On the sound of water: Amiri Baraka's "Black Art".

On the Sound of Water

Water flows and laps and pools, and in the flowing it makes a sound--the sound of water. The sound--. Music. The sound of music is without language or the sense of language, yet it is not without sense. In this way, there is also a form of language that is without linguistic sense--a form of language without sense that is not nonsense and thus carries sense--the sense of music, or the sound of water or of the songs of birds or the wind in tree tops. Or the sense of the sound of traffic, of the duration and staccato of human voices in the street, of the sound of hammering or of heavy machines.

These sounds have meaning and sense, yet they are without linguistic sense. So there is an undercurrent in language of meaning and sense that is not linguistic sense. It is the sound of water, falling. It is the sound of language.

Toward a Black Sound

In his Blues People, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) argues that a confluence of African music and European instruments made jazz possible. Basing his work on histories of the formation of both blues and jazz in New Orleans, Baraka tells a story of how European instruments and African sounds were brought together. In New Orleans and across the country brass marching bands became very popular in the Napoleonic period. The popularization of the marching band made European instruments available to African Americans for the first time, at first primarily brass instruments. In New Orleans, two strains of marching bands playing two different musics came into being in African American communities: a downtown Creole music, very closely tied to European musical models, and an uptown "darker" music, based more closely on African musical traditions.

Over time, these two strains of music became increasingly differentiated. As Baraka writes,

   The Creoles had received formal musical training, sometimes under
   the aegis of white French teachers. They had mastered the European
   instrumental techniques, and the music they played was European.
   The Uptown Negroes, who had usually learned their instruments by
   ear and never received formal and technical training, developed an
   instrumental technique and music of their own, a music that relied
   heavily on the non-European vocal tradition of blues. (Blues
   People 78)

Baraka here is particularly interested in the differing timbres or tones that the two strains of music produced. The Creole musicians, according to Baraka, were trained to produce a clear, European tone on their instruments. This purity of tone was "put aside by the [Uptown] Negro trumpeter for the more humanly expressive sound of the voice" (79), for what was called a "jass" or "dirty" timbre. Thus, the uptown musician's instrumentation and timbre was heavily influenced by the vocal tradition of the work songs and spirituals of slavery, and, ultimately, by its African roots.

After a legislative act in 1894 enforcing segregation, many of the downtown musicians lost their jobs and began to be barred from playing in white venues. In the resulting forced move uptown, downtown musicians began to sit in on uptown sessions. Baraka cites the violinist Paul Domingues explaining, "See, us Downtown people, we didn't think so much of this rough Uptown jazz until we couldn't make a living otherwise.... I don't know how they do it. But goddam, they'll do it. Can't tell you what's there on the paper, but just play the hell out of it" (qtd. in Blues People 79).

"It was an American sound" Baraka writes (79), produced by the "connections engendered by this forced merger" (139). Yet, he argues, it was also and perhaps primarily an adaptive sound. While for a short time after the Civil War Creoles in New Orleans had assimilationist options open to them--formal educations, music lessons, and downtown jobs and venues--for the most part, African American ex-slaves at the turn of the century could not simply assimilate. Instead, they had to adapt to a dominant white culture that would not let them forget their blackness. Out of that necessity, Baraka concludes, African Americans taught themselves "to fashion something out of that [dominant] culture for [themselves], girded by the strength of the still evident African culture. The Uptown musicians made jazz in this manner." The sound of this jazz was unique to America--an American adaptation of European instruments, rhythms, and melodic lines to the voices, rhythms, and sounds that the slaves had carried over with them from Africa. This sound was "something indigenous to a certain kind of cultural existence in this country" (79).

It was also a black sound, for "the Negro could not ever become white" (80). And the black sound was more diverse, more dissimilar, more variable than mainstream music, as a result. This "bitter insistence" by the dominant culture that African Americans could not be white prevented the assimilation of their music-making into that culture and forced them to create a new sound, a sound reflective of their conflicted movements, migrations, and livings on the ground of the Americas--thus, a unique sound that was both black and American.

This black sound, this most-American of sounds, Baraka contends, became the first form of black expression open to white artists. In fact, he argues that "Afro-American music did not become a completely American expression until the white man could play it!" (155). Precisely because jazz was an amalgamation, an adaptation of African and African American sounds to European instruments, both white and black musicians could find their own ways into it. "Jazz ... could make itself available as an emotional expression to the changing psyche of the 'modern' Negro, just as in less expressive ways, it made itself available to the modern American white man" (141). The very social disparities that forced black Americans to create jazz as a musical form also allowed for multiple ways into it as expression. Thus this black sound became the first truly American sound.

On the Behavior of Water

With poetry, however, the question before us is a question of language. As water makes the sound of water, so a saxophone makes the sound of the saxophone, a trumpet makes the sound of the trumpet. But what sound does a body make of language? How is a black sound made? Can English make a black sound?

