Jerry Gafio Watts's Amiri Baraka

...Jones also directed his rage at Jews in a torrent of vile, anti-Semitic verses: Smile, jew...

...Yet, as Watts notes, he responded to it by deepening his involvement in local electoral politics...

...From the Beat generation to black nationalism to socialist revolution: what a long, strange, incendiary trip it's been, one that has inspired reams of commentary and criticism...

...He jettisoned his Beat identity, left Greenwich Village for Harlem, and eventually changed his name to Amiri Baraka...

...In Newark, Baraka stumbled upon a threestory wooden building, which he purchased and renovated...

...I look out from his eyes./ Smell what fouled tunes come in to his breath./ Love his wretched women...

...One of the eulogies is for his sister, Kimako, who was murdered in 1984 by a mentally ill man she had tried to assist...

...Was Baraka, like other silver-tongued rebels of the 1950s (Mailer and William Burroughs come to mind) a literary pugilist out 110 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 BOO KS to shock bourgeois sensibilities...

...his father was a postal employee who subscribed to Esquire...

...What is needed is a deeper analysis of the man...

...The murder of Malcolm X in 1965 radicalized Jones...

...Eventually, Baraka and his supporters would wear dashikis, and a cult of personality would develop around the Maximum Leader, one that included buttons with Baraka's photograph and official celebrations of his birthday...

...In early 1960, Jones went to Cuba...

...Jones arrived in Greenwich Village in early 1957 and took up residence in a tenement on East Third Street...

...The Black Arts Repertory Theater (BART) was born...

...Jones's 1966 book, Black Art, began with a poem called "SOS": "Calling black people/Calling all black people, man woman child/Wherever you are, calling you, urgent, come in...

...Still, Watts's book springs to life in the Newark phase, and his account of Baraka's hubris—Watts's primary theme—is damning...

...A friend burst into the room, shouting and weeping: "Malcolm is dead...

...Describing this trajectory in his memoir, Baraka confessed: "The phrase 'scientific socialism' fascinated me...

...We were summing things up, what had happened, what was happening, what needed to happen...

...In the preface, Watts declares that "at no time have I tried to interview [Baraka] or any of his closest former associates...

...SCOTT SHERMAN is a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review...

...Gone were the brooding poems of the early 1960s...

...I was never the same again," he has written...

...He eventually became the night librarian on his military base, where he immersed himself in Herman Melville and Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust and D.H...

...But Baraka's political career—along with his massive, uneven oeuvre, which consists of more than thirty books of plays, essays, poetry, fiction, and autobiography—deserves more subtle treatment...

...black liberation was his new fixation...

...On February 21, 1965, Jones, dressed in his usual attire—cap, hunting jacket, round dark glasses—attended a reception at the Eighth Street Bookstore...

...At the time, Yale's dining hall workers were on strike, and Watts was astonished to see Baraka pull a pack of Xeroxed leaflets from his satchel, which he distributed to workers and students...

...Baraka's finest work is barely in print, and his place in the literary canon is precarious...

...Jerry Gafio Watts recalls running into Baraka on the Yale campus in the early 1980s, when the latter was a visiting professor...

...More important, I salute him for living a life full of risks and the resultant bruises, regrets and bumps...

...Jones summoned his black friends into a corner, but they were too paralyzed by grief to heed his call, prompting his friend Joel Oppenheimer to quip: "That's the trouble with the black revolution...

...Friendships also developed with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, Gilbert Sorrentino and Hubert Selby, Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers...

...it's a pity Watts has done so little to illuminate it...

...In short, Watts neglects his subject's cultural, political, and intellectual development...

...Jones exclaimed, referring to "the terrible odor of elephant shit...

...Many years later, in his Autobiography, Baraka expressed regret over some—though certainly not all—of these transgressions: "We were all ideologically confused," he wrote in 1984...

...I've seen Du Bois, Wright, 108 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 BOOKS Chester Himes, driven away—Ellison silenced and fidgeting in some college...

...Each morning," Jones wrote, "I go down to Gansevoort Street and stand on the docks./I stare out at the horizon/until it gets up and comes to embrace me./I make believe it is my father./This is known as genealogy...

...Fuck Shriver...

...The definitive study of him remains unwritten...

...Writing in the New York Herald Tribune's Sunday supplement, Jones announced his arrival in an essay that evoked Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself: I write now, full of trepidation because I know the death this society intends for me...

...Or ants piling up tidbits of zero to build the Empire State Building and then not even own it...

...In the early 1970s, Baraka was deeply involved in national efforts to build a viable black left— in 1972 he chaired the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana—but he remained rooted in Newark, working, in a highly pragmatic manner, on numerous local projects...

