by Paul Ortiz
“The spirit will not descend without
—Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963)
Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones) was one of the greatest poets in American history. A two-time recipient of the American Book Award, he founded the Black Arts Movement, a multimedia explosion of poetry, prose, paintings and forms of expression rooted in the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, and the global anti-colonial struggle. His contemporaries in the Movement included literary giants such as Sonia Sanchez, Lorraine Hansberry and Ishmael Reed who used words as weapons to attack the rigid systems of oppression that degrade social relations in the United States.
Amiri Baraka’s words were variously incisive, wide of the mark, angry, joyous, fiery, loving, wicked, satirical, incendiary, full of hate, full of love, strident, whispery, soft as down, hard as iron. Like all great artists Baraka refused to integrate into what he understood to be a fundamentally corrupt society. After winning the prestigious PEN Open Book Award for his magnificent “Tales of the Out and Gone” (2008) he said “Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle. The bourgeoisie uses the arts to valorize capitalism, whether books, films, drama, music. The most progressive artists can never get the exposure that the artist prostitutes get. Mao said even arts, literary criticism et cetera is part of the class struggle. So that we must utilize works that are artistically powerful and ideologically revolutionary.”
