by Amiri Baraka
Table of Contents
___________________
Introduction by Woodie King, Jr.
The System of Dante's Hell
NEUTRALS: The Vestibule
HEATHEN: No. 1
HEATHEN: No. 2
THE INCONTINENT: Lasciviousness
Gluttony
INCONTINENT: The Prodigal
Wrathful
SEVEN (The Destruction Of America
SEDUCERS
The Flatterers
Simonists
The Diviners
CIRCLE 8 (Ditch 5) Grafters (Barrators)
Hypocrite(s)
Thieves
THE EIGHTH DITCH (IS DRAMA
THE NINTH DITCH: MAKERS OF DISCORD
Personators (alchemists) Falsifiers
CIRCLE 9: Bolgia 1—Treachery To Kindred
6. The Heretics
SOUND AND IMAGE
About Amiri Baraka
Also by Amiri Baraka
Copyright & Credits
About Akashic Books
LeRoi Jones and the Emergence of Amiri Baraka
by Woodie King Jr.
The System of Dante’s Hell is an experimental novel by the award-winning poet and playwright LeRoi Jones, written some eight years before he took the name Amiri Baraka. The author’s autobiographical journey is so heavily influenced by Dante Alighieri’s Inferno that it begs the question: did the poet/activist Jones see qualities in Dante that would lead him to become Baraka, for whom art and politics were inextricably connected?
When Jones first arrived in New York City, he was searching for an identity and for like-minded artists, poets, musicians, and writers. As it often does, his search took him back to where it all started. From his childhood in Newark, New Jersey, through his time spent at Howard University and later the US Air Force, to his self-imposed exile in Greenwich Village in the mid-1950s, The System of Dante’s Hell captures the young poet/novelist “walking in memory.”
The walk is both vague and exciting to witness, as it foreshadows the emergence of a poet, novelist, and activist who would become a major force in American literature. Rereading it now, it is easy to rediscover his literary influences in Beckett, Joyce, Pound, T.S. Eliot, and the existential philosophers Hegel and Kierkegaard; his stylistic and political ties to other writers of the time like Allen Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Frank O’Hara, Olson, Bob Kaufman, Diane di Prima, Larry Rivers, and Nat Hentoff; and his deeper connection to fellow Greenwich Village exiles like Calvin Hicks, A.B. Spellman, Bob Hamilton, Steve Cannon, Harold Cruse, Archie Shepp, Leroy Lucas, and Roland Snellings.
In his 1984 autobiography, Baraka explained how his voice emerged from The System of Dante’s Hell:
I consciously wrote as deeply into my psyche as I could go. I didn’t even want the words to “make sense.” I had the theme in my mind . . . but the theme was just something against which I wanted to play endless variations. Each section had its own dynamic and pain. Going so deep into myself was like descending into Hell . . . I was tearing away from the “ready-mades” that imitating Creeley (or Olson) provided. I’d found that when you imitate peoples’ form you take on their content as well. So I scrambled, and roamed, sometimes, blindly in my consciousness, to come up with something more essential, more rooted in my deepest experience . . . I wrote in the jagged staccato fragments until at the end of the piece I had come to, found, my own voice, or something beginning to approximate it.
This results in a structure of free association, in which each section has headings instead of chapters. For example, the heading “Gluttony” tells us: “This place is not another. Cold white sidewalks. Time, as intimate. To myself, beautiful fingers . . .” In “SEVEN (The Destruction of America,” note the free association of riffs, not unlike Ella Fitzgerald scatting. In the heading “CIRCLE 8,” I have no idea what LeRoi means by “Ditch 5” but I do know he comes to a beautiful and lasting observation: “I am hidden from sight and guarded by demons.”
The journey into hell had already been explored by Milton, Virgil, and Homer, but found a new readership with LeRoi Jones. This new version was as experimental as free-form jazz and abstract art; however, now it was from an African American perspective. Hell occupies space in LeRoi’s head. Hell is where white people refuse to see him. He is Black. In defending his humanity to white people, he cannot ever focus on his own Black self.
Hell is in his head and is the inferno of LeRoi’s frustration.
