African-American History

Baraka: (right) I see it as a continuation. I also became an editor because I wanted to publish my own work when I was young. I never believed in waiting for anybody to publish me. I never believed I was going to be discovered by nobody. I never believed that somebody was going to say, hey, I want to publish you. I thought that if anybody was going to publish me it was going to be me. I’m not going to make believe, I’m just going to publish. Why? Because I wrote it. I want it out. That’s it. Why did I do a magazine? Because I thought that there were a lot writers like myself who needed to be published. I think you all, you writers, you publish your stuff. All you need is a mimeograph. You don’t need a whole lot of money and stuff. In this day and age of Kinko’s--we didn’t have that when I was coming up--you can get twenty books published in five minutes. For the next poetry reading you can print twenty or thirty books and then sell them. I would do that. You love the poetry, you’re writing the poetry, put it together, charge a couple of dollars for it. You can make the money back you spent and get your work out. To me that’s the best armament for writers. Always have your stuff with you. Always. Mash it on somebody. Sell it. Give it away. You’re a writer, you want people to read your work. Right? That’s what you want. If you want to get rich, get into another field! But if you want to write, you want people to read your writing, well then, write it down and publish it, give it away. People been holding on to their writings talking about, one day, the sun god is going to come down and discover me, and make me chief editor of Playboy. You know that kind of stuff. Whoever discovers you is going to turn you into something you wish you wasn’t, I’ll tell you that. They used to tell me all the time when I was down in the village, so and so sold out, so and so sold out. I would say, well, where’s the office. Ain’t nobody asked me. They was discriminating even in selling out.

Don’t wait for anything. Just wait for your own agreement. When you think you’re ready. Two poems. One poem. A broadside. Anything. Get it out. Because if you don’t, you’re constipating yourself. It’s true. You walk around with a whole sheaf of stuff that you’re not publishing, that’s constipation because your mind is fixed on that, and you’re not going to do much until you get that out of you. And once you--even if it’s on Kinko's paper-- do something with it, it’s out of you. That act will get it out of you and then you can go on to your next thing. But you have got to do it.

ya Salaam: Talk a bit about poetry specifically and literature in general as sound rather than as text. We’ve been talking about text for the most part.

Baraka: First, the music. Always being intensely interested in the music, I always tried to use the music as a catalyst and a kind of object lesson or a paradigm for my own work. It comes from Langston who said, I try to use the forms and content of Black music, of jazz and blues. I was trying to do that. As far as the sounds are concerned I always thought of myself as a saxophone player or a drummer, and a trumpet player I guess, in terms of the poetry.  I always thought too that the sound of the voice is important. Just the sound of your voice has an aesthetic quality to it. In order words, it's tonal. It has timbre to it, it has a sound, and that that sound is useful in terms of poetry. For me it always goes back to musical sounds, how do you replicate musical sounds, how do you replicate the percussive kind of catalyst that our music rides on.

ya Salaam: But why music?

Baraka:  Because poetry is nothing but music. Poetry is words given the musical emphasis. It’s nothing but music. If you don’t like music, then you shouldn’t be no poet. I don’t think you should be a writer, but then that might be biased. I know that there were several European writers who hated music. I don’t know how they could make it, because language is musical, rhythmic.

ya Salaam: With performance, where did you pick that up? In the early years we can imagine you sitting down and reading your poetry, but by the seventies, no one can imagine you sitting down in a chair and reading It’s Nationtime.

Baraka:  That’s a combination of things. One, the first person I saw reading poetry to music was Langston Hughes. I had never thought that you were not supposed to. I never came into the world thinking that poetry and music were divorced. I always thought that they should be together. Why did I think that? From the blues, that’s where I took my thing from, the blues. I always liked that. Larry Darnell. The old talking blues, I loved that. Lighting Hopkins. Charles Brown. That’s where I was coming from. And all them "bird" groups: The Orioles, The Ravens, The Flamingos. I used to walk down the halls of high school doing that. I thought it was hip. Also, that’s the activism coming in to it. I read a guy named Brown, I think it was W. W. Brown in England, who said, you can always tell when the activist period is coming in politics because theatre becomes dominant. At the point where words turn to action. When theatre comes in, when real theatre is dominant, then it means that people are getting ready to go to war, getting ready to make revolutionary change. Why? Because it means that they are actually going to do it and not just observe. I began to notice that my poetry began to have talking in it. Conversations in the poem. With people’s names like in a play except this was before I started writing plays. And then the more I got busy actually, started working in Harlem, went to Cuba six months after the revolution, we were trying to send guns down to Robert Williams. The more I got into activism, the more the language changed. Then I met people like Askia Toure.

Askia always had that singing quality, that kind of epic quality like reciting the work. Larry Neal had that singing quality. Those were influences on my reading style, but it was the music that took it. So I guess, the music in combination with the activism.

ya Salaam: By the time you were doing Black Art, Sabotage, Target Study and some of those books, the poems actually had instructions for gestures in them in parenthesis.

