Writers Seminar at the Atlanta Black Arts Festival August 1994
Playthell, Sonya Sanchez, and Baraka circa 1994
RecentlyI received a phone call from my good buddy and former colleague at the University Massachusetts, Mike Thelwell, a distinguished writer and Professor of literature, who told me that Amiri Baraka had just given a lecture at a Conference on Art and Politics in the Age of Martin Luther King, which was in session at Georgetown University in Washington.
Mike told me that Baraka had proclaimed to this august congregation of genteel scholars and artist: “The New York critic Playthell Benjamin does not believe that art has a role in politics.”Given the concerns and priorities, indeed the raison d’etre of the conference, this declaration was intended as a dis.
What Baraka was referring to was a 1994 column I wrote when I was an Editorial Page columnist for the New York Daily News. Titled “Art Must Obey Inner Voice, Not Politics,” the commentary argued that all great art is an honest reflection of the unfettered vision of the artists, and mere politicians must never be allowed to subvert that process in order to use their art as propaganda for the politician’s vision of reality.
The genesis of my commentary – which was his ridiculous antics at an important international festival of Pan-African artists – and the portrait of Baraka it conveys, explains why he was so upset about it. But all I did was report his behavior – which was a colossal pain in the ass for everybody, as the column reprinted below will show – so if he looked like a pugnacious buffoon it was entirely his own doing. I sure didn’t tell no lies on him!
As one who knew Amiri Baraka back when he was Leroi Jones, a master word sorcerer who inspired a movement with performances of his revolutionary verse, it is painful to witness what he has become – a sad and angry old man desperately trying to even scores by scandalizing the names and misrepresenting the ideas of his intellectual adversaries.
As a founding member of the Revolutionary Action Movement – along with Max Stanford and Don Freeman – I was around when the Spirit House Movers, under the spiritual and artistic guidance of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka,electrified audiences with songs that celebrated the strength and beauty of black people and fortified us for the fight.
I remember sitting in Philly smoking wisdom weed with my good buddy Larry Neal, another conjurer of redemption songs, when he dreamed of coming up to New York and meeting the great Leroi Jones, this bad brother from Sarah Vaughn’s home town who was creating a new art with the spoken word, an art that celebrated our black selves with no apology.
And I was on the scene in Harlem when it was the incubator of the Black Arts movement, with the Juju music of the Milford Graves/ Don Pullen Duet warming up the audience for the verbal magicians that painted brave new worlds in which we could envision a future where the revolutionary masses of the Bandung World would drive the white devils into the sea: “Black people! Black people! Black people!…white people” brother Baraka chanted to our delight.
Askia and Sonya
They be Word Sorcerers!
Like all the other young seekers of wisdom and truth I basked in the beauty of their inspired words – Yusef Rachman, Askia Muhammad Toure, Calvin Hernton, Larry Neal, et al –as they lifted us to astral planes with the power of their poetry. I believed it was an art that could move the masses and change the world. In these days – Larry Neal called them “Divine Days” – Harlem enjoyed an embarrassment of cultural riches. Unique talents were everywhere because just like the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s gifted black folk came from all over the Pan-African world to get in on the action and find their voices.
Max and Abby
The First couple of the Blacks Arts Movement!
Yet the truth be told the pivotal figures in the birth of the Black Arts Movement were native New Yorkers: Cecil and Ronnie Braithwaite – who evolved into Elombe and Kwame Brath and remain cultural warriors in the field as I write – and Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, the first couple of the movement, who together founded The African Jazz Art Society in 1958.
This organization foreshadowed the cultural developments of the Sixties, and their Album “We Insist: Freedom Now” Set the standard for revolutionary black art. At that time Baraka was still Leroi Jones – whom his Jewish wife Hettie Cohen describes in her revealing book, How I Became Hettie Jones, as a nice middle class Negro from Newark who was well liked in the white beatnik milieu of Greenwich Village.
Hettie Jones
Baraka’s first wife and Mother of his talented daughters
I think that anyone wishing to understand this complex, fascinating and enigmatic poet should read Hettie’s book. I found it trustworthy because it is surprisingly free of rancor from someone who has legitimate cause for anger – considering that LeRoi had cavalierly abandoned her and their two daughters once he was bitten with the black nationalist bug and decided he needed a black wife, then quit the lily white downtown environs of Greenwich Vilage for the black, brown and beige cityscape of Harlem.
