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Amiri Baraka and The Dutchman
Author Biography: Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka (buh-RAH-kuh), born Everett LeRoi Jones, is one of the most important and most articulate writers of the Black Arts
movement. Born on October 7, 1934, to a middle-class family, he graduated from high school at fifteen and attended Rutgers University on a
science scholarship. After a year, he transferred to Howard University, receiving a B.A. in English in 1954. After serving in the Air Force,
Baraka moved to Greenwich Village and plunged into a bohemian lifestyle that was influenced by the aesthetic protests of the Beat
generation. During this period, he was married to a Jewish intellectual with whom he edited Yugen, an avant-garde magazine. He gained
recognition as a music critic, did graduate work in philosophy at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research, and taught
courses at both schools as well as at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Although he wrote plays during this period, most have been
lost—except The Eighth Ditch, which was later incorporated into his novel, The System of Dante’s Hell. The play was closed after a few days
because of obscenity; its aborted production marked the first of Baraka’s many conflicts with the law.
The year 1964 was the beginning of a radical shift in Baraka’s political and aesthetic beliefs. He increasingly associated himself with the
cultural aspirations and standards of the black community. He developed the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem, with the goal
of increasing black pride by utilizing theater as a weapon against American racism. In addition, four of his plays that year gained for
him both notoriety and fame. In The Baptism, a minister and bohemian homosexual compete for the favors of a young boy seeking baptism.
The Toilet is set in a high-school latrine, where a white homosexual is beaten senseless for loving a black gang leader. The racial and sexual
ambivalence which runs through these plays is eliminated in The Slave, a frankly autobiographical work. In it, a returning black serviceman
violently renounces his former life, shooting the husband of his white former wife and watching as their home and his children are destroyed
by his black revolutionary forces.
In 1967, LeRoi Jones officially became Imamu (prophet) Amiri (warrior) Baraka (blessed), a minister of the Kawaida faith and an
adherent of black cultural nationalism. He returned to Newark, founded Spirit House Theatre, and became active in local politics. The plays
from this period reflect Baraka’s antiwhite rage in the form of agitprop theater, designed to shock and to assault. For example,
Madheart is a morality play in which a black Everyman removes female obstacles—a sexual white woman, an Uncle Tom mother, an
assimilationist sister—on his road to black manhood. Many critics believe that Slave Ship is Baraka’s most significant play from this period.
Subtitled A Historical Pageant, the play presents the exploitation and victimization of blacks in America. Using music to reinforce his images
of black history, Baraka assaults the moderate views of most middle-class blacks and advocates violence as a means of solving racial conflict.
In 1974, Baraka renounced black nationalism for Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought and dropped Imamu from his name. Dismissing most of
his sociopolitical ideas of the 1960’s, calling them chauvinistic, he began to analyze the problems of blacks in economic rather than racial
terms. This shift in ideology was reflected in his plays. S-1, like the left-wing plays of the 1930’s, calls for the overthrow of the capitalist
regime, populated by blacks and whites, by the call of the black Communist protagonist: “We fight opportunism, we fight
chauvinism. And we fight narrow nationalism too.” Generally, these more didactic plays have not met with critical success. Baraka defends
his work from this period by insisting that its political philosophy represents a growth of, and not a change in, his previous ideologies. What
has remained consistent is his focus on how culture shapes internal and other personal conflict as well as social and political strife.
In 1979, Baraka began teaching Africana studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received tenure in 1982 and a
promotion to full professor in 1984. In 1990, Rutgers University, where he had been teaching as a visiting instructor, denied him a tenured
appointment, sparking allegations of racism and campus protests. Baraka remains an outspoken and controversial activist for civil rights and
a critic of the establishment. In 2002, his position as New Jersey’s state poet laureate was hotly debated as a result of inflammatory passages
in his poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” a reflection on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The poem suggests that four
thousand Israeli workers stayed home from the World Trade Center that day because they had advance warning of the attacks.
Although Baraka’s critical reputation has been on the decline, his impact on theater cannot be overestimated. Although his best-known works
are linked to the violence and radicalism of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Baraka’s impact extends beyond that time. He brought to the
stage black cultural experiences, rituals, and language as well as anger and the burning need to find a solution to the problems of living in a
racist society. Baraka’s work has paved the way for a whole generation of black playwrights, challenging them with his experimental and
cultural models. Essay by Lori Hall Burghardt, and Christian Pyle
Critical Commentary on Dutchman
Dutchman, winner of the 1964 Obie Award for best Off-Broadway production, is a riveting dramatization of psychosexual, interracial
tensions. The title bears mythical implications, supported by Baraka's own stage directions, which indicate a subway setting filled with
modern myth. Despite Baraka's insistence that the two main characters are individuals, not allegorical creations, he confines them within this
subterranean set. The Dutch sailed the first slave-bearing vessel to the American colonies. The legend of The Flying Dutchman is one
of a ship cursed to sail the seas eternally without ever finding safe harbor. Even if the first were a simple allusion, together these suggest
that white America has doomed itself through its nonrecognition of blacks as human. If so, Lula, as the white representative, will inhabit the
subway, preying upon her black victims until one galvanizes himself into action, freeing himself and both races through her murder.

