African-American History

In addition to his creative work as a writer, Baraka is also a social activist. Baraka was a founder of the Congress of Afrikan People and the National Black Political Assembly as well as a major member of the Afrikan Liberation Support Committee. In the late sixties, Ebony Magazine listed Baraka as one of the 100 most influential Black leaders. Baraka started his professional life as a writer in Greenwich Village, moved on to become a Black Nationalist, and in 1974 converted to Marxism.

Baraka lives, writes and continues to be active in politics in his hometown of Newark, NJ.

This discussion with Amiri Baraka covers his development as a writer and his views on the craft and impact of writing. Baraka discusses in detail his formative years and gives an in-depth insight into his own approaches to style and technique in writing.

Advice to Young Writers: Amiri Baraka

On February 17, 1998 Amiri Baraka offered words of advice to aspiring writers of NOMMO Literary Society, a New Orleans based writing workshop founded by Kalamu ya Salaam. Baraka not only gave advice, he also expounded on his viewpoint concerning the importance and process of writing. In the process he often revealed both his idiosyncrasies as well as his insights. Filled with humor and highlighted by gestures and copious use of body english, the conversation was informal in tone and lasted over two hours. Baraka’s sharing was neither a lecture nor prepared speech, but rather was made up of spontaneous comments from the heart. The following is an edited transcript of that sharing.

Amiri Baraka was one of the first people to introduce to me [Kalamu ya Salaam] the possibility that you could write "Black" and at the same time write anything you wanted - Blackness was not a formula. There was no specific mode you had to fit in. Back in the day, it would be interesting when The Journal of Black Poetry or some of the other journals would come out, Baraka would have a poem like "SOS"--calling all Black people, calling all Black people, SOS, Come in, wherever you are, calling you, come in, come in--stuff like that which everybody could relate to. And then, he would have some weird-a-- [sh--]. You would go, damn, what was that. Since that time he has gone through various ideological developments, some people would call it changes, but I think he would choose to call them developments, in an effort to become clearer politically, but he has always maintained an oppositional stance to the status quo while balancing popular and experimental forms. Some of Baraka’s literature is what I would call "popular literature" written for the masses that not even Joe Blow the wino would misunderstand what is being said, and another part of his literature was written for, as he would say, the advanced, for people who want to sit down and study and peep some things philosophically and politically. He has agreed to take some time and talk a bit about his advice to young writers and to talk a bit about his approach to writing.

ya Salaam: Amiri, was it a conscious decision to write both what academe would call "agit-prop" pieces which have a mass orientation, and also these, for lack of better term, these way out experimental pieces?

Baraka: No, I think the culture is that broad. I don’t feel any less Black trying to find out something I don’t know than trying to say something I do know. At one point, you are always trying to find out more which always leaves what you’re saying seemingly more discursive because you are not quite clear on what you’re saying. But you know a lot of things clarify themselves as you get older. When I wrote that play Dutchman, I didn’t know what I had written. I stayed up all night and wrote it, went to sleep at the desk and then woke up, and looked at it and said "what the [f---] is this?" And then put it down and went to bed. (Laughter.) Some things you know absolutely what you’re saying, you’re absolutely clear. Bang, it’s an idea you want to express. Sometimes though you can’t limit your mind by what you know. You have to always figure that you can hold on and you just open your mind to where it wants to go to, which you don’t know at the time, but if it’s legitimate, you’ll find out what you’re saying.

See, there are levels. Can you understand the levels of what knowledge is? The first level of knowledge is perception. Perception is nothing but a sponge. Everything you are around, you pick it up. You might not even know it, but your mind is just picking up stuff like a blotter. The second level is rationalization, you actually name it. Oh, that was this. But the highest form of knowledge is use. For example, I can say I know about the piano. I know all kind of stuff about the piano, about music, but then they say: can you play? I say, oh, no I can’t play. You can conceive all kinds of things and give them names, but of that myriad of perceptions and rationales, how much of it can you use? A lot of stuff you do that is reaching out is really you trying to clarify stuff for yourself.

I always got the feeling that, well, I guess maybe some of it comes from Dumas. You know Henry Dumas’ work? Dumas was a great writer of the Black Arts Movement, murdered by the police. Ark of Bones, those stories, great stories. I think Toni Morrison cops from him a lot. She really is influenced a lot by Henry Dumas, more than a lot of people know. The whole fascination with the bizarre, with the hidden. Mosely’s first book is like that, Gone Fishin’. Yall read that book? You should read that. That’s a much heavier book than those detective stories. But that kind book where you walk in the Black community and suddenly it’s like you’re opening the door to a whole other world. You step into there and all kinds of wild things happen. Like that Dumas story Fon where these White people stop this brother at night on a road like they going to lynch him or something like that. He leads them to this abandoned city where there’s Black people’s ghosts still living their lives. That never occurred to me that you follow blood down the road and that might lead you to a ghost town and then suddenly an arrow comes out of the night. And when they start messing with him, he says, my brothers are watching you. You better watch out and they don’t believe him, and suddenly this arrow comes--twing through the air and gets them through the neck. Well, that opened up a lot in me because I started thinking about well, yeah, I know some Black people look like they be doing stuff like that.

