For the amount of scrutiny and discrimination casts upon black men during the lifetime of Amiri Baraka, I am astonished by the way he captivated the anguish and frustration of not only being a minority but suffering from depression. He was born as LeRoi Everett in Newark, New Jersey. Everett attended Rutgers, Howard, and Columbia universities, and served in the U.S. Air Force. The composition of Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, An Agony, As Now, and Black Art are three of his most elegant pieces in which he expresses his vulnerability about the struggles of mental illnesses.

Baraka worked as an editor, a playwright, a theatre director, and publisher. Before diving into Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, I would like to acknowledge that in almost all his poems, his first line is so captivating. It sets him apart from other writers and leaves a lasting effect on the reader for the remainder of the piece. In this poem, he talks about how everyday life is like while dealing with depression. The theme is hope. One of the hardest battles people who suffer from depression fight is searching for a reason to get out of bed. Or the confidence that today is going to be better than yesterday, and ultimately hoping that this illness with not consume them. The first two lines of the poem read as: “Lately, I’ve become accustomed to the way. The ground opens up and envelops me”. The poet is exhausted from everyday life. The smallest tasks take the most out of him. Everything is consuming.

The second stanza talks about how he looks to the night sky and stars for a sign or guidance. He even mentions that when the stars are not there, he counts their empty spots. Which could either mean he is just so desperate for hope that he will plead even when the thing the poet asking to is absent, or Baraka has lost someone close to him which has sent him into a depression and “the absence of the stars” is the void of whoever he lost. “Nobody sings anymore.” He explains how the whole world has lost hope in their initial dreams and desires. In the last stanza, he walks into his daughter’s room, where she’s kneeling and praying in her hands. This is his realization that perhaps not all the hope in the world is gone. In which all the hope adults have lost is within children or their inner child.

An Agony, As Now, is a marvelous piece about a man who has been consumed by his depression, lives his life as a secondary character. He wears a metal mask that only has slits in the eyes where he watches his life unfold from the shadows. He must breathe the foul stench of what his world has become an even sees the horrid women he confides in to cover his actual problems. Flesh and metal are continuously brought up throughout the poem. His flesh is the only thing holding him together, yet it makes him weak. “Flesh” is a metaphor for all that makes him vulnerable and weak, which equates to all those bottled up emotions that he can not channel from the body of who he does not know. The metal is cold and hinders his ability to feel human touch and warmth. Baraka artistically explains how depression prevents one from not only expressing emotions but feeling emotions altogether. Mt final point about the poem is about his longing. He longs to escape his “enclosure.” Though he knows not how to feel, he knows what he wants to explore. “But it has no feeling. As the metal is hot, it is not, given to love.” To properly understand this line, we must revisit the first line of the poem, which reads as: ” I am inside someone who hates me.” Amiri believes that somewhere inside of himself, he still loves the person that he truly is. Without the depressive state is has been trapped in holding him back, he would be able to unwrap the love he desperately needs. Even in 2020, the black community still struggles to validate mental illness and combat negative feedback to those who search for relief from their struggles. Amiri Baraka is beyond a poet. He is a real activist for a conversation that so many people need to be having.