Somebody Blew Up America & Analysis by Imamu Amiri Baraka
Somebody Blew Up America
Imamu Amiri Baraka
(All thinking people
oppose terrorism
both domestic
& international…
But one should not
be used
To cover the other)
They say its some terrorist, some
barbaric
A Rab, in
Afghanistan
It wasn't our American terrorists
It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads
Or the them that blows up nigger
Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row
It wasn't Trent Lott
Or David Duke or Giuliani
Or Schundler, Helms retiring
It wasn't
the gonorrhea in costume
the white sheet diseases
That have murdered black people
Terrorized reason and sanity
Most of humanity, as they pleases
They say (who say? Who do the saying
Who is them paying
Who tell the lies
Who in disguise
Who had the slaves
Who got the bux out the Bucks
Who got fat from plantations
Who genocided Indians
Tried to waste the Black nation
Who live on Wall Street
The first plantation
Who cut your nuts off
Who rape your ma
Who lynched your pa
Who got the tar, who got the feathers
Who had the match, who set the fires
Who killed and hired
Who say they God & still be the Devil
Who the biggest only
Who the most goodest
Who do Jesus resemble
Who created everything
Who the smartest
Who the greatest
Who the richest
Who say you ugly and they the goodlookingest
Who define art
Who define science
Who made the bombs
Who made the guns
Who bought the slaves, who sold them
Who called you them names
Who say Dahmer wasn't insane
Who/ Who / Who/
Who stole Puerto Rico
Who stole the Indies, the Philipines, Manhattan
Australia & The Hebrides
Who forced opium on the Chinese
Who own them buildings
Who got the money
Who think you funny
Who locked you up
Who own the papers
Who owned the slave ship
Who run the army
Who the fake president
Who the ruler
Who the banker
Who/ Who/ Who/
Who own the mine
Who twist your mind
Who got bread
Who need peace
Who you think need war
Who own the oil
Who do no toil
Who own the soil
Who is not a nigger
Who is so great ain't nobody bigger
Who own this city
Who own the air
Who own the water
Who own your crib
Who rob and steal and cheat and murder
and make lies the truth
Who call you uncouth
Who live in the biggest house
Who do the biggest crime
Who go on vacation anytime
Who killed the most niggers
Who killed the most Jews
Who killed the most Italians
Who killed the most Irish
Who killed the most Africans
Who killed the most Japanese
Who killed the most Latinos
Who/Who/Who
Who own the ocean
Who own the airplanes
Who own the malls
Who own television
Who own radio
Who own what ain't even known to be owned
Who own the owners that ain't the real owners
Who own the suburbs
Who suck the cities
Who make the laws
Who made Bush president
Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying
Who talk about democracy and be lying
WHO/ WHO/ WHOWHO/
Who the Beast in Revelations
Who 666
Who decide
Jesus get crucified
Who the Devil on the real side
Who got rich from Armenian genocide
Who the biggest terrorist
Who change the bible
Who killed the most people
Who do the most evil
Who don't worry about survival
Who have the colonies
Who stole the most land
Who rule the world
Who say they good but only do evil
Who the biggest executioner
Who/Who/Who ^^^
Who own the oil
Who want more oil
Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie
Who/ Who/ ???
Who fount Bin Laden, maybe they Satan
Who pay the CIA,
Who knew the bomb was gonna blow
Who know why the terrorists
Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego
Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion
Who need fossil fuel when the sun ain't goin' nowhere
Who make the credit cards
Who get the biggest tax cut
Who walked out of the Conference
Against Racism
Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother
Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing?
Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln?
Who invaded Grenada
Who made money from apartheid
Who keep the Irish a colony
Who overthrow Chile and Nicaragua later
Who killed David Sibeko, Chris Hani,
the same ones who killed Biko, Cabral,
Neruda, Allende, Che Guevara, Sandino,
Who killed Kabila, the ones who wasted Lumumba, Mondlane , Betty Shabazz, Princess Margaret, Ralph Featherstone, Little Bobby
Who locked up Mandela, Dhoruba, Geronimo,
Assata, Mumia,Garvey, Dashiell Hammett, Alphaeus Hutton
Who killed Huey Newton, Fred Hampton,
MedgarEvers, Mikey Smith, Walter Rodney,
Was it the ones who tried to poison Fidel
Who tried to keep the Vietnamese Oppressed
Who put a price on Lenin's head
Who put the Jews in ovens,
and who helped them do it
Who said "America First"
and ok'd the yellow stars
WHO/WHO/ ^^
Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the Rosenbergs
And all the good people iced,
tortured , assassinated, vanished
Who got rich from Algeria, Libya, Haiti,
Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Kuwait, Lebanon,
Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine,
Who cut off peoples hands in the Congo
Who invented Aids Who put the germs
In the Indians' blankets
Who thought up "The Trail of Tears"
Who blew up the Maine
& started the Spanish American War
Who got Sharon back in Power
Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo,
Chiang kai Chek who WHO W H O/
Who decided Affirmative Action had to go
Reconstruction, The New Deal, The New
Frontier, The Great Society,
Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for
Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza
Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro
Who give Genius Awards to Homo Locus
Subsidere
Who overthrew Nkrumah, Bishop,
Who poison Robeson,
who try to put DuBois in Jail
Who frame Rap Jamil al Amin, Who frame the Rosenbergs, Garvey,
The Scottsboro Boys, The Hollywood Ten
Who set the Reichstag Fire
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away ?
/
Who,Who, Who/
explosion of Owl the newspaper say
the devil face cd be seen Who WHO Who WHO
Who make money from war
Who make dough from fear and lies
Who want the world like it is
Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national oppression and terror
violence, and hunger and poverty.
Who is the ruler of Hell?
Who is the most powerful
Who you know ever
Seen God?
But everybody seen
The Devil
Like an Owl exploding
In your life in your brain in your self
Like an Owl who know the devil
All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl
Exploding in fire. We hear the questions rise
In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog
Like the acid vomit of the fire of Hell
Who and Who and WHO (+) who who ^
Whoooo and Whooooooooooooooooooooo!
Imamu Amiri Baraka (2002)
Reading "Somebody Blew Up America"
On Saturday 22, November 2002, Amiri Baraka, one of America's most distinguished poets delivered a lecture at Wellesley College. It caused a huge controversy on the campus because Baraka wrote "Somebody Blew up America," a poem that dealt with the disastrous events of September 11, 2002 and his reaction towards it.
Amiri Baraka's poem has caused painful feelings on all sides and generated much controversy. Whether we agree or disagree about the "anti-Semitic" nature of "Somebody Blew up America," it is important to engage the poem in its own terms and in its literary and cultural contexts. Yet we must be careful. As is true with so many of these issues, once a black person's work is under scrutiny, most of the critics seem to lose their perspective and decide that statements about hate, etc., are enough to be victorious. Such a position is not new. In 1963-64, in a celebrated exchange with Irving Howe, a progressive Jewish intellectual of tremendous imaginative and intellectual power, Ralph Ellison had cause to ask:
Why is it so often true that when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis? Why is it that sociology-oriented critics seem to rate literature so far below politics and ideology that they would rather kill a novel [or a poem] than modify their presumptions concerning a given reality which it seeks in its own terms to project? Finally, why is it that so many of those who would tell us the meaning of Negro life never bother to learn how varied it really is? (Shadow and Act, 108)
Needless to say, the first two questions are more pertinent to the researcher's discussion and raise several important questions. In the first instance, we must be truthful before any honest dialogue can take place. No matter how we try to disguise it, the entire controversy around Baraka and his persona non grata status on this campus arose because he wrote "Somebody Blew up America." Despite claims to the contrary, prior to October 1, 2002, very few persons can point to one essay s/he penned protesting the hatred, venom, etc., of Baraka's work. Therefore, it seems sensible to discuss this work in its own terms and in its literary and cultural contexts.
Before the present researcher discusses this poem, it is important to point out that amidst the sound and fury of this controversy, Professors Erika Williams and Elena Gascon-Vera sought to remind us that we were dealing with a poem as a particular form of literary expression. For example, Professor Williams asserted: "Baraka produces literature-a fact that seems to get lost in the discussion about his personal views and/or stated rhetoric in such forums as newspapers interviews and public speeches." In their own ways, Professors Williams and Gascon-Vera sought to nudge us to an understanding that it was necessary to take on the poem in its own terms before we arrived at any conclusions about what it had to say.