Hettie calmly describes how she had developed a hatred for racism when she attended college in Virginia, and how when the Civil Rights Movement began she and “Roi” watched the demonstrations together on TV and were equally outraged at the behavior of the savage southern whites.
She also describes how when “Roi’s” plays began to become popular among black college students he started going to performances without her. She also describes in moving detail how she watched him as he began telling people that his popular play Slave was autobiographical; which was a blatant lie!
Hettie also paints a compelling portrait of “Roi’s” central role in the development of the literature of the “Beat Generation” and the emergence of the distinguished Jazz critic Martin Williams, because he edited a journal that published them all. And finally she tells a bizarre tale about sitting at a wine and cheese book party in the Village on Sunday afternoon, a celebration of the publication of his book The System of Dante’s Hell, with their white avant garde artsy fartsy down town crowd on the day Malcom X was assassinated.
Suddenly a car pulled up and some somber looking black guys wearing sun shades got out and came over to Roi, she recalls, and announced that Brother Malcolm had been assassinated and bade him come with them. He left with them and that was the end for her.
Then there is also the revealing portrait of Leroi Jones, the Village Beatnik poet evolving into a revolutionary, in the critical assessments written by Harold Cruse in The Crisis Of The Negro Intellectual, a work the distinguished and innovative historian Christopher Lash calls “a masterpiece of Twentieth Century criticism” in his thoughtful and provocative book The Agony of the American Left.
Here Cruse evaluates Baraka at various stages of his development. First there was Cruse’s appraisal of his skills as a dramatist, and where he stood among the black Playwrights of the early Sixties. Addressing Baraka’s first success on the New York stage, Dutchman, Cruse, who had previously dismissed Lorraine Hansberry’s much celebrated Broadway debut A Raison in the Sun as lightweight melodrama, writes “What passes for new drama is but glorified soap opera about domestic conformity – the ‘best face forward’ evasion of the critical facts about Negro inner-group class conflict – or else, the 1930’s protest message revamped for the 1960’s.”
Harold goes on the explain how “Leroi Jones managed to break new ground in Dutchman, but even there a question remains about the meaning of the play’s shock-symbolism.” In other words Cruse liked Baraka’s willingness to break the shackles of tradition – as shallow as that tradition was – and break new ground; yet he found the message of his art confused.
Harold Cruse
The Premiere Theorist and Critic Of the Black Liberation Struggle
Later Cruse would look at the way black intellectuals interpreted jazz and the plight of the jazz musician, and offer his appraisal of Baraka’s magnum opus as a music critic. “The Negro creative intellectuals, the literary and cultural civil righters, supposedly understand and appreciate Jazz music. But even Leroi Jones, whose book Blues People is an important critical landmark in the analysis and interpretation of Jazz in terms of a social art, almost completely passed over the 1920’s.”
Pointing out the shortcomings of Blues People, Cruse noted: “He did not deal at all with those first attacks on Negro jazz and the ‘damming-with-faint-praise’ criticisms of Seldes and others. Jones deals adequately with the evolution of Jazz styles (i.e., the content of jazz and jazz styles and blues modes of expression), but not the social structure (the nature of the cultural apparatus to which Negro jazz and its artist are subordinated)”
Ah, but we should be careful what we wish for, because that attitude would eventually change once Baraka acquired what he believes to be a “science of society” that explains how everything, even artistic production, is determined by one’s relationship to the “forces of production;” which defines one’s “class consciousness” and world view. The claim Marxist ideologues make for Marxism rivals the claims theoretical physicist make for a “Unified Field Theory,” except they have never been able to develop one!
Yet through his many incarnations – as beatnik poet, racial assimilationist, public intellectual, revolutionary Black Nationalist, Marxist ideologue etc – Leroi Jones has remained essentially an artist. The distinguished Afro-American historian and literary critic Wilson Jeremiah Moses paints a compelling cameo of Baraka the artist in his book The Wings of Ethiopia; a remarkable combination of personal reflection and broad scholarship by one of our nation’s most learned minds.
