this effect, and these abstract associations, are to be conveyed to the audience, for he concludes that this "atmosfeeling'' is to be ‘‘gotten some way.’’

Throughout the play, Baraka uses expressive, poetically articulated stage directions to indicate the abstract"atmosfeeling'' to be conveyed at various points. Baraka constructs phrases that read like poetry in that they privilege the expression of feeling, atmosphere, or abstract concepts over clear or concrete description. For instance, in the first sequence, which takes place in the slave ship, Baraka describes the sounds emitting from the darkness as ‘‘the long stream of different wills, articulated as screams, grunts, cries, etc." "The long stream of different wills'' is clearly a poetic image that does not describe a concrete sound or image, but has abstract implications. The ‘‘long stream’’ seems to refer in part to the vast number of Africans brought across the ‘‘Middle Passage’’ over a period of several centuries of slave trade. The mention of ‘‘different wills’’ suggests the ways in which the enslaved Africans and African Americans continued to exert their own individuality and will, despite the extremely oppressive conditions under which they were forced to live. In another stage direction indicating the sounds of the slave ship, Baraka uses the poetic phrase "the moans of pushed-together agony.’’ Baraka also uses expressive, poetic phrasing to describe the expressions on the faces of the white sailors on the slave ship, who appear "grinning their vices.’’

Baraka's stage directions for the musical sounds that permeate the play are also often poetic, expressive, and abstract. In a sequence shortly after the sounds of the slave revolt, Baraka's stage directions call for the sound of drums, ‘‘drums of fire and blood, briefly loud and smashing against the dark.’’ Baraka also makes use of nonverbal phonetic letter combinations to indicate the sounds of drumming as well as of human voices. During the plantation sequence, the stage directions first indicate the sounds of African drumming through primarily descriptive language that indicates both the concrete sounds and the cultural associations meant to be invoked by these sounds: ‘‘drums of ancient African warriors come up ... hero-warriors. ... Black dancing in the dark, with bells, as if free, dancing wild old dances.’’ Baraka goes on, however, to reproduce the actual drumming sounds through the rhythmic phrasing of phonetically spelled sounds: ‘‘Bam Boom Bam Booma Bimbam boomama boom beem bam.’’ Such phonetic sound descriptions are indicated later when Baraka describes the sounds of the slave revolt, which include: '' AIEEEEEEEEEIEIEIEEEE.'' Baraka combines phonetically indicated sounds with poetic description in his stage directions for the sounds of "humming" which permeate much of the play:

(humming starts ... hmmmmm, hmmm, like old black women humming for three centuries in the slow misery of slavery ... hmmmmmmmm, hmmmmmmmmmmm)

And later, but still on the slave ship:

(... Soft drums, and the constant, almost maddening, humming ... hmmmmmmmmmmmmm ... like mad old nigger ladies humming forever in deathly patience ... hmmmmmmm hmmmmmmmmm hmmmmmmmmm.)

Baraka makes further use of poetic language in the dialogue of the ‘‘New Tom,’’ the modern day black Preacher calling for integration. Several critics have observed that this "New Tom'' Preacher, wearing the garb of a business suit, is meant to represent the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., an extremely influential figure in the civil rights movement who advocated integration and harmonious relations between black and white. Baraka, a black nationalist when he wrote this play, is rather blatantly comparing Martin Luther King to the "Old Tom’’ who dances and shuffles in an act of self-deprecation in hopes of gaining favor with the white man. Critics have also pointed out the similarities in the Preacher's advocacy of "non-violence" and "integration'' to the well-known rhetoric of Martin Luther King's civil rights writings, speeches, and political actions. But Baraka's critique of the racial politics represented by Martin Luther King is further developed through the Preacher's speech to the white man. The Preacher is described as ‘‘jabbering senselessly to the white man,’’ but his "senseless" jabber, in the skillful hands of Baraka's poetic sensibilities, is crafted to express Baraka's strong anti-integrationist feelings at the time he wrote this play.

Preacher—Yasss, we understand ... the problem. And, personally, I think some agreement can be reached. We will be non-violent ... to the last ... because we understand the dignity of pruty mcbonk and the greasy ghost. Of course diddy rip to bink, of vout juice. And penguins would do the same. I have a trauma. That the gold sewers wont integrate. Present fink. I have an enema... a trauma, on the coaster with your wife bird-crap.

And, after the bloody corpse of the dead baby has been laid at his feet:

Preacher—Uhhherrr ... as I was sayin' ... Mas'un ... Mister Tastyslop ... We kneegrows are ready to integrate ... the blippy rump of stomach bat has corrinked a lip to push the thimble. Yass. Yass. Yass...

Baraka here introduces a plethora of made up nonsense "words," and phrases, such as, ‘‘diddy rip to bink, of vout juice,’’ and ‘‘the blippy rump of stomach bat has corrinked a lip to push the thimble.’’ But, in the midst of this "nonsense" Baraka has crafted poetic phrases that may be interpreted, like poetry, through their associations, rather than their (lack of) literal sense. There are several ele-mentsofthis ‘‘senseless jabber’’ that do make sense in the historical context of Martin Luther King's famous ‘‘I Have a Dream’’ speech. In place of ‘‘I have a dream,’’ Baraka's ‘‘New Tom’’ Preacher states that,"I have a trauma,'' and, later,"I have an enema... a trauma...’’ Exchanging "trauma" and "enema" for "dream," Baraka transforms King's idealistic message of hope in regard to the future of racial relations in the United States into a very different message. The scatological associations of "I have an enema'' imply a very harsh criticism of King's dream—one that many who consider King to be a great figure in American history would certainly find offensive: that King's "dream," from Baraka's perspective at the time the play was written, was unrealistic. The substitution of "trauma" for "dream'' changes the focus of the speech from that of hope for the future, to that of the expression of the "traumatic’’ suffering caused by centuries of slavery—that slavery was a national "trauma" that cannot so easily be overcome. The Preacher's statement, "I have a trauma. That the gold sewers wont integrate,’’ further develops this critique in a sentence that at first seems like nonsense, but that can be interpreted, like poetry, through the associations evoked by the words. Throughout the play, the white man has been associated with ‘‘s—t’’in the slave ship, the Africans call the white slave traders ‘‘s—t eaters’’—and, by association, with ‘‘sewers.’’ The white men are also associated with wealth, as acquired through the slave trade, when one of the sailors on the slave ship says that"riches be ours.'' The "gold sewers,'' then, refer to the white oppressors who have amassed the wealth symbolized by "gold" from the exploitation of African-Americans. Thus, while Martin Luther King's "dream'' is of integration between black and white, Baraka's message is that this "dream'' is, symbolically full of s—t, because the white oppressors, who benefit financially from a racist society,"won't integrate.’’

Thus, Baraka's innovative play Slave Ship is noteworthy for its expressive, poetic stage directions and experimental staging, designed above all to create an "atmosfeeling" of racial relations in America in accordance with Baraka's black nationalist sentiments at the time the play was written.

Source: Liz Brent, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale Group, 2001.
Brent has a Ph.D. in American Culture, specializing in film studies, from the University of Michigan. She is a freelance writer and teaches courses in the history of American cinema.

In the performance of Slave Ship playwright Baraka and director Gilbert Moses also sought to connect the cultural past with their immediate social struggle. They created images and action that infused the present historical moment with symbols of African cultural heritage. Through sparse dialogue, music, sound, and movement, Slave Ship chronicles African-American history from Africa through the middle passage to the civil rights and black power struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. The symbolism in Moses's production of Slave Ship emphasized the survival of African culture, spirituality, and com-munalism in African-American experience. Yoruba dialect was spoken during the first twenty minutes of the play, while the beating of African drums remained constant throughout. As the action moved from the roots of black civilization in Africa through slavery to the 1960s, the characters continued to chant and speak phrases in Yoruba and pray to African deities. This visual portrayal of African cultural retention informed the spectators that, despite the pressures from white America to conform, African traditions continued to survive in African-American culture and experience.

