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

Meta DuEwa Jones

Politics

In a recently published book, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual, the scholar Jerry Watts invokes Baraka in iconic fashion. He prefaces the book with the following admonition:

   In the best of worlds, it would be unwise to call out the name
   Amiri Baraka in a crowded hall of black intellectuals. To bring
   up Baraka in a symposium on art and politics is to bring a
   conversation to a standstill. One of the most controversial
   Afro-American intellectuals of the last forty years, Baraka is
   admired, hated, feared, dismissed, adored, and despised. (x)

The recent broil over Baraka's recital of the poem "Somebody Blew Up America" has only served to intensify the poet's controversial status. With calls by some state and local officials to force Baraka to resign from his post as New Jersey's poet laureate, one could add to Watts's alliterative list of verbs the darkly descriptive dethroned.

But Watts's perspective on Baraka's position as an intellectual is of lesser relevance, for this essay's purposes, than is Watts's position on Baraka's poetry. Of his second poetry collection, It's Nation Time, Watts opines:

   None of the three poems [in the book] is impressive. The redundancy
   and tendentiousness of the themes make it appear as if Baraka had run
   out of ideas.... [He] may have done himself a disservice in trying to
   force his strong polemical impulses into a poetic form. His didactic
   intentions overwhelm his artistic sensibilities and make the poetry
   abysmal (236-37)

Watts diametrically opposes the polemic and didactic to the artistic and the poetic, rendering Baraka's form as distinctly separate from--instead of an extension of--verbal content. Watts's critique highlights the time-worn division drawn between art and politics (as opposed to art as politics), and his method for critical analysis entails focusing on the semantic substance of the poems on the page. Thus, he disregards the poems' formal structure and the performance environment in which they emerged and through which Baraka planned to articulate them. This neglect of the potential presentation context leads to what might seem to some to be a well-founded dismissal of Baraka's poetry, especially work penned during his prolific outpouring in the 1970s such as It's Nation Time.

Ironically, Watts's censure of "It's Nation Time," and concurrently Baraka's poetics, occurs in the same chapter, "Amiri Baraka as Black Arts Poet and Essayist," which readily acknowledges, first, Baraka's talent and popularity a a performance artist, particularly during the Black Arts Movement (BAM), and, second, the importance of performance (poetry and drama were the favored genres of Movement participants) as one of the political strategies Baraka and other Black Arts artists employed to reach a black mass audience. Indeed, Watts proclaims, "One had to hear Baraka in order to experience the Imamu," or spiritual leader (237). Yet Watts's inattention to the dynamic effects of Baraka's speaking voice when he recites his poetry amounts to a mishearing and, consequently, a misreading of his corpus. More specifically, I contend that, through the arena of performance, a dimension of Baraka's poetics emerges that counters a one-dimensional interpretation of his poetry as appallingly flattened by his poet cal motivations. As the poet and critic Charles Bernstein justly observes, "... performance, in the sense of doing, is an underlying formal aesthetic as much as it is a political issue in Baraka's work" (7). If a primarily page-based analysis of Baraka's poetics leads to its underestimation, then a formal audio and visual analysis of Baraka's poetry-in-performance can potentially enrich our appreciation of his poetics.

As this essay will demonstrate, Baraka's additions to and alterations c verses, his shifts from speech into song, and his imitations of the sounds of instruments while performing his poems all suggest that, in a performance context, his work engages in a process of revision modeled upon the improvisatory ethos of jazz. The essence of Baraka's jazz-influenced poetry, like its counterpart, jazz music is in the performance. Visual representations of Baraka's poems on the page alone do not sufficiently define the forms of his art or aesthetic. Thus my analysis emphasizes the improvisatory interaction that occurs between Baraka and accompanying musicians in recorded jazz-and-poetry performances. I will focus on two moments of Baraka's vocal delivery of the title poem in the book Watts critiques--It's Nation Time. Considering "It's Nation Time" within the context of performance takes into account of his an implicitly political aspect of his writing; that is, the local--and historical--context in which his verse emerges. It also suggests, in contrast to Watts, that the political can inform and enrich the poetic, and vice versa.

