Sometimes funny, but most times deadly serious: Amiri Baraka as political satirist.

Smash and bludgeon Giuliani forty-one times a day Tie him to a tree in front of city hail So every one of his victims families and friends Can make Forty-one ass-whipping calls (Baraka, "Giuliani" 20)

During a poetry workshop at the Betty Shabazz Wholistic Retreat Center in the summer of 2000, Amiri Baraka debuted a new satiric poem that he had been working on for a political anthology entitled Keeping Track: 41 Voices, 41 Visions for Amadou Diallo. A longstanding tension between New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his constituents (some members of the lower class and minorities, especially African Americans) came to a head when the unarmed African emigrant was gunned down by four undercover New York City Police Officers in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building in February 1999. A case of mistaken identity, the special Street Crime Unit shot at the defenseless twenty-two-year-old forty-one times, striking him nineteen. Long before the shooting, however, Mayor Giuliani had been harshly criticized for fostering an atmosphere in which citizens have a right to fear the police, and since, for impatiently mishandling the investigation into the special crime unit whose motto is ironically taken from a Baraka poem, "We Own the Night." In the poem "A Modest Proposal for Giuliani's Disposal in Forty-one Verses Which Are Also Curses," Baraka viciously lampoons Mayor Giuliani for what many activists and citizens believe to be Giuliani's complicity in the murder of the innocent young man, and the city's strong-armed attack upon the people of New York. Before he read, Baraka joked that soon after he had written the poem cursing Giuliani, the inhumane mayor was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The audience laughed, Baraka chuckled, but given his illustrated knowledge of Yoruba conjure, his belief in the West African concept of Nommo, the power of the word, and his almost four decades of radical activism, Amiri Baraka could have been deadly serious.

Baraka's "Modest Proposal," unlike eighteenth-century satirist Jonathan Swift's satiric prose piece of the same title, relies heavily upon Juvenalian satire, which the Encyclopedia Britannica defines as "any bitter and ironic criticism of contemporary persons and institutions that is filled with personal invective, angry moral indignation, and pessimism." Here's an example:

   Dog Dick Pus, Ugly wound ... The Bad Breath of Ibis, The Devil's Gas,
   Criminal G, Dahmer's Successor, R Like the Child Killer, White Death,
   Black Death, Murder Man, Death Jam, Mayor NAZI Chiller, Insane
   Killer, Rudy Maniac, Murder Beast, Rudy the Vile, 666, City Hall
   Hitler,
   The Ice Man, Killer Rudy, Rudy Death,
   Rudy The Ripper, Crazy Rudy, Doo
   Doo Brain, Giuliani De Sade, Grand
   Dragon of The Apple, Mayor
   Murderer, Alcalde Diablo ... Serial
   Assassin.

Though quite funny, the poem never allows the reader to forget the tragedy that inspired it. The phrase 41, the number of bullets the police shot at the unarmed African, which recurs in all forty-one verses, stands as a testament to the excessive force that Mayor Giuliani allowed to be visited upon the people. The reader may laugh, but will forever link Mayor Giuliani to the murder of innocence.

Baraka's contemporary satiric poem, though less sophisticated than his satiric drama of the '60s and '70s, has evolved just as the word warrior himself has evolved, as well as the world and the people for whom he writes. We are no longer embroiled in open racial warfare, as when Dutchman, the first play by Amiri Baraka, then LeRoi Jones, was produced in 1964. Therefore, his contemporary satire has to meet the people where they are (often times in their comfort zone), without being preachy or overtly didactic. Baraka calls Giuliani "Dahmer's Successor ... Death Jam, Mayor NAZI, Chiller, Insane Killer ... Rudy The Ripper ... Doo Doo Brain," and his message is immediately received. Readers might be inspired to action--maybe to attend a rally, withdraw all support from Giuliani's administration; maybe to write letters to their congressman and hold all such politicians accountable for their deeds for and against the people. The readers' actions would be governed by the social mores through which they are conditioned.

