america adrift

Picking up on the following remark from vol. 1 of this post, I want to focus on the role (or lack thereof) of African-Americans in the Beat movement:

Representations of the racial Other in the Beat ‘canon’ also are problematic. Kerouac notoriously idolized the racial Other as a Fellaheen primitive, who was more in touch with the land and with the immediacy of human needs and urges, and whose creativity was somehow primordial, and usually pre-linguistic. Thus the great jazz-men of On the Road blow tremendously, but rarely speak – in fact it is their animalistic qualities that are always singled out as their distinguishing marks. The most acute analysis of this figuration of the racial other as the sociopathic, orgasm-directed figure, prowling the subconscious of white disaffected youths, of course remains Norman Mailer’s influential essay “The White Negro” which can now be read on-line at Dissent Magazine‘s website. I recommend that one also reads Frantz Fanon as a counterpoint to Mailer’s discourse to get a perspective on what it feels like to wear a white mask over black skin…

Of all the fellow travellers with the Beat Generation group, the one African-American writer of distinction is Amiri Baraka. Most of the other black figures associated with the Beat phenomenon are relegated to supporting or minor roles as ‘inspiration’, or at best ‘forerunners’. Such figures as the hipsters with the ability to talk ‘the jive’, or the be-bop musicians with their improvisatory skills – almost exclusively black – were major influences on Kerouac’s aesthetic ideals, and with him put their stamp on the diction and tonality of much Beat writing. Some would argue that both hipsters and jazz-men were performers, and that the public and theatrical element of the Beat writing and life-style comes straight from there. The history of the 1940s hipster subculture is not yet something I have personally researched, but the current Wikipedia entry on the subject seems above average for the site, so it may safely be consulted…

Obviously, African-American culture has its own, much deeper roots, and Baraka has always kept a consciousness of this multifaceted heritage at the forefront of his literary and political practice. His participation in the Black Arts Movement from the late 50s onward, including setting up the Harlem based theatre company The Black Arts Repertory Theatre, is a case in point. The link above will take you to one of several resources on the history of the movement, and this is another. Baraka’s several political and aesthetic mutations are detailed quite comprehensively in the Literary Kicks’ web-page on Baraka. His activities with his publishing house, Totem Press, from 1958 onwards were significant to the Beats, but more so his journal Yugen, and later the newsletter The Floating Bear, which he edited together with Diane di Prima. This site reproduces a bunch of issues of the Bear. As Jed Birmingham points out: “It seems like he had his hands in every major magazine coming out of New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Jones published Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Ed Dorn, Diane Di Prima, and Paul Blackburn.”

Several sites are dedicated to the work and thinking of Baraka: Poetry.org from The Academy of American Poets has a comprehensive page w. bibliography, and a direct link to Amazon.com for the LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader and other Baraka titles.

The Modern American Poetry site, as always, features selected excerpts from critical works on individual Baraka texts, as well as some resources situating him in literary and cultural history.

A Finnish site on Books and Writers has a capsule personal biography plus bibliographies of Baraka’s work and selected criticism.

The best portal for Baraka resources, however, remains his own web site, which features a gallery of photos, a short bio, links to and covers from selected books, and – most valuably – links to a wealth of on-line Baraka texts and critical resources.

Of the many YouTube clips available I recommend the following three:

A brief soundbite on the link between performance poetry, rap, and street poetry…

Here is a longish interview from the Blackademics.org site, featuring both Amiri and his second wife Amina Baraka. Note how Amiri liked to hold his head and shake it a bit when he is asked a question that perhaps he finds a bit naive (all of them). Pay particular heed to what he thinks the price is for not being a revolutionary poet…

Finally, my favourite clip is Baraka in performance from 2007. He treats us to what he calls Lowkus, a bawdy form that shouts back in a trickster vein, but very politically so, at the sometimes pale aestheticism of the Haiku. So Lowku, which also puns on ‘loco’, the Spanish word for crazy, and also hints at the whole locomotion Baraka would like to get started against, say Bush, is a wholly original performance genre… Enjoy Baraka scatting and riffing (this is Bud Powell, he tells us) in between the little slogans and joking digs his lyrics consist of…Baraka has perhaps never been so intensely scrutinised in the public eye as after the poem he wrote about the 9/11 events – a poem that cost him his post as Poet Laureate of New Jersey, and generally has been very controversial. Why don’t you read it for yourselves and judge?Somebody Blew Up America