The Nation of Islam's Pereception of Black Consciousness In

THE NATION OF ISLAM’S PERECEPTION OF BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE WORKS OF AMIRI BARAKA, SONIA SANCHEZ, AND OTHER WRITERS OF THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT A dissertation submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Ammar Abduh Aqeeli May 2018 © Copyright All rights reserved Except for previously published materials Dissertation written by Ammar Abduh Aqeeli B.A., King Khalid University, 2005 M.A., Murray State University, 2012 Ph.D., Kent State University, 2018 Approved by _______________________________, Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Babacar M’Baye _______________________________, Co-Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Yoshinobu Hakutani _______________________________, Members, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Kevin Floyd _______________________________ Leonne Hudson _______________________________ Patrick G. Coy Accepted by _______________________________, Chair, Department of English Robert Trogdon _______________________________, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences James L. Blank TALBLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………………... iv INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER 1: Amiri Baraka and the Nation of Islam Before the Rise of the Black Arts Movement………………………………………………………………………………………. 28 CHAPTER 2: Amiri Baraka’s Perception of Black Consciousness After the Rise of the Black Arts Movement…………………………………………………………………………………. 74 CHAPTER 3: Sonia Sanchez and the New Positive Black Consciousness …………………... 121 CHAPTER 4: The Black Arts Movement Writers and their Understanding of Black Consciousness ………………………………………………………………………………… 163 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………...… 206 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………. 213 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation advisors, Professor Babacar M’Baye and Professor Yoshinobu Hakutani, each of whom guided me immensely during my dissertation research and writing. I am grateful for their willingness to share so much time with me and I appreciate their patience in agreeing to mentor me. They have been of utmost assistance during my research period as well as during my coursework and studies. They provided me with the necessary materials and supervised my research to ensure that it conformed to the required standards and expertise for my field. They provided me with academic and moral guidance during my studies as well as during my research, which enabled me to complete this dissertation. They were always there for consultation during my studies, which was instrumental in bringing about the strongest research product I could produce. Their supervisions and consultations enabled me to produce my original work while at the same time adhering to the regulations and requirements of Kent State University. Secondly, I would like to thank Professor Kevin Floyd and Professor Leonne Hudson who have served as the first and second readers of my dissertation respectively. I am immensely grateful for their dedicated readings, comments and views, without which I would not have been able to shape this dissertation. I would also like to thank my colleagues who supported me during my research by providing various materials, moral support, and research validation. These colleagues were instrumental in enriching my research work. iv Furthermore, I am deeply thankful to my family for their love, support, and sacrifices. My beloved parents gave moral, religious, and financial support during this dissertation, for which I will be eternally grateful. My dear wife, Shymaa, has always been there for me, providing counseling in situations where I had lost hope. She has encouraged me to overcome the obstacles that I faced during my research. She has been a good teacher and a friend. My children have provided spiritual support for my dissertation. They have prayed for me and have consoled me when I was depressed. Finally, I would like to acknowledge Jazan University in Saudi Arabia for its immense support during my whole years of studies and research in the United States. I am very grateful for its generous financial support to complete my graduate studies abroad. Without the funding support and research leave from Jazan University, my studies neither have been started, nor accomplished. My thanks also go to Kent State University for making my studies abroad a worthwhile experience. It provided me access to the library as well as to the research resources that enabled me to conduct the in-depth research required for my dissertation, without which this research would not have been possible. v INTRODUCTION In Black Aesthetic theory, the literature regarding the development of black consciousness takes into consideration the role of the Nation of Islam (NOI) in raising racial awareness among African Americans. For instance, in “New Space/The Growth of Black Consciousness in the Sixties,” Larry Neal asserts that the rise of the Nation was a significant force in promoting black consciousness among black Americans. He states: “Through Malcolm, the Nation of Islam effected a broader and open discussion of identity – a subject that has always been a part of our ideological continuum” (20). The discussion aimed at securing a separate identity from American national identity and aspiring for a separate black nation inside America. Addison Gayle Jr. postulates that some literary works of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) depict black people as those who “come to understand themselves in relationship, not to the Western ethic and its God, but to history and Islam” (Reader 121). Despite the flourishing scholarship on the representation of black consciousness by the BAM’s writers, the NOI’s strain of black consciousness has received only brief treatments. The Nation of Islam’s program of black consciousness played an essential role in shaping the vocal and resistive politics of the 1960s inside the black community. African American literature of the period was informed by the Nation’s call for black national identity and consciousness. Younger black artists and writers were inspired to quest for a Black Aesthetic that would liberate them from the mainstream aesthetics and would become a tool to stop white control over every aspect of black people’s lives. The NOI’s ideas of black consciousness are 1 manifest in the writings of the Black Arts Movement in the hope of shifting black people’s racial consciousness and creating a self-defined black identity. In the 1960s, the radical teachings of the Nation of Islam inspired African Americans to form the Black Power movement and its artistic sister the BAM. After Malcolm X’s split from Mr. Muhammad, Malcolm X called for an organization that would support black intellectuals and give them the independence to create art and philosophy that nobody had ever made before (Woodward 61). Malcolm’s activism aroused black artists to create theater, poetry, visual arts, and novels that portray pride in black history and culture. The current scholarship on the Black Arts Movement puts a great emphasis on the idea that the assassination of Malcolm X and his role in African American fights for justice had a profound influence on the movement’s writers. This has led to a lack of scholarship on the influence of Nation of Islam on the movement. It is ironic that after Malcolm X’s repudiation of the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, a number of Black Arts writers embraced the NOI’s message, while others flirted with it and utilized some of its main concepts and principles in their writings. Although these writers regarded Malcolm X as an inspirational and iconic role model, they did not undermine the frame and platform that the NOI provided him. In fact, the radical philosophy of the NOI is readily apparent in the works of many Black Arts writers. This dissertation aims to analyze selected literary writings by the Black Arts Movement to demonstrate how its writers responded to and were informed by the 1960s wave of black consciousness. Despite the many sources that had influence on the politics of other black power groups, the increasing prominence of the Nation of Islam played an important role in shaping its 2 understanding of the idea of black consciousness.1 BAM writers were inspired by the imperatives of black consciousness of both the Black Muslims and the black power groups. These writers’ depictions of this consciousness led them to express their connection to Africa and the East and take interest in African history, culture, and such languages as Arabic and Swahili as a way to cultivate a separate national identity within America. However, their depictions were unmistakably informed by the NOI’s frameworks of destroying “double-consciousness” and achieving black self-worth and self-determination that also became fundamental goals for the contemporary black power groups. The second primary aim of this dissertation is to challenge the general assumption in the scholarship of the Black Arts Movement literature that Malcolm X was the main source of the movement’s artistic creativity. While it is true that Malcolm X had inspired these writers’ portrayal of black consciousness, some of them leaned toward the type of consciousness that Malcolm X advocated during his twelve-year’s career as a minister and as spokesperson of the Nation of Islam. Analyzing selected works by these writers will show how they mixed between the ideas of Malcolm X before and after his disaffiliation with the Nation. Moreover, the claim that the emergence of BAM was primarily due to Amiri

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