20 minutes with Amiri Baraka

“You will only get what you’ve gotten if you never become who you’ve never been.” Anonymous Amiri Baraka could be the Father of reinventing oneself. The idea that you only become who you are if you truly understand how you perceive the world and then implement those ideas in some form so others can understand is how Baraka has lived his life. From his poetry to his plays, Baraka has become a voice that speaks for the underrepresented and unheard. Parallel to his reality with his early works and society today, his manifesto is that nothing really has changed…it’s only in a disguise.

In your poem; Ka’Ba, the last two stanzas read:

We have been captured,

and we labor to make our getaway, into

the ancient image; into a new

Correspondence with ourselves

and our Black family. We need magic

now we need the spells, to raise up

return, destroy, and create. What will be

the sacred word?

Scheme: Explain this piece and has the sacred word been discovered?

Amiri Baraka: Revolution! That poem was written in 1964-65. I had moved from the Village to Harlem, and the whole question of the unification of Black people was on my mind. They had just murdered Malcolm X and the question of unification was finding that sacred word; revolution, not only in a spiritual context, but in a context of class struggle.

Scheme: How do you feel about the revival of your play, Dutchman?

Amiri Baraka: It makes me happy. The director is doing a great job. The set designer has created a set that brings the play into the new age. I think this is a chance for people who either were there then and could have seen it and people in your generation can now see it and appreciate the message.

Scheme: Is there any parallel between your book, Blues People and hip hop today?

Amiri Baraka: Ohh! It’s continual, if you have no blues, then you have no national consciousness. Hip hop is like talking blues, if you go back to the oldest blues, it’s the same form. Like Jolly means happy it was also seen to light up your mind. It could be ambiguous to people that don’t understand it, but people need to understand that it’s an ancient tradition. It has always been used as a form of history and song.

Scheme: How is Everett Leroi Jones different than Amiri Baraka?

Amiri Baraka: Well, he’s much older! I say that without the fear of contradiction. Hopefully wiser; he’s gone through many changes and learned a lot of things and have forgotten a lot of things. But, hopefully I’ve maintained some kind of conscious.

Scheme: Where did the idea of Somebody Blew up America come from?

Amiri Baraka: It came from the world, 9/11. When they blew that up, whoever did it. I suspect Bush more than I suspect an Arab. I was supposed to go over there (twin towers) to campaign. I thought it was an accident and then the 2nd plane hit the building. From my house you could see the World Trade Center. Then when Bush started the scheme about terrorism; it encouraged me. Black people have always equated slavery, lynching as terrorism. To show how backwards Bush and his company are, they squandered the sympathy that the world showed America, by invading Afghanistan. They were talking about Osama Bin Laden and ethnic cleansings. Then they invade Iraq for talking about Islamic extremism. It was a secular government. These people were killing the same people. They knew from the beginning they had weapons of mass destruction because they gave them to them…if they wanted to know where they were, all they had to do was check their receipts. This is what inspired it (Somebody Blew up America), you could see the evil behind these calls to fight terrorism. We cause a civil war in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and it is actually what they wanted to do in the 1st place. They wanted them to kill each other so that they could control what they really wanted…the oil.

Scheme: I recently read an interview about you…and you stated that the whole point of developing the skill of writing is so that the words fly on the rhythm; to feel the rhythm before you know what you’re talking about. What is this rhythm you speak of and what is this feeling for you?

Amiri Baraka: Everything is manifested in a rhythm…if you don’t have any rhythm, you’d be dead and your heart has stopped. You live your whole life the way you see the world and it’s rhythmic; an internal location. Your conscious thinking and your automatic spontaneous life rhythm like your speech, when you write you are very much in tune to that, or you should be otherwise your writing would be artificial. It should sound like the way you talk. Not only will it flow out easier but your perception is more consistent with how you think and how you view the world. How you utilize your rationalization…you begin to build character.