riday, March 4th, a small, subdued crowd showed up to listen to a talk by Amiri Baraka—yes him, the famous playwright, poet and activist. Throughout the event, one couldn’t help but wonder: where was the excitement, the overflow seating, the raw sense of eagerness to accompany the man’s appearance? Jane Goodall may have been a humanitarian and a lover of apes, but Baraka is something else: a witness to, a flag bearer of, an equally controversial, eccentric, and brilliant participant in the Civil Rights Movement. The playwright’s (literally) subterranean speech, given deep in Rocky 3, was the sort of living metaphor that strikes a person square in the face.
While Baraka confirmed his visit to Dartmouth at the last minute, making the poster campaigns and institutional advertising you’d expect for such a major speaker impossible, the absence of even a mass campus blitz the night before was strange. Whether due to some desire to contain publicity or concerns that the event, which had to be scheduled in the moderate-sized auditorium Rocky 3 at the last minute, would be too crowded, the end result was empty seats and a missed opportunity for most of the Dartmouth population.
Baraka’s story, told through a mix of anecdotes, autobiography, and commentary and framed by tales of the civil rights movement, lay at the center of his speech. From Newark, New Jersey, to New York City, then to Cuba and San Francisco, then back to Newark, Baraka’s adult life has dutifully (and, as many would argue, necessarily) traced the extremes of African-American politics.
Living as a college student cum military officer cum starving artist in New York City, the playwright underwent a in’60 political transformation while visiting Cuba, then in the throes of revolution. Inspired to pursue activist work, Baraka was an early proponent of Malcolm X and his assertive rejection of nonviolent protest, an acquaintance of Martin Luther King Jr., and an instrumental player in the development of black nationalism. He has spearheaded the formation of numerous artistic groups, and has long stood tall at the fringe of cultural criticism—a fiery commentator on race and politics who, throughout his iconoclastic quest to define black identity, has been alternately described by some as racist, homophobic, sexist, and anti-Semitic.
In some ways, Friday’s Baraka seemed the man he’s always been cast as, the one we imagine behind a mask of seething characters and pointed commentary: controversial, indignant, self-assured and, eager. En route to Dartmouth, he had lost both his bag and a tooth (in a fall), but nevertheless took to the podium with poise. Describing his history and relationship with the Civil Rights Movement, Baraka struck no conciliatory notes and initiated no dialogue with the past. Instead, he strode forward without apology; the events he described appeared not through the chastened lens of time, but as they must have to Baraka at age thirty, age forty, and age fifty. Stubborn though it may have been, his delivery conveyed something of a rarely seen commitment and vigor that we rarely see, a fierceness of vision whose sincerity is its saving grace.
If celebrity is a measure not only of brilliance but also of boldness, Baraka possesses the latter in excess. His persona was a formidable force, convincing in its self-assuredness. Not that Baraka was particularly controversial—he wasn’t. Instead, the man who once called for white genocide was restrained and affable, a stern but ultimately moderate commentator on issues of race and politics. Perhaps Baraka’s most pointed exhortation, one of the evening’s few, came while he fielded questions. When an African-American girl wondered what it meant for her, and those like her, to settle (post-college) outside of the less privileged communities in which they were raised, Baraka came down firmly: such behavior is not okay. Instead, he argued, it is the responsibility of underprivileged, highly educated African Americans to return to and better their communities. In such a moment, Baraka’s forceful, abrasive manner was apparent: one part moral assurance, one part utter presumptuousness.
Is activism and political awareness so diminished now that we no longer rally around figures like Amiri Baraka, whether to support or oppose them? Here was a man whose vigor has defined him through years of intertwined political, social, and cultural warfare, quietly appearing on our campus. Where was the heckler from The Dartmouth Review? Where was the group of radicals to follow Baraka in lock step? When the eagerness of an old man runs headlong into the unruffled tranquility of a younger audience, generational divide is palpable. In the presence of this world’s Barakas we feel the strange heaviness of our generation’s peaceful upbringing, the wonderful and terrifying insularity that comes when there is no Great Depression, no Civil Rights Movement, no Cold War to cleave our political identities into being.
We expect to feel the radicalism, the raw intensity of political figures like Baraka viscerally, as something transformative and enthralling, as majestically big. But deep inside Rocky, that feeling was lost. Praise to our College, really, for bringing Amiri Baraka here. It was fantastic. But next time, whip up some fervor to go along with it—even if it’s contrived, as desperate a plea to someone’s corny understanding of tradition, as the chill we’re supposed to feel when told of the “granite in our muscles and in our veins.” If tradition can be marketed, Frankenstein-like, into being, perhaps we can revive political fervor by the same means. It would be a start, at least.
