October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014
“At his wake and funeral on Friday and Saturday there will be an overflow of all kinds of people,” the St. Louis author Quincy Troupe said of his longtime friend Amiri Baraka, who passed January 9, 2014 in his native Newark, N.J., at the age of 79.
“People will be sad, deeply sad. A lot of people care a lot about him, people of all races from all over the world.”
A co-founder of the Black Arts Movement, Baraka will be remembered at a wake 4-9 p.m. Friday, January 17 at Metropolitan Baptist Church, 149 Springfield Ave. in Newark. His homegoing service will be held 10 a.m. Saturday, January 18 at Newark Symphony Hall, 1030 Broad St. in Newark.
Troupe and East St. Louis poet Eugene B. Redmond, a friend of Baraka’s for more than 50 years, will be among the literary figures who will honor Baraka at his service.
Baraka was a longtime and lively trustee of the Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club, which will honor the departed legend with a tribute 6 p.m. Tuesday, February 18 at the Sunshine Cultural Arts Center, 630 N. 59th St. in East St. Louis.
Redmond first met Baraka in Greenwich Village in 1961, when Baraka was a jazz critic and Beat poet known as LeRoi Jones. That was the year he published his first book of poetry on his own Totem Press imprint. The collection, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,has one of the most unforgettable titles in American literature.
“His jazz criticism led a lot of young people like myself to listen to a lot of challenging, difficult music by people like Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor,” said Gerald Early, author and Washington University professor.
From poetry to prose, Jones next mastered the stage in his 1964 play Dutchman, an allegorical treatment of tensions between black and white, man and woman, which opened Off Broadway in Greenwich Village.
“Amiri Baraka was heroic, poetic and iconic,” said Ron Himes, founder of the Black Rep. “Amiri Baraka showed us our blackness in all its shades and variations.”
Striving to get blacker
Indeed, Redmond and Jones/Baraka drew closer after the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 intensified the radicalization of their generation of black writers and thinkers.
“Most of us saw ourselves as striving to get black or blacker – whatever that was – at the time,” Redmond said. “There was the Black Power Movement and the Black Arts Movement, and some of us straddled the line between them. Baraka and Larry Neal became the chief theoreticians for the Black Arts Movement.”
After the assassination of Malcolm X, Jones left his first wife, Hettie Jones, who was Jewish, and their two daughters and moved to Harlem. In 1967, influenced by Maulana Karenga in Los Angeles, he changed his name, eventually settling on Amiri Baraka.
Troupe first met Baraka in L.A. in 1968 when he performed as Baraka’s hand-picked opening act at UCLA.
“I had submitted my work to Black Fire, this seminal anthology Baraka co-edited with the late Larry Neal, and he really liked my work, but the manuscript of the book was already at the publisher,” Troupe said. “But he let Karenga know he wanted me to read with him when he came to L.A.”
Troupe had been schooled as a poet reading Jones/Baraka with K. Curtis Lyle and others in the Watts Writers Workshop. “He taught me how to structure poetry in a new way,” Troupe said. “He taught me a new way for poetry to move.”
The choreographer, dancer and activist Katherine Dunham asked Redmond invite Baraka to East St. Louis in 1969. It was a perilous time for outspoken black activists. “He had his bodyguards with him, these massive guys,” Redmond said. When Redmond visited Baraka at his modern office in Newark in 1970, these same tough men checked him for weapons.
But it was Baraka who would start to get inside the head of Redmond and many other black intellectuals, writers, artists and activists.
“He influenced me to think about black people and what we could do to achieve liberation for ourselves,” Redmond said. “We consciously decided to withdraw, look at each other, and regroup as a people. We really didn’t know each other.”
That was the Baraka who resonated most with Donald M. Suggs, the publisher of The St. Louis American.
“I was deeply moved, because someone from our community was willing to forsake a promising career to stand up for our people,” Suggs said. “Baraka stood up.”
