In the tradition: Amiri Baraka, black liberation, and avant-garde praxis in the U.S

African American Review, Summer-Fall, 2003 by Daniel Won-gu Kim

   The razor. Our flail against them, why
   you carry knives? Or brutaled lumps of

   heart? Why you stay, where they can
   reach? Why you sit, or stand, or walk
   in this place, a window on a dark

   warehouse. Where the minds packed in
   straw. New homes, these towers, for those
   lacking money or art. (Reader 72)

The invocation, then, of Black Dada Nihilismus to arise and wreak terror and violence is the poet calling forth a force--a rage--within himself. But we can see the poet twisting in self-doubt, even fissuring himself into these fractured entities--these pronouns ambiguously pointing back to himself--as he struggles to find the will to purge himself ("our flail") of something he cannot yet bring himself to give up. (6) This screaming indictment has a self-conscious, hollow echo.

Finally, the poem's selection of civilizations destroyed by the West--Byzantium, Tenochtitlan, Commanch--complicates any simple model of racial or colonial oppression. Tenochtitlan, listed with Commanch and Byzantium to close the penultimate section of the poem, was the glorious capital of Aztec civilization, the capture of which was the pinnacle of Cortez's colonizing mission and the symbolic end of Aztec civilization. But it was not simply "the West" that destroyed it. Baraka turns part of the critique of the West against himself in his reference to "Moctezuma"--a "mock" spelling of Montezuma, the Aztec ruler who believed Cortez to be a god, who marshaled his own people to support Cortez's war, who provided Cortez with his infamous mistress and translator Malinche. (7) Is this immanent self-critique?

Commanch and Byzantium also resist being read as simple victims of Western colonialism. (8) Byzantium is typically understood to have been the critical linkage between Greek and Roman civilization and the European Renaissance, then emerging from the Dark Ages. Byzantium was a bulwark protecting Christian Europe from "barbarism," and it fell--not to the West--but to the Ottoman Turks. Is Baraka somehow identifying with the intercultural role of Byzantium? The Comanches, in contrast, led one of the last important waves of Indian resistance against white settlers, conducting masterful guerilla warfare against numerically superior federal troops. The symbolic beginning of their destruction was a battle in which a band of Comanches, under Chief Peta Nocona, was defeated by a company of Texas Rangers, under Captain L. S. Ross. The Rangers killed Chief Nocona but captured his 33-year-old wife, Cynthia Ann Parker, a white woman whom the Comanches had captured when she was nine. Cynthia Parker died when removed from the Indian culture and society she had grown to consider home. Does she represent, against "Moctezuma," an alternative figure for Baraka's conflicted identity?

In this reading, I have wanted to suggest that the Baraka of "Black Dada Nihilismus" was never so narrowly or violently cultural nationalist as he's been portrayed, but, rather, that he was much more self-critical in both his politics and his poetics. At what has been assumed to be the very nucleus of his "visions of vengeful violence" and his "contempt for a dying West," Baraka can be seen engaged in a meaningful--difficult--struggle to transform himself and his work. It has been too easy to present Baraka's development as discontinuous: a series of radical breaks, the unpredictable swings of a wild, impetuous temperament and ego. Since Baraka's politics have always been extreme and inconstant, so the logic goes, it serves nothing to take them seriously; his Poetics, his Art are what are important. Such a view has only encouraged the misapprehension--to the point of trivialization--of the vital and developing relationship between his politics and his poetics.