ALTHOUGH BARAKA CONTINUED to write and perform poetry during the heyday of the Black Arts, his poetry became less significant as drama became his preferred genre. Baraka’s concern for a revolutionary mass art led him to encourage black artists to privilege those art forms most accessible to the broader black community. In 1972, he published the short essay “Black Revolutionary Poets Should Also Be Playwrights.” The essay begins as a condemnation of what Baraka views as pseudoblack black art. He labels as reactionary not only the film Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song but all those so-called black poets who romanticize the joy and delight of black life or sentimentalize “the good old days on the block.” Such poets refuse to acknowledge that the pervasiveness of white racism is strangling black life. Any art that tries to proclaim blacks as a hip people without showing how they are imprisoned is reactionary.1
Many of the known Black literati should be made to go to Political Education Classes or dismissed from the struggle as enemy sympathizers! Much of our black poetry is imitative at best, and mouths impossible rhetoric rather than concrete instructions for World African Revolution! . . . Also a great many of the theater companies that were once Black are still “Black” but hardly revolutionary. They often become fixed and stylized, and individualistic elitist celebrant cults for gigantic egos, to boot.2
Instead of relying on the writings of these deracinated black artists, true revolutionary black poets should organize small drama groups. They should write and even record improvised dramas, plays, skits, songs, and dances about the international black struggle. Poets could write short skits. Actors, singers, and dancers could write short musicals. Regardless of form, the guiding theme should be the need for black unity and self-determination.
Baraka imagines these skits being produced for churches, youth groups, social clubs, fraternities, sororities, and any other black group. Insofar as black Americans do not yet have an identity separate from that of Americans at large, he suggests that these plays and skits be used to teach blacks a new nationalist consciousness. Not surprisingly, the values that he believes constitute the core of this new revolutionary group consciousness are found in Kawaida.
As Baraka intensified his commitment to the new Black Arts movement, his drama, like his poetry, became increasingly unambitious. In his attempt to develop a theater audience, Baraka wrote and produced plays that were not only inferior to his earlier efforts but, more often than not, artistically banal. Some scholars have attributed the pedestrian quality of his Black Arts plays to his understandable desire to politicize the black community (i.e., his black audiences). Such explanations assume that the artistic quality lost in producing agitprop plays was a cost that Baraka was willing to pay for political engagement. Assuming that Baraka did not suddenly lose the dramatic sensibility that inspired Dutchman, we must presume that his decision to write a string of minor dramatic pieces was intentional. But why?
In 1969 Baraka published Four Black Revolutionary Plays, a collection made up of Experimental Death Unit #1, A Black Mass, Great Goodness of Life, and Mad Heart. The title of the collection indicates Baraka’s belief that the plays followed the dictates of his seminal 1964 essay “The Revolutionary Theater.”
Experimental Death Unit #1 was written in 1964 during the height of Jones’s anguish over his continued affiliation with the Village scene. It was first performed at the fund-raiser for BART held at St. Mark’s Playhouse on March 1, 1965. Like many other productions of BART, the production of this play had to overcome the destructiveness of various persons associated with BART. During the rehearsals for Experimental Death Unit #1, director Barbara Teer was slapped by one of the Patterson brothers,3 and so Jones was forced to take her place.
Although the play’s content is racially militant, its form reflects Jones’s soon-to-be-discarded fondness for the European avant-garde. The three major characters in Experimental Death Unit #1 are two heroin-addicted white bums and a female black prostitute. The two bums, Duff and Loco, are modeled on Samuel Beckett’s characters in Waiting for Godot. As they stand on a street corner during a winter storm, they engage in an irrational but erudite conversation about beauty and life. Suddenly their conversation is interrupted by a once beautiful but now burned-out black prostitute who emerges from the alley. She propositions them. The two white men engage the woman in sexual banter, using sexually explicit images to convey what they would like to do to her. Duff states,
I am to be used in all your vacancies. All those holes in your body I want to fill. I got meat and mind to do it with. I mean out there in the street. I’ll throw you down . . . mount you, giddyap! giddyap! big-assed nigger lady! . . . then I ride you right out through the rain . . . maybe licking your neck.4
One of the white men asks her how much she charges. She responds, “I charge just what you owe.” Duff is baffled by her answer, but Loco responds to him, “You fool, we owe everything.” Loco wants her badly and begs her to let him lick her. Duff is initially disgusted that his friend finds this filthy black whore so enticing. Loco breaks free of Duff’s efforts to restrain him and runs to the black woman, on whom he performs oral sex. Duff walks away, stops momentarily, and ultimately gives in to his own sexual desire. He races to the black prostitute and tries to pull Loco away from her. They fight, and Duff beats him unconscious. Throughout the fighting, the woman is cheering on Duff with cries of “kill him, kill him.”
With Loco sprawled on the ground, Duff can now have intercourse with the black woman. Duff and the woman begin to copulate in the hallway but are interrupted by a paramilitary group of young blacks marching down the street. At the front of the group we see one of the black youths holding a spike with a severed white head impaled on it. The leader of the paramilitary group orders Duff and the black woman to come out. Unafraid of these “soul brothers,” the prostitute comes out of the hallway with Duff behind her. She tells Duff that she will handle this interruption. The leader of the group gives an order for the soldiers to shoot Duff and the black woman. The black woman is killed. Duff screams “niggers, niggers” as he is dying. Beaten and lying on the ground, Loco is heard murmuring something about “a little pussy . . . I need it, baby.” He then dies. The black youth cut off the heads of the two white men, place them on poles, and march off.
Experimental Death Unit #1, the first play that Jones wrote after The Slave, is a kind of transition play. Although it is the first of Baraka’s explicit agitprop plays directed toward a black audience, his borrowing of themes and characters from Beckett testifies to the resilient but soon to be abandoned influence that Western avant-garde playwrights still had on him.
Henry Lacey argued that the black woman in the play must be killed because she is a knowing participant in her own subjugation.5 She possesses knowledge about the immoral character of whites and their historical participation in her subjugation, and yet she does not change her ways. For Theodore Hudson, the meaning of the play was clear: blacks who choose to prostitute themselves to whites should be executed.6 Sollors viewed the play as an attempt by Baraka to exorcise his bohemian demons. That is, what Baraka once considered acts of bohemian freedom he now regarded as the manifestations of decadence. Perhaps each of these commentaries is correct. Nonetheless, the play’s meaning remains quite simplistic.
A Black Mass was first performed in May 1966 at Proctor’s Theater in Newark, New Jersey. The play is a dramatic interpretation of the myth of Yacub. According to Nation of Islam mythology, Yacub was the evil scientist who more than 6,000 years ago created white people by genetically altering a black man. One student of the Nation of Islam described Yacub’s project:
By practicing a strict code of birth control, killing all the darker babies and saving the lighter ones and letting them breed, he produced the brown race. By successive gene manipulation, Yacub grafted new races in intervals of 200 years, each lighter than the one before, possessing less and less divine substance. After 600 years, a race of weak-blooded, weak-boned, weak-minded, pale-faced people was finally grafted: the blond, blue-eye white devil. The white man is thus neither truly human nor created by God. He is . . . totally deprived of divine substance, which makes him intrinsically evil by nature.7
The opening scene of A Black Mass takes us back in time to an ancient African-Islamic civilization. We see three black scientists/magicians at work in a chemical factory. The signs on the wall are written in Arabic and Swahili. Two of the scientists are swaying to music while working. The third one ignores the music as he intently studies a book. He seems not to be connected to his environment, as if he “lives in his head.” His name is Jacoub. The two rhythmic scientists are working on a potion that will inspire blacks to “dance mad rhythms of the eternal universe until time is a weak thing.” Time, we learn, had been invented by Jacoub earlier. Considered a form of “white madness,” time distorts and dominates life. Because of time, people have discarded the natural flows of their daily and seasonal rhythms.
While the two other scientists are trying to find an antidote to time, Jacoub is at work trying to create a new organism. The work has consumed his life for quite a while. The other two magicians are repulsed by his creation of time, which they view as evil. But Jacoub rejects this assessment of his invention because he does not believe that any knowledge could, in and of itself, be evil. The three scientists debate whether they need to know everything. The two rhythmic scientists believe that they already know everything of value. Jacoub, however, wants to be like God and create something new even though there is not a need for his creations. That is, he believes in the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself, whereas the others view knowledge as useful only if it contributes to a harmonious, humane life.
