essential dichotomies
Amiri
Baraka The Toilet, first presented
in New York at St. Mark’s Playhouse, on December 16, 1964; reprinted from
Douglas Messerli and Mac Wellman, eds., From the Other Side of the Century II: A New
American Drama 1960-1995 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1998)
On
the surface, Amiri Baraka’s short play of 1964, The Toilet, appears to be nothing but a documentation of a bullying
incident in a high school, with a majority of Black boys beating a frail white
boy, Karolis, who has apparently written a kind of love letter to the head the
Black gang, Foots (or Ray). It might be superficially represented as a kind of
abbreviated “rumble” scene out of West
Side Story.
But the authenticity of Baraka’s language
and his briefly catalogued “types” at the beginning of the script, quickly—and
the play is performed, surely, at nearly lightning speed—transforms this work
into a work which, quite subtly, explores a whole series of dialectical issues:
masculinity and its inverse, weakness, power and powerlessness, futility and
hope, justice and brutal punishment, leadership and rebellion, and, most
importantly, love and hate.
The play begins, strangely enough,
somewhat offstage, as several members of the gang, the “short, ugly, crude, and
loud Ora” (a.k.a. Big Shot), the “tall, thin, and somewhat sensitive,” Willie
Love, and the “big, husky, somber, and cynical” Perry report to each other that
their would-be victim is upstairs hiding in various classrooms as others of
their group attempt to seek him out. Like young, angry youths everywhere, these
boys not only report the goings on, as they meet in the stinking, high-school
boy’s bathroom, but swear at each other, and pretend to battle, all the while
showing off their supposed virility and strength through their acts of
urination and other uses of their sexual members. The following “attack” on
Karolis, accordingly, is not only a response to his homosexual challenge to
their leader, Foots, but is to be a kind of proving of the only thing these
desperate kids have left, their “manhoods.”
Through their jests with each other, we
quickly learn that several of these young men do not even have parents, others
live lives of destitution, and nearly all of them are doomed to failure in
their future lives. They describe each other the way the society around them
has, with words like “bastid,” “punk,” “muthafucka,” “sonofabitch,” and, yes,
“nigger.” These are the lost boys of the street, forced to gather in the
institution which they so detest.
Only Foots (Ray) seems to have any
intelligence, as he reports that the authorities, evidently, think highly of
him, and hope that we will prevent any attack of another student. Baraka
describes him, quite poetically, as “short, intelligent, manic,” a “possessor
of a threatened empire.” That empire, of course, is a mean-spirited gang, ready
to implode or explode, depending on which series of emotional responses they
take. They have already exploded by the time they bring Karolis to their lair,
having beaten him so badly that for much of the play he cannot even talk.
Foots wisely refuses to beat him any
further, insisting that to do so would be meaningless, since the white boy is
already sprawled out upon the floor. But the others, particularly Ora, are
determined to see more blood in revenge for his daring. Another white boy,
Donald Farrell (“tall, thin, blonde, awkward, soft”)—who seems tangentially
part of the gang, but is not very welcome in its midst—tries to talk them down
from doing any further damage, bravely refusing to leave the toilet unless
Karolis goes with him. He fails, and is literally physically expelled from
their group.
Foots, accordingly, is in a difficult
position. If he does not show enough outrage for Karolis’ challenge, he will be
seen as weak, possibly even in cohorts with the boys offer to “blow him.”; yet
he rightly sees no pleasure in fighting someone who has already been felled. A
lesser playwright may have had this character throw a couple of more
sucker-punches and left it at that. But Baraka intensifies the situation by
suddenly having Karolis demand a fight with Foots, a fight he knows he cannot
win. It may be that the gay boy has even a lower self-esteem than the Blacks in
this work; or, at least, in fighting he might have some sort of physical
contact with Ray, whom he describes as “beautiful.”
Foots, now gradually being described by
Karolis and the others by his ordinary name, Ray, continues to refuse to fight.
But Karolis, quite eloquently (described by the playwright as “Very skinny and
not essentially attractive except when he speaks”) continues to challenge his
“rival,” bragging that he will “kill him.” Suddenly everything changes, as the
gang members, eager to see the fight, move in on the two, egging on the fight
Ray is trying to prevent. When the fight does get underway, it is Karolis who
gets Ray into a stranglehold, while the gang head is rendered inoperative; when
his power is suddenly thrown into question, the others, in response, enter into
the fray, beating Karolis again into submission, as Ray lays also flattened
across the floor.
Finally getting their revenge, the others
move off, as Karolis drags himself into a toilet cubicle to recover. And, here
again, Baraka surprises us, as with the last of his stage instructions:
After a moment or so karolis moves his hand. Then his head moves
and he tries to look up. He
draws his legs up under him and pushes
his head off the floor.
Finally he manages to get to his hands and knees.
He crawls over to one of
the commodes, pulls himself up, then falls
backward awkwardly and
heavily. At this point the door is pushed
open slightly, then it
opens completely and foots comes in. He
stares at karolis’ body for a
second, looks quickly over his shoulder,
then runs and kneels before
the body, weeping and cradling the head
in his arms.
