(The late poet Amiri Baraka, née LeRoi Jones, gave a talk and a poetry reading in 1979 at the University of California, San Diego. Even though he was booked as part of a usually well attended poetry series at the University, publicity was sparse at best, and the attendance was smaller than what this great, if problematic writer deserved. I went to the talk and reading and took notes, a write-up of which appeared in the UCSD Daily Guardian ).
“People and their life are always the primary principle,” Baraka asserted—but is this not also the initial, anguished recognition of existence, the first trembling encounter with Being that Jean-Paul Sartre would urge us never to elide? Each work of art, then, is not a mere artifact, but a project: a condensation of the lived, the suffered, the willed. Amiri Baraka, both poet and witness, stands at the confluence of individual facticity and collective becoming. His address to the clustered students of Mandeville Center was not simply instruction, but an invitation to reflect on the conditions which make art—and, by extension, meaning—possible.
Baraka’s opening echoes Sartre’s dictum, “existence precedes
essence.” Art does not descend from a Platonic sphere, nor does it impose
itself as an immutable structure; rather, it is wrought from the raw,
unrepeatable experience of persons cast into the world. “The art comes as a
result of the people and not the other way around,” he intoned. Here, art is
revelation, not origin: literature and music are the sediment of the people’s
labor, their trembling anguish, their fleeting joy. To create is not to escape
reality but to return to it, to bear the responsibility of rendering the
particular as universal. Baraka’s own trajectory—emerging from Beat bohemia,
burning through black nationalism, arriving at a Marxist-Leninist commitment—is
the story of a consciousness grappling with the imperatives of authenticity and
social engagement. His works do not merely reflect the world; they interrogate
it, laying bare the structures of alienation and the conditions for freedom.
But what is it to be black in America, to be thrown into a
history not chosen but endured? Baraka’s reflection on slavery—Africans
uprooted, languages severed, gods silenced—is not merely historical; it is
existential. In the crucible of terror and endurance, a new being-for-itself
emerges: Afro-Americanism. “Afro-Americanism developed as a new culture—the
result of many African nationalities coming together under slavery,
creating a culture in English and influenced by Christianity.” Here, alienation
is origin, and meaning is never given, but incessantly forged against the
absurdity of history. The slaves' experience is the paradox Sartre locates at
the heart of freedom: that in the moment of greatest objectification, the
possibility of authentic self-creation still flickers. The “practical elements”
that survived—work song, spiritual—are not mere residues, but acts of defiance,
the irruptions of subjectivity where only objecthood was intended. The black
church, at first a mechanism of control, becomes a forge for revolt; it is
within this site that the consciousness of freedom stirs, and the word—sermon,
song, narrative—becomes a weapon.
The dialectic of institution and resistance is always tense,
always incomplete. The church is simultaneously locus of discipline and
sanctuary for the oppressed—a Sartrean situation par excellence, where
structure and freedom collide. “Nat Turner was a preacher,” Baraka offers;
every sermon is an assertion of transcendence against the facticity of chains.
The soul tradition, the literature spoken in churches, refuses to let pain be
mere suffering; it transforms anguish into speech, into music, into revolt. This
is not mere survival, but creation—a reclamation of the right to define
oneself, to make meaning in the teeth of nullification.
As the narrative of black existence moves, so too does its music—a living chronicle of contingency and choice. “Afro-American music reflects what the people themselves are. It’s gone through great changes because those changes reflect the changes of the people.” The blues does not merely “come up the river”; rather, it is carried by the existential migration of bodies seeking meaning, seeking escape, seeking a place to be. The music, like the people, is condemned to freedom—to invention, to adaptation, to endless negotiation with a world that is neither chosen nor wholly hostile. In New Orleans, the synthesis of African rhythm and European instrument is not a harmonious blending, but a confrontation, a surpassing of given essences toward a new, richer mode of being. The music does not precede the people. It is their residue, their echo—an affirmation of existence in the face of nothingness.Baraka does not merely celebrate these acts of creation—he interrogates the machinery that seeks to erase them. The exclusion of black, Native, Chicano, and women’s voices from the anthologies of academic power is not an oversight but a strategy. The anthology is a site of bad faith, a curation of history that seeks to mask its own contingency. “A person who puts together such an anthology isn’t necessarily ‘the bourgeoisie,’” Baraka observes, “but he’s obviously one of the bureaucrats—a little group of dudes who reflect the group that runs things.” This is the Sartrean “group-in-fusion” turned inward: a bureaucracy concerned with preserving its own legitimacy, its own narrative, and thereby denying the authenticity of voices that threaten its stability. The artist, then, is called to expose this bad faith, to rupture the serenity of the status quo with the anguish of the excluded and the cry of the Other.
To speak of jazz, disco, and authenticity is to revisit the grueling anxiety about the cooptation of freedom. Baraka names those who, in
pursuing “truth rather than profit,” resist the temptation to become objects in
the spectacle of commercial culture. The “fusion” jazz and disco that he
critiques are not merely musical forms; they are the signs of alienation—music
as commodity, as endless repetition, as narcotic. “They don’t give you a break.
I have nothing against dancing—I like dancing—but I can’t dance forever. I have
to take a break and use the other part.” The “other part” is consciousness,
reflection—the refusal to let oneself be dissolved into the endless now of
consumption.
Baraka’s poetry reading, a “blend of gurgles, howls, and
dramatic word divisions,” is not mere performance. It is Sartrean action: the
transformation of the word into deed, the refusal of the artist to remain safe
within the boundaries of aesthetic distance. His language, at once surreal and
political, exposes the structures of capitalism, the violence of history, and
the absurdity of domination. There is no comfort here, no false reconciliation;
only the raw assertion of existence, the laughter of those who know the
contingency of power and the necessity of revolt.
Baraka is not merely a writer—he is a consciousness in
motion, a restless adventurer among the possibilities of American identity.
Like Sartre’s engaged intellectual, he refuses the safety of detachment,
accepting instead the burden and possibility of responsibility. His work,
evolving in style and tone, stands as a challenge and a promise: that to write,
to sing, to speak, is always to choose, and that each choice reverberates in
the world. Someday, perhaps, America will recognize in Baraka not only the anger
of the dispossessed, but the existential grandeur of one who dared to wrest
meaning from absurdity, and who, in doing so, rendered the world more free.
(This originally appeared in a different form in the UCSD Guardian, 1979)
