Trouble man: Amiri Baraka has been under siege recently for his poem "Somebody Blew Up America." But long before the latest firestorm, this literary legend has made controversy a way of life - includes selected bibliography

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2003 by Robert Fleming

He was a pivotal figure in the election of Newark's first black mayor, Kenneth Gibson in 1970. During the '70s, he reassessed his black-nationalist stance, criticizing its limitations, and embraced socialism. His message of race pride, self-determinism and political activism could still be found in the flurry of work published in this period; books such as In Our Terribleness (1970), Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1975 and Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979). At a time when many Black Arts Movement writers saw their talents cool, the poems, plays and essays continued to flow from Baraka, including mesmerizing dramas like Dutchman and The Slave. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as he evolved both artistically and politically, Baraka published Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1974-1979 (1984), The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1984), Eulogies (1996) and Six Persons: Novel and Short Stories (1998).

In an almost chameleon-like way, Baraka pushed his stylistic prowess as a poet, essayist and novelist to the limit. Going from a formal, Beat-influenced approach of startling images and wordplay to a more verbal, accessible format, which only increased his popularity. Some have criticized this transition as an example of a former wordsmith's rapid decline. But Baraka sees it differently.

"I have changed over the years because I have struggled to understand and change the world," says Baraka. "People who question change cannot really be trying to do this. How can you be in the world and your ideas over the years remain the same," he observes. "Those who question change are intellectually lazy, or suffer from the passivity of the overstuffed or cryptically satisfied."

While much of his early works are out of print, Baraka notes that part of what has happened has to do with the consolidation of American publishers and the stress on profits, and what he terms "covers" (when a white artist duplicates the work of a black artist and becomes more famous) of legitimate work with sensational imitations. "Black literature has been deeply co-opted by super-structural `covers' as in our music," he says.

"Since Dun & Bradstreet reported that the largest incremental leap in book buyers was among young black people, the corpses, as in rap, have covered or marginalized and obscured the most serious and committed young, black artists, with some Negroes committed to self-gratification and `getting over.' Or pleasing the master," he suggests. "Their work is superficial, frivolous, and tied to the shallow commercialism of the mainstream. The so-called mainstream `covers' its most significant, profound artists," Baraka adds. "Not only is the Black Arts Movement covered and denigrated by pimp Negroes and white folks, the Negro writers and artists raised by academic and commercial institutions are superficial hacks or openly reactionary," he says.

"The historic paradigm of the revolutionary democratic tradition of Afro-American literature is assaulted and obscured as much as possible," he asserts. "The works of Frederick Douglass, Sterling Brown, W.E.B. Du Bois, Margaret Walker, Ted Ward, Henry Dumas, Larry Neal, Lorraine Hansberry, Rudolph Fisher, Wallace Thurman and Claude McKay are mostly hidden. Langston gets mentioned more and more, but the great works of his in fiction and drama are left untouched. Where are the great plays of Hansberry, Baldwin, Ward, Bullins and Caldwell," says Baraka, continuing his rant. "Instead, we get plays glorifying the most cowardly sector of the Negro petty bourgeoisie, some even caricaturing great black artists or opposing the Afro-American liberation itself!"