Amadou Diallo's case is generally viewed as an extreme manifestation of such sanctioned political brutality against the people that occurred with tragic frequency up to the 1970s. Therefore, when Baraka's 1969 verse "Black Art" calls for "poems that kill. / Assassin poems, Poems that shoot / guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys / and take their weapons leaving them dead" (219), or if in 1965 Baraka instructs his audience to answer murder with murder in a satiric play that does not make the audience laugh--using parody, burlesque, irony, and allegory--he is not a lone voice crying out for justice and action. Nor does he have to wrap the truth in a chuckle so that it is easier for people to take. Baraka uses satire, according to the sensibility of his audience, to mark and solidify his own personal philosophical transitions, and to ridicule, if not destroy, certain targets that are detrimental to "the cause" of liberation, such as white liberals, bourgeois nationalists, Uncle Tom black leaders, Religion, Capitalism, and even himself before his Journey Back to Black in 1965.

The satiric drama and poetry that Amiri Baraka produced during his transitional phase, between 1960 and 1965, illustrates his growing internal conflict as he tries, and eventually succeeds in, breaking away from the decadance of the Greenwich Village Beat lifestyle. Satire becomes Baraka's weapon, a means by which to critique himself and society as a whole. His satire l at this time is no laughing matter, for the real revolution was about to get started. The purpose of satire is not always to make the reader laugh. Satire is:

   a verbal caricature that shows a deliberately
   distorted image of a person,
   institution, or society. The traditional
   method of the caricaturist is to exaggerate
   those features he considers to be
   characteristic of his victim's personality
   and to simplify by leaving out
   everything that is not relevant for his
   purpose. The satirist uses the same
   technique, and the features of society
   he selects for magnification are, of
   course, those of which he disapproves.
   ... [the reader] is made to recognize
   familiar features in the absurd and
   absurdity in the familiar. (Britannica)

Up until Amiri Baraka, still LeRoi Jones, made his abrupt conversion to Black Nationalism, he was a Beat poet with a nagging angst that did not fit into the bohemian paradigm as expressed in his 1961 satiric poem "Hymn for Lanie Poo," subtitled "Vous etes des faux Negres" (roughly translated, 'You are the fake Negroes'). Baraka writes in part 6:

   They laught,
   and religion was something
   he found in coffee shops, by God.
   It's not that I got enything
   against cotton, nosiree, by God
   It's just that ...
   Man lookattthatblonde
   whewee!
   I think they are not treating us like
   Mr. Lincun said they should
   or Mr. Gandhi
   For that matter. By God.
   Zen
   is a bitch! Like "Bird" was,
   Cafe Olay
   for me, Miss.
   But white cats can't swing ...
   Or the way the guy kept patronizing me--like
   he was Bach or somebody
   Oh, I knew
   John Kasper when he hung around
   with shades ... ("Hymn" 8)

In this poem, Baraka has a multitude of satiric targets, including himself. He sees himself as the "fake Negro" who has nothing against "cotton" and the oppression that it symbolizes to black people in America. At this time, Baraka is still living the bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village. His living conditions are not so threatening that he cannot be distracted in the middle of his protest by a white woman (the blonde). In fact Baraka remains married to his Jewish wife, Hettie Cohen, until 1965. But "white cats can't swing," and "John Kasper," a phrase coined by the jazz musician Lester Young, is used to represent the white patrons of jazz who used to hang around with "shades" like LeRoi Jones. While the formalist critic might argue that to assume that Baraka is the "I" in the poem is an intentional fallacy, contemporary literary critic Calvin Reid, in a May 2000 Publishers' Weekly interview writes, "Baraka's writing has always been characterized by the habitual retelling of his life's story--his intellectual and emotional development; his conflicts and his strident, impassioned political transformations" (44).

During Baraka's 1960 visit to Cuba, his eyes were opened to some truths that made him question his purpose as a poet and change his course, slowly at first, but dramatically. He was harshly critiqued by Third World revolutionary poets, who would call him "a cowardly bourgeois individualist" (126). Baraka attempts to analyze himself in the 1960 essay "Cuba Libre," while at the same time setting up the type of people he would be satirizing in future protest, and eventually in Black Nationalist drama and poetry. He lists the other travelers on the Cuba excursion as if they are all simply types, with whispered attacks in parenthesis:

   One embarrassingly dull (white) communist,
   his professional Negro (i.e.,
   unstraightened hair, 1930's bohemian
   peasant blouses, etc., militant integrationist,
   etc.) wife who wrote embarrassingly
   inept social comment-type
   poems, usually about one or sometimes
   a group of Negroes being mistreated
   or suffering in general (usually
   in Alabama, etc.). Two middle-class
   young Negro ladies from Philadelphia
   who wrote poems, the nature of which
   I left largely undetermined. One 1920's
   "New Negro" type African scholar
   (one of those terrible examples of what
   the "Harlem Renaissance" was at its
   worst).... One strange tall man ...
   (whom I later got to know as Robert
   Williams ... The first Negro to work
   for the Philadelphia Inquirer)--I think
   probably this job has deranged him
   permanently, because it has made him
   begin to believe that this (the job)
   means that white America (i.e. at large)
   loves him ... and it is only those
   "other" kinds of Negroes that they
   despise and sometimes even lynch. (126)

Baraka later labels the aforementioned types (except for the dull white communist) Black bourgeois nationalists. They are black on the outside, yet so controlled by European standards that their acts of protest become distorted by accommodationist rhetoric. However, it is not this composite type that Baraka parodies in Dutchman. He goes for the black, middle-class integrationist who works to suppress his latent black militant tendencies in lieu of white symbols of power.

In a sense, the main character in Dutchman, Clay, is Baraka around 1964. The play was produced four years after his enlightening Cuba trip and a year before he would finally leave his white wife. It is also the year after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Medgar Evers, and the church-bomb murders of four little black girls in Birmingham. Baraka, still LeRoi Jones, is on the brink of total transformation, but still must strip away the layers of counter-revolutionary, black bourgeois binding. With Clay, Baraka begins to dig for the militant within, even if it means giving up his own life. The play opens with Clay, a middle-class black man in button-down suit and tie, on the subway on his way to a party. His attention is captured by a "mod" white woman in skimpy summer clothes and sunglasses, eating an apple. Immediately, the reader might see parallels to Adam and Eve because the white temptress eating the forbidden fruit can mean nothing but ill to a black man in 1964. The train is empty at this time, yet Lula takes the seat right next to Clay, after waiting to be noticed.

From this point on Lula sexually and racially taunts the confused young man. Baraka uses the white woman to satirize the black man trying to be white, seeking his white woman trophy. Lula calls Clay a "liver-lipped white man" and a "dirty white man" (94). She tells him about himself as if he were a case-study, like Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas, and she is right. Like the caricaturist, Baraka, through Lula, highlights and makes ridiculous those traits in this black man which will lead to his downfall. For example, had Clay not been attracted to white women he may never have mark and solidify his own personal philosophical transitions, and to ridicule, if not destroy, certain targets that are detrimental to "the cause" of liberation, been drawn into Lula's trap. When she accuses him of "reading Chinese poetry and drinking lukewarm sugarless tea" or being like those Jewish poets in Yonkers, and when she describes his friend Warren as a "tall skinny black boy with a phony English accent," Lula is signifying on the absurdity of the black bohemian. When Clay later asks if he has angered Lula, or said something wrong, she replies, "everything you say is wrong... that's what makes you so attractive." She continues to taunt him about all of his posturing, which leads to his trying to be everything he is not, "a Black Baudelaire" or a white man who has earned the right to wear the suit that he is wearing. It's always been about your manhood, she tells him. When Lula kills Clay, it is almost as if Baraka kills that part of himself which he can no longer live with.

Baraka would later write in his autobiography that, after Dutchman's success, "even if I wasn't strong enough to act, I would become strong enough to SPEAK what had to be said ...." He continues, "I knew the bull-shit of my life" (i.e., his white wife), "but I felt, now some heavy responsibility." He speaks about the meaning of the fame that Dutchman brought him: "If those bastards were going to raise me up for any reason, then they would pay for it! I would pay those motherfuckers back in kind" (Reader 19). If "they" were going to exalt him as the angry voice of Black America, he would turn it around and use it against them. In this sense Baraka lampoons white liberals for praising him even as he is trashing them and calling for their death to their faces. In a later essay entitled "Black Revolutionary Theatre," Baraka explains what black theatre should be: "It should force change; it should be change" (1899). "The Revolutionary theatre must EXPOSE," he exclaims. It must "accuse and attack because it is a theatre of Victims...."

