Free Verse and Freedom Fights


Representation of blacks in American media has always been problematic. The legacy of white owned and dominated sources of information has "created and fixed an image of Blackness... necessary for racist America's fight against Black People," (Diawara 3). Such racist imagery has the effect of changing how black people are treated and thought of, even how they treat and think of themselves (Color Adjustment). Such political repercussions of representation create the necessity for blacks to represent themselves, as the "cultural barriers... created" produce "truly 'different worlds,'" (Gates 25). As Baraka says of black art, "our art describes our past, the middle passage, slavery, the struggle for Afro-American nation... for democracy [and] self-determination," (Baraka xiii). A tension is therefore created between blacks and the American image of black people. This tension, furthermore, is insidious, manifested in the double consciousness described by W.E.B. DuBois and an intra-community argument about how to represent the black community in response to the dominant racist imagery.


For a celebration of the life of Malcolm X on May 19th 1968, a group of black poets called The Last Poets were born, who attempted to show a culture on the verge of drastic change (Oyewole and Hassan xxii). In their debut self-entitled album, their depiction of blackness is largely a recreation of old imagery and themes which are altered with the motive of inciting revolution. In this way, the medium and momentum of the sixties' Black Arts movement, the stereotypical image of the "nigger," and the method of ritual insult are invoked for the purpose of ending the dominant paradigms that brought them all into existence. The images and methods they use for representation are all abrasive and ultra-realist with an implicit goal of confronting those realities and beginning a painful and bloody process of fundamental change in a nation that is hostile to any real change of the racist and oppressive bases of the system.


The 1960s was a revolutionary time for black art and its representations of black people. The "Black Arts movement," concentrated in the decade of the 1960s, "was a collective effort to transform the manner in which black people were represented" in the United States. "Black poetry," in particular, became a new means of "black mass communication" that was able to re-create the idea of blackness "to express a new pride of the times," (Gates and McKay 1798-1799). Furthermore, black artistic expression reflected the new radical black political expressions, and in many ways was a part of the larger political movement. Black poetry in particular has been described of as a "black voice committed to struggle [that] served as a persuasive and effective weapons in the campaign to liberate a black nation," (1797); the black mass communication became an incredible media for those ideas (Gates and McKay 1791-1796). The members of The Last Poets themselves had strong personal connections with groups such as the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and the Black Panther Party of New York, (Oyewole and Hassan 5-7). Abiodun Oyewole says that his greatest influence was Maclolm X (Oyewole and Hassan 1) and Umar Bin Hassan says that one great influence for him was Ahmed Evans, a "black nationalist" who was convicted of killing three police officers during civil unrest in Cleveland in 1968 and sentenced to die in the electric chair(Oyewole and Hassan 25)(Masotti and Corsi 71-82). Furthermore, their creation on Malcolm X Day symbolized a their birth from "Malcolm X's fierce rhetoric of black self-pride and black resistance to the brainwashing and violent deracination by whites of the so called Negro," (Gates and McKay 1792). In The Last Poets' work this pride and resistance at times expresses itself in violent manners. Such abrasiveness is evident in the following lines of "On the Subway:"
Me knowing me/ Black Proud and determined to be free/ could plainly see my enemy,/ I know him, I once slaved for him body and soul/ off the sweat of my labor he stole/...things must change.../ he could never understand the new black man... He still hasn't dug me, he stares endlessly.. Shall I save him, can he be saved/ [answered in the background] No! No!
This sombre and confrontational representation of the black man in the white world became more dominant as the aim for "revolution replaced reform" in the political sphere and the world of black artistic expression. As Gates and McKay state, the "civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s dissolved from energetic idealism and communal hopefulness to sullen, at times dictatorial cynicism." This fundamental change in black political energy began to change the goals of black expression in the same way toward revolution.


Released in 1970, The Last Poets in many ways illustrated this transition toward a more provocative and revolutionary form of cultural expression. "When the Revolution Comes" by the group is in some ways an ultra-realist reaction to the optimism of earlier Black Arts works. The violence and frustration are represented in the following lines of the song:
When the revolution comes/ transit cops will be crushed by the trains after loosing their guns/ blood will run through the streets of Harlem drowning anything without substance/ when the revolution comes/... Black cultural centers will be forts/ supplying the revolutionaries with food and arms/ white death will fall off the walls/ of meuseums and chruches... but until then... niggers will party and bullshit/ and party and bullshit and party and bullshit and party/ and some might even die before the revolution comes.
In addition to promoting the use of art and culture to feed a violent uprising, the piece recognizes the fact that no real change will occur until many blacks die in addition to white American symbols of power.


