Amiri Baraka - "Ka 'Ba"

A closed window looks down
on a dirty courtyard, and black people
call across or scream or walk across
defying physics in the stream of their will

Our world is full of sound
Our world is more lovely than anyone's
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk the air

We are beautiful people
with african imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants

with african eyes, and noses, and arms, 
though we sprawl in grey chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.

We have been captured, 
brothers. And we labor
to make our getaway, into
the ancient image, into a new

correspondence with ourselves
and our black family. We read magic
now we need the spells, to rise up
return, destroy, and create. What will be

the sacred words? 

Amiri Baraka was the founding artist behind the Black Arts Movement, a largely literary movement which emerged from the reaction to Malcolm X's assassination. The Black Arts Movement (or BAM) has been characterized at times as the aesthetic equivalent of Black Power - indeed many of the works of the movement are very explicitly in favor of black power & black seperatism. Ishmael Reed, an artist often associated with the movement but who never formally joined it, characterizes BAM as the beginning of a political multiculturalism which rejects the assimilation of marginalized groups in favor of "doing your own thing."

In "Ka 'Ba", Baraka clearly reflects on these themes. The title immediately elicits a connection to Islam, as the Kaaba is the most sacred place in Islam, a shrine in the religion's most sacred mosque. Islam was often associated with Black Power, as the Nation of Islam provided much of the leadership for this movement. Baraka thus agrees with the Nation of Islam in that he seems to view Islam as integral to the development of a black seperatist identity.

BAM works are also often defined by their open celebration of blackness and black people, and this is clearly evident in Baraka's work - he says that black people "[defy] physics in the stream of their will" and that their "world is more lovely than anyone's / tho we suffer." This radical celebration of blackness, even whilst acknowledging the hardships of black people in America, is fully characteristic of the concept of Black Power endemic to BAM. Baraka closes the poem by asking "What will be the sacred words?" that will free his people from bondage. Given the title of the poem, we may be led to believe that these "sacred words" are Islamic, but perhaps the words he has just used are indeed the words he speaks of - BAM could then fulfill its ambition as the literary wing of black liberation.