Baraka and Surrealism

In 1979 Baraka published an essay on the poet Aimé Césaire, a key source.  The essay, however, is highly critical. Baraka is dismissive of the idea of “the word as magic, and the poet as magician”, which by 1979, he had come to see as being associated with “cultural nationalism and metaphysics”. Baraka’s essay is important, then, because while it shows Baraka to have become almost dogmatically dismissive of some of the metaphors he had used in his youth, it also allows us us to think through what value those metaphors may still have as a revolutionary poetics.

There have been a number of recent claims for an affinity between Surrealism and radical black poetics. Aldon Nielsen has claimed that black poets consciously saw in Surrealism the same struggles that they were facing to reach a consolidation between radical poetics and radical, leftist politics:

For poets such as Baraka, Spellman, Cortez and Cecil Taylor, moving to an avant-garde poetics was never motivated by the desire to evade the political imperatives of race and class. For them a radical politics and radical poetics were virtually inseparable . . . In the surrealists, they located a radically anti colonial politics given formal experimental expression.


Robin Kelley has taken this suggestion further, and has gone so far as to argue that “surrealism served as a bridge between Marxism and the Black Radical Tradition”, and, perhaps in an echo of Baraka’s early claim that simply being black in America is to be a “nonconformist”, claims, somewhat sweepingly, that radical black artists’ “dissatisfaction with socialist realism had to do with the suppression of key elements of Black culture that surrealism embraced: the unconscious,the spirit, desire, magic and love”. Kelley, himself a one-time member of the American Surrealist Group, has recently co-edited an anthology of Black Surrealism, in which he has pointed to the importance of Baraka’s “very long, critical engagement with Surrealism and Dadaism”.

While Baraka was rightly critical of Surrealism, he has never denied certain affinities. In a 1980 interview with William Harris he expressed admiration for Surrealism’s ability to “create strange worlds in which strange things happen”, but with the caveat that, for him, “these strange things (had to) really relate to the real world”.In 1988 he published an essay in tribute to Henry Dumas, an important writer who was a key figure in the Black Arts Movement, and who in 1968 was shot and killed by a police officer in a still unexplained case of “mistaken identity”. Baraka called Dumas an “Afro-Surreal Expressionist”, and praised his “skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one”. Here, Baraka echoes his earlier definition of an image as a “practical vector from the soul”. The artwork can take us to some “weird and wonderful” places and yet if it does not have a “practical” grounding in actual lived being, and if it does not retain a critical and antagonistic relationship with that lived being, then it risks being recuperated into the bourgeois world it claims to despise. Dumas’ version of Surrealism, Baraka claims, runs no such risk, because no matter how “shattered” it may become, no matter how many “excursions and multilayered ambiguities”,

The very broken quality, almost to abstraction, is a function of change and transition. It is a though the whole world we inhabit rests on the bottom of the ocean, harnessed by memory, language, image to that “railroad of human bones” at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Dumas’ surrealism is, for Baraka, ultimately realism, on the basis of the horrific images that are at the base of all African American art. The “railroad of human bones” is not only a striking, surrealist image, it is the memory of the skeletons of captured African still on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean, cast overboard as they died under the unimaginable conditions of the middle-passage. Black Surrealism, Baraka argues, is always ultimately going to be realism, due to outlandishness of the imagery that exists at the base of African American cultural memory. Robin Kelley makes a similar point. While European Surrealism is concerned with the dream, and something they refer to as the “marvellous”, Black Surrealism has more to say about “the multiplicities of Madness, the nightmares, the terrifying hallucinations embedded in the collective black unconscious”

Baraka argues that a Black Surrealist goes further, that the revolutionary content of their work must necessarily be deeper and more profound because, as well as the horror at the base of the collective memory of the descendants of slaves, there is also the question of the imposition of a language. In the essay on Aimé Césaire, Baraka refers bluntly to this as the “conquerer’s language”, and distinguishes between those writers who seek “merely to assimilate themselves” into that language and those who “answer questions that have been posed in the conquerer’s language, by the conquerer’s culture - but ultimately they answer those questions with a language of their own - resistance”.The revolutionary intellectual, or artist, takes the enemy language, and transforms it, turns it against it owners, turns it into a weapon. Frantz Fanon had made a similar point: “(s)ooner or later, the colonised intellectual realises that the existence of a nation is not proved by culture, but in the people’s struggle against the forces of occupation”.

Larry Neal’s insisted that the artwork is just one element in a wider culture both of struggle, and of everyday life, and that the search for new forms in poetry or in art only has validity if it is a part of the struggle for new social forms. Baraka even defined it: a revolutionary artwork, he claimed, must be a “struggle form” the artwork is no longer related to national culture, but to national struggle. For Baraka, this means that a poetic work must not only “really relate to the real world” in terms of its content, or even the transformation of its form, but how it relates to other forms of literary production: in the section of the Autobiography that speaks of his early days in Harlem, he claims that his feelings at that point in his life could be summed up via a triangulation of three books:Aimé Césaire's  Notebook, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and Amilcar Cabral’s Return to the Source.Poetry is not merely brought together with other revolutionary texts: Césaire’s proximity with Fanon and Cabral brings out the political value that is concealed within its poetic value, and therefore, likewise, the poetics inherent in the work of Cabral and Fanon also becomes apparent.

The European Surrealists had had a similar insight, and tried to do equivalent things: they went so far as to demand that Marx and Rimbaud be brought together, in order to transform the latter’s “alchemy of the verb” into “real chemistry”. But Baraka dismisses this as “intellectual pastiche”, and claims that European Surrealism “calls for a disordering finally of the bourgeois world, but it does not really call for its destruction”. He basically accuses them of being petit-bourgeois adventurists, anarchists or ultraleftists with no actual connection with the realities of actual working class struggle. The accusation is preposterous. The history of the Surrealists’ fraught relationship with the French Communist Party ultimately reflects far more badly on the PCF and than it does on the Surrealists. The Surrealists may have had a bourgeois class base, but their revolutionary commitment is clear from their actions. Paul Eluard and Tristan Tzara were both highly active in the French Resistance. Benjamin Peret fought in the anarchist militias on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. Further, the European Surrealists were outspoken supporters of anti-colonialist struggle, some decades before it became common for European intellectuals to take such positions:

Surrealism may have originated in the West, but it is rooted in a conspiracy against Western civilisation [. . .] The Paris Surrealist Group and the extreme Left of the French Communist Party were drawn together in 1925 by their support of Abd-el-Krim, leader of the Rif uprising against French colonialism in Morocco [. . . ] In other words, the revolts of the colonial world and its struggles for cultural autonomy animated surrealists as much as reading Freud or Marx.

Be this as it may, for Baraka, Surrealism was a movement that “confuse(d) bourgeois rebellion with revolution”.But while Baraka’s dismissal of the Surrealists’ political commitments was unfounded, if we apply his criticisms to their aesthetic commitments, things looks slightly different. Baraka - and the Black Arts Movement in general - sees artistic production in a dialectical relationship with other elements of the political struggle, so that poetry is inevitably changed by claiming a relationship with Fanon, or Cabral, or Malcolm X, or even John Coltrane, and further, this is a seen as positive and necessary part of the struggle. While the Surrealists claimed they wanted to conflate Rimbaud and Marx, this never really consisted of anything more than an attempt to elevate the importance of Rimbaud in the eyes of revolutionaries. Poetry and revolutionary theory would always only have a complementary, never a dialectical relationship. They continued to fetishise the figure of the poet, and more precisely, the poete maudite, as always already revolutionary. Benjamin Peret claimed that “the poet of today has no other choice to be a revolutionist or not be a poet”, but this was purely because of the poet’s “accursed”, “outsider” status.This enthusiasm for the poet as cursed outsider led to an uncritical belief in the idea of the poet as magician, which was a position that Baraka had shared, but had come to reject.

Baraka was critical of the poems of Césaire’s that were most obviously influenced by Surrealism, those included in books like The Miraculous Weapons and Solar Throat Slashed. While he admired the aggressive force of the poems, he described them as “an unfocussed torrent of heat, that must be focussed to blast steel”.Rather like his own account of The System of Dante’s Hell’s move from “association complexes” to “fast narrative”, Baraka demands a directness that loses none of the intensity of raw poetic force:

Césaire’s early poetry was influenced by the wild imagery of Rimbaud (A Season in Hell) and Lautreamont, but Retours goes beyond the scope of that imagery . . . . Césaire’s thrashing images dig into the surreal in the sense that they are sometimes wildly unrelated elements, but juxtaposed they make a new dissociation that calls forth new associations and new meanings . . . . wild imagery can cause brilliant new meaning. The power is in the focus on real life that can fuse into a new dialectic seemingly dissimilar elements.

Baraka ultimately feels an affinity with Césaire, and thus his criticisms of Surrealism are less an absolute dismissal of it, than a call for a redefinition of it, that, as we have already seen, the specific character of Black Surrealism to a large extent did undertake. When Césaire's “thrashing images dig into the surreal”, they are actually digging into the surreality of injustice and oppression, as Baraka had noted in his account of the work of Henry Dumas.

When we look at how Césaire described the poetic image, we see how unfair Baraka was being. His own account was wildly convulsive and confrontational:

It is through the image, the revolutionary, distant image, the image that overthrows all the laws of thought, that mankind breaks through the barrier . . . . In the image A is no longer A

That is, as far as Césaire is concerned, his “wild imagery” is going further that merely creating “new meanings” - or even digging into the concealed “old meanings” of the injustices of the past - but is smashing through the barriers put in place by the old meanings and imagery of the bourgeois world.
One of Adorno’s gnomic maxims in Minima Moralia is “the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.This is the poetic image: a magnifying glass that rips into your own eye, transforming everything you see into the horror that it conceals. Another telling passage in Minima Moralia runs as follows:

No science has yet explored the inferno in which were forged the deformations that later emerge to daylight as cheerfulness, openness, sociability, successful adaptation to the inevitable, an equable practical frame of mind.

