Amiri Baraka's writing on race, freedom, and universal human experience

¶ … Corrections in Blue Suggestions / New Material in Red

No Apprenticeship for Freedom

"A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom," wrote Amiri Baraka whose life work has been a series of attacks on what he has felt to be the constraints -- the chains -- of mainstream American society. His plays, poems, and essays have made him one of the signature voices of the Civil Rights Movement and continue to make him an important force in American literature in the twenty-first century.

Beginning in the 1960s he has became one of the voices of black America, a complicated and sometimes internally contradictory position. He has written on the particular and unique circumstances, desires, and fears of African-Americans (and particularly of African-American men) over a half-century as the position of blacks in the United States has changed dramatically -- and yet not changed enough and is still necessarily undergoing change. And yet, e Even While embodying the specificity of the experiences of African-Americans, he has also written more broadly about the his subjective experience of the texture of life in over the last half-century and the ways in which he believes imperialism is still an irrefutable element of our putatively post-colonial world.

It is always at least somewhat suspect to argue that a black writer -- or a woman, or a Latino, or an artist who is anything but male and white -- embodies both particular individual as well as universal human concerns. This implies that minority writers either are betraying their identity in not writing solely about their own demographic group or that there is something surprising about the ability of any minority to write about universal experiences. I, of course, do not mean to fall into either of these fallacies. The implication being that either minority writers are betraying their own identity when writing about things other than their ethnicity, or that the ability of a minority writer to understand and write about universal human experiences is surprising. Both stances are patently untrue. Baraka is able to write about his individual experience as an African-American as well as his experience as a human being irrespective of race. Rather, when I argue that Baraka writes both about the concerns of black men in the decades since the Civil Rights Movement as well as concerns that affect all people I am instead arguing that he has chosen to write in both veins.

He could have chosen to be a chronicler only of the lives of African-American men of his generation, or he could have chosen to forgo writing about his own cohort. Instead he chose to write primarily about his own life and times but also to extend his experiences and perspectives to the larger issues of his time. Rather than limit himself as a writer defined by race, Baraka has chosen to write simply about himself; his life and experiences and the manner in which race and humanity converge on his subjective experience.

While he is not limited compositionally by ethnicity, there is a tangible sense of his "Black Voice" in every line he has ever written. One of the defining characteristics of Baraka's most famous works are the rage at and revulsion of white middle class America (Watts, 2001). Particularly those individuals who express kinship with the struggles of African- Americans in defining themselves as a culture distinct from traditional white American Ideals.

Baraka is himself very aware of his balancing these two different literary (and at least earlier in his life personal) trajectories. In a 1963 interview he described his position in the following way:

I'm fully conscious all the time that I'm an American Negro, because it's part of my life. But I also know that if I want to say, 'I see a bus full of people,' I don't have to say, 'I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people.' I would deal with it when it has to do directly with the poem, and not as a kind of broad generalization that doesn't have much to do with a lot of young writers today who are Negroes. (Ossman 118).

This is not to say that Baraka has represented all aspects of American life with equal validity. His writings have intertwined his reputation with a number of at-times ugly controversies, most of them involving charges of anti-Semitism that very much appear to be proven substantiated by his own words. It is evident though that these opinions reflect more cogently personal belief than the reality of African- American and Jewish interaction in the Civil Rights Movement. In this way he reflects more some of the values that have run through the Black Nationalist movement and not the realities of the ways in which Jews and African-Americans worked together in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement.

In this paper I examine both the talent of Amiri Baraka and his life and the ways in which he has influenced American literature and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, examining both the controversies in which he has been involved and the important contributions that he has made to the literature of our age.

It is impossible to understand Baraka's writings without reference to his life, for both his work and his biography have been intentional and studied productions of a very specific kind of identity. So I begin with a brief overview of his life in its various stages because he has seen himself very differently during different eras of his life, which hashad consequences for the kinds of writing that he has focused on.

A Fellow Traveler

But While the Beats and the larger general cultural movement towards non-conformity was an important part of Baraka's early life, it is important to stress that he was not truly a part of the movement, and would go his separate way relatively quicklyultimately leaving relatively early on.

Having managed to escape what he considered the assimilationist inclinations the desire to assimilate shared by of his parents and the middle-class neighborhood in which he grew up. He did not Neither did he want to be captured by the conventions of the Beats. For, While they certainly embraced values very different from (and in some ways directly antithetical to) mainstream America, they had their own orthodoxy, which Baraka began to find stifling (Brown 61).

As the 1950s became the 1960s, the beatniks became the hippies and the New York City liberals and activists all became part of a more general counterculture movement. A movement that was in some ways parallel to the concerns of the Civil Rights Movement and of black nationalist leaders but in some ways very different from these other social movements to a degree. There would be political elements of the hippie movement, of course. Arguably all counterculture movements are political -- politics by another name -- but This emerging counterculture of the 1960s was also explicitly politicalcountercultural a feature highlighted by in its protests of the war in Vietnam and open rebellion against the sexual roles of the time. A reflection of the changing nature of American society. Though the desire for peace and for equality were driving forces the young adjutants of the time were becoming increasingly radicalized in their drive to achieve those goals. Baraka's own political focus would shift to a more explicit focus almost exclusively on civil rights and the empowerment of African-Americans and from there to a as well as supporting of Marxist causes as he like those around him became more radicalized.

This path to radicalism is one which had been taken by other minority writers, they like he felt that their rebellion could easily "become mainstream." The answer to this fear was always to move one step further, unceasing in their drive to achieve Marxist ideals of utopia where all people were equal. This should not be surprising, since it was a path followed by other minority writers who found that the kind of artistic and personal rebellion favored by the Beats could all too easily become consolidated within (relatively) mainstream American culture (Knight 29).

(it doesn't make sense to talk about 58 here. You were talking about the transition from the 50's -- 60's in the above paragraph. Jumping between decades in this fashion is very confusing for the reader and will likely result in them being unable to concentrate on your point.)

In 1958, the same year that Baraka -- still Jones -- started his Totem Press, he also married Hettie Cohen. Like a small group of other women, She would become one of the successful female writers of the group. Female writers, such as Jone's first wife Hettie have largely been lost to history, a reflection of rampant sexism as opposed to their merit as authors. These women have in large measure been lost to the historical record, a fact that reflects not so much their literary merit but the sexism of the times that made it much more difficult for women either to become artists or to join in a Bohemian lifestyle. While men such as LeRoi Jones could do so and be seen as artistic free spirits, women who tried to do so joined the movement often faced serious cultural sanctions and personal costs.

Potentially great women writers wound up dead or crazy. I think of the women on the Beat-scene with me in the early '50s, where are they now? I know Barbara Moraff's a potter and does some writing in Vermont, and that's about all I know. I know some of them died and some of them got nuts, and one woman that I was running around the Village with in '53 was killed by her parents putting her in a shock-treatment-place in Pennsylvania (Knight 14).

Hettie Cohen, who took the last name of "Jones" when she they married, achieved some amount a degree of success, partly through her autobiography How I Became Hettie Jones as well as through her poetry. The following is an excerpt from her poem "Women in Black":

Patterns in the dust of different kinds of shoe soles black on black

we sway like grain, like the woman beside me, the scar of the burning she escaped

When she turns to me, smiling, the scar is a path, slick in the gathering dark Half the world is ours to take.

Her writing in general reflects this kind of Modernist spare style and punctuated rhythm and departs from the more surreal and even Dadaist elements of the rest of the Beat Generation. It is a useful reminder that the Beat poets and those influenced by them were very much Modernists. Though this term tends not to be applied to them because it implies a certain adherence to mainstream literary values and conventions.

The entire above section is unrelated to your paper. You are discussing LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka. Though the trials of his wife and writers like her are an interesting cultural reference to the time period they ultimately detract from your paper. A more effective segue into the topic of modernism is (continuing from the last segment in red):

As Jones's views became more radical so too did his writing. One feature that remained consistent however was Jones's distinctive highly personal voice (Harris, 1991). This characteristic of his writing would always physically connect him to the idyllic bohemian roots of his success. Modernism, a style of writing which emphasized the awareness of the author that he, was writing something which represented himself, is evident throughout the body of Jones's work. But It is important to remember that Modernism itself was in many ways revolutionary. And is more connected to Postmodernism than adherents of either school would generally like to admit. (post modernism has nothing to do with your paper. It is unclear why you chose to discuss it here) Modernism (like Postmodernism) rejected the over-arching coherence that had been the provenance detachment of art and literature prevalent since the Enlightenment. Modernist prose and advocated an insistence on were defined by self-awareness, a sense that the author was intimately and immediately aware of their position as the author, the purveyor of their own voice. The author of the Modernist text is always very much aware of the power of authorship and of his or position of authority (in both a limited and a broader sense) within the text. As the literary world shifted into Postmodernity, the sense of suspended reality rationality and coherence which that had marked earlier artistic schools was discarded in favor of meta- literature, or literature immediately aware that it is literature. fragmented even further so that not only did the center not hold in terms of art and discourse but also in terms of the artist's own sense of self. When we contrast Modernism and Postmodernism, it is clear that Baraka is a Modernist author because we are always aware, as is he, of a clearly of his clearly defined sense of self and authorship within the text. We always know who is speaking to us.

Following an unsuccessful attempt at developing a youth theatre in Harlem Jones moved back to Newark NJ. There he became involved in a number of activities and organizations generally focused on the development of the "Black Arts Movement." Among the most personally important of Jones's efforts was Spirit House which was described as a community center intended to be "whatever the community wanted it to be." It was in this period of his life when Jones was first