The Price Of His Meltdown

What Amiri Baraka Cost America.

I don’t have the clearest memory of my mother taking us from my father’s house to the YWCA, but I have flashes. Dad’s jaguar storming out of the driveway, giving her an opening. How gray the sky was. The brown seats of the bus took us away from the house. having my brother spoon me in the bed and the room we were staying in. And he quiet. The quiet in that huddled room like I never remembered in my life.

As I got older, memory would turn into formidable sketches. Staying close to my mother’s vest as she walked through the neighborhood, then my adopted aunts, then my mother’s friends who were fellow single mothers. Later, it would be us moving from place to place in order to hide from his binges, drug-addicted swings that veered from tearful pleadings of forgiveness to threats of murder that were bolstered. From place to place, in makeshift attempt to wake up and take different buses to go to school, the contrast between voices was jarring. On the one hand, there was my mother’s circle, the only place where I saw people who would talk about life in a way that made sense. Your father was an important man, but he did sick things. You had to leave and make a life apart from that. We can’t live in your father’s past. You have to live in the real world and ignore anyone who tells you otherwise.

If not safe, that circle was a place that was safer for me to be human than anywhere in the world. Those women were multicultural, tolerant, had an emphasis of literature as entertainment, and had a communal sense of bonds in regards to raising children( AKA: It takes a village to raise a child) With my grandmother’s help, I learned my history here, developed a healthy sense of self, and became aware that I was experiencing a broader gamut of humanity in Hilltop and the outer eastside of Tacoma than we were in University Place and the north end of the city. For the most part, black people didn’t have time to consciously fuck with me because of my white mother. They were trying to live.

It was outside of that circle, outside of those bonds, where I had to go to people privileged enough to cosplay a nationalist reality. When my mother and her friends had to go to jobs, foodbanks, and streets where they weren’t safe is where I learned of the performative dynamics of black nationalism. Inside other women’s houses, my mother was a white woman struggling to raise two black kids with little support. Outside these houses, in places that could afford to be in thrall to my father’s vision of being undone by the system, my mother was a white bitch who helped undo a black hero who employed more black folks than anyone in the system. It did not matter that no one who accosted us knew the details of the story and how my father’s accusations were nothing but drug paranoia. It did not matter whether we were at the bus stop, in line at the food bank, or at the mall going to and from my mother’s job. The important thing was that my mother and her friends were there, poor, expendable, and prey. More than that, she-in their fabulist obsessed minds-was a political oppressor.

In other words (and tangential to the subject of this essay) she was an antagonist in an Amiri Baraka snuff poem come to life.

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The Newark that Everett Leroy Jones came from was like many middle-class black neighborhoods in post-World War II America: at the corner of progress and peril. Born in the nation’s refusal to grant black people their full humanity or the sacrifices they made in WWII, Jones was a son of a Postal supervisor and a social worker. He later was a gifted student stifled by Howard, and later a Sargent frustrated at not getting its freedom for the sacrifices they made for their country. As a young writer, Jones strode the schizoid binary that affected many middle-class youths in the 50s and 60s, of wanting to be a part of society and being violently against it at the same time. Preface To A 21 Volume Suicide Note, Jones’s first book, is Juvenilia that’s sometimes dazzling, written in lines influenced by (but never bettering) William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley, documenting the passions, insecurities, and deep cruelties (“I slept with all the mediocre colored girls in Newark” ”Black women are incapable of seeing nature”) of a young black man trying to make his place in beatnik societies.

For a time, Jones was the singular black figure in literary circles outside of academia. Yet such reigns are as short as the ones of drug addicted heavyweight boxing champions, a fact that affected him more than his fans cared to admit. To be specific, it highlighted his unseemly need to focus his anxieties and pain at the most unseemly, unwarranted places, and in ways so glaring that the act turned into terrifying cruelty. A negative review of Blues People, Jones’ book on jazz theory, by Ralph Ellison caused him to have an unseemly altercation at Ellison’s apartment and led to a lifelong obsession. James Baldwin’s popularity ended any chance at him being “the only man” in white society and inflamed a fear that his own gender fluidity would be outed, thus Baraka considered him to be “Martin Luther Queen”. A generation of writers and scholars in the freedom movement were beginning not to take him at his word about black women writers.