The poetic image, if understood in the way that Césaire understand it, is just that science. For radical poetry, the image is not the vehicle of exquisite feelings, it is that which can split apart the “deformations” that hide, for example, the “railroad of human bones” that, as we saw Baraka point out earlier on, runs invisibly through thecentre of bourgeois social reality. The image, for Césaire, insofar as it is, in his formulation, “the revolutionary, distant image, the image that overthrows all the laws of thought, that mankind breaks through the barrier”, has the same transformative and revelatory power as does Baraka’s own “practical vector from the soul”. For both Baraka and Césaire the revolutionary image is created by the juxtaposition of the solidly present with an elsewhere, be that understood as the “soul” or the “distant”. Césaire's “revolutionary, distant image” seeks to “overthrow all the laws of thought”. It attempts to enable us to think past what can be already be thought. “In the image A is no longer A”, says Césaire in the Notebook he makes the same point by insisting that “2 and 2 makes 5”. Baraka also attempts to build a poetics from an image that the “enemy” can have no access to because they cannot think it. But for Césaire, the image is more than just a battleground, it is not the case that “we” can think the image, while the “enemy” cannot. Everyone is, in the image, being forced to think inside new structures. It is what happens inside revolutions.

2.

On Archie Shepp’s album Live in San Francisco he includes a poem called “The Wedding” which concludes with the lines  “she retrieved me with the songs of Damballah / and Engels on her lips”: within this incongruous pairing we might find a way to define a poetics of the moment of revolt, of the what Fanon called the “irreversible act”.Fanon is not speaking about poetics, of course, but to the stage in a revolt when there is no going back.

The group requires each individual to have performed an irreversible act. In Algeria, for example, where almost all the men who called on the people to join the national struggle were sentenced to death or wanted by the French police, trust was proportional to the desperate nature of each case. A new militant could be trusted only when he could no longer return to the colonial system.

This moment can be as deadly as a terrorist bomb, or as equally deadly as the voicing of a slogan that so articulates revolutionary decision that the whole situation is convulsed, and utterly transformed. It is at this moment, Fanon argues, that superstition is vanquished, and that the revolutionaries develop a “ravenous taste for the tangible”.I want to argue, then, that Shepp’s imagining of the “song” - a sorrow song, perhaps - of Damballah and Engels, allows us to imagine what happens to the poetic imagination when it meets the irreversible necessities of the revolutionary moment.

Aldon Nielson has claimed that Shepp’s conjunction of Damballah and Engels would have been a shock for jazz audiences of the mid-60s. It was “surely not” what they were expecting, he opines, and, further, it was “not your father’s double consciousness”. It certainly isn’t. Just as we saw Baraka intensify the split that double consciousness implies, and accept the necessity of being torn asunder by it, Shepp grasps that consciousness and turns into a weapon. The magical thinking inscribed within Voudoun and the rationalism of Marxism are placed in a dialectical relation where each exists, in absolute tension, inside the other. This is the revolutionary image as poetic weapon that we outlined in the previous two sections of this chapter. Baraka’s “summoning” of images is reflected in Shepp’s “she retrieved me”, although Shepp has secularised the ritual affect of this summoning.

Damballah is the central deity (loa) of the Voudoun religion, described in Maya Deren’s still definitive account The Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti as “the ancient, the venerable father . . . . the great father of whom one asks nothing save his blessing”. A snake god, Damballah is conceived of as being so distant from human concerns that, unlike the other loa, he can barely communicate, and “when he speaks, it is a barely intelligible hissing”. According to Deren, this “detachment” is comforting, and enables access to “some original and primal vigour that has somehow remained inaccessible to whatever history, whatever immediacy might diminish it”. Ultimately, Damballah represents a sense of “historical extension” and “gather(s) up all history into a solid, contemporary ground beneath one’s feet”.While retaining the traditional escapist role of religion as providing a comforting access-point to a realm supposedly existing beyond the injustices of the contemporary everyday, Damballah also allows “all history” - including the history of those injustices - to be gathered into a highly compressed force of energy that, as we have seen, if we think of it as a form of the revolutionary image and therefore can secularise it, can be used to explosive effect.

The idea of a voice that is at the limit of communication and the border of intelligibility is one that appears throughout the history of western radical poetry. In Paradise Lost, when Satan returns to Pandemonium following his successes in Paradise, his transformation into a serpent is registered by Milton primarily via the loss of language:

So having said, a while he stood, expecting
Their universal shout and high applause

To fill his ear, when contrary he hears

On all sounds from innumerable tongues
A dismal universal hiss, the sound
Of public scorn . . .
He would have spoke, 
But hiss for hiss returned with forked tongue
To forked tongue, for now were all transformed 
Alike, to serpents all, as accessories
To his bold riot.

As antagonists to official good, the citizens of Hell have their voices stolen. That is, social antagonism is removed from what Benjamin called homogenous history. Damballah’s comforting silence is here, then, to be understood as the Hell of enforced silence. In a further example, Blake’s Urizen, in The Four Zoas cannot communicate to the “horrid shapes and sights of torment” in the Abyss: his words, whether “soothing or furious” are “but an inarticulate thunder”, and the citizens of the Abyss (or Hell, or the Factory) cannot hear them.Unlike in Milton, language has not been lost, but it has lost the ability to communicate to those for whom it is intended. Similarly, Shelley’s poetry is full of a sense of liberatory language as that which comes from a distant so great that it can barely, if at all, be heard: the spirit of Liberty in Laon and Cynthia speaks in a “strange melody / that might not belong on earth” , while in Prometheus Unbound we are told that we cannot hear if we can not hear “the language of the dead”. Unlike the “barely intelligible” communications of Damballah there is no comfort to be had. But that is just fine. The comfort that Damballah brings, Fanon would argue, is a consequence of a belief system designed to enable survival within an oppressive system, rather than to fight back against that system. It is a sign that the people have not yet started to use violence and fight back. Violence, claims Fanon, “rids the colonised of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude.”

But Damballah does more than merely comfort. In Petro Voudoun - the active and antagonistic form, less a religious system and more an occultist method - his hissing is that which “is heard in the roar of the flames”. Voudoun language is precisely “the language of the dead” (Shelley), and in the Petro system the unintelligibility of this language changes from a comfort into to a strategy. Voudoun itself can be grasped, and turned into a revolutionary method. It was an organising principle in the early days of the Haitian Revolution. Ceremonies were places where more than religious rites were performed, but where news could be exchanged and plans for revolution made. The symbols of Voudoun were no longer simply for comfort, they defined difference from the oppressor and provided the strength and courage necessary for the struggle.The outcome of that struggle depended on the development of communications that are unintelligible to the enemy, and that unintelligibility is not only necessary in terms of revolutionary conspiracy, as Edouard Glissant has pointed out, it was also crucial under slavery for basic day to day survival:

Since speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provocative intensity of the scream. No-one could translate the meaning of what seemed to be nothing but a shout. It was taken to be nothing but the call of a wild animal. This is how dispossessed man organised his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise [. . .] Creole organises speech as a blast of sound.

Mark McMorris reads Glissant as describing the origin of avant-garde language use in the linguistic survival modes of black history:

. . . . at the very least we recognise in Glissant’s speculations the chaos and bewilderment attendant upon the early demonstrations of Dada and the Surrealists, with their simultaneous poems for multiple speaking voices closing out the audience from discursive meanings; and the genre, in particular, of the sound poem that, including the scream, shout, grunt and testing other possibilities for paralinguistic utterance, manages to suggest alternative modes of communication and communities.

McMorris goes on to admit that Glissant has far more in mind than innovation in poetics: he is talking in survival modes. I would go further than McMorris, though, and claim that the “provocative intensity” of the scream makes avant-garde “alternative modes of communication” trivial and bourgeois. If we can find any analogies in art, they are more likely to be found in the revolutionary poetics I am arguing for in this thesis. Glissant is not suggesting that “extreme noise” is a mere “alternative”: it is a survival tactic that at any moment may be transformed into struggle. This “organised speech” is not so for the purposes of new forms of art, it is political organisation in the interests of a fight to the death that is played out in language as well as everywhere else. Avant-garde poetics are, ultimately, only legitimate, in political terms, if they can push themselves out of art categories and into the fault-lines between poetics and revolution.

Glissant implies that language, for the dispossessed, is a conspiracy and, also, a barricade. Inside its structure of “apparently meaningless noise” is the chance for the development and organisation of meanings that run counter to the official definitions of the reality of property and slave-ownership. When the time comes, official reality will be destroyed by a “blast of sound” - that “blast” being the sound of “apparently meaningless noise” becoming the instant of meaningful social truth, where all social antagonisms are made visible, audible and intelligible, where meaning is expropriated and the definitions that sustain the reality of property are negated. The void of incomprehensibility is filled by the self-consciousness of the dispossessed as antagonists to those who would “possess” them. That is, the rituals of possession in voudoun are transferred into the move for the oppressed peoples to possess their own lives.

For Fanon, before the “texture of extreme noise” can be transformed into expropriated meaning, the dispossessed exist within what Fanon called “atmospheric violence”, which may be expressed in a violent religious ritual, or, indeed, in the secular claustrophobia of The System of Dante’s Hell, where social antagonisms are able to go unnamed but are everywhere apparent. The crucial moment, then, is the irreversible moment of naming, where the “atmosphere” of violence breaks out into actual social convulsion. The dispossessed recognise that their superstitions are metaphoric expressions of social monsters that are all too real. The dispossessed emerge from a position where, say, “zombies [. . . ] are more terrifying than colonists” to a position where the rituals that are used to keep zombies away - taboos on “urinating, spitting or going out in the dark” - are less “terrifying” than the system of laws that keep them subjugated.

