Two Literary Laureates Celebrated: Herta Müller and Amiri Baraka (Part 2)

Amiri Baraka with poems and mic in hand. (photo by Lynda Koolish)

For Part One of this article featuring the profile of Nobel Laureate Herta Müller Please Click Here . The section on Amiri Baraka starts now:

While his was not among the names short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature Amiri Baraka has long been lionized for his trademark intellectually penetrating yet poetically engaging analysis of U.S. culture and his fire-brand style of political truth-telling.

A playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, short-story writer and performance artist all rolled into one, Baraka was born October 7, 1934 in Newark, NJ. He attended Rutgers and Howard Universities and is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. The author launched his writing career under the name LeRoi Jones with the 1958 play, A Good Girl is Hard to Find, produced in Montclair, New Jersey. He went on to confirm the promise evident in his early efforts with the 1961 publication of his first major collection of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, and the 1964 Obie-winning play Dutchman, among other published and performed works. These early years of Baraka’s career are often described as his “Beat” period both for the influence of jazz and blues music upon his writings and because of his literary affiliation with such Beat writers as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, many of whose work he published in a literary magazine called Yugen.

From Beat to the Black Arts Movement

Like authors Haki R. Madhubuti, Sonia Sanchez, Eugene Redmond, Nikki Giovanni, and a number of other African-American litterateurs still writing today, Baraka became a major voice of the 1960s Black Arts Movement that championed both the re-publication of classic works by Harlem Renaissance authors and the publication of new works by emerging black authors of the era. This time-frame has been called the writer’s Black Nationalist period and later years would find his work described as Third World Marxist-Leninist in scope, leading some to criticize that the politics of his writing diluted its overall literary structure and quality. Nevertheless, the primary unifying thread throughout Baraka’s prolific career has been that of versatile creative artistry committed to exploring and documenting an evolving yet steady vision of the human condition as experienced by Black Americans.

In 2002, Baraka was appointed poet laureate of New Jersey. The following year, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he composed and performed a poem called “Somebody Blew up America,” in which he expressed controversial opinions about the origins of the 9/11 attacks. The resulting furor over the poem ended with the dissolution of the New Jersey poet laureate position. The author has also been named the Poet Laureate of Newark Schools.

In a rare open and intimate recorded conversation with another writer, Baraka in 1998 shared the following with author Kalamu ya Salaam regarding his creative inspirations and motivations:

“In my studies of world Black culture, there’s still the smile at the bottom of the world. You know the masks of drama, [where] one smiles, one frowns? That geography, that’s aesthetics, that smile at the bottom of the world. That sense of the wonderful, the bizarre, and the comic, I was always intrigued by that.”

In Honor of a Great Author

Awards for his many contributions to literary culture include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards, the James Weldon Johnson Medal, Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, the Langston Hughes Award from The City College of New York, and a lifetime achievement award from the Before Columbus Foundation Life Achievement Award.

The Amiri Barak Reader

The celebration in honor of Baraka’s 75th birthday is slated to take place at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture in New York City, October 10. Among those scheduled to appear at the event are Louis Reyes Rivera, Sonia Sanchez, Ja A. Jahannes, Eugene Redmond, Miguel Algarin, Herb Boyd, Karen Taylor, Melba Joyce, and many others.

by Aberjhani, the African American Art Examiner and author/co-author of eight books including Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance and ELEMENTAL, The Power of Illuminated Love.