When LeRoi Jones wrote The System of Dante’s Hell, America had not yet witnessed the Watts Riots, Malcolm had not been assassinated, the Black Arts Movement was not in ascendance, and LeRoi Jones had not yet become known as Amiri Baraka. Some fifty years later, we can see the spirit of these events anticipated in his poetic and politically charged coming of age in the bowels of hell.
Woodie King Jr. is a producer and director of Amiri Baraka’s plays. Most recently, he produced and directed Baraka’s final play, Most Dangerous Man in America (W.E.B. Du Bois). He is author of The Impact of Race and editor of ten anthologies.
THE SYSTEM OF DANTE’S HELL
Neutrals
Circle 1.Virtuous Heathen
Circle 2.Lascivious
IncontinentCircle 3.Gluttons
Circle 4.Avaricious and Prodigal
Circle 5.Wrathful
Circle 6.Heretics*
(1)Violent against others
ViolentCircle 7.(2)Violent against self
(3)Violent against God,
nature, and art
(1)Panderers and Seducers
(2)Flatterers
(3)Simonists
(4)Diviners
Circle 8.Simply(5)Barrators
Fraudulent(6)Hypocrites
(7)Thieves
(8)Fraudulent Counsellors
(9)Makers of
discord
(10)Falsifiers
(1)to kindred
(2)to country
and cause
Circle 9.Treacherous(3)to guests
(4)to lords and
benefactors
*I put The Heretics in the deepest part of hell, though Dante had them spared, on higher ground.
It is heresy, against one’s own sources, running in terror, from one’s deepest responses and insights . . . the denial of feeling . . . that I see as basest evil.
We are not talking merely about beliefs, which are later, after the fact of feeling. A flower, turning from moisture and sun would turn evil colors and die.
NEUTRALS: The Vestibule
But Dante’s hell is heaven. Look at things in another light. Not always the smarting blue glare pressing through the glass. Another light, or darkness. Wherever we’d go to rest. By the simple rivers of our time. Dark cold water slapping long wooden logs jammed 10 yards down in the weird slime, 6 or 12 of them hold up a pier. Water, wherever we’d rest. And the first sun we see each other in. Long shadows down off the top where we were. Down thru gray morning shrubs and low cries of waked up animals.
Neutrals: The breakup of my sensibility. First the doors. The brown night rolling down bricks. Chipped stone stairs in the silence. Vegetables rotting in the neighbors’ minds. Dogs wetting on the buildings in absolute content. Seeing the pitied. The minds of darkness. Not even sinister. Breaking out in tears along the sidewalks of the season. Gray leaves outside the junkshop. Sheridan Square blue men under thick quivering smoke. Trees, statues in a background of voices. Justice, Égalité. Horns break the fog with trucks full of dead chickens. Motors. Lotions.
The neutrals run jewelry shops & shit in silence under magazines. Women disappear in
to Canada. They painted & led interminable lives. They marched along the sides of our cars in the cold brown weather. They wore corduroy caps & listened to portables. The world was in their eyes. They wore rings & had stories about them. They walked halfway back from school with me. They were as tall as anyone else you knew. Some sulked, across the street out of sight, near the alley where the entrance to his home was. A fat mother. A fat father with a mustache. Both houses, and the irishman’s near the playground. Balls went in our yards. Strong hitters went in Angel’s. They all lived near everything.
A house painter named Ellic, The Dog, “Flash.” Eddie, from across the street. Black shiny face, round hooked nose, beads for hair. A thin light sister with droopy socks. Smiling. Athletic. Slowed by bow legs. Hustler. Could be made angry. Snotty mouth. Hopeless.
The mind fastens past landscapes. Invisible agents. The secret trusts. My own elliptical. The trees’ shadows broaden. The sky draws together darkening. Shadows beneath my fingers. Gloom grown under my flesh.
Or fasten across the lots, the gray garages, roofs suspended over cherry trees. The playground fence. Bleakly with guns in the still thin night. Shadows of companions drawn out along the ground. Newark Street green wood, chipped, newsstands. Dim stores in the winter. Thin brown owners of buicks.
