American - Poet | October 7, 1934 - January 9, 2014
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.
Amiri Baraka
LifePeopleWorldYouArtistKnow
To name something is to wait for it in the place you think it will pass.
WaitThinkNameYouPlaceWill
The man who buried Malcolm X - my Muslim imam, priest - he, after I got beat up by police... came to me, and he said, 'You don't need this American name.' And I was susceptible to it at the time because, God knows, I had just gotten whipped near to death. So he gave me an Arab name; he gave me the name Amir Barakat.
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When I was saying, 'White people go to hell,' I never had trouble finding a publisher. But when I say, 'Black and white unite and fight, destroy capitalism,' then you suddenly become unreasonable.
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The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.
ExperienceThinkGivingSomeoneYou
My bohemianism consisted of not wanting to get involved with the stupid stuff that I thought people wanted you to get involved with... namely America... Dwight Eisenhower, McCarthyism and all those great things.
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My own thinking has evolved. You find Africanisms in American speech. You find an African influence on United States culture. There are all kinds of Africanisms in America, as you would expect, if you really thought about it... That whole thing is much broader; the influence is much broader than I first understood.
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A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
FreedomManFreeCannotHeEither
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.
ArtThoughtProcessUnderstanding
You have to start with slavery because those abuses have never been eradicated. You know, people are not living in slums because they voted to. You know, their children are not in jail because they wanted them to. You know, these are the results of a people who have been oppressed and suffer national oppression, you know.
ChildrenPeopleSlaveryStartYou
America is as much a black country as a white one. The lives and destinies of the white American are bound up inextricably with those of the black American.
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The black artist's role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.
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