Amiri Baraka comes to North Beach (San Francisco)

I had hoped to arrive at City Lights an hour early to get a seat and read from Tales of the Out & the Gone before Amiri Baraka's reading. With a holiday bus schedule (and at least one missed route), I was only 40 minutes early and the chairs were all filled. I managed to secure a place on steps against the doorway through which the author would enter, and still managed to read almost half the stories in the collection and the introductions to the two parts ("War Stories," contains longer and more-or-less realistic stories written between 1974 and 1985. the second 60%, "Tales of the Out & Gone" consists of mostly wispy, sci-fi tales.)

The other side of the doorway was kept clear until the start of the reading--when it was occupied by a bodyguard in a black leather jacket just like mine. During the wait, Lawrence Ferlinghetti came through and stepped on my foot en route to the office mezzanine overlooking the reading space.

Baraka is 73. His shoulders were hunched, making him look even shorter. I thought that another bantam, Spike Lee, might look like this in another quarter century. Baraka seemed quite amiable, and funny (albeit frequently sarcastically so), not the fierce Black Nationalist/black Muslim of the late 1960s.

Baraka was introduced by Jack Hirschman, who presented him a copy of a tome of his own writings. Baraka said he was delighted that he still had elders (Hirschman and Ferlinghetti) and recalled the multi-force rejection of academic, Latinate poetry during the 1950s, including the Beats, Frank O'Hara, Black Mountain poets, et al. He recalled being the night librarian while in the Air Force stationed on Puerto Rico during the 1950s and feeling that "Howl!" showed that poetry could grab readers. This led to his legendary letter to Allen Ginsberg written on toilet paper, "Are you for real?" and the reply (written on better, French toilet paper) that he was and a list of other poets that led to the magazine Yugen, which he and his white wife Hettie produced (he did not mention her, but her own account is available in the superb memoir I Was Hettie Jones).

Without ever looking up, he read the first and oldest story from Tales of the Out & the Gone, "New and Old." Having returned to Newark in 1967 and worked to elect black officials, Baraka's home was invaded by policemen, his (second and appropriately black) wife held at gunpoint, because they heard that he was torturing a policeman on the third floor. That experience is not in the story, but the bitterness that a change in the color of the faces was only a change in the color of the faces, not policies or urban life is quite explicit: "black faces in high places, but the same rats and roaches, the same slums and garbage, the same police whippin' your heads."

The next story, "Neo American" from 1975 also slams the mayor Baraka helped elect, as the mayor (Kenneth Gibson, herein called Goodson) frets about a visit from a Republican president (W fits as well as Gerald Ford, who was then president): "The president comes--he gotta get security. And the city gotta pay for it. It's a hell of a thing, him a Republican and this city full of black Democrats" and  "It's a heck of a lot of work running a big city. Especially one like Finland Station, with a half-million people--almost 400,000 of them black or Puerto Rican. With a bunch of big mouths floating around on the edge of that, playing like leaders, always stirring some bullshit up."

Someone indelicately asked about the murder two years ago of Baraka's daughter. He told the story.

He also told of watching Venezuela's president Chaves spend 6+ hours as a queue of people who wanted to speak to him did so (once upon a time, this happened in the White House, but now presidents are kept in bubbles and anyone with contrary views is kept away as a threat to "security"). He also remarked that "Homeland Security" sounds like it was back-translated from German, where it would be a single word (heimatsikerheit?).

Asked about the N-word, he agreed that it is overused, now, and, along with "dog," is used by young black men to vaccinate themselves... and is inadequate for the m__f___ Clarence Thomas. Not surprisingly, he did not think that having "colored" Secretaries of State improved murderous US foreign policy and lying about matters such as waging war in Iraq. Senator Obama he characterized as "very slick," and the best candidate running, but emphasized that that was faint praise.

He also reminded the audience that slavery and the Middle Passage were sustained policies of terrorism, and laughed that the governor (Jim McGreevy) who made him Poet Laureate of New Jersey (before the legislature abolished the position because he was in it) is making a lot of money from his memoirs.

 Asked about the African American Beat poet Bob Kaufman, Baraka praised the poetry that he thinks should be better-known and more widely read, but sighed about Kaufman's belief that hanging out with the Beats would keep him from being beaten-up as an "uppity n_____."

The Book

Alas, Tales of the Out & the Gone is pretty insubstantial with many unsatisfying "stories. "The first 40%, "War Stories," contains longer and more-or-less realistic stories written between 1974 and 1985. the second 60%, "Tales of the Out & Gone" consists of mostly wispy, sci-fi tales.

Baraka said that as a youth he consumed Bradbury and Heinlein, and read all of Poe at age twelve. Poe with more directly sexual content seems the influence on the story I like best, "Norman's Story." It is one of few in the collection that was previously published (in Playboy) and was an attempt to write a story that would make some money. This information makes me feel that my tastes are convention (and commercial?!), but I think that it is a very well-constructed tale by a serviceman to his buddies of an ultimately terrifying sexual encounter that is reminiscent of Baraka/Jones's most famous work, the 1964 play "Dutchman."

Plot also matters in "Blank," though in relatively few of the other stories ("Blank" refers to  amnesia), but not in some of the politically focused stories in the first section.

"Mondongo," reaching back to his Air Force days in Puerto Rico and a friendship between his alter ego Johns and  a Jewish friend (Laffawiss ) who shared literary interests, undercuts the anti-Semitic rap to a degree (but falls into the suspicious "Some of my best friends" counter-argument that usually runs the opposite direction). The two with shared homesickness for New York, go to a whorehouse together (though sexual politics are muted in contrast to some earlier LeRoi Jones works such as "The Toilet").

There are some almost wistful stories focusing on aging and death, "The New Recreation Program" and "A Monk Story." And some artful dialogue ("From War Stories" stands out in this regard). Alas, there are also many puerile wordplays (outtelligence, undug, overstand, WaBenzi [black Mercedes drivers]), the kind of purple prose some consider "poetic," and only mildly amusing fantasies ("Rhythm Travel" is the best, the "clothes ray" and the "pig detector" might amuse others).

When he was LeRoi Jones, he was good at beginnings and endings, but could also riff be-bop prose  (The System of Dante's Hell. which was more a collection of stories than a novel). Rather than that he can't do them, I think that he can't be bothered with doing them, but this reduces his audience--readers, that is, City Lights had turn people away half an hour  before his scheduled appearance--and inside was jammed and soon hot.

He did not object to signing old books (he has published more than 40, though most are out-of-print, particularly those from mainline publishers).


copyright 2007, Stephen O. Murray