ABSTRACT
Nobody says muthafucka like Amiri Baraka. Whether excoriating spiritual enslavement to the "madness" of seeking exemption from history —"preach!!/baldhead rip off/teach!!/chicken eatin metaphysical/loud talkin chained up mutherfuckas" ("Reggae or Not!" — TB, p, 177) — or celebrating the anarchic energy of resistant black musicality — "There was nothing left to do but/be where monk cd find him/that crazy/mother fucker/duh duh-duh duh-duh duh . . ." ("Am/Trak" — TB, p. 191) — muthafucka rises and thumps, slithers and roils, slides and screams from Baraka's throat both as a vehicle of archaic power, evoking the irreducible violence of rupture, distance, loss, and restitutive transgression, and as a vessel of symbolic import, carrying the complex burden of ideological critique, reproachful admonition, and oracular fury. By turns witheringly ironic and brutally tender, scornfully embittered and slyly reverential, Baraka's muthafucka is a signature of a supple and sometimes self-divided voice that has for nearly four decades not so much graced America's imaginative ambitions as haunted its nightmare refusals, seductions, and betrayals, insistently ululating from the culture's subversive margins a long-breathed blues-tinged wail of prophetic outrage and utopic expectation, part Shine, part Br'er Rabbit: The motherfuckin' heart, of the motherfuckin' day, grows hot as a bitch, on her motherfuckin' way, back home. I want to go back home. I've got nothin' against you. But I got to get back home. ("Lady Bug" — SP, p. 97)
