Amiri Baraka (Everett LeRoy Jones) and the Great Irish Writers

For years I have maintained that often, in the history of theatre and literature, the best and most representative writers of a country are often outsiders or minorities. Pushkin had African roots, Gogol and Bulgakov were Ukrainian, Pasternak was Litvak, etc.

This is one reason why it seems natural to me, though not always to others, my association of three lines of research, apparently distinct, but in fact with a great deal in common: Black American writers, post-colonial writers and Irish writers. What a surprise, then, to find my intuition confirmed by a radical Black-American communist and namesake (at least until he changed his name), Amiri Baraka. The article (from Home, a collection of essays published in the sixties), is called "Black Writing" and often refers to Joyce's The Dubliners. In the last paragraphs, Baraka writes:

"The vantage point is classically perfect - outside and inside - at the same time. Think of the great Irish writers - Wilde, Yeats, Shaw, Synge, Joyce, O'Casey and Beckett - and their clear and powerful understanding (social as well as aesthetic) of where they were and how best they could function inside and outside the imaginary English society, even going so far as teaching the mainstreamers their own language, and revitalizing in the doing." (p. 140)

Some commentators (Watts, 2001) say that Baraka's position oversimplifies the question, that there can be no comparison between a colonized people like Ireland, and an enslaved people who were forced to abandon all connection to their past. But this argument implies that culture is eminently geographical, and that the African cultural practices did not persist for centuries in the Americas; in Colombia and Cuba, however, Yoruba and Ibo are still spoken in some places, and if the search for a romantic Celtic past has driven the Irish writers, there is no question that a search for a romantic African past, for all its caleidoscopic enormity, has also driven Black American writers. What is also certain is that colonialism and the slave trade were of a piece, in terms of mentality, and that colonialism and post-colonialism are hardly limited to our era. I would like to ask Aesop, Greek poet and Roman slave, his opinion on this matter.

In any case, the point here isn't so much the formal social setting, as Baraka's comment on the "imaginary English society" - implying, if I understand him well, that the colonizing "cultures" are not cultures at all, but political clubs, or at the very least, cultures of power practices. Rome was one of the first trans-national organizations, and if Latin was later vitalized it was by indigenous cultural re-conquest. Baraka's whole point, as radical as it may seem to some, is that where there is a powerful institution, there can be no art - and that siding with the powers that be often is the fastest way to kill art. Baraka's argument, in fact, is more Hegelian than Marxist: it is the sublimation of the conflict between master and slave, where, as Hegel famously writes, the master suddenly becomes (shall we say culturally?) dependent on the slave, and the slave, master of his own work, art, and eventually, freedom.