Galician Vice: Unearthing Deviance & Masochism in Bruno Schulz

by

 Juliette Bretan

Bruno Schulz might have been an enigmatic writer – his works magical and fantastical – but he remained a son of Drohobycz through and through. Much has already been written about the way his stories are woven almost irrevocably into the fabric of his hometown and wider region.

But exploring his stories through the context of his local life might also expose other, shadier influences on his writing. Grounding a reading of Schulz’s work in the history of Galicia, the region of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that had come under Austrian rule, Bohdan Budurowycz argues there are some hidden allusions in the writer’s works:

Schulz’s sketches reveal some of their author’s personality traits which come through only occasionally and almost furtively in his writings, namely his preoccupation with deviant sexuality.

Bohdan Budurowycz, 'Galicia in the Work of Bruno Schulz'

And this, Budurowycz suggests, can be attributed to the influence of one Galician figure alone:

It was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), a second-rate Austrian writer, who introduced Galicia to the West European reading public […] both [he and Schulz] – born within some fifty miles of each other – shared another peculiar affinity. While Sacher-Masoch was immortalised when a term derived from his name was added to the lexicon of sexual aberrations, Schulz also gained a certain notoriety because of his addiction to masochism […] Thus, what is sometimes referred to as le vice anglais could be called, with more justification, the Galician vice.
Bohdan Budurowycz, 'Galicia in the Work of Bruno Schulz'

Born in 1836 in Lviv, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch had appeared to live a conventional life. The son of the police chief of Lviv, he grew up at a time when Galicia was ethnically heterogeneous – and he, like Schulz, drew upon his own childhood experiences in his many works. Sacher-Masoch in fact once said he had ‘spent [his] childhood in a police residence’ – and Larry Wolff believes that ‘the darker side of police work – bondage, imprisonment, punishment, and especially flogging – may have made a particular impression on his youthful imagination’. Coupled with what Wolff calls the ‘brutally oppressive conditions of serfdom in Galicia’ during Sacher-Masoch’s childhood, his stories depict a distinctly perverse locale.

One of Sacher-Masoch’s most famous – and most sadistically Galician works – was the 1870 Venus in Furs, the story of a deviant sexual relationship between Wanda von Dunajev, a whip-wielding woman from Lviv, and her slave, the Galician nobleman Severin von Kusiemski, who was almost perpetually depicted as lying at her feet.

Written in a confessional style, the story was in fact inspired by Sacher-Masoch’s own experience of sexual perversion: in the 1860s, he had embarked upon an affair with a woman called Fanny Pistor, who agreed to wear furs and act cruelly towards him. In return, Sacher-Masoch was to be her manservant, allegedly adopting the name Gregor – a typical servant’s name of the time.

The fictional couple in Venus in Furs also agree a similar contract of duties to each other, with one of the clauses requiring Severin to again take on the name Gregor and act submissively – as Wolff puts it, ‘the Galician nobleman turned Galician slave’. Another section also demands that:

Mme. von Dunajev on her behalf agrees to appear as often as possible in her furs, especially when she purposes some cruelty toward her slave.
Trans. Gertrud Lenzer

Along with obvious ties to Sacher-Masoch’s experiences, the agreements in this contract also bring to mind another Eastern European author – not Schulz, but Franz Kafka.

In particular, it evokes Kafka’s short story Metamorphosis, in which a character called Gregor finds he has become an insect:

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin […] His room, a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls. A collection of textile samples lay spread out on the table – Samsa was a travelling salesman – and above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and housed in a nice, gilded frame. It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer.
Trans. David Wyllie

The ties between Sacher-Masoch and Kafka also go deeper than fur. Kafka’s works are saturated with sadomasochistic behaviour, from the eternal, nightmarish torment of The Trial, to the fixation on power, subordination and humiliation in Description of a Struggle.

But the connections in Metamorphosis are far more explicit, with the motif of transformation coming across in the title, which evokes Severin’s – and Sacher-Masoch’s - embodiment of a ‘vermin’ of a slave. F. M. Kuna even suggests there is more to the name connection between Sacher-Masoch and Kafka:

If all the evidence points to Kafka’s Gregor being a symbolic name, in the manner indicated, then the temptation is great to read Gregor’s surname, SAMSA, as an anagrammatic abbreviation of the first masochist’s name SACHER-MASOCH. That the last two letters had to be turned round is of course due to Kafka’s well-known practice of making the names of some of his heroes rhythmically consonant with his own name […] the elaborate allusion is not so much a ‘literary’ one as an allusion to an actual life situation.
F. M. Kuna, ‘Art as Direct Vision: Kafka and Sacher-Masoch’

And it is the symbol of fur in Metamorphosis which appears to cinch the association. According to George Colpitts, the fur industry boomed in the western world in the late 19th century – he thinks ‘it might not be simply coincidental that in the period when many women were wearing fur that libidinous associations with it and slang terminology around female genitalia […] emerged in the English lexicon by 1921’.

Significantly, Schulz also uses fur as a symbol of power and authority, with his drawings including women swathed in fur-like clothing. And, in his short story August in The Street of Crocodiles, a description of the ‘fox-fur of a nobleman’s coat’ is used to describe acacia trees. This primarily evokes the nobleman Severin, but the ancient symbolism of the acacia tree with gods and goddesses could also recollect the introduction of the character Adela a few lines before, who is first described as being like the goddess of fruitful abundance, Pomona. And this, of course, links back to the powerful, authoritative Venus of Sacher-Masoch.

But if sadomasochism was so pervasive in European literature of the late 19th and early 20th century is there more of a connection to Schulz than brief flashes of fur?

Aside from the fact that Schulz was known as ‘The Polish Kafka’ for his similar labyrinthine, eccentric descriptions, Russell E. Brown argues that animal transformations in Schulz also recall Kafka’s Metamorphosis, along with, crucially, the Schulzian obsession with a father figure – who becomes an animal.

As Ariko Kato notes, at the time Schulz was writing, Freudian theory – which is, of course, tied to regression and oedipal tendencies – was becoming increasingly popular in Poland. Freud was writing in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which Lviv was also located:

Since the first decade of the twentieth century, Freudian theories, like the novels of Sacher-Masoch, have been translated into Polish. In 1936, in the second open letter to Schulz, Gombrowicz wrote, ‘I know that if someone today talks about thighs, people say Freud and that’s all.’ […] In 1937, the Encyclopedia of Sexology was published in Warsaw […] the article titled ‘Literature and Pshycoanalysis’ in the Polish encyclopedia described Schulz as one of the writers influenced by Freudian theory, along with Witkacy.
Ariko Kato, 'The Early Graphic Works of Bruno Schulz and Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs'

A very Mitteleuropean sadomasochism could thus be seen as being at work, and the importance of local backgrounds is also central to the three writers – all of whom were from towns in Austro-Hungary. Larysa Tsybenko argues that a polyglot culture existed in Galicia, the home of Sacher-Masoch and Schulz:

[Sacher-Masoch’s] knowledge of many languages and the natural talent of a story teller helped the language in which [he] writes to shape up, perhaps for the first time in Austrian literature, into a linguistic phenomenon characteristic of multicultural spaces – a phenomenon later manifested in the work of […] the German-language Joseph Roth and the Polish-language Bruno Schulz. This phenomenon provided Sacher-Masoch’s individual style with a particular expressiveness, endowing his language with a characteristic polyphony.
Larysa Tsybenko

And, as Budurowycz says of Schulz’s works: ‘even his manner of writing – long, elaborate sentences, a sometimes convoluted style, and frequent use of foreign words – is akin to the Austro-Galician officialese, with its obscure, pretentiously wordy phrasing.’

The mention of ‘officialese’ again evokes those motifs of power present in Sacher-Masoch and Kafka. And the emphasis on language also points towards the diverse identities of the writers – Sacher-Masoch was Austrian, but mainly wrote about the eclectic Galicia; Kafka was a German-speaking Jew in Prague, and Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer, working at a time when 1/3 of people living in Poland had declared themselves ethnic minorities.

Incidentally, when Venus in Furs was translated into Polish in 1913 – with further translations in 1919 – this multi-ethnic pattern appeared to occur again. In the Polish version, Wanda was rewritten as coming from Russia, rather than Lviv, with the exoticism of Galicia seen through the eyes of an Austrian removed. As Ariko Kato notes, one professor from Jagiellonian University even criticised Sacher-Masoch for claiming Slavs were masochists.

But there’s another, more prominent, bond between Sacher-Masoch and Schulz. Schulz’s famous drawings, picked out in glowing cliché-verre, have explicit echoes of the Austrian writer’s sadomasochist ideas, with depictions in The Book of Idolatry showing men grovelling at the feet of haughty eroticised women.

Allegedly, Schulz even once said they were intended as illustrations for a new translation of Venus in Furs.

But in either case, the connection between the drawings and Sacher-Masoch’s novel cannot be underemphasised. According to Kato, the women in his works also ‘have iconographic references to Goddess Venus’, with some early drawings including the name ‘Venus’ in their titles, and others linked to symbols of the goddess, like spring.

Kato also suggests the character of Undula, who often appears in Schulz’s drawings, resembles Wanda from Venus in Furs. Jeszcze raz Undula depicts Undula with her hair tied up and a man at her feet, echoing the introduction of Wanda in Sacher-Masoch, when she appears like a painting, with ‘knotted hair’. Kato also points out that ‘given the contextual backdrop, we can also discern that the hairstyle is similar to that of the statue of Venus’.

Incidentally, according to Wolff, knotted or matted hair had also became ‘a characteristic pathology of Eastern Europe’ after the 19th-century disease Plica Polonica.

But the Polish side to the story goes on: Theodosia Robertson suggests that Undula is also the counterpart to Adela – the rhythmic connections between the names also evoke Kuna’s analysis of Gregor Samsa, and could be reminiscent of Wanda too. The character of Adela is often cited as the central link between Sacher-Masoch and Schulz: she wields an intense domination over the house, despite being only a servant.

