YAKUB AND “A BLACK MASS” (1966)

Halloween Month is flying by! Here’s another seasonal post.

A BLACK MASS (1966) – This short horror/ mythological play was written by LeRoi Jones aka Amiri Baraka and has nothing to do with Satanism. The writer played on words, meaning “black” as in his skin color, not as in the Satanic masses enacted by larping geeks trying to be edgy. (Longtime readers may remember my contempt for the fools who call themselves Satanists.)

Whenever I review works by film director Jean Rollin I always point out that his creations run the gamut from brilliant to So Bad They’re Good. In the same spirit, I’m pointing out that Jones/ Baraka’s writings have been called racist, antisemitic, misogynistic ravings as well as artistic expositions on black thinking and culture.   

In A Black Mass Baraka fused elements of the Frankenstein story and zombie lore with the Nation of Islam’s myth about the black mad scientist/ evil magician Yakub.

In the NOI’s literature, Yakub created white people, who in this context are the source of all evil. Per the Nation of Islam mythology Yakub was a scientist member of the Tribe of Shabazz, a technologically advanced race that existed before white people came along. The teaching goes that Yakub lived roughly 6,600 years ago. 

In NOI tales Yakub’s scientific genius came from his larger than normal brain (in some versions said to be two brains in one head) and he hubristically conducted experiments frowned upon by other members of the Tribe of Shabazz. Yakub was exiled to the island of Patmos, where he engineered the white race and unleashed them on the world. 

(This is all from NOI myths and can be verified wherever entries on Yakub are found. I left out the references to black people being from the moon and the elements of space travel, plus other concepts that might cause confusion with scientology.)

In the play A Black Mass, Baraka depicted Yakub in typical mad scientist fashion, creating a monster against all warnings and ultimately being destroyed by it. Some critics prefer to think of Yakub as a magician, which reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke’s line about sufficiently advanced science being indistinguishable from magic to observers. So to me, both scientist and magician are fine.

Yakub creates a White Beast which he tries to educate and civilize to no avail. At length the beast attacks Tilla, a black female colleague of Yakub’s, and bites her.

Again using monster/ horror themes, Baraka depicts the White Beast’s bite “spreading the infection of its whiteness” to Tilla the way that zombie bites turn their victims into zombies themselves. Tilla becomes white and animalistic like the beast.

The more members of the cast that the White Beast bites, the more turn into beasts themselves and in performances the now-violent beasts would jump into the audience and pretend to attack them, too. That aspect reminds me of the way William Castle and other horror film producers would have similar stunts at showings of their monster flicks. 

Much of the music for A Black Mass was provided by THE Sun Ra and his Arkestra (as in the Space Ark he sang about). A Black Mass ended with warnings about the monsters still at large in the world, a partial reference to Nation of Islam mythology about futuristic black civilizations of the ancient world being destroyed by Yakub’s White Beasts.

Some NOI variations of these myths claim that thousands of years ago those advanced black civilizations had sent out spaceships to explore the universe. Those ships and their crews (or their descendants) are still out there and the day may come when they return to the Earth, where they will punish white people when they see how they destroyed the ancient, high-tech black civilizations. Or simply take black people away with them as in Sun Ra’s Space Ark.

Obviously, I am not endorsing any of the concepts presented here. I just found this play appropriate for Halloween because of the way the hatemongering sentiments of the writer gel with monster lore, amping up the overall horror of it all.

Some reviews compare the White Beast’s bite spreading its “infection” to a vampire’s bite, but I prefer to use a zombie comparison because while vampires actively intend to spread their curse, zombies mindlessly spread theirs with every single random bite.

In my next post I’ll return to more conventional Halloween Season fare.