The literary, cultural, political importance of Amiri Baraka’s life and work is there for all to see. I would like to briefly say why his work has been important for my own vision of the world. Indeed, it was his writing and example that helped set me straight about America when I started seriously reading Leroi Jones/ Amiri Baraka after getting to the U.S.A. in 1967—at exactly the date, I was to find out later, when he was jailed in Newark. Before that, growing up in Europe after WWII Europe, my experience of African-American culture was a more or less unthoughtthrough romantic love-affair with an attractive, fascinating, strange, sexy and also at times dangerous other. At 12, on holiday in Belgium, away from perfectly white Luxembourg, my parents took me to a Nat King Cole concert and a year later to a Louis and Ella concert; at 15, I got mother to drive me into France to catch Ray Charles in Metz. On AFN radio I listened to Fats Domino, the Platters, Chubby Checker, etc. I bought Bessie Smith records. I fell in love with jazz and my first published piece of writing in the high school catholic students’ paper was a potted bio of Charlie Parker. In Paris as a medical student in 1965 I started to read Invisible Man and the poetry of Hughes and Bob Kaufman. I got dissed at my first poetry reading there—for a bad poem in honor of Langston Hughes—by Ted Joans, but saved by Jimmy Baldwin who told Joans to stop; I drove with friends to Orly airport to welcome various free jazz musicians come to play at the Huchette clubs; I played pinball with Memphis Slim; I learned pages of dialogue from Baldwin’s Another Country by heart, etc...