essential dichotomies
by Douglas Messerli
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 and 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.
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; 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.
I published Baraka’s play in 1998 in my
large, 38-play anthology, with his and his agent’s blessing. I had been in
communication with Baraka for several years, he sending me, quite early on in
his career, Communist-inspired manifestos—as if somehow I was oblivious of his
radical leanings. I had long before been a follower of Baraka’s various
contributions as editor and participant in early magazines, including the
renowned Yugen (founded with then-wife Hettie Cohen) and,
later, the even more important—at least for my own tastes—The Floating Bear
(copies of which I discovered in a huge
open, canvas bin in the back stacks of The Library of Congress), which
published so many of my favorite writers of the period, including John Weiners.
Baraka also was a founder of the important literary publishing venture, Totem
Press, which published his first collection of poetry, the powerful Preface
to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.
Early
on in my own publishing, I was skeptical, I must admit, of poetry that combined,
as Baraka increasing 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 that perspective, I did include several of his poem in my large poetic anthology, From the Other
Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1999, working his closely on his selection.
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:
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 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
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