“Who the Biggest Terrorist”: Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America”

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I discussed the argument—hardly specific to the 1980s yet certainly emblematic of the period’s culture wars—that poetry occupies a marginal place in American society. I also noted that such complaints usually ignore the extraordinary wealth of poetic practices in the United States, including those that openly address political issues, demonstrate racial or ethnic diversity, and exist in alternative, especially nonacademic settings. In this chapter, I examine Amiri Baraka’s poem “Somebody Blew Up America” (2001). Like Pinsky’s reflections on national themes and Rich’s patriotic lament, Baraka’s poem directly and vigorously engages with public events: in this case the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Those events, as well as their consequences in the decade that followed, did not call into question the imperial tendency first identified by Hardt and Negri in 2000. Rather, they exacerbated its many contradictions, including the persistence of national ideology and religious fundamentalism in the era of global capital.