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Controversy a hallmark of poet's life
Monday, October 14, 2002
By PAUL H. JOHNSON
Staff Writer
The Air Force kicked him out. Howard University flunked him. Rutgers University denied him tenure. So it comes as little surprise to Amiri Baraka that the governor of New Jersey wants to fire him.
Baraka, 68, who was born Everett Leroy Jones - amiri means "commander" and baraka means "blessing" in Swahili - has been ensnared in one controversy or another since arriving on the literary scene nearly a half-century ago. He has been called an anti-Semite, a sexist, a racist, and a homophobe - as well as one of the nation's greatest living poets.
What does surprise Baraka is that Governor McGreevey and others did not realize that his unheralded appointment as New Jersey's poet laureate would lead to the level of outrage swirling around a poem that only recently came to light.
"If you're going to appoint someone poet laureate, you would presume they would know something about their work,'' Baraka said from his comfortable Newark home, decorated with jazz art and overflowing with books. He was born in Newark and has lived there nearly all his life.
To some New Jersey legislators, Baraka is an irritant that needs to be removed. His poem "Somebody Blew Up America," they say, spreads the dangerous lie that Israel had advance knowledge of the attack on the World Trade Center.
"The removal of Amiri Baraka as New Jersey poet laureate is merited because of his insensitive statements to the Jewish community," said state Sen. John C. Coniglio, D-Paramus. "An official state position cannot be used to spread malice, divisiveness, and hate."
Coniglio and other state senators have sponsored a bill that would empower McGreevey to fire Baraka and give the state Senate approval power over poet laureate nominees.
Baraka vows to resist his removal.
"If they want to fight, I'll fight,'' he thundered.
Although Baraka is one of the nation's most reviled poets at the moment, he also is one of the most successful writers New Jersey has produced. He is on a par with poets William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsburg, both of whom became embroiled in their fair share of controversy. Baraka also is one of the foremost jazz essayists in American history and an important playwright who made a name in the vibrant world of off-Broadway theater in the 1960s.
Baraka has been a Guggenheim Fellow and won a PEN/Faulkner award, an Obie, (the off-Broadway equivalent of the Tony), the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, and the Langston Hughes Award for Poetry. He has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been the subject of biographies, doctoral dissertations, and academic panels.
"As a contemporary American artist, Baraka must be ranked with the likes of John Coltrane, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, and Thomas Pynchon," wrote literary critic William J. Harris.
Even some of his opponents grudgingly acknowledge Baraka's skill as a writer.
"He actually has some talent as a poet, I'm sorry to say," said Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Association of America.
There is perhaps no other poet more closely associated with Newark or the black power movement than Baraka.
"He is an integral part of the history of Newark. He played a major role in the transition to black power in Newark," said Lawrence Hamm, a former member of the Newark Board of Education and current president of the People's Organization for Progress, a civil rights group. Hamm was in high school when he met Baraka in the 1970s.
"He was very instrumental for many of us. We had missed Dr. King, we missed Malcolm X. [Baraka] did for us what they did for his generation," Hamm said.
An avowed Marxist, Baraka has been a Greenwich Village beat poet and a black nationalist. He was married to a Jewish woman, but they divorced when he joined the black power movement in the wake of Malcolm X's 1965 murder.
Although Baraka penned gay-themed plays, in his essays he taunted gay writer James Baldwin in the 1960s. The two reconciled in the 1970s.
Baraka supported Kenneth Gibson when Gibson became Newark's first black mayor, but then spurned him when he adopted pro-business policies. Baraka acknowledges embracing and shedding more identities - and friends - than most people.
"Baraka has had a long and complicated career,'' said Sarah Lawrence College Professor Koomzie Woodard, author of "Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics."
Baraka, who taught for years at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and and is a professor emeritus there, was denied tenure at Rutgers in 1990. He had been a visiting professor at the state university.
Baraka briefly attended Rutgers and then Howard University, where he flunked out. He then joined the Air Force, where he read book after book to counter the tedium of military life. Before long, he was ejected from the military for "unbecoming behavior." He found it to be a blessing in disguise because he could pursue his poetry.
Baraka soon became a part of the beat generation of poets who congregated in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. He married a fellow poet, Hettie Cohen, who is white, and wrote poetry under the name LeRoi Jones, a French twist of his birth name.
After Malcolm X's death, Baraka abruptly left his first wife, moved to Harlem, and embraced the black power movement. There he met his current wife, Amina Baraka.
"I responded like my generation,'' Baraka said of his transformation from beatnik to black radical. "When they killed Malcolm X, they affected a lot of African-Americans. We thought somebody had to pay."
He moved back to Newark, where he began organizing politically.
He became the arch foe of Anthony Imperiale, Newark's self-described "Italian-American civil rights leader."
Baraka helped elect Gibson but later broke with the mayor and the black power movement because he felt that Gibson promoted business interests over the needs of the poor.
"We thought naively that all we had to do is get rid of white people and get some black faces in there and we'd get some real change,'' Baraka said.
It was then that Baraka fully embraced Marxism.
He only recently made peace with Sharpe James, the current mayor of Newark. Baraka's son Ras Baraka, who ran unsuccessfully for City Council last spring, is a deputy mayor. His daughter from his first marriage, Lisa Jones, is a widely published writer who for many years had a column in the Village Voice. Baraka has six other children.