How do sites of performance extend the possibilities of poetic form? What is the significance of discrepancies between the performed and printed versions of Baraka's poems? Do recitals of jazz-influenced poems remain consistent irrespective of the performance venue, or do they change over time and under different circumstances? My method of examination Is engages the above questions.

Process

Baraka's stated philosophy for his method of reading and performing signals a critically appropriate method for discerning his poetics. "You have to start and finish there ... your own voice ... how you sound," he declared in a statement on poetics included in the New American Poetry anthology (Baraka, "How?" 16). When reciting his poems, he marshals his voice in a manner which reveals that he deliberately uses his vocal chords an instrument to be played. He employs a wide variety of tonal registers and often emphasizes dissonance or euphony in particular verses by varying the intensity of speed and volume while reading. The spontaneity and continual alteration so highly valued in jazz translates to Baraka's poetry when it is performed. He does not read the same poems in the exact same manner in different contexts. His is an intentional inconsistency that results from what the scholar and poet Nathaniel Mackey refers to as Baraka' "exaltation of process," of "the doing, the coming into being," of an artistic product. As Mackey astutely observes, "the closeness of improvised music to the primacy of process is the quality Baraka strives for in his poems" (32). Baraka is a process artist (Harris xv) for whom the process of creating a poem possesses an artistic value which is superior to the actual poem produced--what he calls the "artifact." "Even the artist," Baraka avows,

   is more valuable than his artifact,
   because the art process goes on in his
   mind. But the process itself is the most
   important quality because it can transform
   and create, and its only form is
   possibility. The artifact, because it
   assumes one form, is only that particular
   quality or idea. It is, in this sense,
   after the fact, and is only important
   because it remarks on its source. (qtd.
   in Mackey 32)

Baraka's belief that the "artifact" is limited to "one form" is revealing. His desire to explore multiple possibilities in the form of his poetic compositions engenders this hierarchy between process and product. Furthermore, he draws an analogy between this creative process and the "at the time" characteristic of "live music." He contends that its particular value lies in the listener's ability to contemplate "the artifact as it arrives," to listen "to it emerge." Baraka's practical application of this process-based poetics is manifest in his divergent deliveries of the hallmark poem "It's Nation Time."

The charismatic characteristic of Baraka's performance style is exemplified in his two different recorded recitals of "It's Nation Time." "What time is it?--Nation Time" became a catch phrase artists and activists alike used during the peak of the Black Arts/Black Power period in the early to mid-seventies. The poet and critic Kalamu ya Salaam maintains that Baraka's poem, which riffs on the phrase, served as a virtual anthem of black cultural nationalism (21). The poem's anthem-coining qualities and circulation value are apparent in the politician Jesse Jackson's recollection of his frequent use of the phrase at national political assemblies:

   I had drawn much of the strength of
   Nationtime from a poem written by
   LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka at that time.
   The sense of people saying, "What's
   happening?" ... Say, ... "It's
   Nationtime, it's time to come together.
   It's time to organize politically ... It's
   time for blacks to enter into the equation."
   (qtd. in Woodard 209)

Jackson's remarks--as we shall see shortly--strikingly resemble, almost verbatim, the opening lines of Baraka's poem. One could, of course, argue that this resemblance is not remarkable, since the poem's propagandistic phrasing captured the common political sentiments of the tune. ya Salaam, in fact, is one of many critics who have commented on the doctrinaire aspects of Baraka's poetry, and indeed they are evident in "It's Nation Time." (1) Yet, I want to highlight the manner in which Baraka's performance reveals elements of the poem's jazz inflection while also potentially deflecting some of its didacticism.

