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Social Change & Poetic TraditionAuthor(s): Amiri BarakaReviewed work(s):Source: Chicago Review, Vol. 43, No. 4, Contemporary Poets & Poetics (Fall, 1997), pp. 109-113Published by: Chicago ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25304217 .

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AMIRI BARAKA

Social Change & Poetic Tradition

Define social as relationship that forms community, society, as thatcommunity from its economic material base to its cultural philosophical-institutional superstructure.

Society is a sum and dimension of all its relationships whichdefine it?as to what kind of society. E.g., how people get their food,clothing and shelter?i.e., what they have to do, absolutely, to behere. These are the fundamental shapers of what we call society. Thereis no such thing as society without the relationships of those in it tocreate, change even destroy whatever it is these relations exist as.

Social Change can be progressive i.e. toward a more organicallyand consciously related entity as Human Earth. Toward the proliferation and enhancement, in all ways, of Life.

Or that change can be backward, reactionary, deathly, as the onewe live in here. The gains from the democratic struggles of the sixties rolling back down Sisyphus mountain, as the U.S. loses its national sovereignty and is ruled now more directly by an imperialistruling class, an international network of capital.

Poetry is an expression of Human Society, an aspect of its livingdescription. And like society itself, the huge living culture is relatedand ordered (by whatever) lives. Art is "an ideological expression ofsociety," says Mao at Yenan. "Where Do Ideas Come From?" asks

Mao. From "Social Life." Our real objective lives as well as the psychological reflection, clear or "through a glass darkly," of those lives.So in the arts, the culture, the society, there are classes, histories,experiences, values, assumptions, ways of rationalization, of class

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perception. "All ideas are stamped with class," says Marx. "For whomdo you write?" Mao says at Yenan. What do you celebrate, what doyou attack? What do you think beautiful, what ugly? Art expressesthis, all art, even our own!

In society there are classes, groups formed by the socio-economicdevelopment of society and our place in it.Groups of people formedby their relationship to the production process, how material life goeson. Do we own these factories, television stations &c or work forthem? Are we the purchasers of labor or the labor which is purchased?

What is our place in the social organization of labor? Do we giveorders or take them? What is the size of the social product (salary)and how do we get it?For instance, most of us here are petty bourgeois by educationand socialization, the vast majority of people can only sell the musclesin their arms.

A tradition is a historical social process in which certain recurring themes, motifs, forms, philosophies, institutions present a continuous tale of their social presence and impact. There is in any nation, two cultures, Lenin says, likewise in the U.S. there is the culture of the oppressed and the culture of the oppressors. So there is, as

well, a tradition of the oppressed and a tradition of the oppressors. Inthe U.S., a minority of the oppressed are often utilized to shape thelook, the approach, the themes, and message and psycho-social biases and presumptions on the majority of the oppressed, by adoptingthe forms of the oppressed. To look poor, for instance the jeans withthe holes torn into them, which cost more money. Or Gangsta Rap.

This is bourgeois commercial culture. Which takes the popular, as inrap, perverts the recurring themes of democracy, resistance, struggle,oppression and transforms them into a glorification of lumpen criminal Thuggishness. Extolling gangsterism not revolution.

In the arts and cultural expressions there is a sector enriched bythe U.S. rulers, while the most democratic expressive and objectivereflections of society are quickly covered, attacked, dismissed, whilethe art which expresses and confirms and legitimates the rule of capital, oppression, exploitation, imperialism, anti-democratic social relations, will be well-paid and ubiquitously in evidence and celebrated,

given prizes, declaring the supremacy of them as person, artifact,

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tradition (and white supremacy) in whatever pose.If we are consciously part of the tradition of the oppressed, the

culture of the people, we know, as Cabrai said, "...the culture of thepeople is the repository of resistance." And the culture and the traditions of the people are those of the oppressed and this culture, in itsart and statement and act, Resists. Its forms and themes and focus,fundamentally (as themeasure of consciousness is irritability) resist.For one thing, it resists being swallowed by the tradition, forms, values, of the oppressor. Which today, to sum up the tradition of slavery,colonization, national oppression, capitalism, the anti-democraticessence revealed as women's oppression, the oppression of homosexuals, the non-representative, electoral system, all these can besummed up as imperialism, the international rule by the network andinstitutions of the owners of money.

We live in the sick Rome of the last part of the 20th century,where the problem is still, as Du Bois said, the "Color Line," as thedivision of the world into a small group of imperialist oppressorsand the majority of the world as oppressed nations. Where we are,

we are witnessing this system go crazy and die, killing many of us asit goes, many of us irrational and self-deluded as it is.

