The paradox of experience: black art and black idiom in the work of Amiri Baraka - Critical Essay
Throughout the prose writings, artistic manifestoes, poems, and plays that mark his move toward the Black Arts, Baraka consistently strives to express the paradoxical character of African American existence. Each of the various formulations--the "no-man's land," the community of nonconformity, the separate experience that is yet inseparable from American life and culture--emphasizes more than just marginalization by the dominant culture; the more important objective is to capture its singular Analysis Essays facticity, which I have described as an original homelessness. This does not mean that Baraka seeks to redefine African American life as an ahistorical and purely existentialist condition. Just the reverse is true. However its historical character is such that the memory of a proper origin has been displaced and transformed into the unreality of an "emotional abstraction." His choice of words is revealing: "Abstraction" is the sign of a Western art that seeks to escape from reality into the bloodless realm of Ideas. Accordingly, the concrete historical character of African American existence cannot be grasped by the simple substitution of an African pre-history for the founding Analysis Essays myths of America. Insofar as it keeps the myth of origin intact, such a gesture leads to the same kind of escapism that is itself a prevailing feature of the American landscape. "The denial of reality," writes Baraka, "has been institutionalized in America." This in turn can only be combated effectively by the far more difficult task of finding one's place: "An artist, any artist, must say where it is in the world that he actually is. And by doing this he will also say who he is" ("Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall" 182). At one level, this repeats a classic modernist gesture: The Analysis Essays self is an invention, an innovation rather than a derivation, stamped upon the chaos of Becoming. However, once Baraka links this gesture to the question of place and "place/meant," the process of self-discovery becomes considerably more complicated because the intended place is neither present in the "here and now" nor concealed in the oblivion of a lost or fragmented tradition. Beyond the condition of impossibility, this "neither-nor" indicates that the question of place must be rethought outside of this binary opposition, and that therefore the modernist gesture must be repeated with a difference. Otherwise, the singular paradox of this in/separable experience that places African American existence at Analysis Essays the limit of and beyond the borders of the Western-European and Euro-American, the African and Afro-American will be reduced to the same structure of identity that has, unsuccessfully, drawn its color lines.
If we therefore strive to free up the implicit tendencies within Baraka's artistic development, one finds an anticipation of a Black self that transgresses the limits of these cultural spaces and opens itself to the play of their non-identity. What I am suggesting here is that Baraka conceptualizes Black selfhood as a transgression: The "Black self" is never an "itself"; it exceeds both the myth of the autonomous individual and the organic, collective unity. Transgression, therefore, Analysis Essays is the unthought that animates Baraka's thought without being named--except, perhaps, as poetry.
What needs to be shown, therefore, is the constitutive role that poetry plays not only in the unmasking of American hyper-reality, but also in the dismantling of the Western traditions of art and humanity, and the corresponding understanding of the self. On the one hang Baraka's destructive poetics adopts the visionary elements and rebel stance of his avant-garde predecessors, especially the Beats, in his endeavor to destroy and reinvent both the images and symbols of a White (and Black) middle-class consumer culture as well as the rules of their production and validation. However, his attempt Analysis Essays to "bring out a little American dada" must go beyond the anti-establishment iconoclasm of a Ginsberg potato salad and the neo-romantic posture of the outsider. American dada must become Black dada, and this passage signifies his desire to destroy the sacred cows that even the Beats could not relinquish--most notably the Whitmanesque persona who reconciles the teeming otherness of the American landscape into one grand Subject in a gesture of erotic embrace.
