Читать книгу The Last Poets - Christine Otten - Страница 35

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NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, SEPTEMBER 2001

Amiri Baraka

‘I’ve seen Langston Hughes perform with Charles Mingus. In the ’50s I performed with a jazz quartet. Ideally, my poems should be read like music. I still work on them every day, so that a good musician can transform the words into music. The disconnection of poetry from music is a Western notion. Poetry comes out of music, it’s music put into words. So a good musician can turn the words into music. Music is not abstract. Emotions are not abstract. Nor is jazz, except maybe for the listener who doesn’t understand the concepts behind it. Take Coltrane’s piece about the murder of those four black girls in the church in Birmingham, Alabama. It’s about the civil rights movement. It’s one of the saddest and most touching pieces of music I’ve ever heard. Trane took regular, popular music as a basis and expanded it with African musical forms, Eastern forms, new breathing techniques. All of it to break out of the prison of commercial music. He could make statements at high speed, and then alter them harmonically, which made the solo much more interesting. It wasn’t just about swiftness or virtuosity, oh no, he could play a chord in eight hundred different ways: repeat it backward, inside out, expand it, make use of its invincible power … plus, Coltrane was very sensitive and political in a completely aesthetic way.

Or take Duke’s “Black, Brown and Beige”. If you listen to it you’ll hear the emotions and the ideas. That’s why I can set poetry to his music. Ellington, Monk, Coltrane, those are people whose music I play every day. Their music is part of me. I am that music. Somebody gave me twenty-six volumes of the Duke’s music for my birthday. That’s the greatest present I’ve ever had. Well, aside from the forty-five volumes by Lenin I got from my wife. Those are gifts you never get rid of.’

I still hear that

song,

that cry

cries

screams

life exploded

our world exploding us

transformed to niggers

‘We had a house like this one, but on the other side of Newark, a big wooden house. In the summer it was hidden behind the thick, full trees. Shady and cool inside. Like here now. We used to call it the “Spirit House”. My wife and I lived upstairs with the kids and the theater was downstairs. This was in the mid-’60s. The heyday of the Black Arts Movement. Performances every night. This has always been a rough town. I was born here. I remember my wife and I being in the car one afternoon, discussing how much money we could spend on sneakers for the kids. We had words. A policeman saw us and got out of his patrol car and came over to us. Made me open the door and dragged me out of the car. Beat the crap out of me, because I was supposedly abusing my wife. She couldn’t do a thing, just watch until he was done. In ’67 people tore the city apart because of police brutality. The whites fled for the suburbs, where they still live. The middle-class Italians had nice houses up north. The more working-class Portuguese lived on the other side. We elected some new people, black leaders. But we found out that skin is thin: racism just changed form, and the corruption stayed the same.

‘I come from a lower-middle-class family. My father was a foreman at the postal service and my mother was a social worker. Our neighborhood was where what they called “decent blacks” lived.’

My parents […] They made me too ‘polite’, in one sense. Too removed from the rush and crush of blood […]. I was taught good hair and bad hair. Light-skinned folks in moccasins at picnics was hip. I didn’t even really understand the ‘war’ between my brown grandmother and the cold white boney Miss Banks of the flower committee till years later.

‘I wanted to leave Newark to develop my writing skills. I went to the Lower East Side and then to the Village. I performed with Ginsberg and Burroughs and Kerouac. But when Malcolm was murdered I couldn’t stay living in a white world anymore. I realized I had to choose. That art had to be politics. But I was married to a white woman, I had two daughters. When Malcolm got murdered I wanted to wage war. Losing my family wasn’t easy.’

You arrived, in a brownstone in Harlem. All the Misfits. Wdbe what? Killers? Agents? Revolutionaries? Black Black Black to the fore.

Black Black Black at the top.

Black Black Black.

You set up housekeeping.

‘We had four trucks and every night we drove around the neighborhood giving performances, putting art on the street. Drama here, poetry over here, music somewhere else. We would go to playgrounds, vacant lots, bars; we’d block off streets, and everywhere we went, people crowded to see us. We even got a government subsidy through the anti-poverty program. When they found out what we were doing, they cut it off.

‘What is black? Black is a color. Back then they’d shoot each other up over that. Black was Communist, or Muslim, or nationalist, or vegetarian, or reformist. Black was no longer a color. Black was an ideology. That’s why I came back to Newark.

‘I remember The Last Poets coming to the Spirit House. It was Gylan Kain, Felipe Luciano, and David Nelson; Abiodun Oyewole might have been there too. They asked me what I thought of their work. They were looking for affirmation. They were real young. I gave them a lot of encouragement. I was impressed. These sensitive artists were expressing the most advanced ideas of the political struggle. And at the same time, in their performance they returned to music’s oldest form: they used only their voices and the drum.’