African-American author (1934-2014)
Nonviolence, as a theory of social and political demeanor concerning American Negroes, means simply a continuation of the status quo.
AMIRI BARAKA
Home: Social Essays
The grey steel streets were indeed paltry (not our feelings, and no, not the blues) but those gray streets were dead and cold, despite our warm living selves celebrating the life in us dancing across their surfaces.
AMIRI BARAKA
The Autobiography of Leroi Jones
Love is an evil word. Turn it backwards. See, see what I mean?
AMIRI BARAKA
"In Memory of Radio"
The clear-headed will see the striking gain I've made since I did find a woman, in the real world, whose life was connected up with mine and mine with hers before we knew anything about each other.
AMIRI BARAKA
The Autobiography of Leroi Jones
I have been a lot of places in my time, and done a lot of things. And there is a sense of Prodigal about my life that begs to be resolved. But one truth anyone reading these pieces ought to get is the sense of movement--the struggle, in myself, to understand where and who I am, and to move with that understanding.
AMIRI BARAKA
Home: Social Essays
It seems my life plagues a few people. They want to "know" how I got wherever they perceive I am. Why I would leave where they "thought" I was in the first place. But was I ever there, where they thunk? And where was they?
AMIRI BARAKA
The Autobiography of Leroi Jones
The white man is in love with the past, with dead things, and soon he will become one.
AMIRI BARAKA
Home: Social Essays
And later in school I developed an interior life that was split obviously like the exterior life. One half-tied to Dey Street while we still lived there and the black life of the playground and streets. And the other tied to the school experiences of McKinley and Barringer. It must be true, maybe obvious, that the schizophrenic tenor of some of my life gets fueled from these initial sources (and farther back with words whispered into the little boy's ear, from mouths and radios).
AMIRI BARAKA
The Autobiography of Leroi Jones
The Black Artist's role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.
AMIRI BARAKA
Negro Digest, April 1965
The idea that came through in the Renaissance and took hold of the West was that life was no mere anteroom for something greater or divine. Life itself was of value--and could be made perfect.
AMIRI BARAKA
Blues People
There are black men who love the white man so dearly, who love, I must suppose, the nice warm feeling of shoe sole on their woolly heads, that they would do nothing to see that the white man relinquishes his stranglehold on the world.
AMIRI BARAKA
Home: Social Essays
The horizontal quality of black life, that is, the smashed flat quality of life for the oppressed, proposes that we is all generally equally mashed.
AMIRI BARAKA
The Autobiography of Leroi Jones
The radio, I've told over and again, was always another school for my mind. I listened to the radio all my young life, seriously and continuously, changing my focus, I guess, as I changed. The TV must serve the same purpose now for kids.
AMIRI BARAKA
The Autobiography of Leroi Jones
We try to make theories of our perception. We try to explain what was or is making repeated indents upon our senses, life. We rationalize and give something a name, a number, try to recognize a persistent quality to some element of sorrow, distance, feeling.
AMIRI BARAKA
The Autobiography of Leroi Jones
There was no communication between master and slave on any strictly human level, but only the relation one might have to a piece of property--if you twist the knob on your radio you expect it to play. It was this essential condition of nonhumanity that characterized the African slave's lot in this country of his captivity, a country which was later and ironically to become his land also.
AMIRI BARAKA
Blues People
Having read all of whitie's books, I wanted to be an authority on them. Having been taught that art was "what white men do," I almost became one, to have a go at it.
AMIRI BARAKA
Home: Social Essays
Childhood is like a mist in so many ways. A mist in which a you is moving to become another you.
AMIRI BARAKA
The Autobiography of Leroi Jones
And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.
AMIRI BARAKA
"Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note"
If we live all our lives under lies, it becomes difficult to see anything if it does not have anything to do with these lies. If it is, for example, true or, say, honest.
AMIRI BARAKA
Home: Social Essays
There are things, elements in the world, that continue to exist, for whatever time, completely liberated from our delusion. They press us also, and we, of course, if we are to preserve the sullen but comfortable vacuum we inhabit, must deny that anyone else could possibly tolerate what we all agree is a hellish world.
AMIRI BARAKA
Home: Social Essays