Worksheet 7- Dutchman PDF

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DUTCHMAN, BY AMIRI BARAKA, 1964 1. Explain the symbolism behind the choice of setting. It is in the subway, because it’s hidden, things are hidden under the city just like what happens with racism. Amiri Baraka thought racial relationships were kind of like the Flying Dutchman, always following the same dynamics and paths, not finding a good port, and the moving subway kind of recalls the movement of this ship. 2. Comment on the importance of this fragment: LULA – Now you say to me, "Lula, Lula, why don't you go to this party with me tonight?" CLAY – Lula, why don't you go to this party with me tonight, huh? LULA – Say my name twice before you ask, and no huh's. In order to prepare Clay for his death/birth at the end of the text, Lula, playing her part of white phallic mother, even teaches him his proper lines, his proper role, as a mother would instruct her son. But she teaches him the exact words he should use to commence a seduction of her. In this way, Lula teaches Clay to speak in her words, requiring that he merely parrot the lines fed to him by her. Lula, the mother/lover, attempts to seduce Clay the son/lover, though her seduction will not lead to sexual union but to her murder of Clay. Baraka here explores the horror of the sexual aspect of the politics of integration. It’s a white woman giving a black man an order and shows the dynamic between the two of them, she expects him to obey his orders, keeps mocking him on the way he speaks and behaves, and she tries to speak and act more like a white person. This is related to assimilation, and later on she will mock him for assimilating too. 3. Discuss the character of Clay and how he struggles with his African-American identity. Does he embody assimilation? Resistance? He embodies assimilation, he tries to live behaving and speaking and doing what would be expected of a young white man, but there is also a little bit of resistance in him, he is full of rage too, he is mostly assimilating out of need, and he is resentful. 4. Comment on the importance of this fragment: LULA – And we’ll pretend that people cannot see you. That is, the citizens. And that you are free of your own history. And I am free of my history. She is asking him to do something in which she includes herself, but it is mostly impossible for an African-American to forget his history, especially in American in the 60s, and Lula is giving this proposal and she has no risks at all, nothing is making her life hard for being white. It also refers to assimilation because she says ‘pretend’, and that is what African-Americans were doing with assimilation, pretending to be something they’re not.

The pretense masks the impossibility of avoiding history, the past of slavery or the present state of sexual and political domination, which prevents Clay and Lula from meeting as ``beauties´´. 5. Explain the meaning of the title. It is a reference to the Flying Dutchman, a ship that was cursed to sail the ocean without ever finding a port, and it symbolizes the way in which Amiri Baraka sees racial relations at his time. It can also refer to the actual Dutch ships which were used to transport African to America as slaves. 6. Comment on the importance of this fragment: LULA – You middle-class black bastard. […] Clay, you liver-lipped White man. You would-be Christian. You ain't no nigger, you're just a dirty white man. Clay becomes increasingly angered by Lula and her public display of annoyance at his refusal to accede to her demands to dance. She calls him a middle-class bastard, a liver-lipped white man. Following more racial invectives from Lula, Clay tries to grab her but fails. When he actually tries to act like a white person, it is funny to her, because he is going to get mocked anyway, because he is a fake white man, a dirty white man, she is going to judge him and mock him anyway, no matter what he does. 7. Why is Lula usually read as a modern Eve? What symbols and examples can you find to support this claim? She is seen eating apples, she brings temptation into Clay’s life, she actually feeds the apple to him at some point in the play. There is also a Lula/Satan symbolism […] Lula brings apples onto the subway and gives one to Clay, even insisting he takes 1 or more. Symbol of temptation, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It foreshadows what is going to happen to Clay: he is going to lose his innocence and die. 8. According to Clay, what is the role of art in the lives of African-Americans? Find examples in the play. Art is a way to escape and let out the anger they have inside. Blues and jazz music was their way to escape, and white people thought they were great hits and really good songs, without really understanding what was going on. They sang very sorrowful songs, and the plays says that if black people could have normal lives, they wouldn’t need to make that kind of art. 9. Comment on the importance of this fragment: CLAY – […] and all of those ex-coons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have very rational explanations. Very much like your own. He is saying to stop making them behave like white people, because the day blacks actually do behave like them, they would be able to kill whites and give very rational explanations in the same way as whites are doing with blacks.

Lulu must kill Clay because she has goaded him into admitting that he wants to kill her. Thus, her murder of him is a form of self-defense. She is sane in the sense that she performs a rational act; Clay admits that his retreat into language is not rational. 10. Explain the significance of the ending. Lula kills Clay and asks the other people in the subway to dispose of the body. Then another black guy climbs in, and the conductor, who is also black, and they greet each other but he doesn’t warn him of what Lula just did, which is actually Baraka saying that if black people actually warned and helped each other, maybe those things wouldn’t happen so much....