On Amiri Baraka
2015; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 59; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-5804
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
ResumoCalling all black peoplecalling all black people, man woman childWherever you are, calling you, urgent, come inBlack people, come in, wherever you are, urgent, callingyou, calling all black peoplecalling all black people, come in, black people, comeon in.-Amiri Baraka, SOSDear Bosses and Tastemakers commenting with kid gloves on Amiri Baraka s SOS: Poems 1961-2013:The recent, posthumous collection of Amiri Baraka s ruthlessly beautiful and piercing and visceral poetry, edited by Paul Vangelisti and published last year by Grove Press, opens with an air of urgently festive exclusivity: the title track above beseeches union, revival meeting, impromptu festival- a true point of entry into the nature and texture of Baraka s work, his life, and his legacy. Dwight Garner's January 2015 review of the work fails to take into account the intensity of Baraka's commitment to this love call. Baraka's intentions, as a writer and as a man, are clear and unflinching: his first fidelity is to those whom he considers his people, including all people-especially but not only black people-beleaguered by the incessant struggle for equality against the obstacles that race and/or class jut out in front of them. He was loyal to this purpose even at the expense of his own ego. consequence, from mainstream critics like Garner and establishment papers like the Times, is the tacit effort to undermine his work and message by way of too much hype and emphasis on his politics. myopic focus here is always on statements Baraka made or ideas he championed or deployed as bait, particularly when he was a young man, without recognizing their origin in his frustration with the failure of the American promise, or their role in his active search for the equilibrium and the wisdom of experience to assuage that frustration. To honor the work presented throughout SOS is to review it with as much candor as Baraka himself had, and to remain as mercilessly eye-to-eye as he was, in the precarious and self-effacing stance he needed to enter to create the work, to be as generous as he was in that way.SOS is the collection of poems I wish I had encountered on a syllabus as an undergraduate at Berkeley, where instead I was asked to read the most polite black poets in the canon, or even in high school, when I scoured the canon for any semblance of a black-and-tan fantasy I could identify with. As Baraka knew too well, academic institutions are still often devoid of truly vanguard or rebellious black voices: or when they include them, they do so in murmur only. It was in a seminar taught by Margo Jefferson, during my first semester as an MFA student at Columbia, that I read Baraka's short story The Screamers and was reawakened to the sense that black lives matter in literature. Baraka's work struck me with its unapologetically Afrocentric and soulcentric tone, humbly honest at the expense of glamor-until the sheer truth becomes glamorous. That tone was there in the bravely original and vernacular prose of The Screamers. It reminded me to work with what matters to me, with or without permission.In his subtly dismissive review, Garner reduces Baraka to sound bites by citing his more incendiary lines: for instance, I've slept with almost every / mediocre colored woman / on 23rd street. Many lines from The Screamers seem to do a similar kind of thing: But my father never learned how to drink, Baraka writes in a moment of autobiographical vulnerability. Taken in context, lines like this one reveal a key strain in Baraka's work and consciousness. He gave our literature something valuable with his ability to render the political and the poetic reciprocal by way of the deeply and often unflatteringly personal. These lines and tones manage to capture the tender disappointment that sometimes is what love is at its most enduring or least deluded.The meaning and value of the political in Baraka's work needs to be understood in this context. …
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