Lula, the protagonist, controls scene 1. She enters from behind Clay, initiates their confrontive conversation, and sits beside him. Even
though he is uncomfortable, she makes seductive overtures. Her accurate assessment of his middle-class background and assimilationist
behavioral mask also fascinates him into continuing their conversation. Lula, the oppressor, condescendingly sees Clay as a stereotype and
commands the topics with which they essentially talk at each other. By admitting that she is a liar—and later, that she is insane—Lula forces
him into the untenable situation of having to process each of her statements as fact or fiction. Furthermore, it is she who offers Clay an apple
that he accepts; critics have made much of the possible Adam and Eve analogy. Lula is also the initiator of physical aggression, first running
her hand along Clay's leg and later harshly grabbing and shaking his wrist.
Clay, in suit and striped tie despite the summer heat, has assimilated into the white world. He does not wish to call attention to himself. Clay
sees Lula also as a stereotype—of the liberal white woman fascinated by fantasies of interracial sexual intercourse. Momentarily excited by
her, he allows himself to become vulnerable by adapting to her mercuric emotional shifts.
In scene 2, as Lula describes her party plans in seductive detail, Clay begins to make physical advances. Their dialogue, strikingly fast-paced
from the play's opening lines, intensifies into a dueling rhythm as they both become more openly confrontational. They even capture the
attention of normally apathetic fellow subway riders, who watch their interaction with some interest. A major shift occurs when Lula
unmasks Clay, accusing him of having escaped to her (the white) side. Clay assumes control, and Lula defends herself with hysterics, singing
and dancing in the train aisle. Clay refuses every invitation to join her until she goads him to restrain her by warning him that he is dying
because of his assimilation, that he must release himself from his self-imposed bonds. He wrestles her (as well as the drunk who attempts to
defend her) into submission, slapping her with full strength.
Baraka sees dance as an ultimate expression of life. Lula's hysterical invitation, however, assumes a double meaning. Even though she may
be offering Clay an apparent passageway out of his self-victimization, she is simultaneously inviting him into a new bondage: life on her
terms. With no viable means of regaining his mask or escaping, Clay is finally free to expunge his rage. He erupts into a devastating diatribe
that avows his contempt for those who surround themselves with illusions to avoid reality, his homicidal hatred of whites, and his need to
assimilate so as not to commit mass murder. According to Clay, black art and music are escape valves that would be unnecessary if the artists
would simply exterminate whites: “A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the
neurosis would be your murders.”
Clay defeats himself, however, by retreating tiredly from an insistence upon action to the safety of words. He concludes with a warning not to
trust assimilated blacks because someday they will embark on a genocidal rampage, using as their justification the same white
rationalizations they have been taught.
As Clay bends to gather his books, Lula stabs him twice; after he has destroyed her illusions of him, she must destroy him. Whether her
actions are premeditated can be interpreted dramatically through her interactions with the other passengers. Her earlier admission that she
knows them even more intimately than she knows Clay and their easy acquiescence in disposing of his body suggest either complicity or a
compelling fear. That their presence as her “crew” is prearranged is in keeping with the Dutchman myth. Her preparation to start the cycle
once more with another young black who enters the car further supports the mythical interpretation.
In Dutchman, Baraka dramatizes two of his major themes. The first is that dehumanizing sexuality, in any form, leads to death. Clay and
Lula's sexual interaction is simply another layer of masking. It is sterile, with no spiritual or emotional intimacy. Baraka's second theme is
that psychic paralysis leads to annihilation. Clay has the opportunity to survive until he is caught in his own self-destructive trap. As a
poet, he retreats into words and poetry when challenged because they are safe and comfortable, even when he recognizes the need for action.
He does not see his art's potential as a motivating agent for change, and he reverts to passive resistance, giving up. Consequently, his art, too,
is sterile. It is Lula who survives, by committing the extreme guerrilla action in murdering him. Essay by Kathleen Mills
A powerful one-act drama, Dutchman brought immediate and lasting attention to poet Amiri Baraka. The play is a searing two-character
confrontation that begins playfully but builds rapidly in suspense and symbolic resonance. Set on a New York subway train, Dutchman opens
with a well-dressed, intellectual, young African American man named Clay absorbed in reading a magazine. He is interrupted by Lula—a
flirtatious, beautiful white woman a bit older than he. As Lula suggestively slices and eats an apple, she and Clay tease each other with
bantering talk that becomes more and more personal. She reveals little about herself, but Lula is clearly in control of the conversation and the
situation as she perceptively and provokingly challenges Clay’s middle-class self image. Lula is, in fact, a bit cruel. “What right do you have
to be wearing a three-button suit and striped tie?” she asks. “Your grandfather was a slave, he didn’t go to Harvard.” Aware of his
insecurities, Lula dares Clay to pretend “that you are free of your own history.”
Clay’s insecurities about his race, social status, and masculine prowess—slowly revealed as his answers shift from machismo to
defensiveness—become the targets for Lula’s increasingly direct taunts. Eventually, Lula’s attempt to force Clay to see in himself the
negative stereotypes of the black male—as either oversexed stud or cringing Uncle Tom—goad him into an eloquently bitter tirade. Black
music and African American culture, he tells her, are actually repressions of a justified rage that has kept African American people sane in
the face of centuries of oppression. Clay seems as desperate to prove this to himself as he is to convince Lula. He does not seem to know
whether the rage or the repression has taken the greater toll on African American sanity. The scene escalates in dramatic force until Lula
unexpectedly stabs Clay to death.
Baraka has said that Dutchman “is about how difficult it is to become a man in the United States.” Nevertheless, the ancient symbolism
of apple and temptation, and the myth of the ghostly pirate ship, The Flying Dutchman, used in Richard Wagner’s opera and other literary
works, are carefully suggested in Baraka’s play and amplify the dimensions of racial conflict. Essay by Lorenzo Thomas