“An Agony. As Now” (1964), derived from his early radicalism, dissociates selves in a tormented first-person speaker. Driven mad with toxic emotion, the unacknowledged self lives in the sensory experiences of a hated outer self. His distaste takes shape in the songs his double sings and the women he loves. Like the man in the iron mask, the internal self looks out through metal at an interaction with the world that he neither understands nor condones.
Beginning in line 12, pain takes on a greater distraction as the schizoid state becomes less tolerable. Repetitions of “or pain” recycle the poet-speaker’s misery as he attempts to name the source and type of hurt. The suffering outdistances his notion of God as it reaches for a “yes” in line 27, the beginning of resolution. With controlled self-direction, the speaker forces himself to see and acknowledge beauty. In the final five lines, the trapped inner speaker batters the outer shell that refuses to feel normal love. The outer man, incapable of compromise, gazes at the sun and scorches the pulp-tender inner being.
A long verse ode, “A Poem for Willie Best” (1964), retrieves the humanity of modern-day Jim Crow, a black actor who functioned in film as “Sleep’n’eat.” The poem opens on Best’s head, a symbol of his disembodied talent, which performs while ignoring a suffering heart. Carefully aligned alliteration (all/hell, beggar bleeds) and assonance (time/alive) precede a rich image of doom in slippery-sided hell “whose bottoms are famous.”
In Baraka’s trademark poetic geometry, stave II pictures the dimensionless point of the head viewed from “Christ’s / heaven” and emphasizes God’s disinterest in the black man’s anguish. Pilloried, the black Christ figure can expect no aid, for “No one / will turn to that station again.” In succeeding staves, the poet-speaker ponders the use of sexual release as repayment for racial degradation but interrupts his angst in stave VII to plead, “Give me / Something more / Than what is here.” The reasoning is crushingly simplistic: Relief must come from the outside world, for “my body hurts.”
In line 128, the poet-speaker begins a resolution calling for balance. Punning on a homonym (“Can you hear? Here / I am again”), the insistent voice turns from easing the body to seek comfort in spirit. The speaker is tired of losing. He justifies the demand as only fair. Retreating into casual violence as a form of self-reclamation, the “renegade / behind the mask” lists the black qualities and behaviors stereotyped by the white world. Still misidentified, the suffering Willie Best, his name a mockery of what the white world expects of a talented black, awaits “at the crossroads,” a symbol of martyrdom on the cross.
Five years after “An Agony. As Now” and “A Poem for Willie Best,” Baraka composed “Black People: This Is Our Destiny” (1969). He launches his verbal challenge in an oratorical, out-of-syntax style drawn from the tradition of storyteller and ecstatic preacher. Visionary in its obscurities, the text spins out the reality of black fate. The pulsing rhythm forges ahead in noun clusters—”the gases, the plants, the ghost minerals/the spirits the souls the light in the stillness.” The poet shocks in line 15 with a jarring declaration that there is “nothing in God.” On its descent, the poem gathers speed once more before halting at the pause in line 17 and plunges into a bold statement of the future. Drawing on a belief that blacks were the first humans to evolve from primates, Baraka sees his idealism as a holy commission to “evolve again to civilize the world.”
