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Tales Of The Out And Gone
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Amiri Baraka |
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Akashic Books, $14.95, 221pp |
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ISBN: 1933354127 |
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Review by Grace F. Edwards |
Amiri Baraka
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Relevance Endures...
Tales Of The Out And Gone, a collection of short stories by Amiri Baraka, the icono-clastic poet laureate of New Jersey are as relevant and revolutionary today as when they were originally published - some as early as 1974. Anyone reading these stories for the first time might conclude that he is "still angry after all these years" - and with good reason.
These short stories cover a period from the 1960s when one dared to "rage against the machine", challenge the status quo, and expose J. Edgar's garter belt. Folks dared to dream, work, and fight 'for a better life' but instead saw dreams delayed, deflated, and bubbles burst with depressing regularity. With the poet's keen eye, Mr. Baraka surgically dissects several of such instances and in doing so, lays bare the moral and political decomposition of the state of the union.
In 'Neo-American' some black politicians, deluded into believing they're on the inside track to receive the crumbs on the table, plan to host the President at a $1000-a-plate Republican fundraiser. Brothers on the outside learn of the event and organize a protest. Guidelines are established. But as one 'insider' (who himself is later betrayed) states: "the president wasn't going to do anything. There was nothing that could be accomplished by demonstrating in front of the hotel where the president was. "what's he gonna do? It aint gonna get nobody no jobs. I'll fix them..." The A.C.L.U. threatens to sue. But the 'insider' knows - "by the time the stuff even gets to where somebody will look at it, everything will be got up and gone. Ha!" The economic climate is so desperate that 'sometimes muggers mugged each other'. In the end, the demonstrators are corralled far away. They don't see the president, the president doesn't see them. And the beat(ings) goes on. |
Mr. Baraka covers a lot of territory in this collection: In 'Norman's Date', a short story earlier published in Playboy magazine in 1983, he describes in hilarious (and ultimately bone chilling) detail, what happens when a love too good to be true goes bad. Norman is in a bar and with contemplative notes of Bird, 'Trane, and Monk sweetening the back-ground, he details a night of perfect love with a perfect woman. She's so beautiful his drinking buddies think he's dreamt the whole thing up until the woman appears at the entrance. And Norman stares open-mouthed as she silently advances toward him, holding a bloody pair of scissors.
In 'Post- and Pre-mortem Dialogue', Mr. Baraka's musing on the nine/eleven catastrophe is summed up in one sentence: "... (i'm) saying the cowboy need a pearl harbor the way shicklgruber need the reichstag so they let the dogs out." Baraka's innovative style compels one to think, to mine specifics from the abstract as characters re-shape and transform themselves and phrases transform meaning. And one discovers the kernel of truth hidden in plain sight.
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Grace F. Edwards is the author of the Mali Anderson Mystery Series, The Viaduct and In The Shadow Of The Peacock.
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