitative, in the ways that white ethnicities were targeted. For example, in one well-known poem, Black Arts [originally published in The Liberator January 1966], Baraka made offhand remarks about several groups, commenting in the violent rhetoric that was often typical of him, that ideal poems would 'knockoff ... dope selling wops' and suggesting that cops should be killed and have their 'tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.' But as Baraka himself later admitted [in his piece I was an AntiSemite published by The Village Voice on December 20, 1980, vol. 1], he held a specific animosity for Jews, as was apparent in the different intensity and viciousness of his call in the same poem for 'dagger poems' to stab the 'slimy bellies of the ownerjews' and for poems that crack 'steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth.'"[52] Prior to this time, Baraka prided himself on being a forceful advocate of black cultural nationalism; however, by the mid-1970s, he began finding its racial individuality confining.[9] Baraka's separation from the Black Arts Movement began because he saw certain black writers – capitulationists, as he called them – countering the Black Arts Movement that he created. He believed that the groundbreakers in the Black Arts Movement were doing something that was new, needed, useful, and black, and those who did not want to see a promotion of black expression were "appointed" to the scene to damage the movement.[24] In 1974, Baraka distanced himself from Black nationalism, embracing Marxism-Leninism in the context of Maoist third-world liberation movements.[43] In 1979, he became a lecturer in the State University of New York at Stony Brook's Africana Studies Department in the College of Arts and Sciences at the behest of faculty member Leslie Owens. Articles about Baraka appeared in the University's print media from Stony Brook Press, Blackworld, and other student campus publications. These articles included a page-one exposé of his positions in the inaugural issue of Stony Brook Press on October 25, 1979, discussing his protests "against what he perceived as racism in the Africana Studies Department, as evidenced by a dearth of tenured professors". Shortly thereafter, Baraka took a tenure-track assistant professorship at Stony Brook in 1980 to assist "the struggling Africana Studies Department"; in 1983, he was promoted to associate professor and earned tenure.[53] In June 1979 Baraka was arrested and jailed at Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Different accounts emerged around the arrest, yet all sides agree that Baraka and his wife, Amina, were in their car arguing over the cost of their children's shoes. The police version of events holds that they were called to the scene after a report of an assault in progress. They maintain that Baraka was striking his wife, and when they moved to intervene, he attacked them as well, whereupon they used the necessary force to subdue him. Amina's account contrasted with that of the police; she held a news conference the day after the arrest accusing the police of lying. A grand jury dismissed the assault charge, but the resisting arrest charge moved forward.[54] In November 1979 after a seven-day trial, a criminal court jury found Baraka guilty of resisting arrest. A month later he was sentenced to 90 days at Rikers Island (the maximum he could have been sentenced to was one year). Amina declared that her husband was "a political prisoner". Baraka was released after a day in custody pending his appeal. At the time it was noted that if he was kept in prison, "he would be unable to attend a reception at the White House in honor of American poets." Baraka's appeal continued up to the State Supreme Court. During the process his lawyer William M. Kunstler told the press Baraka "feels it's the responsibility of the writers of America to support him across the board". Backing for his attempts to have the sentence cancelled or reduced came from "letters of support from elected officials, artists and teachers around the country".[54] Amina Baraka continued to advocate for her husband and at one press conference stated, "Fascism is coming and soon the secret police will shoot our children down in the streets."[55] In December 1981 Judge Benrard Fried ruled against Baraka and ordered him to report to Rikers Island to serve his sentence on weekends occurring between January 9, 1982, and November 6, 1982. The judge noted that having Baraka serve his 90 days on weekends would allow him to continue his teaching obligations at Stony Brook.[56] Rather than serve his sentence at the prison, Baraka was allowed to serve his 48 consecutive weekends in a Harlem halfway house. While serving his sentence he wrote The Autobiography, tracing his life from birth to his conversion to socialism.[57] 1980–2014 In 1980 Baraka published an essay in the Village Voice that was titled Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite. Baraka insisted that a Village Voice editor titled it and not himself. In the essay Baraka went over his life history, including his marriage to Hettie Cohen, who was Jewish. He stated that after the assassination of Malcolm X he found himself thinking, "As a Black man married to a white woman, I began to feel estranged from her ... How could someone be married to the enemy?" He eventually divorced Hettie and left her with their two bi-racial daughters. In the essay Baraka went on to say We also know that much of the vaunted Jewish support of Black civil rights organizations was in order to use them. Jews, finally, are white, and suffer from the same kind of white chauvinism that separates a great many whites from Black struggle. ... these Jewish intellectuals have been able to pass over into the Promised Land of American privilege. In the essay he also defended his position against Israel, saying, "Zionism is a form of racism." Near the end of the essay Baraka stated the following: Anti-Semitism is as ugly an idea and as deadly as white racism and Zionism ...As for my personal trek through the wasteland of anti-Semitism, it was momentary and never completely real. ... I have written only one poem that has definite aspects of anti-Semitism...and I have repudiated it as thoroughly as I can.[58] The poem Baraka referenced was "For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet", which contained lines including ...Smile jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew. I got something for you ... I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured ... So come for the rent, jewboys ... one day, jewboys, we all, even my wig wearing mother gonna put it on you all at once.[8][58] Baraka addressing the Malcolm X Festival from the Black Dot Stage in San Antonio Park, Oakland, California, while performing with Marcel Diallo and his Electric Church Band During the 1982–83 academic year, Baraka returned to Columbia University as a visiting professor, teaching a course entitled "Black Women and Their Fictions". After becoming a full professor of African Studies at Stony Brook in 1985, Baraka took an indefinite visiting appointment in Rutgers University's English department in 1988; over the next two years, he taught a number of courses in African American literature and music. Although Baraka sought a permanent, tenured appointment at the rank of full professor in early 1990 (in part due to the proximity between the University's campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey and his home in Newark), he did not attain the requisite two-thirds majority of the senior faculty in a contentious 9–8 vote that favored his appointment. Baraka would go on to collectively liken the committee to an "Ivy League Goebbels" while also characterizing the senior faculty as "powerful Klansmen", leading to a condemnation from department chair Barry Qualls.[59] Thereafter, Baraka was nominally affiliated with Stony Brook as professor emeritus of Africana Studies until his death. In 1987, together with Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, he was a speaker at the commemoration ceremony for James Baldwin. In 1989 Baraka 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 he was a supporting actor in Warren Beatty's film Bulworth. In 1996, Baraka contributed to the AIDS benefit album Offbeat: A Red Hot Soundtrip produced by the Red Hot Organization. In July 2002, Baraka was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey by Governor Jim McGreevey. The position was to be for two years and came with a $10,000 stipend.[60] Baraka held the post for a year, during which time he was mired in controversy, including substantial political pressure and public outrage demanding his resignation. During the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Stanhope, New Jersey, Baraka read his 2001 poem on the September 11th attacks "Somebody Blew Up America?", which was criticized for anti-Semitism and attacks on public figures. Because there was no mechanism in the law to remove Baraka from the post, and he refused to step down, the position of state poet laureate was officially abolished by the State Legislature and Governor McGreevey.[61] Baraka collaborated with hip-hop group The Roots on the song "Something in the Way of Things (In Town)" on their 2002 album Phrenology. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante included Amiri Baraka on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.[62] In 2003, Baraka's daughter Shani, aged 31, and her lesbian partner, Rayshon Homes, were murdered in the home of Shani's sister, Wanda Wilson Pasha, by Pasha's ex-husband, James Coleman.[63][64] Prosecutors argued that Coleman shot Shani because she had helped her sister separate from her husband.[65] A New Jersey jury found Coleman (also known as Ibn El-Amin Pasha) guilty of murdering Shani Baraka and Rayshon Holmes, and he was sentenced to 168 years in prison for the 2003 shooting.[66] His son, Ras J. Baraka (born 1970), is a politician and activist in Newark, who served as principal of Newark's Central High School, as an elected member of the Municipal Council of Newark (2002–06, 2010–present) representing the South Ward. Ras J. Baraka became Mayor of Newark on July 1, 2014. (See 2014 Newark mayoral election.) Death Amiri Baraka died on January 9, 2014, at Beth Israel Medical Center in Newark, New Jersey, after being hospitalized in the facility's intensive care unit for one month before his death. The cause of death was not reported initially, but it is mentioned that Baraka had a long struggle with diabetes.[67] Later reports indicated that he died from complications after a recent surgery.[68] Baraka's funeral was held at Newark Symphony Hall on January 18, 2014.[69] Controversies Homophobia and alleged bisexuality Author Jerry Gafio Watts contends that Baraka's homophobia and misogyny stem from his efforts to conceal his own history of same-sex encounters. Watts writes that Baraka "knew that popular knowledge of his homosexuality would have undermined the credibility of his militant voice. By becoming publicly known as a hater of homosexuals, Jones was attempting to defuse any claims that might surface linking him with a homosexual past."