Volume 31, Number 10 · June 14, 1984
The Fire Last Time
By Darryl Pinckney
The Autobiography of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka
Freundlich Books, 329 pp., $16.95
The works of Leroi Jones reveal a mind groping toward orthodoxy. Certainly he Mau-Maued the flak catchers, which was not hard to do in the Sixties. But the swell of black consciousness did not carry him to any liberating heresies. Hating Whitey was not the new frontier it seemed to be at the time. He rowed through the tumult of black nationalism, reinvented himself as Imamu (spiritual leader) Amiri Baraka (blessed prince), and landed on the shores of Marxist-Leninism, as if unaware of the footprints already visible in the sand.
Review, 4033 words
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