Baraka’s Truth

Amiri Baraka
October 7, 1934–January 9, 2014

I am consistently trying to hold on to the truth, and the truth ought to be valuable to anybody, regardless of race or nationality. … The truth is concrete and it can be used; it must be used by everybody.

—Amiri Baraka, Conversations with Amiri Baraka

When I first came across these words in Maya Angelou’s 1993 interview with Baraka, I was puzzled because this version of the truth did not match my own version of the truth about Amiri Baraka, who he is (still can’t put him in the past tense yet) and who he had become. I expected Baraka’s approach to a notion of truth to be less familiar, less routine even. I expected him to blast the truth as a phantasm of the Western empire. Instead, he proceeds to connect the truth with a demand for objectivity and the real. These words come in response to Angelou’s question about how Baraka handles “the multi-racial classroom” as “a professor at a university.” In the ellipsis above, Baraka says, “If there are people in my classrooms who don’t understand that, that’s part of why they need educating. They need to understand the truth is exactly that: what is objective? what is real?” (Conversations 261). When I say “my version of the truth about Baraka,” I mean that relatively fixed set of expectations that you tend to establish about an author whom you re-read attentively; whom you teach year in and year out; whom you read about in various media; whom your students, after returning from a poetry reading or lecture with him at your university, report back as being “just like he seems when you read about him in books.” It is a truism of traditional literary criticism that great writers not only demand constant re-reading, that they also compel constant re-interpretation. The giants of literature, I was taught as a student, transform us and, as we encounter them in texts, track our own intellectual and emotional evolution as moral persons engaged with the world around us. Not knowing whether that truism holds true or not, I do think that Baraka—like most literary giants—is usually not interpreted or taught according to this narrative of the reader’s developmental transformation. When I think of Baraka, the canonical Baraka, which is after all the only true Baraka we now have, I think of a writer fixed within a narrative of his own unwavering development to become who he had set out to be. With much embarrassment, I must admit that I have taught Baraka as a settled truth—not so much that I could deliver the final truth about what he means when he writes, but that his person, his identity, promises such a final truth deliverable by intentioned study. Baraka’s response to the multicultural classroom in the Angelou interview unsettled me a bit because I had imagined Baraka as a teacher verbally throttling his students into conscious alarm the same way he had throttled me into something like alarmed consciousness as a reader. Who is/was this other Baraka—the one asking for or after the truth, followed up with “what is objective? what is real?”? Baraka the teacher is/was, no doubt, not quite the same Baraka who showed up in my books and over my t.v. and computer screens.

I think that the more a writer develops or is cast through a larger-than-life public persona, and certainly Baraka from early on acquired such, the more the truth about him or her is assumed to be settled, answerable. Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Angela Davis immediately come to mind. (That such a list would no doubt render more men than women bespeaks the nature of what historically has been deemed “larger-than-life” and the gendered condition of what has constituted the public.) We come to know them as much on the public stage of the world as through the...