But this is not yet a complete negation of superstition: the violence of gods are, as we have seen, used against the oppressors.“The magical, supernatural powers are surprisingly ego boosting”, says Fanon, and the oppressors powers are “infinitely shrunk”.The expression of the transformation of the “meaningless noise” of the dispossessed into all too comprehensible truth has to be accompanied by a deeper acceptance of the “truth” of superstition, as, according to Fanon, the dispossessed know that “madness alone can deliver them from colonial oppression”.The uncovering of the rational kernel within the irrational superstitious system (ie, the transformation of the fixed system into the revolutionary method), will, for Fanon, involve a “bloodbath”, through which “hallucinatory dreams” will, “amid blood and tears give birth to very real and urgent issues”. Systems that tell them what not to do to keep monsters away are transformed into things to do that will rid them of the all too real monsters of colonialism. Taboos to appease zombies become revolutionary tasks: “giving food to the mujahideen [. . .] staging lookouts [. . .] such are the practical tasks the people are asked to undertake in the liberation struggle.

The value of voudoun, then, is that it allows for its own overcoming, and the energy unleashed by its negation is the energy necessary to negate the power of the oppressors in revolution. Thus, in Shepp’s poem, what Maya Deren identifies as the stored historical energy of Damballah becomes the historical materialism of Engels. Engels too, in for example The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, gathers the collected forces of history in order to define the conditions of oppression in the everyday, and to demonstrate that “the various false conceptions [. . .] of spirits, magic forces etc.” all have an “economic basis”.All true, but still, even the clearing away of religious “bunk” depends on the metaphorical existence of those “spirits”, albeit just at the moment, as in Fanon, when they are realising that their semiconscious, spectral being is precisely the result of those “economic forces”. The famous opening sentence of The Communist Manifesto invokes not only the collected material energies of history, but also - metaphorically, of course - implies that the realisation of Communism means that the spirits of the dead will invade the contemporary scene in order to convulse it, negate it, and thus transform it.

It’s difficult, especially in the context of Archie Shepp’s poem, to not see traces of Damballah within the materialist conceptions of Marx and Engels. The metaphor becomes stronger, and weirder, when we consider the first English translation of the Manifesto: in 1850, Helen MacFarlane rendered the opening sentence as a “frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism”

The “frightful hobgoblin” seems closer to European folklore, and the “ghost” seems more matter-of-fact, less grandiose, than does the more easily metaphorical “spectre”. What both metaphors have in common, though, is that a fearful and unknown - perhaps even unknowable - force is about to break out in Europe and destroy it. The social convulsion comes when the “hobgoblins”, “ghosts” and “spectres” of folklore become the “primordial and extra-political force” of the proletariat, a term that first appeared in the early 1840s as a necessary naming of a social force that up till then had been invisible within official history. Further, a force whose “anguished cry” had been, as far as the ruling class was concerned, an “inarticulate thunder”, “that might not belong on earth”.Once the peasant “hobgoblins” of the European countryside had been transformed into the industrial proletariat, that “inarticulate thunder” became, as Heinrich Heine pointed out, a “simple and universal language comprehensible to all”.Or, to put it in Baraka’s terms, they are “seeking to answer questions that have been posed in the conquerer’s language [. . .] but ultimately they answer those questions with a language of their own, resistance”.

Here, I have reached the limit of the political efficacy of the poetic image. What I have argued is that the weight of metaphors that enforce silence are seized, in moments of revolution, to become sheer noise. Poetry, like everything else, will break apart at this moment. But that moment could only have been reached by the force implicit in the system of images that poetry had allowed us to grasp in the first place.

Time Negatives of Variable Universe

Henry Dumas imagined a musician named Probe, whose ‘Afro-Horn’ was a repository of occult and revolutionary wisdom that also had the power to kill. His short fiction “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” is an account of three white people - a musician, a jazz critic and some kind of generic Beatnik - who try to get, and are at first refused entry to a Harlem jazz club called The Sound Barrier. They are at first refused entry for safety reasons, but following the intervention of a local cop they get in. Unfortunately for them the ‘safety reasons’ are a bit heavier than they might have expected: the Afro-Horn is rumoured to have secret powers, and that evening those rumours turn out to be true. The music opens up a vortex that kills all three of them.

The central musicological statement of Dumas’ fable, of the weight carried by music, its simultaneous use as a spiritual balm and actual weapon, was a commonplace in the writing produced by partisans of the Black Arts Movement in the late 60s. Lindsay Barrett, for example, wrote that if a Coltrane solo could be grasped “as a club”, “wield(ed) with the force that created it”, then “the battle would be near ended”. The suggestion, the metaphor (not only a metaphor) was that the intensity of a Coltrane solo was a carrier of the accumulated rage and misery of the past 400 years of black experience in the US, and that the compression of that rage that each note represented was such that it had actual use as a revolutionary weapon. That African-American music carried such an intensity of knowledge was not something unique to the Black Arts Movement: Ralph Ellison’s narrator in The Invisible Man has visions while smoking weed and listening to Louis Armstrong records, Julio Cortazer wrote about the “obscure and forgotten central flame” at the centre of the music. W. E. B. DuBois, in the first years of the twentieth century, had spelled out what the content of that flame, that forgetting, actually was, while writing about the sorrow songs (spirituals), which are the root of all African-American music:

I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world . . . They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways. The songs are indeed the sifting of the centuries; the music is far more ancient than the words; and in it we can trace here and there signs of development. My grandfather’s grandmother was seized by an eveil Dutch trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and the Housatonic, black, little and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the harsh north winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned a heathen melody to the child between her knees . . . The child sang it to his children and they to their children’s children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we sing it to our children and they to their children’s children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music . . . In these songs, I said, the slave spoke to the world. Such a message is veiled and half articulate.

A veiled, half forgotten content, traces of “barely remembered” African cultures that had been criminalised from the earliest days of chattel slavery. The transformation of that meaning into a weapon - the musical counterpoint to the rejection of the pacifism of the Civil Rights movement as it morphed into the Black Liberation Movement following the murder of Malcolm X - was due to the act of remembering, or, if not remembering, the speaking of what had previously been unvoiced. Duke Ellington had once quipped that “you could say what you want with a trumpet, but you have to be careful with words”, and had also pointed to his own hidden militancy by saying that in music you “say something by not saying it” (how different, that, to the reprehensible “I have nothing to say and I am saying it of John Cage). This “it” is social death, the unspeakable because unknowable, in the process of being, impossibly, spoken and known. Robin Kelley has called “it” the “multiplicities of Madness, the nightmares, the terrifying hallucinations embedded in the collective black unconscious”. Cedric Robinson has pointed out that a chief task of the Black Radical Tradition has been to grasp those hallucinations, to turn them inside out, to transform them into revolutionary meaning. Analagous with Walter Benjamin’s “secret” (and so revolutionary) “cargo” (the metaphor is highly fortuitous) at the heart of esoteric poetry, Robinson notes that the slave-ships had, despite themselves, smuggled “critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmologies and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs and morality”. This was, for Robinson, “the embryo of the demon” at the centre of American (and so Western) culture. The artists of the Black Arts Movement were trying to raise that demon, to make clear the social fact at the centre of the metaphor. In an early poem, Amiri Baraka described the task as “to provoke some meaning / when before there was only hell”. And to provoke meaning means to attack it, to force into being a revolutionary moment where the social metaphor becomes actual, ceases to be at best an image to hide inside, at worst a decorative alibi, becoming instead a working hypothesis.

For Dumas, then, each note Probe played was that metaphor in the process of being turned inside out. He described it as “an atom stripped of time”. Dumas was a close student of Sun Ra, Ra in turn being the intellectual heart of the early phase of the Black Arts Movement, described by Amiri Baraka as a spiritual advisor to the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem. For Ra, music was metaphor for everything that exists, which itself is only the active sub-set, the detonator, of all that does not exist. Bassoon player James Jacson gives this example of the kind of instructions Ra would give to his players during rehearsal:

He once said to me, “Jacson, play all the things you don’t know! You’ll be surprised by what you don’t know. There’s an infinity of what you don’t know.” Another time he said, “You know how many notes there are between C and D? If you deal with those tones you can play nature, and nature doesn’t know notes. That’s why religions have bells, which sound all the transient tones. You’re not musicians, you’re tone scientists”.

Sun Ra’s music has been accused of being weird. When he hit New York from Chicago in the very early 60s, the absolute otherness of what the Sun Ra Arkestra were doing seemed to mirror the escalation in absolute criticism of and confrontation with the everyday world that was happening everywhere. Years later, Baraka recalled that “the Weirdness, Outness, Way Outness, Otherness was immediate. Some space metaphysical surrealistic bop funk . . . they put on weird clothes, space helmets, flowing capes. They did rituals played in rituals, evoked lost civilisations, used strangeness to teach us open feeling as intelligence. In those cellars and lofts, Sun Ra spun a cosmic metaphor. He was a philosopher musician. He used music as language, and image”. The music, in the stage directions for Black Mass, the play he and Ra collaborated on, was described by Baraka as being of “shattering proportions”. Much of it still sounds startling. Talking drums, electronic noise, Fletcher Henderson, fully out free jazz, easy listening schmaltz, poetry, space mythology proto-dub, technology, ballroom music, all of it as delicate and as swinging as Duke Ellington, as devastating as the collective moons of jupiter and saturn all crashing into the sea, or a colonised people storming the enemy citadel. All of this taking place in vaguely dangerous holes on the Lower East Side and elsewhere.

