Radio review #2: Controversies

Amiri Baraka in the spotlight

I ONLY MET Amiri Baraka on one occasion, in the English city of Manchester in 2013, the year before the African American poet, both acclaimed and controversial, died, aged 79, after complications involving surgery.

I saw the visitor give a reading at the politically-minded Contact Theatre to a largely African Caribbean audience – I seem to recall that women and children made up most of those in the stalls – and even managed to secure an interview with the man in the post-performance hubbub.

When I say I interviewed Baraka, I have to confess that is something of an exaggeration. The cult of celebrity surrounded this highflying figure, this vintage wordsmith with a certain notoriety, and it was quite hard to find the space to engage among the milling crowds – young and older – who had come to hear him present.

And, anyway, why would this long-established individual with something of a militant reputation in matters of race (and more) want to give time to a middle-aged white reporter, quite out of step with the ethnic mix gathered there? He seemed uncooperatively distracted by my questions – inane? simplistic? insulting? – and also diverted by those people who wanted to say hello and shake his hand.

The gig, which I was reviewing for the magazine Beat Scene, did not disappoint in terms of Baraka’s ability to court a certain sensation. He certainly read ‘Someone Blew up America’, the late long poem which claimed that the World Trade Centre bombing was entangled in a Jewish conspiracy.

It was the kind of dangerous assertion that had dogged his life since the mid-1960s when he decided in the midst of the fallout from Malcolm X’s murder that the time had come to uncouple himself from the bohemian intellectual buzz of Downtown white society and head to Harlem to reassert his blackness and his true cultural and political soul, choosing a black Muslim name in the process.

Michael Goldfarb’s incisive and unflinching portrait of Baraka on BBC Radio 3 last night reminded us of that crucial juncture in the writer’s life, when he burnt his bridges with the racially tolerant enclave in Greenwich Village, telling shocked, mostly Jewish, liberals that they could do nothing to aid the Negro struggle and that he cared nothing for two young men of Hebrew background who had recently died in Mississippi trying to encourage black voters to register in the South. ‘I have my own dead to mourn for,’ he somewhat coldly explained.

In keeping with the theme of this new five-part series Controversies: American Writing of the 1960s, Goldfarb shows us how cancel culture has been part of the literary cavalcade before, that it was not merely a contemporary phenomenon to blackball speakers on campuses and in other debating arenas where views expressed on race or gender or immigration, for instance, might prove too incendiary to safely marshal.

In this sense, Baraka, previously Everett Leroy Jones, then LeRoi Jones and sometimes Imamu Amear Baraka, through his inflammatory remarks lit his own blue touch paper that would explode his career in polite academic networks for many decades to follow, almost, in fact, for the rest of his life.

His declamations, which so rattled progressive members of the thinking Manhattan set, were actually expressed in quick time in a pair of live discussions held in two famed jazz clubs – the Village Vanguard and the Village Gate – at the very heart of the creative community where the poet and playwright might actually have felt most at home. Perhaps that was why the betrayal felt so cutting. Somebody blew up LeRoi Jones, we might argue, and that somebody was Amiri Baraka.

Until that point, Baraka appeared to be in favour of the fair-minded tolerance of that unique artistic milieu, not colour-blind but willing to give black-white liaisons a sporting chance: he was married to Hettie Cohen, a Jewish woman, had children by her and was a significant activist on the literary scene, through little magazines, as editor and his own writing for the page and the stage.

He particularly dug the musical family around Cooper Square where he lived – a rundown apartment block close to another music venue of consequence the Five Spot – and regularly brushed shoulders with his friends and heroes – Shepp, Monk, Taylor, Coltrane – alongside the Beat fraternity with whom he was on more than merely nodding terms.

One story Goldfarb relates captures much of that excitement. He tells us that Baraka introduced Langston Hughes, giant of the Harlem Renaissance, to Allen Ginsberg at a party where the avant-garde pathfinder Ornette Coleman was providing the live soundtrack, taking jazz to new places, new planets.

Further, and this is of critical moment, the man still known as Jones had published, in 1963, the first history of jazz by a black commentator. In Blues People: Negro Music in White America, which became and remains an agenda-setting text, he provided a typically opinionated overview, one which continues to provide fuel for the debate about music’s part in African American life over centuries.

Goldfarb in the radio show makes an interesting remark about the ways some black Americans distanced themselves from the country blues because it was a style too evocative of the pain and horror of slavery. It prompted this presenter to investigate this terrain from a Jewish position – did some Jews in the 150 years pre-Holocaust abandon the shtetl experience of Yiddish theatre and klezmer to sever their ties with the searing memories of persecution? – in his 2009 book entitled Emancipation: How Liberating Europe's Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance.

But for Baraka, the life of a black artist in the post-war US – and intriguingly never once does this documentary mention the word Beat – was an enduringly problematic one. As he said during this period of personal and more general turmoil: ‘The minute you become anyhow, anyway, accepted or known or thought of in good stead in white society what have you done to be that?’ He confessed: ‘I have that constant paranoia.’

Note: Michael Goldfarb’s series Controversies considers four other US novelists who experienced critical difficulties during this period – William Styron, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and Joan Williams.

See also: ‘Radio review #1: “Song to the Siren”’, December 8th, 2021