Amiki Baraka
Photo Credit: Loss Glazier
Source: EPC/Amiri Baraka Author Home Page
"Live Cultural Criticism Starring Amiki Baraka and Patti Smith" by Jessamin Swearingen (adapted and edited by Allan Metz)
‘We Created It: Let's Take It Over!' web site, 1999-2001
Reflections on the beats, women in rock, jazz, punk, parallels between black poet and writer Amiri Baraka and Patti Smith, and more–Ed.
Amiki Baraka
Photo Credit: Loss Glazier
Source: EPC/Amiri Baraka
Author Home Page
Expressing alienation through poetry is a strong vehicle for social criticism. Amiri Baraka (full name, Imanu Amiri Baraka) and Patti Smith approached their critiques through tales of personal alienation during live poetry readings with musical backdrop. Baraka used jazz in the late 1980s to articulate his anger toward a racist culture that was trying to deny the influence of black people on society. Smith used a rock band to describe how artists–especially women–were thought of as dangerous once they had a cultural voice.
Though different in ethnicity and medium but similar within the context of their respective genres, Baraka and Smith spoke to society with the same message. In Baraka's "In The Tradition" and Smith's "Babelogue/Rock'n'Roll Nigger," the artists related living and creating within a society that wants to quiet opinions because of skin color, gender, or perceived threat to society. Both Baraka, as a black male writer and poet, and Smith as a female rock musician, approached the mainstream from an outside perspective. In live poetry and music, their articulated social criticism is veiled in a more easily digestible model. Baraka and Smith are creators within a world unaccustomed to standards other than those established by white male ideas of art and cultural identity. Both poets make their work's message aggressive and pointed with their words, but accessible to their audiences because of the musical backdrop.
Baraka began his writing career with the name Leroi Jones but in time renamed himself Amiri Baraka to reclaim his African American identity. At twenty-three, he moved from his home in New Jersey to New York City, and by the late 1950s he had become part of the beat movement. His cultural alienation as one of the few blacks participating in the beat movement created an interesting dichotomy within the liberal-identified beatnik culture. Most beats thought it hip to go to jazz shows and associate with the musicians, yet few white beatniks acknowledged black culture until it became fashionable within the medium of jazz....