Dutchman (Themes)

Themes

Race and Racism

Racial oppression and racial hatred lie at the heart of Dutchman. Yet this play is not a simplistic denunciation of racism but rather one long invective against one (in Baraka’s view ineffective) solution to racism: assimilation. 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. Clay carries a stack of books, and he wears the garb of the well-educated. 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.” Clay, she tells him, looks like he is trying to grow a beard and has “been reading Chinese poetry and drinking lukewarm sugarless tea.” These are the trappings of the Bohemian intellectual, such as Baraka was himself at the time he wrote this play.

Lula hates Clay not just because he is black, but because of his obvious attempts to discard his racial heritage. She berates him for his meek acceptance of assimilation as a desirable goal, saying, “Boy, those narrow-shoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by.” When she taunts him that his grandfather was a slave who did not go to Harvard, he responds lamely that his grandfather was a night watchman. In other words, 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. It is left to Lula to clarify that he would have to be the black Baudelaire, and she chides him “I’ll bet you never once thought you were a black nigger.” 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.

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.

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. A black Baudelaire can never surpass Baudelaire’s artistry because by adopting both the genre and the criteria for judging it, invention is stymied. The very impetus to invent is destroyed. No leader, political, artistic, or social, can emerge in a copycat society — nothing grows in a stagnant pond. The stagnation of black society in a sterile, white pond can only lead to a downward spiral in imagination, performance, and self-image.

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.

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 is a sterile goddess, with hands as “dry as ashes,” luring him to her room as “black as a grave,” a dwelling that she promises will remind Clay of “Juliet’s tomb.” She tempts Clay with sexual promise, murders him dispassionately with a quick stab, and then prepares herself for her next victim. 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. Lula belongs to the sisterhood of “Crow Jane,” or “Mama Death,” Baraka’s idea of the siren muse who lures black artists to pervert their black artistry to fit the hollow, sterile criteria of white art.

Topics for Further Study

• Ironically, when Baraka moved Dutchman to a Harlem theater in order to reach a black audience, the play was quickly rejected by the audiences because they saw it as promoting hatred of whites. Is this a racist, white-hating play?
• Clay’s reaction to Lula is infuriating because he desperately tries to maintain his composure, his “mask” of bourgeois pretensions, in the face of her ever-more vitriolic racist jibes. Why doesn’t he simply ignore her, move to another seat, or ask her to leave him alone? What is the significance of his “fatal attraction” to her?
• When Clay finally reacts in outrage, his outburst proves cathartic to the audience as well as to himself. Aristotle in his Poetics suggested that catharsis is the objective of all tragedy: that feelings of pity and fear raised in the audience would be purged by the resolution of the tragedy. Over time, critics have debated what Aristotle meant by catharsis. Is it that the audience learns vicariously to avoid the problems that led to the downfall of the tragic hero? Is it that the balance of the audience’s own emotions of pity and fear is restored through vicariously watching them resolved in the tragic hero? Or is it that the tragic hero serves as a scapegoat for feelings too strong for the audience to admit? Which of these readings seems to fit the cathartic experience of Baraka’s emotionally demanding play?
• In Dutchman, Baraka suggests that Clay’s pursuit of assimilation with American bourgeois culture, in the form of his intellectual pretensions, is a path of self-destruction. Baraka suggests an alternative: to develop a separate black value system and a new black aesthetic. He purposely built theaters and community centers to promote the cultural ideas of the Black Arts Movement. From a modern perspective, in what ways has this cultural and aesthetic movement of the 1960s succeeded? In what ways has it failed?