The poem begins and ends with the slogan "It's Nation Time." Baraka chants it at varied intervals throughout the poem's narrative. "It's Nation Time" also functions as an invocation in his reading of the poem on the It's Nation Time: Visionary Music recording is he made with musical accompaniment (Baraka). Idris Muhammed immediately follows Baraka's statement of the phrase by initiating a clamorous drum roll that lasts for nearly six seconds. As the drum roll subsides, a group of African drummers play a softer beat background while Baraka recites:

   Time to get
   together
   time to be one strong fast black energy
   space
   one pulsating positive magnetism,
   rising
   time to get up and
   be
   come
   be
   come, time to
   be come
   time to
   get up be come

   black genius rise in spirit muscle ...
   ("Nation Time" 240)

Baraka's method of reciting "time to be one strong fast black energy space / one pulsating positive magnetism, rising" enacts the lines' meaning; an energetic pulse marks his rapid delivery. Yet he controls this vigor, inserting a slight half-second's pause between "become" each time he repeats the fragmented word. Baraka's diction, if not elegant, is precise. He emphasizes the long vowel in the e in become and pronounces the word come with a clipped attack on the consonant c. His arrangement of "be come" on separate lines suggests that the visual shift marks a space for a slight silence to occur during his performance.

In contrast to many of Baraka's poems of this period, whose peripheral (and often parenthetical) words provide explicit recital cues, Baraka appears to embed performance directions within the printed text of this poem. Thus, at the moment that Baraka says, "sun man get up rise," he drastically--and breathlessly--increases the speed and volume of his vocal delivery. Consequently, his pace makes his speech nearly indecipherable when he recites the lines

   ... heart of universes to be
   future of the world
   the black man is the future of the world
   be come
   rise up
   future of the black genius spirit reality
   move
   from crushed roach back
   from dead snake head
   from wig funeral in slowmotion
   from dancing teeth and coward tip
   from jibberjabber patme boss patme
   smmich (240)

One could argue that, textually, the poem's verbal content does not merit deciphering, since it is fairly transparent up until the lines" surrealist imagery in "crushed roach back," "dead snake head," and "wig funeral in slowmotion." On the page, the poem may not seem so visually compelling, but Baraka's reiteration of bald pronouncements develop the poem orally and aurally. His structurally varied repetition in phrases such as "Time to get, Time to be one, Time to get up, Time to be come" and "future of the world," "the black man is the future of the world" moves the poem along rhythmically and musically in the performance. Baraka's characteristic phrasal repetition, Nathaniel Mackey claims, "gives the sense of wrestling with definition, a sense of anxiety regarding the possibility of arriving at a stable sense of what these phrases mean" (44). Thus, Baraka's reiteration of the lines "black energy space," "black genius rise in spirit muscle, and "the black man is the future.., of the black genius spirit reality" potentially destabilize more than codify a fixed notion of "blackness," even as these same phrases, regrettably, limit the conceptual notion of racial authenticity in masculinist terms.

(Jazz) Performance

Baraka's use of anaphora and repetition--his "changing same"--also indicates that a jazz aesthetic structurally influences the poem's form. Repetition and riffs are crucial within jazz improvisation. As the ethnomusicologist Ingrid Monson attests, in jazz performance, "frequently an exchange will begin with the repetition of a particular musical passage or a response with a complimentary musical interjection." Jazz musicians' bring repetition into play in performance to help to create "a participatory musical framework against which highly idiosyncratic and innovative improvisation can take place" (Monson 89). Likewise, Baraka's reiteration enables the percussionist that accompanies him to punctuate and puncture his reading rhythm. Baraka's reading style concurrently encourages and mimics musical interaction. For instance, he recites the following lines in a swift and percussive manner:

   It's nation time

   Boom
   Booom
   BOOOM

   Dadadadadadadadadadad
   Boom
   Boom
   Boom
   Boom
   Dadadadad adadadad (240)