[8] Critics of his work have alternately described such usage as ranging from being vernacular expressions of Black oppression to outright examples of the sexism, homophobia, and racism they perceive in his work.[70][71][72][73] White people The following is from a 1965 essay: Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank ... The average ofay [white person] thinks of the black man as potentially raping every white lady in sight. Which is true, in the sense that the black man should want to rob the white man of everything he has. But for most whites the guilt of the robbery is the guilt of rape. That is, they know in their deepest hearts that they should be robbed, and the white woman understands that only in the rape sequence is she likely to get cleanly, viciously popped.[74] In 2009, he was again asked about the quote, and placed it in a personal and political perspective: Those quotes are from the essays in Home, a book written almost fifty years ago. The anger was part of the mindset created by, first, the assassination of John Kennedy, followed by the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, followed by the assassination of Malcolm X amidst the lynching, and national oppression. A few years later, the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. What changed my mind was that I became a Marxist, after recognizing classes within the Black community and the class struggle even after we had worked and struggled to elect the first Black Mayor of Newark, Kenneth Gibson.[75] September 11 attacks In July 2002, ten months after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Baraka wrote a poem entitled "Somebody Blew Up America?"[76] that was accused of antisemitism and met with harsh criticism. The poem is highly critical of racism in America, and includes humorous depictions of public figures such as Trent Lott, Clarence Thomas, and Condoleezza Rice. It also contains lines claiming Israel's knowledge of the World Trade Center attacks: Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion And cracking they sides at the notion ... Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day Why did Sharon stay away? Baraka said that he believed Israelis and President George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks,[77] citing what he described as information that had been reported in the American and Israeli press and on Jordanian television. Baraka himself denied that the poem is antisemitic due to the use of word Israeli rather than Jewish.[78][10][11] However, antisemitic watchdog organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) denounced the poem as antisemitic. The ADL noted that the "4000 workers" conspiracy theory had initially referred to Jews writ large[79] and that Baraka was using a common antisemitic tactic of replacing references to Jews writ large with references to Israel and then claiming a comment is merely anti-Zionist. [80] After the poem's publication, then-governor Jim McGreevey tried to remove Baraka from the post of Poet Laureate of New Jersey, to which he had been appointed following Gerald Stern in July 2002. McGreevey learned that there was no legal way, according to the law authorizing and defining the position, to remove Baraka. On October 17, 2002, legislation to abolish the post was introduced in the State Senate and subsequently signed by Governor McGreevey, becoming effective July 2, 2003.[81] Baraka ceased being poet laureate when the law became effective. In response to legal action filed by Baraka, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that state officials were immune from such suits, and in November 2007 the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear an appeal of the case.[82] Honors and awards Baraka served as the second Poet Laureate of New Jersey from July 2002 until the position was abolished on July 2, 2003. In response to the attempts to remove Baraka as the state's Poet Laureate, a nine-member advisory board named him the poet laureate of the Newark Public Schools in December 2002.[83] Baraka received honors from a number of prestigious foundations, including the following: fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Langston Hughes Award from the City College of New York, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, an induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Before Columbus Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.[84] A short excerpt from Amiri Baraka's poetry was selected to be used for a permanent installation by artist Larry Kirkland in New York City's Pennsylvania Station.[85][86] I have seen many suns use the endless succession of hours piled upon each other Carved in marble, this installation features excerpts from the works of several New Jersey poets (from Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, to contemporary poets Robert Pinsky and Renée Ashley) and was part of the renovation and reconstruction of the New Jersey Transit section of the station completed in 2002.[85] Legacy and influence Despite numerous controversies and polarizing content of his work, Baraka's literary influence is undeniable. His co-founding of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s promoted a uniquely black nationalist perspective and influenced an entire literary generation.[87] Critic Naila Keleta-Mae argues that Baraka's legacy is one of "saying the unsayable", a course that likely damaged his own literary reputation and canonization.[88] For example, Baraka was left out of the 2013 anthology Angles of Ascent, a collection of contemporary African American poetry published by Norton. In a review of the anthology, Baraka, himself, criticized editor Charles H. Rowell's hostility towards the Black Arts Movement, calling Rowell's "attempt to analyze and even compartmentalize" contemporary African American poetry as "flawed".[89] Indeed, Rowell's introduction to Angles of Ascent references the "fetters of narrow political and social demands that have nothing to do with the production of artistic texts", evincing a political/apolitical dichotomy where the editor considers overly political works of lesser artistic value. Critic Emily Ruth Rutter recognizes the contribution to African American literary studies of Angles of Ascent yet also proposes adding Baraka and others to ensure students do not "unknowingly accept" the notion that Baraka and writers like him were somehow absent from influencing twenty-first century poetry.[89] In Rain Taxi, Richard Oyama criticized Baraka's militant aesthetic, writing that Baraka's "career came to represent a cautionary tale of the worst 'tendencies' of the 1960s—the alienating rejections, the fanatical self-righteousness, the impulse toward separatism and Stalinist repression versus multi-racial/class coalition-building ... In the end, Baraka's work suffered because he preferred ideology over art, forgetting the latter outlasts us all."[90] Baraka's participation in a diverse array of artistic genres combined with his own social activism allowed him to have a wide range of influence. When discussing his influence in an interview with NPR, Baraka stressed that he had influenced numerous people. When asked what he would write for his own epitaph, he quipped, "We don't know if he ever died",[87] evincing the personal importance of his own legacy to him. NPR's obituary for Baraka describes the depths of his influence simply: "...throughout his life – the Black Arts Movement never stopped".[13] Baraka's influence also extends to the publishing world, where some writers credit him with opening doors to white publishing houses which African American writers previously had been unable to access.[26] Works Poetry 1961: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note 1964: The Dead Lecturer: Poems 1969: Black Magic 1970: It's Nation Time 1980: New Music, New Poetry (India Navigation) 1995: Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones 1995: Wise, Why's Y's 1996: Funk Lore: New Poems 2003: Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems 2005: The Book of Monk Drama 1964: Dutchman 1964: The Slave 1967: The Baptism and The Toilet 1966: A Black Mass 1968: Home on the Range and Police[91] 1969: Four Black Revolutionary Plays 1970: Slave Ship 1978: The Motion of History and Other Plays 1979: The Sidney Poet Heroical, (published by I. Reed Books, 1979) 1989: Song 2013: Most Dangerous Man in America (W. E. B. Du Bois) Fiction 1965: The System of Dante's Hell 1967: Tales 2004: Un Poco Low Coup, (graphic novel published by Ishmael Reed Publishing) 2006: Tales of the Out & the Gone Non-fiction 1963: Blues People 1965: Home: Social Essays 1965: The Revolutionary Theatre 1968: Black Music 1971: Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965 1972: Kawaida Studies: The New Nationalism 1979: Poetry for the Advanced 1981: reggae or not! 1984: Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974–1979 1984: The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka 1987: The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues 2003: The Essence of Reparations Edited works 1968: Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (co-editor, with Larry Neal) 1969: Four Black Revolutionary Plays 1983: Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women (edited with Amina Baraka) 1999: The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader 2000: The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka 2008: Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2 (Audio CD) Filmography The New Ark (1968)[92][93] One P.M. (1972) Fried Shoes Cooked Diamonds (1978) ... Himself Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement (1978) ... Himself Poetry in Motion (1982) Furious Flower: A Video Anthology of African American Poetry 1960–95, Volume II: Warriors (1998) ... Himself Through Many Dangers: The Story of Gospel Music (1996) Bulworth (1998) ... Rastaman Piñero (2001) ... Himself Strange Fruit (2002) ... Himself Ralph Ellison: An American Journey (2002) ... Himself Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed (2004) ... Himself Keeping Time: The Life, Music & Photography of Milt Hinton (2004) ... Himself Hubert Selby Jr: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow (2005) ... Himself 500 Years Later (2005) (voice) ... Himself The Ballad of Greenwich Village (2005) ... Himself The Pact (2006) ... Himself Retour à Gorée (2007) ... Himself Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place (2007) Revolution '67 (2007) ... Himself Turn Me On (2007) (TV) ... Himself Oscene (2007) ... Himself Corso: The Last Beat (2008) The Black Candle (2008) Ferlinghetti: A City Light (2008) ... Himself W.A.R. Stories: Walter Anthony Rodney (2009) ... Himself Motherland (2010) Discography It's Nation Time (Black Forum/Motown, 1972) New Music - New Poetry (India Navigation, 1982) with David Murray and Steve McCall Real Song (Enja, 1995) With Billy Harper Blueprints of Jazz Vol. 2 (Talking House, 2008) With the New York Art Quartet New York Art Quartet (ESP-Disk, 1965) With Malachi Thompson Freebop Now! (Delmark, 1998) with David Murray Fo Deuk Revue (Justin Time, 1997), "Evidence" with William Parker I Plan to Stay a Believer (AUM Fidelity, 2010) Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, on October 7, 1934. His father, Colt 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 BA in English. He served in the Air Force from 1954 until 1957, then moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There he joined a loose circle of Greenwich Village artists, musicians, and writers. The following year he married Hettie Cohen and began co-editing the avant-garde literary magazine Yugen with her. That year he also founded Totem Press, which first published works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others. He published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. From 1961 to 1963 he was co-editor, with Diane Di Prima, of The Floating Bear, a literary newsletter. His increasing mistrust of white society was reflected in two plays, The Slave and The Toilet, both written in 1962. Blues People: Negro Music in White America, which he wrote, and The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, which he edited and introduced, were both published in 1963. His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of Dutchman at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York on March 24, 1964. The controversial play subsequently won an Obie Award (for "best off-Broadway play") and was made into a film. In 1965, following the assassination of Malcolm X, Jones repudiated his former life and ended his marriage. He moved to Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. The company, which produced plays that were intended for a black audience, dissolved in a few months. He moved back to Newark, and in 1967 he married poet Sylvia Robinson (now known as Amina Baraka). That year he also founded the Spirit House Players, which produced, among other works, two of Baraka's plays against police brutality: Police and Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself. In 1968, Baraka co-edited Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing with Larry Neal and his play Home on the Range was performed as a benefit for the Black Panther party. That same year he became a Muslim, changing his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka. He assumed leadership of his own black Muslim organization, Kawaida. From 1968 to 1975, Baraka was chairman of the Committee for Unified Newark, a black united front organization. In 1969, his Great Goodness of Life became part of the successful "Black Quartet" off-Broadway, and his play Slave Ship was widely reviewed. Baraka was a founder and chairman of the Congress of African People, a national Pan-Africanist organization with chapters in 15 cities, and he was one of the chief organizers of the National Black Political Convention, which convened in Gary, Indiana, in 1972 to organize a more unified political stance for African-Americans. In 1974 Baraka adopted a Marxist Leninist philosophy and dropped the spiritual title "Imamu." In 1983, he and Amina Baraka edited Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women, which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and in 1987 they published The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka was published in 1984. Amiri Baraka's numerous literary prizes and honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, 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. He taught poetry at the New School for Social Research in New York, literature at the University of Buffalo, and drama at Columbia University. He also taught at San Francisco State University, Yale University and George Washington University. For two decades, Baraka was a professor of Africana Studies at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. He was co-director, with his wife, of Kimako's Blues People, a community arts space, and died on January 9, 2014. The dramatist, novelist and poet, Amiri Baraka is one of the most respected and widely published African-American writers. With the beginning of Black Civil Rights Movements during the sixties, Baraka explored the anger of African-Americans and used his writings as a weapon against racism. Also, he advocated scientific socialism with his revolutionary inclined poems and aimed at creating aesthetic through them. Amiri Baraka’s writing career spans over nearly fifty years and has mostly focused on the subjects of Black Liberation and White Racism. Today, a number of well known poems, short stories, plays and commentaries on society, music and literature are associated with his name. A few of the famous ones include, ‘The Music: Reflection on Jazz and Blues’, ‘The Book of Monk’ and ‘New Music, New Poetry’ among others. The literary world respects the playwright and poet, Amiri Baraka as one of the revolutionary provocateurs of African-American poetry. He is counted among the few influential political activists who have spent most of their life time fighting for the rights of African-Americans. Born Everett Leroy Jones to a middle-class family in Newark, New Jersey, the son of a postal employee and social worker, Amiri Baraka was educated at Rutgers, Howard, and Columbia universities. His work and his system of beliefs have gone through several distinct phases. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he was active among Beat writers on New York's Lower East Side, writing his own poetry and plays and editing two period magazines, Yugen and Floating Bear. Yet he was also increasingly impatient with what he saw as the political irrelevance of the Beats and the gradualism of the Civil Rights Movement. In Baraka, the Beats' scorn for materialism was gradually being transformed into a more aggressive and politically focused critique of capitalism. Race was also becoming more central to his view of American culture. His center of operations moved from the Lower East Side to Harlem, and he became a founding figure of the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. "Black Art" was essentially the ars poetica of the movement. He had first published as LeRoi Jones; now he was Amiri Baraka. For several years, he was a stunningly forceful advocate of black cultural nationalism, but by 1975 he was finding its racial exclusivity confining. He thus embraced the revolutionary forms of international socialism. Baraka's poetry, plays, and essays have been defining documents for African American culture for nearly four decades. Poems Black Art Black Dada Nihilismus In the Tradition SOS When We'll Worship Jesus Criticism by Poem Black Art Werner Sollors: On "Black Art" William J. Harris: On "Black Art" William W. Cook: On "Black Art" SOS Jay R. Berry: On "SOS" Phillip Brian Harper: On "SOS" Black Dada Nihilismus M. L. Rosenthal: On "Black Dada Nihilismus" In the Tradition William J. Harris: On "In the Tradition" Philip Heldrich: On "In the Tradition" David Ossman: Interview with Baraka Kimberly W. Benston: "Amiri Baraka: An Interview" Biographical Criticism Arnold Rampersad: About Amiri Baraka Joe Weixlmann: About Amiri Baraka Joel Oppenheimer: About Amiri Baraka Maurice Kenny: About Amiri Baraka Michael S. Harper: About Amiri Baraka William J. Harris: About Amiri Baraka General Criticism William J. Harris: On Amiri Baraka's Beat Period (1957-1962) William J. Harris: On Amiri Baraka's Black Nationalist Period (1965-1974) William J. Harris: On Amiri Baraka's Third World Marxist Period (1974- ) William L. Van Deburg: On The Black Power Movement The dramatist, novelist and poet, Amiri Baraka is one of the most respected and widely published African-American writers. With the beginning of Black Civil Rights Movements during the sixties, Baraka explored the anger of African-Americans and used his writings as a weapon against racism. Also, he advocated scientific socialism with his revolutionary inclined poems and aimed at creating aesthetic through them. Amiri Baraka’s writing career spans over nearly fifty years and has mostly focused on the subjects of Black Liberation and White Racism. Today, a number of well known poems, short stories, plays and commentaries on society, music and literature are associated with his name. A few of the famous ones include, ‘The Music: Reflection on Jazz and Blues’, ‘The Book of Monk’ and ‘New Music, New Poetry’ among others. The literary world respects the playwright and poet, Amiri Baraka as one of the revolutionary provocateurs of African-American poetry. He is counted among the few influential political activists who have spent most of their life time fighting for the rights of African-Americans. According to the famous American biographer and literary critic, Arnold Rampersad,”Baraka . . . . stands with Wheatley, , Dunbar ,Wright ,Douglass, Hughes, Ellison and Hurston, as one of the eight figures (in my opinion) who have significantly affected the course of African-American literary culture. His change of heart and head is testimony to his energy, honesty, and relentless search for meaning.” Riders know that protective armor is as important as careful driving. This is the reason for having strict laws everyone needs to follow on the road. With so many companies manufacturing protective armor for riders, it is absolutely necessary to select the gear carefully. Many riders are partial to Spyke Owl motorcycle leather boots along with Spyke Kaver Div man leather racing suit. Many riders also prefer AGV Sport motorbike long leather gloves and Turin Green motorcycle jacket to protect their wrists and upper body. Riders are recommended to only buy from companies that offer quality protective gear. One of America's most important — and controversial — literary figures, Amiri Baraka, died on Thursday from complications after surgery following a long illness, according to his oldest son. Baraka was 79. Baraka co-founded the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. His literary legacy is as complicated as the times he lived through, from his childhood — where he recalled not being allowed to enter a segregated library — to the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. His poem about that attack, "Somebody Blew Up America," quickly became infamous. They say its some terrorist, some barbaric A Rab, in Afghanistan ... In that poem, Baraka hurls indictments at forces of oppression throughout history: Who the biggest terrorist Who change the bible Who killed the most people Who do the most evil Who don't worry about survival Who have the colonies Who stole the most land Who rule the world Who say they good but only do evil The poem is a furious blaze of references, from the invasion of Grenada to the Jewish Holocaust, and conspiracies ranging from who shot Malcolm X to who killed Princess