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

2/ raze: jazz: raise

Nathaniel Mackey, in his essay "The Changing Same," has noted that black music--blues, jazz--is the aesthetic center that does hold in the apparently wild "inconsistency" of Baraka's politics. Mackey's insightful arguments provide a useful framework against which to examine Baraka's Third World Marxist poetry. According to Mackey, at the center of Baraka's theory of black music is the concept of an historical racial/class spectrum within which the blackest working-class artists constantly attempt to sabotage and contest the equally constant "assimilationist aspirations of the [black] bourgeoisie" (26). At each phase of assimilation there arose an anti-assimilative black sound to combat the white mainstreaming trend. The important case to Baraka is hard bebop's aggressive anti-assimilative honking (Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane) against Western hegemonic musicality:

   The point it seemed was to spend oneself
   with as much attention as possible,
   and also to make the instruments
   sound as unmusical, or as non-Western,
   as possible. It was almost as
   if blues people were reacting against
   the softness and "legitimacy" that had
   crept into black instrumental music
   with the advent of swing. (qtd. in Mackey 26)

One of Mackey's central and most perceptive arguments about Baraka's poetics concerns the poet's use of repetition. He makes his case by taking up the poems "The Clearing" from Preface and "An Agony. As Now" from Dead Lecturer. In the first case, he points out the poem's several repeating and unanswered questions (e.g., "What song is that?" "Were you singing?"). In the second, he points out the continuous repetition of small phrases throughout the text (e.g., "or pain," "the yes"), each phrase being "followed by a staccato burst of imaged evocation" (44). In these he perceives a stumbling or stuttering effect which is

   a salient feature of the playing of those
   black musicians Baraka most admires.
   (Listen, for example, to Sonny Rollins's
   "Green Dolphin Street," Coltrane's
   "Amen," John Tchicai's "Everything
   Happens to Me.") In some [of Baraka's]
   poems, in fact, the use of repetition
   is almost purely musical, in that
   sound seems to take precedence over
   sense. (45)

Mackey, of course, is picking up on modern jazz's intensified practice of hard rifling. He then picks out something Baraka wrote in response to a Coltrane performance:

   One night he played the head of
   "Confirmation" over and over again,
   about twenty times, and that was his
   solo. It was as if he wanted to take that
   melody apart and play out each of its
   chords as a separate improvisational
   challenge. And while it was a marvelous
   thing to hear and see, it was
   also more than a little frightening; like
   watching a grown man learning to
   speak ... and I think that's just what
   was happening. (qtd. in Mackey 45)

Drawing on this observation, Mackey goes on to conclude that "Baraka too seems to have gone back to the beginning, to be learning to speak or relearning to speak--unlearning modes of speech that impede the speech he is reaching toward" (45). It is this direction of Mackey's analysis that suggests its limitations.