Baraka:  Right. Right. And that’s just making your way. You don’t know where you’re headed but that’s where it’s headed. First, the poetry is headed up on the stage. It’s going to come out of somebody’s mouth in a minute. You’re writing it as a poem, but in a minute you’re going to put it in somebody’s mouth and they’re going to be up on a stage. With that sound, you could write poetry but have some people say it. It was a much more popular form than theatre. I love theatre, I love it’s results. You have to deal with a lot of nuts, but I still love theatre. That’s really a sad thing, that we don’t have a repertory company that you can’t just see the works of an O’Neal, Langston, Zora, Tennessee Williams, that’s horrible, all the great works. Why we don’t have it? Because that stuff is dangerous. If they start doing the historical literature of America: White, Black, Latino, Asian. Hey, it’s so hot, in terms of what it’s saying about this, not just us. Look at O’Neal’s The Hairy Ape or Waiting For Lefty. Those are hell of plays. They don’t want young people to come in and look at that every day. Tennessee Williams, to me, is the greatest of American playwrights. His portrait of America is out to lunch. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Sweet Bird Of Youth, look at that. I’ll tell you the one, Suddenly Last Summer. You want to see something, see that. It’s a portrait of colonialism and a portrait of America. The White thing to Williams was a symbol of craziness and decadence, though White he may be.

ya Salaam: Whenever somebody asks you a question about basketball, we end up on a football field with a reference to baseball. I still want to know about the basketball. Your performance style as a poet.

Baraka:  My performance style came from listening to other people influenced by the music and the political activism, I think. The fact that I was interested and attached to the music, attached, I mean I used to live over the Five Spot. When Monk and Trane played there, I was there every night. I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean literally. I would go downstairs and Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane would be in there getting ready to play, where was I going to go? It was incredible. I think also that shaped a lot of my ways of seeing things. Like these group of stories I’m writing on the musicians about Sun Ra, and Monk, Walter Davis, Don Pullen, Albert Ayler. People I knew. The way they talked, the music they played, that’s very important. That influenced me a great deal. The performance style is wanting to be a horn but also the activist. Having to speak before people, speaking before hundreds and thousands of people. In the street, trying to move people in the street.

And then there was the fact of performing for the people. I’ll tell you, my class, anybody, you think your work is good, read it to some of these brothers on the street, you know the ones who be digging holes in the ground and they have a half hour break and they be sitting there eating them sandwiches on break. Read your stuff to them and see if it interests them. They are not blocks, nor stones, nor worthless, senseless things. They are human beings. See if your work can reach them. Dare that. That’s your people. In that situation of being out in the street having to deal with people on the real side, then you have to come up with the real thing. You have to make your feelings translatable, reachable. You have to move people and not with no "do it baby, do it baby, do it baby." Not like that. But with the kind of depth and profundity you’re really talking about. How do you actually reach the people with a message of profundity and not some kind of artificial garbage that comes out everyday on the hit parade? You know what I mean, you hear the lyrics to them songs, they say the same thing all the time. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the lyrics, it’s (begins pounding monotonously on the table), if I do that your heart’s going to pick it up. Your heart picks up the beat, you can’t help it, and I could be saying: you’re stupid, you’re stupid!, you’re stupid! You need to kill yourself! And you would do it, you will start to say, I’m stupid, I’m stupid, I’m stupid! I need to kill myself. (Laughter.) They do it everyday on television, don’t they. Everyday. And you’ll be walking down the street, if you don’t catch yourself, die, die, die, I’m stupid, I’m stupid, I’m stupid. They know it don’t take nothing but that (beating). Your heart assumes the beat.

ya Salaam: It’s like people say, I didn’t understand everything they said, but you could dance to it.

Baraka:  That’s the point. See? If you notice, now, rap and reggae have gotten intelligible, whereas before--Bob Marley was very clear. Try to understand these people now. See if you can understand what they’re saying. That’s movement into another thing. To me, the point of art is communication. Now, I ain’t saying how or what, but that’s the point of it communication.

ya Salaam: Is emotional communication, for you, as valid as intellectual communication?

