The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  The positive aspect of all that was clear, it represented struggle, the desire for liberation. The negative was the bashing together like children. And so those structures could not last, the internal contradictions were so sharp. Like the Black Arts. Like CFUN and CAP. Like RCL. Internal contradictions, lack of science, attacks by the state.

  But just like the ’20s we set some further footprints on a path yet to be fully trod. Yet to be fully understood. Except it is the getting out of the prison of self-deprecation. The mind bent by oppression, such beautiful people beat into submission by ugliness. Yet there is no submission, except from the already dead. The living resist and resist. We’ve held that line in song and story. It’ll make you weep.

  Fanon laid it out how the pathological intellectuals will rush headlong, unknowing, into love of their oppressors, trying not to kill them but to be them. And discovering the trap, how they have been used, they rush again headlong, or heartlong now, into Africa of their mind. The crippled fought each other and tried to stop any health or victory even in the name of victory and resistance. There is deep sickness among oppressed people. Deep hatred of each other among the pathological. Who even while they mouth liberation are trying to kill each other so they can scramble up the ladder of the oppressor’s world. Or they think they can bash the world and mash it into pieces forever and with the resulting explosion reappear as cowboys of a new world made holy by their warped desires.

  So many way stations to reality. And among the middle class, black as well as white, their narrow view too often they take as the necessity of the world. All that was positive from the Black Arts will be pieced up and a lot of the stupidity, too, will go on other places, replayed because the actors have no institutions of their own from which to learn. But how to duplicate that flash of heat that we mistook for absolute reality. How to explain that breaking out of the jail of white possession, even while reinventing the same shit in blackface, had to be done. We can look back at it now and laugh. At the mistakes, the viciousness, the errors, of our struggle. But only fools, the sick, the misinformed, the white supremacy freaks, would not understand the correctness of our vault toward the real.

  And the errors were not that we left that world and its sickness but that we were ever there in the first place!

  When the Arts had folded for me, I could look back there too, but it was not a place one never needed to be. There are folks still there worshiping the disappeared. Some hoping what is dead will come one day—not knowing it’d come and split. We met very sinister presences and sickness, but we began to understand our own world better. Not from across the chasm reading the newspapers listening to music memorizing our childhood or fantasizing, but touching and feeling. The men the women, the sights and sounds. There was no time for drawn-out reflection, bullets smashing into the walls. A pistol in my briefcase. Confrontations every day. Yet trying to build something. And that something being held up for the bright colors to be seen in the distance and signaled further on.

  That failed because we did not know enough. We were young people just out of adolescence flexing our muscles, hero-worshiping. Trying to actually fly. We loved each other and fought for each other. We learned to love black people from close up again, and we laughed a lot as well as cried and cursed. We needed each other then, in the worst way, at that time of transition. Our flag was a gold mask on a black field, divided between tragedy and comedy, the drama of our time. Or was that symbol yellow on that flag? But those times were golden not yellow. There were the terrorists of our own movement, not just the state, but the sick. But something was raised. And at the same time, the seeds of even worse mistakes were made. There’s no doubt in my mind that the Black Arts Theater will be remembered even in its brief throw against the dead. Its tiny light in shadows. The victory was in the struggle the unity the raising of ourselves, our history and tradition. That is simple national consciousness, where the victims focus on the requirements of their liberation. Where a people come to see themselves in contrast to their oppressors, and their lives and laws. Where they climb back into the stream of history.

  But we made the same errors Fanon and Cabral laid out, if we had but read them, understood them. Because the cultural nationalism, atavism, male chauvinism, bourgeois lies painted black, feudal dead things, blown-up nigger balloons to toy around with. I would say the Nation of Islam and the Yoruba Temple were the heaviest carriers of this, the petty bourgeois confusing fantasy again with reality. The old sickness of religion—all the traps we did not understand. Crying blackness and for all the strength and goodness of that, not understanding the normal contradictions and the specific foolishness of white-hating black nationalism. The solution is not to become the enemy in blackface, that’s what one of the black intellectuals’ problems was in the first place. And even hating whites, being the white-baiting black nationalist is, might seem, justifiable but it is still a supremacy game. The solution is revolution. We thought that then, but didn’t understand what it meant, really. We thought it meant killing white folks. But it is a system that’s got to be killed and it’s even twisted some blacks. It’s hurt all of us.

  Sometimes, though, you feel you move through tragedy and shame. That you step forward in the midst of ruins and explosions. Your eyes shining. Your survival ensured somehow by the fact of the I running on that computer track between your ears, behind your eyes. You could see the Black Arts in flames months before. Even while we did our heroic work of bringing the art, the newest strongest boldest hippest most avant of the swift dark shit to the streets, you could look up at that building some nights and swear it was in flames. That it shuddered and shook wreathed in hideous screams of fire. When you looked into the eyes of some very sick nigger, who might wind up in an ice cream suit selling dope or staggering down Seventh Avenue mumbling his divinity, my brothers, or with little women never had to face a real real world playing half house in the half dark, naked and burning, you knew it was that brief youthful footstep erased by fire and a cooling unremembering rain. But what was real survived the flame.

