Amiri Baraka
“You are an artist. You are a writer. The strongest political work
you can do is in the arts.”
At the time of the 1994 conference, Newark, New Jersey native Amiri Baraka—poet, activist and playwright—was one of the most prolific and exciting authors in America. Born LeRoi Jones, Baraka was educated at Rutgers University and Howard University, and taught poetry and drama at the New School for Social Research, Columbia University, Yale University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and elsewhere. Considered an architect of the Black Arts Movement, Baraka has published countless books of poetry, plays, essays and more, including Preface To A Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), The Dead Lecturer(1964), Dutchman + The Slave (1971), The Autobiography of Leroi Jones (1983), Transbluesency (1995), Somebody Blew Up America (2004), Tales of the Out and the Gone (2006) and the posthumous collection S O S: Poems 1961-2013 (2016). Baraka was also a central artistic force in the Black Arts Repertory Theater School in Harlem and Spirit House in Newark. Throughout the course of his career, he founded the beat poetry magazine Yugen, edited the African American music magazine, Cricket, the literary magazine The Black Nation, and directed Jihad Press. For his extensive contributions to the American arts at large, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a PEN/Faulkner Award, an American Book Award, the Langston Hughes Award from City College of New York, and other distinctions. Amiri Baraka died in 2014.
Featured Poems
“Heathens”
“I am”
Interviews, Talks, and Readings
/ Amiri Baraka reads “Heathens”
Heathens
1 They Ugly
on purpose!
2 They get high
off Air Raids!
3 They are the oldest
continuously functioning
Serial Killers!
4 They murder
to Explain
Themselves!
5 They think
Humans
are food.
6 They imitate
conversation
by lying.
7 They are always naked
and always dirty
the shower & tuxedo
don’t help.
8 They go to the bathroom
to have a religious
Experience.
9 They believe everything is better
Dead. And that everything alive
is their enemy.
10 Plus Heathens is armed
and dangerous.
/ Amiri Baraka reads “I Am”
Blues March
We are being told of the greatness
of Western Civilization
Yet Europe
is not the West
Leave England headed West
you arrive
in Newark,
The West is
The New World
not Europe
The West is
The New World
not Europe
The West is
El Mundo Nuevo
The Pan American
Complexity
As diverse as the routes
& history
of our collection
The West is The Americas
not Europe
It is the America that the home
boy tells, the sister we can
see, yr wife, husband & children
Yr mama
Yr friends
Yr family
Yr close enemies
Are West, the quest
The Search
for Humanity
still goes on
But of the Euro White Supremacists
The Slave Masters
Conquistadores
Destroyers of Pharonic Egypt
Carthage
Invaders, Destroyers of Moorish Spain
Of African and Asian Worlds
Creators of the Inquisition
Christ Killers
Murderers of thousands of Christians
in the Coliseum
Murderers of Spartacus
Vandals
Germ Mens
DitchMen
Boers
Destroyers of Mohodarenjo
Tenotchitlan
Killed Montezuma & Emiliano Zapata
Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, even
the Kennedies, Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton
Medgar Evers,
The Aztecs
The Incas
The Mayans
The Taino
The Arawak
Conquerors
of
America
Enslaving
Humanity
in
Cannibal
Menus
Bush men living on human
flesh as public
ritual
ideology of predators
& blood covered claws
Murderers of Iraq, wd be destroyers of
the ancient Mesopotamian culture
Assassins of Sandino
Toussaint Louverture, Patrice Lumumba
Enslavers of Women
Overthrew Mother Right
Killed Socrates, Copernicus, Lincoln
John Brown & Nat Turner
Amilcar Cabral & David Sibeko
Who claim Civilization & Christianity & Philosophy as
Crucifiers who worshipped statues
till 300 AD
Who destroyed the libraries of Alexandria
the University at Timbuctoo
Who thought the wind made babies
Who say now they are the creators of Great Civilizations
plagiarists, ignorant imitators
claiming Geometry & the Lever
Which existed 1000 years before
they was even here
whose great minds are thieves like
Aristotle, Con men like
Democritus & Anaximander
whose Gods are the Vanilla Ice
of Ethiopian Originals
half dressed cave dwellers
painted blue
Anglos (knife wielding) Saxons
Sackers (Robbers) of Ancient Civilizations
Vikings whose Gods were drunk and rowdy
robbers like Conan & Wodan
Punks like Napoleon who
got run out of Haiti
by Toussaint & Dessalines
who got bum rushed out
of Russia
wacked out
racist monsters
shot the nose & mouth
off the Sphinx
so sick &
anti-life & history were they
who put Mali and Songhay &
all Africa
in Slave Ships
for money, whose profits
were numbers not visionaries
Life as a low thing
worshippers of mines not Minds
War Lovers not Peace Makers
Aint instead of Art
(Death instead of Life)
Dog they best friend
Ice & Snow
Not We & Know
Blood Suckers &
Mother Fuckers
Love War
so much
call the history
of their civilization
The Cannon!
in honor of Marco Polo’s
trip to China
Should we praise them
for Dachau, for the poisoning
of David Walker
the Genocide of Native
Americans
or concentration camps
for Japanese
Americans
Perhaps 700 years of Irish Colonialism
or Ghandi’s
murder
The Conquest of India
The Opium Wars
TB sheets for
Indians
or the trail of Tears
So how should we praise them?
And what should we call them?
Who style themselves God
Whose New World Order
Seems old & Miltonian in that they rule
& do not serve
But somehow the term Satan seems too narrow
The word Devil is too limiting
But there must be some description, some appropriate
horrific
we can coin–
Something that says liar, murderer, maniac, animal
something that indicates their importance.
Related Links
Interactive Program Day I
Collection Highlights
Timeline: History, Witness, and the Struggle for Freedom in African American Poetry
Language, Music, and the Vernacular in African American Poetry