In 2004, Kamoinge published its first book, The Sweet Breath of Life: A Poetic Narrative of the African-American Family, a collaboration with the late author Ntozake Shange, iconic playwright of the groundbreaking 1970s choreopoem — and Broadway hit — For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf (1976); several poetry collections including Nappy Edges (1979); and the novels, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Betsey Brown (1985) and Liliane (1994).
Kamoinge’s stellar members all pick up the baton from DeCarava with images that à la their maestro, represent Gotham’s Black communities’ supercharged self-possession with consummate grace, elegance, wit, drama and love. Shange’s interpretive prosaic fandangos with the Kamoinge’s hypnotic images are aglow with cinematic snap, crackle and lustre.
The torrential tsunami of linguistic witchcraft Amiri Baraka throws down in the pages of In Our Terribleness (Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style) (1970) — his joint volume of gripping expression with Chicago-based photographer Billy ‘Fundi’ Abernathy — dares us to blink, let alone look away. Empowered by Abernathy’s portraiture of (predominantly) Black masculinity’s hardened glamour in 1960s Chicago, Baraka delivers a manifesto extolling the embodied weaponry of self-styled Black physicality back in that day: brothers (mostly) captured in a self-ennobled world reckoning and world-threatening display of artful swagger and (per Shange) ‘relaxed virility’. Baraka, titular ‘Father of the Black Arts Movement’ is, at his most rhetorically incendiary, drawing fire from Abernathy’s urban guerrilla pantheon:
Our terribleness is our survival as beautiful beings, any where. Who can dig that? Any where, even flying through space like we all doing, even faced with the iceman, the abominable snowman, the beast for whom there is no answer, but change in fire light and heat for the world
To be bad is one level
But to be terrible, is to be
badder dan nat*
* Baraka, Amiri. (1970) In Our Terribleness (Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style) [Poem, excerpt]. The Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc., New York.