Di. Then, critics said, Amiri Baraka took it way too far: Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day Why did Sharon stay away? Who? Who? Who? More on Amiri Baraka Black History Meets Black Music: 'Blues People' At 50 A BLOG SUPREME Black History Meets Black Music: 'Blues People' At 50 BOOKS Author Amiri Baraka: 'Tales of the Out & the Gone' New Jersey Poet Laureate The poem had immediate consequences. Baraka was reviled even by former fans, and his post as the official state poet laureate of New Jersey was dissolved. A few years later, the host of the NPR show News and Notes pressed him about the incident, asking if he had any regrets. "No — I have regrets that they didn't pay me my money — cheap criminals. I have regrets about that," Baraka said. "But I don't have regrets about writing the poem. Because the poem was true." Over his life, Amiri Baraka would express an extremely broad range of beliefs — some offensive, some achingly beautiful. He was born in 1934, in Newark, N.J., as Everett LeRoi Jones. As a child, he was transfixed by poetry and music. He remembered the passing of musician Miles Davis for NPR, saying he wanted to be just like Davis as a teenager: In 2002, Amiri Baraka faced criticism of his poem "Somebody Blew Up America," which led to the removal of his position as state poet laureate of New Jersey. Mike Derer/AP I wanted to look like that too — that green shirt and rolled up sleeves on Milestones ... always wanted to look like that. And be able to play "On Green Dolphin Street" or "Autumn Leaves" ... That gorgeous chilling sweet sound. That's the music you wanted playing when you was coming into a joint, or just looking up at the sky with your baby by your side, that mixture of America and them changes, them blue African magic chants. As a young man, the writer was part of New York's then-mostly white Bohemian community. He hung out with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac — and wrote a book called Blues People that changed people's ideas about the importance of African American culture, says scholar Kumozie Woodard. "I think the Blues People might be his signature work. And that introduced jazz studies to the American academy," Woodard says. Then, in 1964, the writer still known as LeRoi Jones wrote a play, The Dutchman, which won a prestigious Obie award and established the playwright as a literary star. It's set on a subway train, where a beautiful white woman strikes up a conversation with a young black man — and begins to tease him mercilessly. "You look like you live in New Jersey with your parents and are trying to grow a beard. That's what. You look like you've been reading Chinese poetry," she says. But the teases become taunts, and the interaction grows ugly. Eventually, she stabs him in the heart. The play, said critics, expressed deep hostility towards women — a charge that followed the playwright for much of his life. After the murder of Malcolm X, he left his white wife and two daughters to live by radical black nationalist ideals. He described it on NPR in 2007: "In the '60s, after Malcolm's death, black artists met and decided we were gonna move into Harlem and bring our art, the most advanced art by black artists, into the community." The Black Arts movement was a basically a counterpart to Black Power, and Baraka wrote a number of books now seen as foundational for a certain kind of black aesthetic and cultural identity. He converted to Islam, changed his name and in the 1970s, turned towards Marxism. His work would always emphasize social and political issues: "The people's struggle influences art, and the most sensitive artists pick that up and reflect that," he said. Baraka's work galvanized generations of younger artists, even as his stridency alienated him from the mainstream. But he managed to work in both worlds. He was a full professor for decades at SUNY Stony Brook, and he was recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. At the same time, he ran a community arts center in Newark with his second wife. Professor Kumozie Woodard says all these roles — teacher, activist, artist, leader — came together as soon as you walked into Baraka's front door. "One time I came to his house and there was all this noise downstairs, and I asked him what it was, and he said it was a group of junior high school students who had a jazz history class downstairs," Woodard says. "And then I heard noise upstairs, and I said, 'What's that?" and he said, 'Well, the kids have taken over my office, and they have a newspaper.' " In Baraka's house — and throughout his life — the Black Arts Movement never stopped. Everett Leroi Jones, poet, playwright, activist, and educator, was born on October 7, 1934, in Newark, New Jersey to Coyt Leverrette Jones and Anna Lois Jones.  He attended primary and secondary schools in Newark and in 1954 he earned a B.A. in English from Howard University.  Jones joined the military that same year, serving three years in the Air Force as a gunner. Following his honorable discharge, Jones he settled in Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan where he socialized with Beatnik artists, musicians, and writers.  While living in the Village, he also met and married Hettie Cohen, a Jewish writer.  The couple co-edited the progressive literary magazine Yugen.  They also founded Totem Press, which published the works of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and other political activists. Jones’s own early writings often reflected issues of racial and national identity.  His first book of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note appeared in 1961.  In 1963, he published other progressive books like the Blues People: Negro Music in White America and The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America.  As the civil rights movement intensified, Jones’s work as a playwright began to reflect his growing distrust of white America.  Following the moderate success of his plays The Slave (1961) and The Toilet (1962), his reputation as playwright reached a new level with his 1964 off Broadway play Dutchman.   The highly acclaimed, but controversial, production won an Obie Award for “best off-Broadway play” and became a film. Following the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Jones renounced his bohemian lifestyle and divorced Hettie.  He moved uptown to Harlem, and helped usher in the Black Arts Movement by founding the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) which produced plays for black audiences.  After the school closed in 1967, he returned to Newark and married African American poet Sylvia Robinson (Amina Baraka). The couple founded the Spirit House Players, which produced Baraka’s anti-police brutality plays. During the late 1960s Jones converted to Islam, changing his name to Amiri Baraka.  He also embraced black nationalist themes and organizations such as US in Los Angeles, California.  He later served as Secretary-General of the National Black Political Assembly and Chairman of the Congress of African People, a Pan Africanist organization. In 1972 Baraka became one of the lead organizers of the National Black Political Convention held in Gary, Indiana.  By the mid 1970s Baraka underwent another philosophical change and became a Marxist, supporting the overthrow of capitalism. During Baraka’s career, some of his writings have been criticized as being homophobic, sexist, and anti Semitic.  His post published 911 poem “Somebody Blew Up America” caused such a controversy that New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey abolished Baraka’s title of New Jersey Poet Laureate in 2002.  However, that same year, in a political compromise, state officials bestowed on the artist the title of poet laureate of the Newark Public Schools. Baraka’s numerous literary honors and awards include the Guggenheim Foundation, the Langston Hughes Award from the City College of New York, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. After serving as a visiting professor at several universities, including the New School for Social Research, San Francisco State University, Yale, and George Washington University, Baraka in 1985 began teaching in the Africana Studies Department at the State University of New York in Stony Brook where he remained for two decades.  Baraka was Professor Emeritus at Stony Brook and in the first decade of the 21st Century resided in Newark where he was co-director of Kimako’s Blues People, a community arts center. Amiri Baraka died in Newark, New Jersey on January 9, 2014.  He was 79. LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka  Liberator, July 1965 * This essay was originally commissioned by the New York Times in December 1964, but was refused, with the statement that the editors could not understand it. The Village Voice also refused to run this essay. It was first published in Black Dialogue. LeRoi Jones  The Revolutionary Theatre should force change, it should be change. (All their faces turned into the lights and you work on them black nigger magic, and cleanse them at having seen the ugliness and if the beautiful see themselves, they will love themselves.) We are preaching virtue again, but by that to mean NOW, what seems the most constructive use of the word. AP / Library of Congress LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, 1965 THE REVOLUTIONARY THEATRE The Revolutionary Theatre must EXPOSE! Show up the insides of these humans, look into black skulls. White men will cower before this theatre because it hates them. Because they have been trained to hate. The Revolutionary Theatre must hate them for hating. For presuming with their technology to deny the supremacy of the Spirit. They will all die because of this. The Revolutionary Theatre must teach them their deaths. It must crack their faces open to the mad cries of the poor. It must teach them about silence and the truths lodged there. It must kill any God anyone names except Common Sense. The Revolutionary Theatre should flush the fags and murders out of Lincoln’s face. It should stagger through our universe correcting, insulting, preaching, spitting craziness . . . but a craziness taught to us in our most rational moments. People must be taught to trust true scientists (knowers, diggers, oddballs) and that the holiness of life is the constant possibility of widening the consciousness. And they must be incited to strike back against any agency that attempts to prevent this widening. The Revolutionary Theatre must Accuse and Attack anything that can be accused and attacked. It must Accuse and Attack because it is a theatre of Victims. It looks at the sky with the victims’ eyes, and moves the victims to look at the strength in their minds and their bodies. Clay, in Dutchman, Ray, in The Toilet, Walker in The Slave, are all victims.1  In the Western sense they could be heroes. But the Revolutionary Theatre, even if it is Western, must be anti-Western. It must show horrible coming attractions of The Crumbling of the West. Even as Artaud designed The Conquest of * National Humanities Center, 2007: nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/. LeRoi Jones, “The Revolutionary Theatre,” Liberator, 5 July 1965, pp. 4-6. Copyright © 1963, 1966, by LeRoi Jones. Later published in LeRoi Jones, Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1966), pp. 210-215. