In his 1965 short story “The Screamers”, Baraka describes his experience at a rhythm and blues gig in 1950s Newark. As the story progresses, the gig is eventually brought to a close by the audience rioting, but that is not the violence that I am interested in right now. Rather, his description of the music itself describes the consequence of an aesthetic violence (as distinct from an aestheticised violence) that might just as well have worked as a manifesto for his own artistic practice in the mid-1960s.
The repeated rhythmic figure, a screamed riff, pushed in its insistence past music. It was hatred and frustration, secrecy and despair. It spurted out of the diphthong culture, and reinforced the black cults of emotion. There was no compromise, no dreary sophistication, only the elegance of something that is too ugly to be described . . . the great sounds of our day. Ethnic historians, actors, priests of the unconscious. That stance spread like fire thru the cabarets and the joints of the black cities, so the sound itself became a basis for thought, and the innovators searched for uglier modes . . . and the horn spat enraged sociologies.
Baraka describes a music that extends beyond its own limitations, that refuses to respect borders. It is music, and it is also discourse, albeit discourse of a previously unknown type. It transforms its listeners into initiates (the occultist vocabulary is necessary) of a reality both unknown and unknowable to the citizens of the official, white world. In an early story, “Suppose Sorrow Was a Time Machine”, Baraka had asked “where does the music go when it become silence”, and “what is the content of the silence at the top of our screams”. In “The Screamers” he has the answer: a basis for new thought from which a new knowledge can be built from the “hatred despair secrecy and frustration” melded together in the alchemical heat of the music itself.
Music as carrier of secret thought. For any scholar of African-American music this is a commonplace: the roots of black music in the sorrow songs, and as Du Bois famously pointed out, the roots of those sorrow songs in the barely remembered fragments of African songs and language that had survived their criminalisation in the days of chattel slavery, and their near total erasure (or transformation) in what Fred Moten has called the vast “laboratory” of the Middle Passage.
By the time he published “The Screamers”, Baraka was already famous for the off-Broadway hit Dutchman. In this play, a young, middle-class, slightly bohemian, black intellectual (if not modelled on Baraka himself, then certainly on the milieu in which he moved at the time) is approached by a white beatnik woman on a subway train. They chat etc. He’s a bit of a dork etc. Her chat becomes more aggressive, more racially charged, she accuses him of playing the Uncle Tom. Finally he loses it, and the climax of the play is a long soliloquy, which is essentially a detailing of the content of the “enraged sociologies” of “The Screamers”.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don’t know yet what they’re doing. They say “I love Bessie Smith”. And don’t even understand that Bessie Smith is saying “Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass”. Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she’s saying, and very plainly, “Kiss my black ass”. And if you don’t know that, its you that’s doing the kissing.
Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip 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 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 . . . . You understand? No I guess not. If Bessie Smith had killed some white people she wouldn’t have needed the music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors. No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their back on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
Not murder itself, but the expression of the desire for murder, is what is powerful, and what is important here. The raw emotion in the music of Bessie Smith, the intense intellectual positions laid out in that of Charlie Parker - two great black musicians largely romanticised and so basically scorned by “the hip white boys” who “scream” for them - are what have allowed Baraka’s character to finally use the word “murder”. Because it is important to remember how intense this spectacle would have been, even on a stage in the East Village. An enraged black man, yelling about Charlie Parker “killing the first ten white people he saw”. It is true that Robert Williams had been advocating armed self-defence against the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina since the late 50s (and had been thrown out of the NAACP for doing it), and Malcolm X was developing his corrective to the pacifism of the Civil Rights Movement, but Baraka’s work - perhaps by dint of its being art, being spectacle - carried a cathartic charge that must have been terrible. In a poem written around the same time, “Leadbelly Gives an Autograph”, Baraka had written
I am saying now
What my father could not remember
to say, what my grandfather
was killed
for believing
The structural violence of racism had made certain things impossible to say. As such, black music (Baraka and others at the time argued) did not only carry traces of the highly various African cultures and traditions,that had scattered across the American continent in brutalised form, but also carried a different tradition: the secret hatred of the oppressor, of the white. Secret because to express it was to risk death. The terrible knowledge carried in Baraka’s work is the power to finally say it straight.