...He was put on gardening duty, tending to the flowers on the base, and left the "error farce" shortly thereafter with a dishonorable discharge...

...WHAT ARE THE useful parts...

...I don't mind it," the custodian retorted, "I live in Harlem...

...But those efforts left him disillusioned, and in 1974 he abandoned black nationalism for the rigid Marxism he adheres to today...

...By 1964, he had achieved considerable notoriety, thanks to a steady stream of plays, essays, and poems ("What can I say?/It is better to have loved and lost/Than to put linoleum in your living rooms...

...He mostly ignores Jones's upbringing, his stint at Howard, his years in the military, and his Greenwich Village period...

...Watts calls it "one person's necessarily flawed, critical commentary on another's life and work...

...So quickly our lives pass by us, let us more consciously use them...

...I got/something for you now though...

...Yeh, a white guy said this," Jones recalled in The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, "and it went through me like a frozen knife...

...Very early in his book, in a rare moment of generosity, Watts writes: "I thank [Baraka] for giving us a corpus of works worthy of serious engagement...

...Was his career, as Werner Sollors argued, an interminable search for a "populist modernism," a black revolutionary avant-garde—and, if so, to what extent did he achieve it...

...Its goal...

...Watts, sounding rather like Baraka himself, goes so far as to label him "a parasite on the parent social order...

...among his sins was possession of a copy of Partisan Review...

...Malcolm's been killed...

...Racial consciousness came to Jones at a young age...

...It consists entirely of testimonials that Baraka delivered in churches in New York, Newark, and Philadelphia...

...For the most part, Baraka's artistic work declined after 1974...

...Food and money were scarce, so he sometimes stole food from delicatessens: "My best shot was those nice barbecuing chickens they sit on the counter after taking them off the spit...

...A turbulent life, indeed...

...Throughout the book, Baraka's voice is unusually tender...

...Spirit House" was born...

...In a tribute to Al Ryan, a California civil rights activist and lawyer, Baraka recalled the last time he saw his friend: We went to a bar, and drank beer and talked...

...It's too early for a definitive assessment, since he continues to write, but one can readily discern the high points of Baraka's career: the early poems, Blues People, Dutchman, and The Autobiography...

...Roi's giving directions and nobody listens...

...his method throughout is to summarize a book or play, toss in an opinion or two, and then quote the opinions of other Baraka scholars, primarily Werner Sollors, author of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a 'Populist Modernism.' But Jones's early work, much of which is dazzling, deserves more detailed treatment...

...Yet Baraka still has the power to surprise us...

...It was not to be...

...At the morgue, my father stumbled backward, a cry broke from his lips...

...A six-hundred-page book of this sort ought to contain an analysis of Baraka's anti-Semitism, but Watts condemns it without ever exploring its roots...

...The tragedy of Baraka's writing," Greg Tate wrote in 1984, is that "he hasn't been able, like Garcia Marquez, Cortazar and Cabrera Infante...

...Jones, fearing for his personal safety, fled to Newark...

...In 1996, he published an astonishing collection entitled Eulogies, which Watts mentions in passing but never considers at length...

...Tell me you love me, jew...

...Watts's book purports to be about Jones's "life and work," but the author is content to skim the surface...

...The leaflets read: "SUPPORT THE YALE DINING HALL WORKERS...

...The assassination was a shock to Jones: "I felt stupid, ugly, useless," he later wrote...

...BART's end was near by late 1965...

...An elderly white man strolled past them...

...And I remember, as we started to split, we stood in a parking lot, still talking, still analyzing and plotting, still caught up in the dynamic of unity and liberation, still very intense in our different ways, about Black Self-Determination...

...For Baraka, the election had revolutionary implications: "We will nationalize the city's institutions," he wrote before the vote, "as if it were liberated territory in Zimbabwe or Angola...

...We hugged each other, like we always did . . .We waved as I got in another car headed for the airport . . ."Hey Man, take care of yourself," was the way Al put it...

...Downtown in my mix-matched family"—he was married to Hettie Cohen—"and my maximum leader/ teacher shot dead while we bullshitted and pretended...

...FVERETT LEROY JONES was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1934...

...to radically fuse his comprehensive knowledge of Western Literature with his need to address the condition and complexity of his people...

...But the housing project was scuttled by Gibson and local elites...

...But the Kawaida influence also led to the creation of an alternative school, the Afrikan Free School, which Baraka claims as his proudest accomplishment and which Watts largely ignores...

...From 1965 to 1974, Jones devoted himself to the black nationalist cause, mostly in Newark, New Jersey, but also on the national level with the short-lived Congress of Afrikan Peoples...

...Jones attended Howard University, but recoiled at its "stiffness and artificiality," its "petty bourgeois Negro mentality...