This revolutionary energy was not unique in black art, but the Poets' threatened to take their message to an unprecedented level. Revolutionary realism, for example, is evident in the earlier work of Amiri Baraka (a good friend of the Last Poets): "We have awaited the coming of.../ mystics and romantics, knowledgeable workers of the land/ But none has come./ Will the machine-gunners please step forward," (qtd. 1799). In this way, The Last Poets were part of a larger movement that was expressing a certain need for armed struggle. The Last Poets, however, did more reflect and re-create this expression of frustration and desire for change as their description of Black cultural centers when the revolution comes suggests. The Last Poets believed that black artists had to take an active role in achieving this revolution. The origin of their name in a poem by South African poet Willie Kgositsile is a similar expression. "When the moment hatches in time's womb there will be no art talk," he wrote. "The only poem you will hear will be the spearpoint pivoted in the punctured marrow of the villain.... Therefore we are the last poets of the world," (qtd. Green 2). The group wanted to transcend their art into an active fight of the oppressive society, in some ways the phoenix like birth of the end of the Black Arts decade. One founding member of the group, Abiodun Oyewole, was even convicted of robbing a bank with radical political members of the SDS soon after the album, The Last Poets, was released . Saying that he had been ridiculed because "he had not done anything risky... [and that] cultural revolutionary was weak," (Oyewole and Hassan 7), his involvement in the robbery (and the burglary of the guns used in the action) were an attempt to spark an uprising in the volatile atmosphere into which the album was released. Like the Black Panthers, the The Last Poets represented a semi-failed redefinition of blackness and black activism. The forceful push for real change failed to make the types of changes that the civil rights movement had seen, and the Poets, like the Panthers, soon disintegrated into rivalry and disorganization (Gates and McKay 1795)(Green xv-xvi).


In their attempt to revolutionize black culture, the group paradoxically often represented the black male as "nigger." Although created as white stereotype and insult, the word "nigger" and many of its characteristics had been appropriated popular black male culture to describe itself. The group uses this imagery as provocation aimed at a black audience. The poets describe, "Niggers Are Scared of Revolution," a great example of the use of these stereotypes, as "a prayer [and] a call to arms," (Oyewole and Hassan 60). Typical lines are the following:
Niggers are very untogether people. Niggers talk about getting high and riding around in Els. Niggers should get high and ride to hell. Niggers talk about pimping. Pimping yours pimping mine. Just to be pimping is a hell of a line....
Niggers are players. Niggers play football baseball and basketball while the whiteman is cutting off their balls. When a nigger's play isn't tight enough to play with black thighs, niggers play with white thighs to see if they got any play left... Niggers will tell you that their ready to be liberated but when you say let's go take our liberation. Niggers reply... oh... I was just playing. Niggers are playing with revolution and loosing. Niggers are scared of revolution.
This passage takes on, in abrasively explicit language, both the image of the black man as emasculated by the "whiteman" and as being the hypersexual stereotype in response. They even take on the image of the pimp that for a time Malcolm X was very proud to take on (Kelley 177-179) and which was celebrated in the Black Power movements, as well as in rap culture (Kelley 216). All of these images are negative because, as the poets themselves write, even "the mindset of the nigger had to change if there was to be Black Power," (Oyewole and Hassan 45).


Nonetheless, the poem was not entirely negative about the "nigger" figure. The concluding paragraph states: "I love niggers because niggers are me. And I can only love that which is part of me. Love to see niggers go through changes.... Act.... Make them plays and shoot that shit. But there's one thing about niggers I do not love... Niggers Are Scared of Revolution." In many ways the use of the word nigger could be described in the same terms as the use of racist imagery that is said to "explode the stereotype" in visual art such as Kara Walker. "Kara's pain is very internalized," (International Review of Art 3-10). The Last Poets likewise, describe the word "nigger," which is "part of" them, as the "embodiment of all the anger, frustration, joy, and pain of being Black in America." The Last Poets use this racist imagery to "arm [blacks] with true self-consciousness" and awareness needed to take their liberation (Baraka xv).


The use of the word and the descriptions of the "nigger" can also be seen as a type of revolutionary ritual insult. In black American culture, ritual insult, also called toasting or playing the Dozens, is described as "a symmetrical joking relationship in which ... people were free to insult each other [in an] oral contest of verbal facility, originality, ingenuity and humor," (Levine 347). Although, as a recorded form, the Poets' relationship with their audience could not be "symmetrical," lines such as those in "Niggers Are Scared of Revolution" can only be said because of the originality and poetry which render each line a work of art. What makes this ritual revolutionary is that it is used not as a "vehicle for deflecting aggression away from the white world where it was dangerous" (Levine 356) as the traditional toasting is meant to do. Rather the insults are an attempt to provoke a "call to arms" against the oppression of the white society. "Developed at a time when Black Americans... could not safely respond" to the insults of the white world, the "resort to physical reprisal was a sharp break of the rules governing" the tradional game of the Dozens. The Last Poets, however, say those who are "shoot[ing] the shit" and afraid of physical reprisal are examples of "niggers... playing with revolution and losing." The use of the insult by The Last Poets is, therefore, meant to break the very tradition of insult and, in some ways, be the last game of the Dozens before black people will take white insults no longer.


