Preface to a Twenty Volume Critical Note: For Amiri, Ghost of the Future

Amiri Baraka will for me be forever entwined with Larry Neal. I had read much of Baraka’s work by the time I enrolled in Larry’s class “Black Power and the Black Arts” in 1972, but Larry made vivid the living context in which so much of Baraka’s most stirring work had its dramatic effect. In that class, the work wasn’t embalmed as historical artifact or made precious as an accomplishment of literary tradition; it was burning with prescience, presence, and potency. It seemed, if anything, more urgent in its implications and possibilities than when it spilled into the Black Arts Movement from Baraka’s fervid imagination. Paradoxically, Larry made us feel this powerful sense of immediacy by disclosing the intellectual fiber of Baraka’s vision, the gritty awareness of modern Western culture subtending the incendiary pronouncements that startled us to attention: through Larry’s insight and eloquence, we understood that Baraka wasn’t just throwing homemade bombs at the cultural establishment; he was unraveling its dilapidated structure, porous intellectual brick by brittle sentimental brick, exposing its inner contradictions through that distinctive Barakan blend of verbal wizardry, sardonic repudiation, and (this being the part so easily overlooked, by celebrants as much as detractors) sturdy and knowing craft. Through Larry’s learning, at once streetwise and book-smart, we grasped that Baraka’s work was a kind of explosive kenning, as canny as it was uncanny.

In preparation for writing a chapter of my college senior thesis in the spring of 1974, I traveled to Detroit to see Slave Ship in Concept East’s church-based community theater. When I arrived, I found that the entire church meeting hall had been transformed into a scene of horror, a vessel transporting an angry, bewildered, suffering, but ultimately resistant remnant of African society to what Baraka called “the grey hideous west,” embodied in a single White Figure (played in white face by an African American actor). Throughout the play, the black cast brilliantly directed its vituperative critique and rebellious energies toward me, the lone white audience member, until the play crescendoed toward its ritual triumph as the black nation rose up in revolutionary triumph over the oppressor by dropping the White Figure’s body at my feet. As I left the theater near midnight to walk Detroit’s streets toward the train station for my trip back to Connecticut, I realized I had left the sanctuary of performance, the citadel of metaphor, for the hard authenticity of the real. Of such ironic dis-figurations were Baraka’s works consistently composed: “revolution” could become real only if first rehearsed and thereby internalized and believed; reality could be transfused with rich cultural implication only if pressed forward by art, which melted into air once inscribed. “Performance” was for Baraka a trope for the real within the aesthetic, asserting its purchase on authenticity over and against the written; but performance remained—in reality—yet another modality of imagination and desire. For Baraka, desire longed for its dissolution in action, a yearning that reflected the urge to transform the narratives of history into the Event of liberation: early he had written, “what is tomorrow / that it cannot come / today?” (“Valéry as Dictator,” Dead Lecturer 78).

From its first emanations, Baraka’s voice was pertinacious, demanding, insistently provocative, yet tinged with a note of untimely angst, as if slightly behind or ahead of the historical beat to which he relentlessly addressed himself. He spoke as an apostle of change and movement, but with a blend of impatience and tenderness that suggested a voice struggling to redeem the specters of inherited injustice without losing the present in lamentation and doubt: “A political art, let it be / tenderness … / Let the combination of morality / and inhumanity / begin” (“Short Speech to My Friends,” Dead Lecturer 29). At times, his writing seems entangled in the phantasmagoria and anxiety, the fear and obsession that come from looking without blinking at our history of national brutality and mendacity, risks he accepted as a requirement of his charge to iterate a promise...