Wait for Ping Pong?

By R.Z.S.

RAISE RACE RAYS RAZE: ESSAYS SINCE 1965 by Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). 169 pages. Random House. $5.95.

For all his bitter denunciations of white civilization as decadent and evil, LeRoi Jones cannot quite flush it from his system. It is as much a part of this 36-year-old black writer as having been the son of a Newark, N.J., postal worker, a graduate of Howard University, an East Village intellectual with a Tyrolean hat and a white wife, and a gifted poet-playwright who was cheered until white liberals decided that white guilt was a form of masochism.

An ambivalent past can be a source of strength and creative energy. Today Jones--also known as Imamu Amiri Baraka--has a black wife and is the leader of Spirit House, an African culture center in Newark. But the past can also cause awkward ironies. Why, for example, should Jones, as dedicated as he is to the unique genius of African cultures, be so dependent on the white man's academic jargon and propaganda techniques? Their dead weight has a consistently bad effect on the otherwise vital and aggressive street style of many of the essays and manifestoes contained in Raise Race, etc. Sometimes he attempts to lighten the load by adding asides--"if you can dig that," after phrases like "we hate as of a legitimate empirical reaction." The result is an embarrassing self-consciousness. Yet self-consciousness is what at this stage Jones' Black Power mission is really all about. "We are self-conscious now," he writes, "because we are trying to break from slavery. If we could see it continuously as people, as the devil collecting and using our energies to pervert the world, then there would be no pause, no rhetoric, only action, which is divine/'

"O Allah." Jones' rhetoric about virile blacks v. effete whites proves his own point. Like the quotations of Chairman Mao, such talk is a form of political action, though hardly divine. The book does offer a savage vignette of blacks being harassed in a Newark courtroom as well as a snarling account of that city's 1967 riots set against a background of ethnic politics and official corruption. But mainly Jones pushes a distended version of black nationalism based on a fusion of black art, black politics and African spiritualism.

What Jones means when he uses the word black is not always evident, though it is clear that he is against anything white in the American or European sense. "O Allah O Shango (rulers of our ancient cities) O Osiris, we will be closer to you from now on,'' he cries. Elsewhere he declares, "Do not talk Marx or Lenin or Trotsky when you speak of political thinkers. Abdel Rahman, Nkrumah, Sekoti Toure, Mao, Du-Bois, Fanon, Nyerere, Garvey, Lumumba, Malcolm, Guevara, Elijah, Abu Dekr will plot, have already plotted, our way."

Totalitarian Fantasy. Naturally, Jones fails to note that Allah and Egypt's gods were divine sanctions for slave societies, and that many of the distinguished mortals he names learned their politics from the writings of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. But why complicate the issue and disrupt Jones' totalitarian fantasies about white evil and righteous black revenge? At certain levels of his struggle to spread black cultural consciousness, hyperbole and distortion may be necessary. Jones' energetic campaigning for Kenneth Gibson, Newark's first black mayor, indicates that he is well aware of the ways in which real political power is gained and wielded. As for the rhetoric of provocation and hate, perhaps it is wisest to let it blow over and await an invitation to play Ping Pong.

R.Z.S.

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