by Amiri Baraka
For Amina, the shattering impact of our move to socialism brought a self-awareness of this intense and formal male chauvinism disguised as African traditionalism that disfigured our movement. The more we saw the atavism and cultural nationalism as backward, so the male chauvinism, in all of its ugly disguises and pretenses, the more — she will tell you this — she felt used and made silly by the whole of our ideological trend.
I tried to transform the organization. We read Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State; we studied the woman question together, once a week. Each morning I had the men reading and discussing the Marxist texts. On the oppression of women, the overthrow of motherright as the denouement of the first class struggle, male against female. I thought this was critical, if we were to advance in our understanding and reform both organizationally and ideologically.
But the Marxist teaching outraged many of us, some openly. The national organization flew apart, and each local did, too. The “dizzy imbecility” of dialectical and historical materialism as a “White ideology” (I’d said it myself, even in print, a bunch of times) was all around us, inside and outside. Plus we did not understand completely what we were reading. We could not yet translate the theories into real-life understanding. We were dogmatic or liberal. Book worshippers or insufficiently critical of ourselves. We were also made deeply defensive by the rounds of criticism, some accurate, some F.O.S., that kept being poured at us.
I was called an opportunist, a traitor, a disguised nationalist, a police agent, a White-minded Negro, &c. The Left, in their frenzy of sectarian dogmatism and liberal empiricism, offered us no help. But the altered environs of the intraorganizational struggle among the Lefts was new to us. Not only the incessant call of socialist revolution and the much-talked-about struggle against opportunism and war against nationalism and cultural nationalism that rang around us, but even the personal and organizational style of the Lefts was new. A few of the cultural nationalist women including my wife embraced this because as the original practice changed and women were drawn more directly into day-to-day organizing, the long African clothes became a less central part, or at least a less obsessive part, of our thinking. Particularly when we began to come into contact with the young African students, many of them Marxists who denounced traditional feudal women-oppressing Africa with all their might. The Ethiopian students were especially strident in this regard, urging CAP women to fight against the male chauvinism and African atavism they were fighting at home.
There were so many strains of Marxist-Leninist, revisionist, Trot, and social democratic trends bent in the wind around us that it would take some time for us to accurately distinguish, so we were pushed from there to there in unpredictable currents. The advocates we sent to various meetings would likewise come back perhaps influenced by this line or that line and proceed to pump them into our superstructure without a peep.
The organization did change, on the topside. I made the structural changes Marxism and its democratic centralism called for. We were heavy on the centralist side, as cultural nationalists. So that when the struggles arose within the organization they would reflect the various lines that whipped around us with surprising turbulence. It was a turbulent time for the whole movement, for the entire anti-imperialist movement. There was a sharp lurch to the Left, but also there was a pitiless retrenchment and overturning of solid anti-imperialist values as well. (An extreme or infantile Left position always comes back around to embrace the Right, in essence.) We were headed for the time when the sabotage and undermining and murders and buyouts and internal disruption caused by our enemies would take a qualitative leap and the period when Revolution Is The Main Trend would come, at least temporarily, to a halt.
I could no longer, as the leader, be seen as invincible and all-correct. The conference in D.C., “Which Way the Black Liberation Movement?” sponsored by the Left-leaning ALSC leadership, saw our last threads of cultural nationalist cant thrashed publicly by an outright socialist line. But under scientific scrutiny it was still an incorrect old CP line that in a few months I had penetrated and easily dispatched. As for our other leading attackers, likewise, in a relatively short period of time, I had brought enough genuine analysis into our studies to point out their flaws and ideological deviations. At least it seemed and still does seem that way to me.
But the top-down nature of our organization and the genuine disorder the introduction of the socialist line had caused by challenging and attacking deeply held nationalist lines meant that for many of our advocates real understanding of what we were doing and where we were going came too late, or not at all.
Amina took the new socialist learning to be a truly liberating factor. So that with the catalyst of now having the ultimate tool against male chauvinism, she was drawn to those political lines that seemed most at variance with the old CAP teachings. When I was under all kinds of attacks from organizations and sources from Left to Right, she took my furious response to be resistance to change, and often tried to point out the correctness of the critics, even though they might, at the same time, be saying I was some kind of collaborator with the police.
I took this as a kind of betrayal, chafing at the loss of the official male domination, which had never really taken root in our house in the first place. Still, I could not accept the public criticism of our line by someone I felt should always be in my corner. For instance, I upheld the new leadership in China after Mao’s death and their attacks on the ultra-Left “Gang of Four.” Amina never did, and this caused deep conflict.
The call for the Proletarian Party by forces like RWL and WVO and the so-called “Revolutionary Wing” brought us into conflicts characterized by screaming rage, since she agreed with their premises, which I thought, and still think, were infantile Leftist, and since they were also relentlessly attacking me, personally and by name.
