In the tradition: Amiri Baraka, black liberation, and avant-garde praxis in the U.S

And so we understand the final lines of the poem not as an expression of any "murderous impulse" but the collective will to survive it!--and to remember and continue the singing fight. Baraka plays a figure from the final song of Arthur Blythe's In the Tradition, a rendition of Coltrane's "Naima" (29):

   Boosheee dooooo doo dooooo dee
   doooo doooooooooo! (310)

It suggests an elegy and a taking of inspiration--taking in of spirus, breath, life--from those who died in struggle in Greensboro the same year Blythe recorded the tune, the same Greensboro of the first sit-ins, SNCC, and the first radical surges of the Civil Rights Movement:

   Klansmen calmly walk to the trunks of
   the rear cars, open them, and take out
   and distribute rifles and handguns. A
   shot rings out, and the demonstrators
   run for cover. Armed Klansmen walk
   about, carefully select victims, fire and
   reload.... They seem like casual participants
   at a skeet shoot. One of them
   methodically pumps bullets into the
   body of a fallen protester. (Wade 381)

Among the 100 women, men, and children gathered, nine were wounded that day. The five dead were young, militant union and community organizers. They were Cesar Cauce, Michael Nathan, William Sampson, Sandra Smith, and James Waller. They were two textile union presidents, two doctors, and the former president of her class at Bennett College. (30) It was November 3, 1979, and their rallying call--Baraka's last line--was

DEATH TO THE KLAN

Notes

(1.) In his essay on Cesaire, Baraka links Cesaire's blackening of Surrealism to his own attempt: "See my poem 'Black Dada Nihilismus' for a parallel legitimization of the Dada-surreal utilization idea" (Reader 325).

(2.) Rothenberg and Joris's anthology Poems for the Millenium is a good example of this tendency, both for its treatment of Baraka and of Negritude.

(3.) This interpretation bears out Nielsen's insightful examination of Baraka's recording of the poem: "Baraka's poem calls for 'Black scream / and chant," but there is no screaming from the poet on this recording" (190). The recording, instead, is marked by Baraka's "quietest delivery" (192).

(4.) Also consider the inclusion of Tom Russ (Baraka's grandfather) in the list of black rebels.

(5.) In a famous interview, Baraka claimed that his blackness had nothing to do with his art: "I am fully conscious all the time that I am an American Negro because it's part of my life. But I also know that if I want to say, 'I see a bus full of people,' I don't have to say, 'I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people'" ("LeRoi" 7). Baraka would, of course, come to reverse this statement.

(6.) Indeed, as Baraka would later realize, he never gave up his bohemianism in becoming a nationalist. He only reclothed it in black: "It is my contention that much of the cultural nationalism young people fervently believe is critically important to the struggle is just a form of black bohemianism. Take away the attention to Africa, and the 'weird' clothes, and 'communalism' can be found in any number of white hippie communities. Some of the cultural nationalists we began to recognize when we started to read the history of the Communist Party (Bolshevik). These old Russian hippies and cultural nationalists were called Narodniks" (Autobiography 424-25). Sollors also argues that, for most of his cultural nationalist phase, Baraka maintained an elitism and aesthetization of politics that was consistent with his white bohemian avant-gardism.