“Black Art”: Rejecting Enlightenment Hierarchies

“Poems are bullshit unless they are

teeth or trees or lemons piled

on a step."

"Or black ladies dying

of men leaving nickel hearts

beating them down. Fuck poems

and they are useful, wd they shoot

come at you, love what you are,

breathe like wrestlers, or shudder

strangely after pissing. We want live

words of the hip world live flesh &

coursing blood.”

So begins Amiri Baraka’s incendiary, highly polemical poem “Black Art.” Marking the beginning of his Black Nationalist period, the poem provides a useful, complicated, and in many ways horizontally problematic criticism of the poetic and symbolic tradition, and offers a multi-fold case study for Kenneth Burke’s “Terministic Screens” and Gates’ “Writing Race.” 

 In a concerted effort to renounce his middle-class, perhaps “avant-garde” upbringing (to borrow from Satrapi) and acceptance into the white poetic tradition, Baraka’s poem defines as well as celebrates “Black Art” and forcefully works to resolve toward an absolute essence of “blackness” in poetry. Key to this conception is the idea of difference/differance, as he works toward a definition of blackness in contrast to the whiteness of the ruling class and its adherents, politically, poetically or otherwise, as opposed to stating outright what constitutes “blackness.” His initial proclamation that “Poems are bullshit” unless they are “teeth or trees or lemons piled on a step” indicts the very sanitary, metaphorical language that in his view fails to affect meaningful social change through action, literally by using concrete, effective words, but also ironically by using the traditional metaphorical language of his oppressors. He is no longer concerned with the traditional aesthetics of poetry he once embraced. Thus his equates whiteness with metaphor and aesethics, and calls for a robust “black art” based on concrete, physical words and action, rather than a sanitary language that has both failed to produce change and simultaneously reinforced existing hierarchies.

While reading through Gates’ “Writing Race” I couldn’t help but relate his criticism of Enlightenment thinking to “Black Art.” Baraka’s violent rejection of T.S. Eliot and the canonical white poets of the European tradition he once sought to impress or identify with, suddenly made sense in a way that, through my own inherently limited terministic screen, it previously had not. 

Gates writes that for Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes, “Reason was privileged, or valorized, above all other human characteristics.” Considering that Enlightenment values directly informed the philosophical basis for the United States and its educational institutions —the setting for Baraka’s experience as a black man growing up with and consorting with white people— I began to explore the idea of educational privilege and my own liberal arts education’s impact on my ideas of “reason.” From the humanities course I took at FSU, the Enlightenment has been an entry point for most discussions within such classes. That such historically exclusionary and racist ideas were whitewashed in the prefacing of this movement is profoundly disturbing as the historical terminology of “reason” affected the terministic screen through which I viewed the world, and in this case, perhaps Baraka’s “Black Art.” “Reason” would have been a term that, as Burke writes, “pulls things together” when historically it had been one that “pulled things apart” alienating and further subjugating minorities. It had directed my attention toward one set of attributes and directed it toward a set of “positive” ideals.

Past this realization, the way Baraka treats language as metaphor and concrete signifier seemed to correlate directly with Burke’s “scientistic” and “dramatist” approaches to language. On one hand, he is scientistic, describing what black art “is” (or rather, “is not”) and on another seeks a more dramatistic approach to poetry in order to fully actualize a definitive, paradigmatic black art based on opposition to the very hierarchy it opposes.