Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women

by Amiri Baraka

418 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 1983

About the author

Poems and plays, such as Dutchman (1964), of American writer Amiri Baraka originally Everett LeRoi Jones focus on racial conflict.

He attended Barringer high school. Coyt Leverette Jones, his father, worked as a postal supervisor and lift operator. Anna Lois Russ Jones, his mother, worked as a social worker.

He studied at Rutgers, Columbia, and Howard universities but left without a degree and attended the new school for social research. He won a scholarship to Rutgers in 1951, but a continuing sense of cultural dislocation prompted him to transfer in 1952 to Howard. He studied philosophy and religion, major fields. Jones also served three years in the air force as a gunner. Jones continued his studies of comparative literature at Columbia University. An anonymous letter accused him as a Communist to his commanding officer and led to the discovery of Soviet literature; afterward, people put Jones on gardening duty and gave him a dishonorable discharge for violation of his oath of duty.

In the same year, he moved to Greenwich Village and worked initially in a warehouse for music records. His interest in jazz began in this period. At the same time, he came into contact with Beat Generation, black mountain college, and New York School. In 1958, he married Hettie Cohen and founded Totem Press, which published such Beat Generation icons as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

Jones in July 1960 visited with a delegation of Cuba committee and reported his impressions in his essay Cuba libre . He began a politically active art. In 1961, he published Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note , a first book. In 1963, Blues People: Negro Music in White America of the most influential volumes of criticism, especially in regard to the then beginning free jazz movement, followed. His acclaimed controversy premiered and received an Obie Award in the same year.

After the assassination of Malcolm X (1965), Jones left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem. His controversial revolutionary and then antisemitic.

In 1966, Jones married Sylvia Robinson, his second wife, who later adopted the name Amina Baraka. In 1967, he lectured at San Francisco State University. In 1967, he adopted the African name Imamu Amear Baraka, which he later changed to Amiri Baraka.

In 1968, he was arrested in Newark for allegedly carrying an illegal weapon and resisting arrest during the riots of the previous year, and people subsequently sentenced him to three years in prison; shortly afterward, Raymond A. Brown, his defense attorney, convinced an appeals court to reverse the sentence. In that same year, Black Music, his second book of jazz criticism, collected previously published music journalism, including the seminal Apple Cores columns from Down Beat magazine. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Baraka penned some similar strongly anti-Jewish articles to the stance at that time of the Nation of Islam to court controversy.

Around 1974, Baraka himself from Black nationalism as a Marxist and a supporter of third-world liberation movements. In 1979, he lectured at Africana studies department of State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1980, he denounced his former anti-Semitic utterances, declaring himself an anti-Zionist.

In 1984, Baraka served as a full professor at Rutgers University, but was subsequently denied tenure. In 1989, he won a book award for his works as well as a Langston Hughes award.

In 1990, he co-authored the autobiography of Quincy Jones, and 1998 , he served as supporting actor in Bulworth, film of Warren Beatty. In 1996, the red hot organization produced Offbeat: A Red Hot Soundtrip, and Baraka contributed to this acquired immune def

Reviews

[MrsB]

Because it is an anthology, the styles differ between writers, and so there is almost certainly something for everyone.

I borrowed a digital copy for free from archive.org because I wanted to read Toni Morrison’s short story ‘Recitatif’. However, I enjoyed more than just her story. The ones that I particularly enjoyed (in the same order that they are found in the anthology):

- ‘You Know’, ‘Big Fine Woman From Ruleville’ and ‘For the Brave Young Students in Soweto’ by Jane Cortez
- ‘...And Then She Said’ by Alexis De Veaux
- ‘Where Have You Gone’, ‘Speak the Truth to the People’ and ‘early in the mornin’ by Mari Evans
- ‘Friday the 13th Candlelight March’ by Adrienne Ingrum
- ‘My Last Feeling This Way Poem’ by Mae Jackson
- ‘On Being High’ and An Name Change’ by Abbey Lincoln (Aminata Moseka)
- ‘NEED: A Chorale of Black Women’s Voices’ by Audre Lorde
- ‘untitled’ and ‘New Chapters for Our History’ by Rosemari Mealy
- ‘Recitatif’ by Toni Morrison
- ‘Minority’ and ‘Equal Opportunity’ by Judy Dothard Simmons
- ‘I’m Really Very Fond’ by Alice Walker
- ‘My Truth And My Flame’ and ‘Five Black Men’ by Margaret Walker
- ‘The Envelope’ by Michelle Wallace
- ‘I Am Not My Sister’s Keeper: I Am My Sister’ by Regina Williams

[William]

Great collection of mostly poetry. The prose is what’s best though. Usually with poetry I enjoy it more when I read a lot of it from one author. This didn’t satisfy that longing but it was great to read from a similar perspective throughout. Beautiful and powerful.