Barakas work galvanized generations of younger artists, even as his stridency alienated him from the mainstream.WilsonAP One of Americas most important and controversial literary figures, Amiri Baraka, died on Thursday from complications after surgery following a long illness, according to his oldest son.Baraka was 79. Baraka co-founded the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s.His literary legacy is as complicated as the times he lived through, from his childhood where he recalled not being allowed to enter a segregated library to the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.
His poem about that attack, Somebody Blew Up America, quickly became infamous. No I have regrets that they didnt pay me my money cheap criminals. Over his life, Amiri Baraka would express an extremely broad range of beliefs some offensive, some achingly beautiful. He was born in 1934, in Newark, N.J., as Everett LeRoi Jones. He remembered the passing of musician Miles Davis for NPR, saying he wanted to be just like Davis as a teenager. I wanted to look like that too that green shirt and rolled up sleeves on Milestones. And be able to play On Green Dolphin Street or Autumn Leaves. Thats the music you wanted playing when you was coming into a joint, or just looking up at the sky with your baby by your side, that mixture of America and them changes, them blue African magic chants. The Dutchman Amiri Baraka Pdf As a young man, the writer was part of New Yorks then-mostly white Bohemian community. Then, in 1964, the writer still known as LeRoi Jones wrote a play, The Dutchman, which won a prestigious Obie award and established the playwright as a literary star. Its set on a subway train, where a beautiful white woman strikes up a conversation with a young black man and begins to tease him mercilessly. You look like you live in New Jersey with your parents and are trying to grow a beard. But the teases become taunts, and the interaction grows ugly. The play, said critics, expressed deep hostility towards women a charge that followed the playwright for much of his life. After the murder of Malcolm X, he left his white wife and two daughters to live by radical black nationalist ideals. He described it on NPR in 2007: In the 60s, after Malcolms death, black artists met and decided we were gonna move into Harlem and bring our art, the most advanced art by black artists, into the community. The Black Arts movement was a basically a counterpart to Black Power, and Baraka wrote a number of books now seen as foundational for a certain kind of black aesthetic and cultural identity. His work would always emphasize social and political issues: The peoples struggle influences art, and the most sensitive artists pick that up and reflect that, he said.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |