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An artist who challenges us to remember past wrongs and bear witness to current injustice in times of official repression engages in a dangerous occupation. Amiri Baraka, whose poetry confronts the Bush administration's distortions and lies, is currently the target of political, academic, and media smear campaigns, some of which have gone so far as to call for his death. Offering his poetic counterpoint to the post-September 11 flag-waving qua gang-sign-flashing chauvinism, Baraka released "Somebody Blew Up America" over the internet in October of 2001, but it was not until the Dodge Poetry Festival in September of the following year that the poem came to the attention of those who launched the slanderous attacks.
The subsequent controversies over Baraka's position as poet laureate of New Jersey and his poem have reminded me of Eduardo Galeano's Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World. Galeano describes our world as one in which things presented as if they were good are, in reality, harmful, a world where the perpetrators of atrocities appear as if they were victims, an "as-if-it-were-real" mirror world that reflects back to us the real turned upside-down. This, Galeano explains, is the kind of world in which the biggest criminals, such as those who profit from war, can jail those upon whom the greatest crimes have been inflicted, the poor, the colonized, and the brutally oppressed who fill so many of our prisons and juvenile halls. This image of the upside-down looking-glass is especially appropriate for beginning a discussion of the twisted and distorted attacks on Amiri Baraka in light of the poet's recent collaboration with Theodore Harris, an artist whose collage pieces depicting an upside-down Capitol Building compel us to question the "truth" the corporate media tells us comes directly from the Capitol, to question the official versions of events. Galeano's metaphor also speaks directly to the gap between the content of Baraka's poem and the unstated premises behind the claims made against it.
The four recurring complaints in the spurious criticisms of the poem and efforts to remove Baraka from his position as poet laureate are that he is anti-semitic, anti-white and anti-american, as well as a poetic "has been." The charge of anti-semitism, advanced most vociferously by the Anti-Defamation League, has...