Spotlight on … Amiri Baraka The System of Dante’s Hell (1965)

 

‘Amiri Baraka’s literary work from the early-to-mid-1960s registers some of the affinities between his thinking about black poverty and that of the liberal intellectuals who helped plan out the War on Poverty. These intellectuals were engaged in a shared project—that of rethinking poverty as an identity category, as a distinct culture at odds with the attitudes and values of the rationalistic middle class. This shared project became a common motif in the literature and social science of the 1950s and culminated in 1960s debates about the Great Society. It gave rise to a peculiar kind of welfare politics—one whereby confronting poverty entailed either affirming or rejecting the culture of the poor.

‘Baraka’s The System of Dante’s Hell, an experimental novel written in the early 1960s and published in 1965 was written while Baraka was still a Beat poet living in Greenwich Village, associated with white, avant-garde artists such as Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Frank O’Hara. However, it is a transitional text, one that moves toward the cultural nationalism that dominated Baraka’s writings from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, when he became a third world Marxist. Baraka began work on the novel at about the same time that the idea of a distinct “culture of poverty” began to permeate public discourse in the United States, thanks largely to Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962), which publicized the existence of widespread poverty to an American middle-class audience. The System of Dante’s Hell exemplifies the similarities between this poverty discourse and the idealization of poor Americans and especially poor African Americans that pervaded the Beat literature of the 1950s and that persisted into Baraka’s cultural nationalism.’ — Stephen Schryer

‘I highly recommend Amiri Baraka’s experimental novel from the ’60s, The System of Dante’s Hell. Written under the poet’s name at that time, LeRoi Jones, Baraka gives a highly personal, somewhat autobiographical, account of how the experience of being a black man can be related in terms suggestive of Hell as developed by Dante in the Inferno.

‘In fact, a modified version of Dante’s system is provided at the beginning of the book. But don’t get trapped into attempting to marry each section of Baraka’s narrative to Dante’s map of Hell.

‘Most of the imagery and narrative expressed in this novel is is highly personal and vividly representative of the black experience, whether in Newark, New Jersey, or in some mythical representation of a southern outpost defined by segregation and racism. There’s a lot of feelings and experiences in this text that are probably new and often jarring, even after fifty years … but read carefully, they’re worth it.

‘Two things that struck me while reading The System of Dante’s Hell: first, and somewhat frivolous, is what appears to be a summary on Wikipedia of a different book. No, it is not the story of a black man roaming around the south experiencing racism and segregation in various cities. The Wikipedia entry suggests to me that it was written by a reviewer who hadn’t read the book:

The novel follows a young black man living nomadically in big cities and small towns in the Southern United States, and his struggles with segregation and racism. The book correlates the man’s experience with Dante’s Inferno, and includes a diagram of the fictional hell described by Dante Alighieri.

‘The other, which is possibly even more frivolous, is that Baraka foresees the rise of text abbreviations much like used today on the internet to save keystrokes. No, he never writes LOL or ROTFLMAO but you have to lookout for THOT and WD and CD … not too much but just enough to tweak my personal dislike of dialect and misplaced argot.’ — A Celebration of Reading

 

____
Further

A Turbulent Life: On Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka @ Goodreads
The Path Cleared by Amiri Baraka
Amair Baraka @ PennSound
Amiri Baraka – Militant Writer and Artist
Answers in Progress: Amiri Baraka’s Lyrical Manifesto for Life
The Sweet and Angry Music of Amiri Baraka
The Lives of Amiri Baraka
ON AMIRI BARAKA: WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN?
Setting the Record Straight on Amiri Baraka
Remembering Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
Amiri Baraka: Walk On To The Freedom Land
Amiri Baraka’s Legacy Both Controversial And Achingly Beautiful
art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas: interviewing amiri baraka
Amiri Baraka: The Village Voice Years
Amiri Baraka Is in Contempt
Revolutionary Equations: Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
A Rage to Write
“The System of Dante’s Hell”: Underworlds of Art and Liberation
From Brother LeRoi Jones Through The System ofDante’s Hell To Imamu Ameer Baraka
“A Culture of Violence and Foodsmells”: Amiri Baraka’s The System of Dante’s Hell and the War on Poverty
Buy ‘The System of Dante’s Hell’