Feeling eclipsed, afflicted by his own natural feelings and a burgeoning addiction to heroin, facing the furies and demons that drive many to write, Jones found bigger and bigger ways to gain attention. A play, Dutchman, extended his reign as a hipster king a little white longer, by the performative anger of its antagonist, and it’s laying the problems of race at the legs of a blond white woman. Yet it was the death of Malcolm X that unleashed his ID and led him to believe he had some sort of pass at being human. It is at the nexus of his most infamous book, The Dead Lecturer, where he makes the effort to redouble what the American had affected on him, and in the end becomes one of the most frightening figures in English language poetry. To read it not to analyze poetry, it is to go through his sickening dream graveyards. Page after page, there are murderous reveries about dead white and Jewish women (“Crow Jane,” “Black Art”), dead white women with black children along with the children themselves (The Slave), dead white and Jewish men (“For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet”), dead gay men (“Civil Rights Poem”), dead black women who slept with white men (“Experimental Camp #1”), and dead black people who just didn’t agree with him (“Poem for Half White College Students”). To read Baraka is to read a man who fetishized murder more than any figure in the history of American literature, and the lack of attention paid to this shows how little black poetry is thought of as a closely read art form and how much it is seen as an extension of the gruesome fringe of radical leftism.

For a time, it gave him the attention he wanted. In an era of haunting violence against blacks, he was considered the premiere “Hurt person who hurt people”, and too many people conflated that anger with brutal honesty. Never mind that those who got past Baraka’s surface either found his threats sickening or were at the business end of them. Never mind that beneath that surface was snidely classist cruelty (“They have become our creators. The Poor, the Black, the thoroughly ignorant”) Baraka was letting out a roar unlike no other person not named Muhammad ail and people thought attention must be paid to it.

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A decade later, people wanted to stop paying attention. When Toni Morrison’s novels went almost infinitely deeper into the black experience and were crafted impeccably enough to reach all corners of the globe, no one wanted to hear the monotone voice of a homicidally angry institutional man who had no use for craft. By 1975, Ed Bullins, a gang member and abuser, found grifting Baraka esque scripts of his rages towards women as a way to be in the proximity of his ex,(Poet Pat Parker); and his winning a Critic’s Circle award for it began creating a backlash against what black arts movement had become. By the time Baraka was arrested for domestic violence 100 days into his call to cancel Ntsoake Shange’s For Colored Girls for being against black men, he was finished as vanguard poet and scholar of black America.

This is where a Dark web writer would write a paragraph condemning Black Twitter for bringing him back to preeminence, with the assumption that the history wasn’t complicated or that black conservatives had nothing to do with it. Spoiler Alert: I’m not going to write that paragraph. For you can’t talk about the re-asension of Amiri Baraka with a poet that-for my money- was one of the most destructive figures in our arts and letters. Not Ralph Ellison, who championed Toni Morrison in print, and was so tired of the right’s shit that, by the end of his life, he canvassed for Jesse Jackson. No, It was Derek Walcott, the most acclaimed black poet of his time who also, like Clarence Thomas and Glenn Loury, became known both for being a cultural scold of black American and an abuser of every woman in his vicinity.

Walcott had become a global literary figure in his own anti-creation myth in 1973’s Another Life; gruelingly flattening the pensive, thoughtful, judicious writer of form and lyric verse that he was in his early books and replacing him with a right-wing macho man. He also became famous in America, and beloved by Harold bloom, by who he wasn’t. For a generation of Legacy literary critics intimated by Gwendolyn Brooks range, and embarrassed that she was anti Stalinist before they were, Walcott was an easy figure to worship.. For a generation before, Brooks commanded a central stage in American poetry by creating a poetry that had a complex, finite focus on Chicago, with a literary range spanning the blues and hundreds of years of classic formalism. Her verses had a discipline and a skill set that intimidated most white male poets, and a low tolerance for bullshit that made her not conducive to social clubs. Her work wasn’t against white people, it just wasn’t about them(in the same way that Milosz or Celan’s majestic poetry wasn’t specifically about me)

Where Brooks’ was going deeper into her Bronzeville with demanding, complex poems about the changing nature of the project industrial complex, Walcott was positioning himself as a mixture of Byron and Jim Brown, telling variations of the coming of age narratives that had Caribbean backdrops, mythic and mythically curved ladies and locker room bonding rituals. They were also Poems that deemed the ground that literary boomer dudes walked on being the promised land, the finish line of intellect and manhood. Walcott commanded the center of English language poetry because he put such subjects of race and gender into packages that charm the hell out of so many straight men. I’m not going to tell you that Another Life wasn’t mesmerizing at times. But at times, and as he kept repackaging his narrative, however, his work became less and less mesmerizing; to the point where the hero of the 70s became the creepy, cruel old man at the bar.

Walcott’s journey to becoming that old man came at a price, one that his free-thinking critics aren’t willing to examine. To spell it out: it wasn’t just the wives he beat up and the women he sexually harassed to get kicked out of two ivy league universities, it was the women he beat up and harassed and got away with. More than himself or his cases, it was the culture and the archetype of the canonical institutional man that damaged poetry and poetry culture as much as any Baraka murder rant. One can’t put a number of the lives of young writers ruined because of the toxic networks he didn’t create but damn near modernized.