Baraka: I don’t see that kind of separation. I mean I can see it in certain kinds of tortured kinds of definitions, but to me, I would say, what can not feel, can not think. What can not feel, can not think. That’s what I think about that! The whole European thing about thought and emotion being at odds is bizarre. That’s like Wagner and the birth of tragedy talking about emotionalism interferes with his thought; well, your thought is messed up. I mean if you Hitler’s hero, I can see that. That’s always been one definition of that kind of tortured, alienated Euro-sensibility. I’m saying that not so much in terms of nationalism, but rather as an identification of the kind of psychology that has developed out of capitalism, because you can’t feel if you’re going to torture people. You can’t feel if you’re going to have slaves. You have to then find a way to define profundity as alienated from feeling, otherwise you can’t have no slaves. You can’t be whipping people’s ass and doing all kinds of terrible things and celebrating feeling at the same time, you know what a mean? Because otherwise you’d be saying, oh, my god, look at that, oh, no that’s bad. Have you ever been to the slave castles in Africa? If you get a chance, check those out. They’ll do wonders for you in terms of why the people who created slavery, can not feel, or rather, why you must not feel.

ya Salaam: And why you must celebrate thinking above feeling.

Baraka:  Right. Why you must elevate the intellectual process above emotions, cause you couldn’t possibly feel because then you couldn’t make that money. For instance, my son Ras and I went up there in Goree. He had just graduated from college and we went over there, and when we went to the slave castle and we sat up there in this dungeon with the door closed and everything, tears started coming out of our eyes. The two of us sitting there, father and son, not saying a word, just sitting there crying. Why? I don't know. It's just that feeling is too strong, it's too strong. You sit in there and there's a window (pointing towards the twelve-foot high ceiling) about up to where that chandelier is, you have to leap up there just to see the ocean. Imagine fifty Black people in there trying to survive. You just sit there and suddenly, psychologically you begin to feel it on you. It's something. You don't want that but you start feeling it. I remember we came out of there crying and when we came out in the open, it was a group of French tourists walking towards us, and Ras says to me, Imamu, what they want? What do these White people want? At another point I stood by a wall that had those chains on it and I put my arms in the chains and said, Rashida, take a picture of this. She said, no. I said, Rashida, take a picture of this. She said, no, no, no, and she started crying. She said, no, I'm not taking a picture of that. That thing grips you. When you come into that, when you actually come close to slavery itself--I don't mean stories of it, but when you actually get close to it, it will do something to you. No doubt about it. They got a hole in the wall, the door of no return and if you couldn't make it they would just kick you aside into the ocean. A lot of the people had never seen the ocean, you know, because they were from inland. They had seen lakes. They might jump out there and think they could swim it, might think it was a lake, but that was the Atlantic ocean and the sharks be circling down in there. Now when you conceive that and conceive that there were people upstairs over the prison, who lived there, who had a little hatch, like that light in the ceiling, a trap door in their floor where they could look through there and check on the slaves, you understand what I'm saying? You've got to be a cold mamajamma to do that. People down there (makes screaming sounds) screaming and what not, and you can pick up the door, you have your dinner and [sh--] upstairs and you could pick up the door and look down and see what was happening with that, well, you can't have no feeling with that. Feeling has to be abolished. That's why I'm saying they make that separation between the intellectual process and emotion. But I say, if you can't feel you can't think. That's my feeling about that. That's why we ask philosophers every morning, how you feel? (Laughter.) That's it.

ya Salaam: When you spoke of DuBois and the rhythms and forms he used, do you think they had trouble with DuBois' rhythms or his content?

Baraka:  It's always the content. Always the content. Form is secondary, always. Each class has its own politics and that's what it's about. That's what literary criticism is: a form of class struggle. In the literary canon that was just published by the Encyclopedia Britannica, the greatest books in the world, there's no Black people in there. There's no Brown people, Yellow people, there's nothing in there. There's one woman in there, Wilma Catha, the Catholic writer, and all White men. They had a little disclaimer, well not a disclaimer, I guess you would say "claimer" where they explained that DuBois almost made it, but he kept insisting on talking about real [sh--]. It is in essence political. Like the man said, the most dangerous thing the devil does is convince you he don't exist. That's why the man says, politics, ah that's too political to be art. But you're fighting politics against politics. You mean to tell me you really believe their stuff is great. Look at it. Tell me what you think of it.

If you are not forced--and that's what your education does, force you to accept something you would not accept otherwise. The middle class is taught to be bored. You could sit there and be bored, and be bored, and be bored because somebody has told you that's some hip [sh--]. And you start to say, oh, yes, yes. And all the while they be beating you up. But see the average working person won't go for that. They said that's corny, I'm getting out of here. But we've been taught by our education to go for it, to stay there. You might hate it, it might be ugly, it might be nonsensical, but, it's deep! (Laughter.) Oh, my god, when you imagine all the hours and hours of your life you have spent investigating trash, and garbage and stupidity. It's incredible. It's the politics. Form is important but I think content is more important. What you are saying is more important than how you are saying it, but at the same time, how you say it is important because if you don't say it in a way that people can understand you than then there's no use in you saying it. The form that you develop has to suit that content, has to be a vehicle for your content, it should enhance that content. It's not form our critics be objecting to, finally though, it's the content, it's the politics.

Djali Dialogue with Amiri Baraka - Part I

Djali Dialogue with Amiri Baraka - Part II