The reigning authority on the history of Black Nationalism in America, Moses looks at the turbulent Sixties in an interpretive essay titled Rediscovering Black Nationalism in the 1960’s. “Of all the figures associated with Black Nationalism in the 1960’s,” he writes “there is, perhaps, no one who symbolizes better than Amiri Baraka the movement’s continuity with the assimilationist patterns of the nineteenth century.”
Professor Moses describes Baraka thusly: “Half mad, half visionary, always erratically individualistic and egotistical, Baraka has faithfully acted out the traditional role expected of the artist in America. His erratic genius, emotional virility, naïve zeal, and boundless energy make him the archetypical artist – as artists are conceived here in the west…We want to see ‘flashing eyes and floating hair,’ and we don’t believe anyone is an artists until he gives us reason to ‘close our eyes with holy dread.’”
Well, Brother Baraka has given us many reasons for holy dread after he dramatically exchanged Jesus for Marx and found a new religion. After that revelatory event we were even commanded to evaluate the cosmic spiritual musings of John Coltrane by some spurious Marxist critique of art, – a tendency from which the great traditions of Chinese art are still struggling to recover.
The critical lesson to be learned from the Chinese experience is that the willful employment of their art in service to political struggle by activist artist, such as “The Great Helmsman’s” use of poetry to raise the morale of his troops on the amazing “Long March,” during the arduous days of the Red Army’s attempt to seize power through protracted revolutionary war, is one thing; the use of state power to suppress or dictate artistic expression based on political criteria is quite another.
I applaud the former with deafening decibels and I reject the latter unequivocally! In my youth I read with rapture Mao’s Lectures at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, and once made it my bible on matters of artistic production and the role of the artist – and thus the basis of my criticism of art. Until I discovered that it had but litle to do with the political and cultural reality of blacks living in the United States.
Chairman Mao: The Great Helmsman
Amiri Baracka misapplies his Lessons On Art
When I was a child I thought as a child, but now I’m and old man and I have long ago put away childish things. We are not now, nor have we ever been, in a revolutionary war in this country! Recognition of this fact is the minimal essential proposition on which I and the survivors of the black radical struggles of the Sixties must agree in order to continue this discussion with any hope of making sense.
Hence the thoughtful observer must learn the real lessons about the policy of the Chinese government toward art and artist during The Great Cultural Revolution – especially what it means for the African American artist today.
In order to recognize the dimensions of this disaster for the Chinese artistic community it is enough to simply witness Chang Ching, Mao Tse Tung’s wife and leader of the notorious “Gang of Four,” charging the conductor’s podium during a rehearsal of the Peking Symphony Orchestra and snatching the baton out of the conductor’s hand, piously announcing that she will teach them how to make “revolutionary music!”
A sonic nightmare ensued that was a vivid sound portrait of the chaos and confusion that plagued Chinese society during the tragic misstep that was the Cultural Revolution. Although their efforts were well intended, as Baraka no doubt is, a sincere effort to advance the political revolution using culture as a vehicle, I cannot imagine a more graphic illustration of the dangers of placing politics over aesthetics in matters of art.
It is especially dangerous if a government – which has all of the means of persuasion and coercion already in their hands, including a monopoly over the use of organized violence – also insist that art must serve the politics of the state or political party.
Such an arrangement will inevitably result in crass philistines ignorant of art dictating to gifted and perceptive artist what their work should be about. Which almost always has to do with the pedestrian concerns of those in power who wish to remain in power; purely artistic concerns be damned!
This tendency, as the gentle reader will discover when they read my commentary on politics and art Amiri Baraka was referring to, which is posted right below this essay, was my concern. And it is a real concern, since this is what has happened everywhere in the world where the politicians who run governments have dictated what the proper role of art is; it doesn’t matter a fig whether the government is right or left in its ideology.
Ideologues are always convinced that their vision of the world is based in reality and everyone else is deluded or “counter-revolutionary,” hence dictatorships of the right and left behave remarkably alike in the ways they seek to exercise total control over their citizenry. That’s why the German Nazi’s and the Russian Communists both held positions on Jazz that were virtually indistinguishable.
This is not to say that there were no distinctions, but it was a distinction without a difference since both concluded that jazz was the sound of a civilization in decay! And so have the Muslim fundamentalists; in fact the Ayatollah banned all but martial music after the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. This should be enough to make the thoughtful observer wary of those who preach the gospel of art serving politics – especially jazz lovers!
