poems by Amiri Baraka [b.

Leroi Jones]

Ka'Ba

A closed window looks down

on a dirty courtyard, and Black people
call across or scream across or walk across
defying physics in the stream of their will.

Our world is full of sound

Our world is more lovely than anyone's
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk the air.

We are beautiful people

With African imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with African eyes, and noses, and arms
tho we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.

We have been captured,

and we labor to make our getaway, into
the ancient image; into a new

Correspondence with ourselves

and our Black family. We need magic
now we need the spells, to raise up
return, destroy, and create. What will be

the sacred word?

1969

...........

Monday in B-Flat

I can pray
all day
& God
wont come.

But if I call
911
The Devil
Be here
in a minute!

1996

Somebody Blew Up America

They say its 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 1
Or David Duke2 or Giuliani
Or Schundler3, Helms4 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 5out the Bucks6

Who got fat from plantations

1
Former United States Senator from Mississippi. He entered Congress as one of the first of a wave of
Republicans winning seats in Southern states that had been solidly Democratic. He became Senate
Majority Leader, then fell from power after praising Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist Dixiecrat
presidential bid.
2
American White nationalist, writer, right-wing politician, and a former Grand Wizard of the Knights of
the Ku Klux Klan. Also former Republican Louisiana State Representative.
3
At the time of 9/11, Bret Schundler, governor of New Jersey [Baraka’s home state] for a decade, was
running for Governor. Perhaps by mentioning him, Baraka gives the poem a New Jersey connection.
4
Jesse Helms, white supremacist.
5
Urban slang [“bucks”, i.e., dollars]
6
Basketball team.
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 Dahmer7 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

7
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal, was an American serial killer and sex
offender. Diagnosed by psychologists and prison psychiatrists as suffering from a borderline personality
disorder, Dahmer was found to be legally sane at his trial.
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 Sibeko8, Chris Hani9,

the same ones who killed Biko10, Cabral11,
Neruda, Allende, Che Guevara, Sandino12,

8
David Bambatha Maphgumzana Sibeko (b. 26 August 1938 in Johannesburg, South Africa – d.12 June
1979 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) was known as the "Malcolm X of South Africa".
9
Chris Hani, born Martin Thembisile Hani, leader of the South African Communist Party and chief of
staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), was a fierce
opponent of the apartheid government. He was assassinated on 10 April 1993.
10
Stephen Bantu Biko, anti-apartheid activist in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s.
11
Amílcar Cabral, Portuguese poet and revolutionary, inspired the post-colonial wars in Angola and
Moçambique.
12
Augusto César Sandino, Nicaraguan revolutionary and leader of a rebellion between 1927 and 1933
against the U.S. military occupation of Nicaragua. He is a symbol of resistance to U.S. neoimperialism
[see “sandinistas”].
Who killed Kabila13, the ones who wasted Lumumba14, Mondlane15,
Betty Shabazz16, Die, Princess Di, Ralph Featherstone17,
Little Bobby18