As the goddess Pomona’s representative, she is first described as bringing in sustenance for a house which itself stands ‘in Market Square’. She seems to embody the role of tantalising middleman between producer and consumer: the food she handles has ‘a yet undefined taste’, remaining on the cusp of satisfaction, and later, Adela also enacts this desire, with her ‘tickling’ finger in Birds allowing her own body to transform into an enticing – if tormenting – commodity.

Other historians and literary critics working on the period corroborate the idea of titillation in the modern era: Allison Pease’s work on modernism and mass culture implies covetousness can descend into the pornographic, with the distance between observer and observed collapsing in an ecstatic climax. She references Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) to indicate the modern mass who ‘[absorb] the work of art’ and steadily move closer to the desired – and with Schulz’s drawings imbued by erotic suggestiveness, this analysis works to stress a sadomasochistic reading of his art and literature. Adela too is described as wielding a ‘limitless’ power – evoking the pornographic repudiation of distance Pease describes.

But Kato’s reference to the popularity of Freud in Interwar Poland also brings another sadomasochistic link to the fore. According to the Encyclopedia of Sexology from 1937 which she references – and which was published just after Schulz had published his two collections of short stories – masochism was linked to fetishism, particularly for boots.

Budorowycz also suggests Schulz had a ‘classical type of masochism, connected, as it so often is, with foot fetishism’ – he quotes one of Schulz’s close friends, the more explicitly controversial artist Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz, who is reported to have said:

For Schulz, the female instrument of oppression over males is the leg. . . . With their legs Schulz’s females stamp on, torture, and drive to desperate, helpless fury his dwarfish, humiliated and sex-tormented male freaks, who find in their own degradation the highest form of agonised bliss.
Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz

In keeping with Pease, Kato thus suggests that whilst Sacher-Masoch and Schulz in turn were inspired by Venus in their works, theirs was a very modern twist on the goddess, with the subject placed in contemporary settings. She thus argues that Schulz’s allusions to Venus could be considered a part of his parodic style of historical paintings, with his self-portraits working to undercut high art, by replacing devotion to the goddesses of mythology with a devotion to naked women.

Recalling the two interwoven narratives in Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs – one from the present, and one from the past – she argues that both artists thus challenged the mimetic idea of a representative artwork. This begs the question of whether fiction and reality overlap in his works too.

Kato mentions that at the beginning of Gombrowicz’s open letter, the writer quoted ‘a possibly fictitious comment’ by a doctor’s wife:

Bruno Schulz, she said, he’s either a sick pervert or a poseur, but most probably a poseur. He’s only pretending.
Comment cited by Gombrowicz

She goes on to say the idea of a ‘Schulz-masochist’ may well, therefore, have been a type of ‘intellectual play among Schulz’s contemporaries’.

‘Schulz, to some extent,’ she concludes, ‘played his part as a masochist – a part that was given to him – in Polish literary circles.’

Thus, one could say the titillating transformations don’t stop with the perverse fiction of Mitteleuropa.

Credits: This article originally appears in 2020 in Culture.PL. It appears here in a slightly redacted form. 

The Man Who Was Rampa

By

David Bartley

Tibet. A country forbidden to Europeans. A country that has, for centuries, jealously guarded its secrets from the west. Imagine, then, the excitement that greeted the publication, in November 1956, of an extraordinary book. The Third Eye was the first ever autobiography of a Tibetan lama, and it created a sensation. This is the strange tale of its author: the remarkable man who called himself ‘T. Lobsang Rampa’.

The Third Eye lifted, once and for all, the veil of secrecy that had shrouded this inscrutable land. It spoke of astonishing mystic practices, never before heard nor dreamt of by all but a few hierophants in the West.

The work took its title from an operation, undergone when the author was eight, to open the so-called third eye. ‘A strong looking lama sat behind me and took my head between his knees. The second lama opened a box and removed an instrument made of shining steel … He pressed the instrument to the centre of my forehead, and rotated the handle … There was no particular pain as it penetrated the skin and flesh … Suddenly there was a little “scrunch” and the instrument penetrated the bone.’

A sliver of wood, which had been treated with fire and herbs, was then inserted into the incision. ‘Suddenly there was a blinding flash … like a searing white flame. It diminished, died, and was replaced by spirals of colour, and globules of incandescent smoke.’ The third eye had been opened. ‘The lama Mingyar Dondup turned to me and said “You are now one of us, Lobsang. For the rest of your life you will see people as they are and not as they pretend to be.”’

The operation was a success; a runaway best seller was launched. But what of the book’s provenance? And what of T. Lobsang Rampa, the extraordinary individual who wrote it?

Our story begins two years earlier, in 1954, in London. Visits to the offices of literary agents by Tibetan lamas were, then as now, rather rare. But just such a personage presented himself at the office of Cyrus Brooks, of the Heath Agency. His purpose? To try to interest Brooks in taking on a book he had in the mind, a book on do-it-yourself surgical corset-making. Brooks gently explained to his visitor that works on do-it-yourself corset-making, surgical or otherwise, were notoriously absent from the best seller list.

But his visitor intrigued him. Dr Ku’an-suo, was, it seemed, no ordinary lama. Whilst serving as a medical officer in the Chinese army during the Second World War, he had been captured by the Japanese. Having made good his escape, the intrepid holy man then progressed, in a small fishing boat, to Korea, and slowly made his way, via Moscow and New York, to England. Having picked up a smattering of English in the Japanese prisoner of war camp, he was eager to put his therapeutic knowledge at the disposal of the western world. Brooks was beguiled. Why don’t you, he said, write your own story?

A few weeks later, the first chapters arrived. And what remarkable chapters they were. In addition to the tale of the third eye, they told of the author’s early life as the son of a highborn family in Lhasa, the Forbidden City. Of his astonishing life in a Tibetan lamasery. Of his training in the mystic arts of clairvoyance, levitation, and astral projection. Of intimate colloquies with the Dalai Lama, of encounters with an Abominable Snowman, of marvels and wonders.

The book had by this time been accepted for publication by Secker and Warburg, with £800 advanced against royalties. A tidy sum for those days. (This information, as does much of what follows, comes from the engaging and waspish autobiography of Fredric Warburg, published in 1973, All Authors Are Equal. Under Warburg’s leadership, the firm were the distinguished publishers of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.) Editors were appointed to oversee the book, schedules were drawn up, work proceeded apace. Only one question remained to be settled: was any of it actually true?

Three publishers, it turned out, had already passed on the book. But, as Warburg reasoned, it was far from unusual for publishers to do so, for any number of reasons. He was heartened when Elliott Macrea, the President of the highly respected American publishing house, E. P. Dutton, threw his hat into the ring and picked up the U.S. rights.

Warburg was convinced that if the book was authentic, he had a lulu of a best seller on his hands. ‘From the beginning there emanated from Dr Kuan’s masterpiece a magical aroma of enchantment.’ (In his chapter on "The Great Lama Mystery," Warburg refers to ‘Dr Kuan’ throughout.) But if it was merely the work of an overheated imagination … not quite as profitable.

Dr Kuan was duly invited in for a meeting of minds at the S&W mother ship. Warburg and his team, though somewhat nervous as to how their auras would appear in the mystical gaze of the savant, were impressed. Dr Kuan, fully-robed, proved to be a self-possessed, rather reticent and rather unworldly individual – no doubt due to the strenuous religious training he had undergone. His appearance, though, was reassuring. ‘Between the eyes, slightly to the left of centre’ Warburg reported, ‘a small purplish-red mark could be seen, almost the size of a collar button, the scar no doubt of that remarkable incision.’ To further get the measure of his man, Fredric Warburg unleashed the most powerful weapon in any publisher’s armoury. He took his author out to lunch.

It did not begin well. In preference to the scampi and rice that Warburg had assumed might suit his palate, Dr Kuan ordered fish and chips. A Tibetan lama eating fish and chips? But, as Dr Kuan explained, ‘I can’t stand rice, I had too much of the horrible stuff in Japanese prison camps.’ He tucked in with gusto. Somewhat shaken, Warburg returned to his office. Not to worry, he was assured by his editor, who had spent a year knocking about India, these gurus were often quite vulgar chaps, unconcerned with the social niceties.

According to his chapter on the Rampa affair, Warburg now decided that there were five possibilities. The work was genuine but embroidered here and there, as with so much autobiography. The work was authentic, but the person he knew as Dr Kuan was a front for the real Tibetan author, in hiding from the vengeful forces of Communist China. The work was partly true, partly made up. Possibility No. 4 was that ‘the manuscript was the work of a brilliant psychopath who had thought himself thoroughly into the mind of a lama, after studying the history of Tibet and the theory and practice of Lamaism.’ No. 5: ‘The manuscript was a fake, written to deceive.’

By early August, 1955, the MS. had been delivered, most of the large advance had been handed over, the first descriptive note for the trade had been written, interest had been piqued and orders from booksellers were already flooding in. As Warburg recalled in his memoir, ‘There could hardly be any going back now. The die was cast.’

Come September, come the first bombshell. Macrae at Dutton had by now sent the chapters for appraisal to three acknowledged experts on Tibet. All were agreed that a series of troubling mistakes had been introduced into the manuscript. Discrepancies in the geography of Lhasa, the author’s native town, for example. Buildings appearing on the wrong side of the city. Certain previously unobserved eccentricities of dress and custom amongst the Tibetans he described. Unusual objects, such as golden candlesticks, not noted before by other, authenticated visitors. Ear-rings worn by people of insufficient rank. A seeming unfamiliarity with the intricacies of Tibetan robes. A mysterious and never before reported Tibetan reverence for cats. Et cetera. One reader thought it possible that the author was Tibetan, but from an outlying province. The others believed that his descriptions of both Tibetan life and religious beliefs were bogus, and to boot, seemingly produced by the time-honoured method of copying them from already published books. Not altogether accurately, alas. Most worryingly of all, perhaps, the author did not seem to be able to write correct Tibetan.

Warburg, rattled, stopped all payments to Dr Kuan. He now made the momentous decision to seek his own expert advice, and determined to ask the Professor of Tibetan at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Dr David Snellgrove (who died only in 2016) to give his assessment as to the work’s authenticity, or otherwise, on his return from holiday. Meanwhile he summoned Dr Kuan for a showdown.

Loaded for bear, Warburg gave his author both barrels. ‘”You are not a Tibetan lama”, I told him grimly, “and you have no real knowledge of the Tibetan language. Our reports demonstrate that elementary mistakes have been made in the Tibetan script, most if not all of which has been copied, sometimes very clumsily, from readily available sources.”’

The deflated author shuddered, and passed a weary hand across his face. ‘Part of what you say is true’, he finally acknowledged. But he was by no means down and out of the game. ‘”When I left Tibet I served, as you know, as a medical aide with the Chinese armies fighting the Japanese invaders. The Nipponese captured and tortured me. … They had seized Tibetan documents and plans: now they wanted me to translate and explain them!”

“Yes, but what has this got to do with your mistakes in Tibetan?”

“Do you think I would reveal important secrets to the bloodthirsty Japanese? … I imposed a hypnotic block on my knowledge of the Tibetan language. After that I could no longer read or write or understand Tibetan. The secrets were safe. Even today, trying to read or write Tibetan brings on a fearful migraine.”’

Explaining that for the last six years he had been suffering from an incurable disease, had less than two years to live, and wished he’d never even started the wretched book, Dr Kuan left Fredric Warburg to ponder his doubts. Doubts that that were little assuaged when Dr Snellgrove’s assessment came into his possession. ‘The book is a complete fantasy, culled from the work of others’, the professor concluded. ‘The fellow is a complete impostor and has probably never been to Tibet. He should be properly unmasked, as such men are dangerous.’

So much then, for T. Lobsang Rampa’s credentials, and so much for hundreds of orders that had already flooded in from booksellers all around the world. So much, too, for the £500 that had already been advanced to the author.

Warburg now slipped rapidly through the gears of the familiar cycle of grievous loss: denial, anger, despair, pain, and finally a sorrowful resigned acceptance that an important part of one’s life was now gone forever. But then a ray of sunlight penetrated the gloom of the publisher’s mood. ‘Could we not publish it after all,’ he asked himself, ‘while warning the reader that we had been unable to authenticate it?` Why not indeed?

Happily rolling the dice one more time, Warburg decided to approach another expert. This was John Morris, ‘a fine Orientalist… who had travelled widely in the East.’ On this wayfarer Warburg pinned his last tattered hopes.

And he was rewarded for his perseverance. ‘This is a curious mix of fact and fantasy’, Morris reported. ‘There is not the slightest doubt that he was brought up in Tibet from an early age.’ Warburg breathed a sigh of relief. Of the mystical elements, Morris was less convinced, finding them ‘very hard to swallow.’ ‘My own opinion is that the author is some sort of psychopath living in a private world of his own. It is even likely that he has persuaded himself that all this occult nonsense is true.’ But no matter. With this ambiguous imprimatur ringing in his ears, Warburg decided to forge ahead, and devil take the hindmost.

‘I would reject the other experts whose views contradicted each other. We should publish The Third Eye with a ‘beware’ notice, but without suggesting that it was a complete fabrication. It would, I felt certain, become a best seller. As a publisher, I could not reject it. The decision was made. Publish! At least then, I thought, the truth will somehow emerge.’

In November 1956 the book was proudly launched into the world.

‘I am a Tibetan,’ began the author’s preface, ‘one of the few who have reached this strange western world. … Some of my statements, I am told, may not be believed. That is your privilege, but Tibet is a country unknown to the rest of the world. The man who wrote of “the people who rode on turtles in the sea” was laughed to scorn. So were those who had seen “living fossil” fish. But these men were eventually proved to be truthful and accurate. So will I be.’

In a carefully worded Foreword, Secker & Warburg made it clear that they did not entirely share the author’s confidence in this regard. In a masterpiece of equivocation they invited their readers, more or less, to take it or leave it, and make up their own minds as to whether the book was genuine or not.

‘The author must bear – and willingly bears – a sole responsibility for the statements made in this book. We may feel that here and there he exceeds the bounds of Western credulity … None the less the publishers believe that The Third Eye is in its essence an authentic account of a Tibetan boy in his family and lamasery … Anyone who differs from us will, we believe, at least agree that the author is endowed to an exceptional degree with narrative skill and the power to evoke scenes and characters of absorbing and unique interest.’

But of course the publishers, they assured the reading public, had not placed the book on the shelves without due diligence, and plenty of it. ‘In an attempt to obtain confirmation of the author’s statements the Publishers submitted the MS. to nearly twenty readers, all persons of intelligence and experience, some with special knowledge of the subject. Their opinions were so contradictory that no positive result emerged. Some questioned the accuracy of one section, some of another; what was doubted by one expert was accepted unquestioningly by another. Anyway, the Publishers asked themselves, was there any expert who had undergone the training of the Tibetan lama in its most developed forms? Was there one who had been brought up in a Tibetan family? (Mysteriously this caveat lector was only included in the first two editions; thereafter it disappeared.)

‘Some with special knowledge of the subject’ (my italics.)… ‘Their opinions were so contradictory that no positive result emerged.’ This is a little disingenuous. As far as I can ascertain, from this distance in time – and of course this may simply be an unhappy coincidence – every single person who could be regarded as an expert in Tibet in any meaningful way had pronounced the book bogus. Only readers – like John Morris – who had not been to Tibet, and never claimed to have done, were willing to grant it even a grudging credence. David Snellgrove was one of the leading scholars of Tibet in the western world, and he was utterly damning of the MS. And only a small handful of Europeans alive had actually visited the country before 1950, at which point it had become terra incognita. Three in particular were to play a starring role in the subsequent history of The Third Eye. One was Marco Pallis, a wealthy Anglo-Greek connoisseur and amateur violist, who had travelled widely through Tibet, and published an acclaimed book about his experiences. Another was Heinrich Harrer, the author of the famous Seven Years of Tibet, published in 1952. (He and a party of German mountaineers had been stranded in India when war broke out. Having escaped from a British POW camp, Harrer and a companion subsequently made their way to Lhasa.) Harrer had gone on to tutor the present Dalai Lama in English.

The last in this significant triumvirate of Tibetan experts was Hugh E. Richardson, a Scottish scholar-diplomat who had been our first, and last ‘Man in Lhasa’. (From 1936 to 1940, and again from 1946 to 1950. At which point, to his immense dismay, His Majesty’s government had pretty much washed its hands of Tibet’s problems with her Chinese aggressors.) He and Harrer had become close friends.

I met Hugh Richardson in the early 1990s – a spry, charming, patrician presence, then in his late 80s, living only a fairway or two’s distance from the Royal and Ancient golf course at St Andrews (he had introduced the game to Tibet in the 1940s, albeit with mixed results). Still sharp as a tack and blessed with extremely good ‘recall’, still wryly despairing of the fact that The Third Eye – ‘an impudent fake’ – had been published at all, he very kindly provided me with copies of his own files on the affair. Hugh Richardson was one of the three outside experts that E. P. Dutton (but not Secker & Warburg) had approached. Indeed it was his comprehensive trashing of the manuscript that was the main spur for the American publisher’s dropping out. (To be replaced by Doubleday.)

Richardson’s documents still in my possession include two of the three pages of closely typed, rather exasperated notes sent to him by Harrer back in the late 1950s – the first page was lost. Harrer may also have been approached by the assiduous E. P. Dutton, he may have been sent the MS by Richardson himself, or he may have been commenting on the published book. Either way, his annotations are far from a ringing endorsement.

‘Ignorance as he shows on the last two pages,’ Harrer writes, having reached page 91, ‘make me doubt that the author is even a Tibetan.’ Between pages 76 and 255, which his surviving notes cover, he identifies some 45 mistakes in Tibetan geography, language, life and manners. (Had he seen the photograph on the back cover of the published book, Harrer may also have been surprised to see that the author would seem to be wearing the outer part of his robes the wrong way round. But perhaps that was a printing error.)

In his personal note to Richardson Heinrich Harrer mentions that he approached Secker & Warburg, asking to meet T. Lobsang Rampa and discuss the book with him. In Tibetan. The guru, however, proved tricky to pin down. He was meditating and couldn’t be disturbed, Harrer was told. On pressing further, the news was conveyed that Dr Kuan was, reportedly, in Canada.

Despite these trifling cavils the reviews – on the whole – were highly favourable. The Times Literary Supplement thought that the book was a ‘work of art’. The Observer pronounced it ‘extraordinary and exciting’ while the New Statesman congratulated the author ‘for having written a book in a language not his own.’

The very perception, it might be added, that had rather baffled some of the experts who were willing to believe that the book was – broadly – authentic. Just how, in a few short months in a Japanese POW camp, had the author managed to acquire such a grasp, not just of correct English (in marked contrast to his Tibetan), but of the kind of patois familiar to fans of Billy Bunter and his oafish chums in the Greyfriars Remove?

‘A stunning crash – I thought my head had split – and the sound of voices. “New boy. One of the high born. Come on, let’s scrag him!” … There was a sudden loud bellow. “What’s going on here?” A frightened whisper: “Oh! It’s old Rattlebones on the prowl.” … The Master of the Acolytes reached down and dragged me to my feet by my pigtail… “You one of the future leaders? Bah! Take that, and that!” (And what of the traces some observers – including a BBC producer – claimed to have noticed, in Dr Kuan’s speech, of a west country accent?)

There were some nay-sayers amongst the reviews, it’s true. Hugh Richardson slaughtered the book for the Telegraph. ‘Anyone who has lived in Tibet will feel after reading a few pages of “The Third Eye” that its author is certainly not a Tibetan.’… ‘If I am mistaken I should be happy to make amends to the author in person and in Tibetan.’ But as we’ve seen, such a conversation, with Pallis, Harrer or Richardson could not, owing to Dr Kuan’s harrowing experiences while a prisoner of the Japanese, be possible.

No matter. The Third Eye was a huge success. Reprint after reprint followed. By the end of 1957 Secker and Warburg had shifted more than 45,000 copies, in hardback. The book was translated into several languages. (Heinrich Harrer’s review of the German language edition was so scathing that its publisher threatened to sue him.) Corgi soon issued a paperback, which too became a best-seller. As Fredric Warburg remembered concluding at the time, ‘Another gamble had succeeded. Or had it?’

No. Just as the clouds gather over the jagged peaks of the Himalayas in the darkening twilight, so now a storm was rolling and tumbling towards the London offices of Secker and Warburg. For not everybody was as charmed with T. Lobsang Rampa as were the majority of the reviewers.

On the last day of January 1958 Fredric Warburg took a call from Hugh Medlicott, a reporter from the Daily Mail. ‘Would it surprise you to know’ he asked, ‘that your Tibetan lama is a hoaxer?’ Warburg’s heart, he tell us, skipped a beat. But he rose magnificently to the challenge. ‘It’s no surprise to me at all.’ The next day’s headline, on February 1st, 1958, did not beat about the bush. ‘THIRD EYE LAMA EXPOSED AS FAKE.’

Unbeknownst to Warburg, Dr Kuan had by now relocated to Howth, the hill overlooking Dublin Bay. Here he was soon to be besieged by the world’s press. For T. Lobsang Rampa, alias Dr Ku’an-suo possessed, it seemed, an unusual background for a Tibetan lama, unique even amongst that remarkable body of men. He had, in fact, been born Cyril Henry Hoskin, in Plympton, Devon, in 1910, the son of a plumber. Later, he had moved to Nottinghamshire, there to work in a surgical goods factory. In the early years of the war he took himself to Thames Ditton, Surrey, and enrolled as the clerk of a correspondence school. And there the man who became Rampa began to emerge.

In 1947, neighbours testified, Dr Ku’an-suo, as Hoskin now styled himself, shaved his head, grew a beard, adopted oriental dress, and was occasionally to be seen taking his cat for a walk on a lead. In the early 1950s he was to be found running an unsuccessful book, surgical corset and women’s clothing shop in Ladbroke Grove. But how had Dr Kuan only now come to be exposed?

He had, it seemed, acquired a disciple early in 1957. This was Sheelagh Rouse, described in the press as a ‘socialite’ (in 1950s Britain this was considered an occupation) and ‘a well-known Mayfair party-goer’. She had, at the age of 25, fallen under the savant’s spell, and left her husband and three young children in order to sit at the guru’s feet, there to drink freely from the cup of oriental wisdom. Her now-estranged parents had approached Scotland Yard, and an interview with Dr Kuan – presumably under caution – had been conducted. He had, it turned out, no passport, of any kind. He could neither have entered, nor indeed have left the UK. But as no crime had been committed – there was nothing in the Constable’s Powers of Arrest and Charges that covered impersonating a Tibetan lama, and of course Mrs Rouse was over 21 – the police took no further action.

Equally concerned about Dr Kuan’s activities were Messers Pallis, Harrer and Richardson. Certain that the man Rampa was an egregious fraud, still smarting from the fact that Secker and Warburg had brushed aside their suspicions, they had set out to prove them. Into the story, then, comes Clifford Burgess, a private detective from Liverpool, ably assisted by his ‘pretty young assistant’. Whether he was employed by Sheelagh Rouse’s wealthy parents – which they strongly denied to the press – or whether by Marco Pallis, which became the official version, isn’t clear. Hugh Richardson indicated to me that Mrs Rouse’s parents had approached the Tibetan experts to seek their help in unmasking the bogus lama (as the press now liked to call him), presumably in the hope that in doing so their daughter might come to her senses. (She never did.) Over three weeks, travelling the length and breadth of the country, taking scores of statements, the shamus began to piece together a rather different picture of the author of The Third Eye to that offered by the mystic himself.

When the story broke in the newspapers, Dr Kuan was holed up in Howth in the company of his wife, his secretary, Mrs Rouse, and his two cats. He had retired to bed, announcing that he was now in the grip of both heart disease and terminal cancer, with but a short time to live. The unsatisfactory auras of the gentlemen of the press, he added, who were regularly managing to sneak into the house, were making him iller still.

Finally, after a day of stalemate, Mrs Kuan herself came out to break the deadlock. ‘About the middle of 1949,’ she told the waiting reporters, “my husband, after a slight accident, with apparent concussion and headaches, was no longer the same man. For some weeks he seemed to be very vague about many things, and when I discussed an event of the past with him he had no recollection of it. Instead he spoke of life in a lamasery, of experiences in the war, prison camp life and Japanese torture.’ Bang went an appearance on Mr & Mrs.

Soon a further clarification, in the form of a communiqué from Dr Kuan himself, was issued to the impatient throng. Hoskin, the reporters were now told, had merely adopted the name of Dr Kuan so as to shield the real personage behind the book, who was even now living in fear of Communist reprisals. Then Fredric Warburg attempted to shed light on the matter, in an article he wrote for the Daily Express. In it, while generously acknowledging that the Hoskin angle was an unwelcome development, he concluded, ‘But is the truth, the whole truth out? How could the man alleged to be Cyril Henry Hoskin, known to me as Dr Kuan, write a book which thrilled the world?’ How indeed? ‘Why did he choose this subject? How did he gain the material? …. Was he perhaps the mouthpiece of a true lama, as some have alleged?’

To get to the bottom of the matter once and for all, Warburg sent one of his employees, Eric Newby, to beard the lama in his lair. Newby would, of course, later the very same year publish his own excellent, but in this case true account of an Asiatic experience – A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Installing himself with a tape recorder at the ailing author’s bedside, Newby was able, finally, to set down for posterity the true facts behind this baffling turn of events. (They were later issued as a statement to the press by the guru himself, How I Became A Tibetan. A yet fuller account was offered in his astonishing fourth book, The Rampa Story.)

It now turned out that Madam Kuan’s mention of the ‘slight accident’ that had befallen her husband in 1949 was something of an understatement. While climbing a tree in his garden at Thames Ditton, in order to photograph a young owl, Mr Hoskin had, it appears, overreached himself (perhaps not for the last time) and fallen to the ground.

’There was a blinding pain, and a flash, as if of coloured lightning, and all went black. I do not know how long I lay a crumpled inert mass beneath the tree but quite suddenly I became aware that I was disengaging myself from the physical body … Then a sudden movement, the only movement in this strange world of mine, attracted my eye, and I nearly screamed, or should have screamed if I had had a voice. Approaching me across the grass was the figure of a Tibetan lama dressed in the saffron robe of the High Order.’ The lama, after a certain amount of karmic horse-trading, grasped Hoskin’s astral form, severed the silver cord connecting it to the world of the spirits and entered his earthly body.

Cyril Henry Hoskin, then, simply became T. Lobsang Rampa. Or perhaps it was the other way round. At any rate, the troubling question of how the earthly husk of Hoskin had written an account of a country in which it had never been present, at least in any conventional corporeal sense, was at last cleared up in a satisfactory manner.

For certainly, this explanation didn’t harm The Third Eye’s’ sales. Far from it. Another 10,000 hardbacks were sold after Rampa furnished the true story of his remarkable transubstantiation. Secker & Warburg, indeed, received letters from several readers who had read sarcastic press accounts of the supposed hoax and angrily claimed to have had undergone the exact same operation themselves, and, what’s more, to be in possession of fully functioning third eyes.

The book continued to sell. As Fredric Warburg remarked in his 1973 memoir, ‘It was one of the most profitable books we ever published.’ The Corgi paperback sold upwards of 300,000 copies. (And that may be a conservative estimate). And while he never quite re-captured his early glittering success, T. Lobsang Rampa went on to write a further nineteen books, all of an intoxicatingly esoteric bent. One of which was dictated to him by his cat, Mrs Fifi Greywhiskers. (Whether the animal was also fronting for another spiritual presence is not entirely clear.) None of them, strangely, was published by Secker & Warburg.

The most interesting of the subsequent works was My Visit To Venus, written (it seems) in 1957 but only published, by other hands, ten years later. And, eventually acknowledged by Rampa as the real McCoy after insisting on a couple of alterations. This book told of his thrilling journey in a spaceship, during which he was able to meet what he described as the masters of several other planets. It’s a surprise that the publishers of The Third Eye passed over this extraordinary tale, as it would surely only have helped to cement the guru’s mystic credentials.

Not everyone, it’s true, took all these works in the serious spirit in which they were undoubtedly offered. In a cruel and tasteless jibe at the savant’s expense, the Telegraph, on the occasion of the publication of Rampa’s third book, in 1959, Doctor from Lhasa, looked forward to a series of future works along the lines of the then highly popular ‘Doctor’ novels of Richard Gordon, portrayed on screen by Dirk Bogarde. ‘Lama in the House, Lama at Sea, Lama in Love’, et cetera. They were not forthcoming.

Despite his coronary thrombosis and non-specific cancer, Rampa/Kuan/Hoskin managed to struggle on for a further 23 years after the press frenzy at Howth, before shuffling off (at least) his mortal coil at the respectable age of 70, in 1981. Sheelagh Rouse having remained his devoted helpmeet and secretary the whole time.

