The logic of retribution: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman

African American Review, Summer-Fall, 2003 by Nita N. Kumar

The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s has been criticized for substituting a neo-African essentialism for what was identified as Western essentialism. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is among those who have critiqued the Black Arts Movement for promoting a "poetics rooted in a social realism, indeed, in a sort of mimeticism," in which the "relation between black art and black life was a direct one" (102). In place of the sociopolitical and empirical binarism of black and white, Gates advocates understanding "race" in the postmodernist terms of a "trope" in which the categories of black and white are not preconstituted. Amiri Baraka's work has been seen, from this postmodernist position, as advocating an essentialist and unproblematic conception of black identity.

This essay attempts to rethink the question of Baraka's binarism. The argument is that, while Baraka's retributive logic is focused on the need for assertion of ethnic and racial identity, his work also reveals complex negotiations with such binary categories as black/white and art/activism. In his essays and theoretical pronouncements Baraka sets up a fixed, non-dialectic opposition between black and white, and the categories have the double load of racial and metaphysical meaning. The white Western usage of black as a signifier of evil, death, and darkness is directly reversed, and white is made to carry the suggestions of sickness, death, and absence. When we analyze blackness in Baraka, we realize that it is both the goal to be passionately struggled for, and the innate being of the African American. The impassioned rhetoric that is built up in Baraka's essays around the terms black and white often projects the two worlds as mutually and self-evidently exclusive. Below the level of passionate rhetoric, however, the categories remain tenuously defined and shifting. Quite often the terms beg the question. "The Black Man must aspire to Blackness," says Baraka in "The Legacy of Malcolm X" (Home 248). If blackness is both the natural and the ideal state, then the term black evidently is not definitive, and needs to be defined. The charge of Baraka's propounding "black essentialism" also needs further examination, since the polarization of white and black in his work may be more apparent and strategic than real.

Rejection of the White World

What was the significance of Baraka's move from downtown New York to Harlem in 1965 and his resolute severing of ties with the white world? His essays written around this time are aggressively anti-white, and in them Baraka dwells on the necessity of destroying white culture in order to build black culture and consciousness. The white world is repeatedly described as evil, sick, and dying, and the creation of a positive black consciousness is crucially linked to the declaration of white culture as evil and insane. "In a time of chaos, in a time of trouble, we're asking for unity, black unity as defense against these mad white people who continue to run the world" (Baraka, Home 234). In a similar key, Baraka's compatriot Larry Neal, in "The Black Arts Movement," declares that the "motive behind the Black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at the world" (30). "Hate whitey" was the rallying point around which much of the black nationalist activity was being organized. "It was our intention," Baraka writes in his Autobiography, "to be hard and unyielding in our hatred because we felt that's what was needed, to hate these devils with all our hearts, that that would help in their defeat and our own liberation" (216).

This aggressive and unyielding anti-white position, which was a cornerstone of black nationalism in the middle and late 1960s, needs to be seen against the background of the integrationist Civil Rights Movement of the preceding decades. Martin Luther King's scheme of race relations proposed integration as a spiritual ideal that would engender acceptance and love between the two races. But Harold Cruse, in his influential book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, struck out at liberal Civil Rights leaders chasing the mirage of social integration, as if there existed "a great body of homogenized, inter-assimilated white Americans" with whom blacks could integrate (9). He rejected the notion of the melting pot and claimed that, while other ethno-religious groups had no desire to integrate with each other, American blacks alone had been mesmerized by this ideal. Black nationalism, he concluded, was the only viable course for blacks trying to forge their individual and collective identities.

These rejections of the white world, however, cannot simply be understood as realistic and attainable goals. In some cases they were inspired by the various struggles of independence being waged across Africa and Asia. There is, however, a crucial difference, since the African American could aspire to nationhood only in spirit, not material control of land. Therefore these gestures of rejection have to be seen primarily as ideological and rhetorical strategies for the empowerment of the community.