Reading Baraka’s Aggressive Poetic Language in Black Art in light of Gates’ The Signifying Monkey.

Abstract

LeRoi Jones A.K.A Amiri Baraka (1934-2014), a controversial African American writer, was known for his radical views and his uncompromising political engagement in public life. Due to those reasons, his literary works were widely examined. A number of studies dealt with his distinctive use of language and others highlighted the radical views in his literary works. However, the verbal aggressiveness of Baraka’s poetic language is not approached yet. Therefore, the current paper aims at examining the verbal aggressiveness of poetic language in Baraka’s Black Art in light of The Signifying Monkey Concept. Henry Gates’s theory The Signifying Monkey (1988) offers useful insights in examining the poet’s usage of verbal aggressiveness and obscenity and it frees the poems from the biased mainstream view of language. The study concludes that verbal aggressiveness in these poems is a signifying techniques of the African American vernacular, used by Baraka as a means to subvert the dominance of the standard English language which marginalized African Americans. Thus, Baraka employs a verbal aggressive language in his poetry to create a new discourse of resistance by re-signifying the language of the African American character.