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
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.
There is other disturbing facts surround the hideous 911 attacks, which my family and I could see from the third floor bathroom window of our homes!
God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.
Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.
This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi.