Amina Baraka
Amina Baraka is a Black American poet, singer, actor, dancer, and activist. She was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1942, and raised in Newark, New Jersey. Art and politics entangle in Baraka’s poetry, where social justice and feminism play a central role. As an activist, she managed the Women’s Division of the Community for a Unified Newark and organized women’s conferences for the Congress of Afrikan People and the Revolutionary Communist League. Alongside her husband, Amiri Baraka, she also co-founded The Spirit House. This was a space to promote Black cultural and political consciousness, where people gathered for poetry readings, theatre, music. The Spirit House was perceived as a continuation of the Black Arts Movement, of which the Barakas were important figures.
Her published work includes her debut poetry collection, “Blues in All Hues” (2014), and the feature work in the anthologies “Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry” (1994) and “Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam” (2001).
About her work in WOV II:
In “It’s alright”, Baraka accounts the history of Black liberation in the US by explicitly declaring her approval of the action of “key figures” – Black women – throughout history. Activists that, from different perspectives and in various roles, contributed to the human rights and women’s rights movements: Harriet Tubman (1822-1913), Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), Claudette Colvin (b. 1939), Rosa Parks (1913-2005), and Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977).
“Soweto Song” (1983) was published for the first time as part of “Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women”, which Amina Baraka co-edited alongside Amiri Baraka. Baraka speaks in the first person, announcing her purpose throughout the poem: to avenge, to free, and to praise “Black gold”.Although Soweto Song is inspired by a specific event in history – the Soweto uprising of 1976 – writer Palmer Adisa states that the poem’s effectiveness resides in that the subject “becomes all African women who were taken as slaves, and all women reading this poem become the warrior preparing for battle.”