Eventually Jacoub admits that he is trying to invent a new kind of person or what he calls a “neutral being.” This new being will be in love with time. In response to the questions from the other two scientists, Jacoub describes his creation as “a being who will not respond to the world of humanity. A being who will make its own will and direction . . . .A being like us, but completely separate.”8 The discussion is interrupted by several terrified women who run into the laboratory. The scientists admonish the women for coming in, as females are not allowed in the holy sanctuary of the chemical laboratory. The women are screaming that evil is loose in the world, that the rhythms of life are in disarray. Even the stars are out in the daytime. We then hear a vast explosion and see a blinding light. With the music of Sun-Ra blaring in the background, a beast appears. He is white with a red, lizard-devil mask. Everyone screams at the sight. The beast leaps into the audience and hops around, all the while screaming, “White, white, white.” He leaps back onto the stage and continues chanting while hoping around and vomiting.
The other two scientists immediately recognize that Jacoub has created a monster. The creature has neither feelings nor a soul. It is a being capable of killing other humans. Jacoub has created the world’s first murderer. In a frenzy, the beast grabs one of the black women by the throat. Soon after, she clutches her throat and turns into a grunting white beast hopping around on stage. She too begins to chant, “White, white, white.” The scientists cast a spell that imprisons the two beasts in an invisible cell. Although Jacoub is distressed by the changes in the woman, he still believes it is possible to teach the beast how to feel. The two other scientists disagree, for they know that the beast cannot be taught humaneness. Sure of his ability to teach the beasts, Jacoub breaks the spell and releases the two beasts from their invisible confinements. Once freed, the two beasts attack and kill the two scientists and the women gathered around. Only then does Jacoub recognize his mistake. The beasts attack him. As he is dying, he imposes a curse on the beasts that banishes them to caves. After the beasts leave, we hear the narrator’s voice over the loud speaker.
And so Brothers and sisters, these beasts are still loose in the world. Still they spit their hideous cries. There are beasts in our world, Brothers and Sisters. There are beasts in our world. Let us find them and slay them. Let us lock them in their caves. Let us declare the Holy War. The Jihad. Or we cannot deserve to live. Izm-el-Azam, Izm-el-Azam, Izm-el-Azam, Izm-el-Azam.9
“Izm-el-Azam” [May God have mercy] is repeated until the stage is black.
Baraka’s play about Jacoub follows quite closely the tale of Yacub and the creation of the white race as developed in the Nation of Islam’s mythos. Indeed, the play could have been cowritten by Elijah Muhammad! Though entertaining, the play is shallow and reactionary. Its primary message is that whites and blacks constitute morally antagonistic groups owing to their innate racial differences. By thus depicting whites as demonic and blacks as divine, A Black Mass celebrates the most banal form of racial essentialism.
Critic Larry Neal, one of Baraka’s friends and a partner in the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School, was, however, thoroughly entranced by the play.
This is a deeply weighted play, a colloquy on the nature of man, and the relationship between legitimate spiritual knowledge and scientific knowledge. It is LeRoi Jones’s most important play mainly because it is informed by a mythology that is wholly the creation of the Afro-American sensibility.10
Why Neal perceived such depth in this play is beyond my powers of explanation. Certainly, the mere fact that the play is based on a cosmological narrative created by black Americans does not in any way enhance the play’s meaning.
Like A Black Mass, Jello was written while Jones was working at the Black Repertory Theater School, but it was not published until 1970. Jones had originally intended to include it in Four Black Revolutionary Plays, and in an afterword to that collection is a short explanatory note entitled “Why No Jello.”11 According to Jones, the publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, refused to include the play in the collection, claiming that it attacked the private life of a public figure. Whether or not Jones’s explanation is correct, Jack Benny’s television show was certainly ripe for dramatic interpretation, however scandalous that might be. In retrospect, one can only agree with Jones’s claim that Bobbs-Merrill’s refusal to publish it was an attempt at censorship. Interestingly, this censorship may speak to the seriousness that certain white publishers granted to Jones and/or the new black writing. Jones, unwilling to concede defeat, claims that despite the publisher’s efforts, the play has become well known throughout the black drama world.
Jello is a spoof on the Jack Benny radio and television show. Jack Benny played the central character whose assistant was Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. Baraka’s play focuses on the newly rebellious Rochester. No longer willing to serve as Benny’s jokester black flunky, Rochester has acquired a new militant attitude. Even his hair is no longer “conked.” The scene is Benny’s house which, we are told, is also the setting for the television show. The white comic calls for Rochester and casually orders him to get the car. Rochester responds in a way that Benny had never heard before: “What the hell you want man? Don’t be calling me all the time. Damn, can’t never get away from you.” Benny hears the words coming out of Rochester’s mouth but does not perceive them as threatening. He seems to think that Rochester is simply acting weird. It takes Benny a few moments to recognize that Rochester’s manner of speech does not reflect his usual obsequiousness. Rochester makes his new attitude clearer. “You wanna go somewhere you get the car out in front yourself, and drive it yourself. Why I have to go with you?”12 Now angered, Benny orders Rochester to get the car. No longer pretending to be the black man’s friend, he has assumed the role of Rochester’s white employer. He threatens to fire the Negro and then does so when Rochester doesn’t jump at the threat. He predicts that the black man will become a bum now that he has lost his job as a chauffeur. Benny is surprised when Rochester robs him. Not satisfied with the three hundred dollars he has just taken from Benny’s wallet, Rochester demands that Benny open his wall safe. Benny, fearful of being assaulted, opens it. A miser, Benny begins to cry inconsolably at the sight of Rochester stealing his money. Soon he is sprawled on the floor kicking and screaming like a “hysterical child.” When Rochester asks Benny how he accumulated so much money, Benny answers that he worked hard for it. Rochester knows that not only has Benny underpaid him throughout their years of working together but that he also owns stores in Harlem that overcharge black customers.13 Benny admits to owning these stores but claims ignorance of their business practices. Rochester clearly knows everything there is to know about Benny’s life, and Benny knows little, if anything, about Rochester’s. Sounding a great deal like LeRoi Jones, Rochester tells Benny that given the vacuity and sickness of his life, he should commit suicide.
Two other regulars from the show enter the set. One, an explicitly effeminate man, thinks that Benny is trying to fool him when he claims that Rochester has just robbed him. Then Rochester lifts this man’s wallet without his realizing it. A white female regular member of the cast enters and also thinks it is a joke but then wonders whether Benny’s pleas for help are real. Rochester admits that he has robbed Benny and that he also intends to rob her. She thinks and hopes that Rochester wants her sexually. But when he reaches under her dress, it is only to retrieve her hidden purse. Angered, she falsely accuses him of rape. Finally, the voice of the program’s sponsor enters the set and cites Jello as the sponsor of the show. Rochester smacks him on the head, and he too falls near the other bodies. Rochester robs him of his wallet. A car horn is heard, at which Rochester screams out the window that he’ll be right out. Rochester leaves. The play ends.
The play is quite hilarious, although it is shallow and lacks any kind of subtlety or complexity. According to Theodore Hudson, “The major point is that in every ‘Negro’ there is a potential black man—a point which is not missed by most black audiences.” The question that Hudson should have asked was whether this play’s major point is sufficiently engaging to sustain the drama. One can imagine black folks laughing at the play, but one cannot imagine them leaving with their political consciousness raised. Unfortunately, when coupled with the play’s lack of finesse and variation, the weakness of the message led Hudson to conclude that the play would not “often fail to convulse audiences composed of society’s common folk,”14 thereby indicating the ways in which Jones’s inferior dramatic productions were often interpreted, if not excused, by traditional black literary intellectuals. The play is unambitious because it is intended for audiences of black common folk. Never stated but clearly implied is the idea that these “common folk” cannot handle a more complex drama.
Literary scholar Werner Sollors analyzed the play in the following manner: “Despite its underlying criticism of art and television Jello does not transcend what Gerald Weales called a ‘one-gag play.’ Like most of Baraka’s nationalist drama, it cannot be measured with the yardstick of Dutchman or The Toilet.”15 I agree.
Great Goodness of Life: A Coon Show was first performed in November 1967 by the Spirit House Movers at the Spirit House in Newark. Court Royal, a fiftyish black man, stands bewildered in the center of the stage. He appears to be quite nervous, as if he were in a courtroom. Over a loudspeaker we hear various commands being directed to him. Although we never see the physical body of the voice, we know that it is white authority. Court Royal tries to figure out the specific charges being brought against him, but Voice repeatedly tells Court Royal to shut up. When he does, Voice tells him that he has been charged with harboring a murderer. Court Royal denies the charges and is puzzled as to how these false charges could have been made. After pleading innocent, Court Royal states, “Of course I’m not guilty. I work in the Post Office. . . . Didn’t you ever see me in the Post Office? I’m a supervisor; you know me. . . . I’m no criminal. I’ve worked at the Post Office for thirty-five years. . . . There must be some mistake.”16 Voice tells Court Royal that he will be assigned a court-appointed attorney. Rejecting the offer, the postal worker says that he would rather be represented by his private attorney, John Breck. Soon a buffoon-acting, smiling Uncle Tom figure crawls across the stage. A wire that runs offstage is attached to his back much like that on an electronic toy. In the side of his head, we see a huge “wind-up” key. Soon it becomes clear that this mechanical figure is his lawyer, John Breck. Breck advises Court Royal to plead guilty. Court Royal protests. Why should he plead guilty to unknown and erroneous charges? Once again the wired and wound-up John Breck tells Court Royal to plead guilty. Now seeing the key lodged in Breck’s brain, Court Royal wonders why he looks like a human-size toy. Breck tells him that he has always looked like that.
Suddenly over the loud speaker we hear the voice of Young Victim, who directs his anger toward Court Royal.
Now will you believe me stupid fool? Will you believe what I tell you or your eyes? Even your eyes. You’re here with me, with us, all of us, and you can’t understand. Plead guilty you are guilty stupid nigger. You’ll die, they’ll kill you and you don’t know why now will you believe me? Believe me, halfwhite coward.
Voice orders the police to silence Young Victim. Over the loudspeaker we hear the sounds of a beating. Young Victim speaks again: “You bastard. And you Court Royal you let them take me. You liar. You weakling. You woman in the face of degenerates. You let me be taken.”17 Court Royal hears the voice of Young Victim and vaguely recognizes it but forgets when the sounds of rapidly firing machine guns come over the loud speaker. Fearful of being shot, Court Royal pleads for his life. Seeing Court Royal whimpering, Voice erupts in loud and sustained laughter. Hooded men drag a black woman across the stage. They pull on her hair and run their hands freely over her body. They tell Court Royal that she is drunk and ask him if he wants to smell her breath. He refuses and declares that she “brings our whole race down.” The hooded men return carrying the body of a dead black man on a stretcher. The dead man is referred to as “the Prince.” When asked by Voice who killed him, the men respond, “a nigger did it for us.”18
Court Royal continues to maintain his innocence in the face of repeated accusations from Voice. Voice asks him if he knows the man on the screen. When Royal looks at the screen (on the wall behind him) the images of King, Garvey, Medgar, and so forth flash in rapid succession. Court Royal claims that he cannot tell who they are. Voice accuses him of lying. Once again Court Royal claims never to have seen those faces. Voice tells him that he is guilty and must be sentenced. Court Royal, defeated, now awaits his death. At this moment of resignation, Voice suddenly declares him innocent. Court Royal is elated. Voice informs him that he can go after he completes one last task. Court Royal learns that Voice will free him if he shoots the murderer. Even though Court Royal does not realize that the so-called murderer is actually Young Victim, the audience knows. Court Royal does not want to shoot anyone but agrees to do so when Voice convinces him that the young murderer is not really alive but is only a shadow. By shooting the murderer’s shadow, Court Royal will free himself from guilt, shame, and blame. For carrying out this act, his soul will be washed “white as snow.”
Court Royal aims and shoots the supposed shadow of the so-called murderer directly in the face at point-blank range. As his body collapses, Young Victim utters the word “Papa.” He dies. Immediately, Voice declares Court Royal innocent and free. Elated, Court Royal repeats, “My soul is as white as snow, my soul is as white as snow.” The play ends as Court Royal, now jovial, asks Louise, his wife, if she knows where his bowling bag is.
Great Goodness of Life is dedicated to Jones’s father. The name of the protagonist, Court Royal, is similar to that of Jones’s father, Coyette. Moreover, Coyette Jones had been an employee of the Post Office. Jones has admitted that the play was written with his father in mind.19
The play can be read on many different levels. On a literal level, the play is about a middle-class black man who, in his haste to do anything and everything demanded of him by white authority, willingly murdered his own son. On a different level, the play might be a statement that the subjugation of blacks can continue only as long as blacks continue to devalue themselves psychologically. By murdering Young Victim, Court Royal has actually murdered blackness and a belief in black people. As Benston notes, “The guilt that he avoids by killing his own son is merely the oppressor’s condemnation. The real crime and guilt are the higher sins of moral and spiritual betrayal.”20
Slave Ship was first staged at the Chelsea Theater Center in New York City, on November 8, 1969. The setting is a slave ship. Although the theater is completely dark, the audience can hear sounds of heavy chains, African drums, the splashing of the sea, whips, and guns. There constantly are screams and cries of human agony. We first see white sailors smiling and laughing with one another as they anticipate the riches that will be theirs when they trade the “black gold” in the ship’s hold. Chained black women are heard speaking in African tongues calling on African deities. Children are crying. Men are trying to calm the frightened women, although they, too, are crying out for their gods Shango, Obatala, and Orisha. Using the chains, one woman strangles her child and then herself. The others weep and pray to their gods for deliverance and the souls of their dead comrades. One male slave tries to rape one of the women but is thwarted when another African male fights him off. We repeatedly hear the captured Africans calling their white captors “Devils.” The African drumming is unceasing. The stage lighting emphasizes the juxtaposition of the gleeful white sailors and the desperate black cargo.
The setting shifts to a group of slaves in the colonies/states. One slave is depicted as a subservient Uncle Tom. Scratching his head in stereotypical fashion, he shuffles to the center of the stage where he speaks to the white man in Willie Best fashion: “I’m so happy I jus don’t know what to do.”21 Other slaves are shown discussing rebellion and making plans to slit the master’s throat. We learn that the rebellion being planned is Nat Turner’s. The Uncle Tom slave tells the white slave master about Turner’s plot. All that he asks for in return is a pork chop. At this point, we see scenes depicting the fighting between slaves and masters and the subsequent repression of the Turner revolt. The Uncle Tom is seen happily eating his pork chop.
The scene then changes to more contemporary times. Instead of calling to African deities, we see blacks calling out to Jesus. A Negro preacher (played by the Uncle Tom figure) speaks in an obsequious manner about the need for peace and nonviolence. Interspersed throughout his dialogue is rhetorical gobbledygook that resembles the inarticulate utterances of the white family in Baraka’s play Home on the Range. The preacher’s servile performance is interrupted by a slave woman’s crying out for her stolen child, presumably taken away from her and sold to another master. As if depicting the continuing subjugation of black girls, a bloody and burned corpse of a small girl is placed before the Negro preacher. This girl, we are supposed to believe, is one of the victims of the church bombing in Birmingham. The minister grins while he tries to push the girl’s corpse behind him. It is apparent that he would rather talk about his Christian ideals than deal with the reality of the girl’s murder.
The sounds of a saxophone and drums break through the silence, and the black bodies that were sprawled out on the floor of the stage come to life. The people are rising metaphorically and literally. The singing mixes with the drumming and the screams of the slave ship. The cast breaks into song:
Rise, Rise, Rise
Cut these ties, Black Man Rise
We gon’ be the thing we are . . .
When we gonna rise up, brother
When we gonna rise above the sun
I mean, when we gonna lift our heads and voices
When we gonna show the world who we really are
When we gonna rise up, brother
When we gonna take our own place, brother
Like the world had just begun.22
The lyrics are repeated. During the singing, black bodies continue to rise from the floor. The arisen blacks form a dance line like that of the Temptations of 1960s Motown fame. Others join the line but do an African dance. Nevertheless, the rhythmic movement of all is clearly seen and felt. The dance and drums have a symbolic power that is distinctly black.
The preacher is afraid of the rising rhythmic black masses, and the music and dance make him aware of his impending doom. He begs the white man for protection. We hear the voice of the white man laughing at the sight of the preacher.
PREACHER: Please, boss, these nigger goin’ crazy; please, boss, throw you’ lightin’ at ’em, white jesus boss, while light god, they goin crazy! Help! . . . Please, boss, please . . . I do anything for you.
