Knowledge of the Face

Knowledge of the FaceThe Mythic Hero in Dialogic Readings of Jay Wright and Amiri Baraka Sarah RudeWalker (bio) Now come back to the wordcharged with proprietary schemes, a lustig localeof available difference,the [hallowed ground]1 of ambiguity.Who could wish For the purple indifference of prophets? —Jay Wright, Polynomials and Pollen A heated exchange took place between Amiri Baraka and Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the New York Times in March of 1984. Gates’s review of The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones appeared in the New York Times Book Review on March 11. Although Gates notes the auto-biography’s “density and lyricism,” his review serves more as a critique of Baraka’s life than a constructive review of that life as narrative. Gates charges that Baraka “is cursed ... in a peculiar, unenviable way: Whereas most of us can experience identity crises in splendid, if painful, isolation, he consistently builds a program or a movement around his. Few of us, thank goodness, are able to institutionalize our hang-ups, our ‘changes.’” Gates goes on to argue that the public nature of Baraka’s ideological changes has been detrimental to the people he inspired: “One must wonder at the costs of those who, at any given phase, have been his true believers.” He charges that Baraka has yet to demonstrate himself as a convincing Marxist convert and asserts that “Until he does so, he will remain as he was at the beginning of his journey, ‘A renegade / behind the mask. And even / the mask, a renegade / disguise. Black skin ...’ (“A Poem for Willie Best,” 1964)” (Gates 12). Jay Wright, who did not read the New York Times Book Review or any reviews as a matter of practice and had a notably unaffectionate opinion of Gates and his work, came across the review of the autobiography through his wife, Lois, who, in Wright’s words, “read me some passages from the pigshit.” Wright wrote to Baraka, his longtime friend and artistic peer, on March 18, 1984, encouraging Baraka not to “allow that superficial, toadying and poorly written plantation report to disturb you, or to keep you away from your real work.” Countering Gates’s suggestion that Baraka’s ideological shifts had harmed his public, Wright asserts that Baraka’s writing is important to a broad critical base of readers who have respected his work without having been harmed by his ideological shifts: “There are [End Page 358] ... far too many of us in the world—even some who will argue and continue to disagree with you—who do take these things seriously and who look upon your past work with much respect. You have a lot to be proud of, and absolutely no reason to apologize to Gates, his gang and masters for being human, or for having ambitions different from theirs.”2 Baraka responded to Gates in a letter to the editor published on April 8, 1984. Headlined “Baraka and the Establishment,” the piece includes an indictment of Gates as an Establishment servant and mouthpiece: “He is well thought of by the Establishment, I would say, because ‘they’ have been led to believe that he generally reflects some of the key Establishment values.” Baraka explains that “Mr. Gates is certainly not a separatist. He is a ‘structuralist’ in literature, having wowed me with an essay ‘Binary Oppositions in Frederick Douglass’s Narratives’! ... [in which] one can speak of Douglass’s works in a strictly grammatical way, as abstractly as possible, and not lower oneself to deal with the content of those speeches.” Baraka refers sardonically to Gates’s structuralism to defend himself against what he reads in Gates’s review as the long-standing critique of his work as overly polemical and situated too particularly in an African American context: “So the Gates-Establishment rap is that they would rather have me, us, imitate Yeats, etc., than try to arrive at our own (African) American voices. But the point was I did not want to be an imitator of neo-English but an originator of original African-American” (“Baraka and the Establishment” BR 30). Like the Gates that Baraka critiques, and in contrast to Baraka’s fraught

Art · Art history · Biography · Epistemology · HERO · Literature · Narrative · Nothing · Sociology · Wonder · Wright · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Latin American history and culture · Media, Communication, and Education · Philosophy

• Selected Poems of Jay Wright

  Colin Nicholson, Jay Wright et al.•Journal of Religion in Africa•1989

  Add to list