***

Nothing dates quite like a fake. The poems of the dodgy Gaelic bard Ossian, the Vermeer knock-offs of Van Meegeren, Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan … within a few years they become, for most observers at least, glaringly obvious frauds, and we wonder how anyone was ever taken in. The Third Eye, of course, benefited from the clue afforded us by the author himself in his own preface back in 1956: ‘Tibet is a country unknown to the rest of the world’. And as Fredric Warburg finally asked himself, at the end of his chapter on The Great Lama Mystery, ‘Why should Dr K. [Secker & Warburg were the English publishers of Kafka], who had declared himself Chinese, pose to us as a Tibetan? Simply that too much was known about China and so little about Tibet.’ A most illuminating perception.

And yet, to be fair, Warburg had on several occasions begged Dr Kuan, if this be the case, to admit that he had made the book up. He clearly had a great gift for imaginative writing. The author adamantly refused to agree that the work was a fiction. There seems no reason, indeed, to doubt that he himself ever wavered in his belief in the essential veracity of his work.

He was not alone. The Third Eye, a preposterous mash-up of sub-Blavatskian hogwash, along with Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, and Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience, a riff on The Tibetan Book of The Dead, went on to become an Ur-text of the burgeoning hippy movement of the mid 1960s. Before LSD took over as a chemical version of the ‘third eye’ karmic surgery, with its short cut to instant satori.

Lobsang Rampa/Cyril Henry Hoskin remains to this day a revered figure amongst some devotees of the occult arts. He is, to take a quote pretty much at random from the web, ‘a true mystic and trailblazer of the New Age.’ But let us leave the last word to T. Lobsang Rampa himself, and his wise exhortation in The Third Eye – a formulation of which Schopenhauer himself would surely have been proud – ‘Leave this, the World of Illusion, and enter into the Greater Reality.’ Indeed.

Credits:  This article originally appeared in 2016 online at the David Bartley blog (which now seems to have gone missing).

Horoscope

by 

Kathryn A. Kopple

This, my dear crab, is how it is:
You were born to a meager constellation,
a creature without a head, pincers instead of wings.
You are the dark sign of the zodiac, the least
interesting of Hercules’ labors.
You are constantly hiding, and therefore
mysterious, and the tides are always lapping
at the shell you keep armored against the
moon swept waves, the singing coral, pink
as a baby’s finger. And there is, in you,
a tendency to give it all away, your heart
in violin concertos, although crabs don’t sing
or dance, nor are they gifted with the crocodile’s
smile. The name you were given is synonymous
with grave ills and calamity, and you are not
immune to breakage. You drink the salt
of the oceans’ sweat, and never greet things
head on but claw a ragged path on your lateral
journey, envious of the gods, those elegant
spinners of love and fate, while you balance
on unsteady stilts at water’s edge.

Note:  "Horoscope" originally appeared in a slightly different form in Construction literary magazine.  Kathryn has published a number of poems over the years.  Poetry is her preferred medium, the space where she is happiest making things with words.  One day, she may collect her poems and call it a book.  One day, she may not.

The Leader We Have

by

Peter Cowlam

Those nominated before me megaphoned
Everything, and sounded important enough,
Not that I braced myself to listen – ever.
The grain is rough coarse matter, an insistence,
And always the same. The division of self;
Its afflatus and assertion; the many
Sanctions in the justification of it.
Ridiculous to follow.

These high winds on a first public holiday
Since I took the call – they’re here to stay. I can
Tell you one thing more about leading, or me:
It’s an isolated peak, in a bad sky,
And, you should know, I always desert my friends.

Peter Cowlam is a poet and novelist. He has won the Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction twice, most recently in 2018 for his novel New King Palmers, which is at the intersection of old, crumbling empires and new, digital agglomerates. His last published book of poems is Addendum Manifesto, with a foreword by Kathryn Kopple. Addendum Manifesto is aimed as a counter-blast at the political and financial institutions complicit in the deceptions of our master-slave society, wage slaves exhorted to fund a debt economy, and by that heavy price remain obedient citizens. His latest ebook (Kindle) is his novella A Forgotten Poet, which follows the fortunes of diffident and reluctant man of letters Harold Humber, from his early life in the English Midlands, through his post-war career as economist, jazz aficionado, expert in industrial architecture, and, in the final reckoning, author of four slim volumes of popular verse.

A Forgotten Poet is available at Kindle USA and Kindle UK.

Tompkins Square Park

by

Kathryn A. Kopple

Wooden benches do time inside cast iron
fences that hold the park squarely between
10th Street and Alphabet City; the one
hood in Manhattan where avenues are
named by letters; they go from A to D.
Hard drugs, hard luck—
the pair of them flowing in and out of
the park like best friends bringing out the worst
in each other. Those benches doubled
as twin beds twelve months out of the year.

Back then, I squeezed into a room rented
from a guy on Avenue C. His dada
owned the whole building. My walk to work
funneled me past the park—and its stark sights.
To the west, Washington Square, that oasis
of polished stone.  Strong contrasts.
The Arch—tall as a Roman aqueduct—clearly
in charge. The statues weren’t going anywhere.
Robert Moses’s civic ambitions turned
the old fountain into New York’s most
elegant wading pool. As for Tompkins,
it’s as if Moses never got that far.
No one to lead the people out of the squalidness.
Or spare them the ten plagues.

To see the park now—green mantels of grass,
green canopies of elms, green flowerbeds.
I come bearing envoys of decades past;
envoys that come as strangers.  Without
a place.  Lost.

Notes:  This poem was first published in a slightly different version in the now defunct Sunflower Collective.  Photo credit:  Gray Artus.

The Lesson

by

Toni Cade Bambara

Back in the days when everyone was old and stupid or young and foolish and me and Sugar were the only ones just right, this lady moved on our block with nappy hair and proper speech and no makeup. And quite naturally we laughed at her, laughed the way we did at the junk man who went about his business like he was some big-time president and his sorry-ass horse his secretary. And we kinda hated her too, hated the way we did the winos who cluttered up our parks and pissed on our handball walls and stank up our hallways and stairs so you couldn’t halfway play hide-and-seek without a goddamn gas mask. Miss Moore was her name. The only woman on the block with no first name. And she was black as hell, cept for her feet, which were fish-white and spooky. And she was always planning these boring-ass things for us to do, us being my cousin, mostly, who lived on the block cause we all moved North the same time and to the same apartment then spread out gradual to breathe. And our parents would yank our heads into some kinda shape and crisp up our clothes so we’d be presentable for travel with Miss Moore, who always looked like she was going to church though she never did. Which is just one of the things the grownups talked about when they talked behind her back like a dog. But when she came calling with some sachet she’d sewed up or some gingerbread she’d made or some book, why then they’d all be too embarrassed to turn her down and we’d get handed over all spruced up. She’d been to college and said it was only right that she should take responsibility for the young ones’ education, and she not even related by marriage or blood. So they’d go for it. Specially Aunt Gretchen. She was the main gofer in the family. You got some ole dumb shit foolishness you want somebody to go for, you send for Aunt Gretchen. She been screwed into the go-along for so long, it’s a blood-deep natural thing with her. Which is how she got saddled with me and Sugar and Junior in the first place while our mothers were in a la-de-da apartment up the block having a good ole time. 

So this one day Miss Moore rounds us all up at the mailbox and it’s puredee hot and she’s knockin herself out about arithmetic. And school suppose to let up in summer I heard, but she don’t never let up. And the starch in my pinafore scratching the shit outta me and I’m really hating this nappy-head bitch and her goddamn college degree. I’d much rather go to the pool or to the show where it’s cool. So me and Sugar leaning on the mailbox being surly, which is a Miss Moore word. And Flyboy checking out what everybody brought for lunch. And Fat Butt already wasting his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich like the pig he is. And Junebug punchin on Q.T.’s arm for potato chips. And Rosie Giraffe shifting from one hip to the other waiting for somebody to step on her foot or ask her if she from Georgia so she can kick ass, preferably Mercedes’. And Miss Moore asking us do we know what money is like we a bunch of retards. I mean real money, she say, like it’s only poker chips or monopoly papers we lay on the grocer. So right away I’m tired of this and say so. And would much rather snatch Sugar and go to the Sunset and terrorize the West Indian kids and take their hair ribbons and their money too. And Miss Moore files that remark away for next week’s lesson on brotherhood, I can tell. And finally I say we oughta get to the subway cause it’s cooler an’ besides we might meet some cute boys. Sugar done swiped her mama’s lipstick, so we ready.

So we heading down the street and she’s boring us silly about what things cost and what our parents make and how much goes for rent and how money ain’t divided up right in this country. And then she gets to the part about we all poor and live in the slums which I don’t feature. And I’m ready to speak on that, but she steps out in the street and hails two cabs just like that. Then she hustles half the crew in with her and hands me a five-dollar bill and tells me to calculate 10 percent tip for the driver. And we’re off. Me and Sugar and Junebug and Flyboy hangin out the window and hollering to everybody, putting lipstick on each other cause Flyboy a faggot anyway, and making farts with our sweaty armpits. But I’m mostly trying to figure how to spend this money. But they are fascinated with the meter ticking and Junebug starts laying bets as to how much it’ll read when Flyboy can’t hold his breath no more. Then Sugar lays bets as to how much it’ll be when we get there. So I’m stuck. Don’t nobody want to go for my plan, which is to jump out at the next light and run off to the first bar-b-que we can find. Then the driver tells us to get the hell out cause we there already. And the meter reads eighty-five cents. And I’m stalling to figure out the tip and Sugar say give him a dime. And I decide he don’t need it bad as I do, so later for him. But then he tries to take off with Junebug foot still in the door so we talk about his mama something ferocious. Then we check out that we on Fifth Avenue and everybody dressed up in stockings. One lady in a fur coat, hot as it is. White folks crazy.

 “This is the place, “ Miss Moore say, presenting it to us in the voice she uses at the museum. “Let’s look in the windows before we go in.”

 “Can we steal?” Sugar asks very serious like she’s getting the ground rules squared away before she plays.  “I beg your pardon,” say Miss Moore, and we fall out. So she leads us around the windows of the toy store and me and Sugar screamin, “This is mine, that’s mine, I gotta have that, that was made for me, I was born for that,” till Big Butt drowns us out.
 “Hey, I’m goin to buy that there.”