 

____
Extras

Amiri Baraka (1968)

Amiri Baraka Interview (1972)

Amiri Baraka performing “Wailers.” From Poetry in Motion (1982)

Amiri Baraka on his poetry and breaking rules (1988)

 

_____
Interview

 

KALAMU YA SALAAM: When you wrote A System of Dante’s Hell, at one point you decided just to start with memory. You sat down and just started to write your first memories — without trying to make any sense of them or to order them, but rather just to write whatever were your first memories. Is that correct?

AMIRI BARAKA: Yeah. That’s essentially what it is. I was writing to try to get away from emulating Black Mountain, Robert Creely, Charles Olson, that whole thing. It struck me as interesting because somebody else who had done the same thing was Aime Cesaire. Cesaire said that he vowed one time that he was not going to write anymore poetry because it was too imitative of the French symbolist and he wanted to get rid of the French symbolists. So he said he was only going to write prose but by trying to do that he wrote A Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. It’s incredible when you think about that. For me it was the same thing, I was trying to get away from a certain kind of thing. I kept writing like Creely and Olson and what came to me was: “I don’t even think this.” What became clear to me is that if you adopt a certain form that form is going to push you into certain content because the form is not just the form, the form itself is content. There is content in form and in your choice of form.

SALAAM: Is there content or is there the shaping of content?

BARAKA: No, I’m saying this: the shaping itself is a choice and that choice is ideological. In other words, it’s not just form. The form itself carries…

SALAAM: If you choose a certain form, then the question is why did you choose that form.

BARAKA: Exactly–Why did you choose that form?–that’s what I’m saying. That’s the ideological portent, or the ideological coloring of form. Why did you choose that? Why does that appeal to you? Why this one and not that one.

SALAAM: You said you were consciously trying to get away from the form?

BARAKA: Yes.

SALAAM: So, why call it A System of Dante’s Hell?

BARAKA: Because, I thought, in my own kind of contradictory thinking, that it was “hell.” You see the Dante–which escaped me at the time. It shows you how you can be somewhere else and even begin to take on other people’s concerns–I wasn’t talking about Dante Aligheri. See? I “thought” I was, but I was really talking about Edmund Dante, The Count of Monte Cristo. You see, I had read the Count of Monte Cristo when I was a child and I loved the Count of Monte Cristo. Edmund Dante, that’s who I was talking about and I had forgotten that. Forgotten that actually it was Dante Aligheri although I had read that and there was a professor of mine at Howard, Nathan Scott, who went on to become the Chairman of the Chicago Institute of Theology. Nathan Scott was a heavy man. When he used to lecture on Dante, he was so interested in that, that that is how he interested me and A.B. [Spelman] in that. He would start running it down and we would say that damn, this must be some intersting shit here if he’s that in to it. So we read it and we got into it. It was like Sterling Brown teaching us Shakespeare.

SALAAM: So the Count of Monte Cristo is what you were remembering?

BARAKA: Right. Absolutely.

SALAAM: But you were saying A System of Dante’s Hell. Explain the title.

BARAKA: I had come up on a kind of graphic which showed the system of Dante’s hell. You know, hell laid out in graphic terms showing which each circle was. First circle, second circle, etc.

SALAAM: That was Dante Aligheri.

BARAKA: Right. But seeing that, I wanted to make a statement about that, but the memory itself was not about that. See what I’m saying? I was fascinated by Dante’s hell because of the graphic but when I started reaching into Dante, I wasn’t talking about that Dante. I was talking about Edmund Dante. Remember, Edmund Dante, as all those Dumas characters–you know all of Dumas’ characters get thrown down, get whipped, somebody steal their stuff and they come back. All of them do that. Like the Man in the Iron Mask, that could be Africa sitting up inside that mask. The same thing with Edmund Dante, who I didn’t think was hooked up to the earlier Dante, but who was disenfranchished. Despised and belittled. And then his son, the count of Monte Cristo, puts all this money and wealth together. He’s got an enourmous fortune, and he vows revenge on the enemies of his father. That is what was in my mind. What’s interesting about that is first of all that it is Dumas, which I had read as a child before I read Dante Aligheri. I had read Dumas not only in the book but I had read classic comics, you dig? I had read all of that, the whole list in classic comics. That Count of Monte Cristo made a deep, deep impression on me. I think what it was is that I always thought that Black people generally, particularly my father, Black men like him, I saw a parallel with that. They had been thrown down. My grandfather…