The servile, frightened preacher is surrounded by the blacks. They kill him and then go in search of the white voice. The white voice at first laughs at their intentions and then, upon realizing that the blacks are serious, changes to a plea.
VOICE: . . . you haha can’t touch me . . . you scared of me, niggers. I’m God. You cain’t kill white Jesus God. I got long blond blowhair. I don’t even need to wear a wig. You love the way I look. You want to look like me. You love me. You want me. Please. I’m good. I’m kind. I’ll give you anything you want. I’m white jesus savior right god pay you money nigger me is good god be please . . . please don’t.23
The audience hears the wretched scream of the white voice as it is killed by the empowered, freedom-seeking blacks. The stage is dark again.
The lights of the theater then come up, and the cast members begin to dance on the stage. They go into the audience and recruit blacks to join them in the dancing. Once again we hear the song “When You Gonna Rise.” At a point when the dancing is going strong and the audience is relaxed, the severed head of the Uncle Tom preacher is thrown onto the center of the stage floor. After a pause, the dancing resumes even more enthusiastically. The play ends.
Slave Ship has been known to generate intense reactions from the audience. Harry Elam Jr. noted:
At one performance of Slave Ship in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, an aroused audience bolstered by the militant participatory action of the production stood at the end of the performance ready to riot. If not for the fact that the doors of the theater remained bolted until the fervor had subsided somewhat, this audience certainly would have acted on its resolve. At another performance . . . in West Point, Mississippi, the entire audience rose to its feet and joined with the actors, waving fists and chanting, “We gonna rise up!”24
Slave Ship’s director, Gilbert Moses, claimed in an interview with Harry Elam that in some southern cities, black voter registration increased immediately after a performance of the play.25 Although Elam hesitated to draw too close a link between the play and political activism, he believed that the audience’s participation in the play was in itself a form of political engagement. The intensity of the play was amplified by Moses’ clever use of the entire theater as a stage, enabling the action to take place next to where someone was seated or even behind him. By shortening the distance between the performers and the audience, the audience was invited, if not forced, into an emotional engagement with the horrors depicted in the play. At one performance at the Chelsea, slaves were auctioned to members of the audience.
Slave Ship represents the high point of Baraka’s allegiance to Artaud’s theater of cruelty. According to Leslie Sanders,
Slave Ship embodies the quintessential theater-of-cruelty experience, for it creates for its audience not only the experience of the horror of the Middle Passage and black life in America but also an energy that gathers strength in the course of the play to emerge as celebration in the end.26
Baraka’s intentions were different from Artaud’s desire to purge the audience of the desire to act violently. Instead, Baraka believed that by heightening emotional confrontations through drama, he was helping create and sustain political activism on the part of the blacks in his audience. Elam agreed with Baraka and invoked the theories of August Boal in Baraka’s defense.27 Boal, using Brecht as his model radical artist, believed that the theatrical spectacle was at the beginning of the action. Baraka, however, instead of purging actors of their anger, wanted to intensify it and, in turn, inspire the audience to change the social order. I remain unconvinced that Slave Ship transcended a ritual of rebellion, a means of articulating a catharsis that ultimately serves to undermine political engagement. Rituals of rebellion can stimulate political activism, but they do so while diffusing an oppositional mentality. It is not an either/or but a both/and proposition.
The racial links between the black performers and the blacks in the audience was reinforced when at the end of the play, the black performers began to chant, “When we gonna rise. Rise, rise, rise, cut the ties, Black man rise.”28 As they chanted, they moved into the audience and shook the hands of blacks only. The performers invited some of the black audience members to dance with them on stage. While some performers and members of the audience were dancing, other performers urged the black audience members to chant along with them, “When we gonna rise . . . .”
Henry Lacey explained the meaning of the play’s dance finale:
The dance serves two vital functions. First, it invites the members of the audience to act out the aggression and violence which they have held in check both during the play and in their everyday lives. In this respect, the “loose improvisation” of this dance provides a real communal exorcism. The dance, with its unifying force, also celebrates the spiritual restoration of the black man. The final scene suggests that the primal energies of the African are now being reasserted, i.e., the former slave has reclaimed those vital elements of his being that were so brutally wrenched from him.29
The power of Slave Ship lay in its ability to enable the audience, albeit vicariously, to experience the immediate horrors of slavery, particularly as embodied in the wretched hold of a slave-trading vessel. Describing the reactions of New York drama critics to the play, Theodore Hudson wrote:
Clurman called it a “theatrical phenomenon,” Newsweek’s Jack Kroll reported the overwhelming intensity of the Free Southern Theater production of it; reviewer Edith Oliver declared, “the music by Archie Shepp and Gilbert Moses, and performed by six instrumentalists, sounds absolutely wonderful.” . . . Kroll reported that “. . . slaves reached out clawing for help from the New York Times’s Clive Barnes, a nausea-racked slave retched realistically in the lap of Norman Nadel of the Scripps-Howard papers, and during a slave auction a little black boy was “sold” to the New Yorker’s Edith Oliver.”30
It must have been extraordinarily difficult for Baraka to persuade black Americans to confront their slave past and in a manner that did not result in despair, rage, or a paralyzing shame. Many were undoubtedly hesitant to revisit this open historical wound that lay at the very center of their contemporary devalued status. Slave Ship was one of Baraka’s greatest accomplishments.
In an effort to alter black people’s political consciousness, Baraka wrote a series of agitprop plays. Whereas all drama can be construed as somehow didactic, agitprop drama is explicitly didactic. Kimberly Benston described Baraka’s use of this genre:
Every theatrical device is utilized with the primary intention of projecting political idea in an effort to educate black people to their fundamental tasks. This does not mean that these plays are entirely artless or dramatically uninteresting. On the contrary, they reflect Baraka’s search for a dramatic experience capable of reaching large numbers of black people as directly as possible. Hence, like most successful agit-prop, these plays are highly contrived and their appearance of simplicity is often gained with much effort.31
Even though Benston captures the playwright’s ambitions, he is far too generous and uncritical in his artistic assessment of his plays.
Many of the Baraka’s most popular plays from this era were agitprop productions, one of the best known being Arm Yourself or Harm Yourself. A very short and direct play, it begins in darkness as the police try to force open the door of an inner-city apartment. Once they break down the door, they storm inside and randomly fire their weapons. Next we see two black men and one black woman sitting in the living room of an apartment. Evidently, these three have survived a police assault. The black men begin to argue about how they can resist the racist police assaults. One of them suggests taking up arms, but the other believes that it would be futile. Their argument is interrupted by a black man who stumbles into the room and dies. His wife, the surviving woman, tells the two men that her husband was murdered by the police for trying to protect her from their assault. The argument between the two men continues and eventually escalates into a physical fight. While fighting, white police break down the door and kill the three black people.
Although the play’s message is contained in its title, the play also speaks to the dangers to black activists who spend more time arguing and fighting with one another than in preparing for the state’s impending assault. In this sense, the play could have been a critique of the U.S.-Panther conflict, but there is little reason to assume that Baraka intended it to be interpreted in this fashion.
A second, though perhaps less well known agitprop play, Police,32 picks up on the theme of police repression against black Americans. This play is about the traitorous behavior of a demented black policeman who indiscriminately murders a black man. The black community then persuades the black murderer to commit suicide. Once dead, his white comrades on the police force eat his body.
Not to be confused with Black Power Chant,33 Chant is not really a play but a ritual, a series of choreographed movements interspersed with the performers’ chanting. Beyond a nebulous invocation of the power of patriarchal black nationalist unity to defeat white racism, the meaning of Chant is unclear.
Black women begin the ritual by shuffling across the stage with their heads bowed. They form circles and perform syncopated movements while loudly humming. Black men enter the stage shuffling as the women depart. They also perform syncopated movements while shuffling and humming aloud. Women are then heard offstage shouting in unison “God God God God God God / Devil Devil Devil Devil Devil Devil.” The women reenter the stage shuffling in circular formations and repeating in unison “God God God / Black Truth Black Truth Black Truth / Help us Move, Help us Move.” They then shuffle in a circle around the men who are inside the circle chanting “Black Man’s Nation Black Man’s Nation.” After various other movements and additional chants, the play ends as the men and women engage in a final syncopated movement to the sound of the Impressions’ “We’re a Winner,” a popular song from the late 1960s affirming the ultimate victory of black people.
