I MAMU B ARAKA : H UMANIST AND

WORDSMITH
A Memoir on His Home-going

Barry Beckham 18 November 2014

I was a senior at Brown University when I met the renowned 32-year-old literary genius LeRoi Jones. My roommate James A. Miller, one of the three of us black men to graduate from the college in 1966, had been tapped to meet Jones at the airport. And then Jim, now director of American Studies at George Washington University, was wearing the mantle of the poets official guide, walking with Jones down the aisle to the stage on that night in 1965. It was a histrionic evening for us two young black men, and I doubt that we were mature enough then to realize what an exceptional experience we were having. That was when I became personally fascinated with the humanism of Jones that is such a vital part of both his temperament and his literary genius. Now that Imamu Amiri Baraka has died at age 79, we are blasted with media death announcements and declarations about his incendiary, militant posture. The Washington Post used firebrand in its headline, the New York Times settled on polarizing and the Los Angeles Times inserted provocative. But too few of the stories of his departure from this Earth seemed to care firstly about his sincere insular sense of humanity and secondly about his exceptional genius of language. That night he wasas we expectedinventive and brash, at one point transforming himself into a gesticulating ball of fire, screaming out to a students question about hating white people. The student had already begun with a question about why Leroi Jones took a Guggenheim Foundation award from white people. Because they gave it to me, he had said. Nervous titters. But now the young inquirer pushed further. He said that Jones sounded as if he hated white people. I hate white people, Jones screamed with flailing arms. I hate all white people. I hate you. This was the LeRoi Jones who then and even now after his death is described as an activist, reformer, agitator, revolutionary, and black power nationalist. Our groupBarakas traveling partner and three white professorsmarched to another building for an informal press conference before dinner. A reporter from the Brown Daily Herald asked Baraka a stupid question and the poet waved his hand dismissively, signaling the end. Thats all? asked the Ivy League journalist. Thats it, responded Baraka, you got your interview. Jim and I invited the group back to our dormitory room. From our doorway you could see on my desk a copy of Barakas only published novel The System of Dantes Hell. Professors Hawkes, Honig, and Krause of the English department, along with Barakas traveling companion and my roommate and I, sat, chatting, drinking beer, and listening to jazz. Then I caught Baraka in a moment between conversations and I used the technique developed over a series of autograph hunting encounters since my junior year. I told him how

much I had enjoyed the chapters, then put the book in front of his stomach and asked for his autograph. He wrote:

For Barry Good Luck Good eyes Good Seeing Leroi 1965

But there is an amazing, telling moment about that gathering. The worlds most militant, violent, incendiary, ferocious, brutish and racist writer, who had just screamed so loud that I wondered if the Brown president could hear on the other side of the college green that he hated all white peopleleaned from his chair toward novelist professor John Hawkes. Hawkes had a beer can in his hand and was offering it to Baraka. The poet said thanks and put his lips on the can. He was drinking out of the same can that the white man whom he presumably hated had just sipped from. So all of the hate stuff was just dramatic posturing? Baraka really didnt hate anybody, just disliked the way that we have hated and abused people all over the worldespecially people of color. And his literary endeavors, like any artist who awakens daily to see what this world is really about, is a reflection of that disenchantment. But the reports of his demise are riveted withjust as the media before his death has fixated onhis revolutionary stance. What a disappointment for the artistto be rated only for themes and public posture and not for literary innovation. Suppose we ignored Kafkas surrealistic approach to describing industrial inhumanity and chastised him for berating management and supervisors in The Metamorphosis? Suppose we overlooked poet Robert Haydens crafty experiments with synesthesia (mixing sense sensations) and complained instead of his promulgating the Bahai faith? That is the same as ignoring Barakas dexterous, inventive linguistic performances, as if he has done nothing more for six decades than rant and rave. So much attention in the media has been given to his political stances expressed in his work. But not enough attention has been allotted to a significant feature of his literary achievement. Imamu Amiri Baraka was the consummate wordsmith, a master of linguistic jiu jitsu. He reveled in possibilities that brought out his proclivity for that specialness of languagehis invented diction, his mocking name-calling, puns, allusions, references, unconventional juxtaposition of capital and lower-case letters, deliberate misspellings, sardonic asides, and rhetorical questions.