I am tempted to say yes. Yes, oh yes, English can make a black sound, as water makes the sound of water. But I do not want to say yes too hastily, not yet. So I ask, instead, why, or where, or what makes the sound of water? It is not the water. It is the sound of water moving. It is the sound of what the water is doing and how it is moving and going, and where it is going, against or with what--against or under or over rock, or against sand, or against window panes in the night, or on roads or clay or against tin roofs, or among leaves, or sucking in small pools among cliffs, or crashing violently.

Black Art

To come at question of a black sound in poetry, I want to talk about Baraka's poem "Black Art." "Black Art" is a difficult poem, in places quite violent. It was written during Baraka's black nationalist period, and reflects his political and ideological beliefs at the time--that the dominant white culture and its white and other assimilationist peoples must be destroyed. It is a difficult poem, in its race and gender violence, in its violence against peoples. Yet it is a remarkably tender poem, as well. It calls, at its end, for virtue and love, and for a black poem. "Let the world be a Black Poem," it commands:

   We want a black poem. And a
   Black World.
   Let the world be a Black Poem
   And Let All Black People Speak This
   Poem
   Silently
   or LOUD

In its call for a black poem, it leads us toward a notion of a black sound in poetry. A revolutionary sound. For many reasons, then, "Black Art," despite and perhaps partially because of its controversial stances and violence, may aid us in our questions about sense and sound in language.

"Black Art" is important for what it says about the relationships among poems, people, and the world. "Poems are bullshit," it begins, quite straightforwardly, "unless they are / teeth or trees or lemons piled / on a step. Black ladies dying / of men leaving nickel hearts / beating them down." In his remarkable book on Baraka's poetics, William J. Harris contends that, unlike other contemporary avant-garde writers, Baraka is not satisfied with an abstract aesthetics, or even a materialist notion of language. "For Baraka," Harris writes, "a poem's effectiveness is measured by how much change it has brought into the world" (135). The poet bears a very real responsibility toward the world directly, which cannot be discharged through the creation of the poem as a separable, aestheticized object. The poem must produce active, material effects:

   Fuck poems
   and they are useful, wd they shoot
   come at you, love what you are,
   breathe like wrestlers, or shudder
   strangely after pissing. We want live
   words of the hip world live flesh &
   coursing blood. Hearts Brains
   Souls splintering fire.

As Baraka writes somewhat later in his essay "Aime Cesaire," describing a communist poetics he has taken up as his own: "Communists see literature as primarily a functional weapon in making revolution, not as simply cunning artifacts in some salon rebellion" (193). In this essay, Baraka argues along with Cesaire that the poem must do more than create a momentary sense of disorder, which is simply and entirely recuperable within a capitalist economy, and that the poem must instead remake reality. Finally, for Baraka, however, Cesaire fails, because he remains satisfied with a symbolist or mystical "rearrangement of reality"--and here he is negatively citing Cesaire's own words. Rather, Baraka argues, the poem must actively rebuild, actively produce "the creation of a new reality after the destruction of the old" (200).

How to do this--how to create a truly revolutionary poem that both destroys and recreates the dominant reality--becomes the issue. In his black nationalist period, Baraka relies heavily on prevailing racist stereotypes of both blacks and whites. He describes and reenacts our contemporary racist reality precisely to destroy it. That would certainly be one way of interpreting the violence of "Black Art," whose racist stereotyping shocks and troubles us, I think, not in seeming surreal, but precisely in seeming too real:

   We want poems
   like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
   or dagger poems in the slimy bellies
   of the owner-jews. Black poems to
   smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches
   whose brains are red jelly stuck
   between 'lizabeth taylor's toes. Stinking
   Whores! We want "poems that kill."
   Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
   guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
   and take their weapons leaving them dead
   with tongues pulled out and sent to
   Ireland. Knockoff
   poems for dope selling wops or slick
   halfwhite
   politicians Airplane poems, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
   rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ... tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh
   ... rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ... Setting fire and
   death to
   whities ass. Look at the Liberal
   Spokesman for the jews clutch his throat
   & puke himself into eternity ... rrrrrrrr

   There's a negroleader pinned to
   a bar stool in Sardi's eyeballs melting
   in hot flame Another negroleader
   on the steps of the white house one
   kneeling between the sheriff's thighs
   negotiating cooly for his people.

   Agggh ... stumbles across the room ...
   Put it on him, poem. Strip him naked
   to the world! Another bad poem cracking
   steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth
   Poem scream poison gas on beasts in
   green berets

Like a mantra, the poem repeats current racist and nationalist stereotyped slurs one by one--against whites, blacks, mulattos, Jews, Italians, Irish. Each comes in for its own attack. Thus, according to a certain read, a counter-repetition of our racist and violent reality produces a certain destruction of it, which, in the repetition, clears a ground for some new and different reality. Such a reading is lacking, however, it seems to me, in that it opens the door for a simple dismissal of the poem as merely repeating the racism of what it attacks, without firmly grounding anything new or different. There is much more going on in this poem.

I return to the first line, "Poems are bullshit unless they are." "Are / teeth and trees and lemons"--the very inherence of the word and the thing. To be at all, the poem must be teeth. Must be trees. Must be lemons. The poem must collapse the distance between the word "tree" and the thing "tree"--the poem must be both word and thing. But the poems here are much more than that, as well. They are active. They are live words." They are "poems that kill." The doer in this poem is the poem, the "bad poem:" "Poems / like fists beating," "dagger poems," "poems to smear," "Assassin poems, poems that shoot guns. Poems that wrestle cops," "Airplane poems ... Setting fire and death to / whities ass."

The "bad poem" strips us naked. Reveals our ugly and violent realities. It doesn't merely repeat or describe them. It actively recreates and shows us for what we are, and that we are--are doers of this very violence. Poems are bullshit unless they act in the very way in which we act, so as to lay us and our little barren uglinesses bare. The poem is not a repetition or a representation or a reflection or a mirror image in our image. It lives in the very way in which we are, as beings, as active doers and makers of the world we so often detest and decry and feel we cannot change because we are so busy pointing our fingers at other people for being responsible for the way things are. The poem has effect because it is active as we are. The poem is bullshit--as we are ourselves--unless it is active in this way, and when it is active in this way, it carries the capacity to provoke us into action, to change or revolution, to "put it on" us. That it claims and is active as change and revolution is the first beauty of Baraka's "Black Art."

I want to turn here to an unlikely commentator, the painter Francis Bacon, who despite being apolitical as a person, speaks quite eloquently in his interviews about the affective charge of art and the violence of its effects in the world. (1) I turn to Bacon at least partially because commentators on his art have often charged it with violence, much as commentators on Baraka and his art have often charged him with violence. Bacon's response to such charges is interesting and thought-provoking in this context.

In response to a question from David Sylvester regarding the way in which people feel as if his work conveys a menace or violence, Bacon speaks about his life, having grown up in the violence of Ireland in the teens, England during the first world war, and Berlin, Paris, and London between the wars. He goes on to remark:

   But this violence of my life, the violence
   which I've lived amongst, I think
   it's different to the violence in painting.
   When talking about the violence
   of paint, it's nothing to do with the
   violence of war. It's to do with an
   attempt to remake the violence of reality
   itself. And the violence of reality is
   not only the simple violence meant
   when you say that a rose or something
   is violent, but it's the violence also of
   the suggestions within the image itself
   which can only be conveyed through
   paint. When I look at you across the
   table, I don't only see you but I see a
   whole emanation which has to do with
   personality and everything else. And
   to put that over in a painting, as I
   would like to be able to do in a portrait,
   means that it would appear violent
   in paint. We nearly always live
   through screens--a screened existence.
   And I sometimes think, when people
   say my work looks violent, that perhaps
   I have from time to time been
   able to clear away one or two of the
   veils or screens. (Sylvester 81-82)

For Bacon, there is a distinct difference between the material violence of the world or of one's life, and violence in art. Art does not simply "reflect" or "illustrate" or "describe" the violence of life. Rather, in its re-creation of reality, art clears away the illusions by which we usually live our lives, and this clearing away or destruction of the illusions is felt as--and is--a kind of horrific violence. Bacon does not shy away from acknowledging the violence of art, but he maintains that artistic violence is neither the physical, material violence of life, nor a reflection or illustration of that violence. Rather, it is the art happening as life, as act: "As an artist, you have to, in a sense, set a trap by which you hope to trap this living fact alive" (57), or, as he says a few paragraphs earlier, "catch the fact at its most living point" (54).

In this sense, art operates like a revolution, in that it destroys the status quo in order to remake reality in its truth or fact. Although Baraka and Bacon are not very similar at all, in this regard they do agree--that art is not the creation of symbols or myths, but is rather the destruction of illusions in the act of recreating reality. Bacon catches this, what he calls the real, by distorting the visual appearance of things: "What I want to do is to distort the thing far beyond the appearance, but in the distortion to bring it back to a recording of the appearance" (40). In the process, he believes, the real living fact of life is re-created or reinstated in the nervous system of the viewer directly, as an affective charge. Thus, the violence or distortion of the image is necessary "so that the artist may be able to open up or rather, should I say, unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently" (17). The viewer becomes more acutely--one might almost say uncomfortably--aware of the reality of life in viewing the violently disturbed.

Bacon was well aware, certainly, by the mid-sixties when Sylvester's interviews commenced, that many people viewed his work as needlessly violent and offensive. Yet he insists that what feels like violence to the viewers is simply a kind of fact--not the so-called fact that "life is violent," but rather and quite differently, the violence of fact or truth, the utter and extreme violence of the real itself, which we usually prefer to shield or veil:

   I've always hoped to put over things
   as directly and rawly as I possibly can,
   and perhaps, if a thing comes across
   directly, people feel that that is horrific.
   Because, if you say something very
   directly to somebody, they're sometimes
   offended, although it is a fact.
   Because people tend to be offended by
   facts, or what used to be called truth.
   (48)

He remarks that this violence or directness of the making real seems to inhere in the effort to make art happen, in the artist's effort to bring over this unshielded fact--the real--into the materiality of the paint: "One brings the sensation and the feeling of life over the only way one can. I don't say it's a good way, but one brings it over at the most acute point one can" (43).

I was introduced to the poem "Black Art" by Billy Joe Harris in a reading group about ten years ago. I don't remember what else the reading group might have read. But I remember that the poem seemed shattering in the context of that fairly sedate, academic, suburban setting in central Pennsylvania. At the time I had just left graduate school and was working as a secretary in the administration of Penn State, and I took that poem to work and put it in the top drawer of my desk. Every time I opened the top drawer of my desk it would shatter that world. Everything about that world--the world of that office and its striped satin upholstered seats and cheerful draperies, the white millionaires to whom I would serve tea in a small sitting room--everything was destroyed by the words looking up at me from that poem, when I opened up that drawer. Its speaking noise obliterated the white world around me. It did kill that world, I think, and me along with it.

At the time I remember feeling that that violence was necessary, was welcome. And it did not incite me to physical violence, but it changed me, materially, and my world. Because in time, my world was reconstituted differently, and I got blacker, I think. Well, I am not certain that a short, now somewhat middle-aged white woman can ever reliably say that she got black at all, let alone blacker. Yet it seemed to me that that poem expressed my world, and if Baraka's speaking the rage expressed in "Black Art" made a black world and black people speaking that poem, then I, too, would speak that black world and that black poem. And if that speech made me black, then I got blacker. Because my skin is certainly white. But I wanted some other sound.

Now, I want to be clear and careful to say that I do not take a stance advocating any kind of violence lightly. The racist and sexist things said in this poem are abhorrent, and to the extent possible, I want to separate its racism and sexism from its violence. I am not apologizing for the racism and sexism. They are all over the place in this work, and they are not pretty. But their existence does not invalidate what Baraka is saying and doing with regard to race and with regard to a revolutionary poetics. Baraka has himself more recently been very clear in renouncing the racism and sexism of his black nationalist period. And while I do think that its violence is necessary, the racism and sexism of the poem are entirely and absolutely despicable. I cannot explain how it is one could legitimately claim, as I am claiming, that the racism and sexism of the poem are despicable, while the violence and rage that it expresses are necessary and necessarily powerful. There may not be a simple answer to this difficulty, except to say that sometimes inexplicable difficulties must be tolerated, even while their abhorrent features must be confronted directly. The poem is difficult. No two ways around that. But it is also one of the most powerful poems I have ever read. And it speaks out powerfully for freedom, tolerance, and justice, even in its racism and sexism. I cannot explain how that can be. I think it is human. (2)

I have hesitated a great deal about writing this essay at all, and in the writing of it, just how to say these things--that I, just when I was most despairing and powerless, felt the power and strength of this poem as given in its very violence destroying my world and reconstituting it differently, and thus materially changing me and what I could do and say as a poet. I did not do that. The poem did that. The poem itself is revolutionary, and the possibility for that revolution arrives within its violence. Yet all along, I have been conscious of its racism and sexism, which are troubling. All I know is to say all of that as directly and frankly as possible, which is why I speak about my personal response to the poem.

In Blues People, when Baraka creates a space in jazz for white musicians to express a black music, he opens up a space for me to speak of these things. But, I think, much more importantly, "Black Art" opens up the revolutionary space of a black world and a place for people to speak that black world, particularly for African Americans and people of color, but also, I believe, for all people. This becomes clear as the poem comes to an end--calling for the poem to "clean out the world for virtue and love." This call for love and virtue is the second beauty of Baraka's poem:

   Poem scream poison gas on beasts in
   green berets
   Clean out the world for virtue and love,
   Let there be no love poems written
   until love can exist freely and
   cleanly. Let Black People understand
   that they are the lovers and the sons
   of lovers and warriors and sons
   of warriors Are poems & poets &
   all the loveliness here in the world

Toward a Revolutionary Poetics, Toward Justice (3)

Many people seem to feel that neither we, as poets, nor our language can have any real effect in the world. Yet Baraka makes a claim of revolution for his poetry, his black sound, and for his life. I want to be attentive to this claim.

It might be possible to get at this claim of revolution through a notion of justice. The typical image of justice is a white woman, blindfolded, holding a set of scales and a sword. The woman, Justice, measures one's actions and determines whether they are just or injust. The act is weighed in the balance, and if it measures up to an equivalence, if it measures up to be equal, that is just. If it does not so balance, then the act is injust. The act of measuring or weighing and of setting the mark for equivalence is the justice at work.

I think one of the things that Baraka's "Black Art" does--particularly in hindsight, or in the wake of his own renunciation of certain aspects of his black nationalist period--is to destroy this notion of equivalence without letting go of some notion of justice. That which is black is not equivalent. It cannot be, in our society, because it is black. Equivalence would precisely be a black society retaliating with equal force against a long and terrible history of white social violence--equivalence would precisely be black rape of white, black killing of white, and so on and so forth. Yet such an equivalence of force against force would be an injustice. This is easy to see, now, I think.

Somewhat more difficult to see or explain is the way in which our notion of justice depends upon a certain kind of making sense. The weighing of equivalents depends upon and is a way of making sense out of that which is not the same. Justice makes correlative. Historically speaking, that making correlative is not seen as a kind of violence; in fact, it is seen as a way to make sense of or resolve differences without making war. Justice institutes equivalence and thereby avoids war and violence. Yet, from within a white world, that which is black does not make sense, cannot be made equivalent or correlative. Thus, establishing a black world would require a certain kind of violence against our notions of making sense, of making equivalent, or making correlative. That violence against white equivalence would be a kind of justice, a justice without equivalence. This is the revolutionary charge of "Black Art."

Violence may be necessary to create change. This violence is just, even though a racist or sexist violence is unjust. Even though white violence against blacks may be unjust, and even though a corresponding black violence against whites may be unjust, there yet may be a certain violence necessary to enact justice. This would be the violence that would enact a black world. Not a black world set up by force counter to the white world, but rather a black world, a black world that would simply be, in its blackness. That would be black without being not-white. Such a black world could not be spoken without a certain violence being enacted, in its very speaking destruction of that world which has always been white and which has enforced the denial and exclusion of blacks from its world and from its justice. This violence enacting a black poem and a black world would enact justice otherwise. Yet in the sound of that black world would be the sound of justice, and whites could also speak that black world, could speak within that justice, if they would make that black sound.

I think this is something of what Baraka says in Blues People, when he speaks of the black sound of jazz as a form of expression accessible to both white and black musicians, and as a uniquely American sound, though I think Blues People was written before Baraka had a clear sense of the revolutionary possibilities for black expression. Yet it is clear throughout Baraka's oeuvre that justice is certainly not returned by the figure of a blindfolded white woman holding a pair of scales. Justice is not so rendered. Justice is, in fact, a social body. It is the language and doings of a speaking and acting people, a people enacting and speaking an entire black world; or, the poem so doing, establishing and speaking the possibility of such a world, a revolutionary world spoken by the many people. This world would make a new sense, a revolutionary sense.

Let me try to get at what I mean by coming back around to the mid-section of "Black Art" where the poem breaks down into violence and the language breaks down into letters and syllables:

   slick halfwhite
   politicians Airplane poems, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
   rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ... tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh
   ... rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ... Setting fire and death to
   whities ass. Look at the Liberal
   Spokesman for the jews clutch his throat
   & puke himself into eternity ... rrrrrrrr
   There's a negroleader pinned to
   a bar stool in Sardi's eyeballs melting
   in hot flame Another negroleader
   on the steps of the white house one
   kneeling between the sheriff's thighs
   negotiating cooly for his people.

   Agggh ... stumbles across the room ...
   Put it on him, poem. Strip him naked
   to the world!

In our representational world, language operates by standing in for or representing the things of the world. Words are thought to be equivalent or correlative to things and ideas in the world. One can destroy that equivalence by tearing up or destroying words or syntax, yet this kind of destruction is eminently momentary and recuperable, as we have learned, I think, since the 1960s. Simply destroying the order of language at the level of syntax and meaning or at the level of its so-called equivalences to the world is not enough. One has to re-order or reorganize language as it inheres in the world; one must re-order and reorganize the sound and language itself in such a way that equivalence cannot be restored, such that the new sound inheres in the world otherwise.

This is what we see Baraka doing in the middle of "Black Art." The words become detached from making sense linguistically--they make no sense--yet they make an entirely other sense at the level of their sound: "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr / rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ... tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh / ... rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...." This is sheer sound, non-linguistic, yet it is not meaningless. It is the sound of airplanes and of machine-gun fire. It is the sound of the poem "Setting fire and death to / whities ass." And, at the very same time, it is the sound of language. It reorganizes the sound of the poem's language around a jazz sound, around the black sound of scatting. Thus, despite the fact that this sound "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" is, literally, a meaningless sound, it is also, quite literally, the sense of language as it is conveyed or carried underneath or within or despite linguistic meaning. It is not a word. It is nothing. And yet it is sense. It is the sound of a plane, and it is the sound of Baraka, scatting in a jazz combo. (4) It is a black sound. This black sound reorganizes our sense of the English language as it inheres in the world. This poem makes a black sound and it makes a black world. It makes real a revolutionary poetics.

"Live Words"

"The living resist and resist." (Autobiography)

At the end of The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, written in 1982-83, Baraka speaks a bit about his black nationalist period in a way that is relevant to the conversation here:

   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. (323)

Baraka makes it clear that, first, change is necessary--and here we might take a page from Marx, who writes in his "Theses on Feuerbach": "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it" (158). Second, the change must be revolutionary. And third, the revolution must effect systemic social change: Changing individual lives--by killing them or by educating them, by preaching or poetizing at them--will not in and of itself effect global social change.

Baraka is insistent that this kind of systemic social change can be brought about by art, by poetry. Ultimately, I think, this is one of the most important things to carry away from his work. Let me try to show how this might work.