Who locked up Mandela, Dhoruba19, Geronimo20,

Assata21, Mumia22, Garvey23, Dashiell Hammett, Alphaeus Hutton 24

13
Laurent-Désiré Kabila was President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1997, when he
overthrew Mobutu Sese Seko, until his assassination by one of his bodyguards on January 18, 2001. He
was succeeded by his son Joseph Kabila Kabange .
14
Patrice Émery Lumumba was a Congolese independence leader and the first democratically elected
Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo (now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo). As
founder and leader of the Mouvement national congolais, Lumumba helped win his country's
independence from Belgium in 1960. Lumumba's government was deposed in a coup during the Congo
Crisis. The main reason why he was ousted from power was his opposition to Belgian-backed secession
of the mineral-rich Katanga province. Lumumba was subsequently imprisoned by state authorities under
Joseph-Desiré Mobutu and executed by firing squad under the command of the secessionist Katangan
authorities. The United Nations, which he had asked to come to the Congo, did not intervene to save
him. Belgium, the United States (via the CIA), and the United Kingdom (via MI6) have all been accused of
involvement in Lumumba's death.
15
Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane served as President of the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO)
from 1962, the year that FRELIMO was founded in Tanzania, until his assassination in 1969. He was an
anthropologist by profession but worked as a history and sociology professor at Syracuse University in
the state of New York.
16
Betty Shabazz , a.k.a Betty X, was an American educator and civil rights advocate. She was the wife of
Malcolm X.
17
On March 9, 1970 two SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; often pronounced “snick”]
officials, Ralph Featherstone and William ("Che") Payne, died on U.S. Route 1 south of Bel Air, Maryland,
when a bomb on the front floorboard of their car exploded, completely destroying the car and
dismembering both occupants. Theories of the origin of the bomb are disputed. Some say it was planted
in an assassination attempt, others say it was intentionally carried by Payne to be used at the
courthouse where Rap Brown [chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the
1960s, currently serving a life sentence for the murder of two county sheriffs] was to be tried. The next
night the Cambridge courthouse was bombed.
18
Robert James Hutton, or "Lil' Bobby", was the treasurer and first recruit to join the Black Panther
Party.
19
Dhoruba al-Mujahid bin Wahad (born Richard Earl Moore) is an American writer and activist, Black
Panther Party leader, and co-founder of the Black Liberation Army. Dhoruba, in Swahili, means "he who
is born in the storm".
20
Geronimo (1829 –1909) was a prominent leader of the Bedonkohe Apache who fought against Spain
and Texas for their expansion into Apache tribal lands for several decades during the Apache Wars.
21
Assata Olugbala Shakur is an African-American activist and escaped convicted murderer who was a
member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. Between 1971 and 1973, Shakur was
accused of several crimes and made the subject of a multi-state manhunt.
22
Mumia Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook) is a U.S. prisoner convicted for the 1981 murder of
Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. His original sentence of death, handed down at his first trial
in July 1982, was commuted to life imprisonment without parole in 2012. Described as "perhaps the
world's best known death-row inmate" by The New York Times, supporters and detractors have
disagreed on his guilt, whether he received a fair trial, and the appropriateness of the death penalty.
23
Marcus Garvey, Jr. was a Jamaican political leader, publisher, journalist, and orator who was a
proponent of the Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the
Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). He founded the
Black Star Line, which promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands.
24
Who killed Huey Newton25, Fred Hampton26,
Medgar Evers27, Mikey Smith28, Walter Rodney29,
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, Liebneckt30

Who murdered the Rosenbergs 31

25
Huey Percy Newton was an African-American political and urban activist who, along with Bobby Seale,
co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. Newton had a long series of confrontations with law
enforcement, including several convictions, while he participated in political activism. He continued to
pursue an education, eventually earning a Ph.D. in Social Science. Newton spent time in prison for
manslaughter and was involved in a shooting that killed a police officer, for which he was later
acquitted. In 1989 he was shot and killed in Oakland, California by Tyrone "Double R" Robinson, a
member of the Black Guerrilla Family.
26
Fred Hampton was an African-American activist and deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the
Black Panther Party (BPP). He was killed while sleeping in his apartment during a raid by a tactical unit of
the Cook County, Illinois State's Attorney's Office (SAO), in conjunction with the Chicago Police
Department (CPD) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) [see film The Murder of Fred Hampton,
1971]
27
Medgar Wiley Evers was an African-American civil rights activist from Mississippi involved in efforts to
overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi. After returning from overseas military service in
World War II and completing his secondary education, he became active in the civil rights movement.
He became a field secretary for the NAACP. Evers was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith, a member
of the White Citizens' Council. As a veteran, Evers was buried with full military honors at Arlington
National Cemetery. His murder and the resulting trials inspired civil rights protests, as well as numerous
works of art, music, and film.
28
Michael Smith, usually referred to as Mikey Smith, was a Jamaican dub poet. In 1978, Smith
represented Jamaica at the 11th World Festival of Youth and Students in Cuba. His album Mi Cyaan
Believe It includes his poem of the same name. He had left-anarchist leanings and Rastafarian
sympathies, and was allegedly murdered by political opponents associated with the right-wing Jamaica
Labour Party (JLP) after he had provoked the Jamaican Minister of Culture at a political rally on 17
August 1983.
29
Walter Anthony Rodney was a prominent Guyanese historian, political activist and preeminent
scholar, who was assassinated in Guyana in 1980.
30
Karl Liebknecht was a German socialist and a co-founder with Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacist
League and the Communist Party of Germany. He is best known for his opposition to World War I in the
Reichstag. After their deaths, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg became martyrs for Socialists.
According to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, commemoration of Liebknecht
and Luxemburg continues to play an important role among the German far-left.
31
Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg were American citizens executed for conspiracy to
commit espionage, relating to passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. The trial
of the Rosenbergs and Sobell began on March 6, 1951. The prosecution's primary witness, David
Greenglass, stated that his sister Ethel typed notes containing U.S. nuclear secrets in the Rosenberg
apartment in September 1945. The notes allegedly typed by Ethel apparently contained little that was
relevant to the Soviet atomic bomb project and some suggest Ethel was indicted along with Julius so
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 Clarence32 Work for

Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza 33
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 Amin34, Who frame the Rosenbergs,

that the prosecution could use her to pressure Julius into giving up the names of others who were
involved. However, neither Julius nor Ethel Rosenberg named anyone else and during testimony each
asserted their right under the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment to not incriminate themselves
whenever asked about involvement in the Communist Party or with its members.
32
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and African American to serve on the
Court. He is generally viewed as the most conservative member of the Court.
33
Condolezza Rice, first female African-American secretary of state, as well as the second African
American secretary of state (after Colin Powell), and the second female secretary of state (after
Madeleine Albright). Rice was President Bush's National Security Advisor during his first term, making
her the first woman to serve in that position.
34
Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, (born October 4, 1943, as Hubert Gerold Brown), also known as H. Rap Brown,
was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, and during a short-lived
(six months) alliance between SNCC and the Black Panther Party, he served as their Minister of Justice.
Garvey,
The Scottsboro Boys35,
The Hollywood Ten 36

Who set the Reichstag Fire 37

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

He is perhaps most famous for his proclamation during that period that "violence is as American as
cherry pie", as well as once stating that "If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down". He is
also known for his autobiography Die Nigger Die!. He is currently serving a life sentence for murder
following the 2000 shooting of two Fulton County Sheriff's deputies, both black. One deputy, Ricky
Kinchen, died in the shooting.
35
The "Scottsboro Boys" or “Scottsboro Case” refers tp nine black youths falsely charged with raping
two white women in Alabama. This case, more than any other event in the South during the 1930s,
revealed the barbarous treatment of blacks. The case began on March 25, 1931, when a number of
white and black youths were riding on a freight train, traveling to see if they could find work. A fight
broke out between a group of black and white hobos, and the whites were thrown off the train. They
reported the incident to a stationmaster, who wired ahead for officials to stop the train at a town called
Paint Rock. Dozens of armed men rounded up nine black youths and took them to jail. They were about
to be charged with assault when two white women, dressed in boys clothing, were discovered hiding on
the train. Although there was no evidence connecting the youths to the women, the former were
charged with raping the latter – who had had sexual relations with some of the white men thrown off
the train and fearing prosecution for their sexual activity with the white men – agreed to testify against
the black youths. The trial was held in the town of Scottsboro, Alabama. The all-white jury convicted the
nine, and all but the youngest, who was 12 years old, were sentenced to death.
36
In October 1947, 10 members of the Hollywood film industry publicly denounced the tactics employed
by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), an investigative committee of the U.S. House
of Representatives, who blacklisted artists during its probe of alleged communist influence in the
American motion picture business. These prominent screenwriters and directors, who became known as
the Hollywood Ten, were held in contempt of Congress, received jail sentences and were banned from
working for the major Hollywood studios. For more information on the Ten, see
<http://www.listal.com/list/blacklisted-in-hollywood> [also see playwright Lillian Hellman and Arthur
Miller – “The Crucible”]
37
The Reichstag firewas an arson attack on the Reichstag building in Berlin on 27 February 1933.
Marinus van der Lubbe, a young Dutch council communist and unemployed bricklayer who had recently
arrived in Germany to fulfill his dream and to engage in political activities, was caught at the scene and
after admitting starting the fire was sentenced to death. The fire was used as evidence by the Nazis that
the Communists were plotting against the German government and the event is seen as pivotal in the
establishment of Nazi Germany.
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!

Copyright (c) 2001 Amiri Baraka. All Rights Reserved

...........