Ralph Ellison of course was a champion of this stylistic approach with his puns, allusions, and folkloric references. In Invisible Man we can read and re-read his refashioning of Dont have a pot to piss in to Dont have a pit to hiss in. Or re-enjoy I am what I yam, as the premier African-American pun on our preference for the sweet potato or yam. Remember the three-dozen African proverbs in Chinua Achebes A Man of the People as a celebration of the African gnomic or oral tradition. And before both Ellison and Achebe, Langston Hughes tinkered with the blues form until he had devised his own poetic variation featuring one long line repeated and a third line rhyming with the first two. And after a stanza, Hughes might insert a shouta single line of moaning or yelling. Like all of these literary forebears, Baraka relished language and its opportunistic tie to black literary expression. He expressed that appreciation with stylistic escapades that distinguish him as the wordsmith he was. Perhaps both the sense of humanity that I saw and the turn to the thrill of what language can do were instilled in him in his early 1952-1960 years in Greenwich Village with the Beat movement and their magazine, Yugen. In the first issue, they said that yugen means elegance, beauty, grace, transcendence, of these things, and also nothing at all. The beauty of gentle gracefulness is what I saw when Baraka sipped from that beer can and conversed with those white Ivy League professors as if they were old friends. And stylistically, yugen pushed Baraka into composing language that transcended the moment. Barakas penchant for invented language began early in his literary journey, and its seen in all three genresprose, poetry, and drama. And so that beginning meeting on Browns campus in 1965 leads me to think back to how I began to read him with increasing fascination to the point that I was trumpeting him as a ground-breaking stylistic innovator in my black literature course at Brown. I started with Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965 and of course was awestruck by the play on words in the title. Certainly writers have used the pun or play on words in their titles. But who has ever produced a prose title of four words that sound the same? A title consisting of homonyms that then pushes us into reflection about the thematic significance of the essays themselves?and therefore significance about the plight of the African-American community? The last word is Raze. The opening piece, Newark Courthouse66 Wreck (Nigger Rec room) describes the scenes after the civil disturbances called the 1966 Newark Negro Riots. Baraka gives us 2,000 words of puns, allusions, invented words, irregular punctuation, and ironic sarcasm beginning with the first sentence: the basic conflict of America. And without missing a beat, Baraka describes the scene while sustaining the pun on the word creative so that anadiplosis or repetition becomes a central stylistic device. Two of Barakas friends had been arrested the night before for CREATING (a disturbance. WHAT kind of disturbance?). Continuing, he writes, Thats irony I guess. Time for Creating. Finally, Baraka offers this gem of a turned phrase, a powerful, scathing linguistic refrain: The disturbance? The Niggers personality was making noise in the night air.

