Abstract
The search for an ethnic form, for a black theatre that was not white theatre in blackface, led Baraka and other artists during and after the Black Arts movement to experiment with integrating music and dance with the theatrical event. Paul Carter Harrison’s neo-African dramatic poetics, which he names Kuntu drama, exemplifies this orientation. Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant (1967) is one of Baraka’s most powerful plays in which he brings elements from the Yoruba tragedy into a defiant conjunction with his own vision of a revolutionary theater. This essay examines Slave Ship for Baraka’s experimentation with dramatic elements, incorporating Wole Soyinka’s description of Yoruba tragedy, and shows how these artistic innovations are bound up with the realization of the black nationalistic goals.
Harrison, in Kuntu Drama: Plays of the African Continuum, suggests the models and analyses the structure of a fulfilling black theatre. Identifying the Kuntu forces as those of “Song, Dance and Drum,” he argues that “the souls of black folks” cannot be expressed through words alone, and that instead of a play, an event must be orchestrated to “capture the rhythms of that life, committing the community to a form of total engagement of body/spirit” (Harrison 7). Harrison spoke very highly of Slave Ship as being “indicative of the ends” of Kuntu drama (Harrison 8).
Slave Ship is visualized as an event, a performance which creates an enveloping effect using light and darkness, sounds and smells, speech and silence. Speech and words are not privileged over the other sensory theatrical elements, and are often used as mere sounds. All these elements together create a pervasive and oppressive effect, or what Baraka calls “a total atmosfeeling,” which is meant to envelop the audience as much as the actors (132). The slave ship becomes the symbol of the African American historical condition. The play finally shows the triumphant victory of African Americans over the oppressive power, but suggests that African Americans will continue to be on a slave ship until they break out of this prison of history by revolutionary action.
The basic conceptions and structure of Slave Ship are illuminated if one looks at the description of Yoruba tragedy as explained by Wole Soyinka in his essay “The Fourth Stage.” The fourth stage, the stage of transition is described as a metaphysical abyss. The passage from Africa to America, from freedom into slavery can be seen as the “fourth stage,” the zone of transition, and the gulf of the dissolution of the self. Music is the emanation of the will when the human being is faced with the gulf and threatened with the dissolution of the self.
The conclusion of the play envisions a triumphant end to this tragic journey, as the people sing “Rise, Rise, Rise,” and after killing both White Voice and Black Preacher, engage in a triumphal dance. This end remains problematic because it enacts an unproblematic transition from the mythic plane to the social-realistic plane, and translates tragic action into revolutionary action. Baraka transposes the basic conceptions of Yoruba tragedy onto the contemporary African American situation, using the form as a site of contest.
Works Cited
- Baraka, Amiri. The Motion of History and Other Plays. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1978.
- Benston, Kimberly W. Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976.
- Harrison, Paul Carter, ed. Kuntu Drama: Plays of the African Continuum. New York: Grove Press, 1974.
- Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). Home: Social Essays. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1966.
- Soyinka, Wole. Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays in Literature and Culture. 1988. London: Methuen, 1993.