The Poetics of Malcolm X
On the poetry that influenced the Civil Rights trailblazer and the art he inspired.
Elham Shirin
“I’m a real bug for poetry,” 24-year-old Malcolm X wrote in a February 1949 letter to his brother, Philbert X. Writing alone in his cell at the Norfolk Prison Colony, Malcolm continued: “When you think back over all of our past lives, only poetry could best fit into the vast emptiness created by men.”
This year marks 101 years since Malcolm X was born, and his sharp words on the reality of the American nightmare remain true today.
Malcolm’s poetics — his love of language and for his people, his gentleness and ability to speak to the truth of things for oppressed peoples across the continents — is what shaped and awakened his radical politics. It’s what led Malcolm to write poetry in prison, to embody a magnetic rhetorical style as a street corner orator in Harlem, to cut straight to the nature of the human condition as a minister for the Nation of Islam, to pull masses of people into a movement. His legacy, the spirit of which is visible in Black and brown poets across the world, shows the power of language to shape who people are and to help them imagine another world on her way, quietly breathing.
Malcolm sometimes joked in his letters to Philbert that poems filled the pages when he had nothing to say and much to hear. In doing research for the book Malcolm Before X, Patrick Parr encountered the poem Malcolm wrote at Norfolk, “Music.” It reads:
Music is not created / It is always here / surrounding us / like the infinite particles that constitute life, it cannot be seen but can only be felt […] / Music with out the Musician is like life with out Allah / both in desperate need of a home / a body.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that a sense of mysticism pervades this previously unknown poem, a possible influence of his prison reading. While much is said about how Malcolm’s love for language flourished at Norfolk by reading the dictionary, he also read ancient Persian poets, seeking to learn more about Islam. His curiosities included Saadi Shirazi’s The Gulistan, Hafiz’s The Ruba’iyat of Hafiz and Omar Khayyam’s The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam.
“Prison, thanks to Islam, has ceased to be a prison,” Malcolm wrote in a letter to Philbert on March 26, 1950. “For I have learned to love the preciousness of Pure Solitude.”
At the archives of the Schomburg Center in Harlem, which houses a treasure trove of Malcolm’s personal notes and diaries, I found evidence of his notes before his speeches to students at universities and to his community as a minister for the Nation of Islam. Malcolm, as an orator, spoke from his gut; for many of his public talks, there were few planned words — just his thoughts, abilities and personality laid bare, speaking in a language that resonated with thousands. As Amiri Baraka, poet and founder of the Black Arts Movement, said, Malcolm had the ability to give voice to the unspoken: “He’d say things and instantly it’d make sense or confirm something I’d not even thought but felt.” Haki Madhubuti, another architect of the Black Arts Movement,
explained that when Malcolm spoke, it was as if someone was “cutting into your heart and then stitching it back up.”
But Malcolm’s invocations and speeches are also exemplary of poetic sensibility and lyricism, what scholar Joshua Bennett calls a “dance between page and speech, sentence and song.”
In his 1963 “Message to the Grassroots” speech, with the parable of the “house Negro and the field Negro,” Malcolm used figures from chattel slavery to help explain how aligning with white supremacy could colonize a mind:
That house Negro loved his master. But that field Negro — remember, they were in the majority, and they hated the master. When the house caught on fire, he didn’t try and put it out; that field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze. When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he’d die. If someone come to the field Negro and said, “Let’s separate, let’s run,” he didn’t say “Where we going?” He’d say, “Any place is better than here.”
Malcolm beckoned his audience to align with the figure of the “field Negro,” representing the masses who fight against oppression at the grassroots level.
In Malcolm’s 1964 speech “The Ballot or The Bullet,” given at the Cory United Methodist Church in Cleveland, alliteration abounds in his articulation of Black nationalism. Using repetition with natural pauses for the audience to call and respond, Malcolm invoked: “Whether you are a Christian or a Muslim or a nationalist, we all have the same problem. They don’t hang you because you are a Baptist, they hang you because you’re Black. They don’t attack me because I’m a Muslim, they attack me because I’m Black … All of us catch hell from the same enemy. We’re all in the same bag … We suffer political oppression, economic exploitation and social degradation.”
Journalist Mark Whitaker traces the influence of Malcolm on the cultural landscape of America in his book, The Afterlife of Malcolm X. He references cultural critic and playwright Larry Neal to emphasize Malcolm’s style and vernacular as rooted in Black folk memory — and the memory of Malcolm’s Garveyite father, Earl Little, who was also a preacher. Neal described the visceral impact that listening to Malcolm had on him, the musicality of Malcolm’s voice: “We began to hear Malcolm, the Black voice skating and bebopping like a righteous saxophone. We could dig Malcolm because the essential vectors of his style were more closely related to our urban experiences.”
In no small part because of this style, membership in the Nation of Islam grew exponentially under the influence of Malcolm X. During his time as a minister, Malcolm was known to have carried Rudyard Kipling’s galvanizing poem “If” in his pocket, gifted to him by his sister, Ella Collins. Following Malcolm’s rupture with the Nation of Islam in 1964, Ella provided the funds for him to undertake the Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. After undergoing a personal and spiritual transformation, he adopted the Arabic name El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.
During his post-Hajj travels across what Malcolm called the “dark world” of the Middle East and West Africa, he saw Black nationalism as making his people in the United States “conscious” — an awakening he called “doing for self” that would link Black people to Africa, while Islam would spiritually link to Africa, Arabia and Asia. When Malcolm met Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian leader and revolutionary, both saw Pan-Africanism as a key solution to the problems faced by African people, stressing unity between Africans on the continent and the African diaspora in the United States.
As part of his travels, Malcolm undertook a two-day sojourn to Gaza, crossing the Egyptian border at Rafah in early September 1964. There, he met Palestinian poet Harun Hashim Rashid in the refugee camp of Khan Younis. Rashid’s memories of escape from Khan Younis in 1956, where Israeli military forces killed about 275 unarmed civilians, left a lasting impression on Malcolm. At the time, Rashid shared a poem titled “Hattā ya‘ūd sha‘būnā” (“Until Our People Return”), echoing the Palestinian longing for return. Malcolm wrote down this poem in his travelogue:
We must return
No boundaries should exist
No obstacles can stop us
Cry out the refugees: “We shall return”
Tell the mtns: “We shall return”
Tell the valley: “We shall return”
We are going back to our youth
Palestine calls us to arm ourselves
And we are armed + are going to fight
We must return.
Malcolm’s visit to Gaza and his encounters with Rashid would inform his critique of Zionism as a new form of colonialism. This stance was years ahead of other leading Black intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, who first saw Zionism as a model for self-determination before, years later, viewing Israel as a neocolonial state. As part of Malcolm’s anti-oppression and anti-exploitation ethos, his travel diaries connect colonialism in South Africa, imperialism in Congo, and Zionism in Palestine as conceptually tied to racism in the United States.
Within two weeks of his visit to Gaza, Malcolm penned “Zionist Logic” in the Egyptian Gazette, a Cairo-based newspaper. In the essay, Malcolm argued that Zionists lacked legal and moral rights to invade Palestine and uproot people from their homes based solely on a religious claim. “Only a thousand years ago the Moors lived in Spain,” Malcolm wrote. “Would this give the Moors of today the legal and moral right to invade the Iberian Peninsula, drive out its Spanish citizens, and then set up a new Moroccan nation …where Spain used to be, as the European Zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine?”
This subversive position was a precursor to the Black radical tradition and its solidarity with Palestinian revolutionaries, a practice echoed by poet June Jordan. Her poem “Moving towards Home” was published after the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres in Beirut, where Israeli-backed militias killed between 2,000 and 3,500 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians in two days. Jordan proclaimed:
I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
June Jordan was a pivotal figure in the Black Arts Movement — a spiritual and aesthetic sister to the Black Power Movement birthed out of the grief and rage of Malcolm’s assassination in 1965. In a defining essay in The Drama Review, poet Larry Neal conceptualizes Black art as having a social purpose not just to entertain, but to unite and mobilize for Black self-determination and nationhood. “Poetry is a concrete function, an action,” Neal wrote in the essay “The Black Arts Movement.” “No more abstractions. Poems are physical entities: fists, daggers, airplane poems, and poems that shoot guns.”
It is hard not to think of Refaat Alareer, the Palestinian poet and writer killed in December 2023 by the Israeli military. Alareer thought of storytelling as resistance; in the life of Malcolm X, he saw a parallel to his own, and he taught his students Malcolm’s words. Weeks before Alareer’s death, in an interview with The Electronic Intifada—against the audible backdrop of bombs — Alareer articulated that, as an academic, the toughest thing he had at home was a dry erase marker. “But if the Israelis invade … I’m going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I would be able to do.”
Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die,” a symbol of resistance against Palestinian erasure, has become one of the most read and translated poems of the 21st century. The poem concludes: “If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale.” Literary scholars term this type of resolution “late style,” a reference to the survival beyond death, as Alareer’s poem transforms personal mortality into collective immortality.
In response to Malcolm’s assassination, the first and only poetry anthology dedicated to his life, For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X, features a eulogy from Sonia Sanchez:
do not speak to me of martyrdom,
of men who die to be remembered
on some parish day.
I don’t believe in dying
Though, I too shall die
and violets like castanets
will echo me.
An embrace of Malcolm’s life, Sanchez’s percussive work is a drumbeat that continues his legacy, a collective immortality embodied in the work of poets and activists alike.
As Malcolm lay in his final moments in New York’s Audubon Ballroom, shot over a dozen times, Malcolm’s friend Yuri Kochiyama ran to his body and held his head in her lap. In a Democracy Now! interview, Kuchiyama recalled, “I said, ‘Please, Malcolm! Please, Malcolm! Stay alive.’ ”
As Kochiyama wrote in December 1965, in the dedication of the inaugural issue of the North Star newspaper: “No bullets could destroy what he was and what he meant.” Malcolm lives.
Elham Shirin is a reporter and researcher covering stories about nature and culture.