“That there? You don’t even know what it is, stupid.”

 “I do so,” he say punchin on Rosie Giraffe. “It’s a microscope.”

 “Whatcha gonna do with a microscope, fool?”

 “Look at things.” 

“Like what, Ronald?” ask Miss Moore.

 And Big Butt ain’t got the first notion. So here go Miss Moore gabbing about the thousands of bacteria in a drop of water and the somethinorother in a speck of blood and the million and one living things in the air around us is invisible to the naked eye. And what she say that for? Junebug go to town on that “naked” and we rolling. Then Miss Moore ask what it cost. So we all jam into the window smudgin it up and the price tag say $300. So then she ask how long’d take for Big Butt and Junebug to save up their allowances. “Too long,” I say. “Yeh,” adds Sugar, “outgrown it by that time.” And Miss Moore say no, you never outgrow learning instruments. “Why, even medical students and interns and,” blah, blah, blah. And we ready to choke Big Butt for bringing it up in the first damn place.

 “This here costs four hundred eighty dollars,” say Rosie Giraffe. So we pile up all over her to see what she pointin out. My eyes tell me it’s a chunk of glass cracked with something heavy, and different-color inks dripped into the splits, then the whole thing put into a oven or something. But for $480 it don’t make sense.

 “That’s a paperweight made of semi-precious stones fused together under tremendous pressure,” she explains slowly, with her hands doing the mining and all the factory work.

 “So what’s a paperweight?” asks Rosie Giraffe.

 “To weigh paper with, dumbbell,” say Flyboy, the wise man from the East. 

“Not exactly,” say Miss Moore, which is what she say when you warm or way off too. “It’s to weigh paper down so it won’t scatter and make your desk untidy. “ 

So right away me and Sugar curtsy to each other and then to Mercedes who is more the tidy type. “We don’t keep paper on top of the desk in my class,” say Junebug, figuring Miss Moore crazy or lyin one. 

“At home, then,” she say. “Don’t you have a calendar and a pencil case and a blotter and a letter-opener on your desk at home where you do your homework?” And she know damn well what our homes look like cause she nosys around in them every chance she gets.

 “I don’t even have a desk,” say Junebug. “Do we?”

 “No. And I don’t get no homework neither,” says Big Butt.

“And I don’t even have a home,” say Flyboy like he do at school to keep the white folks off his back and sorry for him. Send this poor kid to camp posters, is his specialty.

 “I do,” says Mercedes. “I have a box of stationery on my desk and a picture of my cat. My god-mother bought the stationery and the desk. There’s a big rose on each sheet and the envelopes smell like roses.”
 “Who wants to know about your smelly-ass stationery,” say Rosie Giraffe fore I can get my two cents in. “It’s important to have a work area all your own so that . . .”
 “Will you look at this sailboat, please,” say Flyboy, cuttin her off and pointin to the thing like it was his. 
So once again we tumble all over each other to gaze at this magnificent thing in the toy store which is just big enough to maybe sail two kittens across the pond if you strap them to the posts tight. We all start reciting the price tag like we in assembly. “Hand-crafted sailboat of fiberglass at one thousand one hundred ninety-five dollars.” 
“Unbelievable,” I hear myself say and am really stunned. I read it again for myself just in case the group recitation put me in a trance. Same thing. For some reason this pisses me off. We look at Miss Moore and she lookin at us, waiting for I dunno what. 
“Who’d pay all that when you can buy a sailboat set for a quarter at Pop’s, a tube of glue for a dime, and a ball of string for eight cents? It must have a motor and a whole lot else besides,” I say. “My sailboat cost me about fifty cents.”
 “But will it take water?” say Mercedes with her smart ass.
 “Took mine to Alley Pond Park once,” say Flyboy. “String broke. Lost it. Pity.”
 “Sailed mine in Central Park and it keeled over and sank. Had to ask my father for another dollar.” “And you got the strap,” laugh Big Butt. “The jerk didn’t even have a string on it. My old man wailed on his behind.” 
Little Q.T. was staring hard at the sailboat and you could see he wanted it bad. But he too little and somebody’d just take it from him. So what the hell.
 “This boat for kids, Miss Moore?”
 “Parents silly to buy something like that just to get all broke up,” say Rosie Giraffe.
 “That much money it should last forever,” I figure. “My father’d buy it for me if I wanted it.”
 “Your father, my ass,” say Rosie Giraffe getting a chance to finally push Mercedes.
 “Must be rich people shop here,” say Q.T.
 “You are a very bright boy,” say Flyboy. “What was your first clue?” And he rap him on the head with the back of his knuckles, since Q.T. the only one he could get away with. Though Q.T. liable to come up behind you years later and get his licks in when you half expect it. 
“What I want to know is,” I says to Miss Moore though I never talk to her, I wouldn’t give the bitch that satisfaction, “is how much a real boat costs? I figure a thousand’d get you a yacht any day.”
“Why don’t you check that out,” she says, “and report back to the group?”Which really pains my ass. If you gonna mess up a perfectly good swim day least you could do is have some answers.
 “Let’s go in,” she say like she got something up her sleeve. Only she don’t lead the way. So me and Sugar turn the corner to where the entrance is, but when we get there I kinda hang back. Not that I’m scared, what’s there to be afraid of, just a toy store. But I feel funny, shame. But what I got to be shamed about? Got as much right to go in as anybody. But somehow I can’t seem to get hold of the door, so I step away from Sugar to lead. But she hangs back too. And I look at her and she looks at me and this is ridiculous. I mean, damn, I have never ever been shy about doing nothing or going nowhere. But then Mercedes steps up and then Rosie Giraffe and Big Butt crowd in behind and shove, and next thing we all stuffed into the doorway with only Mercedes squeezing past us, smoothing out her jumper and walking right down the aisle. Then the rest of us tumble in like a glued-together jigsaw done all wrong. And people lookin at us. And it’s like the time me and Sugar crashed into the Catholic church on a dare. But once we got in there and everything so hushed and holy and the candles and the bowin and the handkerchiefs on all the drooping heads, I just couldn’t go through with the plan. Which was for me to run up to the altar and do a tap dance while Sugar played the nose flute and messed around in the holy water. And Sugar kept givin me the elbow. Then later teased me so bad I tied her up in the shower and turned it on and locked her in. And she’d be there till this day if Aunt Gretchen hadn’t finally figured I was lyin about the boarder takin a shower. 

Same thing in the store. We all walkin on tiptoe and hardly touchin the games and puzzles and things. And I watched Miss Moore who is steady watchin us like she waitin for a sign. Like Mama Drewery watches the sky and sniffs the air and takes note of just how much slant is in the bird formation. Then me and Sugar bump smack into each other, so busy gazing at the toys, ‘specially the sailboat. But we don’t laugh and go into our fat-lady bump-stomach routine. We just stare at that price tag. Then Sugar run a finger over the whole boat. And I’m jealous and want to hit her. Maybe not her, but I sure want to punch somebody in the mouth. 
“Watcha bring us here for, Miss Moore?”
 “You sound angry, Sylvia. Are you mad about something?” Givin me one of them grins like she tellin a grown-up joke that never turns out to be funny. And she’s lookin very closely at me like maybe she plannin to do my portrait from memory. I’m mad, but I won’t give her that satisfaction. So I slouch around the store bein very bored and say, “Let’s go.” 
Me and Sugar at the back of the train watchin the tracks whizzin by large then small then gettin gobbled up in the dark. I’m thinkin about this tricky toy I saw in the store. A clown that somersaults on a bar then does chin-ups just cause you yank lightly at his leg. Cost $35. I could see me askin my mother for a $35 birthday clown. “You wanna who that costs what?” she’d say, cocking her head to the side to get a better view of the hole in my head. Thirty-five dollars could buy new bunk beds for Junior and Gretchen’s boy. Thirty-five dollars and the whole household could go visit Grand-daddy Nelson in the country. Thirty-five dollars would pay for the rent and the piano bill too. Who are these people that spend that much for performing clowns and $1000 for toy sailboats? What kinda work they do and how they live and how come we ain’t in on it? Where we are is who we are, Miss Moore always pointin out. But it don’t necessarily have to be that way, she always adds then waits for somebody to say that poor people have to wake up and demand their share of the pie and don’t none of us know what kind of pie she talking about in the first damn place. But she ain’t so smart cause I still got her four dollars from the taxi and she sure ain’t gettin it messin up my day with this shit. Sugar nudges me in my pocket and winks. 

Miss Moore lines us up in front of the mailbox where we started from, seem like years ago, and I got a headache for thinkin so hard. And we lean all over each other so we can hold up under the draggy ass lecture she always finishes us off with at the end before we thank her for borin us to tears. But she just looks at us like she readin tea leaves. Finally she say, “Well, what did you think of F.A.0. Schwarz?” 
Rosie Giraffe mumbles, “White folks crazy.”
 “I’d like to go there again when I get my birthday money,” says Mercedes, and we shove her out the pack so she has to lean on the mailbox by herself. 
“I’d like a shower. Tiring day,” say Flyboy. 
Then Sugar surprises me by sayin, “You know, Miss Moore, I don’t think all of us here put together eat in a year what that sailboat costs.” And Miss Moore lights up like somebody goosed her. “And?” she say, urging Sugar on. Only I’m standin on her foot so she don’t continue.
 “Imagine for a minute what kind of society it is in which some people can spend on a toy what it would cost to feed a family of six or seven. What do you think?” 
“I think,” say Sugar pushing me off her feet like she never done before cause I whip her ass in a minute, “that this is not much of a democracy if you ask me. Equal chance to pursue happiness means an equal crack at the dough, don’t it?” 
Miss Moore is besides herself and I am disgusted with Sugar’s treachery. So I stand on her foot one more time to see if she’ll shove me. She shuts up, and Miss Moore looks at me, sorrowfully I’m thinkin. And somethin weird is goin on, I can feel it in my chest.
 “Anybody else learn anything today?” lookin dead at me. I walk away and Sugar has to run to catch up and don’t even seem to notice when I shrug her arm off my shoulder. 
“Well, we got four dollars anyway,” she says.
 “Uh hun.” 
“We could go to Hascombs and get half a chocolate layer and then go to the Sunset and still have plenty money for potato chips and ice cream sodas.”
“Uh hun.”
 “Race you to Hascombs,” she say. We start down the block and she gets ahead which is O.K. by me cause I’m going to the West End and then over to the Drive to think this day through. She can run if she want to and even run faster. But ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin.

