سید شهاب الدین ساداتی

"Black Art"

Imamu Amiri Baraka

Poems are bullshit unless they are

teeth or trees or lemons piled

on a step. Or black ladies dying

of men leaving nickel hearts

beating them down. Fuck poems

and they are useful, wd they shoot

come at you, love what you are,

breathe like wrestlers, or shudder

strangely after pissing. We want live

words of the hip world live flesh &

coursing blood. Hearts Brains

Souls splinting fire. We want poems

like fists beating niggers out of Jocks

or dagger poems in the slimy bellies

of the owner-jews. Black poems to

smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches

whose brains are red jelly stuck

between 'lizabeth taylor's toes. Stinking

Whores! We want "poems that kill."

Assassin poems, Poems that shoot

guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys

and take their weapons leaving them dead

with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. Knockoff

poems for dope selling wops or slick halfwhite

politicians Airplane poems, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr … tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh

… rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr … Setting fire and death to

whities ass. Look at the Liberal

Spokesman for the jews clutch his throat

& puke himself into eternity … rrrrrrrr

There's negroleader pinned to

a bar stool in Sardi's eyeballs melting

in hot flame Another negroleader

on the steps of the white house one

kneeling between the sheriff's thighs

negotiating coolly for his people.

Agggh … stumbles across the room …

Put it on him, poem. Strip him naked

to the world! Another bad poem cracking

steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth

Poem scream poison gas on beasts in green berets

Clean out the world for virtue and love,

Let there be no love poems written

until love can exist freely and

cleany. Let black people understand

that they are the lovers and the sons

of lovers and warriors and sons

of warriors Are poems & poets &

all the loveliness here in the world

We want a black poem. And a

Black World.

Let the world be a Black Poem

And Let All Black People Speak This Poem

Silently

or LOUD

Imamu Amiri Baraka 1966

Commentary

In order to understand this famous poem by (Imamu) Amiri Baraka, one needs to know about Black Art Movement in United States during 1960's. The Black Art movement – also known as the Black Aesthetic, the New Black Consciousness, and the New Black Renaissance – began in the mid- 1960's and lasted, in its most intense phase, until mid-1970's. The poetry, prose fiction, drama, and criticism written by African Americans during this period expressed a more militant attitude toward white American culture and its racist practices and ideologies. Slogans such as "Black Power", "Black Pride" and "Black is Beautiful" represented a sense of political, social, and cultural freedom for African Americans, who had gained not only a heightened sense of their own oppression but a greater feeling of solidarity with other parts of the black world such as Africa and the Caribbean.

     The Black Arts movement was strongly associated with the Black Power movement and its brand of radical or revolutionary politics. As the critic Stephen Henderson suggested in the introduction to his 1972 anthology Understanding the New Black Poetry, the artists and writers of the Black Arts movement had "moved beyond the Harlem Renaissance" in their capacity to view their community "in the larger political and spiritual context of Blackness". In the poems and critical statements of Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and others, Henderson claimed, "one can see the process of self-definition made clearer and sharper as the self-reliance and racial consciousness of an earlier period are revived and raised to the level of revolutionary thought". The writing of the Black Arts movement would not be "protest" art so much as "an art of liberating vision".

     Henderson identified three basic categories according to which African American poetry could be analyzed. The first of these was the poem's theme or specific subject matter; the second was its structure, including such elements as diction, rhythm, and figurative language; and the third was what he called the poem's "saturation", the extent to which it communicated its "blackness" and the accuracy of its presentation of black life in the United States.

     The dominant theme in African American poetry, Henderson suggests, has always been that of "liberation", whether from slavery, from segregation, or from the false wish for integration into the mainstream of white middle-class society. A secondary theme in African American poetry has been the concern with a spiritual or mystical dimension (whether in religion, African mythology, or musical forms like hymns, blues, and jazz) which can provide a meaningful alternative to "the temporal, the societal, and the political". In terms of structure, Henderson identifies a range of stylistic elements in contemporary black poetry involving references to both colloquial black speech and music, especially jazz and blues. Finally, the "saturation" of an African American poem involves the depth and the quality of its evocation of black experience.

     The most influential of the new black poets is (Imamu) Amiri Baraka. After graduating from Howard University, Baraka became part of the avant-garde literary scene, befriending poets like Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Frank O'Hara. During this period (1950's), Baraka was more drawn to the poetry and ideas of the Beats and other white avant-garde movements than to the politics of black separatism; even he married a white woman. He wrote poems, essays, plays, and a novel within the context of the Beat counterculture. But in the mid-1960's, deeply affected by the death of Malcolm X, Baraka made a number of important changes that we can follow in his literary works.

     Baraka's poetry changed radically during the 1960's, as he turned from a more general sense of social alienation to a vision that was politically revolutionary and that expressed a profound solidarity with black culture. Baraka's real poetic revolution comes with the poem "Black Art" (1966). "Black Art" is Baraka's most famous poem and has been called the signature poem of the Black Arts movement, but it is one about which critics and readers are strongly divided. As Warner Sollors suggests, the poem is "strikingly for its venomous language and for its rhetorical violence". The poem is virtual barrage of language directed against white society in general, and more specific attacks are launched against Jews, white liberals, and bourgeois black.

     Baraka finds that the normal boundaries of poetic language no longer contain the words he needs in order to express his rage. The use of obscenities and of raw sounds – "rrrr … tuhtuhtuh" – turns language into the verbal guns of "poems that kill". Jerry Watts, who is particularly critical of the poem, calls it "an insurrectionary statement of hilarious and demented imagery", and he dismisses it as "nothing more than mere thuggery superimposed on hurt black feelings, importance, and defeat". At the same time, however, there are reasons for the poem's success within the Black Arts movement. While the poem is certainly disturbing, especially in its anti-semitic references, it is rhetorically powerful in its suggestion that poetry can reverse many of the injustices perpetrated on African Americans. Lines like "Poems that wrestle cops into alleys / and take their weapons leaving them dead / with tongues pulled out" express the desire for social and political revenge by reversing the power relationships usually operating in American society. The poem's ending is more affirmative, calling for the "black poem" that can lead to a "Black World":

Let the world be a Black Poem

And Let All Black People Speak This Poem

Silently

or LOUD