For the majority of the people, social transformation is basic tohuman life.What exists, this society, as amaterial, social, economicentity and its tradition and explanations, philosophy and psycho-social delusion, must be destroyed. The traditions of those consciouslyworking for the overthrow of the oppressor society and its traditionsare democratic, cooperative, collective, socialist. We work for thiscurrent society's destruction and the creation of a Peoples' Democratic society ruled by the majority of working people in alliancewith the farmers, oppressed nationalities and the democratic bourgeois and petty-bourgeois. This is the struggle for revolutionary de

mocracy, which leads to the self-determination of the majority ofworking people and socialism, i.e. from each according to their ability, to each according to their work. Because it is only here that we

begin to face the frontier of an ultimately classless society.The cultural, artistic, literary, philosophical traditions that dominate U.S. imperialist society are confirmed as evil by the lies and

bloody violence necessary for their maintenance. Such a tradition is

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oppressive, whether it's expressed as a socio-economic system orpoem. Since the revolutionary democratic upsurge of the 1960s, therulers have mounted a counterattack for the advance of the neo-fascist corporate state, worldwide imperialism ismouthing as a "New

World Order." From the pitiful cultural Mein Kampfa of the Blooms,Helms, Schlesingers, Crouches, to the constant stream of revisionistdistortions of history and society. The popular culture of the peopleincludes the poetry of the revolutionaries of all nationalities, historically and contemporarily, in the traditions of resistance, unity, andstruggle.

The culture celebrated by the universities, is in the main, bourgeois, feudalist, slave-owning, anti-democratic. The Eurocentriccanon of white supremacy, the racial beatification of minority rule.

Metaphysics. Exploitation and pain. Its highest emotional expression is tragedy. The commercial culture of the rulers is violent, exploitative, metaphysical, based on money and anti-democracy. It isno coincidence that of the most academically celebrated U.S. poetsand writers, Pound was a fascist, Eliot, an Anti-Semitic, neo-royalist

Anglican. Henry James, Europhilic; Hawthorne, pro-slavery; Poefascinated with freakishness and death; the petty-bourgeois alienation of Lowell.

That art celebrated by the rulers, whether graphic abstraction orobscure irrelevant verse, is loudly trumpeted. Dissociativedeconstruction (not reconstruction, if you dig it) recondite and unrelated to life itself. My own poetic tradition is Fred Douglass, TheSorrow Songs, David Walker, The Shouts and The Hollers, WorkSongs, Arwhoolies, Prison House moans, Tubman and Nat Turner.Vesey and Prosser and John Brown and Melville and Harper and DuBois, Twain, Truth and Linda Brent and Box Brown. Whitman (except for his American Destiny), Brecht, Mayakovsky, Sembene

Ousman, Lu Shun, Baldwin, Hansberry, Margaret Walker, Mao, Ho,Guillen, Lorca, Roque Dalton, Otto Rene Castillo, Henry Dumas,Larry Neal, Neruda, Louis Armstrong, Babs Gonzalez, DizzyGillespie, Monk, Ellington, Sassy and Billie, The Ginsberg who proselytized for American speech, the breath phrase and Bop Prosodyand the exposure of theMoloch of U.S. imperialism, Sterling Brown,

Aime Cesaire, Olson, The Black Church, Stevie Wonder, Smokey

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Robinson.The life of the Blues, the music of resisting spirit. Niggers alive

and laughing. The victory of the people. Revolutionary democracy,the rule of workers, in alliance with the farmers and democratic forces.

It is the John Coltrane Do Ba?a Coba Beneme Beneme DouglassDu Bois Sassy Billie Return to the Source traditionof the burningexpressions of Human Desire. Both Form and Content areWeaponsof Self-Consciousness and Revolution.

With what we declared by the time of the60s Black ArtsMovement. An Art that isAfro-American (i.e. democratic) Mass-Orientedand Revolutionary. This tradition is the inspiration and method by

which we revolutionaries approach Social Transformation by thepower of our form and content, their unity and the intensity of struggle.But we must create a new superstructure from those traditions. Onecontrolled by the workers and farmers and democratic middle classes.

An international network of institutions and organizations by whichour entire revolutionary tradition can wage righteous war on the criminal rulers and their corrupt oppressive rule. For it is this wailing, thisdefiance, this resistance, this joy in the overwhelming of evil by good,that is at the base of our poetic traditions, our history, our continuinglives.

THIS TALKWAS GIVENATRUTGERSUNIVERSITY IN 1997

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