We were all ideologically confused, but I was struggling day and night for clarity, trying to keep the organization together the best I could. This is a book in itself. Finally, Amina resigned from CAP. Though she was now a member of our reorganized central committee, along with a few other women, she declared that she could no longer uphold the “bogus” cultural nationalist line and chauvinism of CAP.
She said that not only could she not uphold our “backward male chauvinist political lines,” but that as the last days of CAP rolled toward us, she was more and more openly attacked by both the women and the men in the organization. The women, because their men had left the organization and they blamed it on Amina. Often, rather than blame the men who were runaways (which many of them soon became as well), they began to point at Amina, not as the main spearhead of the anti-male chauvinist, anti-Kawaida line, but as a splitter of marriages.
But also, now that the socialist mode of organization had been brought to CAP, some of her erstwhile closest comrades felt that the context was what they needed to struggle openly (more or less) with her for leadership. One line that crept up from the swamp was that just because a woman was married to the chairman of a local CAP branch she should not automatically be made chairwoman of that local women’s division. Purportedly, this line had arisen about local CAPs, but Amina perceived that this was really aimed at her, though she was intellectually and ideologically qualified for leadership if she had never met me. But the introduction of the socialist line had broken down all the old leadership structure of CAP, and before it was over there were even physical blows struck.
Her resignation was very public, and she even got up in public forums to let people know that she didn’t agree with me, that she was seeking unity with the true Bolshevik wing of the movement. The fact that later it would be proven, at least to me, that these people were incorrect and went on to prove themselves not even long-lived as Marxists, gave me some satisfaction, but it did not then. All I knew is that I had been betrayed. How could I be less capable theoretically than these people? How could she just throw our marriage out the window (my own chauvinistic, oppo
rtunistic b.s.) in exchange for “political correctness” that wasn’t even correct? How could she dismiss and belittle my work and study for some two-bit soi-disant “Bolsheviks” who turned out not even to be that?
There was in this a deeper contradiction than either of us understood. For me, I felt I was being belittled in the sense that I had spent my adult life in intellectual pursuits, and for the last decade in clearly political struggle, albeit in a mainly literary and arts context. And now it was being dismissed by someone who claimed to love me.
Whatever someone might think, I knew I was no fool. I knew I could finally grasp the depth of Marxist theory and I could not believe that Amina would feel that there were other forces out there who would have a superior understanding of “the science” or anything else.
How could this be true? Didn’t she know that however incorrect I was in whatever juncture of this travail that ultimately I would find the clarity and correct political direction? How could our relationship be dismantled by some political disagreement? No matter how much we might differ, I thought that if we worked together, as husband and wife and as committed revolutionaries, we would come up with the correct political focus, together. But also, I could not understand how our being together could not be the result of a single underlying political unity of focus and commitment; I guess, like the bourgeoisie who think democracy is a form of competition.
But Amina’s disconnection with the organization I took as a dismissal of me as relevant to the revolutionary struggle itself. How could you be married to somebody whose ideas you did not even respect? As well, cries were thrown at us that CAP had built a cult of personality around us and that this cult had negated whatever political errors I made for the sake of some metaphysical elevation of “Imamu.” And even though many of the features that seemed to do this — buttons with my picture, organizational celebrations of my birthday—had been advanced by Amina, she now felt that Marxist organization demanded the vocalizing of this anti-cult of personality line, which I felt was just an attempt to disrupt the organization and alienate the advocates from leadership.
The male chauvinist public image of CAP was another alienating factor. Many of the CAP women felt that unless they now were outspoken in their rejection of such atavistic male domination, in the new context of our public embrace of Marxism, they would be made ridiculous and pitiful, ignorant figures. Amina felt this. Always sensitive to what she measured as the opinions of the advanced, she felt doubly compromised by our cultural nationalist past.
In addition, the women’s division was exactly that. Amina had taken the cultural nationalist division of men and women and created a women’s group that in many ways always resisted the male chauvinist and opportunist aspects of the CAP leadership, including Karenga.
There was always a spray of negatives about me, surrounding us. As I said, I had never been forgiven by the Village denizens and their replicas internationally. Many of them, as they drifted into more contact with us after the partial inaccessibility the cultural nationalist organization had given us, now had more access to all of us. So that the many contradictions and oppositions that these people and I had had were now transformed into background stories that “Newark people” didn’t know. Their continuing disagreements were given as simple statements of fact. And the resentment at my sudden swoop into hyper-Blackness and disappearance into Harlem and Newark would be represented as measures of my character by “old friends.”
My characterization as “wrong” and “always alienated from the people” and a “Johnny-come-lately” in the Black thing were represented as tales of insiders trying to inform the uninformed about my pre-Black days, but they were also attempts to legitimize their opposition or refusal to participate in the struggle in the mode I had chosen.
