Amiri Baraka & the Naropa Radical Tradition
BIG SECRET. Naropa is an art school founded by radicals. Few represented the radical tradition of Naropa like Amiri Imamu Baraka. Born LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey, Baraka was part of that founding generation of troubled and troubling artists, poets, spiritual teachers, healers, researchers, and weirdos that rode the vortex of cultural and cosmic forces that birthed Naropa University. Through the decades of the school’s existence, he wove through Naropa, most notably as a revered and feared poet-in-residence and teacher in the Jack Kerouac School’s Summer Writing Program.
In his early days, he hung out in Greenwich Village with the Beats and the Black Mountain Poets, with Ginsberg, Diana di Prima whom he married, and the like. He came to early fame with his Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note and the play The Dutchman, where a black train rider kills a white female co-passenger, playing out the fixation of contemporaries like Norman Mailer to expose the underbelly of the collective psyche. At this time, he saw the purpose of his art in the manner of many of his white contemporaries—for its shock value or revelation of private suffering and ecstasy but without a larger aim.He, like many artists of the time, declaimed a “goal” as anti-art.
All this changed when he went to Cuba in 1960 and met with artists, intellectuals, and working revolutionaries who laughed with incredulity at an Afro-American artist who claimed his art was not political. It was time to shed LeRoi (the neutral, the bohemian) and the life he lived and embrace the sovereign burden of Amiri.
As a Black Nationalist consciousness crystalized, he separated from diPrima as a matter of integrity and moved to Harlem with its history asa magnetic center for black cultural life and revolution. He met and married poet Amina Baraka with whom he shared a lifelong commitment to revolutionary art and poetics. He helped to found theBlack Arts Movement with poets such as Sonia Sanchez and the LastPoets. In his poem “Black Art” he famously declared “we want poems that shoot…” in a twist (or deeper actualization) of William CarlosWilliams’ “no ideas but in things.”
Radical art has to do more than describe the state of the exalted perceiver, the isolated bourgeois subject with the luxury to be an 'individual,' walled off from the common struggles of humanity.
If this line also resembles Marx’s dictum that philosophers needed to change the world rather than just interpret it, it also recalled a more ancestral, blacker notion of word as power, as vibratory force that acts upon the world directly because it is part (the innards) of it, word as nommo. Baraka wielded words as sticks and stones. Words to break the bones of the masters of war and commerce who routinely (as in right now!) ground human beings and landscapes to dust to fuel the satanic mills of capital and comfort.He slung words like stones into the glass eye of the Goliath of the war machine, to shatter the all-seeing panopticon of the police state. And further he called out and cursed out any poet and artist who wouldn’t do the same.
Baraka wasn’t above shaming, a well-placed diss or a straight up hex. He was a forerunner in someways of rap music, word as weapon in the tradition of diasporic black art (and if you contextually dig—black magic). Rastafari’s word-sound-power to shake the Jericho walls of Babylon. Or SunRa’s skilled culture as weapon of the future. WuTang Clan’s darts and dirty acupuncture needles, or West Side Gun’s onomatopoeic, semi-automatic spray intros. His poetry was infused with the talk of the street. It wasn’t always nice, but it was beautiful. Stark. Transformative.
Radical art has to do more than describe the state of the exalted perceiver, the isolated bourgeois subject with the luxury to be an“individual,” walled off from the common struggles of humanity. Radical art must go beyond the cushion and introspection. Baraka, in some ways like Chögyam Trungpa, challenged the counterculture to participate, to actually tune in! He was willing to cut ties with those who weren’t ready to get up. In his view, black artists didn’t have the luxury of ivory towers.
Baraka wasn’t for the politics of non-offending.He wasn’t for a false spiritual harmlessness keeping a negative peace, while thousands are being slaughtered (happening at the time of this writing!). His art was meant to upset, upset the unnatural order that claimed itself as the way it is, rather than the way it’s been made. He made art to upturn, to bring about a new world.Some of his critics accuse him of sacrificing his art merely to become a propagandist, or of being too didactic. He’s been called sexist, homophobic, antisemitic. And a cursory reading of his work might support these claims. At times he indulged in low blow, vitriolic statements. We often want the sanitized version of our heroes, or to make the other mistake of collapsing their complexity around some problematic statement or behavior. We also make the mistake of overlooking the harm they caused because of their contributions of genius or wisdom. This is one of the principle moral dissonances of our time, ranging from pop stars, to spiritual teachers, to the founding fathers. Perhaps this is a moment to say a word about ancestors, founders, and legacy, as we celebrate Naropa’s 50th anniversary, to reflect on the past and project futures.
