Amiri Baraka"IT'S NATION TIME"LP M/M BLACK FORUM MOTOWN

$

111

BLACK FORUM B 457 L, 1972
Condition: Cover/ MINT, Gatefold. LP/ MINT

The difference between Baraka's two distinct performances of the penultimate and final stanzas of "It's Nation Time" illuminate his bridging the boundary between speech and song. The recorded performance of "It's Nation Time" took place at the Congress of African Peoples in Atlanta Georgia, in 1970. The significance of the historical and political context for Baraka's reading cannot be overestimated. In his study of Baraka's pivotal role in the organizational development of black cultural nationalism, Komozi Woodard explains that the Congress was one of "four national organizations" which led to the "birth of a black national political community" (160). Woodard also notes that 1970 marked the beginning of a period during which the politics of black cultural nationalism reached its zenith. As one of the key conveners of the Congress, Baraka was an instrumental figure, in multiple senses of the word. When he delivered his poem before the throng of Congress attendees, he recited the lines:

It's nation time eye ime
It's nation ti eye ime
chant with bells and drum
it's nation time (2)

And he sang the word time and protracted his enunciation of the i with a pronounced vibrato, mimicking the sound of a saxophone (Baraka, I'll Make Me A World). His stylization of this phrase suggests that jazz inflection can be present in a poem whose content does not ostensibly indicate any relationship to that tradition. This indicate: the reason that examining the performances is essential to a more comprehensive appreciation of jazz-influenced poetry. Paradoxically, the "eye" spelling in the lines signals a visual instead of a musical emphasis. Yet "chant with bells and drum" reflects Baraka's recurrent phrasing of "it's nation time" and the accompaniment of a saxophonist and a drummer in his performance on the It's Nation Time: Visionary Music album.

Baraka's reading of this particular stanza gestures in a direction different from his previous reading at the Congress of African Peoples. He still protracts the i in time, but his pronunciation seems deliberately disharmonic. He utters "t-I-I-I-I-I-I-M-me" in a raspy tone with a stuttering effect and repeats this several times, varying the length of the I each time. Unlike his mellifluous delivery of the poem at the Congress, his speech-song seems taut, even anti-melodic, grating the ear instead of pleasing it (It's Nation Time). The divergence between Baraka's readings in different contexts points to the variety of his performance approach. For example, in the published version of the poem's last stanza, Baraka states:

It's nation time, get up santa claus

(repeat)

it's nation time, build it
get up muffet dragger
get up rastus for real to be rasta farari
ras jua
get up got here bow

It's Nation
Time! (242)

However, in both recitals, on two different recordings, Baraka inserts additional addressees, departing from the printed phrase "get up santa claus," and expanding it to include "get up roy wilkins, get up diana ross, and get up dione warwick." Moreover, the line "get up got here bow" is transformed into "get up nigger, come over here, take a bow, brother" (Baraka, I'll Make Me A World and It's Nation Time). These alterations highlight the immediacy, fluidity, and theatricality of the performance.

Admittedly, this sense of immediacy is illusive, since these performance are mediated through the realms of videotape and vinyl. Nevertheless, the performance environment does allow for flexibility in the form and tone of his verse unrealizable in the printed version of "It's Nation Time." The poem in print does not provide Baraka the opportunity to alter the poem's potential aural effect or to add and extract words in different verses. Despite Baraka's movement away from solely print-bound possibilities in his poetry, Harryette Mullen observes that the videotape of poets such as Baraka emphasizes "the poet reading the text." These readings are, according to Mullen, "unlike the oral composition the griot or the free improvisations of the jazz musician" in that they "high-light the African-American poet's performance of the written, transforming wordscript into 'soulscript'" (10-11). Accordingly, the video clip of Baraka performing at the Congress of Africa Peoples captures Baraka's downcast eyes while he flips the poem's pages even though he recites the last stanza while directly facing the audience.

Does the presence of the page, a poet's use of his or her written text in a public reading negate the possibility for improvisation to enter the work, as Mullen seems to suggest? If so, then the label "jazz-inspired" only accurately refers to the poem in print but not in performance--even for a poet as dynamic and spontaneous as Baraka. I would argue that for a poet such as Baraka, who is so thoroughly immersed in the jazz tradition, improvisation enters the work at the level of composition--regardless of whether printed versions of his poems are a n present feature in his live and recorded performances. Baraka has consistently and continually moved, metaphorically and literally, from the page to the stage in his poetic delivery. As I have briefly demonstrated in this essay, this movement should be considered in aesthetical and political terms. Baraka's performance methods--including the noisy wailings of his jazzed texts--formally express a key element of his aesthetic agenda, namely, engaging the power and the politics of sound. Scholars of Baraka's poetry should heed his early call "to start and finish there," with the sounds of his voice deployed dynamically in performance, to ensure a more comprehensive criticism of his aesthetics.

Notes

(1.) See for example, Henry Lacey's discussion of the Marxist "sloganeering" that, according to Lacey, mars Baraka's otherwise laudable evocation of Coltrane in his poem "AM/TRAK" (21).

(2.) Baraka, "It's Nation Time," Amiri Baraka Reader 242. Note that this citation is of the poem as it appears in the Reader. In the performance he reads the line "It's nation ti eye ime" three times.

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. "How You Sound?" Baraka, LeRoi 16-17.

--. I'll Make Me A World: A Century of African American Arts. Evening 3, Hour 5. Videocassette. Prod. Denise A. Greene. PBS Video, 1999. 60 min.

--. "It's Nation Time." 1970. Baraka, LeRoi 240-42.

--. It's Nation Time: Visionary Music. LP. Black Forum Records. B-457L, 1972.

--. The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. New York: Thunder's Mouth P, 1991.

Bernstein, Charles. Introduction. Close Listening. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 7.

Harris, William J. Editor's Note. Baraka, LeRoi xv.

Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References. New York: Morrow, 1973.

Lacey, Henry. "Baraka's 'AM/TRAK': Everybody's Coltrane Poem." Obsidian II 1.1-2 (1986): 12-21,

Mackey, Nathaniel. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Monson, Ingrid. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Mullen, Harryette. "A Beat for Which There Is No Notation." The American Poetry Archives Videotape Catalogue. San Francisco: American Poetry Archives/The Poetry Center, 1991.

Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amid Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York UP, 2001.

Woodard, Komozi. A Nation Within A Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999.

ya Salaam, Kalamu. "Why Spoken Word Rules." Black Issues Book Review Mar.-Apr. 1999:21.

Meta DuEwa Jones is Assistant Professor of English at George Washington University, where she teaches courses in modern and postmodern American poetry, performance, and African American literature. She is also currently a Rockefeller Foundation Diasporic Racisms Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin's Center for African and African-American Studies. Her manuscript-in-progress is The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry and the Spoken Word.

COPYRIGHT 2003 African American Review

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group

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