Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual

Chapter 5: The Quest for a Blacker Art

5 The Quest for a Blacker Art THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT The collapse of the Black Arts Repertory Theater provided the impetus for Jones to reflect on the peculiar needs of black cultural-nationalist institutions . BART’s inception and demise became centerpieces of discussions in Afro-American intellectual circles similarly intent on establishing black cultural -nationalist institutions in other locations. At least for the moment, many traditionally educated black intellectuals and artists tried to incorporate the“commonplace”Afro-American individual into their artistic agendas. The“black masses,”however imagined, became the ideal audience. This quest to increase accessibility to a broader black audience profoundly affected black artists’genres and styles. Once“ordinary”black people became the exemplary audience, black writers had to create poetry, novels, and plays especially for them. Because BART was frequently emulated throughout the nation as a model of innovative, politicized black public intellectual/artistic outreach, it must be considered a bedrock of the Black Arts movement. While we can remain skeptical about assigning to any single event or person the responsibility for launching a national arts movement, we must recognize that Baraka was a pioneer and leader in this endeavor. Before going to Harlem, Jones delivered what now appears to have been a manifesto for the emerging Black Arts movement. In April 1965, he was on a panel that brought together black dramatists as well as black and white drama critics to talk about“What Black Dramatists Are Saying.”According to Genevieve Fabre, he delivered a ferocious lecture that“brought an abrupt end to the hope of reconciliation between black artists and representatives of the dominant culture.”1 Later published as “The Revolutionary Theater” in the July 1965 edition of Liberator, a black cultural-intellectual journal,2 this essay proclaimed that the new revolutionary black theater would expose the moral pretensions of white Americans not only in the theater world but also in everyday American life. Jones declared, “White men will cower before this theater because it hates them. . . . The Revolutionary Theater must teach them their deaths. It must crack their faces open to the mad cries of the poor. It 171 must teach them about silence and the truths lodged there.” Jones designated the revolutionary theater as the theater of victims, and as such, it must “accuse and attack.” Its dramatic sensibilities would show the black public the wretchedness of their plight in the United States and do so in ways that shamed their political passivity and tolerance for subjugation. And what we show must cause the blood to rush, so that pre-revolutionary temperaments will be bathed in this blood, and it will cause their deepest souls to move,and they will find themselves tensed and clenched,even ready to die, at what the soul has been taught. . . . The force we want is of twenty million spooks storming America with furious cries and unstoppable weapons. We want actual explosions and actual brutality: AN EPIC IS CRUMBLING and we must give it the space and hugeness of its actual demise . The revolutionary theater, which is now peopled with victims, will soon begin to be peopled with new kinds of heroes—not the weak Hamlets debating whether or not they are ready to die for what’s on their minds.3 An incendiary essay, “The Revolutionary Theater,” is full of graphic and ridiculous images of white folks in various stages of depravity. Given the frequency of its citation,“The Revolutionary Theater” appears to have been one of the most widely read essays of the Black Arts era. But then, what black reader in tune with the consciousness of the time would not embrace the image of “twenty million spooks storming America”? Jones believed that his essay forged a new direction for the black theater. He also claimed to have long subscribed to the ideas of “The Revolutionary Theater” insofar as the lead characters in his previously written plays— Dutchman, The Slave, and The Toilet—were black victims. But does the mere presence of victims as protagonists identify a drama as revolutionary? Dodging this issue, Jones’s “Revolutionary Theater” uses wordplay to seduce the reader. Once enveloped in the essay, readers may imagine themselves seated before a rapidity of furious staged images that crescendo in ethnic catharsis. The dramatization of “the destruction of America”4 was electrifying and emotionally explosive. But despite the allure of such drama to an audience of the racially downtrodden, the centrality that Jones grants to ethnic catharsis and other emotive responses...