 Baraka had learned of the Yakub myth from Malcolm X, whose assassination in 1965 likely provided further inspiration for the work.This play is a visceral experience through the use of music and lighting, beginning in a "Jet blackness" accompanied with the "Music of eternal concentration and wisdom" composed by Sun Ra, which represent a prelapsarian state of non-threatening darkness.Baraka inverts the idea that white symbolizes goodness and black symbolizes wickedness, so that the images of beauty and life are associated with blackness.