Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an African-American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at a number of universities, including the State University of New York at Buffalo and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received the PEN Open Book Award, formerly known as the Beyond Margins Award, in 2008 for Tales of the Out and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth7 October 1934
CityNewark, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to black people./May they pick me apart and take the useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings./And leave the bitter bullshit rotten white parts alone.
There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you
I am inside someone who hates me. I look out from his eyes. Smell what fouled tunes come in to his breath. Love his wretched women.
I'd say I'm a revolutionary optimist. I believe that the good guys -the people- are going to win.
Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.
My responsibility is to truth and beauty.
The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is … political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.
The torture of being the unseen object, and the constantly observed subject.
The artist's role is to raise the consciousness of the people. To make them understand life, the world and themselves more completely. That's how I see it. Otherwise, I don't know why you do it.
In America, black is a country.
A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist.