Garlands to a Revolutionist Thespian—Imamu Amiri Baraka (I)

Time, there shall be, for us to sing a painful song of sorrow for these versatile, committed younger colleagues of mine, who perished on the famished Nigerian road between Abuja and Zaria—and most un-unnervingly, on active line of duty and service. The theatre family—both in scholarship and practice—remains deprived and painfully devastated. There is a […]

Time, there shall be, for us to sing a painful song of sorrow for these versatile, committed younger colleagues of mine, who perished on the famished Nigerian road between Abuja and Zaria—and most un-unnervingly, on active line of duty and service. The theatre family—both in scholarship and practice—remains deprived and painfully devastated. There is a tragic coincidence in the fact that these younger children of former Leroy Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka) who should be celebrating his life, went back to their ancestors only a few days after their patriarch was about settling down on the others shores with their predecessors waiting to receive him—Ogunde, Sutherland, Ogunyemi, Ogunmola, Serumaga, Rose Mbowa, and so on. They will have to prepare a ritual dance of welcome for Baraka and his unripe followers to the world of the ancestors.
It is then time to put our feet together to dance for our departed patriarch of the stage, Imamu Amiri Baraka, actor, teacher, theatre director and producer, writer, poet, political activist and foremost African American revolutionary, whose typifying features was and has always been paralleled with those of his fellow iconoclast and creative and social visionary, Wole Soyinka. Imamu Baraka’s profile and bio-data are commonplace, and on the web, the social media of facebook and twitter. It is unnecessary to bore us here in this lean space. Born Everett Leroy Jones on October 7, 1934, a few months younger than Wole Soyinka, in Newark, New jersey, he was twice married to Hettie Cohen (1958) and enduringly to Sylvia Robinson (1966-2014) and nine children, the youngest of whom was also named Amiri Baraka after the poet-dramatist himself. In his hometown, Newark, he attended Barringer High School, and for his university education, he won a scholarship to attend Rutgers University in 1951, a predominantly white institution, but burdened with a sense of cultural alienation and dislocation, he moved on to Howard University, a black elite equivalent of Harvard, which he attended without the waiting to obtain  a degree. He again attended Columbia University and the New School for Social Research without completing a degree programme. He then went to the United States Air Force and rose only to the rank of a Sergeant and got discharged, upon the charge of being a Communist.
Baraka was committed to the development of literature, literary and creative writing, literary publications and music, including Jazz and Blues, which brought into contact with music movements such as Beat generation, Black Mountain Poets and the New York School of Poets. He founded press houses and journal magazines. He worked as editor and critic of literary journals. Besides, in 1962, he co-edited the New York Poets Theatre with Di Prima, choreographers F. Herko and James Warring along with Alan Marlowe. His communist bent, and his visit to Cuba in 1960, resulted in his co-authorship of Declaration of Conscience to support Fidel Castro’s revolutionary struggle. His essay, ‘The Myth of a Negro Literature’ was a classic rendition of the Negro identity and consciousness experience, stressing the extreme misunderstanding of the black American within the global American cultural experience. This is with particular reference to the African-American middle class elite and their eagerness to be assimilated in mainstream American culture. This politics of Acceptance by the black elite militates against the full expression of the black American consciousness—its ability to speak his mind.
One critical sphere, as I began to remonstrate above, is Baraka’s interest in black music, especially in Jazz. The climax of this interest is his publication of Blues People; Negro Music in White America  where he affirms the import of the African musical tradition, especially Jazz and Blues, in the music civilization of America—the fact  that the black brought music from Africa, that music which symbolizes their essence and patrimony in America, including their identity and contribution to the American civilization; in other words, as he expressed it quite clairvoyantly, ‘blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives’
As I have published elsewhere on Baraka’s dramaturgy and ideology, it is in his dramatic works that he has demonstrated the power of literature in shaping ideology, identity retrieval and revolutionary consciousness. His play Dutchman has been most demonstrative of this ‘triple heritage’ identified above. Dutchman, his 1964 play, typifies this heritage. Here, a white supremacist lady assaulted a black intellectual on the train. The counter-assault of the black and his eventual killing, to the passive glare of the audience of the predominantly which passengers, retracts this perception.
 It is thus difficult to define Baraka purely as a writer—poet-dramatist or as a political activist and revolutionary. His was a classic case of the inextricability of political art from artistic politics, as we shall presently show. Suffice to define him as an American writer who functioned in the diverse genres of poetry, drama, fiction, polemics and music criticism who has authored numerous books in creative writing, scholarly works and pedagogy. His creative works, because of their ideological and revolutionary bent, have been widely praised and subsequently roundly denounced as political correct but also as propagandistic. While some would agree that he was comparable, in terms of his classic output to foremost African-American writer like Baldwin, most liberal literary commentators classify his work within the mode of violence, racist treatise, misogyny and rabid homophobia.
Baraka was a black cultural nationalist who was critical and antagonistic to the pacifist, even passive integrationist Civil Rights Movement, especially after his movement to Harlem following the assassination of the great activist Malcolm X in 1965. Both his activism and his revolutionary poetry gave combative expression to the need for the emergence of a Black World.  It is noteworthy that his revolutionary poetry at this point, including the important poem ‘Black Art’, provided the manifesto of the Black Arts Literary Movement, with it decided violent overtone, at a time when slogans of arms revolt became popular in the black protest and struggle regime. For Imamu Amiri Baraka, and as enunciated in Pablo Neruda’s poetry, that art became a weapon of combat and revolutionary struggle.
For this commitment to the political and social emancipation of the African- American from white supremacist hegemonic repression, Imamu Baraka paid penalties and suffered incarceration. In 1967, he was arrested for carrying, allegedly, illegal weapons and for resisting arrest during a riot in Newark. He was subsequently sentenced to three years imprisonment—a jail term that was reversed by an Appellate court.
To Be Continued.