And this not the first. Not beginnings. Smells of dreams. The pickles of the street’s noise. Fire escapes of imagination. To fall off to death. Unavailable. Delayed into whispering under hurled leaves. Paper boxes roll down near the pool. From blue reflection, through the fence to the railroad. No trains. The walks there and back to where I was. Night queens in winter dusk. Drowning city of silence. Ishmael back, up through the thin winter smells. Conked hair, tweed coat, slightly bent at the coffee corner. Drugstore, hands turning the knob for constant variation. Music. For the different ideas of the world. We would turn slowly and look. Or continue eating near the juke box. Theories sketch each abstraction. Later in his old face ideas were ugly.
Or be wrong because of simple movement. Not emotion. From under all this. The weight of myself. Not even with you to think of. That settled. Without the slightest outside.
Stone on stone. Hard cobblestones, oil lamps, green house of the native. Natives down the street. All dead. All walking slowly toward their lives. Already, each Sunday forever. The man was a minister. His wife was light-skinned with freckles. Their church was tall brown brick and sophisticated. Bach was colored and lived in the church with Handel. Beckett was funeral director with brown folding chairs. On W. Market St. in winters the white stripe ran down the center of my thots on the tar street. The church sat just out of shadows and its sun slanted down on the barbershops.
Even inside the house, linoleums were cold. Divided in their vagueness. Each man his woman. Their histories die in the world. My own. To our children we are always and forever old. Grass grew up thru sidewalks. Mr. & Mrs. Puryear passed over it. Their gentle old minds knew my name. And I point out forever their green grass. Brown unopened books. The smell of the world. Just inside the dark bedroom. The world. Inside the sealed eyes of obscure relatives. The whole world. A continuous throb in the next room.
He raced out thru sunlight past their arms and crossed the goal. Or nights with only the moon and their flat laughter he peed under metal stairs and ran through the cold night grinning. Each man his own place. Each flower in its place. Each voice hung about me in this late evening. Each face will come to me now. Or what it was running through their flesh, all the wild people stalking their own winters.
The street was always silent. Green white thick bricks up past where we could see. An open gate to the brown hard gravel no one liked. Another day grew up through this. Crowds down the street. Sound in red waves waves over the slow cold day. To dusk. To black night of rusty legs. “These little girls would run after dark past my house, sometimes chased by the neighbor hoods.” A long hill stuck against the blue glass. From there the woman, the whore, the dancer, the lesbian, the middleclass coloured girl spread her legs. Or so my father said. The dog Paulette was on fire, and I slipped out through the open window to the roof. Then shinnied down to the ground. I hid out all night with some italians.
HEATHEN: No. 1
1
You’ve done everything you said you wdn’t. Everything you said you despised. A fat mind, lying to itself. Unmoving like some lump in front of a window. Wife, child, house, city, clawing at your gentlest parts. Romance become just sad tinny lies. And your head full of them. What do you want anymore? Nothing. Not poetry or that purity of feeling you had. Even that asceticism you pulled in under your breast that drunks & schoolfriends thought of as “sense of humor” . . . gone, erased, some subtle rot disposed in its place. Turning toward everything in your life. Whatever clarity left, a green rot, a mud, a stifling at the base of the skull. No air gets in.
* * *
The room sat quiet in the evening under one white bulb. He sat with a glass empty at his right hand. A cigarette burning the ugly dining-room table. Unanswered letters, half-thumbed magazines, old books he had to reread to remember. An empty fight against the sogginess that had already crept in thru his eyes. A bare bulb on a cluttered room. A dirty floor full of food particles and roaches. Lower middleclass poverty. In ten years merely to lose one’s footing on a social scale. Everything else, that seriousness, past, passed. Almost forgotten. The wild feeling of first seeing. Even a lost smell plagued the back of his mind. Coffee burning downtown when he paced the wet pavement trying to look intense. And that walked thru him like weather.