In what follows I attempt to explore the ways in which Baraka's destructive poetics approaches the very limit--indeed, illimits--the various American modernist reincarnations of identity. When Baraka articulates the relation of the Black artist to the Analysis Essays Western and American traditions through the metaphor of the "catalyst," he indicates a technique of artistic production that both repeats and destroys the basis of the American experience, indeed destroying its very status as a universal basis. However, this gesture should not be interpreted as a simple negation. Baraka's poetic destruction enacts a violent sacrifice of the tradition from within: The poet transforms his experience of the American tradition by dismantling its metaphysical and mythical basis, a coupling that both justifies and destabilizes its universal claims, and in so doing he forces it to yield to and yield up those possibilities that have been suppressed in its Analysis Essays very construction as a foundation. This destruction consists therefore of a Saying that exceeds the boundaries of the American tradition and offers it to the play of differences--not simply in the form of plural voices and subjectivities, but outside of the Subject-centered bias, the imperative for secure and certain boundaries--and which therefore offers "itself" to the possibility of losing its foundation, of approaching the very edge of Saying which says something other than the repressive and exclusionary logic of identity.
In what follows I will focus on several poems from the collections The Dead Lecturer and Black Magic, and particularly "Black Dada Nihilismus" ("BDN"), because so many of Analysis Essays the motifs that are present in other writings are gathered here and given decisive expression, including Baraka's confrontation with both the modernism of Eliot and Williams and the anti-art impulse of the European and American avant-gardes. What makes "Black Dada Nihilismus" so decisive is the way in which it dramatizes the tradition of Western art and thought as a series of masks that are repeated and emptied of their idealist prejudices in a ritualistic ecstasy. However, this ecstatic transport does not aim at a pure transcendence that would somehow give birth to an original self out of the unity of Being; rather, the movement leads nowhere, or, Analysis Essays more precisely, to the suspension of the known and knowable ground--in other words, one's place in some possible or existing cosmic and social order. In "Black Dada Nihilismus," it is precisely the who of this black self and blackness itself that are in question. How will black writers place themselves vis-a-vis the cultural memory of Africa if this origin does not come to presence other than as a trace inscribed in the language of an "alien tribe"? And how will they exceed this other language when it has already positioned them, as victims and chroniclers?
In other words, the black self cannot be constructed out of a contradiction Analysis Essays between two distinct heritages, the Western and the African, because they do not stand opposite one another, nor can the one be theorized as the negation of the other. Consequently, there can be no third term that mediates between the two, as for instance the universal idea of humanity has often been made to do. The cultural memory of Africa in-forms the African American's life, but it is trans-formed by the American, implying that such memory is neither original nor pristine; there is only that which recurs through the repetition of a trace, and that repetition brings forth a non-identical difference and presents the black poet with Analysis Essays the task of creating new symbols and myths by appropriating this alien language in terms of what remains most alien to it--namely, Literature. Despite Baraka's rejection of the aestheticist character of Western Literature, the essays collected in Home demonstrate just how much the Black writer must remain within its domain, because literature is that very place where the trace of the alien has been preserved, guarded in its non-identity. Literature, to paraphrase Derrida, exceeds literature. Entering into this fractured and contested site, the Black writer must work through literature, but in such a way as to test its limits to see whether it can yield itself up Analysis Essays to a new, radically different syntax and symbolism. In so doing, s/he remains ultimately faithful to literature's infidelity, whose "subversive juridicity requires that self-identity never be assured, nor reassuring" (Derrida 216).
In poetic terms, the paradox of African American experience is that the poet must work through the forms he has taken over from another heritage, and in so doing unwork the grounds and aims of that heritage by the violent assertion of a trace: "Black scream / and chant, scream, and dull, un / earthly / hollering" ("BDN" 98). Nonetheless, these howling exclamations, enunciated in a broken and strange idiom, are juxtaposed with the traces of a Analysis Essays memory that gains its force from its intrusive silence. The "un/earthly hollering" is itself that which can hardly be said, or if it can, only with an unearthly--that is, inhuman--voice. This violence can certainly take the form of the sort of linguistic subversion elucidated in Gates's rhetorical theory--inversion, parody, and signifyin'--techniques that open Western discourses to the play of signifiers. However, it can also take the "form" of a silence that continues to hold out, refusing to become a moment in the process of self-representation, hollowing out speech and afflicting memory with traces that are heard in a sense, but never quite recovered, whether it be in Analysis Essays the poetry of high modernism, in the American idiom, or in those other poetic modes predicated on the desire to rediscover a principle of wholeness out of the experience of fragmentation. It is this second form which predominates in "Black Dada Nihilismus."
