Politics, process & performance: Amiri Baraka's "It's Nation Time"

African American Review, Summer-Fall, 2003 by Meta DuEwa Jones

A culturally politicized component exists in Baraka's performative iterations in "It's Nation Time." The vocal and instrumental "screams" put in practice the ethos underpinning Baraka's improvised interjections. Mackey maintains that, "as a deliberate affront to the dominant culture's canons of musicality, 'honking' [or screaming] challenges and delegitimates that culture's distinction between music and noise, its imposition of hegemonic expectations as to what constitutes acceptable sound." Honking strikes a deliberately discordant note. According to Mackey, honking's "recourse to what would otherwise be thought of as noise" reflects a racial discord because symbolically it "marks the divide between black and white, accenting the dissonant relations within a white-supremacist society, the discrepant rift between racist practices and professed democratic ideals" (29). Baraka's remarks on "honking" among rhythm and blues saxophonists suggest that their unconventional musical gestures cued his performance style. "The point" of these instrumental peals, Baraka notes, "was to spend oneself with as much attention as possible, ant also to make the instruments sound as unmusical, or as Non-Western, as possible. It was almost as if the blues people were reacting against the softness and 'legitimacy' that had crept into black instrumental music with the advent of swing" (qtd. in Mackey 29). Baraka's intentionally unmusical, discordant notes possess a unique and parodic music as he moves in his delivery of "It's Nation Time" through speech, scream, and song.

The difference between Baraka's two distinct performances of the penultimate and final stanzas of "It's Nation Time" illuminate his bridging the boundary between speech and song. The recorded performance of "It's Nation Time" took place at the Congress of African Peoples in Atlanta Georgia, in 1970. The significance of the historical and political context for Baraka's reading cannot be overestimated. In his study of Baraka's pivotal role in the organizational development of black cultural nationalism, Komozi Woodard explains that the Congress was one of "four national organizations" which led to the "birth of a black national political community" (160). Woodard also notes that 1970 marked the beginning of a period during which the politics of black cultural nationalism reached its zenith. As one of the key conveners of the Congress, Baraka was an instrumental figure, in multiple senses of the word. When he delivered his poem before the throng of Congress attendees, he recited the lines:

   It's nation time eye ime
   It's nation ti eye ime
   chant with bells and drum
   it's nation time (2)

And he sang the word time and protracted his enunciation of the i with a pronounced vibrato, mimicking the sound of a saxophone (Baraka, I'll Make Me A World). His stylization of this phrase suggests that jazz inflection can be present in a poem whose content does not ostensibly indicate any relationship to that tradition. This indicate: the reason that examining the performances is essential to a more comprehensive appreciation of jazz-influenced poetry. Paradoxically, the "eye" spelling in the lines signals a visual instead of a musical emphasis. Yet "chant with bells and drum" reflects Baraka's recurrent phrasing of "it's nation time" and the accompaniment of a saxophonist and a drummer in his performance on the It's Nation Time: Visionary Music album.