We will need to begin back at the question of violence in order to approach any notion of a revolutionary poetry. In the 1963 essay "What Does Nonviolence Mean?" Baraka asks why violence is necessary to effect systemic change in contemporary white America:

   The Negro's real problem remains in
   finding some actual goal to work
   toward. A complete equality of means
   is impossible in the present state of
   American society. And even if it were
   possible, the society is horrible enough
   without Negroes swelling its ranks.
   The only genuine way, it seems to me,
   for the Negro to achieve a personal
   autonomy, this equality of means,
   would be as a truly active moralizing
   force within or against American society
   as it now stands. In this sense I
   advocate a violence, a literal murdering
   of the American socio-political
   stance, not only as it directly concerns
   American Negroes, but in terms of its
   stranglehold on most of the modern
   world.

      The Negro must take an extreme
   stance, must attack the white man's
   system, using his own chains to help
   beat that system into submission and
   actual change. The black man is the
   only revolutionary force in American
   society today, if only by default. (Home
   150-51)

Even in the midst of his nationalism, Baraka is clear that revolutionary action must necessarily proceed against the socio-political foundations of American society for real individual freedom to be possible for African Americans. Further, he sees that revolutionary force as possible only for African Americans, because of their unique and very real oppression within American society.

Throughout the 1960s Baraka speaks for a revolutionary art that has real political and social force. In 1964's "The Revolutionary Theatre," he writes:

   The Revolutionary Theatre should
   force change; it should be change....
   The Revolutionary Theatre must teach
   them [white men] their deaths. It must
   crack their faces open to the mad cries
   of the poor. It must teach them about
   silence and the truths lodged there....
   We will scream and cry, murder, run
   through the streets in agony, if it
   means some soul will be moved,
   moved to actual life understanding of
   what the world is, and what it ought to
   be.... The force we want is of twenty
   million spooks storming America with
   furious cries and unstoppable
   weapons. We want actual explosions
   and actual brutality: AN EPIC IS
   CRUMBLING and we must give it the
   space and hugeness of its actual
   demise. (Home 210-14)

I don't think he ever gives up the intensity of this demand that an aesthetic revolution proceed by motivating external forces, by moving the soul to truth and thus to revolutionary action.

However, his understanding of the relations among art, revolution, and audience becomes increasingly nuanced, so that by the mid-1980s, poetry and music have their own direct revolutionary force, and do not operate solely by provoking the audience or individual listener to action. In the very black sound of black music and poetry, the feeling of blackness and thus of a black revolutionary force can be conveyed directly by the art as a sense of life and of living in the fact.

   The fact of music was the black poet's
   basis for creation. And those of us in
   the BAM [Black Arts Movement] were
   drenched in black music and wanted
   our poetry to be black music. Not only
   that, we wanted that poetry to be
   armed with the spirit of black revolution....
   We wanted to bring black life
   into the poem directly. Its rhythms, its
   language, its history and struggle. It
   was meant to be a poetry we copped
   from the people and gave them right
   back, open and direct and moving.
   (Autobiography 237)

The underlying claim here is that black music, poetry, and art--if they can tap into the language, history, and struggle of the people--are then in and of themselves a revolutionary force. He does not have to claim here that the poetry will provoke its black readers to action. In fact, if I am reading this right, he claims just the opposite--that the black revolutionary spirit and action of the people will provoke the poetry to action, will give art its direct revolutionary force. He is describing a cycle of revolutionary force that starts in the people, is brought up directly into their music and poetry, and is returned--if well-made, with increased intensity--to the people.

This claim becomes more clear in the essays collected in 1987, in The Music, where Baraka speaks of the necessity of constant innovation, an innovation based in the social, rather than the purely intellectual--what he calls "socio-aesthetic activism": "There are areas of the brain that can only be stimulated by new feelings, feelings not expressed by the formally intellectual (though they may be pointed to!)" (265-66).

For him, poetry, music, and the everyday reality of African Americans are inextricably linked in a making-revolutionary:

   Poetry, first of all, was and still must
   be a musical form. It is speech
   musicked.... The poetry I want to
   write is oral by tradition, mass aimed
   as its fundamental functional motive.
   Black poetry, in its mainstream, is
   oracular, sermonic; it incorporates the
   screams and shouts and moans and
   wails of the people inside and outside
   of the churches; the whispers and
   thunder vibrato and staccato of the
   inside and the outside of the people
   themselves, and it wants to be as real
   as anything else. (Music 243-44)

The spiritual source or "Soul"--as he says in "The Phenomenon of Soul in African-American Music"--of black music, and thus black poetry, lies deep within the history, economics, and traditions of African Americans.

How fully black art rests on that tradition is explicated most clearly in "Class Struggle in Music," where he writes that "the music, like the culture, has gathered everything it has moved through, past, or over." It gathers and steals from all traditions, but ultimately rests on the African American's history as "the African, the slave, the freedperson, the segregated and discriminated against." The form does not gather these histories incidentally into the music as an unrelated content, though. The music is a direct expression and result of African American experience. "Its sound, its total art face, carries the lives, history, tradition, pain, and hope, in the main, of the African-American people, not accidentally or as a formal sterile hat tipping, but as a result, one significant result of all those categories" (Music 319-20). All of this together makes up class struggle, which "rages" in the music and in the economics of the music world, or as he writes at the beginning of the essay: "Class struggle in music is class struggle in the society, where the music is coming from anyway" (Music 317).