Credits:  This story can be found in PDF format online at The Lesson and in the short story collection Gorilla, My Love.

A Conversation with Amiri Baraka: Civil Rights, Black Arts, and Politics

by

Sala Udin

During the Civil Rights Movement these two men were fighting to put an end to the practices of discrimination. While Amiri Baraka did it from New York, Sala Udin did it from Holmes County, Mississippi and Pittsburgh.

Baraka founded the Black Arts Movement, which advocated independent black writing, publishing, and artistic institutions. In 1966 he set up the Spirit House Players, which produced, among other works, two of his plays against police brutality. Then Sala Udin—a man who, among other things, fought for starting Black Studies at the University of Pittsburgh—used to take young people to those performances. Many of these people went back to change their cities, inspired by the work of “the father of the Black Arts Movement,” as Baraka is known.

Almost fives decades later, in June 2011, it was Baraka who came to Pittsburgh to read at the poetry event that Cave Canem and City of Asylum/Pittsburgh hosted on the North Side. Sala Udin, a former Pittsburgh City Councilman, sat down with him to discuss politics, the future of black art, and the consequences of making political art in America. Their lively conversation is sprinkled with personal memories, sharp political commentary, and humor.

Because it is a unique opportunity to have two figures of the Civil Rights Movement in the same room to talk about that period and their lives afterward, Sampsonia Way presents this interview unedited and uncut. It is our longest interview to date.

A WAY BACK

Sala Udin: We were just talking about little Ras who’s not so little. I know you must be proud of your son, who is a public school principal, was deputy mayor in Newark, and now has recently been re-elected to City Council. Tell us a little bit about Ras’ entry into the politics of Newark, and how it was an extension of the politics that we started way back.

Amiri Baraka: We used to take my sons to all kind of political things — that included my son Ahi who was very little at the time — and Ras was apparently just drawn to that and picked it up. He and our other son Amiri Jr. were into some political organization when they were in high school.

They organized all the students to walk out of the schools because there was no Black Studies. It was a long journey to where Ras finally got to be the deputy mayor under Sharpe James for four years, for a dollar a year. Now they’re paying deputy mayors $176,000 a year.

Sala Udin: He was a little early.

Amiri Baraka: Well it’s another kind of regime that we have now. But it’s been a long time coming. When Ras went to Howard University some students shut down the school over this Bush appointee who would be on the Board of Trustees at Howard. So the students shut the school down, and I went there and the mayor picked me up. They took me to the school, and the president there was so backwards that he had called a SWAT team.

Sala Udin: He called a SWAT team?

Amiri Baraka: Yes, called SWATs on the students. The students had locked up the administration there. What they did was pull the fire alarm and run out and lock the doors. So he called the SWAT on them. I called people I knew who had children there. I said, “They’re getting ready to do something to your kids.” He backed off after a couple of days.

Sala Udin: That’s similar to the struggle we had at the University of Pittsburgh, where we took over the computer center and locked ourselves into the Cathedral of Learning. At that time computers were as big as refrigerators. We had axes and hammers and were threatening to dismantle the computers, and it changed their tune. They became much more agreeable to having a conversation about Black Studies.

Amiri Baraka: Yeah, I don’t think these students now realize how important it was to do that and that’s why I think that there’s not as tight surveillance by the students and by the faculty over Black Studies. It gets diminished.

What the schools did after all that militancy of enforcing the initiation of Black Studies was to bring in instructors who were not revolutionaries and who were simply faculty members who didn’t care what happened. That’s what’s happening all over the country.

Sala Udin: And the whole initiation is forgotten. They don’t know how they got there. They think that they’re there because of their degrees and their brilliance.

Amiri Baraka: A lot of these Africans they bring in are just intended to be some kind of administrative pawn, but that comes from an era when they thought everything African was militant.

Sala Udin: We go back to a time when we brought a lot of young groups to Newark to see Spirit House [a black community theatre that Baraka set up in Newark in 1966]. Since then you’ve been widely known as the father and founder of the Black Arts Movement…

Amiri Baraka: Remember that we had started organizing people in the Village. We were trying to create some kind of black consciousness because the Civil Rights Movement was unfolding. But when Malcolm X got murdered, a lot of us young writers and painters moved out of the Village and up into Harlem.

I had a play downtown and I was getting some kind of money so we rented a brownstone in Harlem and tore out the bottom floor and set up a theater and then we began to send trucks out into the street: Four trucks every night with music and dance and poetry.

It had a very strong effect on the people because we thought that if we were supposed to be doing such profound artistic things, we needed to bring that right into the neighborhood. What was interesting was the play Dutchman, my play, which won the Obie Award, became a racist play.

Sala Udin: How so?

Amiri Baraka: Well because art in an abstract setting is one thing, but art where you’re actually telling people to do things becomes dangerous. Jean Paul Sartre said that as long as you say that something’s wrong but you don’t know what, that’s art. If you say something’s wrong and you know exactly who’s doing it, that’s political protest.

So we had to work with that and begin to understand that. But we wrote art that was, number one, identifiably Afro-American according to our roots and our history and so forth. Secondly, we made art that was not contained in small venues. We wanted to come out and get into the streets. That’s why I was happy to see rap because here you can hear people running stuff down out in the street. The third thing we wanted was art that would help with the liberation of black people, and we didn’t think just writing a poem was sufficient. That poem had to have some kind of utilitarian use; it should help in liberating us. So that’s what we did. We consciously did that.

We brought artists from all over the area uptown, some of the great musicians of the time. We brought Sun Ra into the community. People were saying Sun Ra’s too out there for the people. But people thought it was dance music, they started dancing to it.

There’s a picture in a book of mine called Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music where we’re getting ready to go out into the street, and I’m bringing wine, and at the top of the steps is Sun Ra. It was very effective, and that particular trend spread across the country in Milwaukee, Chicago, Atlanta.

Sala Udin: How do you see Black Art today?

Amiri Baraka: Well we need to restore its purpose. The thing is you’ve got an Afro-American presidential figure and that disarms a lot of people, even though they still suffer from the same ills. I mean, you see that the Tea Party will pop up.

After the Civil War the slaves thought they were free, but then came the Klan. It’s the same thing. You didn’t need the Klan when slavery was going, but the minute you say you’re no longer a slave then you get the Klan and you get Black Codes.

So you cannot stop struggling just because you’ve got a black guy walking around saying some stuff. Just because his skin is your color don’t mean his brain is the same as yours; if you’re going to bomb Libya you’re nuts. So it’s a continual struggle to raise the level of social consciousness in the country. Not only for black people but for everybody who needs that change.

Sala Udin: Do you still see black artists under the continued influence of Black Art who politicize their art?

Amiri Baraka: Some, but you got a whole wave of people who are influenced by this post-struggle art. People who believe that simply to write a poem about themselves or their family is sufficient. That’s not what it is. It’s the whole question of art.

Everything that Shakespeare wrote was against the rulers in that particular age. In Julius Caesar he wrote about the relationship between government and the people. The Taming of the Shrew was about the oppression of women and Hamlet is about the development of liberalism.

So when you can understand that Shakespeare is dealing with the elimination of the whole aristocratic class in that period you see that all the things he talks about are things that we will have to deal with under capitalism for the rest of our lives. But that’s not the way it’s presented. It’s presented as some kind of extra-realistic mumbo-jumbo in verse that puts people to sleep so they don’t see the essence of what that is. But that’s what artists are supposed to do— help the struggle for the advancement of human knowledge.

Sala Udin: When we came to Newark on many occasions there were several Pittsburgh artists who were influenced by what they learned and experienced at Spirit House. Now they are revered here. I wanted to name them and get you to reflect briefly on their work: Rob Penny, August Wilson, Ed Roberson, and John Edgar Wideman.

Amiri Baraka: Well Rob was actually the most active of our unit. He actually wanted to do the things that we were talking about, use art to advance black life and human consciousness.

August was a poet when we first talked. He didn’t write plays yet; he was a young poet talking to me about poetry and I thought that [his movement into the theater] was a miraculous kind of development. When I first met him, he wanted to know why I wasn’t a Beatnik anymore.

Next thing I know he had become a Muslim and joined the Nation of Islam which he stayed with for about that long [snaps fingers]. I think he and Sonia Sanchez got in the Nation of Islam about the same time and stayed about the same time. Thirty minutes. Then they were doing something else.

I was very proud of Rob and August and how much they did. They came to Newark a couple of times.

Ed Roberson I still know. We worked at the same school. I was teaching, and he had an administrator kind of job, but he was writing poetry, and he still is.

Sala Udin: Wideman spoke of you and Ed Roberson as early influences. He talks about Ed and includes him in some of his anthology work.

Amiri Baraka: Yeah well Ed’s poetry is a very fine, profound kind of poetry and it’s interesting to me. John Edgar Wideman and I have had some discussions—that I really don’t really want to credit as his whole being— on whether or not one should teach icons of Afro-American literature. And my line was “You mean you wouldn’t teach Frederick Douglass? You wouldn’t teach DuBois? I don’t understand.” And then he changed his stance because that’s clearly impossible. If you’re going to teach Black Studies you have to teach the great people.

