Wow! Amiri Baraka is quite an interesting character. It’s crazy to me how sometimes you are able to understand writers’ works so much better by analyzing their lives and different times in their lives. And who better to analyze than Amiri Baraka. His writing drastically changed throughout different periods in his life.
At first when we were discussing his writing in class and a little bit about his life, I thought to myself, “Wow, this guy is so easily swayed in one direction and then the other.” But after while I thought, “Alvin, you can’t judge this man.” And I couldn’t as in he himself said that was not perfect and he was still developing as a writer and person…
Then I thought about myself in comparison. The three drastically different poems were written throughout an eight year span. That means he changed his mind at least three times within an eight year span. Now, I’m pretty sure that I’ve changed my mind more than three times in the past month! He was also living in a time that was difficult for black people in America. Had I been alive during the civil rights movement in America, I would have probably been one of the more radical figures LOL.
But in all seriousness I was able to appreciate hearing his poem “Black Art” when he read it out loud. I feel that by him doing that and reading it the way he did, we were forced into that situation and environment. We heard, what I thought were sirens and gunshots, and I just pictured a chaotic environment where calmness, peace, and tranquility held no place. I felt the anger, the passion. You knew that this wasn’t a common poem about lillies and sunsets and the horizon. But rather it was a stark, violent poem. It was political and wasn’t the form of “art” that we are accustomed to.
I feel like that is Baraka, though. Perhaps he felt that the only way to get his point across was to yell it in peoples’ faces so that they had to listen. Maybe that’s why kids don’t listen to their parents today. Have we as a society become too “poetic” and too passive? Just a thought…