The poet and musician must take hold of this class struggle in society and pull its intensity into the art. Speaking of his work with Archie Shepp in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s he writes, "We knew that our art had to be a weapon in the struggle for black liberation, if it was going to be worthy of our people's memory" (Music 212). Thus, the work of the artist--of the socio-aesthetic activist--must proceed concomitantly with the revolution, as and with active revolution. (5) Only then will the art be strong:

   African-American music like the other
   profound expressions of that culture
   can only be strengthened by the whole
   people focusing in on the struggle for
   Self-Determination for the African-American
   Nation!--whether black
   artists or black businessmen, black
   workers or progressive people of any
   nationality. The only way for the
   music to achieve self-determination is
   for the people to. (Music 180)

For me, Baraka's poetry is music, is a revolutionary music. It makes a music out of the sound of language--a music that I have not heard anywhere else in the English language, although at times it sounds to me a bit like Dante's music. I wrote this essay because of the force of this sound, not in order to explain or understand it, but to attempt come to terms with my sense--a visceral, bodily sense--that the force of this sound is more than just aesthetic. Is revolutionary, is social, is political. If so (and I believe it is so, and Baraka also makes this very claim for his poetry), if this poetry is socially revolutionary, then, contrary to much nay-saying that goes on in America today, poetry can be socially revolutionary in our contemporary world. Not just socially relevant. Revolutionary.

Such a poetry, as Baraka shows us, must act and have effect in the world. It does so directly, by taking up the activity and energy of a people, the history, economy, and struggle of a people, directly into the sound and force of the poem. To write such poetry is to proceed by something other than linguistic sense. Is to proceed by the spirit and material force that carries revolution itself. This force is the sound of poetry. In Baraka it is a black sound. It is a black sound, and this black sound is a social body. It is an active body, a living justice, or the sound of justice carried under and through the language, which animates that language and speaks it as black as a black sound, as a black social body. This black sound, this black social body is the third and most profound beauty of Baraka's "Black Art."

Notes

(1.) While there is no direct connection between Bacon and Baraka that I know of, I might note that both were influenced by the Beats and Surrealism, though in very different ways and to different degrees. In his biography of Francis Bacon, Michael Peppiatt briefly discusses Bacon's years in Tangiers, during the mid- to late-fifties. During this time, Bacon knew both Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, and both writers have commented on this association, as Peppiatt notes: "Bacon was intrigued by his [Burroughs'] radical stance, which he found all the more interesting given Burroughs' wealthy origins; and he was genuinely interested in the American writer's use of the cut-up technique (in essence, a variation on the Surrealists' disruptive exercises with which Bacon was familiar). Ginsberg in fact believed that Bacon painted the way Burroughs wrote, but Burroughs succinctly corrected this: 'Bacon and I are at opposite ends of the spectrum. He likes middle-aged truck drivers and I like young boys. He sneers at immortality and I think it is the one thing of importance. Of course, we're associated because of our morbid subject matter'" (169-74). To what extent Bacon was influenced by the Surrealists remains a question, as he denied any such influence. But he often discussed his fascination with Picasso's early work--which was highly influenced by the Surrealists. Bacon was particularly intrigued by Picasso's use and distortion of the human figure in the Baigneuses paintings, begun during the summer of 1928, spent at the beach in Dinard. As Peppiatt writes, "In these images the human body is reinvented as a set of dislocated, semi-organic forms, but it remains fully recognizable, creating an ambiguity between what is seen and what is signified that challenges many assumptions about what it is to be a human being" (61; cf. 38-40, 60-76). With regard to Baraka's Surrealist and Beat influences, see Harris 44-52, along with the 1980 interview printed as Appendix 1 (esp. 140-43); see also Baraka's Autobiography 150-67.

(2.) Just after the completion of this essay, in the fall of 2002, a fresh and heated controversy arose over Baraka's stance toward race and nation, primarily focused on the poem "Somebody Blew Up America," written in response to the events of September 11,2001, and the attack and fall of the World Trade Center in New York. While Baraka has been clear in his claims that the poem was not intended to be racist, and is not racist in his view, seen from other points of view the case is not so easily parsed. Yet, after much thought, I have decided that the two cases--of "Black Art" and of "Somebody Blew Up America"--are quite different in nature, and I can only deal with the first in this essay. "Black Art" is a poem about being black and the being of poetry in 1960s' America, and it is a poem I have read and lived with for ten years. "Somebody Blew Up America" is about the imperialist nation-state that is America of 2002. These are very different things, and the place of race in each is quite different. In this essay, I have responded as best I can to the issues of race and racism in "Black Art." I cannot respond to the issues of race and racism in "Somebody Blew Up America" in the same way, as it would require a careful analysis of the nation-state era and the place of race with regard to the nation-state, something I am not well-read enough to accomplish now. By no means are these issues unrelated, as Baraka's work makes clear, yet they are not the same and cannot be addressed in the same way.

