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
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.
Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.
The films of Warhol, when they are about anything are about sucking people off. This can be high art, to people who are interested in sucking people off. But that will not liberate Black people.
The word “art” is something the West has never understood. Art is supposed to be a part of a community. Like, scholars are supposed to be a part of a community... Art is to decorate people’s houses, their skin, their clothes, to make them expand their minds, and it’s supposed to be right in the community, where they can have it when they want it... It’s supposed to be as essential as a grocery store... that’s the only way art can function naturally.
There is no depth to education without art.
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.
Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.
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 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.
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.
This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi.
The landscape should belong to the people who see it all the time.
Back home the black women are all beautiful