We can only wonder what was going through Baraka’s mind when he composed this chant. It was probably conceived as a piece that could be performed in order to intensify the energy and focus of a political gathering.
According to the notes in the published version of the play, Home on the Range34 was produced at Spirit House in the spring of 1968 and taken on tour that year by the Spirit House Movers and Players. One of the play’s main components is the music of Albert Ayler. A male voice chanting “black” and “blackness” is heard as Ayler’s music is played.
The play begins with Black Criminal looking through the window of a house. Inside, a white family is watching television and chatting. The chatter is audible but unintelligible. Black Criminal knocks at the front door and enters with a gun drawn. Despite showing fear and later humor, the family continues to speak in the unintelligible language.
SON: Gash. Lurch. Crud. Daddoon
FATHER: Yiip. Vachtung. Credool. Conchmack. Vouty
MOTHER: Greenchnool crud lurch.
Black Criminal is bewildered by their weird language. At one point, he shouts, “What kind of shit is this? What the fuck is wrong with you people?” The family responds with their unintelligible chatter and even explodes into laughter.
Criminal is then startled by laughter that comes out of the television set. Shocked and momentarily thrown off balance, Criminal points his gun at the television set, but the laughter coming from it intensifies. The family mimics the laughter on the television. They fall on the floor in a state of uncontrolled hilarity. Criminal is still baffled by the family and fires his gun at the television set. The family stops laughing when the television tube explodes. Black Criminal is still intent on persuading the family to speak in an intelligible language.
CRIMINAL: What? Godamit, why do you people talk like that? What kind of language is that? I’m no fool. I been places. What kind of language are you speaking?35
Criminal’s inability to communicate with Family continues. A voice is heard over a hidden loudspeaker saying, “This is the voice of god . . . everything’s cool! Criminal shoots at the hidden loudspeaker. It stops. The family gets up screaming in unison “light, light, light, light.” Criminal understands this word but doesn’t understand what they mean by chanting it repeatedly. He talks to himself about having entered the house to carry out an honest robbery and instead finds himself at the “funny farm.”
After falling asleep and being awakened by the family, Criminal leads them in a rendition of “American the Beautiful” and then a version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Tears form in Criminal’s eyes when he hears the Negro national anthem. As they all sing, a crowd of blacks crashes through the door. They are acquaintances of Criminal. He wonders why they have come. One of them puts on some records, and they all begin to dance. The family joins the blacks in dancing, but their dances are spastic, crazy, or homoerotic. At this point, Criminal turns to the audience and delivers a soliloquy that encapsulates the meaning of the play. As he talks, he periodically fires his pistol over the heads of the audience.
This is the tone of America. My country ’tis of thee. . . . This is the scene of the Fall. The demise of the ungodly. This is the cool takeover in the midst of strong rhythms, and grace. . . . Run bastards. Run. You grimy motherfuckers who have no place in the new the beautiful the black change of the earth. Who don’t belong in the motherfucking world. Faggot Frankensteins of my sick dead holy brother. . . . You betta’get outta here. . . . The World!36
After the Criminal’s speech, the stage darkens. The next scene is in the living room of the house where the exhausted family is lying in a circle in the middle of the floor, and the blacks are asleep around them. Criminal tries once again to engage Father in dialogue. Drowsy Father says that Family are evil ghosts without substance. All the blacks awaken, but the family remains asleep except for nodding Father, who again informs Criminal that the family used to be phantoms. One of the black girls who has awakened looks out the window of the house and says, “Good Morning, Men. Good Morning.” The play ends.
Sollors thought that Baraka’s use of an unintelligible language for the whites was a reference to the unintelligible “native languages” spoken by blacks in racist movies depicting Africa.37 The whites are overcome by the energy and dynamism of the black folks, a sign of the superior culture of black Americans over that of the “weird-talking greys.” Baraka uses tricks from the theater of the absurd to depict whites as not only mindless but decadent. Benston thought that the play was baffling:
A collage of absurdity, farce, social satire, mythology, and apocalyptic vision, it seems designed to make a series of quick, catching, and only loosely related impressions on a large audience. It . . . succeeds in making simple fun of “goofy” white Americans. Yet it is diffuse and unfocused, more entertaining than educational.
The youthful Benston, who seemed to be infatuated with Baraka’s work, was able to say of this play that it “is probably the least powerful of Baraka’s agitprop pieces.”38 One of Baraka’s favorite and most frequently used techniques for symbolizing the power of black people over whites was to depict the cowering of whites in the face of intensifying sounds of black music and rhythms of black dance, bringing to mind Baraka’s image of a thousand spooks storming America. What remains unclear about the play is the collusion of the blacks in the irrationality of the whites. If the whites are phantoms of former selves, how do we explain the ease of the blacks’ interaction with them? Even if the blacks are authentically alive, they remain confused and depoliticized. It is almost as if Baraka is chiding black people for loving to party in the face of everything. After all, Criminal parties, even though his thieving has been unsuccessful, and his friends come to party for no reason at all. Blacks, we might conclude, are willing to do anything in order to frolic, even if it means dancing and romping with the dead and deadly.
No figure throughout Baraka’s writing is more revered than Malcolm X, so it was not surprising that Baraka dramatized Malcolm’s life or, rather, the circumstances surrounding his assassination.39 The details of Malcolm’s murder will probably never be known. It is a subject that has been an endless source of speculation in black political circles. Malcolm’s larger-than-life image, coupled with the avalanche of public suspicions concerning his murder, would seem to make his assassination ripe for dramatic interpretation. Baraka’s interpretation of Malcolm’s death is governed by the assumption that the U.S. government in partnership with a cabal of powerful whites ordered his assassination. This was and remains a common belief in black activist circles, and given the subsequent exposure of the COINTELPRO program, this popular explanation is possible.
The setting of the first scene is Uncle Sam Central, a place where white men in Uncle Sam uniforms are obviously quite busy. In the hallway hangs a sign telling us that this is the Institute for Advanced Black Studies. Seen lying on stretchers are numerous drugged Negroes who are strapped down, awaiting their transfer to an operating room in the institute. Once inside, white surgeons remove their black “mindsouls” and brains and replace them with white ones. We are offered a glimpse into a classroom at the institute where four Negroes who have already been racially lobotomized are being taught to repeat “White is Right.” In another room we see a white man rehearsing several black men on their plans for entering the Audubon Ballroom, shooting Malcolm, and escaping during the ensuing commotion. We then look again into the institute’s classroom where the Negroes can be seen laughing uncontrollably at movies showing racist caricatures of blacks.
The scene changes. White men are discussing the readiness of their plans, and a Klansman is talking with the President of the United States (dressed as a hippie) about authorization for Malcolm’s assassination. He asks what is holding up the authorization. The hippie President answers that the authorization will soon arrive but that in the meantime the Klansman should make sure that his “people” are ready to go, particularly the Negro preacher. The Klansman tells the hippie President that the old nigger (the preacher) is giving them a little trouble but that he will be fine once he is paid.
Back at the institute, blacks can be heard repeating after their white instructor that the Greeks were the “beginning of thought—the beginning of Culture.” Soon the Klansman is on the phone with the Negro preacher, who is popularly thought to be a civil rights leader but who is actually on the Klansman’s payroll. Evidently the preacher is balking at participating in the plan to murder Malcolm, but the Klansman warns him that he must either go along with the plan or lose his congregation. In a quick succession of scenes, the fat Klansman is depicted in various absurd states of sexual intercourse with a dim-witted white woman. The President finally gets authorization for Project Sambo, the assassination of Malcolm X. The scene then switches to a studio at a television station where Malcolm is speaking into the camera. “No, finally it is the fact that you are evil. Evil. It is that simple fact that will animate the rest of the world against you! That simple alarming fact of your unredeemable evil. You are all disqualified as human beings, disqualified by your inhuman acts.” The Klansman sees Malcolm on the television and proclaims, “Yr right nigger but what good will it do you” and then laughs hysterically.40
The Negro preacher, disguised as a civil rights leader, is seen leading an interracial march. The marchers are chanting, “Let us be Americans.” The marchers, including some of the lobotomized black individuals earlier seen at the institute, are singing “We shall be white.” (I suspect that this song was sung to the tune of “We Shall Overcome.”) Most of the spectators along the parade route are white. They are either cops or civilians dressed in Uncle Sam outfits. The marchers kneel and pray in unison: “Oh white Northamerican God, help us to be like you and your loved ones.” At the very moment that they kneel, the President comes on television denouncing violence, although he cannot do it with a straight face. Soon afterward, the police attack the marchers, but no one lays a hand on the Negro preacher-leader. He stands tall and angelic. Amid the human carnage of the police assault, the preacher proclaims, “Go home my children . . . we have proven our point, that love is stronger than hate . . . we have won, we will be white, we will be whiter than they are . . . whiter, much whiter.”41
The scene shifts to the next morning and the interior of an airplane flying from Washington, D.C., to New York. On it are the lobotomized blacks who have been trained to assassinate Malcolm. Their white instructor is leading them through a final rehearsal of the plans. When the drill is finished, the “Star Spangled Banner” is played over the address system. As if on command upon hearing the national anthem, the assembled Negroes of the hit squad fall to the floor and proceed to lick the white man’s shoes. The scene shifts to Malcolm awakening at home. His wife and children are already up. His aide urges him to hurry so that they won’t be late. Malcolm, his bodyguards, and his family engage in friendly banter.
