The logic of retribution: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman

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

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Lula's stereotyping of Clay contrasts pointedly with her representation of herself as indeterminate, changeable, and unpredictable. Clay's efforts to locate and fix her image are rebuffed in a weary kind of manner. She meets his searching comments with the dismissive "I told you I wasn't an actress ... but I also told you I lie all the time. Draw your own conclusions" (27). Whatever information she does give about herself is supposed to come as a surprise to Clay. The reference to her age in her comment, "My hair is turning gray. A gray hair for each year and type I've come through," and the information that she lives in a tenement because it reminds her "specifically of my novel form of insanity," are unexpected bits of news to Clay (13, 24). Even her generalization about "life" as "change"--"Our whole story ... nothing but change"--is undercut immediately by the cryptic comment, "Except I do go on as I do" (28). Her changeableness and "playfulness," initially innocuous, turn menacing and finally destructive when she kills Clay after he has harangued her about himself and his tortured and hidden psyche. She becomes hard and businesslike as she says, "I've heard enough," and plunges her small knife twice into Clay's chest (37). Lula's apparent randomness takes on a sinister, premeditated aspect as she orders the other subway riders to throw Clay's body out, starts straightening her things and getting everything in order. It is as if she has timed and controlled the entry of the next young Negro who walks into the coach, completely oblivious of the preceding action. The suggestion of premeditatedness of Lula's plan is there in the play at the beginning, when the direction reads that she "begins very premeditatedly to smile," as well as at the play's end, and thus frames the main action of the play (4). Within the play, however, even her premeditatedness remains an element of her unpredictability.

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Lula as the Dominant "Self"/The "Other" as the "Fake Self"

In marked contrast Lula's sense of her own identity, her perception of Clay is a series of stereotyped images hurled at him without any pretense or apology. She tells him disarmingly, "You are a well-known type" (12). She evokes every stereotype that has historically defined the African American, from the escaped slave to Uncle Tom to a "middle-class fake white man" (34). Stereotyping is the most efficient form of lying that helps Lula control Clay. The strategy by which she transforms stereotypes into structures of power and control is by working into the images an element of culpability, which can then become the reason for destroying the black man. "Everything you say [and do] is wrong," Lula tells Clay, and this works as the premise on which perceptions are built. As a nigger, he is an "escaped nigger"; as a non-nigger; he is "just a dirty white man." Not fitting the image of a real "nigger," he becomes a "liver-lipped white man" (31). Ridiculing Clay for wearing a jacket and tie, Lula tells him the brutal truth that these things belong to the tradition he ought to feel oppressed by. She characterizes him as either guilty or fake, with little possibility of an authentic existence.

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The logic of retribution: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman

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

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