Baraka’s first book of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, published in 1961, showed the influence of the Beats, and the genre’s critique of pretense, convention and materialism.
A trip to Castro’s Cuba in 1960 (recounted in the essay Cuba Libre in Home: Social Essays, a collection of essays), and his displeasure of the gradualism of the Civil Rights Movement, along with the assimilationist impulse of middle-class blacks, caused Baraka to move away from the Beats and focus more on race and African-American culture. His shift from the Beat poets to Black Nationalism is evident in his 1964 plays, The Toilet, and The Slave, both of which also featured naturalist and absurdist themes. [8]
Inspired by Kawaida, a philosophical synthesis of Islam and traditional African beliefs developed by Maulana Karenga – the creator of Kwanzaa – LeRoi Jones changed his name, first to the Swahili Muslim Amiri Baraka (“blessed prince”), added “Imamu” a title which means “leader,” and finally settled on Amiri Baraka. After divorcing his first wife, Baraka married Sylvia Robinson (who later changed her name to Amina Baraka).[9] He later moved back to his hometown, Newark N.J., and participated in many black political movements, including being arrested and jailed during the 1967 Newark riots, the Pan African Congress of African Peoples in Atlanta (1972) and the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana. Baraka later became a radical Marxist issuing a number of works that reflected his new political caste. [10]
Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Baraka’s first major non-fiction work, published in 1963; a “theoretical endeavor,” that traced the evolution and aesthetics of black music from, “the neo-african slave chants through the primitive and classical blues to the scat-singing of the beboppers.” [11] The book was inspired by Howard University English professor Sterling Brown’s lectures on the importance of jazz and the blues. Baraka’s advocacy of jazz imbued his poetry with a fluid, rhythmic style that evoked the rhythmic and improvisational feel of an impassioned jazz solo, married to a fiery and unapologetically demand for social justice and self-determination.