D u t c h m an

“I see art as a weapon and a weapon of revolution.”

- Amiri Baraka

A play by LeRio Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka,

in which he presents an image of American society showing an encounter
between a black man and a white woman who meet in a train.

Significance of the Title and character

 The title and the names- Clay & Lula – draw connections between black
enslavement and original sin or the original American sin of importing
slaves from Africa.
 The title of the play, Dutchman, is chosen to emphasize the major
theme in the play- racial discrimination.
 The title bears mythical & allegorical implications.
 The name of the play is also symbolic, referring to the legendary ghost
ship the Flying Dutchman, doomed to endlessly sail the seas leaving only
death in its wake; the title also suggests a connotation to the Dutch
slave ships that transported blacks to enslavement.

At the beginning of their journey, Lula tries to seduce Clay, and the two
characters engage in a flirtatious conversation. Then Lula insults Clay
reminding him of his origin as a black man and a slave and his attempt to
be part of the white society (or what is known in America as assimilation or
racial integration). Clay, who first accepts these racial insults, passively,
violently reacts against Lula when he forces her on her seat, slaps her and
threats to kill her. As he bends over to take his books and tries to leave,
Lula aggressively stabs him while the other passengers watch the violent
scene silently. She orders them to get rid of Clay's dead body and to get
off the train at the next stop. The play ends as it begins as Lula
approaches another young black man who is obviously her next target of
seduction and humiliation
 Historical Context of the Play

 Civil Rights in the 1960s

The year of Dutchman’s debut, 1964, was a tense year in the United States—especially
for civil rights issues. Both violent and nonviolent protests occurred daily in contention
of these issues. The 1964 Civil Rights Act made provisions for fair voting, use of public
facilities, education, and employment practices. Baraka, being a political activist as well
as a playwright, consciously used art as a means to achieve social justice. His
play Dutchman participated in the discourse of hatred and violence of the times, taking
a strong stand against one segment of the black population.

 Black Arts Movement

In the course of defining a new, self-determined black population, blacks
eschewed the terms “negro” and “colored” that were associated with racism and
oppression and demanded to be called “black” or Afro-American (and later,
African American). Both terms affirmed positive aspects over negative ones:
intensifying color to the extreme—black—and underscoring the African heritage
of former slaves. These two trains of thought merged in the search for a new
“black” identity. Styles, language, and values from African cultures were adopted
and sometimes freely adapted to formulate the style of the “Afro-American.” The
phrase “black is beautiful” both acknowledged the aesthetic beauty of the black
body and affirmed the value of black culture as the new black aesthetic as well.
Along with this dramatic shift in cultural identity came a shift in the assessment
of black art.

Black Arts Movement

 The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an African American-led art movement, active
during the 1960s and 1970s.Through activism and art, BAM created new cultural
institutions and conveyed a message of black pride.
 The beginnings of the Black Arts Movement may be traced to 1965, when Amiri Baraka,
moved uptown to establish the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) following
the assassination of Malcolm X.
 The Black Arts Movement grew out of a changing political and cultural climate in which
Black artists attempted to create politically engaged work that explored the African
American cultural and historical experience.
 Black artists and intellectuals such as Baraka made it their project to reject older political,
cultural, and artistic traditions.
 Critical Analysis

 T he play has third- person limited perspectives, consistent with theatrical

convention.
 The tone of the play is patronizing, contemptuous, seductive, mocking,
sardonic, confused and angry.
 The mood of the play is suspenseful, anxious, threatening.
 In the play Dutchman, the protagonist is Clay and the antagonist is Lula.

In Dutchman, the key to the allegorical meaning of the relationship

between Clay and Lula lies in the relationship between Adam and Eve. Eve
(innocently or not, depending upon one’s view), seduced Adam (with an
apple, a symbolic element of that story) into partaking of forbidden
knowledge. In Baraka’s allegory:
 Lula personifies both white dominance and (Baraka’s)
disgust for black assimilation, while
 Clay personifies passive acceptance of low social
status by blacks and their blind refuge-taking in the
culture of their oppressor.

What is new in the play is Clay's presentation as an educated man, though

naive and harmless at the beginning of the play, while the white woman is
portrayed as being racially violent and oppressive in this brief encounter.

