THE HANDSTAND

NOVEMBER 2002

Somebody Blew Up America

by AMIRI BARAKA

They say it's some terrorist,
some barbaric
A Rab,
In Afghanistan
It wasn't our American terrorists
It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads
Or the them that blows up nigger
Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row
It wasn't Trent Lott
Or David Duke or Giuliani
Or Schundler, Helms retiring

It wasn't
The gonorrhea in costume
The white sheet diseases
That have murdered black people
Terrorized reason and sanity
Most of humanity, as they pleases

They say (who say?)
Who do the saying
Who is them paying
Who tell the lies
Who in disguise
Who had the slaves
Who got the bux out the Bucks

Who got fat from plantations
Who genocided Indians
Tried to waste the Black nation

Who live on Wall Street
The first plantation
Who cut your nuts off
Who rape your ma
Who lynched your pa

Who got the tar, who got the feathers
Who had the match, who set the fires
Who killed and hired
Who say they God & still be the Devil

Who the biggest only
Who the most goodest
Who do Jesus resemble

Who created everything
Who the smartest
Who the greatest
Who the richest
Who say you ugly and they the goodlookingest

Who define art
Who define science

Who made the bombs
Who made the guns

Who bought the slaves, who sold them

Who called you them names
Who say Dahmer wasn't insane

Who? Who? Who?

Who stole Puerto Rico
Who stole the Indies, the Philipines, Manhattan
Australia & The Hebrides
Who forced opium on the Chinese

Who own them buildings
Who got the money
Who think you funny
Who locked you up
Who own the papers

Who owned the slave ship
Who run the army

Who the fake president
Who the ruler
Who the banker

Who? Who? Who?

Who own the mine
Who twist your mind
Who got bread
Who need peace
Who you think need war

Who own the oil
Who do no toil
Who own the soil
Who is not a nigger
Who is so great ain't nobody bigger

Who own this city

Who own the air
Who own the water

Who own your crib
Who rob and steal and cheat and murder
and make lies the truth
Who call you uncouth

Who live in the biggest house
Who do the biggest crime
Who go on vacation anytime

Who killed the most niggers
Who killed the most Jews
Who killed the most Italians
Who killed the most Irish
Who killed the most Africans
Who killed the most Japanese
Who killed the most Latinos

Who? Who? Who?

Who own the ocean

Who own the airplanes
Who own the malls
Who own television
Who own radio

Who own what ain't even known to be owned
Who own the owners that ain't the real owners

Who own the suburbs
Who suck the cities
Who make the laws

Who made Bush president
Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying
Who talk about democracy and be lying

Who the Beast in Revelations
Who 666
Who know who decide
Jesus get crucified

Who the Devil on the real side
Who got rich from Armenian genocide

Who the biggest terrorist
Who change the bible
Who killed the most people
Who do the most evil
Who don't worry about survival

Who have the colonies
Who stole the most land
Who rule the world
Who say they good but only do evil
Who the biggest executioner

Who? Who? Who?

Who own the oil
Who want more oil
Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie

Who? Who? Who?

Who found Bin Laden, maybe they Satan
Who pay the CIA,
Who knew the bomb was gonna blow
Who know why the terrorists
Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego

Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion

Who need fossil fuel when the sun ain't goin' nowhere

Who make the credit cards
Who get the biggest tax cut
Who walked out of the Conference
Against Racism
Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother
Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing?
Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln?

Who invaded Grenada
Who made money from apartheid
Who keep the Irish a colony
Who overthrow Chile and Nicaragua later

Who killed David Sibeko, Chris Hani,
the same ones who killed Biko, Cabral,
Neruda, Allende, Che Guevara, Sandino,

Who killed Kabila, the ones who wasted Lumumba, Mondlane,
Betty Shabazz, Die, Princess Di, Ralph Featherstone,
Little Bobby

Who locked up Mandela, Dhoruba, Geronimo,
Assata, Mumia, Garvey, Dashiell Hammett, Alphaeus Hutton

Who killed Huey Newton, Fred Hampton,
Medgar Evers, Mikey Smith, Walter Rodney,
Was it the ones who tried to poison Fidel
Who tried to keep the Vietnamese Oppressed

Who put a price on Lenin's head

Who put the Jews in ovens,
and who helped them do it
Who said "America First"
and ok'd the yellow stars

Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the Rosenbergs
And all the good people iced,
tortured, assassinated, vanished

Who got rich from Algeria, Libya, Haiti,
Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Kuwait, Lebanon,
Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine,

Who cut off peoples hands in the Congo
Who invented Aids
Who put the germs
In the Indians' blankets
Who thought up "The Trail of Tears"

Who blew up the Maine
& started the Spanish American War
Who got Sharon back in Power
Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo,
Chiang kai Chek

Who decided Affirmative Action had to go
Reconstruction, The New Deal,
The New Frontier, The Great Society,

Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for
Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza
Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro
Who give Genius Awards to Homo Locus
Subsidere

Who overthrew Nkrumah, Bishop,
Who poison Robeson,
who try to put DuBois in Jail
Who frame Rap Jamil al Amin, Who frame the Rosenbergs,
Garvey,
The Scottsboro Boys,
The Hollywood Ten

Who set the Reichstag Fire

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?

Who? Who? Who?

Explosion of Owl the newspaper say
The devil face cd be seen

Who make money from war
Who make dough from fear and lies
Who want the world like it is
Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national
oppression and terror violence, and hunger and poverty.

Who is the ruler of Hell?
Who is the most powerful

Who you know ever
Seen God?

But everybody seen
The Devil

Like an Owl exploding
In your life in your brain in your self
Like an Owl who know the devil
All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl
Exploding in fire. We hear the questions rise
In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog

Like the acid vomit of the fire of Hell
Who and Who and WHO who who
Whoooo and Whooooooooooooooooooooo!

http://www.counterpunch.org/poem1003.html

Who Dat Attacking Baraka?
Could it be the Same Who Dat Attacked Lee and McKinney?
The Same Who Dat be Attacking We?
The Backlash Against Amiri Baraka
and the Repression of the Black Moral Vanguard

by Ewuare Osayande ©Copyright 2002
Who the biggest terrorist

Who change the bible
Who killed the most people
Who do the most evil
Who don't worry about survival
Who have the colonies
Who stole the most land
Who rule the world
Who say they good but only do evil
Who the biggest executioner .
Who told you what you think that you later find out a lie
Who? Who? Who?

In Stephen Henderson's 1973 work, Understanding the New Black Poetry, he states that the great overarching movement of consciousness for Black people" is the "idea of Liberation." In that movement poet and political activist Amiri Baraka, the person, his work, is exemplary. He not only represents that movement, he is the epitome of that movement. He is our liberation-consciousness personified. We can chart the state of our movement along the projectile of his development.

This latest controversy surrounding his poem, "Somebody Blew Up America" and post as Poet Laureate of New Jersey is just the latest chapter in the life of a long-distance worker for the liberation and self-determination of African American people. Baraka been making news even when "the news" didn't want to take notice. Already a well-established literary figure in the New York literary arts world in the early Sixties, Baraka -- moved by the clarity and commitment of Malcolm X -- would leave Greenwich Village and relocate uptown in Harlem and institute The Black Arts Repertory Theater in 1965. The key architect in the development of the Black Arts Movement, Baraka would help lay the cultural foundation for the burgeoning Black Power Movement. As he has said, "We wanted to make a popular revolutionary art. Art that would be as strong as Malcolm, as strong as the Panthers." But his contribution didn't stop there. He would return to Newark, NJ and organize a united front of Black folk to elect the city's first Black mayor. Then spurred on by that major victory and similar victories being won for Black self-determination across the country, he sought to advance Black political power to the national level, and called for and mobilized Black people to gather at what would be the capstone of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the National Black Assembly held in Gary, IN, 1972. That body would develop the Black Agenda. Since then and before, the Black community has attempted to advance our struggle to the international level. It is at this level where our community has been hit hardest by the brute force of the system of white supremacy and state-sanctioned repression. Witness the bulleted bodies of Malcolm and Martin. Both assassinated at the point when they were seeking to advance our struggle to the international level. Witness the continued exile of Assata Shakur in Cuba. The recent attempt to extradite her by the state of New Jersey in cahoots with the Congress is reminder that there is still work that needs to be done. As Gwen said, Amiri Baraka's works works. And his work is ever addressing these issues and our oppressed reality as African Americans. Urging us on to fight, to write, and to fight some more. Amiri Baraka's work represents the latest articulation of our struggle for freedom and self-determination. Benefiting from the work of his predecessors, Baraka's aim is to advance the struggle. To connect our struggle with the world-wide struggle against global white supremacy/Western hegemony and its modus operandi, imperialism.

