Olaniyan explores the themes ofSlave Ship, through the "origins of the present struggles for black self-fashioning."

Slave Ship (1967), perhaps the most discussed of Baraka's plays of this period, has a signi.cantly different orientation. It is thematically the most re.ective, a deep introspective exploration of the origins of the present struggles for black self-fashioning, a genealogy of, to paraphrase Chinua Achebe, how, where, and when the rain began to beat us. Thus far more than we could say of the other plays, the audience assumed is largely black, and this assumption is woven into the very fabric of the play. It is not a "play" as such but, more appropriately, a presentational, gigantic ritual, a pageant. It has no defined plot. Dialogue or discursive language is spare and very sparse. The series of scenes or tableaux are juxtaposed with drumming, singing, dancing, laughing, screaming, wailing...