Because the plot and character delineation of Slave Ship were so sparse, the other elements of the production increased in significance. The performance of Slave Ship emphasized gestures and symbols over the spoken word. Spectacle, music, sounds, and smells all combined to bring audience and performers together in an atmosphere of intense feeling. Created by jazz musician Archie Shepp and director Gil Moses, the music covered the historical spectrum of black music, from African drums to jazz to rhythm and blues. This music suffused the entire production, intensifying the emotional impact of onstage moments. Critic John Lahr in the Village Voice called the production ‘‘genuine musical theater.’’ Kimberly Benston asserted that the music in Slave Ship "is thus the strength, memory, power, triumph affirmation—the entire historical and mythical process of Afro-American being.'' As suggested by both Lahr's and Benston's comments, the music acted as much more than background. The conjunction of historical and contemporary African and African-American musical styles symbolized and reaffirmed the African presence in the African-American cultural continuum.

As in Quinta Temporada, the action of Slave Ship was not real but, rather, symbolic re-presenting, re-producing meanings for its audience. Paul Carter Harrison noted, in his response to the performance of Slave Ship, that the director "Moses was able to heighten our sensitivity to the context of oppression without duplicating the experience in a static representation of reality, as in a natural life photograph; instead he relied upon our response to inform the spirit of outrage.’’ Rather than realism, Moses employed powerful stage symbols. Turner writes that ritual symbols act as ‘‘instigators and products of temporal sociocultural processes.'' Correspondingly, the oppressive socioeconomic conditions of black American life inform and were informed by the symbolism of Slave Ship. The play's action compressed the horrors of the middle passage and the degradations of centuries under white racist hegemony into succinct stage moments. Slave Ship's representational account of black history flowed from slavery to civil rights, omitting any record of emancipation. This deliberate omission emphasized that oppressive conditions for blacks have been continuous.

Baraka and Moses also used action and images within Slave Ship to challenge and transform conventional social and cultural meanings. Like The Prayer Meeting, Slave Ship contested the legitimacy of and the black spectators' faith in traditional black religion. Baraka visually associated the civil rights ministry, the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with betrayal and complicity, by having the Uncle Tom house slave of the early slavery scenes and the assimilationist black preacher in later scenes portrayed by the same performer. When the preacher first appeared, the stage directions read: ‘‘Now lights flash on, and preacher in modern business suit stands with hat in his hand. He is the same Tom as before.’’ Audiences close to and familiar with the achievements of the immensely popular Dr. King could potentially have found such an association troubling. Still, the signs and symbols connected with the black preacher in Slave Ship transformed the meanings embodied in the image of the black preacher-as-civil rights crusader. The depiction of the black preacher in Slave Ship worked to, as Jean and John Comaroff suggest, "make new meanings, new ways of knowing,’’ out of established images.

The transformation of the Uncle Tom slave into the black preacher called into question the preacher's credibility within the black liberation struggle. As a result, the representation of the preacher in Slave Ship reads not as a symbol of black pride and authority but, rather, as a caricature in the minstrel tradition, a stereotype of accommodation. According to the stage directions, "He [the preacher] tries to be, in fact, assumes he is, dignified, trying to hold his shoulders straight, but only succeeds in giving his body an odd slant like a diseased coal chute''. With the guidance of these stage directions as well as the language that Baraka creates for this character, the performer who played the preacher presented him as a demeaning and deferential"Steppin Fetchit’’-like character. The play remakes the nonviolent preacher as an accommodating obstacle to the black liberation cause.

With newly awakened political consciousness and militancy, the other black characters onstage rise en masse and murder the black preacher. The execution of the preacher visually dramatized the need of the gathered black spectators to eliminate from their own consciousness any tendency to accommodate oppression. Significantly, the black masses execute the preacher in the same stage area previously used as a slave auction block. Their violent actions transform the space and exorcise the negative vestiges of slavery. The transformations of space and of the complacent black masses into militant activists symbolized for the audience that oppressive circumstances could be overcome,"transformed,’’ through collective revolutionary action.