Ra described music as a “neglected plane of wisdom”, a vocabulary of, echoing DuBois, “unsaid words”. “The music is not only just music”, he wrote, “It touches and projects other dimensions”. That is, it “touches and projects” what, according to the official world,  is “not” - a recurring motif in his poetry, liner notes to his albums, and other writings. Play what you don’t know, he advised his musicians, and, of course, what you don’t know in its wider sense includes what you “can’t know”. And, from the perspective of a world constantly enforcing social death - when, in Orlando Patterson’s words, your threat to the dominant order can only be felt on a supernatural sense - what you “can’t know” is all, finally, that you do know. Ra described himself as a “living myth”, and wrote in a poem that “when the person Myth meets the person Reality / The spirit of the impossible-strange appears”. Baraka, writing about Dumas had this to say, which equally could apply to Ra:

(His) power lay in his skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one. The stories are fables; a mythological presence pervades. They are morality tales, magical, resonating dream emotions and images; shifting ambiguous terror, mystery, implied revelation. But they are also stories of real life, now or whenever, constructed in weirdness and poetry in which the contemporaneity of essential themes is clear.

And when the “entirely different world” meets this one, the mysticism (“you can call me Mr Mystery”, he once quipped) of Ra’s counter-system becomes absolutely clear. The moment of the “impossible-strange” is the moment when it becomes possible to speak the “unsaid words”, and where the racist enemy is forced to listen to what they can’t know. Archie Shepp, writing in the jazz magazine Downbeat in 1965, in an essay reprinted in the anarchist magazine King Mob, voices the exoteric core of Ra’s esoteric system:

I am an antifascist artist. I play about the death of me by you. I exult in the life of me in spite of you. I give some of that life to me whenever you listen to me, which right now is never. My music is for the people. If you are a bourgeois, then you must listen to it on my terms. I will not let you misconstrue me. That era is over.

Speaking the truth to power might as well be speaking in tongues. There is a chasm between Shepp’s plain speech, and the bourgeoisie that he is speaking to. His “terms” are non-negotiable, that is, impossible and incomprehensible. He speaks from behind his death, and the only way that speech is to be audible, the only way the bourgeoise can accept that he is living, is from beyond the bounds of their own death. They can only communicate as two living forces - across the border-lines of separate eras, of the borderline between the world we cannot accept and the world that does not exist, if they understand that it is the dead talking to the dead. Because the actual content of Shepp’s simple antifascism is not so far away from the reality described by Henry Dumas in his liner notes for Ra’s album Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy:

THE QUASAR (QUASI-STELLAR OR STAR-LIKE) EMITTED
RADIO WAVES REACHED OUR GALAXY AFTER 13 BILLION
LIGHT YEARS AND SUN RA, WHOSE MIND-WAVES ARE SYN-
CHRONISED TO NATURE WITH COORDINATED INTUITION,
PRISMED THE VOICE OF THE QUASAR ON A COSMIC TONE
PIANO AND THIS THUNDER IS LIKE SHOCK WAVES SHAKING
AWAY THE STAGNATION OF LIFE IN THE MIND, WHEN YOU
CAN MOVE IN A DIMENSION FASTER THAN LIGHT YOU
SOLVE THE RIDDLE OF TIME AND YOUR MIND’S COSMOSIS
COMPLETES THE EQUATION: LIFE EQUALS DEATH, FOR IN
THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE THE INFINITE DESTROYS THE
ILLUSION OF LIMITATIONS WHICH TRAP MAN TO THE
PLANET EARTH. THE INFINITY OF CONTINUOUS AND
ACCELERATING MOTION CHASES THE FLEEING GALAXY
ANDROMEDA . . . THE MUSIC OF THIS FLIGHT ENERGIZES
THE QUASAR AND SUN RA RECEIVES TONES FROM THAT
QUASAR WHICH HAS BECOME PREGNANT WITH
RADIATION AND THIS COMPLETES THE EQUATION: DEATH
EQUALS LIFE IN A DYING UNIVERSE WHERE GALAXIES
COLLIDE AND WHERE DEATH WEARS A MYSTERIOUS
CROWN OF CONSTELLATIONS CALLED CREATION. TO
HEAR THIS MUSIC IS TO HEAR THE SOLAR BAND OF REVE-
LATION. THE TONES REVERBERATING HERE PASS
THROUGH THE TIME SPECTRUM OF THE ARKESTRA’S MIND
AND YOU SEE WITH EAR AND WITH EYE AND YOU BECOME
THE METAGENESIS OF COSMIC ATOMS.

“Radio waves” - it is here, at the point of the most outlandish elements of Ra’s music, that it meets the everyday, where a cosmic enormity hits the everyday, where the content of pop radio - and we must remember that there was an important element of pop radio that inside Ra’s sound: the version of the Batman theme he recorded in the 60s, and especially those weird doowop records, those sessions he recorded for commercial bands at the beginning of his ‘career’, and which he always insisted were as much of a part of his music as any other. That is, pop, too, the everyday commercial blah, becomes transformed and made weird by being an element of a secret cargo of social antagonism and cosmic apocalypticism - all those sounds of dying stars and interplanetary interference breaking into the centre of mawkish sounds about lost love, transforming even those mawkish songs into the howls of the sorrow songs. An early poem of Baraka’s, “The Politics of Rich Painters”, a carefully directed attack on the Bohemian artists of the Lower East Side whose pretensions he was quickly tiring of as he became increasingly active politically, written around the same time that Ra would have been recording Cosmic Tones, also deals with the secret cargos of radio transmission, ending with these lines:

                                        .  . . . reminding us of lands
our antennae do not reach.

And there are people in these savage geographies
use your name in other contexts
think, perhaps, the title of your latest painting
another name for liar.
These ‘savage geographies’ are on the first level places far outside the immediate social framework of the New York Bohemia that he, Dumas and Ra all inhabited. They are revolutionary Cuba, Algeria, Congo. But they might also be found in New York itself: as another poem of Baraka’s from this period has it, “In back of the terminal /// where the circus will not go. At the backs of crowds, stooped and vulgar, breathing hate syllables”. They are the weird social space opened up at the centre of a riot, they are also the centre of “a dying universe where galaxies collide and where death wears a mysterious crown of constellations called creation”, they are the notes played by Probe and Sun Ra, they are every syllable of Shepp’s glossalaliac plain speech from the pits of social death. And from within these absolutely separate and intimately linked realities they transform the landscape of social reality, which is already a landscape of social antagonism, into one in which liberation struggles and advanced astro-physics make of that landscape a network of dialectically warring signals wherein those savage geographies turn out to be the instant of truth at the centre of the dominant cultures systems of lies. “The truth concerning this planet is indeed dreadful to behold”, Ra wrote, “how strange it is that the truth should reach the state of the dreadful”.

Chicago musician Joseph Jarman titled a poem that he wrote during this same period “Non-cognitive Aspects of the City”. It is from these “aspects” that the radio signals picked up by Baraka and Ra are broadcast: these, utlimately, are Baraka’s “savage geographies”, are Probe’s “atom stripped of time”. The Lower East Side, Algeria, Harlem, Outer Space, all converging within a city and a people who have been denied all memory, understanding, visibility or history, who don’t actually live in the cities they inhabit, but rather in zones, geographical and psychological, zones patrolled by domestic-imperial policy, zones defined by racism, class oppression and debt, zones that extend backward and forward into history. The counter-Ra. Fanon described it thus: “a zone of non-being, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born”.

Fanon’s work, central to the political thinking of the poets associated with the Black Arts Movement is also - to take an analogical leap, or, maybe, to grasp a metaphor as an factual interpretation of reality - central to ways in which we can think about militant poetics in general, and Ra and Baraka’s Afro-Surrealism in general. One of Fanon’s greatest, and strangest, essays from his involvement in the Algerian War of Independence, “This Is the Voice of Algeria” charts the relationship of the actual lived life colonised people with the official statements that came to them from the colonisers. Fanon charts the status of radio within occupied Algeria throughout the 1950s, and strangely or not, his descriptions of that radio are almost descriptions of what we might imagine the experience of decoding the radio transmissions Dumas describes in his liner notes for Cosmic Tones, where those transmissions become sights of conflict, of the battle ensuing when those subjected to when those relegated to absolute social death begin to take back their actual ives from the strongholds of the colonial enemy citadel. For years the colonised, according to Fanon, had been indifferent to the broadcasts from Radio-Algeria, which as far as they were concerned were nothing but “Frenchmen speaking to Frenchmen”: the entirety of the broadcast was a system of lies, of an irreality that was all too real - i.e. the truth transformed into something dreadful - but in the early stages of the liberation struggle, those lies become the site of the first battleground. Faced with the necessity of communication, of the need for a news source, the meaning of the coloniser’s broadcasts change, even if their content does not:

The Algerian found himself having to oppose the enemy news with his own news. The “truth” of the oppressor, formerly rejected as an absolute lie, was now countered by another, an acted truth. The occupier’s lie thereby acquired greater reality, for it was now a menaced lie, put on the defensive.

That is to say, the lies of the colonised become activated, becoming therefore an element of a “truth” that is reaching a boiling point, shimmering, becoming unclear in some places: monstrous and hallucinatory as well as reaching a heretofore impossible clarity (the social relation laid bare in all its vicious modernity). The coloniser contributes to this boiling and intensifying of “truth” (which, of course, also is a source of a wild, un-nerving “poetry”, where the most commercial and schmaltzy parts of Sun Ra’s sound become the wildest, the most out, the most deafening and threatening), by pitching an attack using “lies” as its battleground. The colonisers jam the radio signals of the colonised. That is, the “lies” of the colonisers become less language itself than pure noise, sonic warfare. In turn, the voices of the colonised become shattered until no solid meaning can be reached. The expression of meaning, and truth, becomes a hideous, inaudible hiss. It is here that we see a revolutionary poetic in one of its many forms, its many aspects (non-cognitive) as preparatory study:

The programmes were then systematically jammed, and the Voice of Fighting Algeria soon became inaudible. A new form of struggle had come into being. Tracts were distributed telling the Algerians to keep tuned in for a period of two or three hours. In the course of a single broadcast a second station, broadcasting over a different wave-length, would relay the first jammed station. The listener, enrolled in the battle of the waves, had to figure out the tactics of the enemy, and in an almost physical way circumvent the strategy of the adversary. Very often only the operator, his ear glued to the receiver, had the unhoped-for opportunity of hearing the Voice. The other Algerians in the room would receive the echo of this voice through the privileged interpreter who, at the end of the broadcast, was literally besieged. Specific questions would be asked of this incarnated voice. Those present wanted to know about a particular battle mentioned by the French press in the last twenty-four hours, and the interpreter, embarrassed, feeling guilty, would sometimes have to admit that the Voice had not mentioned it.