We next see simultaneous depictions of the President, the Klansman, and a corrupt white banker, all of whom appear to be anxiously awaiting an announcement of good news. At the same time, the Negro preacher is standing on stage before an all-white audience receiving an award “for meritorious service.” The white audience applauds vigorously.
Malcolm is now seen entering the Audubon Ballroom with his wife and children. Black people are also arriving. White cops are standing around. The hit squad also enters. One of them gives a knowing glance to a policeman. The scene flashes back once again to the Negro preacher on stage now joined by his wife. A close-up of his award is shown, a life-size watermelon made of precious stones and gold.
Now we see the Klansman, the banker, and the hippie President in their offices when the television news interrupts normal programming for a special bulletin. Although Malcolm has not yet been shot, it is apparent that the media are aware of the plans for his murder and so deliver a special news bulletin before it happens. Malcolm begins his speech. Soon he is gunned down as television cameras carry the events live. White men in various offices are seen “howling with laughter or even grinning half embarrassed at their victory.” The television announcer states, “Today, black extremist Malcolm X was killed by his own violence.”
The assassins disappear into a waiting car and helicopter. As Malcolm clutches his chest, the Negro preacher is seen putting on his Uncle Sam suit. The play ends as all the important white figures in the play are attending a party dressed in Uncle Sam suits. Later they can be heard chanting in unison, “white, white, white.”
The play could be viewed as a rather straightforward narrative of the logic behind Malcolm’s death. The play combines realism with moments of absurdity, but its principal effect is to hammer home the point that Malcolm was killed on the order of powerful whites who were afraid of the impact of his message on black people. Ironically, the narrative distorts important historical points in order for Baraka to tease out of Malcolm’s murder a black separatist message. For instance, the Malcolm who is deemed worthy of assassination in Baraka’s play is the dogmatic black nationalist Malcolm of his Nation of Islam days. But in real life, the man who was assassinated was the post–Nation of Islam Malcolm. Many contemporary interpreters of Malcolm believe that his political views became much more subversive to the state when he discarded the racial essentialism that Baraka found so attractive. Baraka’s play conspicuously avoids any mention of the Nation of Islam’s possible complicity in Malcolm’s assassination.
Like so many of his other works from this period, the play is characterized by a simplistic, Manichaean racial/moral divide: good blacks versus bad whites. Baraka could not have sustained this crude formulation if he had included the Nation of Islam as one of Malcolm’s foremost detractors during the period before he was killed. In addition, Baraka’s desire to maintain the dichotomy of good blacks / bad whites explains why he cannot grant moral autonomy to those blacks who participated in the assassination. The lobotomized blacks of Baraka’s plays are essentially white men, for in Baraka’s mind, no right-thinking black person could have helped murder Malcolm. Besides, if he had written the script to include the Nation of Islam in Malcolm’s murder (or even hinted at the possibility of its collusion in his murder), the play would have tilted toward the tragic or pathetic. Baraka of the Black Arts did not want to portray black life as tragic but as either victorious or heroic. Even though the forces behind Malcolm’s assassination are predictable in this play, Malcolm’s heroism is beyond question. Insofar as whites and white-like blacks murdered him, Malcolm’s heroism can be imagined as black-group heroism, as opposed to the individual heroism that would have resulted from implicating the Nation of Islam.
The image of the Negro preacher is too simplistic. He comes across like a crude opportunist and a mercenary fool. Instead of being a victim of his own misguided beliefs about the political efficacy of nonviolent civil disobedience, this caricature of King stands for nothing. It is not clear why he is in the play except to show the different reactions of white elites to Malcolm and King. The play also fails to sustain a rationale for the preacher’s involvement in the murder of Malcolm. Yes, he is on the payroll of the Klan. Yes, he leads a nonviolent demonstration in which the participants are clubbed by the cops. But at no point does this play tell us why this demonstration was a necessary prelude to Malcolm’s murder. Needless to say, Baraka makes all the white characters demonic.
Given the widespread belief in black communities that whites were somehow behind the assassination of Malcolm, it is not clear that this play actually teaches anyone anything; it simply mirrors existing theories. Worse, it does not offer a way out, for in his attempt to create whites as evil controllers of the world, Baraka inadvertently makes them omnipotent.
Bloodrites42 was first produced by the Spirit House Movers in Newark in 1970. It is not a play in any traditional sense of the term. Instead, one might consider it a ritualized dramatization of the power of black cultural nationalism to confront and defeat the cultural authority of the devils (i.e., white folks).
The ritual begins as a black man and woman enter the stage in various stages of awakening. They stumble, walk fast, stumble again. Black poets enter the stage reciting poetry. The poems awaken the black man and woman into a higher consciousness of sorts. Both of them begin to chant “Black Black Black Black.” The poets celebrate this new energy and unity by slapping their palms and repeating “Yeh, Yeh, Yeh.”
Uniformed Devils (whites) enter the stage with guns. They proceed to build a nation of blocks and then march around their creation. The poets repeat “Yeh, Yeh, Yeh,” but they now are unable to slap palms. The Devils counter their Yehs with “No, No, No.” It appears as if the Devils have brought with them a new spirit/force that undermines the connectedness of the black poets. Soon the Devils and the black poets are engaged in a “death struggle.” During the struggle, the poets regain their ability to slap hands. Sensing their problematic situation, some of the Devils leave the struggle and begin to sing “Eat of the host . . . love is the answer.” A black man and woman succumb to the allure of this devilish Christian message and begin to dance and sing with the Devils. They begin to sing to the other black poets but are interrupted by an unknown and unseen voice over a loudspeaker.
LOUDSPEAKER: A culture provides Identity, Purpose, and Direction. If you know who you are, you will know who your enemy is. You will also know what to do. What is your purpose?43
The wisdom of the loudspeaker is repeated several times. Afterward, the blacks rejoin the death struggle as they chant “Black People, Black People.” The Devils (whites) goose-step like the Nazis. Periodically they stop and identify themselves to the audience as various historical white figures: “I’m Jack Armstrong, I’m John Wayne, I’m FDR, I’m MacArthur, I’m Zeus, I’m the dudes that be with Sly.”44 At this point, the Devils form a goose-stepping chorus line, chanting: “We’re Devils, We’re Devils, OOOOO, We’re Devils, OOO You know, you knew it, you knew it, we knew it, we knew it, we knew it too, We’re Devils.” The struggle is transformed into a dance. The loudspeaker voice is heard again. “Identity . . . Purpose . . . and Direction . . . our purpose must be the building and maintaining of our communities, and restoring our people to their traditional greatness.” A voice over the loudspeaker directs several rhetorical questions to the audience while the actors on stage continue moving. The voice asks, “What can we do . . . who are we? . . . What is the purpose of your life? . . . what will you do with your energy? . . . in what direction?” In response, the heterosexual couples on stage embrace in a loving manner and meander throughout the theater in this embrace. As they walk, they speak to the audience: “We all need each other. If we are to survive. We all need to love each other. How does that sound? It sound good. We all need to sound this good, forever. What about you, sister? What about you, brother, you love somebody?” At this point the song “What Does It Take” by Jr. Walker and the All Stars is played throughout the theater.45
Soon brothers start running around on stage very quickly. Now energized by black love and unity, they confront the “crackers.” In the background, we hear the seven principles of the Nguzu Saba announced. As the black men run quickly and deftly, the whites move more and more slowly. Baraka’s poem “Raise Race Rays Raze” is recited. Whites fall to the floor as if dead. The play ends as a the cast dances around the slain devils. The victorious blacks sing the refrain from “Cool Jerk,” a popular song of that time: “Can you do it, can you do it can you do it can you do it.”