There are contradictions. It is true that Dutchman’s status as spectacle and as art meant that it was possible to say things that an activist or leader couldn’t. Malcolm X, for example, never expressed hatred. But equally, its status as art meant that it could be easily neutralised. There is a problem with an artwork that says artworks should be replaced by murder while itself remaining only an artwork. It runs the risk of falling short of the “new basis for thought” that Baraka had demanded, and becoming merely revolutionary showbiz. But while the problem of recuperation is one that any activist artist must take seriously, it is possible to subvert it. Erica Hunt, speaking at the “Expanding the Repetoire: Continuity and Change in African-American Writing conference in San Francisco, 2002, suggested that:
[Capital] also has the capacity to eat things that are in fact detrimental to its own interests. So, in fact, in that process of commodification of oppositional practices, it will also ingest something, I hope at least, that is really bad for it - in fact, inimical to its ultimate goals, which is basically deadening our experience and making us good workers.
The artwork, for Hunt, may carry a poison. Certainly, Baraka’s correspondence in the wake of the success of Dutchman shows that he was acutely aware of the spectacular trap he might be walking into. He was being offered astronomical sums of money to, essentially, sell out: and it to his credit that he refused all offers, with what money he made from the success of Dutchman being put into his Harlem based Black Arts Repertory Theatre, which he - and others - set up to educate working class Harlem youth in theatre, poetry, music and revolutionary theory, and which instigated the whole wave of the 60s and 70s Black Arts Movement, where radical black artists would make and distribute their various art forms outside of the systems of capitalist and white violence. He wrote in his autobiography that
What “fame” Dutchman brought me and raised up in me was this absolutely authentic and heartfelt desire to speak what should be spoken for all of us. I knew the bullshit of my own life, its twists and flip-outs, yet I felt, now, some heavy responsibility. If these bastards were going to raise me up, for any reason, then they would pay for it! I would pay these motherfuckers back in kind, because even if I wasn’t strong enough to act, I would be strong enough to SPEAK what had to be said, for all of us, for black people, because they were the root and origin of my conviction, but for anyone anywhere who wanted justice.
The payment the white ‘motherfuckers’ would make would not be, ultimately, financial. Baraka’s manifesto “The Revolutionary Theatre”, written in the immediate aftermath of the success of Dutchman expanded on and clarified some of the statements made in the play.
WHITE BUSINESSMEN OF THE WORLD, DO YOU WANT TO SEE PEOPLE REALLY DANCING AND SINGING??? ALL OF YOU GO UP TO HARLEM AND GET YOURSELF KILLED, THERE WILL BE DANCING AND SINGING THEN, FOR REAL.
Baraka begins by setting out the tasks for the new theatre (and by extension, the new poetry, the new music, the new Black Art): “it should force change, it should be change”. It is not to be merely agit-prop, but actually be capable to be itself a revolutionary “force”, the “basis for thought” of “The Screamers” transmuted into an energy system capable of unleashing the revolutionary energies. Baraka, at this point, was closer to Artaud than to Brecht. Or, given that this was still to be a pedagogical theatre, perhaps a violently dialectical confrontation of the two.
The Revolutionary Theatre must EXPOSE! Show up the insides of these humans, look into black skulls. White men will cower before this theatre because it hates them. Because they themselves have been trained to hate. The Revolutionary Theatre must hate them for hating. For presuming with their technology to deny the supremacy of the Spirit. They will all die because of this.
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.
It must, as he put it in the early short story “Suppose Sorrow Was a Time Machine” teach them about “the silence at the top of our screams”. But while Baraka’s earlier work had been in a sense conventional in that it was consciously seeking an unknown - a “new basis for thought”, “where music goes when we don’t hear it no more”, here that unknown is coming inward, is invasive and vengeful. “The Revolutionary Theatre must teach them their deaths”. The revelatory moment of Baraka’s proposed art (and this is a manifesto) is precisely the moment when the retributional club smashes the white racist’s head open, an action that releases the previously inaudible, unknowable “mad cries of the poor”.
