God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.
I had just been in some repressive situations - the black middle-class college scene and the crazy United States Air Force - and so I just felt like getting out of that. I thought, now, that I wanted to be a writer. I had something that I wanted to do, that I was interested in doing, so I wanted to pursue that.
I'm trying to make the poems as musical as I can - from the inception. So that whether they're read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given.
We should understand the impact that Malcolm had on the whole of American society.
A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
My family came to Newark in the '20s. We've been there a long, long time. My father's name was LeRoi, the French-ified aspect of it, because his first name was Coyette, you see. They come from South Carolina.
There will be, and should be, reams and reams of analysis, even praise, for our friend but also even larger measures of non-analysis and, certainly, condemnation for James Baldwin, the Negro writer.
This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi.
America is as much a black country as a white one. The lives and destinies of the white American are bound up inextricably with those of the black American.
There is other disturbing facts surround the hideous 911 attacks, which my family and I could see from the third floor bathroom window of our homes!
I guess I was the most unbohemian of all bohemians. My bohemianism consisted of not wanting to get involved with the stupid stuff that I thought people wanted you to get involved with - ... namely America... Dwight Eisenhower, McCarthyism and all those great things.
My bohemianism consisted of not wanting to get involved with the stupid stuff that I thought people wanted you to get involved with... namely America... Dwight Eisenhower, McCarthyism and all those great things.
You have to start with slavery because those abuses have never been eradicated. You know, people are not living in slums because they voted to. You know, their children are not in jail because they wanted them to. You know, these are the results of a people who have been oppressed and suffer national oppression, you know.
I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.
When I was saying, 'White people go to hell,' I never had trouble finding a publisher. But when I say, 'Black and white unite and fight, destroy capitalism,' then you suddenly become unreasonable.
The major poets of New Jersey have all suffered, whether it's Whitman, who lost his job for 'Leaves of Grass,' or William Carlos Williams, who was called a communist, or Ginsberg, whose 'Howl' was prosecuted, or myself. If you practise poetry the way I think it needs to be done, you're going to put yourself in jeopardy.
The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.
If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist.
The man who buried Malcolm X - my Muslim imam, priest - he, after I got beat up by police... came to me, and he said, 'You don't need this American name.' And I was susceptible to it at the time because, God knows, I had just gotten whipped near to death. So he gave me an Arab name; he gave me the name Amir Barakat.
Mao Zedong was a revolutionary. He made a revolution.
