The not-so-dull Dutchman.

Jones and Ginsberg chat in a photo likely taken between '57-'62.

In Jones’ Dutchman, a female character named Lula plays the antagonist to Clay, the protagonist. This was a difficult play to crack open, but our class discussion helped decipher the author’s broader message of the assimilation of black men into mainstream American culture.  Lula starts insulting Clay on page eight, saying “God, you’re dull.” The word “dull” has multiple connotations. In this instance, she infers he mostly that he is boring. But “dull” also refers to intellect. If one is not sharp or bright then one is slow or foolish or stupid. She continues by mocking his appearance on the same page, accusing him of appealing to the white middle class bourgeoisie aesthetic: “You look like you been trying to grow a beard. That’s exactly what you look like. You look like you live in New Jersey with your parents and are trying to grow a beard. That’s what. You look like you’ve been reading Chinese poetry and drinking lukewarm sugarless tea.” When I read this, I immediately pictured the now-all-too-average hipster sitting outside of Starbucks or Mojo or Felicitous as he strokes his beard and reads and waits for his friends to arrive so they may sit and intellectually masturbate one another for hour upon caffeinated hour. “Chinese poetry” immediately brought Mao to my mind, which is fitting as he was kicked out of the military for Communist sympathies and later came to be a Marxist. Page 36 reads like a warning against white people who overstep boundaries (globally, politically, socially) in claiming what is the right or true way to think and live and dream: “Don’t make the mistake of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they’ll begin to listen. And then maybe one day you’ll find out they actually do know what you’re talking about…these blues people. With no more blues…all 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 rational explanations. Very much like your own.” The Encyclopedia Brittanica describes Rationalism as the process “by which fundamental truths are intuitively apprehended. These fundamental truths are the causes or “reasons” of all derivative facts.” Clay is implying that someday black people will reject sensation, feeling, emotion (the antithesis of rationalism) and utilize against them the same methods of "logic" white men have historically to oppress others in the forms of colonialism and imperialism.