[In the excerpt below, Benston explores Baraka's use of music throughout his work, especially in "Slave Ship. "]

In his drama Baraka has constantly used music. In "Jello," Rochester dances soul-steps while robbing Bennie. In A Recent Killing, dances and songs help fill empty dramatic spaces and serve as entertainment. In "Home on the Range," music becomes a metaphor for judgment and apocalypse in the wild "nigger" party. The most interesting use of music before "Slave Ship" is in "Dutchman," where Lula's dance, Clay's discussion of the blues and Charlie Parker, and the Negro conductor's final soft-shoe are crucial theatrical and thematic elements of the play.

It is with "Slave Ship," however, that Baraka elevates music to the dual position of central metaphor and primary theatrical vehicle. … The drama of "Slave Ship" is fundamentally the same as that of Blues People: African Spirit endures Western (specifically, American) oppression and rises to perfection in musical form. The genius of Baraka's play lies in the manner in which the complex black music aesthetic is given precise theatrical embodiment.

These, then, are the primary forces that inform the nature and use of music in "Slave Ship." As one might expect from this diverse background, music operates on many levels and in many ways to give form to Baraka's thought in the play. Every effect of feeling and every physical condition is portrayed through sound. The props call for ship "noises," ship "bells," sea "splashing," whip and chain "sounds." The slave-characters evoke the state of misery with constant moans, cries, curses—all bare intonations which, rather than describing a condition, become its essence. Baraka's observation in the poem "Ka'Ba," that "our world is full of sound," is concretized in "Slave Ship": here, sound fully becomes the world.

The experience of the play, then, is less one of watching than of listening. If sound is the world's substance, then the particular organization of sound into music is the world in process. Music in "Slave Ship" is the form of idealized historicity as projected by the successive "pageant" images. Thus religious, civilized Africa is the music and dance-oriented rite of the opening image. Africa survives on the slave ship and in America in the incessant drumbeats, ritual chants, and tribal dances that remain a basic means of expression among the slaves. On the slave ship, the life of the black people is assured almost thoroughly through the rising "chant-moan of the women [ … ] like mad old nigger ladies humming forever in deathly patience," and in the percussional beating upon planks and walls. The white man's being is his hideous laughter; the entire Middle Passage is composed by Baraka as a sound-war between this laughter and the music of the black collective will (which is also internally threatened by "the long stream of different wills, articulated as screams, grunts, cries, songs, etc."). At times, the "laughter is drowned in the drums," but these moments are always followed by silence (a stand-off) or the rise of white laughter (repression). The tribal humming endures; the African civilization is brought to America with the slaves.

The musical expression of the Afro-American does not simply parallel history; again, it is the complexity of the slaves' alienated existence. The gospels, presaged by the patient moans of women in the hold, take over as the constant undertone of black resistance. The traitorous Tom's shuffling, jeffing "dance" represents the degradation of the masked dancer of the opening fertility rite. Yet subversively, in darkness, the pure and ancient culture remains, juxtaposed to the Tom image:

(Lights off … drums of ancient African warriors come up … hero-warriors. Lights blink back on, show shuffling black man, hat in his hand, scratching his head. Lights off. Drums again. Black dancing in the dark, … scratching his head. Lights off. Drums again. Black dancing in the dark, with bells, as if free, dancing wild old dances. Bam Boom Bam Booma Bimbam Boomama boom beem bam. Dancing in the darkness … Yoruba Dance/lights flash on briefly, spot on, off the dance. Then off.)

With the suppression of the plantation revolt, African war drums subside into "the sound of a spiritual," a song of American experience and African spirituality: "Oh, Lord Deliver Me … oh Lord." White laughter howls in triumph; for a moment, it drowns out what has now become the complex African/American musical fusion.