This year, Baraka was appointed the state's second poet laureate. "Somebody Blew Up America," which he wrote in October 2001, got him into hot water last month.
Baraka read the poem at festivals worldwide but it was not until he read it at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poetry Festival in Stanhope on Sept. 19 that he sparked the anger of Jewish groups. The offending lines were:
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?
Baraka insists he is not an anti-Semite but clings to a theory that Israel, President Bush, and other Western leaders knew about the impending terrorism but did nothing to stop it.
The Zionist Association's Klein said Baraka's beliefs are rooted in the anti-Semitic diatribes of radical Muslim imams in the Middle East who started spreading the lie of Israeli involvement shortly after 9/11. The imams said Israel's goal was to make Arabs look bad in the eyes of the world.
The Anti-Defamation League has a Web page cataloging what it says are Baraka's other anti-Semitic statements.
"This first lie came out of the same newspapers that promote the most vicious anti-Semitism we've seen since the Nazis," Klein said. He also dismissed Baraka's claim that he is criticizing only Israel, not all Jews.
"You think if I condemned Italy as a vicious human rights-abusing country, would I have some antipathy toward Italians?'' Klein said.
Although the focus has been on the 9/11 passage that is considered offensive to Jews, "Somebody Blew Up America" is a stream of rhetorical questions about imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and genocide. Among its lines:
Who put the Jews in ovens, and who helped them do it
Who said 'America First' and ok'd the yellow stars
Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the Rosenbergs
Baraka's supporters hope the conflict over his poem dies down soon.
"It's really unfortunate that people have become polarized like this. I think the situation is unwarranted, and I say it smacks of a degree of political opportunism," said Hamm, of the People's Organization for Progress.
"I think it is legitimate for this to be debated and argued in the public arena, but once you start taking it at the political level and pass laws that are aimed at one person, you're getting yourself into constitutional quicksand. I think people will wish, when this is over, they had handled it in a different way," Hamm said.
The controversy reminds Baraka of the reaction to his friend Ginsburg's poem "Howl," which was banned for its obscenity in the 1950s and was the subject of a widely publicized trial.
After "Howl" was published, Baraka wrote Ginsburg a note on toilet paper asking simply, "Are you for real?" Ginsburg responded - also on toilet paper - "I am tired of being Allen Ginsburg."
Baraka understands the sentiment.
"I know what he means now.''
***
Works by Amiri Baraka
Poetry
Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961)
The Dead Lecturer (1964)
Black Art (1969)
It's Nation Time (1970)
Wise Why's Y's: The Griot's Tale (1995)
Funk Lore: New Poems (1984-1995) (1996)
Drama
Dutchman and The Slave: Two Plays (1964)
The Baptism and The Toilet (1967)
Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself (1967)
Home on the Range (1968)
Police (1968)
The Death of Malcolm X (1969)
Rockgroup (1969)
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, All Praises to the Black Man (1969)
Junkies Are Full of (SHHH...) (1970)
Jello (1970)
BA-RA-KA (1972)
Black Power Chant (1972)
The Motion of History, and Other Plays (1978) includes Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant and S-1
Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979)
The Sidney Poet Heroical, in 29 Scenes (1979)
General Hag's Skeezag (1992)
Fiction
The System of Dante's Hell (1965)
Tales (1967)
Three Books by Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) (1975)
Non-Fiction Essays
Home: Social Essays (1966)
Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1984)
Jesse Jackson & Black People (1996)
***
BIO
1934: Born Everett Leroy Jones in Newark, the son of Colt Leroy Jones, a postal supervisor, and Anna Lois Jones, a social worker.
1952: Attended Rutgers and then transferred to Howard University. He dropped out of Howard to join the Air Force.
1958: Married Hettie Cohen, who is Jewish, and co-edited the poetry journal Yugen. Adopted the name LeRoi Jones.
1961: Published first volume of poetry, "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note," traveled to Cuba to meet Fidel Castro, wrote the essay "Cuba Libre," and had his play "Dante" performed at the Bowery Theater.
1964: His most famous play, "The Dutchman," premiered at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York City. The play won an Obie award for best off-Broadway play.
1965: In the wake of the murder of Malcolm X, he left his wife and moved to Harlem, where he founded the Black Arts/Theater Repertory School. Performed poetry and drama throughout Harlem. Left Harlem and moved permanently to Newark.
1967: Founded Spirit House Players and other political and cultural organizations in Newark, such as United Brothers and the Committee for a Unified Newark. Riots devastated Newark.
1968: Dropped name LeRoi Jones for Swahili name Amiri Baraka.
1970: A slate of candidates backed by the Committee for a Unified Newark won citywide elections. Kenneth Gibson elected city's first black mayor.
1972: Served as secretary general of the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Ind., which adopted a nationwide black agenda.
1974: Abandoned black power movement and embraced Marxism.
1984: Published "The Autobiography of Leroy Jones."
1990: Denied tenure by Rutgers University.
2001: In wake of attack on the World Trade Center, wrote poem "Somebody Blew Up America."
2002: Appointed New Jersey poet laureate.
Paul H. Johnson's e-mail address is
johnsonp@northjersey.com
OK.
I give up.
Who?