  And let the sons of the sons and the daughters of the daughters retell and evaluate it. Let us retell and evaluate it, also more quickly that we might set up more strong, more real, and go on to the actual winning of the world.

  When I was driven out of New York, at this point, I did feel the world was over. It was all ruins. From the wondrous hope, the promise of first coming to Harlem. And every day it had been like seeing again, being reshown the world. Just walking that first new spring uptown was revelation, from corner to corner taking in the panorama of that community was like being refueled with long-sought blackness. And that itself, the mythical blackness that we pumped up full of the hopes and desires of a people, but also the delusions and illusions of a rather narrow sector among that people. What blackness was, how it could be defined. With no science. It was easy enough for dudes with robes or red weird hats, who had some words, some rituals to say, you see, this is what it was. White people ain’t like this.

  When the final big explosion, the separation of myself from this cauldron of confusion and desire, came about, even though I knew the stupidity, frustration, ugliness I had encountered, and was still in awe of the actual tasks, the would-be solutions had come out of my mouth so easily (way way off in another world, another life) that Newark at first was like some Elba. I remembered the first echoes of what was coming, and the moving, that rush of blood into Blood, and the array of sensuous learning, black and gold, and then that gold turned yellow, crumbled right behind my eyes. So I felt in some kind of wounded exile.

  Yet as I came to retune, to take up new energy, the place of my birth stood me up in it anew. And no matter the bleak occasion I began to see yet new again, and take new spirit from that newness, new energy and courage. Because this was literally, and certainly now, Home. And if there was a blackness that was not mythical, it would be found there. And I did move toward something real and tangible. Real life, real love, practical work. />
  The whole sweep of the Newark return was, like anything else, educational. Busted, somehow, is how I felt. Thrown down from the clouds hard upon the ground, even though it was my own decision.

  As I tried to recover from that beating, huddled close to myself like a wet dog, shivering, out my weakness. Gradually there returned a fuller sense of self. I did know some things—I had some actual information. It was my real home. I had roots.

  From there, as I learned more and more about the place and myself there and what could be done, I started to grow again. To do the things I wanted to do again. And the myth that that political work detracted from the art is mostly just another class’s view of what it all is in the first place. Certainly I became concerned with a political truth in its practical operation. Its concrete realization, and that is work. It is difficult grey stone work. But to me it was exhilarating, opening, clearing work. Like the gunfighter wounded sits somewhere practicing pulling his heat to get faster and faster.

  Still I was moving through levels and levels of webs and stages and stages of steps made of different materials. I was having to find out the simplest things. To the more difficult. Learning, building. Making connections. And that whole trip was not bereft of fantasy either. That whole gunfighter fantasy. The real isolation—from an art-derived world. Although I kept working, Newark is no art colony, no panting aesthetic group. It is a grey steel and stone factory workers’ town, the grim highway’s end for those lovely southern men and women who came this way and mistook an “Ark” for a “York.”

  It was a reality less caked with the unnecessary gesture. The fantasies we stepped into had to do with our misunderstanding. As usual. The mixture of half Yorubaist, Malcolm’s death-fascination Islam, bourgeois politics, black nationalism, insecurity, subjectivism, and bohemianism, still, dogged my steps. There were many of us across the country creating various weird structures. Out of the same confusion and metaphysics.

  I was not as into an open metaphysics ever until going into nationalism. I could attach names and a blatant embrace of this stuff as “blackness.” The feudalism, reformism, male chauvinism, all crept in or rushed in under the rubric of nationalism. Blackness. Even the apotheosis of cultural nationalism I took on because it was the best-organized form of the abstraction “blackness.” Some kind of complex and funny Rube Goldberg machine of the mind.

  Yet despite the downright absurdity of that trip it was still part of a long march to better understanding. To some more objective clarity. The Spirit House, the Committee for Unified Newark, the Congress of Afrikan Peoples, all have many elements to them that we still need. A theater—you know it; a black united front based on unity and struggle to fight for democracy and self-determination—of course, only it must be led by a real majority and not salesmen in cheap suits which they will switch backstage for the same thing in African. Not mediocre civil servants with cuffs. Not little-boy intellectuals serving a penance for almost whiting out. Not “Oriental” karate freaks, et cetera. Lying politicians. The numb, the dumb, the fantasized, the hiders from Afro-America. And something to consciously focus the blacks of this earth on their common attacker, of course. But not congealed in the mind-set of the above or atavists or baldhead killers or charisma students or pseudo-semi-soi-disant-aspirant-almost intellectuals or Negroes who believe Africa is a branch of Woolworth’s (or the Chase Manhattan Bank).

