Formely known as Everette LeRoi Jones By Danielle Jones

Amiri Baraka was born in 1934, Newark, New Jersey He is currently married to Amina Baraka, formerly Sylvia Robinson Following the death of Malcom X, he changed his name to Amiri Baraka which means Prince, or The Blessed One Baraka served 2 years in the Air Force as a gunner before he was discharged when some of his writings were discovered and believed to have communist leanings. Baraka NEVER received a college degree, although he did study at Rutgers University, Columbia University and Howard University. Baraka won the Obie Award for The Dutchman and the play established him among the intellectual elite of New York’s poetry, art and music. Baraka’s work is mostly influenced by Black Nationalism and Marxism.

Baraka has written over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and musical history. Plays written by Baraka include “The Toilet” and “The Baptism”. His last play was prohibited from playing in America because of assassinations and rioting that occurred during that time period. Baraka is considered to be a controversial writer who holds hatred towards whites, women and homosexuals. After writing “Somebody Blew up America”, Baraka was also accused of anti- Semitism because the poem implicated Israel in the attacks on 9/11. Critics suggested that Baraka’s work was overtly presentational, showing what the reader needs to think and also providing them with a stimulus to act. In present day, Baraka teaches at the University of New York, and still writes essays about jazz and social subjects.

Obie Award for Dutchman American Academy of Arts & Letters award James Weldon Johnson Medal for contributions to the arts Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grants, Professor Emeritus at the State university of New York at Stony Brook Poet Laureate of New Jersey Founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem

It played at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village New York ( had a primarily white audience) in March, When Baraka moved the play to Harlem to try to educate his black peers, it was taken out of the theatre because Blacks actually thought it was quite racist toward white people, therefore, the play did not sell. Some people say that Dutchman is highly symbolic of the Adam and Eve Story.

According to enotes.com, Dutchman is a story of “a naive bourgeois black man who is murdered by an insane and calculating white seductress, who is coldly preparing for her next victim as the curtain comes down. The emotionally taut, intellectual verbal fencing between Clay (the black Adam) and Lula (a white Eve) spirals irrevocably to the symbolic act of violence that will apparently repeat itself over and over again.”

How Do I feel? What is this play a representation of for Baraka?

Works Cited Klinkowitz,J., Wallace, P. (2007). The Norton Anthology American Literature.(7 th ed.) New York: W.W Norton and Company.