This latest controversy surrounding his poem, "Somebody Blew Up America" must be seen in the light of African American liberation struggle to be seen clearly. To speak of it as an issue of free speech is to belittle not just Baraka and his contribution to the African American struggle for liberation and self-determination, but is to belittle that movement itself.

This past July Amiri Baraka was named poet laureate of New Jersey, only the second person to sit in the position created in 1999. Two months later and a year after he wrote the poem in response to the attacks of 9/11, Baraka read "Somebody Blew Up America" at the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo, NJ. The Anti-Defamation League then decried the poem as "anti-Semitic" and called on the governor of New Jersey, Democract McGreevey, to get rid of Baraka. McGreevey responded to the pressure by calling for his resignation and putting a freeze on Baraka's honorarium for the post. He would later be informed that the governor doesn't have any authority to fire poet laureates like Baraka. So now the Jersey legislature is coming together in good ol' boy bipartisan fashion to create a law that would give McGreevey the power to oust Baraka.

This entire controversy centers around a few lines at the end of a 6 page poem that questions: "Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed / Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / To stay home that day / Why did Sharon stay away?" Because these lines imply that the Israeli government had prior knowledge of the attacks, the ADL has charged Amiri Baraka with being anti-semitic. To label the poem and the poet anti-Semitic is done to demonize Baraka and cast a spell on the poem that will keep folk from the real message of resistance to imperialism that is the poem's central theme.

In the past 30 years or so, just about every major Black leader from Jesse Jackson to Louis Farrakhan have been vilified by the ADL and called anti-Semitic. Since this has become news, many have questioned Baraka's inclusion of "questionable" material into an otherwise solid piece. They claim that he is relying on unwarranted information not backed by any credible source to justify his insinuations. Baraka's questioning the Israeli government's knowledge of the attacks of 9/11 is no more outlandish than the Democratic Party charging that the Bush administration along with higher-ups in the FBI and CIA had prior knowledge that the attacks were gonna occur. Come on. This has all been debated and hashed out on national television for the whole world to consider. Baraka's mere questioning is no worse than any Democratic Senators or Representatives, yet I didn't hear anyone calling for their resignations.

The sad truth is that most of the folk condemning Baraka have no reference beyond the faulty information they get from the American media. Have we forgotten that while Bush was making promises of capturing Bin Laden and raining down bombs on Afghanistan, Ted Kopple and Peter Jennings were on ABC stating tongue in cheek that "the first casualty in war is the truth"?

Now why would a news reporter make what amounts to a disclaimer for everything else they would report? And more importantly, why did America continue to listen? Sun Tzu said it succinctly in The Art of War, "All warfare is based on deception."

Malcolm X raised a similar critique of the American government and how it manipulates the American people. In his 1965 speech, "Prospects for Peace," he states, "Now, in speaking like this, it doesn't mean that I am anti-American. I am not. . And I'm not saying that to defend myself. Because if I was that, I'd have a right to be that - after what America has done to us. This government should feel lucky that our people aren't anti-American. . And the whole world would side with us, if we became anti-American. You know, that's something to think about. But we are not anti-American. We are anti or against what America is doing wrong in other parts of the world as well as here. It's criminal, criminal. And what she did to the American public, to get the American public to go along with it, is criminal."

For Baraka to raise a criticism of the Israeli government makes him no more an anti-Semite as Malcolm raising a criticism of the US government made him anti-American. Malcolm's statement and Baraka's poem both challenge two central concepts that lie at the heart of American society:
1) What is an American? and 2) What is in that American's best interests?

It challenges the popular notion that an American is someone that willingly and wholeheartedly backs the statements and actions of the United States government. This works to buttress the myth that this is a democracy - meaning that the U.S. government is a government of the people, by the people. That whatever the government says or does is inherently in the best interests of the American people, and thus as Americans, we should never question, challenge or - God forbid! - actually oppose our government. That would be unpatriotic. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also vilified for his opposition to the Vietnam War, called this practice "smooth patriotism;" a patriotism that amounts to nothing more than a form of dictatorship and breeds the kind of fascism that ultimately renders all rights null and void.

In "Somebody Blew Up America," Baraka speaks to the full American experience. Not just the white, suburban, middle-class Wonder-bread one dimensional illusion that gets passed off as American. Baraka speaks to the whole America. He speaks to the mult-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-lingual America that is the real America - those that represent the true working class (when they can find work that is). No, this is not the America we see on television every night. It's not the America propagandized as in support of Bush by pollsters who've never been to the hoods or the barrios or Chinatowns or Koreatowns across this country to ask us what we think
about Bush going to war.

Amiri Baraka stands in the line of fire focused. Like Malcolm and Martin and many other African Americans before him, he speaks our truth in defiance to the powers that would shut him up for good. This is our legacy as African Americans of conscience and political clarity. We realize that because of our people's historic experience of slavery in a country that proclaimed "liberty and justice for all," we have a truth that whenever shared, exposes the American democratic process as the fraud it is. No other community has our vantage point and can speak our multi-layered, multi-faceted truths with multiple implications like we can due to our particular and peculiar position in this country. We trouble the meaning of American. Render it a question rather than a statement. That position puts us in the line of fire and if nobody else ever understands this, we, African Americans, should; if only for our own survival and sanity.

If we are going to be honest to our history and accountable to our ancestors who lived it, then we have no other choice but to speak our truth without apology. And when spoken honestly, it does not diminish other people's experiences but illuminates all so that we can see each other clearly and see the cause and root of our suffering and pain to alleviate the same. We Black folk know terrorism intimately.

As Baraka stated in his response statement to the press, "The poem's underlying theme focuses on how Black Americans have suffered from domestic terrorism since being kidnapped into US chattel slavery, e.g., by Slave Owners, US & State Laws, Klan, Skin Heads, Domestic Nazis, Lynching, denial of rights, national oppression, racism, character assassination, historically, and at this very minute throughout the US.

The relevance of this to Bush 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, while asking 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."

The main thrust and the perceived threat of the poem is that it speaks to the African American experience with domestic terrorism in these United States and connects that experience with the experience of terrorism visited upon other communities and individuals throughout history. And by so doing it undermines this unidentifiable, undefined terrorism that Bush and Co. is using to stigmatize and label anyone they decide they want to terrorize and attack. The poem is a series of questions, the wise old owl asking "who, who, who," picking apart the government's propaganda with each question.

With each name we feel our hearts and minds shift alignment from the fiction of this fascist time to the reality of our own experience. And that places us in the appropriate space from which to interrogate and struggle against the real enemy, the historic and contemporary terrorist. The terrorist that terrorizes without provocation .

What gets played out as American is mainly white, and since we ain't never gonna be that, that leaves us on the outs looking in. Since our prolonged sojourn here in the wilderness of the West we have developed this "second sight" ; this ability to see from this marginalized distance. Our vision has been adjusted by our experience here, and when we look at America through the lens of our experience, we can see through the deception, through the deceit to the truth. Malcolm X-ray vision. A multi-faceted and magnified vision that can, not only see through, but also see from across the racial chasm that spans some three hundred years. So, yes, this enables us to differentiate what is in the best interests of the American people and what is in the interests of the corporations that run this country.

When we raise our voices in opposition to what the U.S. government seeks to do, we have the advantage of perspective and experience that gives us the moral authority to proclaim America a contradiction in principle and practice. This government has no moral authority to call anyone terrorist. That before you seek revenge, you gotta settle the score with us first. We are the moral vanguard, the African American people.

To approach this struggle as though it is just an issue of free speech doesn't do it justice. What we are dealing with here is larger than free speech. We are not dealing with one solitary individual's right to speak being violated. This is an issue of the repression of the collective speech, the collective history, the collective struggle of a people that has not just been censored but repressed. Truth is that for Black folks in this country, speech ain't free anyway. It is costly. We pay a high price to speak -- all too often our livelihood if not our very lives. Baraka has not received his honorarium. As he's said, this struggle is not about that, even though he is the one that's been targeted, isolated and attacked.

Now they want to outlaw Baraka and ban his poem. When Jersey legislators realized that Gov. McGreevey had no authority to remove the poet laureate, their response was essentially, "well, let's just make one up." American democracy - white boy style. Not only is it the case that Black folk "have no rights that white men are bound to respect" (see the 1854 Supreme Court ruling in Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sanford), but white men can create new rights whenever they please to keep Black folk oppressed. This is the pernicious legacy of the government's role in repressing dissent and resistance within the Black community.

This is not a case of fascism creeping into American life. Fascism is here. Been here. Always been here for some of us. But clearly in these times, it is now the law of the land. Consider the words of a writer that actually suffered at the hands of the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany. From his prison cell, M. N. Roy wrote the following words, "It has been correctly stated that Fascism means war. . In 1926, speaking in the Chamber of Deputies [Mussolini] declared "the Italian nation to be in a permanent state of war".

Later in that essay he discusses how fascism deals with dissent, "The echo of their [the Italian masses] suffering and the voices of their protest have been ruthlessly suppressed so that nothing but the beating of the war-drums can be heard on the peninsula of Italy." He could have been sitting in an American prison cell writing those very words today.

And finally, one is compelled to ask, what were the folk who decided to name Baraka state laureate thinking in the first place? Every poem Baraka pens is a thorn in the side of the system. What were they expecting? Baraka's commitment to the liberation and self-determination of African American people in the context of socialist revolution is a consistent, persistent path. His is the people's voice, because he lives our reality, breathes our air. Baraka's allegiance has been with the people and will remain there. Thus our allegiance should be with him.

Amiri Baraka is our Paul Robeson. And as Robeson said, Baraka understands that "The artist must take sides. He [or she] must elect to fight for freedom or slavery." Baraka made his choice. Given his history of struggle on the behalf of Black and Third World liberation and self-determination, he "had no alternative." The choice is now ours to make.

Who own the airplanes
Who own the malls
Who own television
Who own radio
Who own what ain't even known to be owned
Who own the owners that ain't the real owners
Who own the suburbs
Who suck the cities
Who make the laws
Who made Bush president .

Hands Off Baraka!

Stop the War!
Impeach the Appointed President!
Power to the People - Not the Corporate State!

Ewuare Osayande is a poet, political activist and author of several books including So the Spoken Word Won't Be Broken: The Politics of the New Black Poetry and 9/11: Riots in the Sky (Poems after 11 September 2001). His next book is an epic poem on the Black experience in Camden,
NJ entitled Kham Deen. He currently serves as chairperson of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Radical Congress.

(undagroundrr@yahoo.com)

photos rory braddell
drawing by jocelyn braddell.