A NATION WITHIN A NATION: Amiri Baraka & Black Power Politics. - Leroi Jones - Review - book review

Civil Rights Journal, Fall, 1999

A NATION WITHIN A NATION: Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) & Black Power Politics by Komozi Woodard (The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 329 pp.)

Bliss it was to be young in the 1960s, but to be black and angry was very heaven--or so one might gather from these two books. They offer glimpses of two of the last of the true believers, Angela Davis and Amiri Baraka, from two of their most devoted admirers. Aptheker's book is a republication of her 1975 account of Davis' trial for murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy--a story that would seem to have all the ingredients of a first-rate read, regardless of one's political perspective. Yet Aptheker writes so ploddingly one would hardly imagine so much as a traffic ticket was at stake. Here she is, arriving at the jail to tell Davis she'd been bailed out: "The matron took me in tow. Jail routine.... She led me down the corridor. I could hear Angela laughing and talking. I went inside. Kendra, Margaret, and Stephanie were standing about, crowded into the cell. The remains of a spaghetti dinner were on a metal tray on a chair. Everyone was munching on part of an orange. Angela was curled up on the bed. She wanted to know if I was hungry. There was some salad left...." And so it goes, one declarative sentence after another, as unappetizing as cold spaghetti. What the law couldn't accomplish, Aptheker has: she's interred Davis in her prose.

Woodard's book is less clogged and more wide-ranging, placing Amiri Baraka in the context of the 1960s urban uprisings and the rise of the Black Power Movement. Baraka, the author of twenty plays, three jazz operas, seven books of nonfiction and thirteen volumes of poetry, whom Maya Angelou calls the world's greatest living poet, is best remembered for the slogan "It's Nation Time" he contributed to the development of black cultural nationalism. Nation Within a Nation aims to be a scholarly work rather than a mere narrative, yet it, too, suffers from too close a regard for its subject. Woodard's uncritical acceptance of Baraka's ideology and tactics prevents him from asking the revelatory questions that a retrospective needs if it isn't to give off a whiff of formaldehyde. Readers looking for a warm soak in yesterday's verities will enjoy these books; the rest will find their protagonists curiously unreflective, sadly diminished in their inattentiveness to the ironies of history.