*****************
Playthell G. Benjamin
Harlem, New York
October 31, 2009
It’s Time To Quit Afghanistan
Posted in On Foreign Affairs, Playthell on politics with tags Afghanistan war, Barack Obama, playthell's commentary, Quit Afghanistan!, Taliban on October 29, 2009 by playthellThe Commander In Chief with his Troops
President Obama Must Not Expand The War
No American President has been confronted with more disasters upon entering the Oval Office than Barack Obama. And of all the crucial decisions he has been required to make, none is more critical to the fate of his Presidency than the direction he chooses to take in Afghanistan. Fortunately, President Obama is showing the better part of wisdom by not allowing the Generals, and the congressional chicken hawks who repeat their demands like a Greek Chorus cheerleading for war, to stampede him into sending thousands of young Americans into the murderous quagmire that is Afghanistan. Any careful analysis of the facts on the ground in that treacherous terrain, and how this war relates to our strategic objective of defeating Al Qaeda, raises troubling questions that must be addressed before committing more American blood and treasure to that perplexing country – which is called “the graveyard of empires” with good reason.
In the wake of the most deadly month since our invasion of that country – with casualties running better than one a day – I have carefully analyzed the situation, and concluded that not only should the President refuse to order more troops into Afghanistan, he should withdraw the ground forces that are already deployed there. I can envision no scenario where anything that is commonly understood as a “victory” is achievable in that country. First of all, there is not a single instance in the historical record where a full blown insurgency, or people’s war, has been defeated by a foreign occupier. This is true whether we are talking about the French in Vietnam or Algeria, or the Portuguese in Africa – both of whom committed myriad crimes waging near genocidal wars in their attempt to defeat the insurgents. Even after years of warfare with France the Vietnamese still managed to defeat the mighty US military machine in a protracted war.
The white supremacist, American Exceptionalist and militarists among us have never reconciled themselves to this humiliating defeat resulting from our misguided attempt to resurrect a failed French colonial project. Hence they view the present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a chance for the US to redeem ourselves and reclaim America’s status as an invincible warrior nation. This attitude is particularly powerful among some members of the warrior class and militaristic policy wonks who presided over the Vietnam debacle. That’s a major reason why I opposed John McCain’s bid for the presidency. (see “John McCain is Not qualified to be Commander-In-Chief.”) It was abundantly clear from McCain’s rhetoric that he would seek redemption for his humiliation in Vietnam by making a stand in Afghanistan. I am convinced such a policy would result in another disaster on the scale of Vietnam.
Afghanistan is a more difficult theater to wage war than Vietnam. Aside from the mountainous geo-physical profile of the country which renders conventional warfare ineffective, there are qualitative differences in the nature of the enemy. The Vietnamese revolutionaries were atheistic political militants whose strategy and objectives were firmly rooted in Mao Tse Tung’s theories of protracted warfare; which were in turn rooted in the doctrine of Prussian military strategist Von Clauswitz. The fundamental conception of all warfare in this view is that war is an extension of politics. Mao put it this way: “Politics is war without bloodshed, war is politics with bloodshed.”
The Taliban on the other hand is made up of religious zealots who are convinced that they are the carrying out the will of God; hence they are indifferent to the objectives of those who are motivated by politics. Whereas politics is the art of the possible and thus the strategy of political actors is shaped by that reality, the Muslim Jihadists are concerned with crushing the infidel invaders and establishing Sharia law.
Mullah Omar, a fearless warrior and the supreme leader of the Taliban, which began as an organization of militant seminarians from a Madrassa where he once taught, epitomizes this other worldly view. And if one is carrying out a mandate from God compromise with earthly realities is not an option. Hence, the Taliban take a very long view of their mission – after all, the Sunnis and Shiites have been slaughtering each other for more than a thousand years over a theological argument and they are still going strong. Furthermore the Taliban leaders – having defeated a Russian army of a half million men – know that Americans will eventually tire and go home. It is in the nature of things. The only question is: How much American blood and treasure, along with innocent Afghan lives in collateral damage, will be spent before American armed forces pack up and go home? I am arguing that the time to get out is now!