The predictable co-optation of the political movement I had helped give leadership to, by the petty bourgeois Negro politicians, or the resurgence of the Beat movement, which now used me to give it some connection to the Black Arts Movement, could be part of the explanation of why I had acted the way I had, and why I had thought the things I did, and why eventually I would be reabsorbed by the totally backward and betray all those who trusted me.
My first wife was one spearhead of continuous rancor and bullshit, both privately and publicly. Her strategy for harassment and undermining was that she would ingratiate herself with my parents (and many of the people I had disconnected from) and thus create a hookup to undermine and disrupt my public life, my marriage, and alienate my parents.
I knew this from the beginning and knew, as well, that the deviousness of the petty oppressor is as damaging, in a specific context, as the Bigs’. For one thing, she created an entire revisionist version of our life together for herself so she could fill our children’s heads and everyone else’s within wordshot with lies and self-legitimizing martyr stories. She created a lying picture of herself as a dedicated political activist who could not understand why I had left in the first place since she was always high up in the movement. She said, as well, that she was a writer, but she had sacrificed her writing, even hidden it from me, because of the crushing weight of my male chauvinism and her selfless desire to forward my career.
In this endeavor of lie mongering, she has been helped by other empty-headed cryptoracists, whose statements printed or reported did have the positive aspect of eliminating the “crypto” from their description, and by the big superstructure of bourgeois untruth itself, particularly the literary sector. The woman herself published a book twenty-five years later explaining how she got to be my wife! Still using my last name as hers, since she never really liked her last name in the first place.
So for all the years since that organization’s emphatic marking of my own life’s changes, the shadow, the “Other,” the dead past, has not been dead at all, but an animated agent of straight-out lies and harassment, from the shabby little autobiography full of plain untruths and opportunistic misdirection running into the willful distortions of White America that I really ceased to exist once I left the White folks! Like all opportunists, she now claims a “feminism” nowhere visible during our connection. But the open, racist dismissal of what I went on to do, with a sickening glorification of her cottage-industry martyrdom and self-effacing support of me, at least let more discerning people check her out in a way that explained the very shallow yet pompous nature of that Village life from another angle, as well as highlighting the sick and hardly subliminal national chauvinism of those masquerading as radicals and liberals. The underlying motif of all the exes in my life, even those of blood, and the various sycophants, revenge-filled guilty bystanders, racists, charming ignoramuses and weak liberals who waved, and will always wave, bye-bye at any real human upsurge, is that they have given a good portion of their energy and consciousness to being the subjective yet part of the objective (No for every Yes), the fake knowers like witches and devils, spreading delusion that passes as real life. Living human propaganda that serves as identity as part of the system’s loyal opposition.
White America has been only too glad to help in this endeavor, because once I became a Marxist, they were not interested in publishing my opinion “enty way.” The struggles and transformations during this Marxist phase of my life were not documented at all. I had more and more problems getting published, while everyone associated with the “Other” was ubiquitous—both the Blacks who resisted Baraka’s “Black Fascism” and refused to leave the Village, and the onetime radicals who more and more could be projected as they grew openly less radical. An entire revisionist account of those times and their meaning grew up around us, which in bitter irony was actually believed by many of the people it was intended to hurt. And so it has hurt them even worse.
The fact that now I could not get published as easily, that the infrastructure of militant resistance I had built had dissipated and not only the old Village Black and White intellectuals could testify to my incorrectness, in bold print, but the political types around us, wheth
er nationalists or on the Left, also “Amen!”-ed the same opinion about my “hopeless, self-deluded irrelevance,” left me, for a time, disoriented to a degree.
As CAP disintegrated I accepted a job at Yale as visiting professor. And using the subjective and chauvinist feeling that I had been betrayed and isolated, I took up with a wholly reactionary woman in the program I was teaching and had an affair, justifying it with my outrage at being “politically rejected” since I would say to myself that Amina must not care about our marriage any more if she is willing to publicly denounce me as some kind of political swindler and charlatan. But, alas, wasn’t that proof?
When the first printing of this book appeared she was furious that I seemed to pay more attention to the Village and first wife than our lives or the lives of the people with whom I had worked and lived since. She began to say after a while that I had wasted her life by pretending to be a revolutionary and that the cultural nationalist CAP had finally not done much but empower the petty bourgeoisie. Plus, people, “old friends of mine,” had told her how sick I was in the first place. If she had only listened, she would lament.
Amina also feels this autobiography hides my abuse and betrayal of her and seems to paint the White woman, first wife, as a martyr while implying, when I speak of her at all, that Amina’s life with me has been glorious fun and games — that I have hidden the many affairs I have been accused of and the cruel male chauvinism and covering of her life and work, which have locked her in a jail of nonrecognition by the world.