But by common consent, after an exchange of views, it would decide that the Voice had in fact spoken of these events, but that the interpreter had not caught the transmitted information. A real task of reconstruction would then begin. Everyone would participate, and the battles of yesterday and the day before would be re-fought in accordance with the deep aspirations and the unshakable faith of the group. The listener would compensate for the fragmentary nature of the news by an autonomous creation of information.

Everything becomes strange. What is at first revolutionary strategy regarding the distribution of information, the endurance that accurate information (“truths”?) can still be passed on, experiences a kind of implosion, whereby the accurate information becomes an obscure signal from elsewhere, where the “operator” of the radio set becomes instead the “interpreter”, and as the radio itself becomes the Voice, that “interpreter” becomes the incarnation of that voice. Strategy and rationally turns inside out, becomes seance, irrationality, even madness (skull-crazies).

But this is not the disaster it could be, is not an absolute collapse into a superstitious false consciousness thus making an expropriation of the colnoisers’ monopoly on the word “truth” impossible. The opposite is in fact the case. The struggle to hear the “choppy, broken voice” of the radio leads to a intensification of revolutionary collectivity, and makes the reality, the truth of revolution tangible: “The nature of this voice recalled in more than one way that of the Revolution: present ‘in the air’ in isolated pieces, but not objectively”:

Every evening, from nine o’clock to midnight, the Algerian would listen. At the end of the evening, not hearing the Voice, the listener would sometimes leave the needle on a jammed wave-length or one that simply produced static, and would announce that the voice of the combatants was here. For an hour the room would be filled with the piercing, excruciating din of the jamming. Behind each modulation, each active crackling, the Algerian would imagine not only words, but concrete battles.

The “piercing, excruciating din” is the whirring, necessary psychopathology of revolution consciousness coming into being made material by the modernity of the radio set. The static is not only the sound of the enemy jamming our signals, but the sound of our own thinking as it moves outside of what official language permits, into an “atom stripped of time”, into a “thunder like shock waves shaking away the stagnation of the life of the mind”, where action becomes music that is “not only music”, that touches other dimensions, other planes of there. In Six Persons, Baraka describes the “excruciating din” of the crisis which is necessary for revolutionary consciousness as an active reality, as a process, to emerge:

What they thought of as their life, was actually several lives. All jammed together, happening simultaneously, and separate. And at some pts, what was raised, by undersea contradictions, forced into the light wild contrasts, extremes.

The problem is how to make those “wild contrasts” absolutely intelligible to us, but unintelligible to the enemy i.e. how to make the excruciating din work as a strategy, as a means of infecting the “lies” that we live under, and make them visible, to translate this dialectical nebulae made up of static and screams into clear speech.

"Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City"

The opening sentences of Baraka’s 1960 essay “Cuba Libre” get to the heart of what, if we are to follow the standard periodisation of Baraka’s trajectory, was the poetics of this first period.

If we live all our lives under lies, it becomes difficult to see anytvhing if it does not have anything to do with those lies. If it is, for example, true or, say honest. The idea that things of this nature continue to exist is not ever brought forward in our minds. If they do, they seem at their most sympathetic excursion, monstrous untruths. Bigger lies than our own.

The essay was written immediately after Baraka’s visit to Cuba with a group of other prominent African-American intellectuals and activists, including Harold Cruse and Robert Williams, at the invitation of the newly formed revolutionary government. Although he said that upon arriving he was determined not to be taken in by what was clearly a propaganda exercise designed to counter the false reports - the ‘lies’ of tbhe quotation above - about the Cuban situation in the US press, Baraka was impressed, in particular by what a group of ‘young radical intellectuals’ (ie Castro, Che etc.) had managed to achieve. By contrast, the achievements of his own milieu of ‘young radical intellectuals’ - the radical poets associated with The New American Poetry - seemed paltry indeed. In the essay he reports on an argument he had got into with a group of Mexican poets and economists. The argument began with a Mexican accusing the US of being imperialist. Baraka was in agreement, but it seems tired of continually having to defend himself:

I tried to defend myself, “Look, why jump on me? I understand what you’re saying. I’m in complete agreement with you. I’m a poet . . . .  what can I do? I write, that’s all, I’m not even interested in politics.”
    She jumped on me with both feet asD did a group of Mexican poets later in Habana. She called me a “cowardly bourgeois individualist”. The poets, or at least one young wild-eyed Mexican poet, Jaime Shelley, almost left me in tears, stomping his foot on the floor, screaming: “You want to cultivate your soul? In that ugliness you live in, you want to cultivate your soul? Well, we’ve got millions of starving people to feed, and that moves me enough to make poems out of.”

The poets Baraka meets in Cuba are like signals from another dimension, demanding a poetry that rejects narcissism, that grows instead out of a merciless negation of bourgeois culture, and the attempt to transform a privatised aesthetic into a social one. Consequently, Baraka’s work for the first half of the 1960s would be a harrowing account of his own attempts to come to terms with the demands placed on poetics by political commitment and, to a degree, the demands a commitment to poetics placed on revolutionary practice. i.e. what would be the specific contribution poetic writing / thought could bring to revolutionary discourse, and to the actual practicalities of the struggle, outside of a merely decorative, rousing people up type of thing. Larry Neal, in the afterward to the 1968 anthology of the Black Arts Movement, Black Fire, that he edited with Baraka, is clear what is at stake:

New constructs will have to be developed. We will have to alter our concepts of what art is, of what it is supposed to “do”. The dead forms taught most writers in the white man’s world will have to be destroyed, or at best, radically altered. We can learn more about what poetry is by listening to Malcolm’s speeches, than from most of Western Poetics.

Baraka’s beginning point are the “lies” that transform the reality of the western world, not least the “lie” that claims that the West is the entirety of the world. When Baraka claims that “we live all our lives under lies”, he is saying rather more than that ‘we’, the ‘people’, are being lied ‘to’.  Rather, the ‘lies’ that we are under have squashed any bit of truth, or reality, out of us. A similar point was famously made in The German Ideology: there, Marx pointed out how the dominant ideas of any one era are those of the dominant class:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.  

Marx goes on to show how the ‘ideas’ of the dominant class are expressed as an “eternal law”: that is, a particular set of ideas becomes a “law”, and consequently, a social truth.  Baraka, even though he was not to become a Marxist for another decade, created in the 1960s a profoundly Marxist poetry of consciousness, of the crisis to the personality implied in the achievement of revolutionary consciousness, which is expressed via a struggle to seize the production of meaning, to wrest back from the “lie” its monopoly on reality.

From the early to mid-60s Baraka’s poems become full of self-loathing and self-accusation, but one remarkably free of narcissism. In “An Agony. As Now”, he describes his alienation:

I am inside someone
who hates me. I look
out from his eyes. Smell
what fouled tunes come in
to his breath.

Ultimately, the “someone” Baraka is inside moves to destroy him:

It burns the thing
inside it. And that thing
screams.

Baraka’s poetry, in these first mature works, then, becomes an analysis of that scream. He constantly accuses himself of being a liar, as if the “lies” that we all live inside, or below, or both, can only be negated if the force of those lies is itself grasped, seized, even ingested. Poems like “A Short Speech to my Friends” and “A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand” are merciless, icy, unforgiving, both to himself and to the society, the Lower East Side “bohemian” “community” he belongs to:

A compromise
would be silence. To shut up, even such risk
as the proper placement
of verbs and nouns. To freeze the spit
in mid-air, as it aims itself
as some valiant intellectual’s face.

It is a choice between “silence” and “screaming”. The “placement / of verbs and nouns” - the geometry of poetic feeling - is only valid if it can conjure the force of a spit in the eye, but at the same time is suspect because the poetic act works to freeze that spit, and thus prevents it from actually hitting its target. “A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand” goes further, sees a terrible solution to problems of prosody and of “truth”:

    We have awaited the coming of a natural
    phenomenon. Mystics and romantics, knowledgable
    workers
    of the land.

    But none has come.
    (Repeat)
        but none has come.

Will the machine gunners please step forward?

In “Cuba Libre”, following the account of his own dressing-down by the militant Cuban and Mexican poets, Baraka becomes critical of the apolitical surface rebellion of his friends and associates in New York. He reports with disgust a friend of his dismissing what was happening in Cuba with the remark “I hate guys in uniform”. He concludes with a withering condemnation of himself and the entire “scene”:

The rebels among us have become merely people like myself who grow beards and will not participate in politics. Drugs, juvenile delinquency, complete isolation from the vapid mores of the country, a few current ways out. But name an alternative here. Something not inextricably bound up in a lie. Something not part of liberal stupidity or the actual filth of vested interest. There is none . . . Even the vitality of our art is like bright flowers growing up through a rotting carcass.

“The Politics of Rich Painters” is one of the poems of this period where Baraka explicitly directs his disgust at the artistic, social and supposedly radical milieu of which he is a part. The politics of the rich painters is that they have none. Their Bohemian position, supposedly on the outside of conventional society, is possible because they are “rich”. They have bought their way out of convention. Baraka’s poem situates him as a member of the painters’ coterie, sitting in the bar with them, exchanging and sharing their opinions:

  [. . .]There are movies, and we have opinions. There are
regions of compromise so attractive, we daily long
to filthy our minds with their fame. And all the songs
of our handsome generation fall clanging like stones
in the empty darkness of their heads.

