At the age of 79, Amiri Baraka, one of the country’s most preeminent poets, playwrights, social critics, and activists, is dead. Baraka passed away as an unrepentant communist, a fact which merits more than a passing notice. Baraka, as his autobiography can attest, did not lack a self-critical eye, and was more than willing to renounce past beliefs, but from roughly 1975 onwards Baraka was a revolutionary Marxist partisan. This was true through the nadir of the variant of Chinese Communism he came into the movement with, through the collapse of the socialist bloc, the triumphalism of the right and the “inevitably” of the “third way” in the 1990s, the amorphous “anti-globalization” of the 1990s, right up through the current catastrophe of the market economy of the present day. Through major events which caused many of the seemingly most stalwart on the “left” to jump ship, or at least tack their sails, Baraka continued on.
This author’s most indelible memory of the man is from an anti-war demonstration, where after I was introduced to Baraka, he exclaimed, “I’m a communist!” If nothing else, his political voice was something of a cry in the wilderness; as the dominant trends on the Black Left became an eclectic mix of social democracy, Black nationalism, and “Marxian” thought, Baraka’s writings never lost their fairly orthodox framework.
This seems worth dwelling on because in such a fertile, creative and self-critical mind it speaks strongly not to obstinacy but to the general validity of the ideology he embraced. Many will eulogize Amiri Baraka for his great accomplishments, and touch ever so slightly on his Marxism (and for that matter his Leninism). For our part we eulogize him for not only his cultural accomplishments, but for his existence as a light in the darkness of the past two decades when many lesser radicals capitulated or adapted.
Early years
Born in 1934 as Everett Leroy Jones in Newark, New Jersey, Baraka was the son of a postal worker and a social worker. He was immersed in a number of artistic pursuits as a young person in Newark and moved from a quick stint at Rutgers to Howard University in Washington, D.C.
Howard, the nation’s preeminent historically Black University, was, to put it mildly, a disappointment to Leroy, who while there became LeRoi. Once a center of depression-era Popular Front politics, Howard had become, in Baraka’s words, “The Capstone Employment Agency on the Hill” (a rework of Howard’s reputation as the “Capstone of Negro Education”), an intellectually stultifying atmosphere of fraternities and sororities, brown paper bag tests, and most of all a constant striving to enter the Black middle class that passed for a “Black bourgeoisie.”
Leaving Howard without graduating, Baraka then joined the Air Force, or as it appears in his autobiography “Error Farce.” It was here, based in Puerto Rico, where Baraka’s intellectual pursuits came into full flower under the truly oppressive atmosphere of military discipline. His reading became voracious: “Joyce, Faulkner, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Flaubert, Cummings, Lawrence, Pound…I would read…a book on Buddhism and the Communist Manifesto in the same afternoon.”
It was here Baraka also seriously took up poetry, writing to and being rejected from all the important magazines. Ultimately his eclectic tastes would get him dishonorably discharged as the military officials interpreted his reading list as evidence of Communist subversion.
Moving to New York’s Greenwich Village, Baraka fell in with the Beat Generation crowd, immersing himself in poverty and just above poverty living, various artistic circles, and the drug culture. After a brief period of being more hanger-on than talent, Baraka’s own editing, publishing, and writing began to make a name amongst the other Beats and the wider community of patrons that noticed the “hip” scene.
Success as a playwright
This would lead him to his first, and probably most successful play, The Dutchman, a major hit that touched on all the raw spots of race relations of the time. Not unsurprisingly it reflected Baraka’s own personal struggles. While un-self-consciously Black, Baraka relates how his own circles were predominantly white at a time of unprecedented Black awakening, which had not in the least passed him by and was dragging him along in its undertow.
This was also a time of further radicalization for Baraka, who after traveling to Cuba in 1960 had become increasingly involved in the periphery of various political movements, including setting up some discussion groups of his own, working in solidarity with Cuba and African liberation movements, and in defense of Robert Williams. His book Blues People which delved deeply into the socio-historical origins of Black culture, was clearly influenced by this growing focus on the political.
