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Chapter 7: Black Arts Poet and Essayist
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7 Black Arts Poet and Essayist AS AN ADVOC ATE of the Black Aesthetic / Black Arts movement, Jones/ Baraka was quite prolific. It was during this period that he produced much of his work. The plays that he wrote during this period included Jello (1965), A Black Mass (1965), Experimental Death Unit #1 (1965), Madheart (1966), Slave Ship (1967), Great Goodness of Life (1966), Home on the Range (1966), The Death of Malcolm X (1966), Arm Yourself or Harm Yourself (1967), and Police (1967). A novel, The System of Dante’s Hell, was published in 1965. Tales, a collection of short stories, appeared two years later. Baraka also published several collections of poetry: Black Magic Poetry (1969), It’s Nation Time (1970), Spirit Reach (1972), and African Revolution (1973). He coauthored with the photographer Fundi a photo-essay, In Our Terribleness (1970). And with Larry Neal, he edited an anthology of Afro-American writing, Black Fire (1968), which became one of the seminal texts of the Black Arts movement, rivaled, I suspect, only by Addison Gayle’s collection The Black Aesthetic (1971), Stephen Henderson’s Understanding the New Black Poetry (1972), and Baraka’s earlier essay collection, Home (1966). African Congress (1972), which Baraka edited, contains the speeches and proceedings of a Pan-Africanist conference held in Atlanta in 1970. Finally, a second collection of social-political essays, Raise Race Rays Raze, was published in 1971. During the height of the Black Arts movement, Baraka also was busy as the titular head of the movement. Besides creating institutions in Harlem and, later, Newark, Baraka traveled throughout the nation giving lectures and readings. He was a particularly popular speaker at colleges. On one occasion during school year 1968/69, Jones was invited by the University of Pennsylvania’s Society of African and Afro-American Students to give a lecture to open “Black Week” on the campus. In agreeing to the campus visit, Baraka demanded that the audience for his talk be racially segregated . Black students and other blacks would be seated in the balcony. White students could sit elsewhere. Jones also stipulated that he not be required to interact with whites face-to-face while on campus. Whites also were to be excluded from the stage when he spoke. While Jones’s theatrics 225 were moronic, black militancy on campuses was such that a major Ivy League university complied with his demands.1 The various stipulations that accompanied the Imamu’s appearance were indicative of the petty irrationalisms that marked the black separatism of the late 1960s. The irrationality of mandating a black campus escort seems even humorous today. Are we to assume that the Imamu did not book seats on planes flown by white pilots or serviced by white flight attendants? Did he drink water cleaned by plants in which whites worked? Where did this behavioral attempt to divorce himself from all interactions with whites end? These black separatist antics were impotent campaigns to exert symbolic control over his life. By forcing various white institutions to agree to his conditions, Baraka may have momentarily felt that he was forcing whites to obey his commands . But by acting in a manner that supposedly indicated his disdain for whites, Baraka was actually exhibiting the limitations and impracticality of black separatism. Baraka was an inspired performance artist. The excitement generated by his lectures and poetry readings was legendary. Insofar as he and other Black Arts artists privileged orality, the performance of poetry was one component of a broader strategy to reach a black mass audience. In her autobiography, poet Gwendolyn Brooks recalls the uproar generated by Baraka’s arrival at the Second Black Writers Conference at Fisk University in 1967. On one evening, Brooks was in the audience when Baraka performed“Black People,”the poem that had been wrongfully used against him at his trial following the Newark riots. The poem’s highly cathartic, violent imagery not only angered the judiciary but on occasion excited black listeners beyond the point of reason. Part of the poem reads: you cant steal nothin from a white man, he’s already stole it he owes you anything you want, even his life. All the stores will open if you will say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall motherfucker this is a stick up! . . . We must make our own World, man, our own world, and we can not do this unless the white man is dead. Let’s get together and...