The Personalities Who Inspired LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka:

Abstract

Amiri Baraka almost single-handedly changed both the nature and the form of post- World War II Afro-American literature. Biographer Arnold Rampersad places Baraka alongside Phyllis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison as one of the eight figures who have significantly affected the course of African American literary culture. He is a singular lyrical poet whose work reveals a special gift of emotive music with a passionate and
incantatory beauty. Baraka’s work is concerned with the sounds of black life and that probably more than any other writer, Baraka captures the idiom and style of modern urban black life. In his writing and drama Amiri Baraka’s personal yearning for individuality and meaning captured the imagination of a generation of African Americans because to varying degrees that group was experiencing similar tensions between moods ranging from spiritual ennui, personal malaise, and identity crisis on the one hand to racial kingship, black consciousness, and cultural regeneration on the other. However we must remember that there are no engineers but only bricoleurs. In this case Amiri Baraka, previously LeRoi Jones was influenced by a number of people. He was highly inspired by reading Garcia Lorca’s “Gypsy Ballads”1, which was translated by Langston Hughes. Apart from Langston Hughes the key people to have influenced Amiri Baraka were Allen Ginsberg, Malcolm X, Robert Williams and a particular episode in his life where he had the opportunity to travel to Cuba and meet Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara. With this as the context, I have discussed how Ginsberg, Malcolm X, Robert Williams, Langston Hughes and Askia Toure were important personalities who gave the ammunition to Baraka to distort the language of the Afro-American people. “Those artists”, Amiri Baraka said later in his essay Revolutionary Art,
“who say their art has nothing to do with politics or society, are simply retarded or winking at their own seduction as state and corporate prostitutes.” (Harris 137)