Looking into Black Skulls: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and the Psychology of Race

Looking into Black Skulls: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and the Psychology of Race GEORGE PIGGFORD Houston A. Baker, Jr. has rightly observed that "the radical chic denizens 0: Bohemia [and] the casual liberals of the academy'" have never recognize, LeRoi Jones's/Amiri Baraka's achievement as a playwright and a poe because his "brilliantly projected conception of black as country·- a separatl and progressive nation with values antithetical to those of white America stands in marked contrast to the ideas set forth by Baldwin, Wright, Ellison and others in the fifties.'" That is, according to the integrationist politics tha continue to dominate discussions of race in the United States, what we migh in the 1990S call the "African-American problem" is indeed seen as th, African-American's problem to examine and solve, not the white's. Baraka', Black Power political agenda, which perceives the United States as a societ~ at least as black as it is white,3 a country built on "oppression and destruc tion,"4 stands in marked contrast to the general integrationist bent of Amen can racial politics..The call to revolutionary action inscribed into his dram. demands a rethinking of both the American social system and the ways that i·is typically examined in the generally liberal critical discourses of the pre dominantly white academy. Baraka's one-act play Dutchman (1964) amply illustrates the persistence 0 racial tension in the United States in the 1960s and represents an emerginl militant attitude on the part of American blacks, and on the part of blacl American playwrights. According to Samuel A. Hay, the African Americ., Protest Drama of W.E.B. Dubois, which viewed theatre as an integrationis "political weapon,'" was transfonned by Baraka into the separatist Black Rev olutionary Theatre of the 1960s, which "no longer represented appeals t, share power," but depicted "seizures of power.''" Baraka himself has claime, that his play is an early example of "The Revolutionary Theatre,'" a theatre like Artaud's "theatre of cruelty," that "should force change; it should b, change" (Baraka, Home 210). Baraka continues: Modern Drama, 40 ([997) 74 Looking into Black Skulls 75 The Revolutionary Theatre must EXPOSE! Show up the insides of these 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 must hate them for haling. For presuming with their technology to deny the supremacy of the Spirit. They will all die because of this. (2 I(}-J 1) Baraka's strong words point emphatically toward the end of this theatre: a revolutionary change in social structures. 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 the theater to be preoccupied with, it is even more a matter for machine guns...8 Theatrical groups such as Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theatre, founded in 1951, attempted to put Artaud's theories into practice. For th,e directors and performers of the Living Theatre: "Life, revolution, and theatre are three words for the same thing: an unconditional NO to the present society."9 The Black Revolutionary Theatre represents an attempt to racialize the Artaudian "theatre of cruelty" by instigating its audience to act in revolutionary and violent ways to overthrow the white-dominated American social order. For Baraka, the theatre of which Dutchman is an example is centrally political ; it will ultimately lead to the (at least) symbolic death of the white race.'o It is also, however, a psychological study, though one that exposes the limitations of the psychoanalytic process. As Samuel Hay states it, "Black Revolutionary drama deconstructed both Outer Life and Inner Life."" In Dutchman, Baraka attempts to psychoanalyze the black male in America, typified by the character Clay; his technique is meant to lay bare the social forces that make black men into neurotic subjects.12 His cure for their neurosis is race revolution and mass murder. Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks, extols the power of language rather...