This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante's Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, and treachery. With a poet's skill, Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City. The episodes contained within the novel represent both states of mind and states of the soul—lyrical, fragmentary, and allusive.
With an introduction by Woodie King Jr.
"Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age . . . the special agony of the American Negro." —The New York Times Book Review
"It's a tortured nightmare, excruciatingly honest and alive, painful and beautiful . . ." —Michael Rumaker, author of A Day and a Night at the Baths
This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante's Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, and treachery. With a poet's skill, Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City. The episodes contained within the novel represent both states of mind and states of the soul—lyrical, fragmentary, and allusive.
With an introduction by Woodie King Jr.
"Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age . . . the special agony of the American Negro." —The New York Times Book Review
"It's a tortured nightmare, excruciatingly honest and alive, painful and beautiful . . ." —Michael Rumaker, author of A Day and a Night at the Baths
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Overview
This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante's Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, and treachery. With a poet's skill, Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City. The episodes contained within the novel represent both states of mind and states of the soul—lyrical, fragmentary, and allusive.
With an introduction by Woodie King Jr.
"Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age . . . the special agony of the American Negro." —The New York Times Book Review
"It's a tortured nightmare, excruciatingly honest and alive, painful and beautiful . . ." —Michael Rumaker, author of A Day and a Night at the Baths
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781617754142 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Akashic Books |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 162 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
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 into 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.
CHAPTER 2HEATHEN: 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.
The house is old and night smooths its fetters with screams. It rolls in the wind and the windows sit low above the river and anyone sitting at a table writing is visible even across to the other side. The shores are the same. A wet cigarette burns the brown table & the walls heave under their burden of silence.
CHAPTER 3HEATHEN: No. 2
1
The first sun is already lost. The house breathes slowly beside the river under a steel turn of bridge. Myself, again, looking out across at shapes formed in space. My face hangs out the window. Air scoops in my head. To form more objects, fashioned from my speech. Trees in the other state. More objects, room sags under light. My skin glistens like glass. Metal beads on the pavement. Eyes on mine. Slick young men with glass skin. Dogs.
He had survived the evilest time. A time alone, with all the ugliness set in front of his eyes. His own shallowness paraded like buglers across the dead indians. Some time, some space, to move.
All I want is to move. To be able to flex flat muscles. Tendons drag into place. My face, the girl said naked, is beautiful. Your face is beautiful, she had said, only this once in her dirty cotton dress. Bernice. Some lovely figure here in a space, a void. Completely unknown her stink. Dirty eyes slippery in dark halls. She lived under my grandmother and peed in the yard. Before the fire. And shouted in the movies under the threat of boredom and myself, who had not yet become beautiful.
Women are objects in space. This new sun, could define them, were they here, or sane, or given to logical things. The mind objects them. Sterile Diane. Not the red-haired thighs / and mad machine of come. Another beast in another wood. One who wore wings made of moths.
He sat and was sad at his sitting. The day grew around him like a beast. Large and vapid, with blue fur turned in the thick fall air. All those people were silent. Their voices grew thinner. Their heads shrank. Their shoes came untied. They had to tug up their stockings several times to make them stay. He was thinking about his enemies. The iron eyes they sucked in their sleep. His own image flayed & drowned mandala. Innocent breathing. These lost beasts hated his mouth. They would kill him for it.
George was a child in blue bonnet. He stood naked against a window and begged for Oscar Williams. The piano struck notes at random. The wind did it. Naked he was smaller than his blue bonnet. His breasts were red sores, hard & indelicate, tasteless as the wet hour bleeding. The sun had come out. The rain had stopped. It was not yet dark.
All the other times I know form crusts under my tongue and hurt my speech. I slur my own name, I cannot remember anyone's name who I thought beautiful. Only indelicate furtive lust. Even intimacy dulled by some hacking silent blade. The knife of the lie. Lying to one's self. You are uglier than that. You are more beautiful. You have more sense than to kill yourself this way. You are invisible in my mouth & talk through my head like radios.
George would laugh & float 3 inches off the ground, in deference to the old man. Believing anything he told himself.
You've done everything you despised. Flowers fall off trees, wind under low branches shoves them into quick chill of the river, the high leaves disappear over stone fences.
Frank in armor thrust out his sword. My flesh is stone but I scream and he cringes with grunts. He screamed when we were close and laughed at the night. Its wet insanity.
Diane disintegrated into black notes beneath my inelegant hands. She died. She died. She died. I walked out into the morning with her breathing on my face. I never came again.
More forms against the white sky. I remember each face, each finger, each dumb word against lips against my face. The words. The stink of insolence. Or even I backing away from the zone. The area of feeling. Where anyone can enter. Unawares, even the cautious sterile greeter.
Another man walked through me like hours. Not even closeness of flesh. Not against this blue ugly air. Not against you or myself. Not against the others, their unclosing eyes. The fat breasted fashionable slut of letters. Her blonde companion in the sulking dugouts of stupidity. She clasped my face in her bones & kissed silence into my mouth.
CHAPTER 4THE INCONTINENT: Lasciviousness
Petrus Borel is the lascivious man. Doubt yourself before you doubt me. To lie to anyone: white birds low over the house, over the roof. Me inside under the same roof. Night for the birds. And the light here burns all night. Burning away the air. Animal life will die. The plants later, when all is stone or the insane reflection of sun on stone. White rocks for the world. From water to low beach houses, expensive paintings to please that young elder.
Leather jacket, glasses, lost outside of purgatory. (Passd the neutrals into the first circle. And then the blue air blows in. Biting his thoughts. The man at the bar with fat trousers & filtered cigarettes. In his brain, white etch. Mouths without pictures.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The System of Dante's Hell"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Amina Baraka.
Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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,
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,