Amiri Baraka on Rodney, Black Liberation and Obama.

Also titled, Amiri: Writa, Painta, Waila, Neva Bada, Booboo, Baba Baraka

by Clairmont Chung

As I contemplated Amiri Baraka's recent passing, and that of so many fighters, I questioned whether it would be as easy to redefine Amiri Baraka, tone-down his image, so as to make him more palatable, as has happened to others. Hunters and momento seekers succeeded stunningly with Mandela's hagiography: the blessed peacemaker. Something seems to happen to us when we become government. Baraka stayed away. He poses a more complex problem. He has recorded it all and made it difficult to rewrite. His work stands like thorns protecting a core.

I knocked at Amiri Baraka's front door one early Spring morning in 2009. He opened the door neatly dressed as if about to go on regular Saturday morning errands. We were both wearing Clarks, brown suede, Desert Boots. Initially, he seemed surprised maybe expecting someone else. Sensing he was about to refuse whatever I was selling, I quickly reintroduced myself and mentioned the magic words, Walter Rodney, early in my delivery. My camera bag, tripod, and lighting equipment completed the message.

A few months earlier, we had agreed to an interview and today was the day. He seemed to relax at the mention of Walter Rodney and to vaguely recall our agreement. He did not protest. I pointed out our mutual taste in shoes. He stepped aside and waved my wife and I towards the foyer. His wife Amina poked her head around a corner, to assess the commotion and to remind Amiri the contractor would arrive at any moment to estimate the cost of house repairs. I don’t believe she remembered us.

Four years earlier, I had begun to put the pieces together for a documentary on renowned Guyanese scholar and activist, Walter Rodney. I had completed most of the needed interviews, but was missing the commentary that connected the black power movement in the Caribbean with that in the US, Africa and elsewhere as a global movement. Up until then, interviews had dealt with Walter Rodney, the personality or the ideology, in a specific place. My interview with Manning Marable had begun the wider process but that tape was stolen.

While going through the Rodney Papers, at Atlanta's Robert W. Woodruff Library, I found letters from Baraka to Rodney dated as early as 1972. Baraka had recognized Rodney's importance to Pan Africanism and wrote inviting him to Newark to address the American movement. In those days Pan Africanism was often used synonymously with socialism. From that letter we know that it was no longer just Black Nationalism, but Baraka was championing a broader socialist line in keeping with the global Black Liberation Movement:a Pan African position. He was not alone. The Black Panther Party leadership was already there.

In our interview, he identified a long standing divide that was ideological and not geographical; cultural nationalism versus scientific socialism. He and Rodney would meet the following year in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and that is where our interview began.

We took 15 minutes to set-up camera, lights and audio, while I explained the socioeconomic and political importance of the Clarks Desert Boots. Baraka had obviously done this many times. He calmly took his seat, submitted to being miked-up, and tested the sound as instructed. He seemed only mildly interested in Clarks boots but a bit more quizzical as I tried to explain the role of the boots, using the dialectic, as a prized possession among working-class and not-working-class Caribbean youth. There is no equivalent in African American style: maybe the Adidas shell-toe or Timberland's Chukka. But nothing as long-serving and as unsuited to the Caribbean climate as the Desert Boot. The common affront is none of these manufacturers have demonstrated any reciprocal loyalty.

Baraka is a lot of things including stylish and swaggering whether in dashiki or tweeded and bow-tied. This was no ordinary style. It was bold and confident without ostentation. This was swag of a man who had met with Malcolm X and entertained Dr. King, Jr. in his Newark home. We sat for under an hour. But I got a lifetime.

He clearly had a story and a position to articulate. In his mind, if its Rodney I wanted, that’s what he was going to give and it would not be an isolated Rodney. It would be his Rodney: a global and timeless one. He needed no prompting and did not disappoint. But he did shock. But then its Baraka. I should have known.

We first met at Columbia University. He was a visiting professor teaching what we called Afro-American Literature. This was around the same time President Obama attended. More than likely, he skipped Baraka's class. I had read Baraka's book on Jazz, Blues People:Negro Music in White America, while a teenager and could hear the music on the pages. I too marched through the aisles, behind screaming horns, and out into the streets with the band as he described. Looking back much later, I think that book is as important as C.l.R. James' Beyond A Boundary, or maybe even The Black Jacobins, and does for jazz what James did for cricket and revolution. Through the analysis of cultural expression, in this case Jazz, he was able to demonstrate the unbreakable embrace between culture and revolt; expression and struggle and how what happens in the arena reflects on socio-politics and back. To understand Jazz you needed to understand all of history.