* * *
I feel sick and lost and have nothing to place my hands on. A piano with two wrong notes. Broken chinese chimes. An unfaithful wife. Or even one that was faithful a trudgen round me. Everything I despise some harsh testimonial of my life. The Buddhism to affront me. Ugly Karma. My thin bony hands. Eyes fading. Embarrassed at any seriousness in me. Left outside I lose it all. So quickly. My youth wasted on the bare period of my desires.
* * *
He lived on a small street with 8 trees. Two rooming houses at the end of the street full of Puerto Ricans. Rich white americans between him and them. Like a chronicle. He said to himself often, looking out the window, or simply lying in bed listening to the walls breathe. Or the child whimper under the foul air of cat leavings pushed up out of the yard by some wind. Nothing more to see under flesh but himself staring bewildered. At his hands, his voice, his simple benumbing life. Not even tragic. Can you raise tears at an unpainted floor. The simple incompetence of his writing. The white wall smeared with grease from hundreds of heads. All friends. Under his hands like domestic lice. The street hangs in front of the window & does not even breathe. Trucks go to New Jersey. The phone rings and it will be somebody he does not even understand. A dope addict who has written short stories. A thin working girl who tells jokes to his wife. A fat jew with strange diseases. A rich woman with paint on her slip. Hundreds of innocent voices honed to a razor-sharp distress by their imprecise lukewarm minds. Not important, if they moved in his head nothing would happen, he thought once. And then he stopped/embarrassed, egoistic. A cold wind on his neck from a smeared half-open window. The cigarette burned the table. The bubbles in the beer popped. He stared at his lip & tried to bite dried skin.
Nothing to interest me but myself. Disappeared, even the thin moan of ideas that once slipped through the pan of my head. The night is colder than the day. Two seconds lost in that observation. The same amount of time to stroke Nijinski’s cheek. One quick soft move of my fingers on his face. That two seconds then that same two if they would if there were some way, would burn my soul to black ash. Scorch my thick veins.
I am myself. Insert the word disgust. A verb. Get rid of the “am.” Break out. Kill it. Rip the thing to shreds. This thing, if you read it, will jam your face in my shit. Now say something intelligent!
2
I’ve loved about all the people I can. Frank, for oblique lust, his mind. The satin light floating on his words. His
life tinted and full of afternoons. My own a weird dawn. Hedges & that thin morning water covering my skin. I had a hat on and wdn’t sit down. Light was emptying the windows and someone else slept close to us, fouling the room with his breath. That cdn’t move. It killed itself. And opens stupidly now like a time capsule. You don’t rub your mouth on someone’s back to be accused. Move it or shut up!
(He was lovely and he sat surrounded by paintings watching his friends die. The farmers went crazy and voted. The FBI showed up to purchase condoms. Nothing interesting was done for Negroes so they became stuck up and smelly.)
All the women I could put on a page have the same names. There was a round bar where the bunch of us sat listening to the sea and a whore suck her fingers. That white woman who counted in Spanish.
My wife doesn’t belong in this because she sits next to a ghost and talks to him as if he played football for her college. He wd know if he sat in a bare bright room talking his life away. If he sat, frozen to his lies, spitting his blood on the floor. If he had no life but one he had to give continuously to others. If he had to wait for Hussars to piss in his mouth before he had an orgasm. If he could fly, or not fly, definitely. If something in his simple life were really simple or at least understandable. If he were five inches taller and weighed more. If he could kill anybody he wanted or sleep with statues of saints. Nothing is simpler than that. If there were a heaven he understood or if he could talk to anyone without trying to find out how much they knew about him. His capes. His knives. His lies. His houses. His money. His yellow hats. His laughter. His immaculate harems for heroes.
Still. The black Job. Mind gone. Head lost. Fingers stretch beyond his flesh. Eyes. Their voices’ black lust. The fog. Each to the other moves in itself. He loves nothing he knows yet love is on him like a sickness. Your hair. Your mouth. Your ideas (these others, these hundreds of others. Old men you made love to in foreign cities have been given uniforms and sit plotting your death in their sleep. All those people you’ve kissed. The lies you’ve told everyone. And you know there is a woman dying now because you will not murder her. Will not dive out of your darkness and smother her under your filth. She knows the old men.