This dramatization attempts to valorize the strength of the seven principles of the Nguzu Saba. It is interesting to imagine how this play was received by audiences who were not already devout believers of Kawaida. As agitprop drama, the play’s message could easily be lost in the various twirls, shuffles, and marches. One of the criticisms of Baraka’s agitprop plays is their heavy-handedness. This attempt to use more subtle symbolic statements and body movements to convey the forces of good and evil does not quite work. The subtlety of the symbolic movements does not mesh with the blatant simplicities of the rhetoric. Throughout his agitprop dramas, Baraka repeatedly has white characters chant “white, white, white,” as if the audience could not otherwise discern their racial identities. Evidently, black audiences must be convinced that whites are obsessed with their whiteness. Nevertheless, such redundant chanting does not make an engaging drama. Baraka was so entangled in this “hate-whitey” syndrome that even when white characters are mentioned in the script instructions, he employed racial invectives (e.g., devils, crackers, beasts).
Like several other agitprop plays written by Baraka, Junkies Are Full of SHHH46 is specifically directed to a Newark audience. The play begins as a member of the Italian Mafia talks about his racist distaste for blacks. He admits that he has now been forced to hire a few niggers to sell drugs because Italian American youth are no longer attracted to the Mafia but are now going to college in pursuit of lawful upward mobility. The mobster is interrupted by a phone call from Hughie, the mayor of Newark (as in Hugh Addonizio). The mayor informs him that blacks in the city’s south ward are engaged in political activities. The mayor is angered because the Mafia has not fulfilled its agreement to placate the black community by means of drugs. The mafioso tells the mayor that he will cool out the niggers by flooding the south ward with drugs. The mayor is calmed.
In the next scene, Bigtime, a Negro drug dealer, appears at the office of the mafioso operative to buy more drugs. But he requests smaller amounts than usual, whereupon the mafioso supplier accuses him of using the drugs himself rather than selling them:
Look Bigtime, don’t shit me! The south ward ain’t high as it shd be. Too much activity going on up there. A guy called me just before you come in. Too much runnin’ around, political jazz going on over there, same in central ward. Now you told me you cd get people high.
Bigtime denies using the drugs but the Mafia figure knows that Bigtime is lying. Nevertheless, he needs Bigtime to distribute the drugs and calm the mayor’s fears.
The second scene begins with Bigtime on the street selling drugs to regular buyers, including a young boy. A man tries to exchange a stolen television for drugs from Bigtime, but the drug dealer refuses to buy it because the woman who owns the television is chasing the addict with a knife. She confronts Bigtime and curses him for his role in the cycle of drug addiction that led to the theft of her television. While walking down the street, two politically conscious black nationalists who are identified by their Africanized names (Damu and Chuma) run into the young boy, who is high on drugs. They are stunned by this child addict. They threaten him with a beating and demand to know who sold him the drugs. He tells them about Bigtime. Damu and Chuma are next seen devising a plan to rid the streets of Bigtime and his white suppliers. They discuss their plan with a group of Simbas, the black young men who comprised the paramilitary wing of Baraka’s CFUN organization.
In scene 3, we see Damu and Chuma talking with Bigtime on the corner. He denies selling drugs. They ask about his supplier, but Bigtime refuses to tell them. Then the two nationalists grab Bigtime and confiscate and burn his drugs while he looks on in shock. The pills that he also sells are taken from his pockets and thrown down the sewer. Bigtime screams, knowing that this theft of his drugs will probably lead to his death at the hands of the Mafia. He knows that he cannot return to the mafioso with the true story of what just happened. In anguish, he tells Damu and Chuma that they might as well kill him, for he is as good as dead. They beat him mercilessly. Writhing in pain, he tells them about his Mafia connection. Damu and Chuma demand that Bigtime take them to his suppliers. At first he refuses, but they trick him into believing that they are interested in selling large quantities of drugs. Bigtime recognizes this motive as valid but tells them that they did not need to steal his drugs or hit him if getting into the business was what they wanted to do. Bigtime calls his Mafia man and arranges a meeting. The Mafia man is elated to hear that even black nationalists are willing to sell dope. Repeating what Damu and Chuma told him, Bigtime tells the Mafia figure that even the brothers in the Committee for Unified Newark are staggering around high. Unknown to Bigtime, Damu and Chuma hold a strategy session with the Simbas. They secretly devise a plan of action.
The fourth scene begins with the Mafia figures laughing about the prospect of getting black nationalists high on dope. They not only relish the possibilities of the huge profits they could make, but they also believe that the federal law enforcement authorities will treat them favorably if they are successful at “cooling out” the black nationalist activists. The Mafia are awaiting Bigtime and his soon-to-be drug-dealing, black nationalist acquaintances. Bigtime, Damu, and Chuma are seen entering the mafioso’s building. When the Mafia man opens the door, he and the other Italian American drug suppliers are killed in a hail of bullets fired from the guns of the Simbas who have run through the door undetected. Bigtime is purposely not killed in the attack. He begs for his life and is reassured by Damu that they are not going to shoot him. Sensing his precarious situation, Bigtime begins to proclaim his aversion to drugs. He even recites the antidrug message that he will now carry to the streets. Instead of shooting him with a gun, Damu and Chuma inject him with an overdose of heroin. Bigtime screams, knowing that the overdose will kill him, and he dies. A sign is pinned to Bigtime’s body.
The final scene shows Bigtime and one of the Mafia figures tied to a light pole in the middle of a busy intersection in Newark’s black community. The sign on Bigtime’s body reads “slave.” The sign on the Mafia operative reads “master.” A needle is visibly sticking out of Bigtime’s arm. Street brothers are seen gazing at the two dead bodies, whispering and then quickly scattering. The stage goes black.
Given the cataclysmic impact of drugs in black urban neighborhoods, the play addressed an important issue. Black urban residents must have found the play compelling. The play is informative in depicting the link between the proliferation of drugs in black communities and white political domination. And the play de-romanticizes black urban drug dealers at a time when such figures were sometimes celebrated as urban folk heroes. In contrast, the play romanticizes the black nationalists, depicting them as selfless creatures who have only the best interests of the community at heart.
An unresolved tension in the play lies in its affected realism. On the one hand, it is a realistic drama of life in black neighborhoods. Yet the play is utter fantasy. It requires nothing less than a “willing suspension of disbelief” to imagine the black nationalists defeating drugs and the Mafia in such a violent and intimidating manner.47 If the lesson of the play is the need for black nationalists to take violent action against drug dealers, why hadn’t Baraka and his Simbas done this? Why create a fantasy of black nationalist agency?
One of the linchpins of the consciousness of the subjugated is the willingness of the oppressed to engage in fantasies of freedom. Black Americans have excelled in this creative endeavor through religious beliefs that depict emancipation in the “by and by.” Although Baraka’s play does not call for blacks to wait for a drug-free life in heaven, it does encourage the audience toward wishful thinking. It is a play premised on feelings of black impotence. I can imagine people walking out of the theater saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if someone really did that?” Ironically, in writing a play about the dramatic defeat of Mafia drug lords by the actions of black nationalists, Baraka effectively admitted that he and his confreres would not do so in real life.
Although The Sidney Poet Heroical48 was not published until 1979, the play is a quintessential Baraka production of the Black Arts era. The central characters in the play are supposed to be close approximations of Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte.49 In this play, Sidney comes from the West Indies seeking fame and fortune. He immediately meets Pearletta, a black woman who aspires to be white. She speaks to Sidney only after she covers her face with a white mask. Not only does she reject Sidney’s advances, but she later fraternizes with a white man who has horns and a tail. She impresses the devilish white man with stories of her love of whiteness and disgust for blacks.
Sidney’s life changes when he meets Lairee Elephont (later referred to as Elephonty). Lairee introduces Sidney to the world of instant black upward mobility which, in this play, means crass deference to all things white and a vehement desire to escape any attachment to blackness. A chorus warns Sidney to beware of the enticements of whiteness. He might be going in “over his head” into a world of decadence and death. But Sidney, tired of impoverishment and life on the streets, ignores the chorus and proceeds to model himself after Lairee. Throughout the play, one of the major inducements to this self-hatred-driven mobility is both financial gain and greater access to beautiful white women. Lairee is paired with a white woman who is, of course, depicted as possessing a crude and somewhat uncontrollable sexual desire for black men.