Also, Larry Neal had a story about religion, a weird church. These Black people had a church and they had Jesus up in there beating him. It was like a White Jesus and they had in this storefront church. That’s what they would do every Sunday, they would go to church and whip this White boy up in the church, and then they would, I guess, lock him up till the next Sunday. I don’t know what that was. It was the sense of the strange, the bizarre. So, I’ve been writing these stories about these Black inventors. They are just brothers you see in the community, they’re not in the University of Nowhere.

They are just in the community and might call you up and say, why don’t you come over and check my stuff out, I got something new. And you go over there and they might have a machine that might do any number of things.

I think that idea of the depth and sometimes bizarre quality, sometimes profound quality of Black life, sometimes we miss that when we have to deal with the beast everyday. I’m talking biblically, Revelations. When you have to deal with the beast everyday you forget that there’s John sitting there, John the Revelator. You know everybody didn’t see no stuff flying through the air. You know four horsemen of the apocalypse, everybody didn’t see that. Now John was sitting there looking at all of that, but everybody looking up at the sky didn’t see that. That sense of wonder, of revelations, has always intrigued me about Black people. I guess in our everyday struggles with 666 we sometimes forget that there are some very wonderful, miraculous things that Black people do. I saw this Negro play some spoons with an amplifier on it. Who would think about that? Who would look at a spoon and say, I know what, I’m going to amplify this sucker. That doesn’t seem like an everyday concern.

I think it’s that sense of the bizarre, the sense of the wonderful, and also the sense of the comic. In my studies of world Black culture, there still the smile at the bottom of the world. You know the masks of drama, one smiles, one frowns? That geography, that’s aesthetics, that smile at the bottom of the world. That sense of the wonderful, the bizarre, and the comic, I was always intrigued by that.

ya Salaam: It’s one thing to have that sense, and it’s another thing to have the technical facility to put that sensibility on the page.

Baraka: Practice. Practice. Practice. I think that’s the only thing you can do. Like my grandmother said, practice makes perfect. To do anything you have to practice. You have to do it. If you don’t do it, you won’t do it. You can’t be a writer in your head, just like you can’t play the piano in your head. I’m the meanest piano player I know--in my head. I can play some piano in my head, it’s just when I get to the piano it gets difficult. You have to work at it.

And then I think, young writers, you have to get to the point where you start grading your work. At first when you start doing it, everything is great. Everything you write is valuable and you must (mimics holding stuff to his chest), this is my work, this a poem I wrote in nineteen-whatever. That’s normal but you have to work through that and get over that. I’m not saying get to the point where you think your work is expendable, but get to the point where you can grade it.

You know the worse thing you can do is write a "you-poem." Nobody can imitate you like you. I can write a hundred poems that I write, but those are "you poems." Those are poems using the things that you know are you. Once you become practiced in writing then you have certain skills that you can put a poem together, but the point is that it won’t have any substance to it. There won’t be any moving, there won’t be any life in it, any heart in it, cause you can imitate yourself.

The whole point of developing the skill is so that the words fly on the rhythm. You feel the rhythm before you know what you’re talking about. If you trust the rhythm and you’ve worked so that you don’t have a lot of dumb stuff in your mind all the time. (Laugher.) No, it’s true, because you might want to write about McDonald’s boxes, I don’t know. That’s why Mao says--and this is very important--when we look at your work we can tell what you love and what you hate, what you celebrate and what you put down, and we can also tell what work you’re doing and what study you’re doing. We can tell what you’re concerned with, we can tell by your writing, what you know and what you don’t know.

Now, the lyric poet is, of course, the great hidden personality of our time. They can write about "I"--I feel, I want, I do, I am--and really be hiding the world because all they’re talking about is this great vacuum in my heart that must be filled by, I don’t know, ice cream cones, a walk down the street, another person. You know what I mean, it could be anything? That’s the lyric "I"--I want, I need. But actually to begin to talk about who is I and where is I in the world among all the other I’s, and how that relates to a real objectively existing world that exists independent of us. The world exists independently of us--if you can get that in your mind. The world does not depend on you to exist, it exists independent of you. That’s hard sometimes, because we’re so subjective, especially we great artists, we think the whole world is in our heads. It’s not. The world exists independent of your will. Things will happen you don’t want to happen. How did we get here?