SALAAM: And it was on you. You were vowing revenge on those who had thrown down…

BARAKA: Absolutely. My grandfather was “Everett”–which always reminded me of “Edmund”–my grandfather’s name was Thomas Everett Russ. He was the one who owned a grocery store and a funeral parlor and the Klan ran him out of there. Then he got hit in the head by a street light, that’s what they said when they carried him in, and he spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair spitting in a can. You understand? So Everett/Edmund, all of that shit. I always remembered him. Like the night that Dutchman came out. I went down to the corner to look at all these newspapers. They were saying all kinds of crazy things: this nigger is crazy, he’s using all these bad words; but I could see that they were trying to make me famous. I said, oh well, I see.

SALAAM: What do you mean “make you famous”?

BARAKA: I could see that this was not a one night stand. They had some stuff they wanted to run about me, either on a long term negative or a long term positive. I said, oh, in other words you’re going to make this some kind of discussion. For some reason the strangest feeling came over me. I was standing on the corner of 8th Street and 2nd Avenue at the newspaper stand reading. I had a whole armful. At the time there were a lot of newspapers in New York: The Journal American, The Daily News, The Post, The New York Times, The Herald Tribune, The Village Voice, The Villager, I had all of them in my hand. A strange sensation came over me; the sensation was “oh, you’re going to make me famous,” but then I’m going to pay all of you people back. I’m going to pay you back for all the people you have fucked over. That was clear. There was no vagueness about that. That came to my mind clear as a bell. That’s why I think that whatever you do, there’s always some shit lurking in your mind and if the right shit comes together–you know the difference between quantitative and qualitative, you know that leap to something else. It could be liquid and suddenly leap into ice, it could be ice and suddenly leap into vapor. When I got that feeling, it was a terrific feeling. It was like some kind of avenger or something. It was: Now, I’m going to pay these motherfuckers back!

SALAAM: Like, all of sudden you now know why you were put here.

BARAKA: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Because until then people wanted to know about the village. I was kind of–not totally, but I was a little happy go lucky kind of young blood down in the village kicking up my heels. I mean I had a certain kind of sense of responsibility. I was involved in Fair Play for Cuba and those kinds of things. I had even worked in Harlem. But I had never determined that I needed to do something that personal and yet that general as pay some people back.

SALAAM: So this was not only personal; it was also taking care of business?

BARAKA: Exactly. I never saw that it was connected specifically to me…

SALAAM: So before your work, your writing, was personal?

BARAKA: Yeah, it didn’t have nothing to do with nobody because it was just me. But then it was, now that people would know my name, I had a sense of responsibility. As long as I was an obscure person, I was going to kick up my heels and be…

SALAAM: Obscure.

BARAKA: Right. Whatever I wanted to do. Althought that’s not a static kind of realization because you were moving anyway. You can’t come to this new conclusion unless you have moved quantitatively over to it. So that was a big turning point because I said, God damn, look at this!

SALAAM: Was that when you got the idea for System? When did you get the idea to write System?

BARAKA: I had written System already, but the point is that that was actually a kind of a summing up of one kind of life to make ready for another. I can see that now.

SALAAM: So System, in a sense, was what made it possible for you to look forward because now you had looked back.

BARAKA: Yeah, it sort of like cleaned up everything. You know how you want to clear the table. I had dealt with all of the stuff, now I can deal with the next phase of my life. Also, there’s this guy, I think his name is Brown, he’s an Englishman. There’s a book called Marxism and Poetry, a very interesting book, but anyway he says that drama is always most evident in periods of revolution. In other words when you get to the point that you’re going to make the characters so ambitious that they are going to actually walk around like they are in real life that means you’re trying to turn the whole thing around. That had been happening to me. I started writing poetry that had people speaking. It would be a poem and then suddenly I would have a name, a colon, and then a speech, then a name, a colon, and another speech. This would be within a poem. The next thing I know I was writing plays. You could see it just mount and mount and mount. You wanted realer than the page. You wanted them on the stage, actually walking around saying it. I had written a couple of plays before Dutchman but the way Dutchman was written was so spectacular that what happened with it didn’t surprise me. I came in one night about twelve and wrote until about six in the morning and went to sleep without even knowing what I had written. I woke up the next morning and there it was. I had written it straight out, no revisions. I just typed it straight out.

SALAAM: What was your thinking about what people had to say about System? The reason I’m asking that is because the plays people could relate to as plays, the poems they had references for, particularly the early poems that they could deal with from an academic perspective, but System was a whole other kind of thing.

BARAKA: Like I said, I was trying to get away from what a whole bunch of people were doing, so it didn’t make any difference to me. I saw this magazine for the first time in, I don’t know, twenty or thirty some years, the magazine was called the Trembling Lamb. They published the first five, six or seven sections of Dante and I thought it was a breakthrough because I thought it was something different from what the little circumscribed community of the downtown hip was doing. So recognizing that, or at least what I thought I was recognizing, well, whatever people think, they’ll think differently after awhile. It didn’t make any difference to me what they thought.

SALAAM: So after it came out and you started getting reactions from people, what did you think?

BARAKA: Well, I never got any bad reactions at first. I got some reactions from critics whom I didn’t think knew anything anyway, so that didn’t mean anything. But in terms of my peers, I never got any bad criticism that would make me think I needed to do something else.

SALAAM: You describe it as a breakthrough…

BARAKA: A breakout!

SALAAM: So you make a breakout but all of sudden it’s like you stopped writing fiction as far as the reading public goes?

BARAKA: I didn’t see it that way.

SALAAM: I’m not saying you stopped writing fiction, I’m saying as far as the reading public goes what fiction came out after that?

BARAKA: Tales. But then when I look at it–well, the first couple of pieces in Tales are from Dante. They were written in the same period. And then a lot of those things that are post-Dante are still making use of the Dante technique. As a matter of fact Tales covers three periods, there’s stuff from downtown, from Harlem, and even stuff from Newark. But it is the same kind of approach.

SALAAM: Ok, but then what? With the fiction–the reason I’m asking you specifically about the fiction is because publically we can trace Amiri Baraka the playwright. The plays are there, even the ones that haven’t been produced that much, the scripts have been in circulation and in many cases published. The same for the essays and definitely the same for the poetry. Even when they weren’t published formally, informally they were circulated around. But the fiction, not so. And at the same time, if we talk about a major breakthrough in terms of form, you probably made the biggest breakthrough with the fiction.

BARAKA: Hmmm. I guess you’re right. But, you know, nobody ever asked me to write a novel.

 

___
Book

Amiri Baraka The System of Dante’s Hell
Akashic Books

‘This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante’s Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, treachery. With a poet’s skill Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City. The episodes contained within the novel represent both states of mind and states of the soul—lyrical, fragmentary, and allusive.’ — Akashic Books

‘A fevered and impressionistic riff on the struggles of blacks in the urban North and rural South, as told through the prism of The Inferno. . . . Other writers addressed race more directly, but for all its linguistic slipperiness, Baraka’s language conveys the feelings of fear, violation, and fury with a surprising potency. A pungent and lyrical portrait of mid-’60s black protest.’ — Kirkus Reviews

Excerpt

The System of Dante’s Hell

 

Neutrals

Circle 1. Virtuous Heathen

Circle 2. Lascivious

Incontinent Circle 3. Gluttons

Circle 4. Avaricious and Prodigal

Circle 5. Wrathful

Circle 6. Heretics*

(1) Violent against others

 

Violent Circle 7. (2) Violent against self

(3) Violent against God,

nature, and art

(1) Panderers and Seducers

(2) Flatterers

(3) Simonists

(4) Diviners

 

Circle 8. Simply (5) Barrators

Fraudulent (6) Hypocrites

(7) Thieves

(8) Fraudulent Counsellors

(9) Makers of

discord

(10) Falsifiers

(1) to kindred

(2) to country

and cause

 

Circle 9. Treacherous (3) to guests

(4) to lords and

benefactors

 

*I put The Heretics in the deepest part of hell, though Dante had them spared, on higher ground.

It is heresy, against one’s own sources, running in terror, from one’s deepest responses and insights . . . the denial of feeling . . . that I see as basest evil.

We are not talking merely about beliefs, which are later, after the fact of feeling. A flower, turning from moisture and sun would turn evil colors and die.

 

*

NEUTRALS: The Vestibule

But Dante’s hell is heaven. Look at things in another light. Not always the smarting blue glare pressing through the glass. Another light, or darkness. Wherever we’d go to rest. By the simple rivers of our time. Dark cold water slapping long wooden logs jammed 10 yards down in the weird slime, 6 or 12 of them hold up a pier. Water, wherever we’d rest. And the first sun we see each other in. Long shadows down off the top where we were. Down thru gray morning shrubs and low cries of waked up animals.

Neutrals: The breakup of my sensibility. First the doors. The brown night rolling down bricks. Chipped stone stairs in the silence. Vegetables rotting in the neighbors’ minds. Dogs wetting on the buildings in absolute content. Seeing the pitied. The minds of darkness. Not even sinister. Breaking out in tears along the sidewalks of the season. Gray leaves outside the junkshop. Sheridan Square blue men under thick quivering smoke. Trees, statues in a background of voices. Justice, Égalité. Horns break the fog with trucks full of dead chickens. Motors. Lotions.

The neutrals run jewelry shops & shit in silence under magazines. Women disappear into Canada. They painted & led interminable lives. They marched along the sides of our cars in the cold brown weather. They wore corduroy caps & listened to portables. The world was in their eyes. They wore rings & had stories about them. They walked halfway back from school with me. They were as tall as anyone else you knew. Some sulked, across the street out of sight, near the alley where the entrance to his home was. A fat mother. A fat father with a mustache. Both houses, and the irishman’s near the playground. Balls went in our yards. Strong hitters went in Angel’s. They all lived near everything.

A house painter named Ellic, The Dog, “Flash.” Eddie, from across the street. Black shiny face, round hooked nose, beads for hair. A thin light sister with droopy socks. Smiling. Athletic. Slowed by bow legs. Hustler. Could be made angry. Snotty mouth. Hopeless.

 

*

The mind fastens past landscapes. Invisible agents. The secret trusts. My own elliptical. The trees’ shadows broaden. The sky draws together darkening. Shadows beneath my fingers. Gloom grown under my flesh.

 

*

Or fasten across the lots, the gray garages, roofs suspended over cherry trees. The playground fence. Bleakly with guns in the still thin night. Shadows of companions drawn out along the ground. Newark Street green wood, chipped, newsstands. Dim stores in the winter. Thin brown owners of buicks.

And this not the first. Not beginnings. Smells of dreams. The pickles of the street’s noise. Fire escapes of imagination. To fall off to death. Unavailable. Delayed into whispering under hurled leaves. Paper boxes roll down near the pool. From blue reflection, through the fence to the railroad. No trains. The walks there and back to where I was. Night queens in winter dusk. Drowning city of silence. Ishmael back, up through the thin winter smells. Conked hair, tweed coat, slightly bent at the coffee corner. Drugstore, hands turning the knob for constant variation. Music. For the different ideas of the world. We would turn slowly and look. Or continue eating near the juke box. Theories sketch each abstraction. Later in his old face ideas were ugly.

Or be wrong because of simple movement. Not emotion. From under all this. The weight of myself. Not even with you to think of. That settled. Without the slightest outside.