Sidney becomes a success. White people love his movies. Baraka even mentions actual Poitier films in the script. After the opening of each picture, Sidney is invited to a party where white people lavish praise on him. White women grab for his body. In the meantime, Sidney has started a relationship with Pearletta, the black woman. She now accepts him, since white people celebrate him as a success. After the opening night of Defiant Ones in which Poitier stars with Tony Curtis, the blacks in the audience boo the ending as intensely as the white folks cheer. The ending of the movie sees the Poitier character give up trying to escape in order to rescue the Curtis character. After the parties for Raisin in the Sun and Lilies of the Field, Sidney abandons Pearletta for white women. Even the nuns from Lilies of the Field are rubbing their bodies against Sidney in a sexually promiscuous manner. The blind young white woman who is befriended by Sidney in Touch of Blue refers to him as her “nigger helper.” She tells him, “I can’t see that you’re a colored nigger.” Baraka reserves his snidest comments about Poitier in regard to Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and Katherine Houghton, the white actors in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In the play’s most hilarious scene, Baraka has Sidney act like a hypersexualized buck in the living room before an approving Hepburn and a tolerant dad. Spencer Tracy gives Poitier a “pop-quiz” on the great thinkers of Western civilization. Sidney passes the test with ease, thereby earning Tracy’s approval.
Next we see Sidney in bed next to a naked white woman. He is awakened by a talking, life-size Oscar award. The Oscar notifies Sidney that he should take a good look at himself. Sidney goes to the mirror and discovers that his skin has turned white. He is astonished at this development and covers himself with brown makeup so as to retain his black public identity. The chorus reappears and chides him for his new appearance. They remind him of their previous warnings. Sidney gets in touch with Lairee to ask his help in this matter. Lairee tells him that his problem isn’t so bad and that he, too, has been wearing skin-darkening makeup for the same reason. Loss of color, in Lairee’s mind, is a minor cost for their success in the white world. Sidney is thoroughly disgusted by Lairee and recognizes his sickness.
The turning point in Sidney’s understanding of his racial self-hatred comes when he is offered the movie role of a white ape who is taught to read and write. Sidney refuses to play this role on the grounds that it is racially demeaning. Lairee tries to take the role from Sidney, but the movie producers really want Sidney to play White Pongo, the ape. Sidney still rejects it. The chorus appears and helps Sidney return to the black fold, Kawaida style. Predictably, Sidney and Pearletta get back together, but this time both confess their deep love of their black selves and the broader black nation. The play ends with their getting married in a Kawaidan ceremony.
In his review of the play, theater critic Mel Gussow wrote: “This exuberant comedy, written in 1969 but for obvious reasons—too hot to handle—not produced until now (by the Henry Street Settlement’s New Federal Theater), permits the author to express himself simultaneously as artist and activist.” Although he believed that the portraits of the two main characters were “malicious, even savage,” he thought that the actors playing the roles were able to make them charming. Gussow clearly perceived the play as politically engaged art, but it is not clear that he grasped Baraka’s actual political intentions.
The play is not just a theatrical equivalent of a roman à clef, but also a devastating commentary on the image of the American black in popular culture, the image demanded by whites and delivered, to order, by blacks. Sidney Poet is heroic because society needs him to be heroic. The author’s criticism—and the play is an act of criticism as well as a piece of theater—is not directed so much against a specific personality as against a role (and movie roles) thrust upon him. He is projected toward his fate.
Gussow suggested that the play might have been improved had Baraka stepped aside as director. Nevertheless, he concluded that it was “a corrosive indictment of an American dream—and the plundering of that dream by the expectations of society. It makes us realize what a loss it was for the American theater when Mr. Baraka turned his attention primarily to political activism.”50
Unlike Gussow, who saw a live performance of the play, I only read the script, and so my take on the play was quite different. Although I found it at times funny, the humor is not sustained. The play can easily appear insipid because Baraka was unable to restrain his satire. The lack of subtlety is reminiscent of other didactic plays written by Baraka during this period. The sledgehammer-like satirical overkill makes it more like a farce, thereby turning the play’s meaning on its head. In this case, the play’s resolution, in which Sidney and Pearletta adopt black cultural nationalism, becomes a ludicrous finale. The characters of Sidney and Lairee are far too overdrawn, plastic, and doctrinaire. There is literally no moment in the narrative that conveys any hint of human complexity. No character is developed. We do not even know why Sidney refuses to play the role of White Pongo, for before his refusal, Sidney had not shown any evidence of a prideful racial consciousness. The narrative of the play is somewhat asinine: success for blacks in mainstream America demands self-hatred and assimilation. The play’s conclusion is trite. Imagine the former assimilationist-minded now-reformed black-loving Sidney becoming a practitioner of Kawaida! Tragicomedy has run amok! In his imprisonment in a warped notion of what constituted an authentic black person, Baraka of the Black Arts period was incapable of writing plays that granted any racial integrity to bourgeois blacks. This play is yet another example of the pedestrian art that he produced during the Black Arts period.
Sidney Poitier is ripe for dramatic interpretation. His rise to stardom was based on the role of the unthreatening black male. Poitier became acceptable to mass white audiences precisely because he never showed a sexual desire for any of his white female costars. He was a safe black man, a sort of cultural eunuch. Even in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Poitier is never seen embracing or even touching his white fiancée in any sexually or nonsexually suggestive manner. But in reversing Sidney’s image, Baraka overkills him. Instead of the black eunuch, Baraka’s Sidney is momentarily a black beast driven by passion. Yet Sidney, the black buck, does not generate fear in whites. Instead, his sexuality releases whites from their sexual inhibitions.
Before Sidney Poet Heroical was published, Baraka worried about being sued for libel.51 The possibility of a lawsuit evidently became an obstacle to having the play produced. Because the play combines music, dance, drama, and film, the production costs also hindered its production. Evidently, Poitier did not sue Baraka or the theater that produced the play—probably Baraka overestimated the significance of his play to Poitier. Certainly this well-established Hollywood figure knew that his prominence could not be threatened by a marginal play written by a self-anointed Imamu.
Why did Baraka satirize Poitier and Belafonte so viciously? Both men were far more progressive and politically engaged than most other black actors. Belafonte had come to Newark to campaign for mayoral candidate Ken Gibson, and Poitier and Belafonte donated some of the receipts from the Newark premier of their movie Buck and the Preacher to the New Jersey delegation preparing to attend the National Black Political Convention in Gary.52 Baraka could have celebrated them as politically conscious black actors.
Because Baraka was not subjected to rigorous critical analyses by those critics sympathetic to his political agenda, he was rarely challenged to realize his considerable talents. Instead, the mediocre was called brilliant and the rote labeled innovative. The tragedy of Baraka’s writing lies in the pathos of a black intellectual groupthink that substituted political concerns for artistic quality. I am not sufficiently naive to have imagined Baraka as a man open to critical dialogue. After all, he was the Imamu. Baraka had to wait until he rejected black nationalism to admit that much of what he had written then was quite reactionary, but he never openly admitted that his writing during this period was aesthetically mediocre.
When Baraka moved from the Village to Harlem, he was accompanied by an extraordinary diminishment of his artistic ambitions. When writing for an explicitly black audience, Baraka’s art became increasingly simplistic if not overtly asinine.53 Indeed, Baraka usually wrote his best work when he imagined himself not writing exclusively for blacks. Baraka imagined the black mass populace as less sophisticated than they actually were, and many of Baraka’s agitprop plays were downright condescending to black audiences. His image of the backward black community was a crucial fictitious construction, for it allowed Baraka to pretend that he had a superior political consciousness, a consciousness that gave him the right to teach and inform other blacks about their struggle. In hindsight, we can see that much of Baraka’s understanding of politics and political change was far less sophisticated and informed than the ideas held by many “average” black Americans.
This is one of the significant paradoxes of Baraka’s black art. In order to reach the black masses, Baraka assumed that his plays could not be complex, nuanced, or ambivalent. In his mind, the black community could not adequately engage or interpret complex materials. Ironically, Baraka’s Black Arts era art was fundamentally informed by vestiges of the very racism that he thought he was in the vanguard of destroying. When most politically engaged in behalf of blacks, Baraka was most thoroughly estranged from them.