Mullah Omar
An Authentic Afghan Rebel Leader
Although I could write a book on why we ought to remove our ground forces from Afghanistan, I shall confine myself to minimum essential reasons for withdrawal. First of all we have lost any moral authority because we are presently, and for the foreseeable future, supporting a thoroughly corrupt gang of dope dealers and criminals who do not have the trust or support of the majority of the Afghans. Thus they had to steal the last election to remain in power, and the Afghan people know it; what is worse is they know we know it too. And it remains to be seen if holding a new election will assuage the cynicism of the Afghan people toward the Karzi government. It will not in any case win the Taliban, because as believers in Sharia they desire a theocracy.
Hence it is to the rest of the Afghans that American policy must be directed in the battle with the Taliban for the allegiance of the Afghan people. General McCrystal correctly argues that we cannot win this war without winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people first. At present our soldiers who are entrusted with training the Afghan army to fight the highly motivated Taliban forces, who are inspired to selfless sacrifice by visions of an after life in Paradise with a harem of beautiful virgins at their beck and call, report that Karzi’s army is fueled by hashish and Yankee gold. Check out the video “The Hashish Army” on You Tube and witness the impossible task our young people have been assigned! The footage in this video was shot on the front lines in the Afghan mountians, and I think it would be criminal to continue sending brave young Americans – many of whom joined the military because they lacked opportunities in civilian society – into this deadly quagmire.
Thirdly, the mountainous landscape and difficulty in identifying the enemy means that American forces will continue to kill innocent people attending weddings and funerals that our armed forces mistake for Al Qaeda conclaves. And this is certain to increase hatred for the “Infidel American invaders.” It is the best recruiting tool the Taliban and the entire Islamic Jihadist movement could wish for. The recognition of this simple fact led William Hoh, a Foreign Service officer serving in Afghanistan, to recently resign his post after concluding that the very presence of American forces in Afghanistan is the major factor fueling the armed insurgency!
Indeed, the recent statement from Mullah Omar marking the end of Ramadan, the holiest period on the Muslim Calendar marked by intense fasting and prayer, supports Mr. Hoh’s conclusion. “”The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan calls on the public of the West not to be deceived by the assertions of Obama,” the statement reads, “who says the war in Afghanistan, is a war of necessity. The West does not have to wage this war… “The invaders should study the history of Afghanistan from the time of the Alexander…Still, if they are bent on ignoring the history, then they themselves saw with their own eyes the events of the past eight years. Have they achieved anything in the past eight years?” Those who are hell bent on pursuing this war will argue that the lack of progress in a war that has already lasted twice as long as world War II is the natural result of bungling on the part of the Bushmen, who squandered the resources in a war of choice in Iraq that they should have committed to a war of necessity in Afghanistan. A month ago that was my position too.
However when I consider Mr. Hoh’s comment in light of Dr. Daniel Ellsberg’s recent observation that before he joined the Foreign Service Mr. Hoh was a Marine officer who had commanded combat troops in Afghanistan, just as Ellsberg had once done in Vietnam before he became a national security analyst and opposed that war, therefore Hoh should be regarded as a more reliable authority on the military possibilities than the Generals, I am confirmed in my conclusion that now is the time to quit Afghanistan! The President should turn the global war against terrorists over to Special Ops and the CIA; and focus on their destruction with the precision of a laser beam. Policing and restraining the murderous repressive policies of the Taliban – especially their treatment of women and girls – is a noble calling to be sure; but it is a task that should be undertaken under the auspices of the United Nations and regional organizations with generous American support.
But let there be no mistake: escalating the war in Afghanistan is dangerous folly – as the distinguished historian Barbara Tuchman – who has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for historical writing – defined it in her seminal book: “The March Of folly.” Which is a term she coined to explain the decision of leaders throughout history who pursue policies that all the observable facts testify is against their nation’s interests. For Lyndon Johnson the motivation was ego; for George Bush it was ignorant macho. Barack must not bog this nation down in Afghanistan to prove he is a man, not the wimp the Republicans are sure to label him should he decide to pull out. For saving face is not worth a single drop of American blood.
****************
Playthell Benjamin
Commentaries On The Times
Harlem New York
October 28, 2009
*