"Somebody Blew up America" is about 240 lines long. It asks some fundamental questions about what took place on September 11. It begins with a declaration: "(All thinking people/oppose terrorism/both domestic/& international.../But one should not/ be used/ To cover the other.)" That seems clear enough to the reader. After such a declaration, the poem states:
They say its some terrorist, some
barbaric
A Rab, in
Afghanistan
It wasn't our American terrorists
It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads
Or the them that blows up nigger
Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row
As a poet, he can only answer these questions through the preparation and organization of language to arrive at a particular stance on the matter. Even more importantly, a poem is meant to be heard rather than read. But it is significant that before he even says a word about the Jews, he uses language that resonates in a manner that brings home the pain and suffering that African Americans and all other oppressed groups have had to undergo at the hands of white American terrorists.
Beginning with the assertion that somebody blew up America, the poem utilizes a rhetorical strategy that asks the questions: why and who. Each unit of the poem contributes to the making of its meaning and reaches its crescendo when it asks the ultimate question: "Who and Who and Who WHO (+) who who /Whoooo and WhooooooOOOOOOooooOoooo!" Such urgency, captured at its most intense in Baraka's reading of the poem, suggests that more than four lines are at stake in this poem. Wrenching four lines from this poem does it a terrible injustice, no matter how passionate one feels about the sentiments that are expressed.
There are other aids that help us to understand the poem. Although the poet's explication of his text is not/should not be taken as self-evident truth, anyone who wishes to understand what Baraka is about in this poem cannot be unmindful of what he says about what he tried to achieve in his poem. In a statement of October 2, 2002 ("Statement by Amiri Baraka, New Jersey Poet Laureate: 'I Will Not 'Apologize,' I will not resign"), Baraka offers many clues about how his poem ought to be read. He says "the poem's underlying theme focuses on how Black Americans have suffered from domestic terrorism since being kidnapped into US chattel slavery, e.g., by Slave Owners, US & State Laws, Klan, Skin Heads, Domestic Nazis, Lynching, denial of rights, national oppression, racism, character assassination, historically, and at this very minute throughout the US. The relevance of this to Bush's call for a 'War on Terrorism,' is that Black people feel we have always been victims of terror, governmental and general, so we cannot get as frenzied and hysterical as the people who while asking to dismiss our history and contemporary reality to join them, in the name of a shallow 'patriotism' in attacking the majority of people in the world, especially people of color and in the third world." In researcher's way of seeing, such a goal has nothing to do with the Jews and Sharon per se. It has to do with an African-American response, if we may, to a very catastrophic moment in our history.
Again, Baraka is very specific in his intention. He says: "We cannot in good conscience, celebrate what seems to us an international crusade to set up a military dictatorship over the world, legitimized at base, by white supremacy, carried out, no matter the crude lies, as the most terrifying form of imperialism and its attendant national oppression. All of it designed to drain super profits bluntly from the colored peoples of the world, but as well, from the majority peoples of the world.!" Then he makes an important statement: "For all the frantic condemnations of Terror by Bush & co, as the single International Super Power, they are the most dangerous terrorists in the world!' There are many persons who would not/do not want to believe this, but some of us see Bush's terrorist campaign as a way to scuttle many of our civil liberties and the war directed against Iraq as a very dangerous undertaking."
This is Baraka's focus. Like it or not, this is where he wants to go. He is concerned about oppressed people all over the world, even the Jews who suffered during the Holocaust, hence his question (constant questioning): "Who put the Jews in ovens,/ and who helped them do it,/ Who said 'America First"/ and ok'd the yellow stars." As Baraka explains, the latter is "a reference to America's domestic fascists just before World War II and the Nazi Holocaust." Baraka also went out of his way to mention the names of Jews all over the world that were "oppressed, murdered by actual Anti-Semitic forces, open or disguised." The poem asks: "Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt/Who murdered the Rosenbergs/ All the good people iced, tortured, assassinated, vanished." At its best, the poem acknowledges Jewish suffering and pain and attempts to speak for all of those groups (and persons) who have been oppressed by racist, terrorist and fascist forces that become rich in the process. He says that he is a communist. Therefore, it seems reasonable that in the penultimate lines of the poem he would ask:
Who make money from war
Who make dough from fear and lies
Who want the world like it is
Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and
National oppression and Terror
Violence, and hunger and poverty.
Who is the ruler of Hell?
Who is the most powerful
Who you know ever Seen God?
But everybody seen The Devil.
These are powerful lines. Baraka means to be provocative. We may not "like" what he says, but he believes he has an important literary statement to make and he demands that we respond to his words. What, then, are the offending lines?
Who knew the World Trade center was gonna get Bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?
And again the question:
Who? Who? Who/
In his reading, Baraka was careful to distinguish between Israeli citizens and American Jews. He insists that he was not saying that "Israel was responsible for the Attack, but that they knew and our counterfeit President did too!" Now, Baraka can certainly be taken to task for this statement, but he has offered his evidence for such a conclusion. He says, even the Democratic Party asserted that the administration knew much more than they told the public and called for an investigation into same. As recently as November 22, the New York Times questioned how much the CIA and FBI knew about the Saudi Arabia connection to the events of September 11. But Baraka goes further. He argued that "Michael Ruppert of the Green Party has issued a video stating clearly, 'Israeli security issued urgent warnings to the CIA of large-scale terror attacks...And that the Israeli Mossad knew the attacks were going to take place...they knew the World Trade Center were targets. This is from the British newspaper The Telegraph." Speaking of the day in question, the British Telegraph of September 16, 2001 had this to say:
In the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, the 69-year-old Defense Secretary, was beginning a working breakfast with a few Congress members to discuss missile defense. Stony-faced, Rumsfeld voiced his long-held opinion that the US would face another terrorist attack in the near future. "Let me tell ya," he drawled, "I've been around the block a few times. There will be another event."
It was hardly the first warning: last month, Israeli intelligence officials had warned their US counterparts that a large-scale terrorist attack on key targets on the American mainland was imminent. Two senior military intelligence experts had been sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA and FBI that a cell of 200 terrorists was preparing a major operation.
Given our understanding of things as it were then, no one can say with any degree of specificity that the CIA or the FBI knew the terrorists would pounce on the targets on which they did. But Baraka speaks from a particular site and from a specific point of view.
Baraka is more specific about the second of the four offending lines. In trying to confirm what the US knew, when it knew it, etc., Baraka insists that "Israeli security force, SHABAK knew about the attack in advance. My sources were 'Ha'aret" and 'Yadiot Ahranot" (two Israeli newspapers) 'Al Watan' (a Jordanian newspaper), Manar-TV and the websites of the Israeli security force SHABAK. There are myriad references to this in Reuters, Der Spiegel. The Israeli newspaper Yadiot Ahranot 1st revealed SHABAK had cancelled Sharon's appearance in New York City that day, Sept 11, where he was supposed to speak at an "Israeli Day" celebration. This was also mentioned in the Star Ledger to the effect Sharon was supposed to visit the US, but no dates were mentioned. It is the Green Party's Ruppert who makes the most effective case for the 4000 Israeli workers (Not Jewish Workers!) but Israeli nationals. He says in his video, 'if what I am showing you is known overtly all through the media, how much more does our thirty billion dollar intelligence community know'. . . 'Nonsense' to say the Israeli did it. They were warning the US hands over fist. . . We reviewed the list of former tenants of the World Trade Center at the on-line Wall St., Journal site. And there's the website. It is an alphabetical list of tenants. Scrool to the very bottom and notice the moving date for the office of Zim American-Israeli Shipping to Norfolk Virginia. They were all in the World Trade Center. They must have had Mossad' or (Shabak-AB) input because they left one week before September and they broke their lease. The Israelis did not pull the attack, but they were smart enough to get their people out of the way."
The present researcher must confess that he checked neither the video nor the Israeli newspapers that Baraka cites. Baraka's conclusion may be right or it may be wrong. He certainly is not a madman-and mad men do have their own truths — proclaiming his truths without a smattering of evidence. As an artist, Baraka is using his poem to disturb, to ask us to questions what took place on September 11 and why. Speaking of five Israelis who were laughing while they were categorizing the collapse (and this is tough to believe), Baraka says: "This is why the poem … throughout continuously chants the question WHO WHO WHO? That is, who is responsible for this horrible crime and WHY? It is a poem that aims to probe and disturb, but there is not the slightest evidence of Anti-Semitism, as anyone who reads it without some insidious bias would have to agree."
However one takes Baraka's declaration, the crude sociological modes that Ellison condemned has to come to terms with other semiological modes of literary analysis in which the status of language within the novel or the poem are of enormous importance. Semioticians (particularly someone such as Saussure) reminded us that there is a distinction between the sound image (the signifier) and the concept (the signified) as he tried to move us away from the notion that there is some "real world" out there which we refer to in words. They also warn us that the "real world" we articulate through signs may not be the same (that is, may not mean the same thing ) for/to all of us. Even Michel Foucault who violently objected to being called a (post)structuralist by "certain half-witted 'commentators'', responded to Eduardo Sanguinetti's appeal to realism with the following quip: "Reality does not exist...Language is all there is, and what we are talking about is language, we speak within language" (David Macey, The Many Lives of Michel Foucault, p. 150). Suffice it to say, that when we examine a poem we must always be concerned to relate systems of signs to meaning.
Even within the African-American tradition of literary criticism, an "epistemological break," to use the language of Louis Althusser (Lenin and Philosophy), occurred when Henry Louis Gates (The Signifying Monkey [1988]) made a stunning advancement over Addison Gayle's work (The Way of the New World [1975]) when he argued that even an analysis of African American literature had to supply a more sophisticated understanding of how language functions in the making of any verbal work. Incidentally, this is one reason (apart from the work that Alice Walker did) why Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) was elevated within the African American canon at the expense of Richard Wright's Native Son (1940). Even within the African-American critical tradition of literature (and we have a way of looking at the world) crude sociological modes of analysis must give way to modes that seek to understand how language functions within the poem.
It is these varied readings of cultural signs that have led to such disparate explications of Baraka's poem. This is what Professors Gason-Vera and Williams have pointed out. Gason-Vera pleads: "My defense is literature. Poems are poems, and for literature people, like me, if they are good, they are sacred. I have not read [David] Duke, actually, if I remember well he is popular racist who wanted to be Governor of Louisiana, isn't it he. I will probable hate the man. However, if Duke will write a poem denouncing injustices and suffering of his people and will do it with a strong poem, with strong metaphors that could be analyses in a literary, political, and historical context, I would love to teach it."
Williams offers the following: "[In 'Somebody Blew Up America,'] there are plenty of references to hot-button political and historical issues ('Who got fat from plantations/Who genocide Indians/ Tried to waste the Black nation'). But there are no imputations to blame any one group for the various social tragedies Baraka is railing against-in fact, he is liberal in his suggestion that quite a few people including key African-American members of the Bush administration might be called into question for their political beliefs or politics. Questioning is in fact the dominant rhetorical strategy in Baraka's poem ('Who is them paying/Who telling lies, etc.,') I suppose that my real questions are: how do we go about anchoring claims that someone's art per se is responsible for promoting-racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. beliefs?"
We must always examine how language is used in a particular work of art. After D. H. Lawrence published Lady Chatterley's Lover, it was condemned for its "phallic reality" and "indescribable corruption." When the novel arrived in the United States copies were confiscated by the US customs on grounds that such "vile" and "vulgar" language would subvert the morals of the community. As Professor Williams asks in the specific context of "Somebody Blew up America": "How do we read Joseph Conrad's portrayal of soulless, savage 'niggers' in Conrad's Heart of Darkness? After being excoriated by the press, Lawrence exclaimed "Nobody likes being called a cesspool" (Lady Chatterley's Lover: A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley Lover," xxxii). One could not help but hear similar resonances in Baraka's outburst: "I am not an Anti-Semite. No one likes being slandered. Your slander will be with me for the rest of my life!" (Lecture, November 22).
We may or may not like "Somebody Blew up America." Yet, we cannot reduce the poem to a crude sociological document. It requires a special kind of expertise and discipline to understand it. This does not mean that we have to like it. Many may find it disturbing, but then that is the author's purpose. Many may find it offensive or worse, that, too, is a conclusion we must also respect. Yet, as scholars and teachers, we have a special obligation to our colleagues, our students and our college, to act as educated men and women to whom rationality and analysis are of primary importance. We do our community little good if we do not ask our students to look at this (and other texts) seriously, carefully and knowledgeable. These are indispensable criteria for ferreting out the truth of any literary act.
Baraka's work has enriched the lives of many persons throughout the world. As he displayed, the thrust of his work is meant to disturb our peaceful acceptance of the terrors and evils of this world. Unless Wellesley is different from other parts of the world, Baraka's work will continue to do for Wellesley what it has done for the rest of the world. Twenty years from now, Baraka's truth, as Whitman's truth, and as Poe's truth, will have more value than anything his critics have said. The truth of Baraka's work, warts and all, will live on as long as we respect the power of the word and the lucidity with which it captures the struggles of all oppressed people all over the world.
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