Baraka’s Jam Session: On the Limits of Any Attempt to Collect Black Aesthetics Unbound

He was our jam session.

—Eleanor Traylor, Howard University Tribute to Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka knew that black art and culture is often framed and collected by forces that crush the people who produce the art and culture. He hated that theft and warned about the future “dis/imaging.” In his short story “Heathen Technology at the End of the Twentieth Century,” in Tales of the Out Tales of the Out & the Gone (2007), Baraka predicts that the appropriation and distortion of black aesthetics will become even more heightened as time passes. In this science fiction story, Baraka imagines a certain apocalypse that includes the “dis/imaging” of people, a type of mind control that makes people disappear by stealing and collecting their image making. The first person narrator is a witness linked to other survivors who resist the mind control by listening, “eight times a day,” to Coltrane’s jazz, and looking, “eight times a day,” at Aaron Douglas’s images. This counter-hypnotism harkens back to Black Arts Movement images of black collective resistance to dominant image making. The short story’s call for continued belief in collective resistance emerges most clearly when the narrator asks his apocalypse-era listeners to “remember” and then realizes that “remembering” is no longer possible in the era of the “brain switch,” but nonetheless continues to remember the power of “bound metaphor.” This bound metaphor is described in the following manner: “If the metaphors of a heavy group were rendered collective and focused on whatever, energy and power could be produced” (Tales 158). This language captures Baraka’s recognition that the power of the Black Arts Movement’s mobilization of blackness as a unifying concept was the power of people realizing that blackness was such a productive collective metaphor.

Some of what is now said about Amiri Baraka will help those who resist the dis/imaging come to understand the cultural work of this visionary. In the midst of all of the tributes, certain words linger. “He was our black on purpose,” Ras Baraka said. “He was our jam session,” Eleanor Traylor sang.

For me, the quietest parts of this jam session have always been the most electrifying. Baraka teaches us how to hear whispers and hums in the BangClash, his vibrating word in “Return of the Native.” Although, as Eugene Redmond counsels, “You couldn’t be asleep around him,” you could learn how to hush and be soothed into waking up. Some of the heaviest, quietest moments in his jam session are In Our Terribleness, the beginning of The Slave, and “Wise 1.” “I cant say more than that except all the visions and thoughts you’ve had actually exist,” he writes in In Our Terribleness, as if he would ever stop saying more and doing more. In these words, we hear the fatigue of the visionary who knows he can’t stop moving. He wanted us to see the freedom that actually could exist if only we let it. The revolution was always, as they dreamed and believed in the 1960s, “right around the corner.”

The Black Arts Movement was a turned corner and a cornerstone of his life work. His work became a conscious jam session during the Black Arts Movement. Thank you, Eleanor Traylor, for teaching us to remember him as this jam session. He leaned into the power of the collective and all of the soloist work became his desire for a meta-language. Just like the speaker at the beginning of The Slave, Baraka kept telling us “As your brown is not my brown, that is, we need, ahem, a meta-language” (45).

“Sometimes you are afraid to listen to this [man].” His tribute to Billie Holiday (“The Dark Lady of the Sonnets”) echoes back to him (25). He kept leaving his own solos and throwing us in a jam session that makes “Black Dada Nihilismus” meet Black Power. What is the Power of Dada and what is the Dada of Power? How do we sound as we now try to sound out this...