“Movies” and “opinions” are the closed circle of what passes for conversation, that is to say, clusters of convention through which the liberal “rebel” can negotiate the accepted limits of thought. Baraka doesn’t bother to give the content of these opinions, or to say what “movies” these opinions are about. That surface content is irrelevant and trivial. Instead, Baraka points to what the forces of these opinions and movies produce: “regions of compromise”, a bland and fashionable geography.

Cultural opinion is a gated community, a repulsive cycle of exchange between something called “us”, and something called “fame”. “We” are allowed to occupy somebody’s “fame” (“I am inside someone who hates me”) and in return we will fill that “fame” with songs. Except the songs are empty,  and are transformed into “stones” that will clang and rattle inside the “empty darkness” of those famous people’s heads. That is to say, “our” heads. Conversation becomes the empty rattle of stones inside someone’s skull. But by the end of the poem, Baraka has some suggestions to make about what the real content of these “songs” and “opinions” may be, as well as a brief geography lesson for the inhabitants of the “regions of compromise”:

The source of their art crumbles into legitimate history.
The whimpering pigment of a decadent economy, slashed into life
as Yeats’ mad girl plummeting over the nut house wall, her broken
knee caps rattling in the weather, reminding us of lands
our antennae do not reach.

And there are people in these savage geographies
use your name in other contexts
think, perhaps, the title of your latest painting
another name for liar.

Outside of the circles of chatter and art there is something else, says Baraka. To which, of course, any one of his Bohemian friends would readily agree. What they might not agree with so easily, however, is the intensity of their own complicity. If their art is broken down, it recalls its sources in “legitimate history”, that is, the “history” that bohemian vanity imagines it has found a way out of. But it is not so. The “pigment”, the actual material basis of the paintings themselves, as physical and as economic objects, is a “whimpering” acquiescence to actual social conditions, conditions that are produced - or at least decorated - by the products of the artists with their opinions, their monads of apolitical rebellion. Meanwhile, the content of the art - “Yeats’ mad girl”, in the poem - leap out of their enclosures, their forms, and smash themselves to pieces on the history that exists outside the “nut house wall”, which might as well be the wall of the artists’ studio, the artists’ bar, the conventions of painting and poetry, the conformity of bohemia.

We have “opinions”, and they rattle around like stones inside empty skulls. That “rattling” has now become the sound of the mad girl’s broken body, tapping out bizarre signals on the walls of “legitimate history” and its “decadent economy”. That is, the “rattling” now does not now simply sound inside empty heads: those heads are transformed into “antennae”, which pick up signals from other “lands”. These other lands, Baraka tells us, are “savage geographies”. The rattling of stones becomes universal, picking up signals from elsewhere, an elsewhere that the rebels of Baraka’s generation would prefer to pretend do not exist. Because within these savage geographies, there are another set of opinons, and those opinions are direct, and incisive, and damaging (ie Hegel 291 - it has in its own self the principle of otherness). They look at the paintings, they read the names of those paintings, and know that the names with which those paintings are signed, from their own perspective as a humanity denied, can mean only “liar”. That is, radio signals are coming in from outside the falsely universalising lie of bourgeois American culture. They are obviously coming in from sites of struggle around the world, be that Cuba, or the independence movements in Congo and Algeria. They are also coming in from the centre of the city where the rich painters live. They are coming in also from further afield: Henry Dumas, in the sleeve-notes for the Sun Ra album Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy - and Ra was a central figure for Baraka throughout his mature writing life - outlines the sheer distances involved in mapping the radio signals coming in from the “savage geographies” of elsewhere:

THE QUASAR (QUASI-STELLAR OR STAR-LIKE) EMITTED
RADIO WAVES REACHED OUR GALAXY AFTER 13 BILLION
LIGHT YEARS AND SUN RA, WHOSE MIND-WAVES ARE SYN-
CHRONISED TO NATURE WITH COORDINATED INTUITION,
PRISMED THE VOICE OF THE QUASAR ON A COSMIC TONE
PIANO AND THIS THUNDER IS LIKE SHOCK WAVES SHAKING
AWAY THE STAGNATION OF LIFE IN THE MIND, WHEN YOU
CAN MOVE IN A DIMENSION FASTER THAN LIGHT YOU
SOLVE THE RIDDLE OF TIME AND YOUR MIND’S COSMOSIS
COMPLETES THE EQUATION: LIFE EQUALS DEATH, FOR IN
THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE THE INFINITE DESTROYS THE
ILLUSION OF LIMITATIONS WHICH TRAP MAN TO THE
PLANET EARTH. THE INFINITY OF CONTINUOUS AND
ACCELERATING MOTION CHASES THE FLEEING GALAXY
ANDROMEDA . . . THE MUSIC OF THIS FLIGHT ENERGIZES
THE QUASAR AND SUN RA RECEIVES TONES FROM THAT
QUASAR WHICH HAS BECOME PREGNANT WITH
RADIATION AND THIS COMPLETES THE EQUATION: DEATH
EQUALS LIFE IN A DYING UNIVERSE WHERE GALAXIES
COLLIDE AND WHERE DEATH WEARS A MYSTERIOUS
CROWN OF CONSTELLATIONS CALLED CREATION. TO
HEAR THIS MUSIC IS TO HEAR THE SOLAR BAND OF REVE-
LATION. THE TONES REVERBERATING HERE PASS
THROUGH THE TIME SPECTRUM OF THE ARKESTRA’S MIND
AND YOU SEE WITH EAR AND WITH EYE AND YOU BECOME
THE METAGENESIS OF COSMIC ATOMS.

The perception of the city is transformed: liberation struggles and intergalactic physics become part of the landscape, a “black hole” at the centre of our speech. Joseph Jarman titled a poem - a poem heavily influenced by Baraka - “Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City”, that is, it is as if the city is a network of dialectically warring gravitational signals all of which deny the rights to legitimacy claimed by the dominant culture’s system of lies. This is a city lacking memory, understanding, visibility or history. These are “aspects” of the city, not areas, meaning that these are not only geographical but also psychological zones, zones patrolled by domestic-imperial policy, zones defined by racism and debt, zones that extend backwards and forwards into history. Frantz Fanon described it thus: “a zone of non-being, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born”. Its intensity is apocalyptic, and it is the source of the scorched desperation of the best of Baraka’s work from this period. He will no longer write from within bohemian pads and literary parties (however wild these parties might get), but rather from the portion of the city to be found “in back of the / terminal / where the circus will not go. At the back of the crowds, stooped and vulgar / breathing hate syllables”.

In terms of art, or poetic production, this sets up an atmosphere of deep forboding, and menace. Not only Baraka’s work is doing this in the early 60s: it is there in Grachan Moncur’s trombone sound, in the really “out” Sun Ra albums, in the poems of Lloyd Addison, David Henderson and Diane diPrima. It is the artistic expression of what Frantz Fanon called “atmospheric violence”, a dense sense of unease that settles over social existence prior to the insurrectionary moment, when violence is “rippling under the skin”, breaks out sporadically, interferes (like static) with all normal networks of social reality, and breaches the frontiers of the limits of that social reality with “news” and “rumours” from elsewhere.

How to make a poetics that registers these “news” and “rumours”, and the vast scope of the varying negations of official reality that they consist of. On one level, the content is simple, it is the “scream” that is forced out of the poet at the end of “An Agony. As Now”. But the scream is neither simply nor, poetically, easy to control. In the 1974 memoir 6 Persons, Baraka wrote about the processes of communications being transformed into a “high-pitched radio whine”, into a “message” that “came on a knife delivered without warning directly into the centre of the skull”. For Baraka, all artistic production becomes potentially an alibi for violence. The famous soliloquy from the end of Dutchman runs in part:

Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip young white boys scream for Bird. And Bird saying “Up your ass, feeble-minded ofay! Up your ass.” And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker. Bird would’ve played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-Seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I’m the great would-be poet. Yes, that’s right. Poet. Some kind of bastard literature. All it needs is a simple knife thrust.

In response to the bohemian cliches about the “tortured genius” we ask who is it doing the torturing, and would it not be better to take revenge on that torturer than for Bird to transmute the wounds of that torturing into the beauty of his music. It is a hideous nihilism. In 6 Persons Baraka describes the psychological and poetic results of allowing himself to express violent desire, the attempt to intercept the various signals from the various “savage geographies”: it is a cacophony, a terrifying parade:

The skull crazies - old skulks - demons - red eyed jaw wagglers - screechers - howlers - black devils - spook worshippers - “voodoo priests - strange islamic sects - back thru - whoosh - spaceless history - red diarrhetic images of bloody haints - bald head zombies

The violent reproaches to the lies we live beneath have opened out into their own flood of nightmares, as if truth had mutated wildly inside its enforced inaudibility and invisibility. Speech itself becomes murder:

The Revolutionary Theatre must teach them their deaths. It must crack their faces open to the mad cries of the poor. It must teach them about silence and the truths lodged there.

Baraka’s attempts to conduct terror. It is less a matter of simply countering the lies of official America, nor even wholly a matter of speaking the truth to power, but of making all that has been made invisible - that which itself may no longer be able to be called truth (return to this) - speak and screech. And if it is horrible, then it is nothing compared to the vicious brutality inflicted daily by official society:

The “turn the other cheek”, “non-violent” approach to the struggle for democracy we rejected. We did not understand why we must continue to let crazed ignorant hooligans attack us to show we were noble or that we deserved to be citizens. The endless television horror shows of Black people being water hosed, beaten, dogged by two and four-legged dogs, lynched, jailed, got our jaws tight not only at the scum who did this but the negroes who accepted it.