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Text as printed in Liberator; ellipses in original; three typographical errors corrected. Footnotes added by NHC. Complete image credits at nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/imagecredits.htm. 1  Victim characters in Jones’s three plays.  Mexico,2  so we must design The Conquest of White Eye, and show the missionaries and wiggly Liberals dying under blasts of concrete. For sound effects, wild screams of joy, from all the peoples of the world. The Revolutionary Theatre must take dreams and give them a reality. It must isolate the ritual and historical cycles of reality. But it must be food for all these who need food, and daring propaganda for the beauty of the Human Mind. It is a political theatre, a weapon to help in the slaughter of these dimwitted fat-bellied white guys who somehow believe that the rest of the world is here for them to slobber on. This should be a theatre of World Spirit. Where the spirit can be shown to be the most competent force in the world. Force. Spirit. Feeling. The language will be anybody’s, but tightened by the poet’s backbone. And even the language must show what the facts are in this consciousness epic, what’s happening. We will talk about the world, and the preciseness with which we are able to summon the world, will be our art. Art is method. And art, “like any ashtray or senator” remains in the world. Wittgenstein said ethics and aesthetics are one. I believe this. So the Broadway theatre is a theatre of reaction whose ethics like its aesthetics reflects the spiritual values of this unholy society, which sends young crackers all over the world blowing off colored people’s heads. (In some of these flippy southern towns they even shoot up the immigrants’ Favorite Son, be it Michael Schwerner3  or J. F. Kennedy.) The Revolutionary Theatre is shaped by the world, and moves to reshape the world, using as its force the natural force and perpetual vibrations of the mind in the world. We are history and desire, what we are, and what any experience can make us. It is a social theatre, but all theatre is social theatre. But we will change the drawing rooms into places where real things can be said about a real world, or into smoky rooms where the destruction of Washington can be plotted. The Revolutionary Theatre must function like an incendiary pencil planted in Curtis Lemay’s cap.4  So that when the final curtain goes down brains are splattered over the seats and the floor, and bleeding nuns must wire SOS’s to Belgians with gold teeth.5 Our theatre will show victims so that their brothers in the audience will be better able to understand that they are the brothers of victims, and that they themselves are victims, if they are blood brothers. And what we show must cause the blood to rush, so that pre-revolutionary temperaments will be bathed in this blood, and it will cause their deepest souls to move, and they find themselves tensed and clenched, even ready to die, at what the soul has been taught. We will scream and cry, murder, run through the streets in agony, if it means some soul will be moved, moved to actual life understanding of what the world is, and what it ought to be. We are preaching virtue and feeling, and a natural sense of the self in the world. All men live in the world, and the world ought to be a place for them to live. What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our “problems.” The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as “things.” Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image’s use in the world. Possibility is what moves us. The popular white man’s theatre like the popular white man’s novel shows tired white lives, and the problems of eating white sugar, or else it herds bigcaboosed blondes onto huge stages in rhinestones and makes believe they are dancing or singing. WHITE BUSINESSMEN OF THE WORLD, DO YOU WANT TO SEE PEOPLE REALLY DANCING AND SINGING??? ALL OF YOU GO UP TO HARLEM AND GET YOURSELF KILLED. THERE WILL BE DANCING AND SINGING, THEN, FOR REAL! (In The 2  Antonin Artaud, French playwright and film scriptwriter (1896-1948), espoused a “theater of cruelty,” i.e., intense visual and psychological stimuli for  the audience, as a mode of revolutionizing theater; he wrote the drama The Conquest of Mexico in 1933. 3  Michael Schwerner. Of the three civil rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in 1964, Schwerner was the white victim. 4  Curtis LeMay: U.S. Air Force general who advocated aggressive military policies during the Cold War and, in 1965, in Vietnam. 5  Many Belgian priests and nuns were massacred in 1960 during the Belgian Congo’s tumultuous transition from colony to independence. National Humanities Center ‡ LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), “The Revolutionary Theatre,” Liberator, July 1965 2 Slave, Walker Vessels, the black revolutionary, wears an armband, which is the insignia of the attacking army . . . a big red-lipped minstrel, grinning like crazy.) The liberal white man’s objection to the theatre of the revolution (if he is “hip” enough) will be on aesthetic grounds. Most white Western artists do not need to be “political,” since usually, whether they know it or not, they are in complete sympathy with the most repressive social forces in the world today. There are more junior birdmen6  fascists running around the West today disguised as Artists than there are disguised as fascists. (But then, that word, Fascist, and with it, Fascism, has been made obsolete by the words America, and Americanism.) The American Artist usually turns out to be just a super-Bourgeois, because, finally, all he has to show for his sojourn through the world is “better taste” than the Bourgeois . . . many times not even that.7 Americans will hate the Revolutionary Theatre because it will be out to destroy them and whatever they believe is real. American cops will try to close the theatres where such nakedness of the human spirit is paraded. American producers will say the revolutionary plays are filth, usually because they will treat human life as if it was actually happening. American directors will say that the white guys in the plays are too abstract and cowardly (“don’t get me wrong . . . I mean aesthetically . . .”) and they will be right. The force we want is of twenty million spooks storming America with furious cries and unstoppable weapons. We want actual explosions and actual brutality; AN EPOCH IS CRUMBLING and we must give it the space and hugeness of its actual demise. The Revolutionary Theatre, which is now peopled with victims, will soon begin to be peopled with new kinds of heroes . . . not the weak Hamlets debating whether or not they are ready to die for what’s on their minds, but men and women (and minds) digging out from under a thousand years of “high art” and weakfaced dalliance. We must make an art that will function as to call down the actual wrath of world spirit. We are witchdoctors and assassins, but we will open a place for the true scientists to expand our consciousness. This is a theatre of assault. The play that will split the heavens for us will be called THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA. The heroes will be Crazy Horse, Denmark Vessey, Patrice Lumumba,8  but not history, not memory, not sad sentimental groping for a warmth in our despair; these will be new men, new heroes, and their enemies most of you who are reading this. INTRODUCTION: THE VALIDITY OF IDENTITY “Certainly if you are black, or a woman, or gay, or poor, it should be obvious that you have to struggle to simply be who you are. The civil rights movement, or the gay rights movement and the struggle against women’s oppression, or the anti-imperialist struggles, give open voice and paradigm to that.” – Amiri Baraka Issues of race, nationality, gender, sexuality, religion, and other factors of identity seem to have existed throughout history. Following an election year when most of the populace split between supporters of the first African American President of the United States and those seeking to remove him from office (many of whom, perhaps not coincidentally, challenging the Commander-in-Chief’s legal citizenship) questions of identity are as crucial as ever. Advances in the movement toward marriage equality and proposed changes in immigration laws, among other developments in current events, further contribute to the discussion. The impulses and actions of individuals desperate to re-create themselves highlight defining aspects of identity often overlooked otherwise. Those who live within an identity without having the necessity, desire, or opportunity to question its essence rarely consider the nature of their identities. Disliking metacognition and the discomfort that can accompany the practice, too many people build entire villages in the land of denial—castle and keep, trench and moat filled with alligators ready to tear into the flesh of investigative attempts at enlightenment. The adventurous, questioning spirit must ask who decides the truth of identity. Is it something different according to each perception—those of others and self? Anthropologist Adam Kuper describes the interaction between internal and external perspectives of identity, explaining how, from “a subjective point of view, identity is discovered  2 within oneself, and it implies identity with others. The inner self finds its home in the world by participating in the identity of a collectivity” (Kuper 235). He also brings up the critical multiculturalist objections to assumptions “that identity is primordial, inherited, even biologically given.” Perhaps, as he claims “both culture and identity are made up, invented, unstable discursive fabrications,” and “pursuit of identity is a desperate existential struggle to put together a life-style that can be sustained for at least a brief moment” (Kuper 239). Pondering identity is a particular passion of mine as explained in a document I wrote earlier in my graduate school career, called “First Manifesto of the Theatre for Self-Declaration,” the introduction of which appears below: As a bisexual, white woman, romantically involved with a black man for nearly half my life, I spend much of my time thinking about race, sexuality, and identity. The artistic works I most want to witness, support, and create, address these issues. I believe that many individuals of my generation share my concerns. We use terms like self-aware, self-determined, and self-actualized to describe the states of being we desire to achieve, living in this self-acknowledgedly postmodern, pluralistic society. We understand that such a fundamental goal as self-understanding can require a lifetime of pursuit. As Peter du Preez explains in The Politics of Identity: Ideology and the Human Image, “Each person has to make something of the identity elements he finds in his community” (31). Provided with these elements, their creative use is a “personal achievement” (du Preez 32). Each individual consists of a unique combination of identity traits constructed from the blending of genetic make-up, family upbringing, societal influence, autonomous preferences, and other  3 factors. The presentation of authentic stories of our selves has the potential to provide unlimited original works of great variety. Consider the creative possibilities of points of view that challenge accepted norms. For example, “Gertrude Stein’s lesbian identity influenced her creation of landscape drama, in contrast to typical linear narratives” (Stone-Lawrence). Rather than conform to a plot structure that “mirrors a phallocentric sexual response cycle, leading to a single climax and resolution, not unlike riding a train down the track to its destination,” Stein’s theory promoted an “aerial view of a landscape” corresponding “to the female body with its numerous erogenous zones and capability for multiple orgasms” (Stone-Lawrence). Not only do those of us who noticeably differ (from the presumed norms promoted as traits of the majority in our culture) have alternative experiences to relate, but no one truly meets artificially homogenized standards (Stone-Lawrence). Engaging such ideas as a result of working on my Theatre for Self-Declaration manifesto, I decided I wanted to write my master’s thesis about three significant theatre artists whom I had studied during that and the previous semester and the impact upon their work of the radical reconstructions of their personal identities. Alfred Willmore, a famous English child actor of the Edwardian era, converted to Catholicism, learned the Irish language, fictionalized an autobiography beginning with a birth in County Cork, and became Micheál Mac Liammóir, cofounder of the Gate Theatre in Dublin and a dominant presence on the Irish Republican stage for over fifty years. LeRoi Jones, a mid-twentieth century, New Jersey “Negro” living and working in Greenwich Village as a Beat poet and leftist playwright, responded to the assassination of Malcolm X by converting to Islam, leaving his white wife and biracial daughters, and moving to Harlem to start the Black Arts Movement under the name Amiri Baraka. Rachel Rosenthal, a  4 biological female who considers herself “a gay man in a woman’s body” (186), has played a prominent role in experimental theatre since 1955, and her eponymous company has produced more than twenty years of award-winning work dealing with gender issues as well as an entire range of human and animal rights themes. With these three radically transformed, self-defined artists fresh on my mind, I felt like serendipity created my thesis statement for me. I planned to focus on the intersection of private and dramatic selves of these artists, studying in particular the way identity influences creative output and vice versa. Learning what led to each artist’s radical personal shift and how it altered his or her work, I hoped to gain a deeper understanding of these individuals and myself. Unfortunately, the research process proved to be more arduous than expected. Although I initially intended to survey the three as equally as possible, balancing the amount of time, pages, and sources I devoted to each, my nearly uncontrollable obsession with research (which disables my attempts to judiciously adhere to a stopping point) and the disproportionate levels of available texts resulted in something very different. Despite his understandable complaints about difficulty getting published, Baraka’s prolific output and the controversy surrounding his work and persona (combined with the demand for such content in academic libraries) resulted in my amassing a greater volume of research on him than the other two artists combined. Fortunately, I realized that dealing even-handedly with each artist was not only unnecessary but potentially crippling by artificially inhibiting the reach of my inquiry. I began comparing and contrasting the three artists’ identity quests in order to recognize shared trends, common themes, and points of departure. 5 Certainly, all men (even those residing in a woman’s body) are created equal, and each biography involves issues of race, sexuality, nationality, politics, and self-determination in common. Professor of Art Education Charles R. Garoian’s comment upon the postmodern performance art of Rachel Rosenthal as “problematiz[ing] the exclusionary practices of the modernists, combining . . . interdisciplinary practices with intercultural investigations in order to expose the hidden agendas of the cultural mainstream” with the aim of “decentralization of authority by aestheticizing ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, race, and class distinctions” is to some degree true of all of my three initial subjects (10). Each allowed his or her inner voice to overwhelm the power of birth, tradition, circumstance, societal pressures, or any other external sources. Considering the effect of self-perception upon perception in general, individual identity may be the ultimate creation from which all other art grows. Seeking proof of this argument, I intensely explored the biographies (and autobiographical writings) of each of my three artists and sought evidence of the influence of their personally crafted identities upon their creative works as well as common themes of the power of identity as a factor in their lives and works. As I studied these stories in depth, I saw how each identity quest serves a different function, the exploration of which illuminates a separate set of issues. All of this effort helped me understand the essence of each artist’s transformation and its significance in terms of identity construction. Through this process of analysis, I came to believe, at least in the case of these three individuals, that sexuality is the primary factor for identity, although nationality, race, and gender were the forms through which the artists’ changes were most prominently demonstrated. The power of sexuality resembles a vector in the personal transformations and expressions of identity in the works of Mac Liammóir, Baraka, and Rosenthal. As a “force or influence,”  6 sexuality is the directionality that drives the individual. Applying the notion of sexuality as a vector in the sense of a trajectory, scholarship suggests Mac Liammóir moved towards his dream, Baraka executed a series of movements away from what he decided he did not want, and Rosenthal freed herself to circumvent limiting categories. Accordingly, the assembled parts of my planned thesis traced a map of these paths. However, in the process of drafting and redrafting the various portions of Proclamation! Choosing Nationality, Manifesting Race, and Revealing Gender through the Art of Self-Declaration: The Dramatic Lives and Works of Micheál Mac Liammóir, Amiri Baraka, and Rachel Rosenthal, I came to the reckoning that I had sufficient content for an entire thesis on Baraka alone. Baraka transitioned through a series of phases that, apart from a degree of interpolation, took the form of radical shifts from one extreme to another although aspects of each identity appeared in earlier and/or recurred in later periods of his life. Apparently, he, like many of his generation and predicament, required drastic steps in order to move at all. Eventually, through a course of fluctuating ambivalence, Baraka refined his definitions of friend and enemy and his categories for love and hate with the passage of time and increased understanding of himself and others. This transpired despite his initially succumbing to the common nationalist pitfall of requiring “purity at every level,” which often undermines the struggle for freedom and fails to register that, as political science professor and author Shane Phelan explains, “non-negotiable identities will enslave us whether they are imposed from within or without” (170). Later, conflict and tragedy in his family life brought him (in some cases back) to a more egalitarian ethos of greater understanding for all. 7 My originally intended Baraka chapters analyzed this almost Candidesque journey of experimentation and rejection of each form of identity picked up and put back down until he found one that suited him to maintain for decades. Later, through contemplation of the power of sexuality as a vector, I realized I could narrow my thesis to focusing specifically on Baraka's rejection of white women and homosexuality as reflected in his works during his cultural nationalist phase (from the mid-60's to the mid-70's) and in relation to his personal life and identity change. This approach still includes some discussion of his whole life as well as analysis of select works before 1965 and after 1974. But I mainly emphasize plays written and/or performed during his cultural nationalist phase, called “the Black Nationalist Period” per a consensus between Baraka and William J. Harris, editor of The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (xv). This separatist phase of Baraka’s career followed “the Beat Period (1957-1962)” and “the Transitional Period (1963-1965).” It ended in 1974, “the year that Baraka pronounced himself a Marxist-Leninist,” beginning “the Third World Marxist Period (1974- )” (Harris xv). Presently, my revised first chapter, “The Blackification of a Former HalfWhite Negro,” mainly consists of biographical narrative about Baraka. The second chapter, “Season of the Witch,” details the poet and playwright’s rejection of white women to embrace black women and the impact of this choice on his representation of females of both races. The third chapter, “True Bloods,” deals with Baraka’s cultural nationalist, macho chauvinist assertions of an unequivocal heterosexuality at odds with his associations and sympathies during his previous Bohemian phase. These illuminating contradictions highlight the irony that Baraka’s emphasis on repudiation of the people and ideals he once embraced caused him to negatively focus his  8 thoughts and messages more strongly on what he chose to reject than what he sought to manifest. Until he succeeded in purging his revulsion, his growth for the sake of his declared values remained inhibited by his hostility. “But if this rage had not been expressed?” Baraka’s ex-wife, Hettie Jones, reflects in her autobiography that she has “come to see those times—and the psychological advances of the Black Power movement—as a necessary phase in AfricanAmerican, and ultimately American, history” (237-38). Indubitably, Baraka’s mid-sixties to midseventies writings offer a number of insights into the volatile climate of those revolutionary times. 9 THE BLACKIFICATION OF A FORMER HALFWHITE NEGRO “Coal-black is better than another hue, In that it scorns to bear another hue; For all the water in the ocean Can never turn the swan’s black legs to white, Although she lave them hourly in the flood.” Aaron the Moor Titus Andronicus Act IV, Scene ii William Shakespeare On the afternoon of February 21, 1965, African American poet and playwright LeRoi Jones and his white, Jewish wife Hettie Roberta (Cohen) Jones “were drinking champagne at the opening of the new Eighth Street Bookshop” in Greenwich Village (Jones 221). In her autobiography, Hettie Jones recounts that her husband was “on the paperback aisle, where Vashti, his new girlfriend, was waiting with two of his new friends. . . . young men, who called themselves poets and functioned as bodyguards, ran errands for Roi and sat with him in endless discussion” (222). News arrived of the assassination of Malcolm X, and Hettie Jones recalls that when “Roi heard of the killing he said ‘Here,’ handing me his half-full champagne glass, and the next minute, with his entourage, he was gone” (222). After leaving his white wife and biracial daughters, LeRoi Jones relocated to Harlem and started the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. He quit drinking and smoking, converted to Sunni Islam, and changed his name to Ameer Barakat—given to him by the priest who buried  10 Malcolm X and meaning “the Blessed Prince” (Baraka, Autobiography 375-76). Later, under the influence of Maulana Karenga (the Black Power leader, Africana Studies professor, and creator of Kwanzaa) this appellation was altered into the more Bantu or Swahili form he has kept since: Amiri Baraka. Sylvia Robinson, the young African American woman who married Baraka in a Yoruba ceremony in 1967 and has remained with him to the present day, became Amina, meaning “faithful” after one of Muhammad’s wives. And Baraka felt he “was now literally being changed into a blacker being” (Autobiography 375-76). Baraka’s ultimate inspiration for rejecting his Greenwich Village lifestyle, Malcolm X, in recounting his Hajj to Mecca for his autobiography, described how, despite his notoriously separatist stance, the most impressive experience of his pilgrimage was “The brotherhood! The people of all races, colors, from all over the world coming together as one!” (388-89). Although in the past, he had “made sweeping indictments of all white people,” he vowed never to do that again because he realized “a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks” (X and Haley 416). Baraka mirrored Malcolm X by starting to work with white groups after his own return from a trip to Africa, but this delayed arrival at the same destination occurred a decade later. Evidently, Baraka had to strike out before finding balance, like a pendulum bouncing from one extreme to the other, breaking from the white world in order to eventually see the multicultural unity among his oppressed brothers and sisters of all races. In the 1970’s, Baraka’s plays and other statements began to embrace a unified multicultural effort to fight the forces of capitalist imperialism while continuing to provoke and demand confrontation of racist tendencies and blatant oppression in contemporary American society, but the mid-1960’s drastic enactment of his separatist ideology provided the  11 quintessential line of demarcation between what are frequently considered the first two of three major phases in his life’s work. Of course, not everything fits in a discrete category. Some works contain elements of a given philosophy, despite having been written before or after the predominance of that philosophy in a particular phase of his career. Others are capable of representing more than one period by the various issues they address or suggest. The term “history of fairly radical breaks” used by Baraka’s contemporary, African American poet and critic A.B. Spellman, in the documentary film In Motion: Amiri Baraka, indicates sharply contrasting shifts although the transitions built more gradually, simmering below the surface before gushing forth, and certain themes remained constant throughout the majority of Baraka’s artistic career. As he explains in his preface to The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, “The typology that lists my ideological changes and so forth as ‘Beat-Black Nationalist-Communist’ has brevity going for it, and there’s something to be said for that, but . . . it doesn’t show the complexity of real life. . . . We go from step 1 to step 2. . . . But there is real life between 1 and 2” (Baraka xi). Viewed as a vector, the cultural nationalist phase of Baraka’s career, during which he created the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, most resembles a movement away from white people, especially his wife, lovers, and other intimate associates. His plays of this period depict white females, as well as white males and assimilated blacks, as evil, ridiculous, or disgusting. This tendency first appears in pivotal work from the end of Baraka’s Greenwich Village days, and vestiges of it remain discernible in plays written after his Marxist-Leninist evolution of the 1970s, but the BAM era writings contain the most extremely reactionary images and rhetoric intended to reaffirm Baraka’s blackness, questioned by many of his fellow militants because of  12 his close personal affiliations with whites. Examination of Baraka’s biography and creative output shows a progression through seemingly contradictory stances as his identity quest spiraled in a narrowing trajectory, ever closer to an integrated center self composed of the remaining traits associated with each of the divergent extremes through which his developing ideology passed over the course of his life. Everett Leroy Jones—changed to LeRoi as a college student (Baraka, Autobiography 127)—was born in Newark, NJ on October 7, 1934. His family had a history of defying racism in the South before moving north. One of his namesakes, his maternal grandfather, Thomas Everett Russ, “lost a business to arson in Alabama before coming to Newark” (Jones 133). Another, his father, Coyt Leroy Jones, fled South Carolina to move in with his married sister in Newark “after he hit a white manager who tried to drag him out of his seat in a movie house for eating peanuts” (Jones 133). The young Leroy Jones grew up in a multicultural neighborhood but discovered limitations to the extent to which association with children of other races was allowed. He was subject to mistreatment by Italian bullies at the integrated high school he attended, and, through participation in cotillion, he learned about the troubling preference for “yellow” skin over brown within the African American community. The atmosphere of Howard University during his limited attendance further promoted emulation of Western European aesthetics and values (Baraka, Autobiography). After leaving college at the age of nineteen, LeRoi Jones joined the Air Force, where, in defiance of the regimented order, he found comfort in books and the independent thought and self-expression they inspired. The incompatibility of mid-twentieth-century United States military service with Marxist ideology, particularly as expressed in the periodical publications to  13 which Jones subscribed and/or submitted his writing, led to his expulsion with an undesirable discharge after a few years and attainment of the rank of sergeant (Baraka, Autobiography). Next, he immersed himself in the Greenwich Village Bohemian community of New York City, where he met Hettie Cohen and married her in a Buddhist ceremony in 1958. The couple edited Yugen, their quarterly poetry magazine that published many Beat writers, and LeRoi became close with Allen Ginsberg, among others. Under the name Totem Press, the Joneses started publishing books, including Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, which LeRoi dedicated to Hettie. In this first volume of verse, LeRoi makes a point of differentiating himself as not African (Baraka, “Notes for a Speech” 47), and neither of the two poems that include Hettie’s name in their title mentions whiteness (Baraka, Preface 13-4). Apart from finding limited references, the uninformed reader might not clearly discern the author’s race based on the content of his poetry because LeRoi Jones infrequently refers to skin color in his work during this period. When asked in a 1960 interview with David Ossman why his work does not give a sense of ethnic identity like that found in poems by Langston Hughes, he says: It doesn’t lessen my feeling of being a Negro—it’s just that that’s not the way I write poetry. I’m fully conscious all the time that I am an American Negro because it’s part of my life. . . . I would deal with it when it has to do directly with the poem, and not as a kind of broad generalization that doesn’t have much to do with a lot of young writers today who are Negroes (although I don’t know that many). It’s always been a separate section of writing that wasn’t quite up to the level of the other writing. There were certain definite sociological reasons for it  14 before the Civil War or in the early part of the twentieth century, or even in the 30s, but it’s a new generation now, and people are beset by other kinds of ideas that don’t have much to do with sociology, per se. (6-7) This statement is beyond shocking to anyone who knows about the career of Amiri Baraka. The dismissal of works by self-consciously African American writers as inferior to “other writing,” presumably by white authors, absolutely contradicts the affirmation of Afrocentric black identities featured prominently (if not the primary theme) in his work for the overwhelming majority of his career. Furthermore, in retrospect, the implication that racial issues were no longer pertinent in the 1960’s appears astonishing to a reader aware of both the overall political climate of that decade and the active revolutionary role the poet-playwright would play. Decidedly, the not-as-yet Baraka would soon perform an ideological about-face. Throughout his youth, he had found solace and inspiration in the works of mostly European authors and their descendants. At Howard, LeRoi had written poetry influenced by the Elizabethans (Baraka, Autobiography 120), and he lived the phenomenon about which he would later warn the intended audience of “Poem for HalfWhite College Students.” In such a state of mind, an African American could find himself “gesturing like Steve McQueen” when attempting to “make some ultrasophisticated point” and might verge on “whistling [D]ixie” (221). In his autobiography, Baraka reflects that he “was ‘open’ to all schools within the circle of white poets of all faiths and flags” but had lost his connection to blackness (231). As evidence of how his “social focus had gotten much whiter” (231), Baraka notes that Yugen had started with the contributors split equally between blacks and whites, but, by the third issue, it did not publish a single black writer (223). Yet, at the time, he “could see the young white boys and girls in their  15 pronouncement of disillusion with