Now, modern rhythms: the gibberish of the preacher-Tom takes up the gospel's "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus …"; against him, the African/American voices sing new notes—jazz and blues scatting—and "new-sound" horns scream the old war chants. The drums persist as the unvarying keeper of the old rhythms. As the community coalesces once again, the original humming gathers and reaches toward climax. White laughter rises sporadically above the swelling sounds of chant, scream, hum, scat, horns, drums; all is "mixed with sounds of [the] slave ship." History gathers all its imagined moments in an anarchy of sonority and becomes imminently apocalyptic. The chant of "when we gonna rise/up" grows with the music; "the white man's laughter is heard trying to drown out the music, but the music is rising."

Eventually, the chant becomes song; African drums, slave-ship noises, and contemporary visionary jazz (Sun Ra, Archie Shepp) become one poem of black experience, one tangible weapon of black revolt. The preacher's voice "breaks" before he dies; the white man gasps on his laughter as the horde descends. Finally, the triumph—spiritual and physical—is expressed as dance. Again, this is an African/American synthesis, "Miracles'/Temptations' dancing line" merging with African movement in a "new-old dance": what Baraka amusingly but pointedly calls "Bogalooyoruba." The improvisational essence of this Afro-American musical sensibility becomes the ultimate statement of transcendence, and this is the audience's achievement. The quickly created "party" is an ecstasy of "finger-pop, skate, monkey, dog" in which each participant's thing is everyone's thing and individual improvisation becomes communal form: in the words of the street-wise saying, 'everything is everything.'

Music is thus strength, memory, power, triumph, affirmation—the entire historical and mythical process of Afro-American being. The mythical curve of return to primordial power is enacted in the dance, for the final dance of the audience in the womblike hold returns us to the site of the whirling fertility goddess. By integrating the spectator with the opening dance, Baraka has moved "Slave Ship" out of drama and into ritual; that is, he has reversed the process by which the Western (particularly Greek) theatre evolved from rite to drama. In Greek theatre, the spectators became a new and different element added to original ritual. The dance was not only danced but also watched from a distance; it became a "spectacle." Whereas in ritual nearly all were worshippers acting, the spectators added the elements of watching, thinking, feeling, not-doing. The dromenon or rite, something actually done by oneself, became drama, a thing also done but abstracted from one's doing. The members of Baraka's audience, on the contrary, are transformed from spectators of drama as "a thing done" but apart from themselves, to partakers of ritual, "a thing done" with no division between actor and spectator. Just as the opening African ritual is refashioned at the end into a higher act, one of communal triumph as well as celebration, so the audience is brought to a higher role. No longer merely observers of an oft-forgotten tradition, they themselves now perform a ritual, affirming by their deed the complete communality of the theatrical event. The collectivity of ritual has supplanted the individuation of drama.

The final rite, with its mimed cannibalistic aspect, is apocalyptic in both a mythical and a religious sense. In its mythical dimension, the ending completes the absorption of the natural, historical cycle into mythology. Its mythical movement is one of comic resurrection and integration, completed by the marriage of the spectator into community and the birth of the "old-new" black nation. This fertility ritual clearly has a religious dimension that has been prepared for by the continuous prayers to Obatala and Jesus, curses of the "Godless, white devil," and litanies such as "Rise, Rise, Rise, etc." Indeed, by creating basic images of resurrection with accompanying sensations of magic, charm, and incantation, Baraka returns the black audience to the most fundamental religious ground of tribal ceremony from which sprung the two greatest epochs of Western theatre (Greek and Christian), and which gave life to the archetypical African spirit. The spectators are as integral a part of the work as the congregation of a black Baptist church is of its service, and they function in much the same way. The nationalist myth of African-inspired renewal and Afro-American triumph is taken up by the audience because Baraka has called upon the community's shared aesthetic—the genius for musical improvisation.

This recreation of the mythical and religious through music points Baraka's art toward the Nietzschean Dionysian state. Here the end of individuation becomes possible, for the Dionysian essence for Nietzsche was a musical one: "In song and dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing" [The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufman, 1967]. By claiming African roots in their totality, the black community controls its destiny as Clay, the middle-class greyboy, could not. Now, Baraka's black heroes, not the witch-devil Lula, dance in triumph. The tragedy-burdened slave ship of "Dutchman" has become the dance-filled celebration of "Slave Ship"; musical transcendence has risen from the spirit of tragedy.