Thank You
Because somebody had to do it
because words are weapons:
fists and daggers, guns.
And your guns were not indiscriminate
your poems were not bullshit,
they were a hot-handed snapshot
that hurts liberal eyes almost forty years later
just like acid in the face of the enemy.
The violence is what the whites feared
as much as they hated you,
an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
You couldn’t have known the violence
wouldn’t work, that the negroleader
you disdain for being on his knees
wasn’t between the white man’s legs
but was praying to God and himself
that his aggressive non-violent resistance
would make the white man begrudgingly
move over to make room.
That violence wouldn’t work, but
it galvanized a people. And it must
have felt good to write about cracking
an old Jewish woman in the mouth
because that woman wouldn’t look twice
if she saw the cops doing it to you.
It took pain and torture, murder and murder
and murder and murder to galvanize a people.
Malcolm was killed by his own people. His twins
were born after his death and named for him.
King was assassinated by a white man.
The riots reached a level of national consciousness
that something had to be done.
So maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that violence,
planes shooting down planes, maybe
it was the only way. Or maybe it walked
side by side, proudly and coldly shouldering
an AK-47, with the peaceful marches.
Then again, when the dogs and barbed wire
hedged those people in, a stain that could
never be bleached clean didn’t become a massacre.
You made a black poem. There is a
Black World.
Black and white are still only a Venn Diagram.
But Black People Speak That Poem
Silently
or LOUD
OR HOWEVER THEY WANT
My poem is a response/imitation of Amiri Baraka’s “Black Art.” I found very conflicting thoughts while reading our selections this week, and felt much of the same while writing this response. On the one hand, can you blame anyone who watches people who look and act and think like him be trampled on, socially, intellectually, and physically and not stand by and watch it happen? On the other, the violence espoused and seemingly even encouraged in poems like “Black Art” is difficult to reckon with. Tracing the non-violent protests of the Civil Rights Movement alongside the Black Power and Black Arts movements provides a very conflicting narrative that is not always at odds with one another. And although non-violent civil disobedience probably won out in the greater scheme of things, a large part of the African American populace had to keep the coals burning to keep their heads above water, in a time when it would be all too easy to give in with exhaustion.
In terms of form, I loosely imitated the form of “Black Art” in terms of line breaks and capitalization, but I wanted to respond more so than hijack Baraka’s voice. I did paraphrase or use several images that appear in “Black Art,” and my final stanza appears in very similar fashion to the last stanza in the original. I don’t think things shook out the way Baraka would have wanted them to in terms of today’s society and the inequality still faced by many people of color, but they unarguably are better than they were forty years ago. That being said, there’s still a long way to go, and black voices are just as strong as they were in the Black Arts movement. This last point is what I wanted to espouse at the end of my response, that of all the things that could have risen from the Black Arts movement, a strong literary and stronger oral tradition has continued to blossom, and at least in terms of the arts, African Americans continue to leave an indelible mark, as they rightfully should.
Are honest discussions on race relations prey to the same level of entrenched positions as there seem to exist between political parties and/or affiliations? I ask this because how are we supposed to read this poetry without simply using an objective academic lens?
BONUS Our readings made me think of a slam poem I use as an example from my students, and two contemporary songs that seem to say that although things have changed, they still look very similar to how things were
I found your poem especially powerful and especially relevant. When you stated how we examine nonviolent protests alongside the Black Power movement and how it presents a conflicting narrative, I can’t help but think of today’s Black Lives Matter movement and how there are conflicting narratives within it. There’s the Charleston Black Lives Matter Twitter account calling North Charleston police “dogs” for forcibly removing hostile and violent students from a school bus. There’s the other side conducting nonviolent protests and marches in various cities nationwide with people of all color joining in. There’s corporate movements and individual movements and celebrity movements to speak on these issues of black and white and race and art and culture.
I also find an internal tension when having discussions of African American literature or culture in an academic setting and trying to make sense of it. On one hand, I can understand the response to a white woman trying to analyze and make claims of a culture she’ll never be a part of, but my response to such a claim is a bit of indignance toward my own intelligence and feel there’s false assumptions made on my purpose for discussion. The first response is clearly portrayed in Nikki Giovanni’s “Nikki-Rosa.” Her final lines clearly and directly stating that white people don’t have the right to write about black artists because they are inaccessible to that perspective. Extending this statement, Giovanni appears to also include the claim that white people are either incapable of or don’t have access to that type of empathy.
What’s troubling in Baraka’s work is the violence and hatred his speakers have toward others, which reminds me of Larry Neal’s argument that there is a tension in literature– a tension of “war” “directed against an unseen white enemy” (647). This tension is present in Baraka during the Black Arts Movement and it is STILL present, unreconciled or resolved in today’s Black Lives Matter Movement.