Amiri Baraka: the staccato master of the word

New Kids in the Neighborhood (Negro in the Suburbs) (1967). Norman Rockwell (American, 1894–1978). Oil on canvas, 36 ½ × 57 ½ in. (92.7 × 146.1 cm). Story illustration for Look, May 16, 1967. Norman Rockwell Museum Collection, Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Printed by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency. © 2013 the Norman Rockwell Family Entities.

Amiri Baraka, A brilliant light that shined brightest when in the middle of battling for his people’s rights, has taken the eternal sleep. His manifest destiny was to make racial criminals and political thugs angry and uncomfortable with a staccato style that imitated jazz music in its isolation of certain notes that appeared to be detached and of a shortened duration. This is why the poems he wrote agitated the establishment and made him a righteous defender of human freedom; they were poems with words that actualized energy and power and, more than most poets, he was a student of sound like the old bald-headed Egyptian priests who knew that articulation of the voice was the chief miracle of human mystery. He was a free man and, in that freedom, he was free to be bold, to be wrong, to be strong and to be adventurous, and to be right at times. He knew that freedom came with a price but that price was never too costly for one’s sense of purpose. Always capable of self-correction, Baraka’s ability to take the dagger of his words and strike the blow for truth as he saw it was uncanny and a part of his genius. We will miss him and his poems and plays and essays that provoked a generation to be better humans, to unleash hell on those whose fat bellies snuffed out the souls of the poor. Despite his detractors, or those who believed that he was merely this-or-that, he was a socialist, feminist, womanist, nationalist, and culturalist who sought to bring equality and justices to the world. Nothing anti-African passed him without a comment and nothing was so close to him as his battle with his own intellect. A great spirit has passed this way!

What Rap Comes in the Morning?

Whose voice is heard louder than Baraka’s in an era of myopic thinking, social upheaval, political corruption, and ideological bankruptcy? He was able to create art that held no contempt for rationalism, but rather exerted an influence on a world dominated by art for the sake of art. His was a functional art. At his first reading of “Somebody Blew Up America,” he said to MK Asante, my son, “So you are a poet? Do you have a book on you? You have to always carry your book with you.” Baraka believed that the writer had to write for the sake of humanity, not for his or her own sake of personal enjoyment. One could have a deeply-felt artistic piece that also served as a practical weapon for an engaged poet. He was the greatest living American poet of the last half of the twentieth century—simply because his voice, not a majority voice, was the most feared among all the poets.

Rebel In and Out of the Village

Sometimes Baraka is affectionately called a rebel, but to call him a rebel is to reduce him to mere reaction. Baraka understood, more than most, that his role in society was to push the idea of victorious consciousness through the troubled rapids of a faltering mainstream. To do this, he had to challenge all lying forces and embark on a journey of resistance to conformity, stereotypes, gangsterism, and anti-Africanism. And so it was that he created, during the l960s and l970s, the African American literary mold for what we now call radicalism. Even now, writers who want to do justice to the masses should find his example instructive. Indefatigable as a poet and prophet of victory for African people, Baraka shook the tree of creativity so powerfully that all forms of modern poetic voices like slam, rap...