I read him in conjunction with that flood of stellar literature, art, that came out of the movement in the US: The time of Black Power. It was our enlightenment period. We had had other periods but this rivaled, perhaps surpassed, anything of 18^th century Europe. It had the benefit of the mistakes of 18^th Century European thinking. So once I heard he was teaching, I knew I would be in every class. I knew instinctively that this was good for us, the world, and a bad thing for Columbia's Administration.

The divestment movement was developing and would reach a head while Baraka was still around campus. I still believe his presence contributed substantially to the escalation at Columbia. Though divestment was the issue on several campuses, it was Columbia students that moved to occupy Hamilton Hall in the Spring of 1985. That spread to other campuses, but Columbia was one of the first to put a plan in place to divest and that was from the direct action of students and some faculty. Many attended his class and more were influenced by those who attended his class.

He taught “Black Women and Their Fictions” and we spent a lot of time on Zora Neale Hurston's, Their Eyes Were Watching God”. The compilation he did with his wife, Confirmation:An Anthology Of African American Women, featured prominently. He analyzed texts according to the dialectics of class struggle. He was clearly in love with Hurston: her writing too. She was before his time, of course, an earlier Black enlightenment, and probably would have been a challenge. In class, he confessed he had tried to hook-up with Toni Morrison while both students at Howard. She had dissed him. He loved challenges and Morrison must have been.

He wouldn't have minded, with his ever-present Sisyphean analogy as a refuge. We were all rolling the mythical ball uphill. Often it came crashing down sometimes on him, but mostly on the gains made by the people for and to whom he advocated. He cautioned that you cannot go wrong if you tell Black people what you think they needed to know and do. And he expected we would start the ball against all odds.

No one person is ever responsible for any movement. It is always a series of factors and personalities.

Outside the classroom something began to stir. Protest and takeover were not knew to the college campus and certainly not to Columbia. Columbia Students had taken over and occupied Hamilton Hall in 1968 as part of the struggle for Black self determination manifested in opposition to a new sports facility in Harlem. Baraka was there then too: in Harlem and active.

In the 1980s, during Baraka's teaching stint it was the Committee for a Free South Africa with the call for divestment. As he pointed out in our interview, it was the 'same struggle' ebbing and flowing. Its like a river.

By spring 1985, students channeling those students of 1968, chained the doors and slept-in, to bring attention to the injustice of apartheid. We held teach- ins in the years leading up to occupation and crowded the university senate meetings to advocate divestment. Columbia University was reported to have some 200 million invested. 

There was no more eloquent corollary to apartheid than our own history of segregation in the US. We could see fascism. Baraka had explained it to us. We talked about US segregation:class and race. Though not a placard carrying marcher he did appear and read poetry, like only he can, and that energized us and gave a sense of our power.

Never missing an opportunity, he performed on campus at the Miller Theater, Dodge Hall. Baraka on the mic, Reggie Workman on upright base, and Max Roach on drums: yeah Max Roach. Plus, Baraka was doing some percussive stuff with his vocal chords. His voice was a drum, his words bullets, like Monk played piano. 

He was a Pan African, performance artist, and Marxist. He made clear: the connection between hip hop and bebop. This was the 80s during the early rise of hip hop. The continuation of Blues People through performance. Baraka has never been late for anything. He was always ahead, well except once.

He started our interview talking about his first meeting with Rodney at the Sixth Pan African Conference in Dar es Salaam, 1973. Then we moved to the importance of Rodney. But you can watch the film yourself.

THE SHOCKER

Then came the shocker. It was not what was said, but who said it. He launched into a stinging critique of the 'Black left' and urged, demanded, their full support for President Obama. He saw Obama as an extension of that earlier struggle for civil rights. I had traveled across the Caribbean, Africa and North America in making the film. I was fully aware of the global support that Obama had generated in unlikely places. I attempted to contextualize Obama's appeal: first according to race and then class. For Africans, people of African descent, the appeal was clear. How could he not have appeal to Black people given the racial history of the US and the planet?

Even Europeans, especially abroad, welcomed the possibility, and then President Obama, and I believe for what he represented as they too needed an Obama. He represented a challenge to the class based selection that characterized most elections and left the working class hardly working.

Their Obama did not have to be of African Descent, they probably would prefer not, but nevertheless she must hold the promise that Obama appeared to hold even without saying a word. 

This I believe spread throughout the world. In fact I believe it was a movement that came here rather than spread from the US outwards. In Latin America it elected Presidents there too and, in-turn, influenced Latino voting inside the US and towards Obama. That swell joined with African Americans and progressives here to elect Obama.

It was the coalition Baraka had constructed 50 years earlier in electing Ken Gibson, Mayor of Newark, with the possible exception of young White voters. Obama brought those.

I remained deeply skeptical: actually dismissive.

But Baraka's support was shocking because it came from a now avowed leftist, Marxist Leninist, Pan Africanist. And because, I did not do my usual preparation for interviews. If I had, I would have read his lambaste of the usual right-wing press suspects, or of Tavis Smiley, Cynthia McKinney and the Black Left in his The Parade of Anti-Obama Rascals. I thought our past together would have been enough preparation. He did not hold anything back. He called them Uncle Toms. Hell, I voted for Cynthia McKinney in that election. She never attacked Obama, then. She was just fighting fascism.

But Baraka made some passionate arguments describing the auto industry and bank bailouts as forms of nationalization and believed Obama would see them as such. I looked at his eyes. Everything said he was dead serious.

For not the first time I tried to rethink my position. I tried to look for something I had heard somewhere, or missed, that even remotely indicated that President Obama would move against corporate interests and commandeer its wealth for us. Maybe his stated unwavering support for Israel would be matched by unwavering support for Palestinians, Pakistanis, Black people, and human-rights. I thought about the military and the planned expansion in Afghanistan, how there and Iraq were now destroyed, and wondered where in that was any inkling that the seizure of oilfields, or whatever, would be made directly available to us without the intervention of the military, Mobil, BP, and Shell.

I was now the Black left. Or worse, I might be in the tea party. I learned this at his house. He was actually describing me. I wondered about the icy hand of the merger between fascism and corporate power and its strangle-hold on our stomachs, warming our planet and heating- up our neighborhoods. This was not about Obama. It was about us, imprisoned, some in our own homes, with flimsy overpriced alarms and steel grilled windows afraid to travel at night in areas where police and thieves roam looking for each other, locked in a battle orchestrated by that icy hand now on our throats.

Then I did something shocking. I did not challenge him. I looked at my desert-ed feet. I wanted to complete my interview. I was on a deadline and not about to risk any interruptions; even my own. It took too much effort to get here.

A year and a half earlier, we had met unexpectedly in a Newark restaurant. Amina was with him and my wife and one daughter with me. We were the only patrons in a spacious feng-shued and upscale restaurant. We had taken our seats only minutes before Baraka arrived. I immediately saw the opportunity. This entire film was made in divine order, or so I told myself, and approached soon after he sat down. 

I  re-introduced myself, but it was clear he had no recollection of me in his class 25 years earlier. Both he and Mrs. Baraka were polite and gracious to me, my wife and daughter. I told him about the film, he said he was interested, gave me his card, and agreed to discuss it further. It took this long to get to his front door. Nothing was going to stop me.

Looking back we looked so Obamaesque in that restaurant. Two handsome couples, and child, who can still afford a meal in a somewhat upscale restaurant. It was the same look that had now been placed on fascism. In Obama, a pretty wife and smiling cute children, would be the cover. Fascism had become face-ism.

I did not call him the day before, as is customary, it was too important an interview and the time too short to risk a reschedule. So now, I would not risk it by challenging him and demanding that he showed me how is it that the auto and bank industry bailouts were nationalizations. Or that how, the bank executives who had bankrolled Obama's campaign and had reformed as his cabinet somehow can reform themselves to care about poor people:or Black people for that matter. Were these not the same bank executives that presided over the sub prime scandal that stole poor people's money: mostly Black people. 

What about the executives who flew private jets to Washington to argue their cases. Where were we in this cabinet; anywhere. Did he not recycle Bush's key people, the same Bush who Kanye said 'don't like Black people'. What about 'stop and frisk' on federal money, mass incarcerations and mass deportations. We justified it all. We said he needed experience and continuity. I shared my disbelief to my closest friends unwilling to suffer public rebuke or worse.

I agonized later, as I listened to the interview and contemplated how it would fit in the Walter Rodney story. In the interview, he proposed that if Walter and Stokely were here they too would be smiling about Obama. I felt a little sick. Imagine.

I knew the interview was gold. But I also knew it could have been platinum had I challenged him. That is how fascism grows. He had told me this years ago.

Fascism is one of Baraka's favorite targets. It seemed no class ended without it being mentioned once. He pointed out the examples of Franco and Hitler in Europe. Some in Africa and the Caribbean with pretensions to socialism, but fascist in practice. Apartheid is fascism. Its not dead. Its alive right here, right now.

His poem “Somebody  Blew Up America”, is about fascism. My own experience with fascists is that they do not or would not listen. It is that strong man, woman, who accepts no counsel. Its the inability of individuals in power to self correct, self analyze and change with the interest of others in mind: those out of power. Its the hoarding of power. Moreover, it is the inability of others with access to the source, the core, to point out the contradictions to the contradicted. Had I become that person: silent, a kind of sycophant interested only in my project?

THEN THE (UN) EXPECTED HAPPENED

The US and its NATO allies invaded Libya. This struck a nerve in Baraka and he struck back, Baraka style. He wrote in 2011, The New Invasion Of Africa,
So it wd be this way
That they wd get a negro
To bomb his own home
To join with the actual colonial
Powers, Britain, France, add Poison Hillary
With Israel and Saudi to make certain
That revolution in Africa must have a stopper....

In the process he did what fascists cannot do:self-correct. On Libya, I was my usual cynical self. It was business as usual imperialism. Baraka redeemed himself and in the process saved others; me included and demonstrated what was possible. But if you know anything about Baraka, know that's what he does. 

Now Syria has joined the others in the dust and guns have swung to Iran. A pattern has appeared. In whose interest, and whose bidding, is it?

Baraka can leave the Village and head to Harlem, unify Latinos and Africans to elect Ken Gibson, leave peace and love for Black Power, leave cultural nationalism and find or add scientific socialism, take or leave Obama. Its not always smooth or complete.

Baraka can be anything and always, soon enough, in the service of the oppressed. In the interview, he told me not to hold him responsible for things he said 20 years ago. It sounded incredible. Only 20 months had passed since President Obama's election before Libya happened. People change. He saw in Libya what he hadn't seen before and was courageous enough to call it.

It must be a lasting treasure for his family to know a man so intimately and a man who was so needed by our world. He did what he did for all of us, not for the money and fame. He read and wrote courageously. We are forever grateful to his family for being so generous.

Politicians and world 'leaders' did not rush to pose for pictures with him. Some wanted him dead. He was not killable. They certainly cannot kill him now. His contribution is immortal

Luckily he lived into the technological age and we have near sufficient of him to last beyond us. That's a pleasant thought: a barrier against forgetfulness and silence.

So as we contemplate his passing, know the usual suspects will rush to eulogize him and try to euthanize whats left, what he thought, his image, and in the same way they did to Mandela. I expect Corey Booker, Obama II, the ex-Mayor of Newark, now a Senator, to be one. No reference would be made to Baraka's Somebody (any four letter word) Up America or Africa's new invasion. Many decry Apartheid as some distant past, but are blind when confronted by it in the present, in the US and Israel most notably, but its really everywhere. They sidestep it so as not to upset the benefactors. We rationalize the approach because we think they have to get into power to change it. Someone said about elections, 'the government always gets in'.

That icy grip forces the oppressed to adopt survival tactics based on race first, religion first, party first, tribe first, gender first, whatever first, while not seeing that 'firsts' sow the seeds of fascism. It works great when seeking unity to seize power, but not so good after the seizure of power. And the reason is the inability to deal with inequality, the distribution of resources to all, the economics of it necessarily begins an exclusion process that dehumanizes. We become the very thing we decried.

So eulogize if you must, but know its fascism we fight and that fascism attempted to eliminate Rodney and Biko and El Hajj and Assata, El Amin, Amiri and understand why we cannot euthanize what they say. They never shut up. His works are like thorns protecting his core. No laureate can achieve that, no Peace Prize, no Pulitzer. Thanks Amiri for humanizing us with culture. We may not be able to fill your shoes or walk in your footsteps. How about wearing the same shoe?

Bada 

Booboo 

Baraka 

De attacka 

Blacka 

Neva guh backa 

Writa, Painta, waila 

Teacha, preacha 

'mi na
Faada

Neva fear ah breda

fyah 

crakah

like you neva

dappah rappa

boppa hip hoppa

Black powa

yuh neva

noah

For Information on the film go to  W.A.R. Stories:Walter Anthony Rodney

A transcript of the extended interview is in the edited volume, Walter Anthony Rodney: A Promise of Revolution, Monthly Review Press, New York 2012 

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