Poet and Playwright; Political Activist Amiri Baraka's standing as a major poet is matched by his importance as a cultural and political leader. As leader of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, Baraka did much to define and support black literature's mission into the twenty-first century. Writers from other ethnic groups credit Baraka with opening "tightly guarded doors" in the white publishing establishment.
Baraka, known as LeRoi Jones until 1967, writes with a style that is confrontational, calculated to shock and awaken audiences to the political concerns of black Americans. Baraka's own political stance has changed several times, each time finding expression in his plays, poems, and essays so that his works can be divided into periods; a member of the avant garde during the 1950s, Baraka became a black nationalist, and later a Marxist with socialist ideals.
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Baraka's first published collection of poems, appeared in 1961. Throughout, the poet shows his integrated, Bohemian social roots. With the rise of the civil rights movement Baraka's works took on a more militant tone, and he began a reluctant separation from his Bohemian beginnings.
His trip to Castro's Cuba in July 1959 marked an important turning point. There he met writers and artists from Third World countries whose political concerns included the poverty, famine, and oppressive governments. They felt he was being self-indulgent, "cultivating his soul" in poetry while there were social problems to solve in America. Soon Baraka began to identify with Third World writers and wrote poems and plays with strong ethnic and political messages.
Dutchman, a play of entrapment in which a white woman and a middle-class black man both express their murderous hatred on a subway, was first performed Off-Broadway in New York City in 1964. The play established Baraka's reputation as a playwright and was considered by many to be the best play of the year; it won the Village Voice Obie Award in 1964.
Subsequent plays and poems expressed Baraka's increasing disappointment with white America and his growing need to separate from it. To make a clean break with the Beat influence, Baraka turned to writing fiction in the mid-1960s. He wrote The System of Dante's Hell, a novel, and Tales, a collection of short stories.
The role of violent action in achieving political change is more prominent in these stories. The role of music in black life is seen more often in these books, also. In the story "Screamers," the screams from a jazz saxophone galvanize the people into a powerful uprising.
Baraka's classic history Blues People: Negro Music in White America, published in 1963, traces black music from slavery to contemporary jazz. Baraka will also be long remembered for his other important studies, Black Music, which expresses black nationalist ideals, and The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, which expresses his Marxist views.
After Black Muslim leader Malcolm X was killed in 1965, Baraka moved to Harlem and became a black nationalist. He founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem and published the collection Black Magic. Poems in Black Magic chronicle Baraka's divorce from white culture and values and display his mastery of poetic techniques.
A new aesthetic for black art was being developed in Harlem and Baraka was its primary theorist. Black American artists should follow "black," not "white" standards of beauty and value, he maintained, and should stop looking to white culture for validation. It was imperative to portray society and its ills faithfully so that the portrayal would move people to take necessary corrective action.
After coming to see black nationalism as a destructive form of racism, Baraka denounced it in 1974 and became a Third World Socialist. Since 1974 he has produced a number of Marxist poetry collections and plays. His new political goal is the formation of socialist communities and a socialist state.
Speech Topics Include:
- Politics, Art, and Culture
- Revolutionary Cuture and Cultural Revolution
- African-American Culture, Politics, and Art
- Black Liberation and the Struggle for American Democracy