That point of writing past the preservation of everything, being able to grade your work--you know what I mean, being able to tell the fake from the true--and of getting past imitating yourself, those are important things.

Also, going back to Mao Tse-Tung. You ever read the Yenan Forum written in 1941? Mao was trying to build the communist party and one of the things he was talking about was intellectuals. What is the role of the intellectual? What is the role of artist in making social transformation? Now, if anybody needs to know that it’s us. That is what Yenan is about. The first question he asks: for whom does one write? Who are you writing for? Why are you interested in writing? Is it to titillate your own compulsive personality? What is it for? That’s a good point. Think about it sometimes. Once you begin to isolate "for whom" then you also know "what it is." How do I explain what has gone down in this world for us?

So, when people be going up to me and saying Baraka you always political, I say why do you want me to be different from. You want me to be different from Baldwin, you want me to be different from Lorraine Hansberry, you want me to be different from Langston Hughes, or DuBois? Who should I get away from? Our tradition is intensely political. And for this recent group--and I’m not trying to categorize you in age terms--but for this recent little group of buppies that they’re publishing who think that somehow writing is not a political act, that always has been around but it’s something that Black people and indeed the people of the world have flogged.

Anyway, that’s a very important question--for whom?--because for whom answers why. You want to know for whom, look at your work. Who does it celebrate, who does it put down, who does it think is beautiful, who does it think is ugly, what work are you doing, what study? We can see it in there. We don’t have to ask you nothing, you give me your poetry or literature, I read it and I know a lot about you just from reading that. You could be writing about something you think is totally disguised, don’t have nothing to do with your life, you could be writing about Johnny Jojo way over there in Nobo land, you know, but it bees about you. That’s what it bees about. Why? Because that’s all you know about. It bees about us.

That’s another thing, a lot of people get frightened at; once they know that people know that when you write something, it’s about you, Jim, it ain’t about that one, it’s about you, then people get constipated. They don’t want to expose themselves. People be saying, I don’t know how he could write that book, Baraka you... hey, what I care. You be dead in a minute, people will read it--I always thought that if you felt strongly about a thing then you would face it.

For me, I had come out of a lil petite-bourgeois family, my mother was a social worker, my father was a postman, they always told me: y'all, are the smartest colored kids on the planet. They gave me piano lessons, trumpet lessons, drum lessons, piano lessons, painting lessons. I used to sing Ave Maria with my sister. I used to recite the Gettysburg Address every Lincoln’s birthday in a Boy Scout suit for about six years--this was my mama. The point is that for them two Negroes right there, they knew what they were going to do, they were going to give us all the information in the world, and they was going to equip us to go out and fight the White people. That’s where my people were coming from. Why? Because they wanted that. You were fighting for them. I never knew that, I never understood what they had planned for me until one night when the White people came--I had this play, Dutchman, and all of these papers, they were calling me names and all kinds of things, stupid, crazy, evil, but I could see that they were going to make me famous.

The minute that that came to my mind that they were going to make me famous, I said, now, I’m going to pay your ass back. (Laughter.) Naw, it was very clear. It was like, bump. I could see how my mama had put the shell in there. Click. Right. Oh, you gon make him famous, I got some shit for you. That’s what it was, it was like you had been doctored on by masters. You understand? Every night at dinner, they’d be running it. You’re sitting there eating biscuits and what not, and they would be running it. They would be telling you the history of the south, the history of Black people, the history of Black music and you would be sitting there. They were actually teaching you. But I didn’t know that then. My grandmother would tell me all the time about this Black boy they accused of raping this woman and they cut off his genitals and stuffed them in his mouth and then made all the Black women come there and watch. My grandmother told me that story when I was a little boy. Why would your grandmother tell you that story? Because she wanted you to remember that shit forever. You understand? Sweet little old lady from Alabama would sit you down, give you something to eat, and tell you this horrible story, and then you trying to figure out: why would she tell me that story? Why would she tell you that story? Oh, you still know the story, you still got it in your mind, sixty years later, you still remember that story?--"yeah, I remember it"--in detail?--"absolutely"--well that’s why she told it to you.

I don’t know if y'all still have that in your homes, I can’t speak on that, but I know that is what we as writers have to do, continue that tradition. The only way I can see that tradition being extended is through the role and function of the writer in the community.

Djali Dialogue with Amiri Baraka - Part II

Kalamu ya Salaam is a New Orleans-based writer and former editor (1970-1983) of The THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Magazine. Salaam moderates CyberDrum, a listserv of over 500 Black writers and diverse supporters of literature. Salaam can be reached at kalamu@aol.com

*"Djali" is the Wolof (from Senegal) term for what many people know as "griot," the traditional African historian/musician/poet.