Baraka created from this a new form of political poetry, one that refused protest, moving instead into a literature of resistance and assault. But this was not, as the caricature goes, a high-metallic screech of simplistic hatred. To claim that Charlie Parker would have played no music if he had simply gone out and killed white people is not to say that he would have been better off not making music, but rather to point out that, perhaps, murder - political, ultimately revolutionary murder - was one “aspect” of the content of Parker’s music, a secret hidden inside it that, given the context of the liberation struggles of the 1960s, would best be made clear. Similarly, the role of the Revolutionary Theatre is to “murder” by teaching “about silence and the truths lodged there”. The work becomes a meditation on the interplay of silence and scream, of truth mutated, of lies tearing themselves apart under the weight of their own brutality. In one of Baraka’s earliest publications he wrote of the need to “reach the silence at the top of our screams”, and in the well-known short story aptly called “The Screamers” he talks about the trajectory those screams will need to follow in order to be able to reach the audible content of that silence:

The repeated rhythmic figure, a screamed riff, pushed in its insistence past music. It was hatred and frustration, secrecy and despair . . . There was no compromise, no dreary sophistication, only the elegance of something that is too ugly to be described, and is diluted only at the agent’s peril . . . Ethnic historians, actors, priests of the unconscious. The stance spread like fire through the cabarets and joints of the black cities, so that the sound itself became a basis for thought, and the innovators searched for uglier modes.


“If you know how to hear” these unspeakable things (in both senses of the word) are also sober historic fact (ie the skull-crazy monsters can become ethnic historians and priests of the unconscious), Leadbelly Gives an Autograph “the possibilities of statement” - but the power of the Leadbelly poem is that he doesn’t say what he is saying, it is silent, and we are expected to recognise it ————- radio in Fanon

The “new basis for thought” means a new poetics, a poetic that makes Larry Neal’s remark about learning more about poetry from the speeches of Malcolm X than from Western Poetics comprehensible. But what exactly is supposed to happen when the voice of Malcolm X and the voice of a poet encounter each other, when they meet like matter and anti-matter, is perhaps not so clear. Baraka continued to be aware of the traps that a primarily revolutionary poetry can become emeshed in; and not only in terms of a simplistic, one-dimensional content (its never the case with Baraka, despite what the caricature says), but with the fate of the poem itself, with how it is used, with what its afterlife is once the social constellation that produced it is past (not as literary quality, but as cultural position). In the early 80s, Baraka wrote in his Autobiography that

The words of an incendiary poet are finally less frightening than a political organiser. They can be used merely to titillate, the other assumes a functional presence in the world that can intimidate.

Baraka is not only making a point about the shortcomings of would-be revolutionary poetry in comparison with other forms of revolutionary communication. He is also making a point about reception: “incendiary” poems are too slippery, and their attack modes too quickly become a source of entertainment. Its a real question. Who, for example, were Baraka’s notorious “kill whitey” poems written for? What does it mean to be discussing them in a seminar room? Can they still contain the kernel of the screams, silence and obscure signals Baraka seeks to analyse.
  
Black Magic Poetry is Baraka’s most horrific (at its worse, simply offensive), and also his most programmatic volume. Highly complex and tortured, with Baraka channelling the most terrible signals from the “skull crazies” and “spaceless history” and “bloody haints”, it is structured around Frantz Fanon’s account of the development of transformations and developments that the intellectual will go through as their relationship to the liberation struggle is altered. The book is divided into three parts - “Sabotage”, “Target Study” and “Black Art” - that describe Baraka’s own trajectory from Bohemian rebellion through to actually military preparation for revolutionary struggle. In the brief Preface Baraka explains that in “Sabotage” details how he “had come to see the superstructure of filth Americans call their way of life, and wanted to see it fall.” The poems included in that first part of the book, he says, are the product of him thinking that simply “talking bad” about said “superstructure of filth” would be sufficient. But he then moves on to “Target Study”, which he claims is where the poems are attempts to really examine the system, “like bomber crews do the soon to be destroyed cities”. He claims the poems become “less passive now, less uselessly ‘literary’”.   Finally, the “Black Art” section is supposed to be “the crucial seeing, the decisions, the actual move.” Black Magic Poetry, then, is a record of Baraka’s struggle through the intensities struggles of the mid-60s to develop a poetry with a “functional presence in the world”.
  
For Fanon, as outlined in the section on the role of the colonised intellectual in The Wretched of the Earth, there are also three stages. Firstly, the writer will show “he has assimilated the coloniser's culture”. The “inspiration [will be] European and [the] works [will] be easily linked to a well-defined trend in metropolitan literature”. This is the Baraka of “Sabotage”, the hip young writer who in the early 1960s was most certainly “linked” to famous trends in metropolitan literature, and now is trying to scratch at the limits of those trends, in order to begin writing what Fanon calls a “precombat literature”. This will, however, be insufficient, says Fanon, because the writer will still not be “integrated with the people”, and so the writing will continue to be intensely expressive of a preconscious bourgeois self, albeit one now expressed negatively through “anguish, malaise, death and even nausea”. Finally, the writer will pass reach a stage where this expression, essentially the death-gasps of the colonised, or bourgeois, self, will be overcome, and the writer will turn into “a galvaniser of the people”. At this stage, the writer will be able to produce what Fanon calls combat literature, and further, the idea of a writer as specialist will disappear. Fanon continues:

During this phase a great many men and women who previously would never have thought of writing, now that they find themselves in exceptional circumstances, in prison, in the resistance or on the eve of their execution, feel the need to proclaim their nation, to portray their people and become the spokesperson of a new reality in action.

At this stage, ideally, the writer becomes simply a member of the collective. Poems and novels, in the bourgeois sense, have less validity than the interpretations of the “exceptional circumstances” that all of the revolutionaries find themselves in. They produce bulletins and slogans. They produce poems also, but these poems are not intended to be read in books. It is what Fanon calls “combat literature”. Walter Benjamin, in the well-known opening section to One-Way Street had made a similar point:

Under these circumstances, true literary activity cannot aspire to take place within a literary framework; this is, rather, the habitual expression of its sterility. Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book - in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment.

For Benjamin, the writer still has a specific role to play in the revolutionary struggle, but if it is to be equal to the struggle, it is absolutely transformed. Fanon warns that, even having achieved revolutionary consciousness, the writer risks being “out of step” and “behind the times”, opportunistically responding to revolutionary events, still with an eye to the production of works of literature.  Literature ceases, to be replaced by “writing”, and that writing must always tightly alternate with “action”, until the two become indistinguishable. Poems become slogans and placards, of only temporary significance, and whose only meaning comes from the revolutionary demands of the moment. In the face of the downturn in the struggle, the ultimate failure (or otherwise) of the revolution, how to these signals, fragments from the struggle reach us. Merely historical interest, or can they still alter our relationship to poetics, our attitude towards art as a social event, an act of communication

Fanon’s work in A Dying Colonialism, in particular, deals with the transformations that take place as the revolution, the liberation struggle, gains in velocity and intensity. “This Is the Voice of Algeria” charts the relationship of the colonised people with the official statements of the colonised. That relationship is similar to the relationship of the inhabitants of the “savage geographies” with the “rich painters” in the poem we were thinking about earlier. Fanon charts the status of radio - that is, of antennae - within occupied Algeria throughout the 1950s. For years the colonised, according to Fanon, had been indifferent to the broadcasts from Radio-Algeria, which as far as they were concerned were nothing but “Frenchmen speaking to Frenchmen”: the entirety of the broadcast was a system of lies (again: “we live our lives under lies” / “the name of your latest painting another word for liar” etc.). At first, this network of lies seems simply irrelevant (i.e it was a “truth” that did not relate to the situation of the colonised, a “truth that they were denied access to), but in the early stages of the liberation struggle, those lies become the site of the first battleground. Faced with the necessity of communication, of the need for a news source, the meaning of the coloniser’s broadcasts change, even if their content does not (just as the being of the coloniser changes, from coloniser to liar to simply enemy, without the content of the social relation changing, just becoming more clear):

The Algerian found himself having to oppose the enemy news with his own news. The “truth” of the oppressor, formerly rejected as an absolute lie, was now countered by another, an acted truth. The occupier’s lie thereby acquired greater reality, for it was now a menaced lie, put on the defensive.

That is to say, the lies of the colonised become activated, becoming therefore an element of a “truth” that is reaching a boiling point, shimmering, becoming unclear in some places: monstrous and hallucinatory as well as reaching a heretofore impossible clarity (the social relation laid bare in all its vicious modernity). The coloniser contributes to this boiling and intensifying of “truth” (which, of course, also is a source of a wild, un-nerving “poetry”), by pitching an attack using “lies” as its battleground. The colonisers jam the radio signals of the colonised. That is, the “lies” of the colonisers become less language itself than pure noise, sonic warfare. In turn, the voices of the colonised become shattered until no solid meaning can be reached. The expression of meaning, and truth, becomes a hideous, inaudible hiss. It is here that we see a revolutionary poetic in one of its many forms, its many aspects (non-cognitive) as preparatory study:

The programmes were then systematically jammed, and the Voice of Fighting Algeria soon became inaudible. A new form of struggle had come into being. Tracts were distributed telling the Algerians to keep tuned in for a period of two or three hours. In the course of a single broadcast a second station, broadcasting over a different wave-length, would relay the first jammed station. The listener, enrolled in the battle of the waves, had to figure out the tactics of the enemy, and in an almost physical way circumvent the strategy of the adversary. Very often only the operator, his ear glued to the receiver, had the unhoped-for opportunity of hearing the Voice. The other Algerians in the room would receive the echo of this voice through the privileged interpreter who, at the end of the broadcast, was literally besieged. Specific questions would be asked of this incarnated voice. Those present wanted to know about a particular battle mentioned by the French press in the last twenty-four hours, and the interpreter, embarrassed, feeling guilty, would sometimes have to admit that the Voice had not mentioned it.

