Somebody Blew Up America

A tortured road or sea voyage leads from Africa to America and back to Africa in that single name change. It was a journey of tears but wild hope also. They are always the best and the worst of journeys.

Leroi is a French legacy, maybe from New Orleans. That was the Royal name a Negro working class family in Newark, New Jersey gave to their infant in 1936. He inherited it from his father Leroy.

Jones, the most common Anglo-Saxon name he inherited from an unknown white-man slaver. Slave mothers have through history named their babies after their rapist white-masters. It is like tattooing the name of your prison home over your right arm. They still do that. No-one can exactly explain why that badge of shame becomes a badge of identity. After it there is the silence.

The Newark Jones were, in their neighbourhood, the browns. They affected to despise the yellows. The yellows were the middle-class coloured. The browns (or at least their youngsters) revered and emulated the blacks. The blacks got drunk routinely. Their schooling and adult lives were broken and distraught. But they were shining, woolly-headed black. Black pride in a white man's world was better than brown patheticness.

Oh how Leroi loved the blues! Only they could speak the language of his actual life. They had their genesis in the African blood transplanted into Francophone Louisiana. A whisper of that journey may survive in the word "jukebox", professedly of African origin. I have read "hip" is also of African etymology. I had always vaguely thought juke had something to do with juice and hip had something to do with the black man's swinging anatomy. A white man cannot publicly discuss African studies without going blue in the face. Whatever.

Leroi also loved baseball. The Negro professional teams of his youth were higher than mere Gods. The greatest were the Elites, pronounced by everyone Elights.

Newark to the white folks is always a dreary industrial city. It exists only because it's there. America is always somewhere else. Newark to the black folks begins as a practical joke. The "niggers" escaped from the cotton fields to go to Harlem. They asked at the train-ticket counter for "New Aark". There, they kept looking for Harlem, while finding housing and an industrial job. Then, as family men, they were stuck there and stayed.

The Negro experience transformed Newark, although the white folks usually never noticed except in a riot, or later an election campaign. Newark became New Ark. The vessel that skippered the Negroes from perdition to Mount Ararat.

Leroi Jones was a precocious school boy. He, in the time-honoured way of poets, flunked Howard University. Howard historically was the Negro Harvard. He joined the air-force. He was discharged after being found to be in possession of "Communist" literature. His exact contemporary Harvey Oswald could shout "Communism" all day in the marines and be promoted. That may be because Oswald was white. The other possibility enters into the dark world of white paranoia.

On an air-force pension, Leroi pursued his prime vocation as a poet. In his autobiography he recalls weeping uncontrollably while reading a poetry magazine monopolised with the language of Robert Frost. He ached for that world of pristine coldness where he could saunter in a New England park. But he could never do so because his skin was black. But now to the Negroes he, by holding that magazine, was already a yellow.

He entered into Greenwich village, "The Village", the home of bohemian New York. The entire experience of subterranean East Coast America entered his bones. He had his poetry published in short-lived rag magazines. He loaded himself with heroin and booze. He did burglaries. But he confined that to books from a much loved book shop.

Slowly, as happens to good poets, his name became known to a very large number of people. He joined a troop of bohemian Americans on a Cuban sponsored visit to the fledgling Castro revolution. He found out what eventually strikes nearly every visitor to a Communist or ex-Communist country. How distorted is our window to the Communist world.

One day he would say he hated all white people and wished they could be exterminated. Another day he would say white people are good and bad too even though they torture black people every day.

After Malcolm X's assassination he left Harlem and his Jewish wife and returned to Newark. He was fully prepared for the revolution. In the 1967 Newark riots he experienced first-hand two truisms. The black rioters will also burn their neighbourhoods. The white cops will make the black rioter not a person like himself but a rabid dog. No revolution came out of it. Only gutted neighbourhoods and worse dysfunction. Out of it he wrote his best play, Slave Ship. He, a black man in the middle of the revolution, returns to his ex-white wife's home to rescue his daughters. At the end of the play all his family are dead. Like all the most searing writing that has always been unfit for general public viewing.

He adopted the black Muslim religion and changed his name to Amiri Baraka. That is a Swahili name that pertains to black Royalty. But when he visited Africa he always said his home was America. The black American is the most American of all. Perhaps no other ethnic group talks so obsessively about it hatefully, hurtfully and sometime lovely. The Indian has his pre-America. All the other Americans have their ethnic land memory. He only has America. Unless he also has Hayley's Roots. That is a complete fake. In America it is also as true as you want it to be. Perhaps he has never admitted it to himself that Amiri Baraka sounds curiously like an anagram of America.

He became famous and even quite rich. In American English that means very rich. I am using the language-modifier used everywhere except America. He had campaigned for black government in Newark and suffered the disillusionment when the black politicians and bureaucrats sounded just like the old white crowd. But he did well. New Jersey State appointed him their poet laureate.

One day in 2002 as befitted his office he read out his poem at a New Jersey poetry convention, Somebody Blew Up America. By half way through it members of the audience were screaming for his blood. He was soon dismissed from his State office for "hate language". If his poem had suggested all white people be exterminated they would most likely have applauded a "court poet".

Very funny things had happened in New Jersey on September 11 2001. Things that the day after disappeared from even the online local archives. New Jersey is across the Hudson river, a freeway beltway from New York city.

Newark city quickly appointed him their poet laureate and reinstated his official salary. The poem Somebody Blew Up America covers history from the European expansion of the world. It finishes with questions about September 11 that the mainstream media will not or cannot seek answers to. The poem has never been published.

In recent days we hear that tens of thousands of New Yorkers are sick and dying from "World Trade Center" disease. Its symptoms are respiratory and skin rashes. Burning fuel and tower crashes cannot explain that. A scientific diagnosis would find pulverised explosives and dust. But no doctor can officially diagnose that. So the New Yorkers share now the fate that befell the great defeated cities of World War Two.

That is a fit subject for an epic poet. Like Homer and Shakespeare et al, Amiri must sing for his supper and endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.