A black man hurries through a Dantean city, segregated San Francisco in the 1960s. I don’t know what newsreel chickens are. Or wool jails? But he sees them and I’m intrigued.
Parataxis, intense inventive free jazz with words, a Beat beat from Ginsberg’s prose peer, Diane di Prima’s soul mate soul brother, an African American who jives better than Baldwin.
“Faces broke. Charts of age. Worn thru, to see black years. Bones in iron faces. Steel bones. Cages of decay. Cobblestones are wet near the army stores. Beer smells, Saturday.”
Writing in which there’s much more at stake than linguistic play. New intensities, changing subjectivities, black differentiation, burning urgency, streetwise anger. Leroi Jones was rewriting himself and becoming Amiri Baraka. ‘A Chase (Alighieri’s Dream)’ is The Black Nationalist’s Tale, written during the struggle for civil rights in America in which he played an eloquent role.
Voting restrictions, beatings, segregation. That was then. What of now? Today mobs form with modified nooses. Baraka they bellow, with some justification, was misogynist, a racist, homophobic, a voice for violence, an antisemite. He was, but not that alone. Baraka stood up to Uncle Sam, then he resisted corporate capture. Now the danger is cancellation. Which is why his writing should be read and shared.
First published in Tales, Grove Press, 1967 recently republished as Tales, Akashic Books, 2016
A Personal Anthology 