I
don’t know how this scene is represented in the stage production—I’ve never
seen the play performed—but the way scene is written seems more appropriate for
film than for stage, simply because we are, at first, not told that it is Foots
is about to enter the cubicle, the fact of which is kept from us, in the
directions, until the very last moment. Similarly, his actions—reminding us of
both a kind of crucifixion and pieta, as well as an expression of sorrow and,
finally, homosexual love—startlingly reveals that the young “skinny” white boy
has won this battle, at least, that the bullied has defeated his tormentors
through his unconditional love. What we might have perceived as a set and
predetermined series of events is, in fact, flexible. The realities of youth,
as we must always admit, are never quite what they seem to be. And with one
fell swoop, this gifted playwright dispenses with the very essential
dichotomies which he seems to have created. Everything in this play, we
suddenly recognize, is not so “black and white” as it originally seems.
That the angry revolutionary of 1964—by
this time Baraka had already traveled to Cuba, arguing that art and politics
should be indissolubly linked, the same year as The Toilet writing his screed of white and black hate, Dutchman—is equally surprising—unless
you know the Baraka I and others knew—a man who might continually be seen, as The New York Times obituary yesterday
reiterated, as a “provocateur”—but as a true “optimist,” even though he
admitted his optimism was “one of a very particular sort.”
Los Angeles,
January 11, 2014
Reprintted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January
2014).
Yesterday,
December 10, The
New York Times announced that my poet
friend Amiri Baraka died on Thursday at the age of 79.
Early
on in my own publishing, I was skeptical, I must admit, of poetry that
combined, as Baraka increasingly did, politics as its subject. It’s not that I
particularly disagreed with the political viewpoints Baraka so eloquently
expressed, but I felt that poetry and fiction was simply not the best venue for
those ideas. Over the years, however, I increasingly begin to perceive how
impossible it was to separate one from the other. Although I continued to focus
on the aesthetic issues behind the
political, Amiri put his political ideas forward, sometimes quite blatantly, in
his fiction, poetry, and drama.
Despite my own antipathy to that
approach, I did include Baraka, working closely with him, in my From the Other
Side of the Century: New American Poetry 1960-1990 anthology. The poems of that selection seem to me to indicate his
great lyricism, as well as his politically nuanced concerns; here’s one from as
late as 1993:
From Alba
I’ve talked (remember
him)
before
of twisting
I’m not sure the twisting
was not
the waves upon
the shore
twisting
to be always
to be always
what came after
is there too
So I keep us clear
& with us connected
as our breath
to we
twisted its
transportation
twisted
The twisting of
this poems reality reminds, in part, of the twisting realities of so many of
his poems and plays.
In the late 1970s I recall listening,
quite intently to an interview with him—in Dutch, which strangely, relaying on
my Norwegian and German, I quite thoroughly comprehended—with Mac Wellman’s
wife, Yolanda, in which Baraka revealed his mixed responses to these issues.
For, despite Baraka’s political radicalism and, what I mention above, his intentional
role as provocateur, the writer was rather intensely complex, a man who deeply
involved with jazz who could create deeply lyrical writing in both poetry and
drama.
As I got to know Baraka better (I never
knew his former self, LeRoi Jones), I realized that his outspoken political
views were balanced—perhaps inspired—by his natural skepticism, even hostility,
of/to any authority—particularly white authority. In a three day celebration of
Italian-American poetry, the second of its kind organized by Luigi Ballerini
and Paul Vangelisti at the University of California Los Angeles, I got to know
Baraka far more personally, growing very fond of him as he, under his breath,
brilliantly satirized the many academic statements that always occur at such
university-sponsored events. I too have a difficulty with authority,
particularly white authority, and we laughed together numerous times, forging a
bond between us. Baraka had long-ago, gleefully, positioned himself as the bad
boy of the U.S. literary scene, and he delighted always in playing that
role—even if, at times, he uttered his positions only under his breath. He was,
after all, basically a gentleman.
After distributing one of his last poetic
collections, Funk
Lore, published by Littoral Books (the
Dennis Phillips, Martha Ronk, and Paul Vangelisti-run press in Los Angeles), he
turned over republication rights to my Green Integer Press. Because of
financial difficulties, I’ve still not reprinted that important work, which I
hope still to reissue in the future.
At other times, he could not resist
playing his role in more absurdly public ways, such as naming a number of his
fellow professors at Rutgers as “Klansmen” and “Nazis,” or, even worse, by
writing the post 10/11 diatribe “Somebody Blew Up America,” which suggested
that Israeli’s were involved in that devastating attack, and had notified
Jewish workers beforehand to stay home on that day. I cannot imagine how the
Baraka I knew could have scribbled such nonsense; but it was equally stupid, I
would argue, for the governor of New Jersey to have chosen such a figure as a
“poet laureate,” a ridiculous position for nearly anyone, but a true temptation
to misbehave by Baraka. Amiri was never at his best in playing such absurdly
“official” roles. If often wrong-headed, the poet was always, at least in his
own thinking, honest, a man of conflicting personalities intentionally
demonstrating the effects of American culture on anybody who truly cared about
serious issues. How could anyone like him—a radicalized Black man, later an
outspoken Communist critic of white and Black culture—ever expect universal
love in our highly politically divided country? For the political Right he
represented everything they hated; for the Left he was often an embarrassment.
For the literary community, however, he was a goad, an important challenger of
all that stood still for too long and that didn’t embrace the whole of the
human race.
Los Angeles,
January 11, 2012
