"Hunting Is Not Those Heads": The Jones/Baraka Critic as Taxidermist

Abstract

Everything mortal dies, beautiful language easily broken. Dead words shall live and live words shall die, and only the mouths of men can decide, only what's said said and therefore alive. (Horace, Art of Poetry) I always had to team to run fast, because (laughing) you'd say certain things to people you didn't know would provoke them to such an extent. You have to get the (Baraka, qtd. Reilly 194) Error Farce, Air Force (Autobiography); raise, race, rays, raze (Raise Race Rays Raze); wise, why s, Y's (Wise Why's Y's). Repeat these sequences aloud to understand the difference between what LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's homonyms are on the page and what they are in the wind. Aloud, his words bring a fusion and confusion of sound and beat and meaning. Read silently, they bring intellectual delight. The title of this essay 'Hunting Not Those Heads': The Jones/Baraka Critic as Taxidermist, but it could just as easily be called Wails/Whales, because when I say Amiri Baraka wails/whales I'm talking about giant living forces constant motion, I'm talking about music, I'm talking about hunting a white enigmatic beast, and I'm talking about something that, if it isn't handled right, can wash up on the beach and start to smell. The critic and reader of Baraka must understand that the inherent ambiguity of spoken words like/wl/ or /rs/is only a small part of the subtle word play Baraka employs to exploit the tension between the spoken and the written word. Many of Baraka's poems can be read as actions that reach far beyond the limits of the page. They are self-conscious efforts to thwart the confinement of written language and its semantic limits. Indeed, the expansive and elusive quality of the language performed and written by this wailing and whaling poet intrinsically connected to the living man who has continually refused the certainty of staying a single place or identity. In his 1964 essay Hunting Not Those Heads on the Wall, Baraka (then Jones) makes clear what would be a constant his aesthetics throughout his opus--art action, verb, hunt (Home 173-78). Art founded thought which, he states, is more important than and certainly more important than artifact (173). He implies that the aesthete, the academician, like a deist worshiping the art, the static thing, without understanding that the thing a function of its creation by a creator. Jones writes: The artist cursed with his artifact, which exists without and despite him.... The academic Western mind the best example of the substitution of artifact worship for lightning awareness of the art process.... The process itself the most important quality because it can transform and create, and its only form possibility. The artifact, because it assumes one form, only that particular quality or idea. It is, this sense, after the fact, and only important because it remarks on its source. (173-74) When I think of these words and the metaphor of the title Hunting Not Those Heads, I imagine the academy not as a deist's temple, but as a taxidermist's shop, with the scholar as the taxidermist. It our job to handle dead things. We do taxidermy, which means we arrange skin; we try to put the appearance of life back into what was destroyed the hunt. If we play out the metaphor further, we can assume some artists, some poets are excellent shots who leave us with an abundance of skin to shape--and others are not. Some poems seem bludgeoned on the page while others seem still to be brimming with life. The reason that we are celebrating Baraka the new millennium that he a poet who not only knows how to hunt, who shoots straight to the heart, but who also understands that the poems he gives us are only glimpses of something that has already happened. …