Analysing “Somebody Blew Up America” by Amiri Baraka: form and content

Who killed the most niggers Who killed the most Jews Who killed the most Italians Who killed the most Irish Who killed the most Africans Who killed the most Japanese Who killed the most Latinos Who? Who? Who? Who had the slaves Who got the bux out the Bucks Who got fat from plantations Who genocided Indians Tried to waste the Black nation Who live on Wall Street The first plantation Who cut your nuts off Who rape your ma Who lynched your pa Who got the tar, who got the feathers Who had the match, who set the fires Who killed and hired Who say they God & still be the Devil Who the biggest only Who the most goodest Who do Jesus resemble Who created everything Who the smartest Who the greatest Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt (.

Who set the Reichstag Fire Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay home that day Why did Sharon stay away? Who? Who? Who? Explosion of Owl the newspaper say The devil face cd be seen Who the Beast in Revelations Who 666 Who know who decide Jesus get crucified Who make money from war Who make dough from fear and lies Who want the world like it is Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national oppression and terror violence, and hunger and poverty. Who the Devil on the real side Who got rich from Armenian genocide Who is the ruler of Hell? Who is the most powerful Who the biggest terrorist Who change the bible Who killed the most people Who do the most evil Who don't worry about survival Who you know ever Seen God? (.

Who? Who? Who? (. Like an Owl exploding In your life in your brain in your self Like an Owl who know the devil All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl Exploding in fire. The poem is meant to be shared orally, in such a manner that the person reading it can emphasise its speech over the more dramatic parts of it. Baraka’s poem makes use of the same repetition of the word ​who, exactly the same word that is repeated several times in Ginsberg’s “Howl”. It is a fact that, sometimes, Baraka’s poem has rhymes, like in “They say (who say?)\ Who do the saying\ Who is them paying\ Who tell the lies\ Who in disguise\ Who the richest\Who say you ugly and they the goodlookingest”, but on the next stanza the poem simply reduces its musical qualities to the bottom, “Who killed the most niggers\ Who killed the most Jews\ Who killed the most Italians\ Who killed the most Irish (.

I believe that, due to the matter discussed over the poem, the author made a conscious choice over how lyric (he calculated the form of the poem) the poem could actually be, because Baraka’s goal was to use this symbolic event, the 9/11 terrorist strike, to address the real issues that the terrorist attack brought up. The erratic behavior of the poem’s rhythm becomes evident on the author’s reading, that can be seen on youtube1, this uneasiness matches the poems content, which emphatically condemns historically all the wealth white people for their actions towards the vast majority of other races. However similar, Baraka’s poem resembles the opposite. “Somebody Blew Up America”’s ​who does not account for a self, a marginalised individual whose existence represents the very aggression of the system based upon normalized behavior, rather it points out the oppressor in its historical dimension all at once: it obliges the factual white people to recognize them as such.

Baraka’s poem presents a condensation of historical facts, and another number of rumors that expose the underlying content of slavery, when he says “Who cut your nuts off\ Who rape your ma\ Who lynched your pa”, or the consequences of American Imperialism, “Who want the world like it is\ Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national oppression and terror violence, and hunger and poverty”. Other recurrent theme in the poem are its allusions to the bible, or christian mythology: “Who say they God & still be the Devil”, “Who do Jesus resemble”, “Like the acid vomit of the fire of Hell”. It seems to be his intention to pay no respect to the christian symbols, neither to the christians themselves, this is probably an attempt to reverse the current state of affairs towards the muslim world, one which Baraka himself as part of, or at least close to.

In Baudrillard own words: “​The tactics of terrorism are to provoke an ​excess of reality and to make the ​system collapse under the weight of this excess (he is referring to the globalization, the super efficient liberal economics and the late technological world)​. The very derision of the situation, as well as all the piled up violence of power, flips against it, for terrorist actions are both the magnifying mirror of the system's violence, and the model of a symbolic violence that it cannot access, the only violence it cannot exert: that of its own death. ”2 The terrorist attacks were an attempt to symbolic oppose the whole globalized/neoliberal system, by exposing its flaws. Baraka’s poem denounces a large number of atrocities the white wealth people have committed along history, it follows this path in an obsessive and anti-lyrical way, because it constantly brings up historical facts, like slavery, the imposing of “democracy” around the world, the killing of the jews, the killing of negroes, the killing of Irishes, the killing of Latinos, the Scottsboro boys, and several others atrocities.

This obsession in proving white 2 Available at https://cryptome. Money and financial speculation, information technologies and aeronautics, the production of spectacle and media networks: they have assimilated all of modernity and globalization, while maintaining their aim to destroy it. ”4 Baraka used the media just as the terrorists used it, in a way that what became evident was the white people lack of historical perception over their own responsability about the attack, and their state of denial in face of the flawed system they obliged over the whole world. I could once more characterize this state of things quoting ​Baudrillard, for whom the contemporary individual are no longer afflicted with common pathologies from the 3 Essay availabe at https://www. academia. edu/13820070/Disciplining_the_Poetic_Amiri_Baraka_s_Somebody_ Blew_Up_America_and_the_limits_of_Political_Poetry 4 ​idem footnote 2 modern era, like paranoia.

The deep meaning summarized by this duality is only accessible in the political act of the speech, and the interaction to a listener/audience, there is no writer and reader, there is a voice and a hearing. This essential feature of “Somebody Blew Up America” is in accordance with its jazz phrasal appropriation, what necessarily unveil the fact that this poem has some performative traits, meaning that it requires a gathering of people to happen as it was designed to be. The necessity of an audience and the act of the poet’s speech, altogether with its uniqueness in terms of jazz phrasal arranging, and its quotation of the symbol of the owl, that 5 6 ​BAUDRILLARD, Jean. ​America. Trans.