While Clay is a victim, he is also a target of satire, a caricature of Baraka as LeRoi ]ones. Later that same year Baraka gives another ridiculous portrait of himself as Walker, the drunken revolutionary, in The Slave. Obvious parallels between Walker and Baraka are not lost on contemporary critics. For example, Nilgun Anadolu-Okur posits that "The Slave is the projection of the conflict in Dutchman from an integrationist perspective to what Baraka perceives as its resolution" (114). Perhaps Baraka is instructing the audience on what Clay should have done--lead a revolution to kill the white man within by destroying the white woman who offers him forbidden fruit. Walker hopes to destroy her (in the person of his ex-wife Grace) through the destruction of all that she loves, while taking out as many white liberals as possible. However, the target of satire in The Slave is not the former white friends of the new revolutionary, but the bumbling revolutionary himself, who, by sheer luck, manages to survive. Walker is not immediately revealed as a drunken idiot, but he is somewhat ridiculous standing in the middle of an active revolution, complete with explosions, quoting Yeats while holding his ex-wife and her new husband, both white liberals, at gunpoint. What could be more absurd than a black revolutionary quoting poetry about dolphins while the city burns in civil unrest?

Walker admits that he came into the world "pointed in the right direction," and along the way he "learned so many words for what [he] wanted to say," but none of the words were his own. It was not the language of the black man, but of his oppressor. In the prologue, the old man Walker states that we live our lives seeking "nothing but ourselves" (Slave 43). It is still 1964 and Baraka, still LeRoi Jones, continues to struggle to break away from the self he believes is worthless to revolution. As a reflection of this, the ex-wife Grace says to Walker, "I don't even think you know who you are any more. No, I don't think you ever knew." She continues, "You never even found out who you were until you sold the last of your loves [white friends] and emotions down the river" (61). Through this parody of himself, Baraka strips away the absurd layers to get at the real Self, the core self, the same core that, when brought out in stark opposition to his baser self, meant the death of Clay in Dutchman. In fact, Walker is still so confused about his purpose as a revolutionary that Grace accuses him of needing to hear himself talk so he can "find out what he's supposed to have on his mind" (63).

Walker really becomes ridiculous to the audience when he begins to show signs of intoxication as he finishes a bottle of liquor, and dances around whooping like a Native American. "More! Bwana, me want more fire water!" (fire water being an indirect reference to the use of alcohol to suppress unrest on Native American reservations). As the leader of this revolution, Walker almost compromises the war by passing out drunk while holding the two white liberals at gunpoint. He becomes a caricature of the singing, dancing darkey down on the plantation, or the corner hood, so happy with drink that he forgets who the oppressor is, and that the goal of the fight is liberation. Baraka parodies this type further in Slave Ship, when a plantation revolt is exposed and violently suppressed for the payment of one extra pork chop to a raggedy, Uncle Tom slave, "scratching his head and butt" (Slave Ship 140). In The Slave, however, the white people die and the children, products of the white liberal-latent black militant union, proclaimed to be dead by Walker, cry out within the ruins of the house. His children's loyalties are up for grabs as Walker, parody of a would-be revolutionary, abandons them just as Baraka, still LeRoi Jones, would abandon Greenwich Village and his former life in 1965.

Amiri Baraka ushered in the Black Arts Movement with dramatic action and a bold new dedication to the people and to black art. At the 8th Annual Gwendolyn Brooks Black Writers' Conference at Chicago State (Oct. 1998), Baraka admitted that in the '50s he was interested in the beauty of poetry. However, when Malcolm X was murdered in 1965 he left the Village, moved to Harlem, and reclaimed his blackness. That act created the line of demarcation between the Negro artists uptown and those in the Village--between those who followed the passive-resistance teaching of Martin Luther King and those who were attracted to the militant, self-determination ideals of Malcolm X. Brother Malcolm had been their voice; his murder was a declaration of war. Influenced by the teachings of "our shining Black prince," Black Power artists rededicated black art to the people and the struggle. According to Baraka, they wanted a mass, revolutionary art that was identifiably black, that expressed their lives. Baraka says, "We wanted a Malcolm Art ... Something to bring change" (Ossie Davis eulogy). In the satiric drama and poetry of his transitional period Baraka adheres to tenets expressed by his Black Fire co-editor, Larry Neal, who wrote that black art should critique symbolism, mythology, and iconology in attempted self-determination and movement toward nationhood. One objective that was expressed in the 1968 manifesto on the new black art of empowerment is that black art should "confront the contradictions arising out of the Black man's experience in the racist West" without supplication to the white man (Neal 124). Baraka writes in his autobiography that The Slave was "really the last play where [he] tried to balance and talk to Blacks and whites" (Ossie Davis eulogy).