(3.) Without going into great detail, I would like to note that the discussion in this section relies heavily upon twentieth-century continental philosophy's critique of traditional philosophical notions of justice. As a poet, I am not qualified to lay out the way in which the philosophical tradition from Plato to Kant thinks justice. But in my thinking in this essay, I have turned to Michel Foucault's discussions of language and representation in The Order of Things, his discussion of madness, discourse, and political power in Madness and Civilization, and Gilles Deleuze's analysis and critique of the notion of equivalence in Difference and Repetition. And while it has been some time since I have worked through Maurice Blanchot's Madness of the Day, I am indebted to his conversation about and figuration of the Law in that difficult text. Each of these thinkers extends a sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit critique of justice, as it has been traditionally thought. In addition, I would like to thank Shannon Sullivan for her careful thought and for our many conversations and readings in the topics of philosophy, race, and bodies, without which this essay would not be possible.

(4.) In The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka, Harris discusses the tradition of orality in African American poetry, particularly as it is influenced by the white avant-garde, both the Eliot-Pound to Black Mountain tradition and the Whitman to Beats tradition, pointing out the ways in which the white avant-garde initiated a turn to the human voice and human speech as the basic rhythm of the poem (53-62). However, as Harris points out, ultimately the apolitical stance of the white avant-garde forced Baraka's turn toward what became his own revolutionary, jazz-based poetics. The blues and jazz become the basis for a new black form. Scatting is one of several jazz techniques that Baraka increasingly carried into his poetry. As Harris writes: "Baraka also blackens the white avant-garde poem with scatting--a jazz singing technique that substitutes nonsense syllables for traditional lyrics" (107). Harris documents a progression in Baraka's work from the addition of scatting into a poem as merely "imitative, suggestive sound" to a fuller integration of scat into the fabric of the poetry, ultimately making for "a new language": "Here [in the poem 'Wise/Why's'] the scat sounds of 'oom boom ba boom' symbolize the identity of black people in America. By substituting scat sounds for readily meaningful words, that is, by using scat sounds as symbols fully integrated into the meaning of the text, Baraka finally demonstrates his mastery of scat.... In 'Wise/Why's' scatting becomes a new language employed to explore the results of losing an old one" (118).

Such a progression in Baraka's work can be seen not only on the printed page, but also and especially in recorded performances. In the early (1965) recording of "Black Art" on Sonny's Time Now, the "rrrrrrrr" and "tuhtuhtuhtuhtuh" of the poem are performed as imitative airplane and machine-gun noises. However, in more recent performances, Baraka breaks into completely meaningless sound/song/scatting that is a brilliant imbrication of the jazz with his poetic voice. The first track, "A Meeting of Remarkable Journeys," on the recently recorded New York Art Quartet--35th Reunion (1999), opens with an unbelievably luminous half-spoken, half-sung blend of screams, chants, not-quite-recognizable words, and meaningless, musical sounds, some with the rise-and-fall intonation of a sentence or line of poetry, others with a more open-ended melodic line, all of which gradually merges into a more recognizably spoken poem. See Graves, Roswell Rudd, John Tchicai, Reggie Workman, Amiri Baraka, New York Art Quartet--35th Reunion. Tokyo: DIW Records, 2000 (DIW-936 / R-99A0121). See also Sonny Murray, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Henry Grimes, Louis Worrell, LeRoi Jones, Sonny's Time Now / Sonny Murray (recorded Nov. 1965). Tokyo: DIW Records (DIW-355 / R-100397).

(5.) In this connection, I find the distinction de Beauvoir draws in her Autobiography between the active role of the politician and critical function of the intellectual to be interesting and helpful: "The intellectual can be in agreement with a regime; but--except in underdeveloped countries which are short of trained people--he should never agree to fill a technical function as Malraux is doing. Even if he supports the government, he should remain a latent source of opposition and criticism, in other words, he should judge policies, not execute them" (127). According to this schema, even within a revolutionary state the socio-aesthetic activist would retain a critical stance.

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. "Aime Cesaire." Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1974-1979. New York: Morrow, 1984. 189-200.

--. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. New York: Freundlich, 1984.

--. "Black Art." The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. New York: Thunder's Mouth P, 1991. 219-220.

Baraka, Amiri, and Amina Baraka. The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues. New York: Morrow, 1987.

de Beauvoir, Simone. The Autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir: Hard Times, Force of Circumstance, II, 1952-1962. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Paragon House, 1992.

Harris, William J. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1985.

Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Morrow, 1963.

--. Home: Social Essays. New York: Morrow, 1966.

Marx, Karl. "Theses on Feuerhach." The Portable Karl Marx. Ed. Eugene Kamenka. New York: Viking Penguin, 1963. 155-58.

Peppiatt, Michael. Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. Boulder: Westview P, 1998.

Sylvester, David. The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon. 3rd ed. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1990.

Sherry Brennan is a poet. She lives in New York, where she works as Director of Development for the Graduate Faculty at New School University. Her book of poems, On the Movement of Plants, is forthcoming from subpress.