The first part of the poem proceeds in imagist fashion, juxtaposing fragments of esoterica, artistic catastrophe, backroom intrigue, genocide, and deicide, which create a complex feeling of dread, anticipation, and subterranean conspiracy. The apocalyptic tone invoked by the cryptic name of the daemonic force links this poem to the visionary tradition of Lautreamont and Rimbaud. Like the latter's gaze into the abyss, Baraka's poem carries out Analysis Essays a symbolic destruction and ritual purification both of an idealized yet decrepit tradition and of the monadic self situated within. In "Black Dada Nihilismus," however, the attack is even more pronounced, more severe. The poem begins with a blank space, followed by a period. (5)
Against what light
is false what breath
sucked, for deadness. (97)
This suggests more than just a rhythmic delay in the breath. It also complicates the very beginning of the poem as an absolute beginning, rendering it indistinguishable from an ending. What is it that inhabits this space, separated from the text of the poem by a period? It is a silence outside Analysis Essays the text, a language beyond language, yet just as surely does it indicate a "pre-text" that is equally an "infra-text," the very text of the tradition and its Others, a tradition no longer governed by the law of identity, which is no longer a tradition. The poem marks itself off against this silent space in a gesture of opposition, yet it just as surely belongs to it:
Destruction cannot simply do away with this space, it owes something to this silence; and the ensuing poem, which lies on the other side of the period, is already spoken by it even as it strives to make that silence speak Analysis Essays in a denaturing idiom.
The poem foregrounds the allegorical significance of light and breath, the very symbols of God and spirit, performing a mock Black Mass, which, rather than invoking the name of Satan or the anti-Christ, reveals the essential emptiness of the space they once inhabited:" ... find the West / a grey hideous space" (98). Or, better to say, the Anti-Christ is Nietzschean, the principal member of the "nihil German killers" who philosophized with a hammer--that is, who "sounded out" the highest values of Western Man and found them hollow. This grey, lifeless space is revealed as empty, made hideous by the decaying death mask of Analysis Essays God, who is, after all, the highest Idea, the Unity; but, on the other hand, the very collapse of the Ideal as such promises a metamorphosis or, better to say, a transmutation of the de-idealized self into a future one, invoked by the occult science of alchemy and its patron deity Hermes Trismegistus.
However, it is really in the second part of the poem that the idea of this future self, like the miraculous transmutation of lead to gold, is affirmed but at the same time abruptly broken off. Part 2 turns to the epic mode, and in a Fanon-like fashion, this new self will decide his existence Analysis Essays in an act of violence: "Plastique, we / do not have, only thin heroic blades. / The razor. Our flail against them...." This act of violence becomes an act of symbolic murder committed against those very icons that express idealism and beauty and their complicity in the oppression of the black man: "Come up, black dada / nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape / their fathers. Cut the mothers' throats" (98). However, this heroic self, this creator, destroyer, and self-definer, represents, in a sense, the last seduction of European humanism. Even Sartre's existentialist revolt, the "last breath" of this tradition, must be swept aside because no matter Analysis Essays how strident his attack on humanism as an ideology of oppression may be, Sartre continues to espouse a much more rigorous form of humanism whose basis is thoroughly Cartesian. (6) Consequently, the "last breath" of the tradition still speaks the language of the cogito, but the latter is no less implicated in the incessant need for modern Western man either to empower himself as a Subject or to search for an originality somewhere outside of his technical/rational world view. Witness, for instance, Sartre's hope that the liberation of the colonized peoples will lead to the decolonization and renewal of Europe itself. (7) The Sartrean type of man, Analysis Essays perhaps the most revolutionary that Western culture has produced, must also be killed off in order for a radically heterogeneous Black self to come into being. Yet this must be accomplished without authoring it. For this very reason the poem re-crosses yet another revolutionary terrain, the vast pre-text of American Modernism in the persona of Williams and Olson, and displaces their poetic vision.