  Because then, for all your steps, our steps, we will be again where we are; if you will peer up from the book for a second and summarize the damage, the bodies, the broken hopes and lives, the still useless fantasists holding religious ceremonies in which black people’s freedom is the drug of the set, for the ooooooo’s and aaaaaaa’s and jumping and twisting, with the same collection and the same ruthless preacher and his pitiful tastes.

  I was a novice in search of blackness still and settled for a cultural/religious fiction that covered the reality of what we did, the real achievements, the actual accomplishments. It is safe to say that if we had known more, if we had known more that drift and drug. But that is a truth, if we had known more this city wouldn’t be so hurting. Or we might be dead or in jail. Perhaps; that is something to consider as well. How much you are permitted to accomplish.

  But I mean if all the jive and model-spaceship building I was into…all the…(denying the actuality of a life is what this is, I suppose) I’m just speculating that perhaps the fat Negro bureaucrat that squats upon our heads in this town, belching, would not be there. Because, yes, it’s true. I was the drum major for that particular drum head. But, look, life is not over. The world is still here. There are still things that can be done. And I swear I do understand the world better. We will find out just how well. In words and deeds yet to be written and realitied out.

  But even in that thralldom, that dumb thrall, we built some actual things, we laid out a process of learning. For the close readers. We did step through madness and bullshit. But we were not just full-of-shit tourists. We did take the city away from the lowest level, and if the next level is sickening, the task is of a higher order, and its solution is the current day’s work. Are we up to it, anyone, anywhere? Of course, is the roared refrain.

  That is, for all the fantasy flags and subjective flying. Stopped lives and wasted motion. I think many of us, boys and girls who grew to men and women, did come away with something of value. And when a better evaluation is given they will find something of value too.

  Even now, for all those who think that “Baraka the Marxist” is just the title of a new play, the latest of the lad’s interesting gambols, they must admit to movement. For myself I think that struggle and defeat finally are useful if our heads are harder, our grasp of reality firmer. I think they are.

  And yet again, the clear-headed will see the striking gain I’ve made since I did find a woman, in the real world, whose life was connected up with mine and mine with hers before we knew anything about each other. I was going to the Bethany Baptist Church right around the corner from where Sylvia grew up. I crossed that Howard Street, back and forth Saturdays going downtown from Belmont. Or as a grocery-carrying teenager, snaking back and forth in snow and sunshine. A few years, a few blocks, away. It was just that I had to grow in a certain way, fill out in a certain way, to be where I was supposed to be at the appointed time. Because I never did know anything about love, because I was never really ready to come out of my head long enough to relate to someone else. To be in the world with another person, listening to them, touching them, holding them, making a life together with them. For all the missteps and beatings, the lies and betrayals, that was, to me, and for us, I think, a reward. We, Sylvia, now Amina, and I, can curse many things. Drains, walls, frustrations, hatreds, the normal and abnormal disappointment of developing love. Plus, there is no way that anyone can overestimate my own capacity to disappoint, to hurt, to drive away. Yet we two have been on a journey together now some sixteen years. And that in itself is the subject of another, much better book. But suffice it to say, she has been in that rush of life, she has felt that pain, she has often lamented being tied to someone whose life at times seems an abstraction. And yes, for those only recently come to consciousness about women’s oppression, and who have even got some notoriety for putting down black women who were involved in struggle during the ’60s because they supposedly did not know about male chauvinism, such nonsense is cruel and stupid beyond belief. And one day that story will be told from some of those women’s mouths how they had to stand up under the incredible and bizarre neo-feudalist yoke of cultural nationalism. How they fought it for every inch. How they improvised and sidestepped and even threw real pots and pans to try to get free of their master the slave.

  Because, fundamentally, there is no one I have ever been as close to as my wife. Not just because of that title, or that social expectation, but because we went to the university of false blackness together, even while, and at the same time, doing some real things, some important things, and most of all, even while learning s
ome critical things about ourselves and the world.

  Each one of those children is like some living loving signpost of our own journey, its defeats and its victories. While we struggled in that university of the “half world” in the world, and finally one day graduated. And also, because at each twist and turn of the world, being thrown forward and sometimes backward in ourselves and on the real sidewalks, both of us knew even more about the other, and had to understand, fight, accept what that was, and for all of it grew closer. To me, sometimes I wonder how you can really be in love with someone without such knowledge. Because at each increment, at each turn and twist, there was a drawing closer, a redefined heart, a reunderstood touch or gesture. So that we could say I knew you and loved you when you was stone crazy. I like you much better now. That is the essence of it, that as you grow you also grow more in love. Because it is a ripening—sometimes you could pity the folks who miss it and many do—that all the various stages and faces we go through, there is a time, a period, when you can become your whole self, and have another whole self with you, who would be your choice of someone to be with even before, if you were conscious. And by the time that happens, your own consciousness, you can look up and there is, indeed, someone there, who’s been there and growing with you, who knows all your bullshit ways and still has made those many moves, who says, “OK, what now?” Those are both your voices at the same time!