...Lawrence, Buddhist texts, and the Communist Manifesto...

...Was he mentally unbalanced, as Martin Duberman suggested in the 1960s...

...perhaps it would undermine his one-dimensional portrait of Baraka...

...Hey, you take care of yrself," I shouted back...

...He began to quote from the works of Lenin and Mao, and he immersed himself in African liberation struggles...

...In their newfound quest for authenticity, Jones and a small coterie of friends moved to Harlem, where they claimed a ramshackle brownstone on West 130th Street...

...Gibson, who needed Baraka's help to win, but not to govern, was weak and ineffective, and he quickly descended into mediocrity and, later, alleged criminality on fraud and conspiracy charges...

...When Sargent Shriver, a top aide to Lyndon Johnson, attempted to tour BART's office, Jones barred him from the premises: "Later for them motherfuckers," he sneered...

...In 1964, Jones's explosive play Dutchman opened at the Cherry Lane Theater, and remained there for a year, solidifying his reputation in Greenwich Village...

...To "create an art that would be a weapon in the Black Liberation Movement...

...Baraka immediately immersed himself in the life of black Newark...

...For Baraka, the Newark "rebellion" was a heroic "cleansing fire...

...Watts never gives us a sense of Baraka as an individual or as an artist—the corrosive satire in Baraka's work generally eludes him— and the reader is left wondering about the deeper roots and motivations underlying his behavior...

...gone, for the most part, is the Marxism and the anti-Semitism and the race-baiting...

...His mother was I a social worker...

...Ralph Ellison, whose contempt for Baraka was total, may have passed the 1960s on campus, far from the revolutionary gusto in Newark, but he produced a novel that will permanently endure...

...The failures in Newark, combined with the factionalism and disillusion that followed the Gary convention, prompted Baraka to abandon black nationalism for Marxism...

...CALL FOR GENERAL STRIKE...

...Around the same time he saw a photograph of Emmett Till in Jet and was stunned by his "ruptured swollen horrible body...

...Shortly thereafter he found a copy of Ulysses "and suddenly understood that I didn't know a hell of a lot about anything...

...But Jones's poems soon took on a darker cast...

...But Baraka soon fell under the influence of Ron Karenga, whose Kawaida doctrine— an African-oriented "philosophy" based largely on notions of polygamy, military discipline, and rote learning—appealed to his fiery cultural nationalism...

...DISSENT / Spring 2002 •111...

...When he was thirteen, he devoured Richard Wright's Black Boy...

...With regard to BART, for instance, he concludes that its impact in Harlem was "minuscule," but he also admits: "I have not surveyed the opinions and remembrances of black Harlemites concerning BART and Jones...

...Consequently, Watts's limited research distorts his critical judgment...

...his hate eroded his talent...

...He had just completed a book called Home, whose introduction concluded with a boast: "By the time this book appears, I will be even blacker...

...SMASH THE CAPITALIST STATE...

...Watts's lackluster treatment of Baraka's Harlem period is indicative of his overall method: by relying almost entirely on secondary sources, he brings forth little that is new and original...

...In his 1965 essay "New Styles in 'Leftism,'" Irving Howe dismissed Jones as a charlatan, "an adjunct of middle-class amusement," a "pop-art guerrilla warrior...

...Jones spearheaded a campaign to break the back of Newark's corrupt white power structure by electing a black mayor, a campaign that drew such luminaries as Jesse Jackson and Harry Belafonte to the city...

...But let them understand that this is a fight without quarter, and I am very fast...

...Jerry Gafio Watts's hefty new book is not, alas, a biography of Baraka...

...Baraka's most discerning critics have focused not on his political shortcomings, which are obvious, but his literary deficiencies...

...BART offered classes in poetry, history, painting, music, and martial arts...

...it concluded with a poetic manifesto wherein Jones issued a call for "poems that kill," "assassin poems," poems that "wrestle cops into alleys/and take their weapons leaving them dead/with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland...

...his second collection, The Dead Lecturer (1964), revealed a deepening preoccupation with violence and self-loathing: "I am inside someone/who hates me," Jones averred...

...In the seventh grade, Jones visited the Bronx Zoo on a class trip, and lingered in the elephant house, where he came upon a white custodian...

...I got this thing, goes pulsating through black everything/ universal meaning/I got the extermination blues, jewboys/I got the hitler syndrome figured...

...That was a mistake on Watts's part, because his text contains numerous speculations about Jones's behavior since 1960—speculations that might have been clarified by personal interviews with him...

...I got something for you, like you dig,/I got...

...Baraka ended: "Jesus Christ...

