Amiri Baraka (1934-2014): Missed Melody, Magic, and Revolutionary Song
2014; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 58; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-5804
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoIt's difficult to be talented & genius yet, often called crazy to your face in a place that rewards moneymakers who build and worship skyscrapers as monuments to the individuality of dollar bill collecting and preemptive war making & whose poets and artists are viewed as handicapped, a bit mad with water colored hands &, ideas. Gathered amid contemplative late-night talks with myself while Monk quietly played in the background, this highly personal reflection is my response to the, numerous calls which had been coming in from across the nation in January of this year regarding the transition of Amiri Baraka--our friend, brother, and colleague. Amiri Baraka was a poet, playwright, fiction writer, essayist, and editor; a musical, cultural, and political critic; and a family man, activist, and iconic artist of many layers and persuasions who radically altered our literature. He created poems, plays, and essays with hurricanelike force that took few prisoners during his many years of artistic and political production. Baraka was a true generational artist-activist whose work often transcended traditional canonization. He danced, thought, and created in multiple genres, all in tune with the best and worst of our culture. Much like his literary predecessors Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, Dudley Randall, and Gwendolyn Brooks, Baraka's art and thinking were combative, instructive, healing, and highly political. Though Baraka committed his work to the battlements of Art, he occupied many worlds. He was born Everett Leroy (later LeRoi) Jones in Newark, New Jersey in 1934. After a brief stay at Rutgers University and a little more than three years' matriculation at Howard University, he joined the Air Force from which he was discharged for reading material that was considered subversive. He moved to New York and settled in Greenwich Village where he cofounded the literary magazine Yugen (1958-1962). Later with the poet Diane di Prima he cofounded and edited Floating Bear magazine (1961-63); Bara-ka documents this era of his life, and the early work of Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and others that Floating Bear regularly published, in his Autobiography of LeRoi Jones / Aniiri Baraka (1984). In this same era he issued his first collection of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), through Totem Press, where he was publisher and editor. *-* I came across Preface in a used bookstore in Chicago in 1962 while I was serving in the United States Army and using my time, as we were then luckily in between wars, to read and write. I quickly read it and realized that here was a poet of unusual talent, living in a world so unlike mine. At the time, I felt little connection to the book's content or its author, except that he was a Black man (we were called Negroes then) writing white. I had been reading Richard Wright, Sterling Brown, Claude McKay, and W E. B. DuBois from the age of fourteen. This early assessment of Baraka gradually changed as I read more: Dead Lecturer (1964), a second collection of poems; Blues People (1963), his masterwork on Black music; and Home (1966), his book of political and cultural essays, which was published after his visit to in 1960. lead essay, Cuba Libre, was highly controversial: it supplied me with another perspective on that media in this country failed to report. It also displayed to me Baraka's independent, flexible, inquisitive mind, his long quest for final answers. Baraka's two plays. Dutchman and Slave (1964), had been produced off-Broadway to much acclaim; and Blues People received great reviews. However, Home was a true eye-opener for me. Just as Richard Wright's White Man, Listen (1957), had introduced me as a teenager to Black literature with the essay The Literature of the in the United States, Baraka's essays in Home were revolutionary. Whereas Wright's Black Boy (1945) and Native Son (1940) awakened me to a fighting Negro political-left literature, Baraka (then Jones) was searching outside the American or Western paradigm. …
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