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Callaloo 26.1 (2003) 129-145



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Our Flesh of Flames

Amiri Baraka and Theodore A. Harris


Teddy Harris' work is the modernism of everyday perception and rationale. He makes works from vouchsafes and unrealized dreams, lies and advertisements for the nowheres. That is, he takes scraps of America North and threads them through his truthoscopic sensibility, for instance, pieces of newspapers, headlines, images from the diversity of our mostly grim experience, and he tells it to us again, and clearer.

Harris is a collagist, itself a modern form, and one that has been used to great advantage in pinning the political tail on the donkey, or elephant or corrupt tiger, as the case may be. One of the greatest practitioners of the collage art for popular advantage, that is, to tell the truth, was the German collagist Heartfield, who actually pulled Hitler's tail during the waning years of democracy in Germany. Right-wing politicians feared Heartfield (Herzfeld) because he used the collage to whack them sharply across the face, and lips, revealing their lies and evil to the people.

Harris, still a young man, has entered the collage with an astonishing clarity of form. The diverse pieces of reflected reality and unreality he thinks and pastes together create new images, replenishing our knowledge of the known, or making us aware of the unknown. There is a clarity and cleanness to his craftsmanship, which heightens the ideational projection the image sprays at us. At times, visual image actually seems to "say" out loud what maybe we know or need to know. Yet, he has put it together with an impressive display of knowledge about the medium he is using. There are no sloppy or half put together "slapdashes" which we must sympathetically take to the hoop with our political sympathies. Harris is a fine "auteur" (as the film magazines say, meaning, author, creator). And with this, the content, which, for me, is always principal, emerges bright and striking.

He tells about the peoples' struggles, world wide, against oppression and exploitation. Our lives under racism and the twisted rule of capital. At times, the images he thrusts at us are sharp enough to make us wince, with understanding and recognition. Harris' work is fundamentally about consciousness raising, and this is what art does. Mao says, "All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art!" Harris' work speaks to us truthfully, forcefully, and with great skill. You need to check it out!

— Amiri Baraka

 

[editor's note: The poems which follow act as captions for the collage with which each is paired.] [End Page 129]

1995 Seize the Time
Theodore A. Harris

[End Page 130]

Seize the Time

by Amiri Baraka

If you come out
        The tree
& get caught
        by the beast
w/ his 666
        shooter
        up against
        yr knot
say to yrself
Oh, Beast you is
        Not a human
        & never will be
Alas
        Yr most progressive
        Odor is name Giuliani
& we trying to get
        an antidote         for that

[End Page 131]

1994 The Cross, The Gun, Tires, Necklacing and Black People
Theodore A. Harris

[End Page 132]

Dis Firmative Negrossity

by Amiri Baraka

 Dead Ass Spooks' Spook Spooking It's some spooky shit The ghost resembled A coon Or The Nigger that Work for The Beast Might even can Carry A tune 

[End Page 133]

1999 Resistance to Repression
Theodore A. Harris

[End Page 134]

Unwe

by Amiri Baraka

 Boy & Tarzan Equal TWO Subtract The woman 2 equal Nun baby bybyed out they butt we Jesus Jesus Christ It Black as Sut 

[End Page 135]

1998 Collage Eulogy for James Byrd, Jr.
Theodore A. Harris

[End Page 136]

1998 Collage Eulogy for James Byrd, Jr.

by Amiri Baraka

[End Page 137]

Diallo's Blues Are Our Blues
Theodore A. Harris

[End Page 138]

Dialogue W/ Noise

by Amiri Baraka

 Can the Devil, Explain Evil? Why? You think It's Interesting? 

[End Page 139]

1999 Betrayal
Theodore A. Harris

[End Page 140]

Untitled

by Amiri Baraka

 "CHRIST was never in Europe!" ( sd Carmichael) (Neither was Krishna Muhammad Nor Buddha!) 

[End Page 141]

1999...

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