[close]

When did you first become aware that you were being watched?
The Freedom of Information Act papers confirmed what was happening, in the sixties and the seventies. For me it goes back to being in the Air Force. That's when all of my Freedom Of Information Act stuff begins, when I was an Airman Second Class Stationed in Puerto Rico. The first mention in there when they charged me with being a Communist, of some anonymous form as I always think - I don't remember being a Communist. I was given an undesirable discharge from the Air Force - it begins there. Then, various kinds of things you're involved with - you see that they have listings; that they've taken note of this, and taken note of that through the years, and although they claim they don't do it anymore, obviously they still do.

Had you already begun writing at that time?
I began writing in high school actually, in terms of a little bit of scribbling. I wrote a little bit in college, but it was in the service that I actually began to write and began to really educate myself, in great leaps and bounds. The two years that I spent in the Air Force was - I think - the most intensive period of self-education for me.

At that time, would you say your work had begun to take on a political nature, or was it more of an artistic ambition?
I've never had anything but the artistic question of feeling, the question of wanting to express myself, but then that gets to be more and more specific.

So you wanted to be a writer, but not necessarily any kind of spokesperson?
Oh yeah. It was about expression, really - the point that I have things that I want to say, I have feelings that I want to express. I didn't try to define what kind of category those things would come under, that was what it was.

By the time you had changed our name from Leroi Jones to Amiri Baraka, what aspects of your previous lifestyle did you have to leave behind?
By that time, it was sort of after the fact. I had gotten away from the whole circumstances that I had considered anti-political - namely the whole Village/Lower East Side thing - and had got a divorce, moved to Harlem, and involved myself even more intensely in that struggle. So, by the time the name change came I had been involved in I guess a more intense level of involvement in the liberation movement. So, the name change - the name was given to me by the man who buried Malcolm X - came as a kind of confirmation of that activity, not an initiation of it. That's all it was. I could accept the idea of being closer to Africa - even thought the name first given to me was Amiri Baraka, which was Arabic, but I Swahili-ized it, banto-ized it and it became Amiri Baraka. Then I was given the name Immamu, which was a title - which I dropped. People still call me that - certainly in Newark. That was just a confirmation of the particular stance that I was taking.

Do you find that people generally tend to misconstrue what you're trying to say?
I think in political ideas, they do that all the time to make you seem like you're half-brained, or you've got some kind of oppressive ideology. They do it usually just to narrow the range that your philosophies can actually reach, to limit you. Sometimes they take your ideas and use 'em and then attribute backward versions of those ideas to you. The whole intensity of class struggle in the arts, comes from critical writing, see, that's where the class struggle is. Various critics represent this side or that side, they represent the forces of good, the forces of evil, and you always see them working out in public.

Have certain ideas of yours been more greatly distorted than others?
I think that people tend to cover and then to distort. For instance, now these people come out with the idea of "performance poetry", and it was just like, a fake idea. When we started reading poetry the way that we thought it should be - according to living rhythms: that the poetry was song actually, that it was an emotional kind of confrontation, not just an intellectual one, or one about alienation or extraction. Then people start saying, "Wow, if they're reading poetry like this then they must be performing", then they create a category called "performance poetry" of which these few people are the leaders. At the same time what they're trying to do is actually distort what you're doing - as if performing the poetry was an act that was not endemic to poetry itself, but that it was some kind of thing you were adding on to it; rather than seeing poetry essentially as a score. Written poetry is something like a score of written music. It has to be actually played, by the person, by the instrument.

Wouldn't you agree that there is a paradox involving the emphasis on education, whereas the public school system is fundamentally trying to condition people?
Well, see that's the point - you emphasize education, you emphasize the fact that people have to take the task of changing these schools as a revolutionary item. It's not that you just say that education is no good because it's created by the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois education is no good - although god knows that you have to have it to make it in this kind of bourgeois world. What we're saying is that you have to forcefully turn the focus of education so that it begins to create self-consciousness, so that it begins to uncover, not cover. That's why we want the youth to go into these schools, go into the public schools, grammar schools, high schools, colleges - to go in these schools and grapple with these curriculums; to struggle with these fascist forces within the schools and to turn 'em around, so that it's a question of fighting for some new directions in the schools, not just going there accepting the status quo.

There seems to be some difficulty in accepting that the purpose of public education is to simply train people to fit into the existing class and economic structures.
That's what they are for, you have to impose another kind of focus on it. That's why we talk about cultural revolution - we have to actually try to make cultural revolution in these schools, in these institutions, otherwise they would do what they do normally - turn out Americans of the most backward ideological development.

The obvious answer to that would be to enter these institutions and be able to exploit the resources for information they contain.
Yeah, again, to the extent that school is a combination of resources. They have to be utilized, they can be accessed, but you have to make certain that you are not being trained by those institutions, because that's the point - to train you. You have to make sure that you can use them as a point of demarcation for your education. What they say, what they want, as opposed to what I'm finding out, and what I'm doing. Use it as a point of departure for real development.

Do you agree that the nature of our society prohibits many - if not most - working class citizens from being able to continue their education beyond high school?
On one hand you have what are called advanced workers - people who might never go to college but who say study, study, study, study, and might turn themselves into advanced revolutionaries, advanced social political thinkers. Then there's people who go to college, and all that college does is to provide them with a method of being co-opted into the system. Most people will never go to college, therefore you have to emphasize the importance of the advanced workers, the people who are not in college, but who are still endeavoring to educate themselves. At the same time, you cannot dismiss formal education. You have to look at it dialectically and suggest how it can be improved and what must be done to change its' class base, to change its' class focus - what it wants, what side it's on; because the schools now generally are on the side of the rulers.

Again, we're simply talking about a fair exchange between what one puts into the system, and what one expect to get back.
Yeah, but you have to assault it - the educational system has to be confronted and challenged and changed and you getting what you want out of it is part of that. I don't think that you can get what you want out of it unless you see that the main focus of the current education system is negative. I mean, they've turned most of these schools into...almost vocational schools - it's like the school is like the unemployment pages or something. You get out and you've got a job, and that's the whole function of it. But the function of college is supposed to be to teach you how to think, and that's a wholly different priority.

So no matter how you look at it, would you say that this people's revolution is imminent?
I think that it depends on the degree of unity and the organization of the people. The question of people's democracy in America - public control of the corporations, banks, utility companies, can that be brought on peacefully, or is that gonna take war? Some of it will come non-violently, the rest of it's gonna have to come with the assault of the people, which is going to be bloody. They're not asking for anything else, because they're not going to do anything else, but exacerbate it until it does come. Some of them actually believe that they've got the tanks and guns to kill people - they welcome it.

© J. Free / The New Puritan ReView; February 1992; 2007

photos of Amiri Baraka & Blue Ark in NYC 1985 © J. Free; 1985, 2007