Baraka's use of repetition in a visual depiction of scatting in the above passage, at its worst, is typographically and syntactically ineffectual. In the realm of what Stephen Henderson called the "cold technology of the printed page" (30), it fails to connote meaning or even an intentional irrationality. But as Mackey observes, in Baraka's poetry, "the use of repetition is almost purely musical, in that sound seems to take precedence over sense" (44). And the sounds do make sense--they function logically and dialogically--within the context of Baraka's recitation to percussive musical accompaniment. The verses' aural aspects pinpoint the poem's power. Baraka's onomatopoetic approximation of a drumming chorus counterpoints the drummer, Idris Muhammed, who interjects and echoes his utterances. Moreover, after finishing the phrase "Dadadadad adadadad," Baraka departs from the printed words on the page and engages in an intense impromptu dialogue with the saxophonist. He begins a series of high pitched yells--"OW! OW! OW!" is the closest textual approximation--that function as a call which summons the saxophonist's response. Instead of trading solos, they trade screams. As the pitch of Baraka's screams increases, the saxophonist parallels his tonal evocation by playing a series of correspondingly shrill notes. Baraka's extra-textual vocalizations suitably fit within jazz improvisational standards, where "the musicians are compositional participants who may 'say' unexpected things or elicit response from other musicians. Musical intensification is open-ended rather than pre-determined and highly interpersonal in character--structurally far more similar to a conversation than to a text" (Monson 81). Baraka and the saxophonist converse, using the words, music, and sheer sound as the combined ingredients for their joint performance.

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.

Baraka's reading of this particular stanza gestures in a direction different from his previous reading at the Congress of African Peoples. He still protracts the i in time, but his pronunciation seems deliberately disharmonic. He utters "t-I-I-I-I-I-I-M-me" in a raspy tone with a stuttering effect and repeats this several times, varying the length of the I each time. Unlike his mellifluous delivery of the poem at the Congress, his speech-song seems taut, even anti-melodic, grating the ear instead of pleasing it (It's Nation Time). The divergence between Baraka's readings in different contexts points to the variety of his performance approach. For example, in the published version of the poem's last stanza, Baraka states:

   It's nation time, get up santa claus

   (repeat)

   it's nation time, build it
   get up muffet dragger
   get up rastus for real to be rasta farari
   ras jua
   get up got here bow

   It's Nation
   Time! (242)

However, in both recitals, on two different recordings, Baraka inserts additional addressees, departing from the printed phrase "get up santa claus," and expanding it to include "get up roy wilkins, get up diana ross, and get up dione warwick." Moreover, the line "get up got here bow" is transformed into "get up nigger, come over here, take a bow, brother" (Baraka, I'll Make Me A World and It's Nation Time). These alterations highlight the immediacy, fluidity, and theatricality of the performance.

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.

--. "It's Nation Time." 1970. Baraka, LeRoi 240-42.

--. It's Nation Time: Visionary Music. LP. Black Forum Records. B-457L, 1972.

--. The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. New York: Thunder's Mouth P, 1991.

Bernstein, Charles. Introduction. Close Listening. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 7.

Harris, William J. Editor's Note. Baraka, LeRoi xv.

Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References. New York: Morrow, 1973.

Lacey, Henry. "Baraka's 'AM/TRAK': Everybody's Coltrane Poem." Obsidian II 1.1-2 (1986): 12-21,

Mackey, Nathaniel. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Monson, Ingrid. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Mullen, Harryette. "A Beat for Which There Is No Notation." The American Poetry Archives Videotape Catalogue. San Francisco: American Poetry Archives/The Poetry Center, 1991.

Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amid Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York UP, 2001.

Woodard, Komozi. A Nation Within A Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999.

ya Salaam, Kalamu. "Why Spoken Word Rules." Black Issues Book Review Mar.-Apr. 1999:21.

Meta DuEwa Jones is Assistant Professor of English at George Washington University, where she teaches courses in modern and postmodern American poetry, performance, and African American literature. She is also currently a Rockefeller Foundation Diasporic Racisms Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin's Center for African and African-American Studies. Her manuscript-in-progress is The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry and the Spoken Word.

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