The album THE LAST POETS was a shot in the dark in the ghettos and alleys across America when violent revolution was not only possible, but seemed "inevitable." The Poets in many ways saw themselves as "vanguards of [the] revolution," (Oyewole and Hassan 44). What the group wrote about was real, not only because they saw it, but because they were living it. Just as one member was arrested for trying to arm and fund an uprising, another dealt with a crack addiction, and the feuding of the group at times escalated to physical violence. The calls to revolution were not only directed to the outside community, but also focused internally to instill pride and confidence in themselves (Green xxiv). The abrasiveness of their poetry was attention grabbing and was so extreme because it had to be, in order to create hope out of the painful images of blacks in America. In the words of Amiri Baraka, "their razor was a raiser, Revolutionary Art for Cultural Revolution," (Baraka xv). Thirty years later, that call to revolution was in some ways a failed one, as the place of blacks in America remains largely unchanged even down to the segregation of the schools. In the opinion of Kim Green, "the Last Poets' story teaches us what America does to its Black men. The Last Poets' story teaches us what Black men do to each other. And, lastly, the Last Poets' poems teach us why," (Green xxiii).


As an ironic epilogue to the story of the Last Poets, the Poets' biggest victory in inciting the revolution is that they were the "seeds" of hip-hop, black America's next generation of revolutionary poets (Baraka xiv). By the end of the decade of the 1970s, the hip-hop movement had built a dominant underground culture that, "like the conscious raising session in the... Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s[,]... produced internal and external dialogues that affirmed the experiences and identities of the participants and at the same time offered critiques of the larger society,"(Rose 60). Rap is perhaps more cheerfully "worked out on the rusting urban core as a playground," (Rose 22) but the same message of revolutionary seizure of the urban space is reflected in hip-hop. The "talk of subways, crew, [and] posses" in Rap is reminiscent of The Last Poets imagery. Furthermore, the graffiti of the hip-hop culture used the subways as a sort of underground publishing medium that in many ways is as a less extreme example of the use of the subway as a revolutionary weapon in "When the Revolution Comes," (see block quote above). Kelley, in fact, credits the influence of the toasts of Jalal Uridin of The Last Poets for many of the characteristics of gangsta rap (Kelley 187). The influence of the Poets is also reflected in the audio samples of their poetry that are used in much rap music, such as the sample of "Run Niggers" in Paris' song "Bush Killa" about killing President George Bush (the sampled line is "I understand that time is running out") and in several Public Enemy songs (Public Enemy also does a cover of "White Man Got a God Complex" from the Poets' second album "This is Madness"). In underground rap circles The Revolution is also still a critical theme (in Dead Prez, Common, Public Enemy, etc.), even though it has largely disappeared from mainstream rap. Rap in the words of Chuck D represents a "semi-hijacked revolution" that has continued the movement of The Last Poets with mixed results, a legacy of misogyny and the impending fear of a hostile corporate takeover. However, as Amiri Baraka puts it, The Last Poets offered the black community in their "rap... a sharp weapon needing to be held in our own hands and kept pointed at the enemy (not at our sisters, wives and mothers)," (Baraka xvi) and in the politically conscious of hip-hop, the poets mission continues fighting for change.











Bibliography

Baraka, Amiri. Forward. The Last Poets: On a Mission. By Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995. xiii-xvii.

Diawara, Martha. "Black American Cinema: The New Realism." Black American Cinema. Ed. Martha Diawara. (New York: Routlage 1993).

Gates, Henry Louis and Nellie McKay. "The Black Arts Movement 1960-1970." The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. (New York: Norton, 1998). 1791-1806.

Green, Kim. Introduction. The Last Poets: On a Mission. By Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995.

International Review of African American Art.

Masotti, Louis H., and Jerome R. Corsi. Shoot-Out in Cleveland: Black Militants and the Police. (Washington D.C: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969).

Oyewole, Abuidyn and Umar Bin Hassan. The Last Poets: On a Mission. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995. xiii-xvii

Rose, Tricia. "All Aboard the Night Train: Flow, Layering, and Rupture in Postindustrial New York." Black Noise. 21-61

The Last Poets. The Last Poets. New York: Douglass, 1970.