The killing of the black preacher is followed by the symbolic execution of an offstage ‘‘White Voice.’’ This offstage White Voice, an invisible but extremely tangible symbol of the powerful psychological and sociological effects of white oppression, hovers above the play, inhibiting black interaction. Implicitly and explicitly, the representation of the White Voice critiques and comments on the power of representation. Although not physically present, the White Voice is powerfully represented. At one point the White Voice announces to the onstage black masses: ‘‘I'm God. You can't kill white Jesus God. I got long blond blow hair. I don't even wear a wig. You love the way I look. You want to look like me!’’ These words underline racist representations and assumptions that have conditioned the treatment of blacks by whites and have also constrained blacks' self-image. By controlling the representational apparatus, the dominant culture has perpetuated its values and superiority. As a result, some blacks have internalized their inferiority and accepted and coveted everything white, including, according to Slave Ship, the concept of a white, blue-eyed, blond-haired "Jesus" god. The play charges the oppressive United States, capitalist system with the perpetuation of a spiritually bankrupt Christian ethos that promotes and legitimizes racism.

The black masses literally destroy and disempower the White Voice, symbolically deconstructing its representational authority. Subdued by the oncoming black onslaught, the White Voice changes from confident disdain to fearful pleading and finally to screams of horror. Simultaneously, other black cast members remove an effigy of Uncle Sam with a cross around his neck—a grotesque representation of the connection between the Christian ethic and U.S. capitalism—from the upstage wall and smash it. By controlling the representational apparatus of Slave Ship, Baraka empowers the black masses and black cultural representations. Through the execution of the White Voice the visible and invisible hegemony of the dominant culture and cultural representations is symbolically expunged.

Slave Ship explicitly invites the black spectators to become participants in this symbolic overthrow of the White Voice. Chanting ‘‘When we gonna rise. Rise, rise, rise cut the ties, Black man rise’’, they cross out into the audience, shaking hands with the black audience members, challenging and encouraging black audience members to stand, to join with them in the chant and in their attack on the White Voice. This antistructural interpolation is at once inside and outside the action of the play. It is both creative and destructive as it allows for the improvisational flexibility of the performers and destroys the conventional boundaries between stage and spectators. Through this antistructural trope Slave Ship move toward Benston's notion of methexis, the ritualistic and communal helping out. The participatory and symbolic action—the chanting and shaking of hands—encouraged audience members to commune, to help out.

The finale of Slave Ship, like the ending of Quinta Temporada, is antistructural. It attempts to induce further audience participation and to compel its audience to act. After the onstage black masses kill the White Voice in Slave Ship, they invite black spectators up onto the stage to dance with the performers to the jazz music of Archie Shepp. This action reinforces the celebratory and communal bond between spectators and performers. Together actors and audience become participants in a collective ritual, a "tribal" ceremony of spiritual and social significance. Just when the party reaches some loose improvisation, Baraka calls for the head of the Uncle Tom preacher to be thrown into the center of the dance floor. This symbolic, antistructural act transformed the atmosphere of the theatrical event. The shocking introduction of the preacher's head abruptly shifts the mood of the action. In a manner similar to Antonin Artaud and his Theater of Cruelty, Baraka bombards his audience with violent, cruel images. Rather than purging spectators of the propensity to act—the expected response to violent images that Artaud articulated in Theater and Its Double—Baraka intends for this final moment of Slave Ship to induce the spectators' participation and compel their activism. Baraka reminds the audience through this powerful image of the unfulfilled legacy of the civil rights movement.

Source: Harry J. Elam, Jr., ‘‘Rehearsing the Revolution Onstage,’’ in Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka, University of Michigan Press, 1997, pp. 86-87, 93.

