You don't know anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart.
A few of us saw Amiri Baraka's
Dutchman, "
one of the high marks in postwar American drama," at the
Source Theatre last night. Amiri Baraka was first known as
LeRoi Jones and associated with the Beats.
When I wrote that play Dutchman, I didn't know what I had written. I stayed up all night and wrote it, went to sleep at the desk and then woke up, and looked at it and said "what the [f---] is this?" And then put it down and went to bed.
If Baraka showed up in Richard Linklater's "Waking Life", his monologue might go something like this: [
Kalamu ya Salaam speaks with Amiri Baraka].