Each generation is tasked with looking back over the works of previous generations with both judgement and compassion. We have to understand both historical context, biographic arcs, and make moral and ethical judgement calls. What should be carried forward into tomorrow? What ended and composted? What questioned and altered? The problem with Baraka’s words and works is similar to the problem with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Chögyam Trungpa, and others, at least on the face of it. As the years pass many of the causes they supported, their “outrageous” behavior, and the scandals they were involved in haven’t aged well, particularly their participation in uneven power dynamics within sexual relationships. Culturally we have a myth of genius that is married to destruction. Geniuses and founders of movements often exact their toll on others, themselves, or both. They leave wreckage in their wake. Until now the story of the dominant culture is to accept or at least turn a blind eye to this. This generation (of Naropa students) is questioning all of that. They are pulling down idols in front of capitol buildings and removing pictures from university walls. And we can ask where is the line between iconoclasm and erasure? If we cancel our founders, how can we learn from them? Even from their shadow material? Conversely, if we don’t openly address their mistakes, excess, criminality, collusion with oppression, how can we learn to do differently?
Baraka recognized this in himself. He recognized that he was in some ways marred and deeply embittered by his struggle against white supremacy and global capitalist larceny. He referred to himself once as a soothsayer—whose traditional role was to prophecy those paths antithetical to life. To point out what not to do. In the negritude reversal of the “shadow” language that posits anything dark as evil, he said it like this:
“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.”
Maybe a similar operation is required for all of Naropa’s founding figures. The ancestors are not perfect. The living have to decide what foundations can be built upon, which can be alchemized, and which demolished. And we have to be aware that the children of the future may hold us under similar scrutiny.
His legacy calls for a Black Naropa (in color, yes, but more consciousness) and presaged the swell in black Buddhism seen today. A Naropa immersed not only in the study of individual psychological liberation, but in cultural, material, and collective liberation.
Amiri Baraka left Naropa foundations to build upon. And unlike some of the aforementioned names, the harm he may have caused exists solely on the plane of ideology. Words do hurt. Poems can shoot. Like many change agents of his generation he went through phases, living through, embodying and piercing illusion after illusion. All the mess that comes with actual struggle and transformation. His critics also often miss the profound respect he had for humanity. His willingness to dedicate himself, decade after decade to human rights, dignity, self-determination. A dignity beyond the use of “nice” language, rather a commitment to using language to arouse the energy to actually transform the material conditions of our lives.
They also miss his devotion to and capacities for beauty, for sensitivity, for the life of the mind. In his view the poet must become a laborer and a prophet. To take up the international struggle for human uplift. To shred the illusion of color/class/ caste hierarchy, or the illusion that we have already overcome it. The productive power generated by human labor, ingenuity, and industrial machinery could (can!) create wealth enough for everyone to have the material, educational, and cultural foundation to participate in the thought of the poet and the contemplation of the mystic. There was/ IS enough to hip up the whole society. For us to wake one another up and collectively get free.
In an interview in 1991, Baraka said, “we still waste our lives working…doing stupid shit, that people don’t even need done. You gotta get beyond food clothing and shelter before you can get to the real work…the stuff human beings have to do, we haven’t done, because we still waste our lives working, doing shit we don’t want to do. What is our job? Thought! Everything we do is supposed be art.” Like the saying from Bali that everything be done as beautifully as possible, but on the international/planetary scale of labor organization, ecological enhancement, and spiritual culture. Dig Amiri as visionary, as Afrofuturist, as agent of enlightened society.
In addition to his poetry and his prophecy, he wrote prolifically on art and musical criticism, of the blues, RnB and jazz from an emic black perspective at a time when white art and music critics saw themselves as the final arbitrators of aesthetic and social significance.
He continued to teach, debate, and struggle with Naropa well into the 2010s, challenging us to take up enlightened society as not just a vague dream, but an actual political project in solidarity with the worldwide struggle for global justice, for decolonization, for co-production and humane circulation of collectively generated resources. In a public talk at Naropa in 1994, on revolutionary poetry, he stated that “art must be our magic weapon to create and recreate the world and ourselves as part of it.” Transform yourself in the process of transforming the world.
His legacy calls for a Black Naropa (in color, yes, but more consciousness) and presaged the swell in black Buddhism seen today. A Naropa immersed not only in the study of individual psychological liberation, but in cultural, material, and collective liberation. As we look back over 50 years and forward to another 450, his voice as ancestor should be evoked (not uncritically) as part of this lineage, to help us rectify unreckoned pasts, unfaced futures, and the ever-pregnant NOW!
I close with a section from his poem “Between Infra-red and Ultra-Viole.”
Between Infra-red and Ultra-Violet
We is
Space and Time as a picture card of everything we is
Revolutionaries. The world is not
What it will be. We is what will make it that and then. We is the
Never of the yes/the
Tiny of the grand. The hotness of the coolth. The seeing of
The believing the practice
Of the theory. The history of the future. The lost and found we
Are what you need and
What you get if you stay around. We are what we was when you
are where you going.
And was still getting down. We was perfect and rejected it for
travel we is with you
We is you we is us and you we is you and you is everything all
Of us is one family one
Thing one mother & father one. One everyall one never not/We is
Revolutionaries…
