"What I thought was love
in me, I find a thousand instances
as fear"
The opening lines of this poem clue the reader in to the fact that some sort of metamorphosis is taking place in the speaker. The lines are in the present tense, which means that the speaker's metamorphosis is happening in real-time. They also help to set the tone for the rest of the poem: one of confusion, change, and estrangement. Baraka uses powerful language to express this sentiment; it is unsettling to see "love" transformed into "fear."
"(Of the tree's shadow
winding around the chair, a distant music
of frozen birds rattling
in the cold"
Baraka gives us beautiful imagery at the end of Stanza I. They are offered as examples of the kind of things the speaker thought he once loved but now has discovered that he fears. These images are delicate and ominous—it is hard to understand how a tree's shadow could curl around a chair in nature. Sunlight never hits a tree at such an angle that it would curl in a circle. However, it is easy to imagine—it is one of those images that can never be but that can be called up in the mind's eye. Next, the speaker offers readers the delicate sound of trembling birds. Though this is also a sound that would be impossible to hear in nature, readers can conjure up what it might sound like in their minds.
"When they say, 'It is Roi
who is dead. I wonder
who will they mean?"
In this final stanza of "The Liar," Baraka reveals himself as the speaker of the poem. "Roi" is a shortened version of Baraka's birth name, LeRoy (later changed to LeRoi) Jones. Other people who have witnessed the speaker's metamorphosis say that Roi was now dead. This speaker leaves the poem with an open-ended question: "who will they mean?" He is not sure which version of himself this "they" is referring to when they tell him that Roi has died. In the end, perhaps this is because he is not sure which version of himself is his true self. The ending of "The Liar" leaves us with a lot of questions about the true identity of the speaker, which the speaker hides from us just as much as he hides it from the "they" who observe him in the poem.
