N.J. poet laureat answers racist attacks
Baraka: I will not resign
By Leslie Feinberg
New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey is desperately appealing
to the New Jersey legislature to grant him the power to fire
the state's poet laureate, Amiri Baraka.
Baraka, famous Black poet and political activist, is
weathering a firestorm of outrage over a poem he wrote entitled
"Somebody Blew Up America." One stanza in the long poem deals
with what top U.S. and Israeli officials did or did not know
about the World Trade Center attacks last Sept. 11.
For this, Baraka has been smeared as an anti-Semite.
McGreevey demands that Baraka apologize and step down. But
Baraka says: "I will not apologize. I will not resign."
In an Oct. 2 position statement, Baraka said that the
pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League is trying to "spread the Big
Lie, distort what the poem says." They're trying, he said, to
"cover the fact that this poem actually is an attack on
Imperialism, National Oppression, Monopoly Capitalism, Racism,
Anti-Semitism. I challenge ADL to show anywhere in this poem
that it is Anti-Semitic in the least.
"First, the poem's underlying theme focuses on how Black
Americans have suffered from domestic terrorism since being
kidnapped into U.S. chattel slavery, e.g., by Slave Owners,
U.S. & State Laws, Klan, Skin Heads, Domestic Nazis,
Lynching, denial of rights, national oppression, racism,
character assassination, historically, and at this very minute
throughout the U.S.
"The relevance of this to Bush's call for a 'War on
Terrorism,' is that Black people feel we have always been
victims of terror, governmental and general, so we cannot get
as frenzied and hysterical as the people who [ask] us to
dismiss our history and contemporary reality to join them, in
the name of a shallow 'patriotism,' in attacking the majority
of people in the world, especially people of color and in the
third world."
Baraka said: "We should know that Bush and his Right Wing
crew want War against all the forces of their so-called 'Axis
of Evil.' What a not-so-wild coincidence that the path of this
Axis parallels the route of the proposed U.S. oil corporations'
pipeline from Saudi [Arabia] to the far east, apparently to
oppose the spiraling economic growth and influence of China.
They scream 'Bin Laden' and 'Taliban' and destroy Afghanistan,
install a puppet president and a shadow occupation force. Next
in the Axis is Iraq, we should have known that."
Baraka noted: "Actually, in my focus on various forces of
terror Afro Americans and other oppressed people of the world
have suffered, slavery, colonialism, imperialism,
neocolonialism, national oppression, the ADL disingenuously
makes no mention of my probing into the creators of the
holocaust, e.g., 'who put the Jews in ovens, / and who helped
them do it, / Who said America First/ and Ok'd the yellow
stars,' which of course is a reference to America's domestic
fascists just before World War II and the Nazi Holocaust.
"Nor do these ADL purveyors of falsehood mention the poem's
listing of some of the Jews across the world, oppressed,
imprisoned, murdered by actual Anti-Semitic forces, open or
disguised. The poem asks, 'Who killed Rosa Luxembourg,
Liebknecht/Who murdered the Rosenbergs/And all the good people
iced, tortured, assassinated, vanished.'
"I challenge the ADL to set up a national television program
so that we might debate this issue.
"NO, I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE, I WILL NOT RESIGN. ... POET
ON!"
Reprinted from the Oct. 17, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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