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Drama
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)
Amiri Baraka (1934- ) was born Everett LeRoi Jones
in Newark, New Jersey. His father, Coyette LeRoy Jones, was a postal worker
and his mother, Anna, was a social worker. Jones attended public schools
in Newark and, after graduation from high school, enrolled at the Newark campus
of Rutgers University. After a year there, he transferred to Howard University
in Washington, D.C., where he studied literature and philosophy for two years.
After graduation, he left Howard and enlisted in the United States Air Force.
After completing a tour of duty, he returned to New York City, where he discovered
a community of art, literature, and a kind of social freedom quite rare in
1950s America. More specifically, in 1958 he met and married Hetti Roberta
Cohen, a Jewish-American woman with whom he had two daughters, and lived in
the East Village, a neighborhood that writer John Gruen (among others) described
as a "New Bohemia." There, unlike the rest of America, interracial couples
were free to marry and live; there, the arts were in full flourish.
For the next several years, Baraka dedicated himself
to writing and became associated with the Beat movement spearheaded by such
figures as Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. In his
autobiography, Baraka explains that he "took up with the Beats because that's
what I saw taking off and flying and somewhat resembling myself. The open
and implied rebellion—of form and content. Aesthetic as well as political.
. . . I could see the young white boys and girls in their pronouncement of
disillusion and .removal' from society as being related to the black experience.
That made us colleagues of the spirit."
By the early 1960s, however, he was no longer able to
see the relationship between blacks and whites in quite the same collegial
way. In 1960, he and other black intellectuals toured Cuba, where he saw
first hand revolutionary change wrought from violence. Sometime around 1963,
LeRoi Jones started moving toward Imamu Amiri Baraka (he would later drop
the Imamu, meaning "spiritual leader"), which meant ultimately a transition
from active force in the bohemian counterculture to fiery spokesman in a simmering
black revolution. For the next decade or so, Baraka would dedicate himself
to an ongoing Black Arts Movement, a cultural wing of a more militant variety
of black nationalism. His transition was completed, in part, by one moment:
the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. And with this shift, the once profoundly
interrracial bohemian began to espouse black separatism, both politically
and aesthetically. His 1969 poem "Black Art" sounds the call for writing
that sets "fire and death to/whities [sic] ass" and helps establish "a black
poem/And a Black World."
Throughout the 60s and 70s, Baraka continued to write
plays, poems, and critical essays delineating the stakes involved in a black
revolution and contemplating the means of accomplishing one. This includes
the founding or co-founding of numerous cultural organizations: The Black
Arts Theatre and School (1965), The Black Community Development and defense
Organization (1968), and others.
Since the mid-1970s, Baraka has shifted his politics
again, although in this later instance more subtly than before. As he describes
it, Baraka now defines revolution "in Marxist terms," not nationalist ones.
He admits to having "struggled as a Nationalist and found certain dead ends
theoretically and ideologically, as far as Nationalism was concerned, and
head to reach out for a communist ideology." He continues to write and teach,
and remains a major figure in the history of American drama.
Production Note: Dutchman was written in the
midst of the Civil Right movement in America. Interestingly enough, however,
it was first produced at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York on a double bill
with Edward Albee's one-act play Zoo Story. It thus played to an integrated
audience, one supportive of the avant-garde, even absurdist leanings of Albee's
work at the time. It ran for 232 performances, a surprising and considerable
success, and was adapted twice into a 1966 film of the same title starring
Al Freeman, Jr. and Shirley Knight.
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Selected Bibliography of Baraka's Works
Plays
Dutchman (1964)
The Slave (1964)
The Toilet (1964)
The Baptism (1965)
Great Goodness of Life (A Coon Show) (1967)
Madheart (1967)
Police (1968)
What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production? (1979)
Boy and Tarzan Appear in a Clearing (1981)
Poetry and Prose
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note. . . (poems, 1961)
Blues People: Negro Music in White America (prose, 1963)
The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America (editor, 1963)
Home: Social Essays (1966)
The System of Dante's Hell (novel, 1966)
Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961-67 (1969)
Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (co-editor with Larry Neal, 1969)
Hard Facts (poems, 1975)
Poetry for the Advanced (1975)
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1984)
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Further Reading About Baraka's Work
Adams, George B. "Black Militant Drama." American Imago 28 (1971):107-28.
Benston, Kimberly W. Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976.
______________, ed. Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978.
Brown, Lloyd W. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.
Fox, Robert Elliot. Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.
Gayle, Jr., Addison, ed. The Black Aesthetic. New York: Doubleday, 1971.
Gwynne, James B., ed. Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch. New York: Steppingstone Press, 1985.
Harris, William. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1985.
Hay, Samuel A. African-American Theatre: A Historical and Critical Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Hill, Errol. "The Revolutionary Tradition in Black Drama." Theatre Journal 38.4 (1986): 408-26.
Hudson, Theodore. From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka. Durham: Duke UP, 1973.
Piggford, George. "Looking into Black Skulls: American Gothic, the Revolutionary Theatre, and Amiri Baraka's
Dutchman. American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy. Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 1998. 143-60.
Sollors, Werner. Amiri Barka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist Modernism." New York: Columbia UP, 1978.
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