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

Admittedly, this sense of immediacy is illusive, since these performance are mediated through the realms of videotape and vinyl. Nevertheless, the performance environment does allow for flexibility in the form and tone of his verse unrealizable in the printed version of "It's Nation Time." The poem in print does not provide Baraka the opportunity to alter the poem's potential aural effect or to add and extract words in different verses. Despite Baraka's movement away from solely print-bound possibilities in his poetry, Harryette Mullen observes that the videotape of poets such as Baraka emphasizes "the poet reading the text." These readings are, according to Mullen, "unlike the oral composition the griot or the free improvisations of the jazz musician" in that they "high-light the African-American poet's performance of the written, transforming wordscript into 'soulscript'" (10-11). Accordingly, the video clip of Baraka performing at the Congress of Africa Peoples captures Baraka's downcast eyes while he flips the poem's pages even though he recites the last stanza while directly facing the audience.

Does the presence of the page, a poet's use of his or her written text in a public reading negate the possibility for improvisation to enter the work, as Mullen seems to suggest? If so, then the label "jazz-inspired" only accurately refers to the poem in print but not in performance--even for a poet as dynamic and spontaneous as Baraka. I would argue that for a poet such as Baraka, who is so thoroughly immersed in the jazz tradition, improvisation enters the work at the level of composition--regardless of whether printed versions of his poems are a n present feature in his live and recorded performances. Baraka has consistently and continually moved, metaphorically and literally, from the page to the stage in his poetic delivery. As I have briefly demonstrated in this essay, this movement should be considered in aesthetical and political terms. Baraka's performance methods--including the noisy wailings of his jazzed texts--formally express a key element of his aesthetic agenda, namely, engaging the power and the politics of sound. Scholars of Baraka's poetry should heed his early call "to start and finish there," with the sounds of his voice deployed dynamically in performance, to ensure a more comprehensive criticism of his aesthetics.

Notes

(1.) See for example, Henry Lacey's discussion of the Marxist "sloganeering" that, according to Lacey, mars Baraka's otherwise laudable evocation of Coltrane in his poem "AM/TRAK" (21).

(2.) Baraka, "It's Nation Time," Amiri Baraka Reader 242. Note that this citation is of the poem as it appears in the Reader. In the performance he reads the line "It's nation ti eye ime" three times.

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. "How You Sound?" Baraka, LeRoi 16-17.

--. I'll Make Me A World: A Century of African American Arts. Evening 3, Hour 5. Videocassette. Prod. Denise A. Greene. PBS Video, 1999. 60 min.