 

*

Stone on stone. Hard cobblestones, oil lamps, green house of the native. Natives down the street. All dead. All walking slowly toward their lives. Already, each Sunday forever. The man was a minister. His wife was light-skinned with freckles. Their church was tall brown brick and sophisticated. Bach was colored and lived in the church with Handel. Beckett was funeral director with brown folding chairs. On W. Market St. in winters the white stripe ran down the center of my thots on the tar street. The church sat just out of shadows and its sun slanted down on the barbershops.

Even inside the house, linoleums were cold. Divided in their vagueness. Each man his woman. Their histories die in the world. My own. To our children we are always and forever old. Grass grew up thru sidewalks. Mr. & Mrs. Puryear passed over it. Their gentle old minds knew my name. And I point out forever their green grass. Brown unopened books. The smell of the world. Just inside the dark bedroom. The world. Inside the sealed eyes of obscure relatives. The whole world. A continuous throb in the next room.

He raced out thru sunlight past their arms and crossed the goal. Or nights with only the moon and their flat laughter he peed under metal stairs and ran through the cold night grinning. Each man his own place. Each flower in its place. Each voice hung about me in this late evening. Each face will come to me now. Or what it was running through their flesh, all the wild people stalking their own winters.

The street was always silent. Green white thick bricks up past where we could see. An open gate to the brown hard gravel no one liked. Another day grew up through this. Crowds down the street. Sound in red waves waves over the slow cold day. To dusk. To black night of rusty legs. “These little girls would run after dark past my house, sometimes chased by the neighbor hoods.” A long hill stuck against the blue glass. From there the woman, the whore, the dancer, the lesbian, the middleclass coloured girl spread her legs. Or so my father said. The dog Paulette was on fire, and I slipped out through the open window to the roof. Then shinnied down to the ground. I hid out all night with some italians.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, True enough. That’s what fire is there for. I was going to say that the only situation I can think of in which you could be paid not to work is to get a sugar daddy, but then not working for a sugar daddy is surely a lot of work. ** Ian, Hi, Ian. Awesome you liked it. All credit to Ben. I hope all is supreme with you. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I’d never heard of it either until Ben made that grand introduction. It would definitely be handy if love is around the big P today with AK47 and is a good aim. Ooh, then I’ll check the pasta sections of the market more closely. I suspect I’ll have to go to that American junk food store to find it, though. Just that word bachelorette, yeek! I’m sure if love has his AK47 in hand, he can manage it somehow. Love commandeering every TV channel and streaming platform to present an 8 hourlong program wherein he teaches all of us how to curtsy, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, My total and utter pleasure, man. You did the bangingest of bang up jobs. ** Sypha, I only saw the movie of ‘James and the Giant Peach’, and I certainly don’t remember there being any nasty parts. To me, you will always be an eccentric nephew, if that makes you feel less eccentric. Not that you should ever want to be less eccentric. Eccentricity is one of the last bastions of freedom in this god forsaken world. I prefer novels too. I don’t know about you, but I basically work short fiction when I don’t feel like I have any ideas that are fresh and big enough. Oh, I need to go look at your writers blog. I’m out of the habit. Good, I’m there, or will be. Thanks, pal. ** Steve Erickson, I’m definitely going to go read that Lenika Cruz essay, thank you! I’ve had this never to be actually written idea for a non-fiction thing about that very pleasure for a long while. The Roger Shepherd interview sounds most intriguing, of course. Cool. ** Bill, Ha ha, I missed that DC reference. So far, my neck is unboiled. ‘Moving along’, that’ll do. I don’t know Charles Sharp or the others, so I’ll see what I can find. Paris has been pretty bereft of compelling music shows, it being the dead zone of August, but IRCAM has a tasty-looking festival coming up ere long. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T-ster! I know, I know, all time blog highlight and accomplishment! ** Oliver, Hi, Oliver. I don’t suppose you’re the long ‘lost’ and legendary d.l. Oliver from the blog’s ages past? Either way, excellent to see you, and I’m doing well. You? ** Okay. The poet Amiri Baraka wrote one novel back in the 60s that seems to have been all but forgotten, but it’s a terrific novel, and I thought I would give it a little nudge towards greater visibility by spotlighting it today. Thank you. See you tomorrow.