and ‘removal’ from society as being related to the black experience,” qualifying them as “colleagues of the spirit” (230). Baraka later judged that these associations prolonged his adolescence, but he did not want to become one of many “sham artists whose claim to being artists was a justification for their bohemian lifestyles” (Autobiography 454, 199). At the weekend-long parties Ginsberg called Jones’ “literary salon” and described as “the one place in New York where everybody met” (In Motion), Village literati primarily focused on their shared passion for poetry and literature, but drinking and adultery occurred, too (Baraka, Autobiography 227). In addition to other extramarital affairs, LeRoi had an extended relationship with the poet Diane DiPrima, who is the mother of Dominique, one of his biracial daughters, and with whom he started publishing and mailing The Floating Bear newsletter. Another project of theirs was co-founding the New York Poets Theatre together with several fellow artists. LeRoi Jones had started utilizing dialogue in his poems and realized the dramatic form satisfied his urge to go “beyond” poetry into “action literature” (Baraka, Autobiography 274). After a 1962 student-directed Actors Studio staging of his play The Toilet, Lee Strasberg advised pursuit of an Off Broadway run (Jones 180). Two years later, a group established by Edward Albee showcased Dutchman, which gave voice to the inchoate rage of the playwright’s awakening disenchantment with the status of Blacks in White America. The play went on to have an extended run at the Cherry Lane Theatre and win the Voice Obie Award for Best Play of 1964 (Jones 207). It has also attained canonical status and is probably the most well-known and acclaimed work of Baraka’s career.  16 Following the success of Dutchman, LeRoi Jones spent a term in limbo, torn between worlds in his personal life. He belonged to a group of nationalists, most with white wives and lovers, who found themselves increasingly more conflicted about their need to free themselves from perceived hypocrisy and confirm their separatist identities. They disapproved of the involvement of white people on their committee while they “were all hooked up to white women” (Baraka, Autobiography 250). Baraka recalls, “We talked a black militance and took the stance that most of the shit happening downtown was white bullshit and most of the people were too. The fact that we, ourselves, were down there was a contradiction we were not quite ready to act upon, though we discussed it endlessly” (Autobiography 291). A distance “that had never existed before” grew between LeRoi and Hettie, and he found himself subconsciously choosing black women for his liaisons (Baraka, Autobiography 281-82). Similarly, white male friends sensed his impending departure, which gave him pause because he still liked them but felt they could not follow where he was going (Baraka, Autobiography 283). Whereas he used to work or hang out with the Black Mountain crowd, now he primarily socialized with black friends (Baraka, Autobiography 258). This ambivalent transition continued even after the assassination of Malcolm X provided the definitive compulsion for LeRoi Jones to move; he fluctuated indecisively back and forth for a time, making mournfully guilty return visits to his wife and their two daughters. Gradually, concern for his identity as a black man and doubts about whether he could remain a revolutionary while married to the “enemy” won. Amidst this awkward transition, The Slave developed alongside parallel occurrences in the playwright’s personal life. First presented at St. Mark’s Playhouse in December 1964, this drama focuses on “a black would-be revolutionary who splits from his white wife on the eve of a  17 race war,” and Baraka admits its basis in fact (Autobiography 288). In her autobiography, Hettie Jones writes about the play she terms “Roi’s nightmare” and recalls that the director used photos of the Jones children, Kellie and Lisa, in the set. The actress who played the lead female character sent Mrs. Jones “a marble black-and-white heart, with a card: ‘Thank you for Grace,’” and this “tall blond WASP” delivered a line actually uttered by Hettie in an argument with her husband: ‘I am not in your head’” (qtd. in Jones 138, 220). The plot consists of a home invasion during which the black militant, Walker, holds his ex-wife and her new husband—a white college professor named Easley—hostage. The three characters confront each other on personal and demographic levels about a range of simmering resentments over the course of a prolonged ordeal. Walker expresses both open hostility and wounded vulnerability concerning his relationship with Grace. His dialogue ranges from the outright rage of the shouted line: “You’re mighty right I want to kill you. You’re mighty goddamn right. Believe me, self-righteous little bitch, I want to kill you” to his sorrowful disbelief that she did not understand that his “crying out against three hundred years of oppression” was not directed at her (Baraka, The Slave 126, 118). The playwright’s quasiautobiographical representative shows obvious suspicion of the motives of even his most trusted of white women when he questions Grace about her use of the word “Nigger” by asking if she has held it within her for a long time. Nevertheless, aside from the emblematic significance of this interrogation of her, she is probably the most verisimilar and three-dimensional white female character of Baraka’s playwriting career. Prone to sentiment, weakness, fear, societal pressures and programming but a real person in conflict amidst a messed-up world, Grace is not an evil, ridiculous, or disgusting archetype like so many others.  18 Still, The Slave contains its share of irate material. The turmoil culminates with Walker killing Easley, and Grace dying in an explosion resulting from an attack on the neighborhood as part of the previously mentioned race war. Before she dies, Walker suggests to Grace that he has killed their two daughters, previously presumed asleep upstairs. The audience never sees the girls to know for sure what happens to them, and a child screams and cries as Walker leaves the house at the end of the play, adding to the doubt of the situation. Yet, at the very least, abandoning children in the middle of a war and disquieting the mind of their dying mother with thoughts of their murder are acts of cruelty, unless viewed from the perception of the father who thinks death is mercy compared to the fate of mixed race people in an increasingly divisive America. (Interestingly, Baraka dedicated the anthology containing The Slave to Dominique Di Prima and Kellie and Lisa Jones.) Considering the inflammatory content of The Slave, a fellow writer friend of the playwright asked the play’s white producer “if he didn’t feel somewhat threatened by the play’s implications” and received the response, “Oh he’s not serious. It’s only a play” (qtd. in Neal 27). However, in the context of the civil unrest and assassinations surrounding them in the 1960’s and their focused determination to act upon heightened awareness of historic injustices, many adherents to Black Power ideologies, including Baraka, actually believed a real revolution was at hand. They “were trying to create an art that would be a weapon in the Black Liberation Movement” (Baraka, Autobiography 311). In fact, although later acquitted, the playwright was “found guilty of incitement on the basis of quotes from some of his plays read out in court” (Barrett 13).  19 Baraka’s Introduction to Four Black Revolutionary Plays: All Praises to the Black Man exemplifies his incendiary rhetoric of the mid-1960s with bold declarations of the sort he later described as “cloaked . . . in the starkest terms of cultural nationalism and Hate Whitey language” (Baraka, “Black Arts” 504). The passage signed with the name “Ameer Baraka” (although “LeRoi Jones” appears on the book’s spine, copyright, and title page) warns, “Unless you killing white people, killing the shit they’ve built, don’t read this shit, you wont like it, and it sure wont like you” (sic) and proudly declares, “we will change the world before your eyes” (Baraka, Introduction Four Black vii-viii). This 1969 essay serves its purpose in setting the tone for the collection of violent Expressionist and ritual dramas dating from 1964 to 1966. Perhaps, Baraka heeded Clay’s speech in Dutchman about murdering white people as the antidote to neurosis because his characters began to do so in a number of extremely gruesome ways (765). Among the eponymous four black revolutionary plays of the anthology, Experimental Death Unit #1 provides one of the most unforgettable Barakan images of this category. After a group of black militants in the play kills two white men discovered brutally fighting over the attentions of a black whore, the “long-haired bearded Negro youths” decapitate the bodies to augment a dripping collection of white heads on pikes which they hold as standards at the front of marching ranks that wearily patrol the nighttime city streets (13, 15). Not in this anthology but published the same year (1969), Slave Ship takes the beheading concept to another level. In this instance, a mob of Yorubas from the titular Middle Passage vessel targets New Tom, a deferential black preacher who speaks with a white voice and calls upon “white Jesus boss” (16-17). The one-act play ends with a riotously interactive dance number that erupts in conjunction with throwing New Tom’s head into the audience (17). 20 Breaching the fourth wall with such intensively agit-prop chaos suits the generally very short Black Nationalist period works which have few characters—often with basic designations like “Black Man” instead of names—and plots built upon drastic deeds. The presence of the Black Panthers providing security for certain productions added an extra element of political statement delivered by the visual of “armed brothers flanking the stage in a symbolic gesture showing the links between black revolutionary art and political struggle” (Baraka, “Black Arts” 353). In his 1966 essay, “The Revolutionary Theatre,” Baraka espouses a theatre implemented to “force change” in opposition to his perception of white liberal artists’ aesthetic demanding separation of art from politics (130, 132). Seeking to reverse the victimhood of the Western heroes in his own Dutchman, The Toilet, and The Slave, Baraka calls for anti-Western, “new kinds of heroes—not the weak Hamlets debating whether or not they are ready to die for what’s on their minds, but men and women (and minds) digging out from under a thousand years of ‘high art’ and weak-faced dalliance” (“Revolutionary Theatre” 130, 132). Designed to hold oppressors accountable while uniting and empowering the oppressed, this philosophy supports the unambiguous, decisive and often permanent action and blunt messages communicated in Baraka’s cultural nationalist works
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