american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

66 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
responsible for the assassinations of these figures, he can safely declare
that American policy, influence, and fingerprints were on the weapons
that killed them.
Baraka’s sweeping indictment of American actions covers slavery,
reconstruction, Jim Crow, the infamous incident at Tuskegee, and
also more generally American corporate and cultural imperialism. This
scathing critique includes a functional rejection of a capitalist concept
of ownership, especially as it concerns natural and human resources.
For the speaker, there seems to be little difference between the ownership
of slaves and the ownership and exploitation of natural
resources for the benefit of the rich. Lines such as “Who own the oil,”
“Who own the soil,” “Who own the air / Who own the water,”
and “Who own the ocean” suggest a malicious intention to commodify
the very materials that sustain life and to control every citizen’s
fundamental ability to breathe and eat. Further, lines such as “Who
define art / Who define science,” “Who own this city,” and
“Who make the laws” imply that American corporate powers control
the structures that define the world and determine right from wrong.
Further, “they” “make money from war” and “want the world” to be
“ruled by imperialism and national / oppression and terror /
violence, and hunger and poverty.” These lines sum up Baraka’s
strategy—to subvert the official public discourse in a war on terrorism
that America fights to bring freedom, democracy, and peace to the
oppressed places of the world. Instead of a “war on terror” and “war
on poverty” the poem claims that there are wars to maintain terror,
poverty, oppression, and the vast power inequalities they enable.
The sound effects of “Somebody Blew Up America,” especially its
AAVE, repetition, and rhyme, oppose the authority of elitist, commodified
corporate language. (Unless of course one claims that hiphop
language has been thoroughly commodified, a claim that I hope
to dispel in chapter 4.) Three lines near the end of the poem illustrate
these features; here the speaker ridicules three prominent black conservatives
for their support of these imperial power structures: “Who
do Tom Ass Clarence Work for / Who doo doo come out the Colon’s
mouth / Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza.” First,
“Who do” and “Who know” highlight one prominent feature of
many AAVE varieties, including those used in hip-hop culture—the
absence of the third singular suffix -s. In Standard American English
(SAE), these lines would read “Who does ” and “Who knows.” By
eliding these suffixes, Baraka not only implicitly challenges public discourse
delivered in “proper” 17 English, he also uses the dialect of
many young African Americans in the hip-hop community. Additionally,