Slave Ship (1967), perhaps the most discussed of Baraka's plays of this period, has a significantly different orientation. It is thematically the most reflective, a deep introspective exploration of the origins of the present struggles for black self-fashioning, a genealogy of, to paraphrase Chinua Achebe, how, where, and when the rain began to beat us. Thus far more than we could say of the other plays, the audience assumed is largely black, and this assumption is woven into the very fabric of the play. It is not a "play'' as such but, more appropriately, a presentational, gigantic ritual, a pageant. It has no defined plot. Dialogue or discursive language is spare and very sparse. The series of scenes or tableaux are juxtaposed with drumming, singing, dancing, laughing, screaming, wailing, miming, and various theatrical devices: sounds of the sea, chains, and whips, smells, dramatic light shifts, and so on— atmosphere ceases to be a mere backdrop for the action but a character in its own right:

Whole theater in darkness.... Occasional sound, like groaning, squeaking, rocking. Sea smells. Burn incense ... make a significant, almost stifling smell come up. Pee. S—t. Death. Life processes ... Eating. Those smells and cries, the slash and tear of the lash, in a total atmosfeeling, African drums like the worship of some Orisha. Obatala. Mbwanga rattles of the priests.... Rocking of the slave ship... sounds... of people, dropped down in the darkness, frightened, angry, mashed together in common terror.

This ‘‘historical pageant,’’ as the playwright calls it, attempts to show its African-American audience their origin and the direction to be taken in the present. It dramatizes the ordeal of Africans from the time of capture as slaves, through the horrors of the Middle Passage, to slavery in the New World, and finally to liberation.

The contradictions arising from the historical black-white encounter still define the moving force of the action but, unlike the calculatingly crafted rhetorical and confrontational bombast of the earlier plays, Slave Ship simply shows the negative effects of the encounter on the victims and proceeds with its more urgent task of celebrating their courage and community, especially as these traits resist total disintegration through alien invasion to betrayal of kin. A critic, Stefan Brecht, also notes this crucial turn in Baraka and contemplates its implication:

This play is devoted to showing the evil done (& suffered), not the evil doer. On the contrary: it neglects him. It focuses on the good, though on its destruction.... This play's principles being profoundly humanitarian, if the course of action it suggests carries the day, the outlook, even for us, i.e., for the survivors among us, is hopeful.

The play's identified task is made poignant by a series of oppositions that seem to be its basic principle of composition: the screams and wails of agony of the slaves versus the satisfied, voluminous laughter of the slavemasters: "We head West! ... (Long laughter) Black gold in the West. We got our full cargo''; courageous women killing themselves and their children in order to escape the ignominy of slavery versus the white slavemasters looking on and laughing in blissful contentment; the slaves' degrading condition versus their intact humanity and fellow feeling; drums of ancient African warriors versus images of detestable "yassa massa'' sellouts; rebellion versus betrayal; and so on.

These oppositions, generously bathed in affective music and evocative oppressive atmosphere, tug insistently on the audience's emotional chord. The brief successive "scenes" are like pages in a history book of a people under an imposed, dehumanizing condition. This condition is not static but evinces a clear, unmistakable—though many times lost and recaptured—progression, from origin to elimination. The protagonist in this movement is the people, as a collective: the characters are not only anonymous but non-individualized, and their effectiveness is shown to be most potent only in that unity. A united African-American community, we remember, is central to nationalist thought. The renegades, the "Toms," who veered away from the group, lose both ways: they are not only treated with contempt and condescension by the oppressors they ally with, but they are also the first to be consumed by their people's wrath. The play is unsparing in their condemnation:

(.. . speaking in the pseudo-intelligent patter he uses for the boss. He tries to be, in fact, assumes he is, dignified, trying to hold his shoulders straight, but only succeeds in giving his body an odd slant like a diseased coal chute)

PREACHER: Yass, understand... the problem. And, personally, I think some agreement can be reached. We will be nonviolenk... to the last....

(Scream . . . moans . . . drums . .. mournful death-tone. ... The preacher looks, head turned just slightly, as if embarrassed, trying still to talk to the white man. Then, one of the black men, out of the darkness, comes and sits before the Tom, a wrapped-up bloody corpse of a dead burned baby as if they had just taken the body from a blown-up church, sets the corpse in front of the preacher. Preacher stops. Looks up at "person’’ he's Tomming before, then, with his foot, tries to push baby's body behind him, grinning, and jeffing, all the time, showing teeth, and being ‘‘dignified’’)

Central to the play then is an exploration of the dynamics of collective self-construction inscribed in the African-American experience.