But what is most chilling is that these “mad cries” are the sounds of sanity. The Revolutionary Theatre, Baraka continues, “should stagger through our universe correcting, insulting, preaching, spitting craziness - but a craziness taught to us in our rational moments”. Our rational moments, Baraka seems to be saying, are entirely other to whatever passes for rationality within the violence of systemic and structural racism. Sanity - social peace - can only be reached by pushing through and exposing the craziness of that structure. The same point is made at the end of Dutchman, with the reference to “crazy niggers turning their backs on sanity”. In Dutchman they are the ones who refuse to kill, who cannot eradicate the essentially subliminal violence of structural racism.
But, to think again about the point made by Erica Hunt, it is not these scenes (or acts) of violence that are ultimately “detrimental” to the interests of capital and the white world. Revolutionary self-defence is, as everything, easily recuperable, easily transformed in capital’s cauldrons into plain old spectacular violence. If there is a toxic pill in Baraka’s formulation that will make structural racism and capitalism itself choke to death it is probably concealed in that troubling (and in more senses than one quite poisonous) word “Spirit”, what Baraka calls “the supremacy of the Spirit”. In one of his last poems Baraka is still playing with this word: “gotta be a spirit / don’t wanna be no ghost”, as if the effort is ultimately to get beyond the earth, not to be a trapped haunting of it. As if it could be.
What Baraka is trying to do with his art - and this is true of all art that would aspire to be actively and actually revolutionary - is to create images that are useless to and unrecuperable by the enemy and of active use to revolutionaries themselves. The key paragraph of “The Revolutionary Theatre” eschews violent bombast, instead invoking a kind of revolutionary techne, a theory of the revolutionary imagination:
What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician etc) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called upon to solve all our “problems”. The imagination is our projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as “things”. Imagination (Image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image’s use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.
What is key here is that “image”, conflated here with the “imagination”, is active. It is worth recalling that in Baraka’s earliest writing - that is, before his politicisation - one of his central influences was Ezra Pound, and that Pound defined the poetic image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”, that is, a frozen moment of clarity that can define some kind of eternal truth about the world. Following his politicisation, Baraka’s sense of the “image” is precisely that which can shatter the Poundian image: Baraka’s aesthetic radicalism is that the image is activated, is a tool by which lost memory (“data”) can be called upon to transform the world. Conflating it with “magic” (itself traditionally defined as the manipulation of imagery in order to transform the world), Baraka’s art is not a Poundian production of images, but a method to break images apart and release the energies (possibilities) contained there. To make audible the noises contained within “the silence at the top of our screams.” In the 1965 essay “The Legacy of Malcolm X and the Coming of the Black Nation”, Baraka wrote:
What a culture produces is, and refers to, is an image - a picture of a process, since it is a form of a process: movement seen. The changing of images, of references, is the Black Man’s way to the racial integrity of the captured African, which is where we must take ourselves, in feeling, to be truly the warriors we propose to be. To form an absolutely rational attitude toward West man, and West thought. Which is what is needed. To make a fight according to the absolute realities of the world as it is.
The liberation struggle, then, is a battle-ground on the level of the image itself. The images of the white world are to be overturned, transformed into black images. What is the “black image”? For contemporary theorists such as David Marriott, Frank Wilderson, Saidiya Hartman it is still the impossible, insofar as the hatred of the Black body (from chattel slavery right through to mass incarceration) is still the unspoken but defining reality of what we must still - a half century after Baraka’s work - call the white world, which is a world built on the enslavement, humiliation, rape and lynching of said black bodies - that is, the denial of their images. That is, every image of the white world is a frozen moment of crystallised absolute violence. The task of the revolutionary artist is to firstly make that violence clear, (or to make that silence scream) and by doing so end the world created by that violence. The task is impossible - if anything, the situation in Black America is now worse than it was in the 1960s - but the continuing presence of that impossibility is all the artist has to work from (that is, the world situation is so dire all we have left is the utopian imagination). Baraka’s spiritual advisor - the great musician Sun Ra - once said “we’ve tried the possible, it didn’t work - now we go for the impossible”. Its the situation the revolutionary artist is at right now. Three years after his death, Amiri Baraka’s work is not finished. He is not yet a ghost.
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