This is stylistic blasphemy, where the militant artist gets his point across about the disregard for the black mans presence in this country while at the same time turning a phrase by combining hyperbole and pun. Hes exaggerating and protesting while playing with words. Here too in this beginning essay are the truncated sentence and the fragmented phrase that Baraka uses often to add rhythmic punch. In all three of his genre, movement is consistently pushed ahead and loud protestation begs our attention because of his stylistic strategies featuring unusual syntax. His puns may seem racist, but wopcop, Shantung judge, and short red sons of Erin, reflect the painful truth of the lives of black men facing the police and then court. For ingenious word combinations, look at chump partner, and official ctroom drifters. For unexpected abbreviations, see ct., mos, ctroom, and yrhonor. His debaits and Mushy sez are characteristic re-spellings, and raggidy is a typical example of his black folk language. I can remember some of these examples without re-reading the text because the power of their initial effect has stayed with me. Grey also is their day which is their faces, and their understanding of where we are, is a poetic line describing the cultural divide between grey boys (whites) and us blacks. His play, Arm Yourself or Harm Yourself unfortunately has still the significance todayespecially for young black malesas it had during the violent 1960s. In one prose piece he takes the derogatory term for blacks, spliv, and fashions it into a verb with, you spliverate. In an interview, he describes his military service in the Air Farce. His puns are consistently connected to the very emotional side of what he identifies as a longstanding, endless bias against the black community. Barakas stance as a militant has especially garnered the attention of the media, and rightly so since the mainstream media is not a legitimate home for critical assessment. When he refers frequently to the oilrish police officer in his prose, Baraka relies not only on the stereotypical pun on the Irish brogue pronunciation, but he also points to the truth that black people have experienced. Police departments in New York and other major cities were dominated by the Irish in mid-century. True, being a police office or fireman meant danger and poor pay, so Irish immigrants arriving in the 1850s were eager to take these positions in New York. Nevertheless, Barakas language still reflects the perceptions of poor urban blacks who encounter the police regularly. His inventive twist in the poem Storage is especially noteworthy since its a found poem, based on the idea that some found piece of paper with writing can in fact be a poem on its own, constructed mostly by placing different elements on the page. Here again Baraka extends the convention with his own stylistics. In a handwritten note detailing Joyce Cadoos address and phone number, the text reveals, she know rich people, a dead giveaway to the speech pattern of blacks ignoring subject-verb agreement. Still, Barakas sportive adjustments within the found poem form peaks the readers inquiry.

Whos looking for money? What happened? Yes Baraka has found the poem, but with deft placement of its elements, he pushes the reader to wonder about the full story behind the note that may have been left in storage. Does (after L. McL) mean that it was found in the materials owned by photographer Leroy McLucaswho also managed a Greenwich Village club, Jazz at the Wagon that Baraka frequented? His best known short fiction, The Screamers, about a rhythm and blues performance interrupted by reports of a riot, is a bebop around traditional fictional conventions. He dismisses the expectation that neither point of view nor tense should be changed. It begins in the first person and switches back and forth from that point of view to the all-seeing omniscient perspective. By the end, we see that the present tense form in the beginning has been changed to the past tense. But its a violation of the rules! Yes, Baraka would answer; he is taking the same creative liberty that the free jazz extollers like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Sun Ra took with chord progressions and melody patterns. It was so different, but it worked for so many. Part of the discordance of The Screamers is related to the very improvisational nature of jazz itself. Baraka fashions his prose about the sax player Lynn Hope and his followers as if he is combining the tones and rhythms of those musicians whose unique styles rested on their own special sounds. Combine Charlie Parkers bebop redistribution of melody, the sheets of sound technique of John Coltrane, the tip-toeing of Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Quartet, the belching of Roland Kirk, and the tenor squeals of Eddie Lockjaw Davis, and you experience the cadence of Barakas prose. You can even hear Maceo Parker, who blew so identifiably behind James Brown. We see his language as its own jam session, filled with conflicting changes, sudden nuances, broken rhythms, and unexpected interjections. The Screamers is a whirlwind of observation filled with sarcasm, insult, elation and sadness. Beginning in the present tense, the omniscient narrator tells us, Lynn Hope adjusts his turban under the swishing red green yellow shadow lights. Dots. And Baraka never stop riffing. I last saw the humanist inventive poet at an event in Harlem in 1980. My wife and I were standing in a mix of people and he came toward us. I raised my hand and prepared to introduce her to Imamu Amiri Baraka. But he had moved backward from me so quickly. His wife was behind him. He ushered her to stand just a foot in front of him, then said, humbly, with the widest, proudest, smile of one remembering what his father had taught him about the manners of being a gentleman: Id like to introduce you to my wife, Amina. He had beaten me to the introductions.