Baraka decided to merge the political and artistic following the murder of Malcolm X by moving to Harlem and starting the Black Arts Repertory Theater (BART). In this move uptown Baraka left his first wife, poet and writer Hettie Cohen Jones, with whom he had two children.
LeRoi Jones was now in Harlem. At the BART he constructed a semi-functional multi-disciplinary artistic endeavor for a brief period in the late 1960s that was critical to a new emergence of overtly “Black” art, art that reflected the millions of dark-skinned people asserting their humanity and beauty just as they were and not as defined by the standards of whites.
This new “Black Aesthetic” also led him into the political movement headed by Ron “Maulana” Karenga, based on the sui generis philosophy of Kawaida, a set of values loosely derived from African customs and the Swahili language with bits and pieces borrowed from elsewhere.
Baraka, who got his “African” name from Karenga, became one of the other major leaders of this cultural-political current to begin to press an aggressive Black nationalism. This would lead to the formation of a national organization, the Congress of Afrikan People that Baraka would end up heading after his break from Karenga. CAP was central to the development of the National Black Political Assembly in 1972, one of the seminal gatherings of the 1960s which attracted just about every Black political organization and important individual in an abortive attempt to construct an independent “Black politics.”
In Newark, Baraka and the local CAP cadres became heavily involved in the effort to elect the majority Black city’s first Black mayor, Kenneth Gibson. This became a critical event for Baraka when Gibson very quickly after his election dumped his nationalist friends and fully integrated into the white-controlled capitalist infrastructure.
Moving further to the left
This experience, the impact of the clear implications of CAP’s mass work, the intense struggle in the circles around the African Liberation Support Committee and his attendance at the Sixth Pan-Africanist Congress in Tanzania, began to pull Baraka and significant sections of CAP to the left. Contributing to this was the struggle of CAP women, including his new wife Amina Baraka, against the heavily sexist orientation of CAP.
In the mid-1970s as a culmination of this process, CAP morphed into the Revolutionary Communist League and Baraka into a follower of Marxist-Leninist-Mao-Tse Tung Thought. RCL emerged as a part of the Maoist or “anti-revisionist” movement. In the late 1970s the RCL would join with anti-revisionist groups based mainly in the Latino and Asian communities to create the League of Revolutionary Struggle.
It should go without saying that throughout this entire political evolution Baraka continued to produce artistically. In the CAP period, he published Its Nation Time! and Spirit Reach, and Marxist inspired pieces such as Motion Forces and What was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production in the RCL/LRS days. Many of his CAP-era publications were published by its own Jihad Publications or by Haki Madhabuti’s Third World Press. Baraka essentially abandoned the mainstream press for most of the 1970s and 1980s.
As bourgeois society gradually regained confidence due to the fall of the socialist bloc, Chinese rapprochement and the collapse of the Western communist movement, Baraka began to gain more mainstream acceptance. He was even appointed Poet Laureate of his home state New Jersey.
This would lead to controversy in 2002 after he mused about the possibility that Israelis might have had advanced warning of 9/11 terrorist attacks and thus avoided work in the towers that day. Quickly the Zionist political movement mobilized to denounce Baraka as “anti-Semitic” and eventually the position of New Jersey Poet Laureate was abolished by the state legislature.
The last several years of Baraka’s life were marked by lecturing and continuing political activity including, of course, advocacy of communism. The latter half of his life also witnessed a marked evolution of some of his political stances. His evolving views on homophobia and anti-Semitism demonstrated his capacity for self-criticism.
There is much to be said, more than one obituary can cover because Amiri Baraka, his life and works touch on so many aspects of the post-war Black experience. His incisive poetry and prose inspired and outraged for most of the past four decades. Radical and uncompromising to the end, Amiri Baraka’s legacy will continue to be a beacon for all those who want to create beautiful things and have too much pride to bow before bourgeois convention. Baraka is survived by his wife Amina and eight of his nine children.