At the beginning, the slaves are Africans held captive and carted away from their land. Their wailings and invocations are replete with references to spaces that had been intimate parts of their lives, that had defined and given them an identity: Shango, Obatala, Ifanami, and so on. With whips, chains, and time, captives are broken to submission as slaves, and there is a concomitant loss of a self-directed sense of self: "Now the same voices, as if transported in time to the slave farms, call names, English slave names'' and metaphysical spaces like Luke, John, Jesus. But the slaves deny the planters' hegemony any completeness. A subversive ‘‘New-sound saxophone'' by the slaves begins a new tune, drawing on aboriginal memory to forge a self-reflexive, hybrid identity: ‘‘sounds of slave ship, saxophone and drums,’’ and ‘‘a new-old dance, Boogalooyoruba line....’’ The resistant character of the new subjectivity is testified to by the fact that what the new music and dance articulate are "sounds of people picking up. Like dead people rising.'' The play's final call is for the destruction of all enemies, black or white, and the eradication of the existing condition of oppression.

Source: Tejumola Olaniyan, ‘‘LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka: The Motion of History,’’ in Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 82-84.

SlaveShip, (1967), ‘‘a historical pageant,’’ is one of Baraka's more successful experiments in ritual drama. The plot is minimal. It consists of images, dances, and pantomime together with sporadic dialogue; all is designed to dramatize the physical and psychic experiences of slavery from the holds of the slave ships to contemporary American society. The play's real strength lies in the audiovisual impact of its materials. Much of the action takes place in darkness or half-light. This suggests the hold of a slave ship, and the relative lack of lighting accentuates the variety of sounds upon which Baraka builds his themes and his dramatic effect—African drums, humming of the slaves, cries of children and their mothers, shouts of slave drivers, and cracking sounds of the slaver master's whip.

The succession of audiovisual forms is integral to the pattern of ritual upon which Baraka bases his historical pageant. The sights and sounds of the slave ship remain throughout, but they alternate from time to time with other forms which depict successive stages of black American history—the plantation of the slaveholder, the nonviolent civil rights movement, and the black nationalist movement. History itself becomes a succession of rituals, particularly the ritual of suffering which gives way after repeated cycles to the new rituals of racial assertion and cultural awakening. The music which dominates the play is integral to the ritualistic pageantry of history. At first the main sounds are those of the African drum, accentuating the fresh African memories of the new slaves. Then as the plot moves toward the contemporary period the sounds of the African drum are gradually integrated with the musical forms that evolved in black American history since slavery. And this musical progression culminates in the blues and jazz idioms both as forms of protest and as the celebration of black nationalism. By a similar token the humming of the slaves in the holds of the slave ships gradually gives way to the sounds of protest and eventual triumph.

But throughout all of this the audience is always in touch with the persistent sounds and sights of the slave ship itself, for this is the setting that remains for the duration of the play, and the subsequent historical epochs are actually superimposed upon it in sequence. The historical pageant is, therefore, both progressive in direction (moving from slavery to the black nationalism of the 1970s) and circular (reinforcing a sense of the moral and social continuities of the society: the slavery of the past exerts a powerful influence on the circumstances of the present). Moreover, the persistence of the slave ship images has the effect of defining history itself as movements (progressive and cyclical) through time. Similarly the ritualistic forms of the play (dance, chant, and pantomime) are each a microcosm of the historical process: each synthesizes the materials inherited from a previous generation with the experiences of the contemporary period. And by extension this kind of synthesis characterizes the play as a whole. As a pageant that combines past and present experiences, traditional forms and new materials, it reenacts the historical process as Baraka defines it.

Source: Lloyd W. Brown, "Drama," in Amiri Baraka, Twayne Publishers, 1980, pp. 161-62.