Home Rules: An Interview with Amiri Baraka

The following is taken from a series of interviews conducted with Amiri Baraka at his house in Newark between January and April 2002. Throughout the conversation, when asked to talk about the transnational or the global, Baraka returned to the specificity of his place and time in the United States, as a young black man growing up in mid-century, a friend of Langston Hughes, and the inheritor of a tradition stretching back to Frederick Douglass. His politics, as well, now seem embedded in a reading of the specificity of the United States, and even a desire that the country finally recognize itself and throw off the shackles of Europe.
 

Van Gosse: What kind of political work have you been involved in, in the past couple of years?

Amiri Baraka: We've been publishing books, we've been publishing Unity in Struggle. We have a monthly program called Kamako's Blues, we have a theater downstairs. And now I'm working on my son's campaign. [Ras Baraka ran for Newark's City Council in the open May 2002 primary but did not win.]

Is he running as a Democrat or as an independent?

It's nonpartisan in Newark in the local election.

What's his relationship to . . .

To the Democratic Party?

I mean, you know these people from way back, obviously.

We were talking about this yesterday. I sat on a stage with these people for five hours at this Martin Luther King Day program, with all these politicians and whatnot, with the governor, so I could get my son's picture taken with the governor, and talked to those politicians about just that: what is the relationship? What are we going to do?.. . They want to help him, but their help for him is less direct, and that's what I have to do these days, call up and make appointments, go to see them, raise money—because local politics at this point to me is much more important, in the sense that it determines what you can put your hands on.

I have the impression that you never stopped being active in Newark politics. You're still talking to people, campaigning and supporting candidates, after Gibson finally left, right?

Sharpe James. I put James in there to defeat Gibson, because Gibson began to do nothing. You know, he had betrayed us from the beginning, and then he began to be even worse, so we got rid of him and put James in there in 1986.

How do you evaluate James as a mayor?

The thing about Sharpe is—that's home rule. So, in the end, when it comes to a struggle between home rule and what we call foreign domination, we've got to stick with Sharpe. It's like Chiang Kai-shek versus the Japanese, you know? Chiang Kai-shek, I got problems with him. But Sharpe James is no fool, see, and even though he's always an inch or two from being identified with moi—at the same time, my son upstairs, Amiri Jr., was his chief aide, and his name is Amiri Baraka too. [Later in the interview, he adds, "Sharpe basically is a good guy; he's just a politician. He doesn't care what you say; he'll lie to you and trick you, he'll pay other people to undermine you. He'll do anything, and shake your hand and grin in your face. That's the kind of guy he is. He's the John Kennedy of black Newark."]

This contradicts that public image grafted onto you as the firebrand, the gadfly, the lone man.

But see, it's not abstract. To me, power is very practical, very concrete, and there's a way to ensnare it, bit by bit, inch by inch. The question of revolution is the question of the seizure of power.

Even incrementally?

Absolutely.

[Showing him letters he wrote to...