The setting of Dutchman also carries symbolic weight. Baraka drew

attention to the importance of the train’s symbolism in the stage
directions, where he characterizes the subway as “heaped in modern myth.”

This is a play about the modern myth of black assimilation: limiting oneself
to existence on the low-status paths of the “flying underbelly of the city.”

The entire play takes place in a subterranean universe, a subway car

hurtling towards its destination. The train slows down, stops to let
passengers on and off, and then regains speed. There is a sense of
movement and progress, but the train is actually repeating the same route
over and over.
It can be described as a political allegory dealing with racial relations
during Baraka’s times.

Clay is merely following the “track” of white culture, sensing forward

motion but in reality restricted to the underbelly, or lower class, of the
thriving city above. Subway trains ferry people back and forth across the
city, traveling the same short distances over and over again, following a
repetitious daily schedule—the path is cyclical.

Likewise, Lula’s process of seducing and killing her victims is cyclical. She
indicates that she has done this for years and has a “gray hair for each
year and type.”

There is an autobiographical element in the play. At the time that Baraka

wrote Dutchman, he was part of the Bohemian literary culture of Greenwich
Village (the Beats) and was married to a white woman, with whom he co-
edited a literary magazine. Baraka’s real life was a successful version of
Clay’s, however; he awoke from his dream of assimilation in time to save
himself from his protagonist’s fate.

The entire play is set inside a single car upon a subway train in New York
City. The subway system is meant to connect to the city, but it becomes a
metaphor for what horrible acts are being committed beneath its surface.
It is both beneath the surface of the city and beneath the surface of the
individual human being. Also, the subway is a means of transportation.
Everyone aboard the train is going somewhere, and they are going to get
there traveling in the same direction as the people with whom they ride.
Yet, the play suggests, although we are heading into the future together,
there are still many who do not want to share the ride with each other.
 THEMES

1. Race and Racism

 Racial oppression and racial hatred lie at the heart of Dutchman. Clay
is a representative of the form of assimilation practiced by many of the
black middle class, a pursuit of white values and culture through
“white” education.
 Lula seems to hate Clay on sight, explaining that he is a “type” she has
seen often. She infers that he has a black friend with a “phony English
accent.” Lula hates Clay not just because he is black, but because of his
obvious attempts to discard his racial heritage. He tries desperately to
distance himself from his slave heritage, even at the cost of
remembering that he is black. As he states, he was the one student at
a “colored college” whose role model was not Averell Harriman (a
white American statesman) but Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, a white
(French) poet.
 Clay wants to distinguish himself, but he limits himself to a superficial
shift, choosing art over politics.
 Clay also fails to recognize the irony that he is as deluded as the other
students at the black college, who aspire not to be black leaders but
white ones.
 Clay’s pretension is not about becoming an educated black; he actually
seems to aspire to be white—or at least to so steep himself in white
intellectualism that his color will not matter. Lula reminds him that he
is black, and, when she calls him a murderer, it is apparent that it is
his black self that he murders.
2. Violence and Cruelty

 Clay steadfastly seeks to maintain his composure in the face of Lula’s

violent language and cruel reminders of his lowly status in society. The
question becomes, how much cruelty will Clay tolerate before he
stands up for himself, for the manhood Lula questions? The dramatic
irony and symbolic tragedy of the play occurs in its final violence,
when Lula stabs a knife into Clay as he reaches for his books to leave
her.

 It is dramatic irony in the sense that he has finally made a stance and
shown his manhood, but he fails to recognize that Lula intended all
along to destroy him utterly.

 His tragic ending is symbolic of the violence of white oppression, which

regularly murders blacks in both a figurative as well as literal sense.

 The play’s increasing dramatic tension leads to the final act of

violence against Clay. In Baraka’s value system, Clay deserves this
violence for not using a more direct and violent, means of bettering
his life and silencing the likes of Lula.

3. Power of Art

 In Clay's monologue, he articulates a view that is close to Baraka’s

own: that art is a powerful way to purge one's deepest emotions.
 Clay speaks of the anger of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, for
example, and says that they wouldn't have needed to make music if
they'd just killed some white people.
 Since they cannot really do that, they sing and they play. They
channel their rage, despair, and cry for change into their art, just as
Jones himself did as the founder of the Black Arts Movement.
4. Passivity

 Intersecting the theme of violence and cruelty is the theme of passivity.