Marxist, academic
But Baraka kept moving. Profoundly influenced by a visit to revolutionary Cuba, he became a Marxist. “He was a Communist – in his thinking and leaning – when he died,” said Redmond, who visited Baraka in the hospital January 4 during his final illness.
Baraka attracted leftists just as he galvanized black artists. Redmond recalls driving Baraka to his home in the Metro East after a performance at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and being followed there by “several carloads of Marxists.”
Baraka became a professional academic, maintaining long associations with Rutgers University and Stony Brook University, among other institutions. Joe Esser, a poet from New Jersey who received his master’s in American literature at Washington University, said Baraka always advised writers to hire agents. “You need a crook to deal with the crooks,” Baraka advised.
Redmond once sat in on a dissertation defense at Stony Brook, at Baraka’s invitation. The juvenile scholar was writing about 19th century social movements and art in America, and Baraka picked apart the dissertation’s many blind spots on the black experience. “It was so embarrassing, the way he ate those stuffy scholars alive,” Redmond said.
A convert to Islam, Baraka published poetry that even he later admitted was anti-Semitic. As a father of daughters with Jewish blood, Baraka came to regret this. “As recently as last August,” Redmond said, ‘he told me, ‘I can’t shake it.’”
Baraka was poet laureate of New Jersey in 2002 when he publicly performed “Somebody Blew Up America,” which claims that Israel was complicit in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. New Jersey abolished the post of poet laureate to remove him from it.
That poem angered Troupe for a different reason – it imitated the structure of Troupe’s 1996 poem “A Response to All You Angry White Males” too closely for comfort. “I got really angry,” Troupe said, “and I told him, ‘Man, you stole my poem’ – in front of an audience!”
‘He told the truth’
Most of Baraka’s close friends fell out with him at one time or another, but they tended to regroup around him. Troupe says Baraka’s fiery public image does not capture his personal warmth.
“He didn’t hold grudges,” Troupe said. “He had a great sense of humor, loved to eat, drink wine, have a good time. I am going to miss that give and take.”
Troupe himself got heated reflecting upon the public misperception of Baraka and, especially, of his work.
“They call him ‘polarizing’ because he told the truth,” Troupe said. “To say this is a racist country is not polarizing, it’s the truth. I understand that some people don’t like to hear it, but it’s the truth.”
Baraka himself was anything but racist, as anyone who knew him well could attest.
“Some think he was racist, but that was way far from the truth,” Troupe said. “His parties were full of white people who loved him.”
Redmond remembered Baraka the father and grandfather.
“He was good with children,” Redmond said. “He was a great grandfather.” Redmond recalled going to see Baraka recently and being surprised that they never left the house. “He played with his grandchildren all day that day,” Redmond said.
Baraka never outlived the pain of the loss of his daughter Shani Baraka, who was murdered in 2003. “That wrecked him,” Redmond said.
In recent years, Baraka worked tirelessly on behalf of his son Ras Baraka, a Newark councilman running for mayor.
One life that Baraka may not have prized highly enough, at least in terms of maintaining it, was his own.
“He was a bad boy when it came to observing the kind of habits that might have kept a diabetic alive longer,” Redmond said. “In the 1990s, when I spent several days with him at Stony Brook, he had a drink at every meal.He’d keep a bunch of chocolates in his pocket and pop them all day. Then at dinner he’d have shots of sake and beers.”
Baraka may not have been the best caretaker of his own health, but his work survives him intact.
“For my generation, there was no black writer more influential in our youth than Baraka,” Early said. “He was the father of the Black Arts Movement, but more importantly he was the father of black literary and cultural criticism.”
“He was a master of all genres,” Redmond said, “a consummate artist-warrior-thinker.”
“We won’t see anybody else come this way like him,” Troupe said.
Baraka is survived by his wife Amina; his sons Ras, Obalaji, Amiri Jr. and Ahi; daughters Dominique DiPrima, Lisa Jones Brown, Kellie Jones and Maria Jones; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