...Flawed, one regrets to say, is the key word: Watts has written a flat, turgid book about a uniquely fasciDISSENT / Spring 2002 n I07 BOOKS nating and disturbing individual, a book that hurls phrases like "demonic" and "pathetic" at its subject...

...That's the old fascist Robert Penn Warren...

...Concerts and plays proliferated, many of which featured neighborhood children...

...My self, particularly, to have let my own sister, my only blood sister, expire, in brutish violence...

...Or was Baraka, as Watts asserts but never quite demonstrates, primarily driven by "his lifelong feelings of estrangement from black America...

...I know of no other book like it...

...He pays tribute to such celebrities as Miles Davis and James Baldwin, but also to neighbors and activists—"the fighters, the advanced, the artists, the intellectuals—people discontent with things as they are...

...But subsequent critics, many of whom are black, are rather more generous to Baraka...

...Watts has little to say about this work...

...When riots shook the city in 1967, he was beaten by the police and jailed...

...Jones soon found a job in a record warehouse, which fueled his interest in black music and brought him into contact with writers such as Nat Hentoff and Martin Williams...

...Outdoor poetry readings, dance, drama—all of it was undertaken, with improvised stages, in Harlem in that hot summer of 1965...

...Wow, how do you stand it in here...

...It staged concerts (black musicians only) in parks, vacant lots, playgrounds, and streets, with performances by John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and Pharoah Sanders...

...Its integrationist mission nauseated him: "In coldly sociological terms, under national oppression, it was the Sisyphus myth given numbers to chart the exact degree of pain," he fumed in his Autobiography...

...If Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note was characterized by a creeping melancholy, Black Art was bursting with rage...

...I think I almost feel the same forces massing against me, almost before I've begun...

...Baraka hissed...

...DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 109 BOOKS From the start, in BART's case, the organization attracted thugs, and, when the money ran out, gangsterism ensued...

...In 1954, Jones dropped out and joined the Air Force...

...Jones responded to the assassination with livid verses: For all of him, and all of yourself, look up, black man,/quit stuttering and shuffling, look up,/black man, quit whining and stooping, for all of him,/For Great Malcolm a prince of the earth, let nothing in us rest/until we avenge ourselves for his death, stupid animals/that killed him, let us never breathe a pure breath if/we fail, and white men call us faggots till the end/of the earth...

...Not my sister . . . .0h No...

...Baraka began, "The failure of all of us in here is staggering...

...I N HIS CONCLUDING chapter, Watts affirms, with little evidence, that Baraka and his colleagues were "modern-day black clients in search of white patrons...

...I see Jimmy Baldwin almost unable to write about himself anymore...

...By 1974, the funding for Baraka's programs, including the Afrikan Free School, evaporated...

...The Baraka who emerges from Eulogies is not the demonic figure depicted by Watts, but a man hemmed in by political defeat, shattered revolutionary dreams, and personal tragedy...

...For the first time, Jones began to associate with white women...

...Funding came largely from the Great Society programs, but Jones was in no mood to cultivate white government bureaucrats...

...Baraka himself, interestingly, seems aware of the imbalance within his oeuvre: In a poem from the mid-1960s called "leroy" he wrote, "When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to black people./May they pick me apart and take the useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings./And leave the bitter bullshit rotten white parts alone...

...He and his followers tried to launch a cable television channel and a low-income housing project, for which they obtained six million dollars in state funding...

...In 1963, he published Blues People, a stirring treatise on Afro-American music...

...He had a girlfriend who lived below Houston Street and, in the mornings, he would pass her Italian neighbors on the stairway: "It seemed they were all scowling at me and so were the ones in the street...

...An anonymous letter to his commanding officer accusing him of being a communist put an end to Jones's military career...

...in too many places, his book feels like a textbook rather than a "critical commentary...

...But BART's demise (and, for that matter, Baraka's own anti-Semitism) was not merely the result of "ideological confusion...

...who have significantly affected the course of African-American literary culture...

...It was ultimately successful, and in 1970, Kenneth Gibson became Newark's first black mayor...

...Arnold Rampersad, the biographer of Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison, has proclaimed that Baraka "stands with Wheatley, Douglass, Dunbar, Hughes, Hurston, Wright and Ellison as one of the eight figures...

...Watts's case against Baraka rests largely on his sins—his sexism, his homophobia, his antiSemitism, and his authoritarianism, which Watts likens to "neofascism"—but that's the easiest vantage point from which to criticize him, and Watts is certainly not the first, nor the most eloquent, to do so...

...Jones's collaborator Larry Neal was shot, and the brownstone was ransacked...

...Dance, jew...

...Jones himself would go on to become the preeminent figure in the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s...

...Baraka's mission remained the same: to "bring political ideas and revolutionary culture to the black masses of Newark...