Halfway through part 2, the three-line stanzas with their fairly regular iambics are interrupted, and quite literally torn apart. What ensues, a fractured line with words often split into their elements, represents nothing less than the violent de-naturing of Olson's Projective Verse. Rather than subordinating Analysis Essays the line to the breath as Olson does, this "Black scream / and chant, scream, / and dull, un / earthly / hollering" forces the voice beyond its conventional rhythms. It is a parodic anarchy, out of tune and out of step, which interrupts the flow of the voice, like the honk of the jazz saxophone. The analogy should not be taken as coincidence. In Baraka's short story "The Screamers," written during this same period of time, he identifies the honk as the basic element of a black world view: "The repeated rhythmic figure, a screamed rift, pushed it insistence past music" (174). At once both musical Analysis Essays figure and stance, an aesthetics that posits its own world view, the honk becomes the figure for Baraka's search for his own poetic idiom beyond any and all existing forms. Jazz music forms the inspiration for Baraka's poetics not only because it is an indigenous Afro-American cultural form of expression, but also because it transgresses the rules of sensibility that govern other musical forms, even to the point of transgressing the very rules of rhythm and harmony themselves.
It is not only Olson, however, but Williams's experimentations with his American Idiom that are repeated and expended:
(I call them sinned
or lost
burned masters
of the lost
nihil Analysis Essays German killers
all our
learned
art ... (99)
This parodic miming of the variable foot no longer simply consummates a marriage between a language and a people within a particular locale, be it Paterson, Gloucester, or America. It exaggerates it, and in so doing interrupts the myth-making and epic orientation of these two great American modernists.
The final section of the poem returns to and repeats one of the crucial aspects of epic performance, the act of naming. Here, however, this gesture does not allow the heroes to appear before a community, recalled from oblivion by the poet's inspired words; on the contrary, the names and signatures of the Analysis Essays rebels, heroes, and victims do not speak, but are rather spoken for in a gesture of dedication:
"For tambo, willie best, dubois, patrice,
mantan, the
bronze buckaroos.
For Jack Johnson, asbestos,
tonto, buckwheat
billie holiday.
For tom russ, l'overture,
vesey, beau jack" (99-100)
This list of names parodies Whitman's gesture of cataloguing and incorporating the alien into an ever-enlarging Self because they are ex-corporal: Rather than establishing a community within the continuity of a tradition, they mark its absence, and their mute resistance bears witness to the nameless others who are consigned to the other side of the initial period. Yet, it is precisely because the nameless cannot Analysis Essays stay in its proper place, but rather insinuates itself into the universe of names constituting the outward aspect of the dominant tradition, that this very tradition is denied the possibility for self-identity. (8) Through the ruse of a technique, Baraka names the nameless, which creates an aporia that interrupts the functioning of the proper name. They represent improper names to the extent that their presence marks a lacuna within the tradition that is always already there. Thus, the "grey hideous space" of the poem expresses not only the historicist logic of decline, but also the very impossibility of this historical space/time called the West--impossible as an identity Analysis Essays realized in a movement of self-becoming, impossible as an "I/We-here-now" that guarantees the presence-to-itself of the universe of names out of which its reality is constructed.
If, however, the names fail to satisfy the criteria for the proper name, still they do function and do in fact bring something into presence. Of course, it is possible to re-situate them within the existing universe of proper names through historiographical research and narrative strategies; nonetheless what is there first of all in this instance of poetic presentation is silence, an ominous silence whose very presence presents an obstacle to ordinary discourse because it cannot be properly phrased according to its Analysis Essays rules. To adopt a term from Lyotard, such a situation constitutes a differend, where "something 'asks' to be put into phrases and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away." What is most important about Lyotard's idea for our purposes here is the way in which he translates the possibility of communication into a question of an "impossible" responsibility, for through the inability to phrase, human beings "are summoned by language ... to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not yet exist" Analysis Essays (Lyotard 13).
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