Is it any wonder that a new generation got tired of his ( and these networks) shit? That wave of extrajudicial executions forced younger writers to find ancestors to teach them to deal with this? And that Brooks, like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, was an ideal literary parent help them deal so. The Bronzeville poems that touched on colorism, police violence, reproductive issues, single motherhood, and scared Saunders reading so much that he wrote an editorial saying that black progress was dependent on brooks toning it down and being more matronly weren’t scary to a generation actually trying to deal with these issues. The best work of Terrence Hayes, Evie Shockley, Jerico Brown, Robin Coste Lewis and Tracy Smith have brooks concern for the interiority of black life and dedication to the crafts; showing Brooks’ literary revival to be a cultural watermark for the Black Lives Matter generation.

The tragedy of Amiri Baraka’s comeback is that I could see how the audience that he targeted could see him as a literary parent. By 1991, when he threatened to kill Spike Lee over his portrayal of Malcolm X, Baraka was seen as a hate clown in even black nationalist circles. Yet it was Brave New Voices, the former slam poetry institution and show, and Def Poetry Jam where Baraka came back, giving young poets a string of compliments and perfect slam poetry grades. To an extent, who could blame those young poets? They had to deal with the project industrial complex, Harold Bloom telling them that they were the “Death of Art” and, if you were a black woman, Bill Cosby and Glenn Loury laying black America’s ills at their feet. Baraka was one of the few elders who were paying attention. Where Walcott and his ilk weren’t there and had personal lives that were emotional carnage, Baraka was there with his wife Amina, a deeply laudable community activist, giving off the perfectly imperfect aura of black familial life. With his performative declarative comments praising black women, Baraka came off like a repentant, evolving father to a generation who hadn’t seen a lot of them.

The problem is that parentage came at two prices. The first is by not pushing young writers, by not giving them constructive criticism you are not preparing them for how difficult writing can be, how the world will not revolve around you, how it can be a series of failures, and the best thing a writer can do is learn from them and find people to help you do so. The second is that a generation of writers swallowed his demons whole. With the turmoil of Somebody Blew Up America, and its inferences that the Jews had something to do with 9/11, the public faces of black poetry had shifted from the remarkable lyric gifts of Rita Dove and the remarkably crafted post-Vietnam witness of Yusuf Komunyakaa to Baraka and his slam and political poet children who had his nation time bully victim routine down pat. By the time he died he was seen as a Christ figure to a politically committed generation of twitter poets. William Jelani Cobb’s breezy recollection of his career and what he meant to him as a young activist, Michael A Gonzalez’s memories of what his anger and statements meant to him as a young writer, and Ishmael Reed’s take on Baraka’s career/ ad hominem attack on his critics, amount to a whitewashing of one of the most racist, sexist, and homophobic writers in the history of American literature.

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In the political evasiveness that Baraka’s defenders have had regarding his violent rages, a sensibility as response forms. “You don’t like what he said? Tough. You have to take it. Baraka being useful to U.S. History shows we have it worse, and you have to accept the rage we give you.” It was the belief system that allowed black people to be openly racist toward my mother and aunts, and it is the same belief system — operating under the reasoning that it is a response to stand your ground, stop and frisk, and a series of brutal police lynchings that have symbolized a neo-Jim Crow era — that makes Baraka’s defenders so cavalier of the people he wanted off the face of the earth.

Though the nightmare of oppression isn’t a card Baraka and his defenders have a right to play (or capital they have a right to spend), that doesn’t mean the details of it are not palpable. The abuse I took and have taken in black communities almost doesn’t register compared to the racism I experienced in white neighborhoods and the abuse I have to take on an almost daily basis as a forward-thinking black man in America. I understand the complexity of the human experience: my right to define what being biracial means stops at my nose. However, anyone’s right to describe their experience stops at their own; and I have no patience for the popular rhetoric that plagues too much writing about being mixed (in which I am benighted by my genealogy, whites are all beacons of liberal tolerance, blacks are all ready and willin’ to throw me out the tribe and the only thing for me to do is embrace my benightedness, is…disown my black ancestry, ignore the fluidity of human experience, and put myself in a black-free box that says “biracial”).

That said, I will not rhetorically kill my mother and aunts to make a social justice schmuck feel comfortable. It isn’t just that — though their belief systems are a different sides of the political spectrum — the rage eulogies of Amiri Baraka and the most gleeful defenders of killer cops have a frighteningly similar disregard for the lives of the people they consider “other.” Specifically, in my case, I love the lives of Glennis Wilson, Pat Wallace, and Marilyn Nault. These Women loved me, fed me, and raised me when almost no one else did, women who went through a hell they didn’t need in their own lives so I could have a better life, and the women that so many of Baraka’s defenders want me to put on an aesthetic spit. The hostility of Baraka’s critics is part of the price I will pay for being an artist and a human being. They can have their lecturer, but to live a life that disgraces a mother’s love is, in this writer’s opinion, to choose a fate worse than being murdered.