'The Sweet Meat of My Feelings': The Ghost of Leroi Jones, The Black Maternal, and the (Re)Birth of a Nation's Kweer

"Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," Hortense Spillers, Diacritics (Warning: This piece recounts graphic descriptions of sexual assault detailed in the works of Jones/Baraka.) After enduring the murder of Malcolm X in March 1965, a severe beating by police in his native Newark, New Jersey, in July 1967, and the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, LeRoi Jones (née Everett Leroy Jones) made a final and dramatic shift in his poetics and life that had been underway at least seven years. [...]the "Mama's babies" of whom Hortense Spillers writes so poignantly reclaim their "black mothers within" in the ways she has told us for a generation they must. In this excerpt of that larger, book-length study, I aim to reclaim Jones/Baraka as a black queer ancestor and to theorize that what Jones's speaker calls the "sweet meat of my feelings" in "leroy," a poem in 1969's Black Magic that signals his final name change and artistic about-face, is the singular and unabashedly black sound of mourning that allows him to give birth to ideologies that have inspired an evolution of this African American kweer into an apologetically black nation. The elegiac strains Amiri Baraka would enfold in "leroy," "Ka'Ba," and other poems in that collection complicate notions about his oft-cited homophobia when we take into account that many of the semiautobiographical speakers and characters he crafted as LeRoi Jones are feminized male embodiments of that which is pathologized under the rubric of "queerness," primarily because they are survivors of rape and other forms of sexual predation and exploitation that black men have suffered that scholars have only recently begun to acknowledge and examine.5 They denigrate cisgender women whose vulnerabilities they know all too well, projecting their shame and grief over the loss of childhood innocence and maternal care upon them.