Love and Fear
The opening line is a complex metaphorical statement. The speaker confesses that the things he once loved are now revealed to have been created out of fear. While complex, this is also a common circumstance of intellectual and emotional evolution. It is a metaphor describing how one’s emotional reactions change over time with the onset of clarity. An extreme example would be, for instance, confusing fear of an abusive parent or partner with feelings of love toward them.
“My Flesh”
The opening line of the second stanza has the speaker referring to claiming his flesh. Flesh in this case is a metaphor for not just dark pigmentation of skin, but the entirety of the black cultural experience. The speaker is undergoing a significant change in personal identity in which skin color and cultural awareness are of intense significance.
A Loud Man
The opening line of the succeeding stanza is one of self-identification in which the speaker alludes enough to life to identify the poem as fully autobiographical. The description of himself as a man who is not shy about in discussing intimate details of his own self-awareness is a metaphor for the poetry written by the speaker who is the poet himself.
Form and Structure
This is a poem about reorganization of the self and transformation of identity. Form matches content toward the end of the poem when the old self loses hold on its center and begins to come apart. This is metaphorically visualized in the very structure of the poem on the page.
Publicly redefining
each change in my soul, as if I had predicted
them,
and profited, biblically, even tho
their chanting weight,
erased familiarity
from my face.
A question, I think,
an answer,
Roi
Everything is back in shape structurally by the final stanza which asks the question of who will they be talking about when they Roi is dead. The author changed the name under which he published from LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka and Roi refers literally to the transformation from of identity. But the shortening down to simply “Roi” lends it a greater symbolic dimension that covers the poet’s former identity in the abstract, touching upon individual personae taken on during the time he lived as LeRoi.