In 1967 Amiri Baraka returned to satiric theatre in the allegorical play Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show). By this point, he had become the Black Nationalist and left LeRoi Jones behind. He was now free to critique his own people, most especially the bourgeois blacks whose existence was counterrevolutionary, without being a hypocrite. In Great Goodness of Life, the main character's name, Court Royal, evokes Ralph Ellison's battle royal scene in Invisible Man, in which black boys risk painful electrocution as they beat each other down to retrieve what they believe are silver dollars for their racist white audience's entertainment. Court Royal is a caricature of a middle-class black man who believes that his good government job at the post office and his total accommodation to the oppressive white power structure will protect him. He is put on trial for the crimes of a Black Nationalist, and is made a buffoon as he says over and over, "but you're mistaken. I work at the post office" (Goodness 227). He proclaims himself conservative because he does not wear loud colors like black folk are inclined to do. To save himself, Court Royal joins the white court in condemning a black woman to death because she seems drunk, when in reality she is terrified and sexually threatened by the white men who drag her in. Next the court brings in the corpse of "the Prince," representative of Malcolm X. "A nigger [killed] him," the bailiffs tell the judge, who instructs them to make sure that the teachings of Malcolm X die with him. Court Royal insists that he had nothing to do with the slain militant. When they project images of other martyred African liberation and Civil Rights activists such as Patrice Lumumba, Reverend King, and Medgar Evers, Court Royal tries to convince the court that he is a good, middle-class Negro accommodationist who has done all that he has been instructed to do. The court finally decides to spare him because they admire his spirit. However, he must make one final gesture to prove his worthiness. Court Royal is given a gold-and-diamond-studded pistol, loaded with a silver bullet. To enter into the covenant of the guiltless, he must kill his son, who represents the myth of the Black Nationalist movement. As he kills the boy, Court Royal states, "My soul is a white as snow" (239).

Amiri Baraka's early satire, in addition to working out his own contradictions, served to expose and condemn, ridicule and instruct. In his later Marxist days, Baraka continued to use satire to highlight that which stands between the people and absolute liberation--for instance, Religion, Capitalism, and racist politicians such as the former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Though Baraka's contemporary satire may bring a chuckle, he may be deadly serious when he closes "A Modest Proposal for Giuliani's Disposal in Forty-one Verses Which Are Also Curses" with the lines:

   Additional Reward will follow
   For information leading to the collar
   Of Rudy's negro pet canary,
   Stanley Crouch, a dangerous
   Homo Locus Subsidiary. (20)

Work Cited

Anadolu-Okur, Nilgun. Contemporary African American Theater: Afrocentricity in the Works of Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, and Charles Fuller. New York: Garland, 1997. 77-125.

Baraka, Amiri. "Black Art." 1969. Reader 219.

--. "Black Revolutionary Theatre." 1969. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton, 1997. 1899-1902.

--. Dutchman. 1964, Reader 76-99

--. Dutchman & The Slave: Two Plays by LeRoi Jones. New York: Morrow, 1964.

--. Great Goodness of Life: A Coon Show. 1967. Reader 225-39.

--. "Hymn for Lanie Poo." 1961, Reader 4-10

--. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. New York: Thunder's Mouth P, 2000.

--. "A Modest Proposal for Giuliani's Disposal in Forty-one Verses Which Are Also Curses." Keeping Track: 41 Voices, 41 Visions for Amadou Diallo. Ed. Tony Medina. New York: African Voices, 2001. 20.

--. Ossie Davis eulogy. 8th Annual Gwendolyn Brooks Black Writers' Conference. Chicago State U. Oct. 1998.

Neal, Larry. "The Black Arts Movement." 1968. African Amedcan Literary Criticism, 1773 to 2000. Ed. Hazel Arnett Ervin. New York: Twayne, 1999. 122-28.

Jiton Sharmayne Davidson earned her master's degree from Howard University and is now a Ph.D. Fellow at the Pennsylvania State University, continuing her studies in African American literature. She is also a novelist who has just completed her third novel, and the winner of the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship for her fourth novel, a work in progress. The creator and publisher of FYAH, an online literary magazine, Davidson was awarded the Small Projects Grant twice. A former writer-in-residence for D.C. Public Schools, Davidson's publication credits include the Black Issues Review and Tough Love: The Life and Death of Tupac Shakur. Her fiction has appeared in Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, MAWA: The Mid-Atlantic Writers' Association Review, and Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas.