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278 AMIRI BARAKA (LEROI JONES) b. 1934 A prolific and controversial author who is equally at home in many genres—including drama, music criticism, fiction, essays, and autobiography— Amiri Baraka has written poetry marked by an inimitably jazzy, profane, freewheeling , ironically charged, and transgressive style that mixes jagged rhythms with edgy wit in support of serious cultural and political aims. His career as a writer can be defined, at least partially, by a series of major shifts in aesthetics, ideology, and personal, racial, and political identity, developments that Baraka himself describes as “my own changing and diverse motion, of where I have been and why, and how I got to where I was when I next appeared or was heard from.” Radical as these changes have been, Baraka has never disowned his past, seeing each stage as an essential step in a process of individual and cultural becoming . In his comprehensive LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader, Baraka and co-editor William J. Harris divide Baraka’s career into four phases: “The Beat Period (1957–1962),” “The Transitional Period (1963–1965),” “The Black Nationalist Period (1965–1974),” and “The Third World Marxist Period (1974–).” Baraka acknowledges, however, that “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, like notations of [the jazz pianist Thelonious ] Monk, it doesn’t show the complexity of real life.” Even as the poet’s work has gone through a series of meaningful mutations, so too has the poet’s name. Baraka was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1934 as Everett LeRoy Jones, the son of a postal employee and a social worker. Jones started college with a scholarship to Rutgers University in 1951, and he began using LeRoi as his first name in 1952. That same year, he transferred to historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he worked with noted black scholars and with the venerable black poet Sterling Brown. But he failed to complete a degree because, as he later said, “the Howard thing let me understand the Negro sickness. They teach you how to pretend to be white.” He served in the Air Force from 1954 to 1957, then settled in Greenwich Village, where he absorbed the influences of such avant-garde poets as Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and Frank O’Hara. There he began to publish his own work, founded the Totem Press, and edited the literary magazine Yugen with his first wife, Hettie Cohen. National recognition came in 1964 when his controversial play Dutchman received an Obie award. Baraka’s early Beat phase is reflected in such examples as “Political Poem” and “A Poem for Speculative Hipsters.” Following the assassination of Malcolm 279 Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) Ø X in 1965, he moved from Greenwich Village to Harlem, where he declared himself a Black Nationalist, divorced Cohen, and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre. He would soon change his name from LeRoi Jones to Imamu Amiri Baraka (“blessed spiritual leader”), though he ultimately dropped the Islamic prefix Imamu. He married his second wife, Sylvia Robinson, in 1966. Baraka helped to found the Black Arts movement and energetically promoted it through his writing and organizing efforts. Poems from his Black Nationalist period include “leroy” and “Return of the Native.” However, by 1974, Baraka announced his rejection of Black Nationalism, because he had come to feel that the movement’s often anti-white and sometimes anti-Semitic rhetoric—which he too had practiced—was in itself racist and was not addressing the core problems of poverty and discrimination. Baraka would later say that “Nationalism, so-called, when it says ‘all non-blacks are our enemies,’ is sickness or criminality, in fact a form of fascism.” Identifying Black Nationalism as “bourgeois” and concluding, in a radio interview with David Barsamian, that “skin color is not a determinant of political content,” Baraka began to advocate socialism as the way forward for the poor and culturally disenfranchised worldwide, and he became a supporter of the global economic perspectives of Third World Marxism, a viewpoint that led to the sardonic cultural critique in such poems as “A New Reality Is Better than a New Movie!” Along with his writing, Baraka has had an extensive teaching career, serving as a professor at the New School of Social Research, San Francisco State University , Yale University, George Washington University, and finally (from 1980...

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