But by common consent, after an exchange of views, it would decide that the Voice had in fact spoken of these events, but that the interpreter had not caught the transmitted information. A real task of reconstruction would then begin. Everyone would participate, and the battles of yesterday and the day before would be re-fought in accordance with the deep aspirations and the unshakable faith of the group. The listener would compensate for the fragmentary nature of the news by an autonomous creation of information.

Everything becomes strange. What is at first revolutionary strategy regarding the distribution of information, the endurance that accurate information (“truths”?) can still be passed on, experiences a kind of implosion, whereby the accurate information becomes an obscure signal from elsewhere, where the “operator” of the radio set becomes instead the “interpreter”, and as the radio itself becomes the Voice, that “interpreter” becomes the incarnation of that voice. Strategy and rationally turns inside out, becomes seance, irrationality, even madness (skull-crazies).

But this is not the disaster it could be, is not an absolute collapse into a superstitious false consciousness thus making an expropriation of the colnoisers’ monopoly on the word “truth” impossible. The opposite is in fact the case. The struggle to hear the “choppy, broken voice” of the radio leads to a intensification of revolutionary collectivity, and makes the reality, the truth of revolution tangible: “The nature of this voice recalled in more than one way that of the Revolution: present ‘in the air’ in isolated pieces, but not objectively”:

Every evening, from nine o’clock to midnight, the Algerian would listen. At the end of the evening, not hearing the Voice, the listener would sometimes leave the needle on a jammed wave-length or one that simply produced static, and would announce that the voice of the combatants was here. For an hour the room would be filled with the piercing, excruciating din of the jamming. Behind each modulation, each active crackling, the Algerian would imagine not only words, but concrete battles.

The “piercing, excruciating din” is the whirring, necessary psychopathology of revolution consciousness coming into being made material by the modernity of the radio set. The static is not only the sound of the enemy jamming our signals, but the sound of our own thinking as it moves outside of what official language permits, into the “silence at the top of our screams”, “the new basis for thought”: the attempt to make sense of the static, via the development of a new language, forces the formation of an altered stance toward social realities, an altered stance that enables the revolution, at first only a notion scattered in “isolated pieces” to exist objectively as a collective, a whole. In Six Persons, Baraka describes the “excruciating din” of the crisis which is necessary for revolutionary consciousness as an active reality, as a process, to emerge:

What they thought of as their life, was actually several lives. All jammed together, happening simultaneously, and separate. And at some pts, what was raised, by undersea contradictions, forced into the light wild contrasts, extremes.

The problem is how to make those “wild contrasts” absolutely intelligible to us, but unintelligible to the enemy i.e. how to make the excruciating din work as a strategy, as a means of infecting the “lies” that we live under, and make them visible, to translate this dialectical nebulae made up of static and screams into clear speech.

Mark McMorris, in an excellent essay on avant-garde poetics in the Black Radical Tradition, cites an account by Edouard Glissant of the strategic necessity of making communication incomprehensible to the enemy:

Since speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provocative intensity of the scream. No-one could translate the meaning of what seemed to be nothing but a shout. It was taken to be nothing but the call of a wild animal. This is how dispossessed man organised his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise [. . .] Creole organises speech as a blast of sound.  

Glissant implies that language, for dispossessed peoples, is a conspiracy and, also, a barricade. Inside its structure of “apparently meaningless noise” is the chance for the development and organisation of meanings that run counter tuo the official definitions of the reality of property and slave-ownership. When the time comes, official reality will be destroyed by a “blast of sound” - that “blast” being the sound of “apparently meaningless noise” becoming the instant of meaningful social truth, where all social antagonisms are made visible, audible and intelligible, where meaning is expropriated and the definitions that sustain the reality of property are negated. The void of incomprehensibility is filled by the self-consciousness of the dispossessed as antagonists to those who would “possess” them. In terms of a poetics, McMorris claims to find analogies in the early European avant-garde:

. . . . at the very least we recognise in Glissant’s speculations the chaos and bewilderment attendant upon the early demonstrations of Dada and the Surrealists, with their simultaneous poems for multiple speaking voices closing out the audience from discursive meanings; and the genre, in particular, of the sound poem that, including the scream, shout, grunt and testing other possibilities for paralinguistic utterance, manages to suggest alternative modes of communication and communities.  

McMorris quickly admits that Glissant has far more in mind than innovation in poetics: he is talking about revolution, the seizure of the means of meaning and of intelligibility. I would go further than McMorris, though, and claim that the “provocative intensity” of the scream makes avant-garde “alternative modes of communication” trivial and bourgeois. Glissant is not suggesting that “extreme noise” is a mere “alternative” to “official speech”: it is an active principle - like Fanon’s radio signals, it contributes to the formation of a revolutionary collectivity via the creation of a cluster of meanings the enemy cannot access. This “organised speech” is not so for the purposes of new forms of art, it is political organisation in the interests of a fight to the death that is played out in language as well as everywhere else. Avant-garde poetics are, undoubtedly, a part of this, but only if the blasts of organised sound and “paralinguistic utterance” can not only “suggest” “alternative modes of communication and community”, but actively force new grounds for thought, from which new forms of communication can not only be suggested, but built.

For Fanon, before the “texture of extreme noise” can be transformed into expropriated meaning, the dispossessed exist within what Fanon called “atmospheric violence”, which may be expressed in a social domination, in street thuggery, in the secular claustrophobia of the best of Baraka’s work of this period, where social antagonisms are able to go unnamed but are everywhere apparent.  The crucial moment, then, is the irreversible moment of naming, where the “atmosphere” of violence is made audible, graspable, comprehensible, truthful, and breaks out into actual social convulsion. In Wretched of the Earth Fanon uses the example of what happens to the networks of superstitions that he says keeps the colonised peasants subjugated:

The magical, supernatural powers prove to be surprisingly ego-boosting. The colonist’s powers are infinitely shrunk, stamped by foreignness. There is no real reason to fight them because what really matters is that the mythical structures contain far more terrifying adversaries. It is evident that everything is reduced to a permanent confrontation at the level of phantasy.

In the liberation struggle, however, this people who were once relegated to the realm of the imagination, victims of unspeakable terrors, but content to lose themselves in hallucinatory dreams, are thrown into disarray, reform, and amid blood and tears give birth to very real issues

The dispossessed recognise that their superstitions (ie the lies they live under) are metaphoric expression of social monsters that are all too real, and the cosmo-dialectical cluster of magic, superstition, phantasy and imagination transform “unspeakable terrors” into “speakable strategy”. The social lie is forced to speak, to reveal itself, and only then can be destroyed.

For Baraka, the bourgeois aesthetics that he continues to right from within have come to themselves be a network of superstitions in the moment of transformation into a system of laws. In the very early work, before the visit to Cuba, he had been able to think that poetics might provide an “alternative”, a “refuge” from the metallic screeches of the social lie: an early poem sees him feeling “safe now, within the poem”, and noting that “the walls of these words protect me”. The crisis comes when Baraka notices what he is being protected from, and who those walls are also protecting. The well known poem at the end of Black Magic Poetry proposes new uses for those walls:

All the stores will open if you
will say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall mother
fucker this is a stickup!

And in 6 Persons, the excruciating radio din that communicates the facts of the social lie is also activated:

All the screamin’ didn’t go out into a void. It hit the VanAllen belt and came back. The lumpen raised, the metaphysical Blacks + Idealist Blacks screamed on of war cries. In Finland Station the ground caught fire.

Naming. It is at this moment that poetry re-emerges, not via screams as the inaudible centres of the poetry, but as real, urgent tasks. The form and content of artistic forms must become indivisible from the form and content of social forms in crisis. In an attempt to realise this, the collective of Black Artists who founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem, 1965 (note the move from individual artist to collective of artists) organised massive street performances, moving African-American avant-garde out from its Bohemian “regions of compromise” and into the “non-cognitve” streets of Harlem:

We brought street-corner poetry readings, moving the poets from by truck from site to site. So that each night through that summer we flooded Harlem with new music, new poetry, new dance, new paintings, and the sweep of the Black Arts movement had recycled itself back to the people. We had huge audiences, really mass audiences, and though what we brought was supposed to be avant and super-new, most of it people dug. Thats why we knew the music critics who put the new music down as inaccessible were full of shit. People danced in the street to Sun Ra and cheered Ayler and Shepp and Cecil and Jackie McClean and the others.

Artists become collective, the boundaries between artforms are also disintegrated into an endlessly variable but unified vortex of revolutionary expression, where the supposedly “difficult” art of the black avant-garde becomes immediately accessible to the people of Harlem, contributing to and strengthening radicalism and collectivity, enabling the communication of information, of the screams at the centre of official life. The nightmares - the “skull crazies” - of the work are translated into the terms of a new and direct poetics supposed to be able to communicate on the street:

The Black Artist’s role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it. His role is to report and reflect so precicely the nature of the society, and of himself in that society, that other men will be moved by the exactness of his rendering and, if they are black men, grow strong through this moving, having seen their own strength, and weakness; and if they are white men, tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be drenched in the filth of their evil.

And this in action: the re-emergence of a new, public avant-garde art after its decoding of the “silence at the top of our screams”. Lorenzo Thomas describes a reading given by Baraka (the changing of the name) in Newark, 1967. He has driven in from Manhatten with Ishmael Reed:

We walked through the cold quiet streets a few blocks to a union hall or community centre sort of place where Amiri Baraka was reading feverish political poems to a few cheerful working class black folks [. . . ] Baraka was dressed in a flowing big-sleeved dashiki and a Moroccan knit cap. He was shouting and singing his poems [. . .] The audience, just like a church congregation, said “Amen” when the poem was finished [. . . ] Ishmael Reed and I sat there with our eyes bugged out, wondering if the brother was mad. Talking like that. Talking that talk [. . .] The people were saying “yeh, uh, huh”, laughing and bopping their heads. Like in church. I was amazed at what the poems were doing.