Baraka!

In Amiria Baraka’s “Expressive Language” an interesting stance on the importance of language is taken. I believe that the author argues that poetry derives from personal experiences that belong to a certain type of people. This culture and these experiences are then demonstrated in the poem through language. However, the mere language is not the important thing; rather, it is the person saying the language that is integral. An example he used which I liked had to do with money. He says that for a poor man, money might mean 70 cents, however for a hotshot like David Rockefeller, money means much more than that. When you say “Where is the money?” to someone like him, you would be talking about a lot of it. I believe that from this, Baraka is trying to show that poetry is different to everyone. A classmate of mine, Akash had an interesting take on the same idea:

"It’s incredible how accurate that statement really is, the word money probably has a similar definition in each dictionary, yet based on the fashion in which one uses the word we associate different meanings to it. For example, if we see a man get out of a Ferrari and say, “I made so much money today,” we would associate the word money in a very different way then if a waitress said to another, “I made so much money today.” The sentences used are identical, but based on the manner in which these people conduct themselves we make the two sentences strangers to each other"

The dictionary definitions of words are all the same, however it the context and the speaker of the writing, in this case poetry, that really defines the words. This was exemplified by the poetry activity we did in class. My poem was a pretty light one about a kid being rowdy in an airplane. From my point of view, it’s a harmless poem, however, from a mother’s point of view it could be something else entirely. She would be able to relate to it and thus, the problems the son is creating would be more realistic for her, and shut they would possibly strike more emotion. Moreover, which has to do about the mother raising her voice was put in there because I needed a word that rhymed, but a mother who had trouble disciplining her children could probably see this as an analogy to her everyday struggle. The problem with my poem is that I don’t have any emotion attached to it, and I feel if I did, there would be so many different interpretations to it. That must be one of the joys of being a poet. It would be interesting to see how others viewed your work of art.
“Words have users, but as well, users have words.” This line demonstrates the ability that word choice has to represent the author’s culture and what he is hoping to achieve with his work. The culture around a word or sentence says a lot and Baraka uses the phrase “God don’t never change!” to signify this. There is a huge difference in meaning if a successful business man was saying this or if a hopeless African American one was. Reverend Pearly Brown purposefully says “don’t never” because this explains the purpose of the statement. On the other hand, if a well off person says it he would be singing it to reconfirm his good fortune.
Attempts to unify language, as seen in “1984” would be the death to art forms like poetry because the different slang of different cultures says a lot about both the poem and the author. The different dialogues used lend to different analysis by the reader. Poetry is a very raw art form and the emotions expressed through it often contained many feelings that come from a person’s upbringing, thus, it makes sense that lingo plays such a crucial role in the art.