OBAMA AND THE UPCOMING ELECTIONS

Sala Udin: As we look at the evolution of the political scene up to 2008, you had put forward a compelling argument for progressives that the Barack Obama candidacy represented an opportunity to push forward the agenda for democratic rights and equality. Now more recently you’ve described Obama as a yapping Negro who would take us back to slavery. I wonder what you would say about Barack’s presidency?

Amiri Baraka: The problem is that I have to support Obama because I remember the Republicans. I remember Bush, and I see the ones they have lined up over there now. At the same time he has to be criticized about what he’s done. I have to ask Obama, what are you going to get by bombing Africa? Take the oil away from Gaddafi? Gaddafi as a leader is no worse than others that he’s close friends with. So where is the logic of that?

And Obama has not learned to struggle like I hoped he would. There’s no way to get anything done unless you’re able to struggle with those long-time lobbies. Even when he was first elected we sent 10,000 newspapers out saying “President Obama, no bailout, nationalize the banks, nationalize the auto company.” I had forums to talk about that.

The only way I could justify his actions is that he thought that above all, capitalism–not just petty capitalism, but big time capitalism, monopoly— has to survive for this country to survive.

I still thought it was a respite, but there’s been so many times where he’s been able to do things and then backed off, like that thing with [Henry Louis] “Skip” Gates getting busted. Obama said it was stupid, then he backed off it. They arrested a guy, a Harvard professor, on his own doorstep. That’s stupid. And obviously racist. But to back away from that with some kind of “let’s go drink beer together,” that’s what began to turn me away from him.

I’ve got to support him to the extent I can, but at the same time I’ve got to criticize him.

Sala Udin: What should be the posture of progressives relative to the upcoming election?

Amiri Baraka: Well you know the right is moving towards fascism. This whole business in Arizona, this whole trading unemployment for refusing to tax the rich. In New Jersey it’s the same thing; Governor Christie will not tax the rich, but we have all kinds of budget cuts. That has to be fought, and Obama has to be held as a bulwark against that; otherwise what are we doing?

I think it’s important to fight the fringe, the Tea Party, and understand that a lot of Republicans, and some Democrats, are the Klan in civilian clothes. They just took off the white robes.

Like I said, after the Civil War, then you get the Klan. So after Barack’s election, then you get the Tea Party and it’s the same thing. It’s the Sisyphus Syndrome. You roll the rock, they’re going to roll it back down on your head. Like I said last night, there was a guy named George Romero who predicted the coming of the Tea Party in a film in the sixties called Night of the Living Dead. But the irony about that is a lot of the people are struggling against their own interests, you know, “Keep your hands off my social security.” That’s a federal program. But that’s where we are now, between a rock and a hard place.

During the campaign of the Weimar Republic, the left split up into pieces and permitted the right to grow. While the left was fighting about whether they were Communists or Socialists, Workers, Syndicalists, Hitler was building. So you looked up and suddenly they had blown up the Reichstag—which reminded me of 9/11—and the next thing you know, they had banned the left from the whole parliamentary thing and began to take hostages.

I don’t see the difference between the media, big media, Murdoch Media, Fox, and what the Nazi media was. Everything is to the right, to the right, to the right, and when you see people like [the radio and television host] Glenn Beck for instance, it’s very scary because they don’t represent anything but fascism.

Sala Udin: You called for the formation of a representative assembly, a united front, to organize black politics. How do you see that happening today? There is nothing close to the kind of assembly that we put together with the National Black Political Assembly. How do you see that evolving?

Amiri Baraka: Well it’s going to have to happen again. First of all, the only way we can go forward in this country is that coalition, that united front that elected Obama. Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and progressive whites have to maintain that motion because if that fragments, we’d go backwards. That’s the danger of Obama acting so backwards, because what he’s doing is cutting off his own backers.

I was actually giving money to the campaign in 2008, but I can’t give money to someone who’s going to bomb Africa. You could never back Great Britain and France against Africa or any other powerless people because they’re bloodsuckers. That’s why when you see these movies about vampires and stuff it’s so popular because they’re talking about themselves, they’re talking about the nature of this economy, the nature of this society. They suck blood from defenseless people.

Sala Udin: So rather than building a united front, many of the critics of Obama—especially left critics—don’t do anything as an alternative to their criticism. They exempt themselves from organizing people, and they think it’s sufficient to stand on the sidelines and criticize.

Amiri Baraka: Well it’s like [American author, actor, and civil rights activist] Cornel West. He called Obama a white man in black skin. This guy taught at Harvard and Princeton. I don’t know many black people who teach at Harvard and Princeton. If you got into one of them you’d be lucky.

I was at a Socialist conference and these people were making all these ridiculous statements. I said “I’m a Communist, I want to know where are the Socialists, where are the Communists in this group?” And Cornel says “I’m a Christian.” So I said: “That’s cool,” but I reminded him, “You know why they killed Christ, don’t you? Kicking the money lenders out of the temple.”

Anyway that’s the problem, people feeling that the Black Liberation Movement was a means of getting them into an Ivy League college. The idea that it was to try to change the very nature of the United States is lost on them because they’re perfectly comfortable. That’s why if you look at that book that [Manning] Marable wrote about Malcolm X, the three people pushing the book were Cornel West, Skip Gates, and Michael Eric Dyson.

Unfortunately Marable fell into this kind of thinking or analysis that the “left,” the Democratic Socialists, even the CP today, and the Trotskyites, are more progressive. I said no, the Black Liberation Movement had the most powerful effect on America. Not the CP, not the Democratic Socialists, not the Trotskyites. And Malcolm and all these Black Liberation groups, the Black Panthers, they didn’t want an Obama. But if you don’t understand that, if you’re going to belittle them because they’re not formally Socialist then you don’t even need Lenin.

Lenin said we don’t measure people’s struggle against imperialism by their formal commitment to democracy, but by the effect they have in beating imperialism. If you’re talking about Lenin, don’t talk to me about no left. That’s the problem: You have people who masquerade under some form of social democracy, pretending they’re on the left, but really just dribbling the ball inside regular capitalist America.

A WAY FORWARD

Sala Udin: When you look back at all of the contributions that you have made as a writer, playwright, music critic, and cultural critic, how do you see the peaks and valleys of your own contributions?

Amiri Baraka: Well, I just wrote a play about [W.E.B.] DuBois called The Most Dangerous Man in America. That’s what the FBI called DuBois. But that man was 82 years old and had a cane.

In the play he explains what they have done to him when they indicted him as an agent of a foreign power for talking about peace and condemning the hydrogen and atom bombs. They indicted him as an agent of a foreign power at 82 years old. He explained that once that happened, publishers that sought his writing no longer did that. They began to stop his speaking engagements. He said “I was a man that every Negro in the United States wanted at one time.”

He became a pariah. So I could understand that. I said yeah that’s what they will do. If you do something that the powers don’t like, they make you invisible. That was the first case against McCarthyism, and at the end, even though DuBois had Vito Marcantonio as his attorney, the last Communist in the Congress. But when he had won, he said: “Now the little children will no longer see my name.”

You can write what you want to, and say what you think needs to be said, but in the end they’ll hit you back.

Sala Udin: Have they done that to you?

Amiri Baraka: Oh yeah, even just money-wise. Last year I lost $16,000 in terms of speaking and stuff. I went to Princeton, and they said: “It’s going to be hard for us to have you at Princeton because we have to spend an extra $10,000 on security,” like people are going to come and shoot me. But it’s a normal thing if you understand what you are doing and who you are opposing.

People are always coming up to me, “Didn’t you have a play on Broadway?” Why should I have a play on Broadway? I mean you think that people want somebody to come up to them and say “You need to die,” and then they say, “Let’s put this on Broadway.” It’s a choice you have to make, it’s a choice you make and you have to live with it.

Sala Udin: What projects are you working on now?

Amiri Baraka: Well the play on Dubois I just finished two weeks ago. That took up my time for the last few months. I’ve got a book called Revolutionary Art that I’ve been waiting on for two years from Third World Press; I don’t know what the publisher’s doing. He sent me two sets of proofs, I marked both of them and still no book.

We are also doing things in Newark: we have a project called Lincoln Park Coast Cultural District. That’s an old district in Newark where the abolitionists lived and used to preach against slavery. Right next to that was the black music center, so we’ve sort of annexed that area and we’re building houses down there. For the last five years we’ve had big music festivals. Matter of fact it’s coming up again next month, and we’re organizing a tribute to James Moody who’s a Newark musician.

Tomorrow [June 26] we’re having a celebration for Juneteenth, the day when word that slavery was over reached Texas three years after the fact. It should be interesting.

We’re just trying to do things now to support Ras and his struggle because he’s the most progressive person on that city council. He’s always involved and struggling against these backwards forces. Politics for some people is nothing but a gig. It’s not about advancing anything in the consciousness.

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka, born in 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism. He is a poet icon and revolutionary political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and political issues extensively in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe.

With influences on his work ranging from musicians such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, and Sun Ra, to the Cuban Revolution, Malcolm X and world revolutionary movements, Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s. Though short-lived, it was a movement that became the virtual blueprint for a new set of American theater aesthetics. The movement and his published and performance work, such as the signature study on African-American music, Blues People (1963) and the play Dutchman (1963), practically seeded “the cultural corollary to black nationalism” of that revolutionary American milieu.

Sala Udin

Sala Udin, whose legal name is Samuel Wesley Howze, is a former Pittsburgh City Councilman, where he represented the 6th district.

Udin traveled south with the Freedom Riders, and during the 1960s, worked primarily in Holmes County, Mississippi, for the benefit of the Civil Rights Movement. It was there that Udin rallied for school desegregation, farmer cooperatives, and voter registration. Upon returning to Pittsburgh, Udin helped to establish a branch of the Congress of African People.

Udin is also known for his acting in the play Jitney and the friendship he had with the famous author of the play August Wilson.

Credits:  This interview was first published in 2011 in Sampsonia Way: An Online Magazine for Literature, Free Speech, Social Justice