Clay passively accepts a second-class role in society, a role that by its
very definition can never produce excellence because it is a weak copy
of the original, white culture.
 Black assimilation consists of adopting the values and norms of the
oppressing society. This passive act of accepting the culture of the
dominant power engenders a race of followers, not leaders. At another
level, Clay’s passivity exists in resorting to words instead of action. He
responds to Lula’s taunts with sophisticated-sounding rebuttals. When
he finally erupts in rage, it is apparent that his nonchalance had been
a mask.

5. Sexism

 Lula is a mythical, evil Eve, enticing Clay (Adam, who was made of
clay) with sexual wiles and murderous intent. Like Eve, she eats and
offers apples. In fact, she offers Clay so much of the fruit that he
cannot eat any more.

 She is the Gorgon/siren/fury, the archetypal devouring female. She

figuratively emasculates Clay, repeatedly challenging his “manhood”
with verbal jibes; she then physically destroys him and throws his
body off of the train.

 She tempts Clay with sexual promise, murders him dispassionately

with a quick stab, and then prepares herself for her next victim.
6. Stereotypical Sexuality of African-American Men

 She is actually bored by the endless cycle of her role; she has “a gray
hair for each year and type” of man she’s gone through.

 Baraka asserts that mainstream society largely expects the average

African-American male to assume the socially-manufactured persona
of the swaggering, ultra-alpha, hyper-sexualized male.
 Lula is written as a representation of how white mainstream culture
pigeonholes and ultimately tries to define the sexual identity of the
African-American male. Ironically, Lula is a temptress patterned
after Eve, as evidenced by the presence of the apple: she is the
aggressive one, initiating the barely-restrained sexual innuendoes.
 The play suggests that the norm for men of Clay’s age and generation
is that they ought to be the sexual aggressor.

Allegory

Lula's Abuse of Clay

Baraka portrays Lula as a kind of white witch with murder on her mind, and
most significantly, as a symbol of the white world and part of the greater
construct of a racial allegory. What Lula does to Clay—abuse, manipulate, mock,
taunt, castrate, and degrade—is what white America has been doing and continues
to do to black people. Clay, what with his malleable name, is an Everyman in this
respect, and the play can certainly be viewed as an allegory of race relations and
power dynamics.
 Symbols

1. Apples
Lula brings apples onto the subway and gives one to Clay, even
insisting he take one or more. This is a symbol of temptation, like Adam
and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It foreshadows what is going to happen
to Clay: he is going to lose his innocence and die. In Dutchman, the image
of the apple, Eve’s prop, threads throughout the play. Lula first walks onto
the set daintily eating an apple. She offers one to Clay, and then offers more
and more of them to him until he refuses another. Her bounty of apples
suggests that their evil poison is so pervasive that Clay will never be able to
avoid contaminating himself.

2. Clay's Suit
A suit, especially the one that Lula describes Clay as wearing, is
a symbol of class, business, capitalism, and social status. It suggests a solid
job, a solid paycheck, and a certain adherence to the rules and norms of
society. Lula uses this sartorial symbol to mock Clay's pretensions and to
suggest that he is being fake. He is a fake white man, she claims, and she
wants to stir up his real spirit.

3. Clay's Name
Clay is a malleable material, capable of being shaped into anything
the manipulator desires. Clay in Dutchman is similarly malleable in Lula's
hands. She manipulates, seduces, lies to, and twists Clay. She rouses him in
many ways and forces him to take on new forms of behavior. In addition,
Clay’s name connotes a black Adam, one who is molded by white society, like clay.
The accumulation of related symbols and the structure of the relationship
between Clay and Lula confirm the significance of this reading.
 Conclusion

The complex interweaving of ethno political themes with the mytho-symbolic and

religious motifs gives more depth to the dramatist's vision and affirms beyond all

doubts that Dutchman is a revolutionary work of the highest caliber, and its

creator is a writer of superior talents who possesses the ability to suggest a

multiplicity of meanings in a simple and direct way. He was committed to the

issues of racial identity and social injustice with the aim of provoking social

change. He believes that the theater should be a weapon in the struggle

against social injustice and the inhumanity of the whites in their racial

treatment of the blacks.