"Lift Up Yr Self!" Reinterpreting Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Black Power, and the Uplift Tradition
2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/4486061
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoIn March 1965, LeRoi Jones defected from bohemian Greenwich Village to Harlem. As the principal voice of the black arts movement, “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept,” the former beat poet would be named America's most important black writer in a poll carried by Negro Digest in January 1968. A year before he had left the Village, his Jewish wife, and their two mixed-race daughters, Jones had written a poem entitled “Black Dada Nihilismus”: … A cult of death, need of the simple striking arm under the street lamp. The cutters, from under their rented earth. Come up, black dada nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers. Cut the mothers' throats. Black dada nihilismus, choke my friends in their bedrooms with their drinks spilling and restless or tilting hips or dark liver lips sucking splinters from the master's thigh … At the height of the black power movement, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice (1967) darkly declared: “I have lived those lines.” Recalling the period leading up to his imprisonment from 1958 to 1966, Cleaver described how he had become a rapist, “practicing on black girls in the ghetto” before he “crossed the tracks and sought out white prey,” as a deliberate, methodical repudiation of “the white man's law.” cnn's obituary of Cleaver in 1998 stated that Soul on Ice “became the philosophical foundation of the Black Power movement. In one essay, Cleaver described his rape of white women as ‘an insurrectionary act.’”1
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