-
Looking into Black Skulls: American Gothic, the Revolutionary Theatre, and Arniri Baraka's Dutchman
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
GEORGE PIGGFORD Looking into Black Skulls American Gothic, the Revolutionary Theatre, and Amiri Baraka's Dutchman Amiri Baraka's one-act play Dutchman (1964) utilizes gothic conventions-the macabre setting of a haunted subway car "[i]n the flying underbelly" of Manhattan (Baraka, Dutchman 3); a quasi-supernatural seductress who is closely related to the mythical Adam's malign, vampiric first wife, Lilith (Sollors 137); and discourses that thematize the "unspeakable" sins of incest and parricide.! It has, however, not been read as exemplary of the American gothic tradition. This seems true for at least three reasons. First, while both Leslie Fiedler's classic examination of American gothic in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) and Baraka's play associate "the Negro problem in the United States ... [with] the gothic horror ofour daily lives" (Fiedler 493), Fiedler's study focuses mainly on the trope of blackness utilized in the writing of white Americans. Baraka's text, by contrast, thematizes the trope of whiteness in the black imagination. In Baraka's writing, it is the blacks who are being terrorized, not the whites. Second, Fiedler asserts that only in fiction does American gothic reach "the level of important art" (Fiedler 142), rather than in poetry or drama. Although the plays ofAdrienne Kennedy, particularly her Funnyhouse ofa Negro (1962), have been examined as gothic (Blau 53 I), readings of the Mrican-American gothic tradition have focused almost exclusively on fiction or, more recently, the "nonfictional" slave narrative.2 Third, even though Baraka's 143 144 RACIAL POLITICS IN GOTHIC TEXTS Dutchman explores both "the theme of slavery and black revenge ," which is, according to Fiedler, the essential sociological theme ofthe American tale ofterror, and that ofincest, which is its "essential erotic theme" (Fiedler 414), the Black Power political project which informs these themes in Baraka's text has been criticized for its emphasis on polemics over aesthetics.3 Houston Baker has rightly observed that "the radical chic denizens of bohemia and the casual liberals of the academy" (Baker 91) have never recognized Baraka's achievement as a playwright and a poet because his "brilliantly projected conception of black as country-a separate and progressive nation with values antithetical to those ofwhite America-stands in marked contrast to the ideas set forth by Baldwin, Wright, Ellison, and others in the fifties" (Baker 106).4 That is, according to the integrationist politics that continue to dominate discussions of race in the United States, what we might in the 1990S call the "Mrican--American problem" is indeed seen as the AfricanAmerican 'sproblem to examine and solve, not the white's. Baraka's Black Power political agenda, which perceives the United States as a society at least as black as it is white (Baraka, Home 85), a country built on the gothic horror ofslavery and its concomitant "oppression and destruction" (Baker 106), stands in marked contrast to the general integrationist bent of American racial politics . The call to revolutionary action inscribed into his drama demands an inversion ofboth the American social system and its gothic tradition. Dutchman amply illustrates the persistence ofracial tension in the United States in the 1960s and represents an emerging militant attitude on the part of American blacks and on the part of blackAmerican playwrights.5 Baraka himselfhas claimed that his play is an early example of the "Revolutionary Theatre," a theater , like Artaud's "theatre ofcruelty," that "should force change; it should be change" (Baraka, Home 210).6 Baraka continues: The Revolutionary Theatre must EXPOSE! Show up the insides ofthese humans, look into black skulls. White men will cower before this theatre because it hates them. Because they themselves have been trained to hate. The Revolutionary Theatre 3.86.235.207] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:46 GMT) LOOKING INTO BLACK SKULLS must hate them for hating. For presuming with their technology to deny the supremacy of the Spirit. They will all die because of this. (Baraka, Home 210-2 I I) Baraka's strong words point emphatically toward the end of this theater: a revolutionary change in social structures beginning with an examination of the black psyche. This will allow the ghosts of the past, the "white terror," to emerge from black skulls and eventually be dispelled. The idea that theatrical performance should attempt to force social change was initially articulated by Antonin Artaud in The Theatre and Its Double: "our present social state is iniquitous and should be destroyed. If this is a fact for theatre...