The Corrupted Warrior Heroes: Amiri Baraka's The Toilet

The Corrupted Warrior Heroes: Amiri Baraka's The Toilet ROBERT L. TENER •• AMONG THE FEW WHO HAVE WRITTEN.CRITICALLY AND FAVORABLY about Amiri Baraka's (LeRoi Jones') The Toilet/ Paul Witherington in "Exorcism and Baptism in LeRoi Jones's The Toilet" has demonstrated that the play is "the acting out of a ritual,,2 dramatizing the passage from boyhood to manhood of a group of black teenage boys. The final events signify their leader's "mature victory over the hyper-masculinity of the gang and over his own divided self.,,3 Embedded in this essay, however, is another idea that Witherington has not developed as fully, namely "that private level of response is the only feasible one for expressing genuine mature feeling in a world dominated by stereotyped responses.,,4 That this is one of the major concerns of the play can be shown by examining the ritual which Baraka develops, the movement from boyhood to manhood. But the concept means more than what Witherington suggests. It is not just the exit from the maternal world in the house into the arena of the gang_ Instead it is the ideological drift from the sense of what is a boy to the sense of what is a man. Indeed the remove is marked by the gradual development of an inner picture or concept (often a stereotype) of what is a man. Its form can be simplified through a syllogism: a man is so and so, or does this and that, or thinks in such a way; when a boy becomes so and so, or does this and that, or thinks in such a way, then he is a man. What is the concept of maleness that the gang members have accepted and from whence is it derived? How does it affect their relationships and ability to cope with their emotions? These are some of the important questions to ask about the play. Their answers bear on the physical actions and language strategically assigned to each character by Amiri Baraka. But the inner sense of masculinity on which the play is anchored cannot be separated 207 208 ROBERT L. TENER from Amiri Baraka's image of what is a man, or more specifically from his vision of the black male intellectual and his relationship to his black brothers in a white society. The problem in The Toilet is part of the larger issue of who are the mythic black heroes and models from whom young black boys derive their images ofwhat is a man. The source of their heroes like their idols determines not only their psychological awareness of self but also helps shape their daily behavior. As the promising young intellectual, the writer of a book of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), and the recipient of a Whitney fellowship (1961-1962), Amiri Baraka was most clearly aware that what he had studied in college was primarily the literature and the heroes of white societies. His writings are filled with allusions to Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and others. But he was also aware that the heroes of a white society, especially middle class, are frequently drawn from other than literary sources. When he was going through his period of intense introspection, transmuting his own image from the man who had become a literary hero in the white world to the man who conceived of himself as a leader of his people, he was obviously aware of mythic heroes and their impact on the development of the individual psyche. In his poem from that first book of verse, "Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today," wherein he refers to the great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca and to his own play The Toilet, he explores the idea that his life is like the white man's myths. Humming lines from Lorca's biting poetry on New York and reflecting a mood reminiscent of Strindberg's marital difficulties, he exclaims "It's so diffuse/ being alive. Suddenly one is aware/ that nobody really gives a damn."s As his introspective mood shifts to include his specific problems in writing The Toilet, he adds "An avalanche of words/ could cheer me...