The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones
Page 1
THE
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF
LEROI
JONES
Works by Amiri Baraka
Poetry
Preface to a 20 Vol Suicide Note (1961)
The Dead Lecturer (1964)
Black Art (1967)
In Our Terribleness (1968)
Ifs Nation Time (1968)
Black Magic Poetry (1969)
Spirit Reach (1971)
Afrikan Revolution (1973)
Hard Facts (1976)
Selected Poetry (1979)
Reggae or Not (1981)
Fiction
Blues People (1961)
The System of Dante’s Hell (1963)
Home (1965)
Black Music (1967)
Tales (1968)
A Black Value System (1970)
Raise Race Rays Raze (1971)
Selected Prose and Drama (1979)
Daggers & Javelins, Essays 74–79 (1982)
Anthologies
The Moderns (1963)
Afrikan Congress (1971)
Black Fire (1972)
Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women (with Amina Baraka, 1982)
Drama
The Baptism (1964)
Dutchman (1964)
A Black Mass (1965)
Experimental Death Unit #1 (1965)
J-E-L-L-0 (1965)
The Slave (1965)
The Toilet (1965)
The Death of Malcolm X (1966)
Great Goodness of Life (1966)
Home on the Range (1966)
Madheart (1966)
Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself (1967) Police (1967)
Slave Ship (1967)
Four Black Revolutionary Plays (1969)
The Sidnee Poet Heroical (pub 1980) (1970)
Junkies Are Full of Shhh (1972)
Columbia The Gem of The Ocean (1972)
S-l (1976)
The Motion of History (1977)
What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production (1979)
Money (Jazz Opera) (1979), Production, New York City, January 1982, Workshop, LaMama Theater
Boy & Tarzan Appear in a Clearing (1980), Production, October 1981, New York City, Henry Street Theater
Dim’Crackr Party Convention (1980), Production, July 1980, Columbia University
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEROI JONES
AMIRI BARAKA
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baraka, Imamu Amiri, 1934–
The autobiography of LeRoi Jones.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-55652-231-2
1. Baraka, Imamu Amiri, 1934- –Biography. 2. Authors, American – 20th century – Biography. 3. Revolutionists –United States –Biography. 4. Afro-Americans –
Politics and suffrage. I. Title
PS3552.A583Z463 1997
818’.5409 [B]
83-20576
CIP
The author is grateful to the following for permission to reprint material:
From THE TRACKS OF MY TEARS, words and music by William “Smokey” Robinson,
Warren Moore, and Marv Tarplin, © 1965, Jobete Music Company, Inc.
Cover photo courtesy of Frederick Ohringer
© Imamu Amiri Baraka 1984, 1986, 1997
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, without permission.
Published by Lawrence Hill Books
An imprint of Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
814 N. Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 1-55652-231-2
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my wife, Amina
who is responsible
for any
truth
in this,
or in the chapters
to come!
Contents
Introduction
Stages: Memoirs
One
Young
Two
Black Brown Yellow White
Three
Music
Four
Howard (Black Brown Yellow White Continued)
Five
Error Farce
Six
The Village
Seven
The Black Arts: Politics, Search for a New Life
Eight
Harlem
Nine
Home
Ten
A Continuing Journey
Eleven
To Sum Up
A Note to the Reader from Lawrence Hill Books
When Amiri Baraka’s The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones was first published, by Freundlich Books in January, 1984, the publisher made substantial cuts to the text of the original manuscript. This new Lawrence Hill Books edition has reinstated all the excised material under the careful direction of the author. What you will read here is in effect the first complete edition of The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones.
Introduction
The last writing of this stopped somewhere in 1974, when we had become Communists finally, Amina and I. From there, there has been a whole whirl and world of changes and contradictions, unions and struggles until we gets into 1996.
The politics is the underlying catalyst, though. And it always is in all of our lives, were we conscious of it. The fact that I became a Communist is not startling to me, as much of a stompdown cultural nationalist as I at one time was. I was sincere, but I usually always am. The abject racism and economic superexploitation, denial of rights and national oppression, and the imperialist overbeing was pressed upon me even in the eastern city of LaLa Land, “The Village.” It grew, this sense of it, as I grew, intellectually, experientially, ideologically … whatever. I had seen a pattern, social, aesthetic, and ideological, that had worked on me, among those who spose’ to be the whatever of the whatitis. And that was cold funky, spaced out above the real, which got to be corny or wrong, since laying in the cloud of ain’t-I-hip here in the capital of anything goes, how could the who-ain’t-here be anything but not?
Then the rush that Malcolm’s murder pulled the trigger on. What Malcolm was saying, what he was for me, was a trigger, a maximum weapon of legitimate resistance to the whole bullshit of the place from its wholeass America to its corny EVillage streets. It was the same, after all, however you code it in your mind. Supremacy and Oppression and Collaboration and Double Consciousness.
The vows I made from the streets of Chicago, as a young smart-ass just got put out of Howard University that I “would learn something new every day,” till ejecting out of the error farce, to the eventual “shot out of guns” into Harlem and the Dangs and crazies there, but it was still the deep commitment I had made, not just with my intellectual self, but with everything that kept me alive and sane. That we would raise this fight to the highest intensity, we would not be slaves like this. No!
So then Newark, and the way I came, and what I wanted to do, and what I did, and my meeting Sylvia Robinson, who became my wife, Amina Baraka, and all we did together in tune or in opposition, was who I would become, certainly, but there is always the shadow that being and doing makes. The “Other,” like my mad phenomenologist friend, Peter Schwartzburg, used to say. What it all had dragging behind it, what it, my being, being and doing caused, is the question.
The question is important because everybody knows the answer … that there is a specific question, the same folk are less clear. The question that tracked me was about my other former life, everybody had a hold on it, every body, but fewer minds.
I mean all the mad speculation a
nd rumors and total lies. Plus, remember, for all the mix-and-serve hype of the now, then, was another story. Oh, yes, it was. What amazes me is that the stories pile up behind you like cities you have escaped clutching your sanity like a naive virgin.
Certainly, as my wife is fond of saying, my writing tells much of the story. Who I was, who I wanted to become, and what became of all that. Yet it is not wholly there, and for the many who knew LeRoi Jones and his works, and even might have dug them or not, there are many fewer, as of yet, who know this Baraka chap. The bosses aim to keep it that way. Like the good doctor, DuBois, when he finally put on his Red Star and proclaimed it to the world, he understood, as he expressed it: “Now the little children will no longer know my name.” But, dig, Doc, we gonna make sure that don’t last.
Anyway, as the book out and inlines, escaping from the place or places I had journeyed to and travailed in was much more difficult than I thought. Like Dr. DuBois I proclaimed it, all right, but the megatons of flying bullshit that flew back at me in return was more than I expected.
Looking back, the organizations that I had helped create were absolutely necessary. What they attempted to accomplish still must be done. And that is the real odor of Beelzebub that still won’t let me rest. Through CAP, which was basically an alliance of local organizations centered nationally around the principles of Maulana Karenga’s Kawaida (Swahili for tradition) doctrine. At first, armed with this nationalist fuel, we did some positive things.
It is still my contention that we were revolutionaries, albeit saddled with the weight of nationalism, which does not even serve the people. In fact, in the U.S., since White nationalism is the dominant social ideology, reactionary Black nationalism merely reinforces the segregation and discrimination of the oppressors.
I mean we were anti-imperialists, even as nationalists, which is what should be meant by the often-abused term “revolutionary nationalist.” We were fighting our national oppression as we understood it. That was manifest as “White people” to us for obvious reasons. That is the nature of the Big Bourgeois is the U.S. And indeed, the very development of imperialism divides the world into a tiny group of industrialized, mostly European nations, which feed on the rest of the nations of the world in the name of “supremacy” or progress or straight-out as money!
I was always anti-imperialist in essence; the works, the previous organizations show that. And I was not always a Black cultural nationalist. The book makes that obvious. But the fact that I had been so much a part of the liberal “integrated” Village scene, including marriage to a White woman, and a kind of growing recognition as a writer, &c., I guess created a whirlpool of tempest and shock among the people I had known in those islands of abstract intoxication, when I finally “changed up” and decided to “book.”
One thing must be understood, that all the people who benefited, or appreciated or whatever, from that Village scene were generally drugged at me for splitting—Blacks and Whites. Many have still not forgiven me! And certainly now, with the deadly plummet of the imperialist God’s rock back down the mountain on Black Sisyphus’s head, to try to obliterate the gains that the sixties’ revolutionary democratic struggle produced, some of these same folks are guffawing in stereo that, “Hey, shit, Roy, I told you that shit wasn’t happening. That you should have stayed down here with all us liberals and cryptofascists and anarchists and opportunists and got over like a big dog!”
The truth of this is that, yes, the Bigs do not want you to cry out, make known how to kill them. They understand that Black nationalism is a form of bourgeois ideology, and that they will be able to negotiate with these darker bourgeois to keep the rest of us in our place (Dig Newark! &c.).
But once you start talking about (WHAT?) socialism and multinational unity, you is definitely (a la DuBois) not to be seen or heard “enty” (as Al Hibber would say) more! This has happened to me with a vengeance. It is with a strict kind of exclusion, except to damn, that these wheels and heels deal with anything I (or even my post-Village Black family) do.
But this is one of the insistent points I draw in what I say and write. Why should you expect the cirtter you are trying desperately to waste to help you do that? So that the publishing and producing and distribution of revolutionary works must be the concern of these activists themselves. To whine about how Rocky ain’t helping you kill him is, at the least, a sign of extreme naiveté cuddling with neon streaks of opportunism.
The transition to socialism was inevitable in my case because, in essence and emotional concern, I had been hovering around that open stance for a long time. But the rise of Black nationalism in the sixties with Malcolm X set me to contemplating myself with another kind of misunderstanding, though there was, at base, a road laid out that I could hit when I had reached a certain level of understanding and move to an emotional and ideological clarity I had not been able to achieve before. What remains important right this minute is what this transition has wrought, not only philosophically and psychologically, but what changes it has brought to my real life.
When I first assumed chairmanship of CAP in 1972, I began by putting out the slogans of Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Ujamaa. This moved, with my readings of Nyerere and Toure, to African scientific socialism. I had begun to conceive in my head by that time that I was moving even further to the Left. Not only my obsessive reading and peeping of this and that, but the experience of working in Black bourgeois politics as part of the whole democratic struggle, gave me an up close and very negative experience with them and their petty bourgeois managers.
Part of the burning union of my marriage to Silvia had been a yearning to be completely whole. To be able to struggle with my whole heart and soul, with my whole being, for what was deepest in me, which I took, then, as Blackness. The nationalist groupings I had been part of could never even concrete a consistent ideological illumination of what that meant. Though it should mean, at its most revolutionary, the possession of national consciousness that not only arises from the blunt patriotism of nationality but the fierce determination not to submit to evil in this racist and oppressive dungeon of Dis.
But as I hoped I laid out, coming from where I was with that tendency to extremes that Lenin characterizes as petty bourgeois and that Fanon confirms (where before I had been, in my own estimation, absorbed within an inch of my senses with the EuroAmerican aesthetic and intellectual traditions, by school, by the negrossity of my socialization, super-White), now I turned furiously around and vowed to be BLACK, I guess like DuBois’s “Smoke King.” We would prove our right to exist and be respected by hating these oppressors more openly and more violently than anyone else.
Yet the struggle in Newark had shown me, along with tireless work within the Black liberation movement and all political and intellectual work that went with that, that nationalism, no matter how justified, was not justifiable. The middle passage cannot justify nationalism just as the ovens of Auschwitz cannot justify the imperialist nature of Israel.
When I was about to come straight out and declare Marxism, I talked to Amina and told her how this move would have many of the Uberschwartzes saying, “See, I told you that dude would jump back White again.” But I had passed all that mindless Blackbaiting and was ready to make the step.
This struggle within the Communist movement has been continuous and rugged. Now I was attacked often not only for the Black nationalist I had been but the Communist I would become. This was not all. The organization split, but even worse my marriage was on the verge of it as well.
Even today, Amina and I have a level of constant polemic that rises and sets like time and the beat. And it is rooted most clearly in ideological and class struggle. For we are both Communists.
Throughout CAP’s history, the cultural nationalist ideology and politics of that movement had a social expression, too. Chauvinism for most men — if expressed to them as part of their psychological patois of thought and practice — can be denied hotly or jokingly, or received legitimately or fa
lsely, whatever. But for the cultural nationalism of our organization, this male chauvinism was glorified as a form of African culture.
We had followed the Karenga doctrine, which said that women were not equal but complementary to men (which could be called sophistry), and that their role in the struggle was to “Inspire the Men, Educate the Children, and Participate in Social Development,” which is almost “Kinder, Kirche, and Kuche.” Same base as cultural nationalism in H’s Deutschland.
So as we entered into the antirevisionist Communist movement, moving away from the Black cultural nationalism movement, the criticism we received from the misguided that we had abandoned Black people for a White ideology was now matched by the Left, which not only criticized us for our cultural nationalism but staunchly tried to beat us up about our not having the correct Marxist line.
The fact that most of the these Leftists were themselves out of the box and not near correct made it a swirling, finally destructive polemic that saw that movement, aided by the Fascist Bureau of Intimidation, all but disappear! Within these organizations (and this must be finally summed up and documented) during the middle and late seventies, the entire Left press was given over more to polemics against each other than against imperialism. Plus many of us still thought that revolution would be here in a few days, based on the fierceness of our rhetoric and posturing. Though, to be sure, there were a great many staunch, serious, capable, actual revolutionaries among our crowd. But the internal contradictions were such that with the external forces (e.g., Crazed Imperialist Assassins, Operation KAOS), the young forces of that movement were thrown apart, screaming defiance at each other, off into the wherever.
Many reasons can be cited in the specific example of our own organization; my leadership, of course. All are agreed to that, even me. Also the fact that we were still mostly nationalists. Remember, it was the very struggle we were involved in that helped free up the productive forces. Black capitalism in the nineties is much more developed than in the sixties and seventies; on the real side, not a figment of Nixon’s imagination. The development of capitalism is contingent upon the broadening of democracy! And these developments are not only obvious; there is a positive aspect to them as well as the deadly negative. For one thing, until a certain level of productive forces (education of the workers and level of the tools they use, &c.) is reached, through the extension of democracy (what that is under capitalism), certain struggles will not be of a mass nature. The internal class struggle, for instance, inside the national Black community is muted by the struggle against the oppressor nation, White America.