34 Derek Walcott: Dream on Monkey Mountain

Dr. Shrabani Basu

1. INTRODUCTION

This module is about the celebrated West Indian poet, dramatist and thinker Derek Walcott, and more particularly about one of his plays “Dream on Monkey Mountain.” You would be looking at a brief account of Walcott’s life and work and his career which earned him the Nobel Prize in 1992 and then would concentrate on the play itself, exploring the different themes and concerns that revolve around it. This module would also contain occasional interesting facts about the playwright and the play, with some self-assessment questions to test your understanding of the play.

First published in 1970 with some other short plays by Walcott, the collection was called Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. It was adapted, produced and broadcasted for NBC (the National Broadcasting Company in America) later in the same year. Walcott himself wrote a prologue for this edition of the plays and named it “What the Twilight Says: an Overture”, where he explains his own doubts and concerns being a postcolonial playwright indulging in the indigenous forms of theatre. He discusses the problems for an artist of a region with little in the way of truly indigenous forms, and with little national or nationalist identity. The play contains in itself most of the themes that preoccupy Walcott’s literary works in general. In “Dream on Monkey Mountain”, Walcott explores the displaced searching psyche of modern man groping for a truth, and more specifically, the hybrid individual, the mulatto, searching in vain for his roots and his sense of identity and purpose in life.

2. DEREK WALCOTT’S LIFE

Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia (an island in the Caribbean Lesser Antilles) in 1930. He was born in a mixed racial household and was given an English education. After studying at St. Mary’s College in St. Lucia and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Walcott moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he worked as a theatre and art critic. In his collection of plays Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays Walcott included some of his lesser known plays like The Sea at Dauphin, Ti-Jean and his Brothers and Malcochon, or The Six in the Rain. His Collected Poems: 1948-1984 was published in 1986, and his subsequent works include numerous plays and poems including his book length poem adapted from The Iliad, which he named Omeros (1990). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1992. He published a collection of verse The Bounty in 1997 and a special edition in 2000, of the long poem Tiepolo’s Hound, illustrated by him. Some of his later plays are The Haitian Trilogy (2001) and Walker and the Ghost Dance (2002). “A Far Cry from Africa” and “Sea Grapes” are two of his most famous poems.

Did You Know?

• Derek Walcott has a twin brother named Roderick.
• In his youth, Walcott was trained to be a painter by a well known painter of their time called Harold Simmons.

1. STAGE DIRECTION AND COSTUME

The play has an elaborate stage direction with the prologue. A moon and a volcanic mountain are the principal backdrops, while an African drum is the most significant stage prop. The two characters that come on stage are in sharp contrast of each other. While one is the quintessential African dancer figure, while the other is a “top-hatted, frock-coated figure with white gloves”. His face is curiously painted half white and other half is left black. There is a long keening (lament) chorus is heard and the figures move their hands in a spider like way. The painted figure touches the moon and we can see the prison with the half naked felons Tigre and Souris in them. Makak is seen as an aged black man wearing an old cloth around his shoulders and carrying a jute sack. The corporal Lestrade is shown as a dressed official with the manners of an animal trainer In Scene i, the disc of the moon is changed as and when needed from one side to the other to show a sun and therefore, denoting daytime. Moustique is in a similar garb and he is shown to be following Makak around miming a donkey. Makak is seen to be authoritative in his gestures and in the end the dancer does a ritualistic donkey-dance and changes the sun side of the disc into moon again. The light dims to create a changing mood.

In the second scene, there is a sound of wailing and white robed women enter carrying torches in the stage which looks like a country road. Behind them, four bearers carry a shrouded man in a hammock followed by the frock-coated figure, who is called Basil in this scene. The women surround and start singing and praying around the sick man. In the third scene, the corporal is seen wearing wig and gown in a market place with its vendors, crates, carts and crossroads.

In Part II, the stage direction is less complicated. The first scene shows the old prison cell, where the corporal enters banging a tin plate and cup. In the second scene, the stage looks like a wild forest with dimmed lights creating menacing shadows. The third scene however, is rather splendid; bronze trophies are shown in abundance, masks of ancient gods appear amidst drum beatings, sticks and chants of triumph. A procession of warrior, chiefs and wives of Makak are seen wearing splendid costumes chanting with the drumbeats. In the last scene, we are back to a now mellow and realistic looking prison cell.

Did You Know?

• Many critics have found startling similarity in structure and imagery between Walcott’s “Dream on Monkey Mountain” and Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood
• Wedding (1932). In both the plays, there are uses of the moon as a stage prop and there are other similarities in the language of the play. Though Lorca was Spanish and was killed in 1936.
• There are other critics who find similarities between this play and Eugene O Neil’s Emperor Jones (1920).

1. PLOT OVERVIEW OF DREAM ON MONKEY MOUNTAIN

Prologue                           

On a Caribbean Island, the morning after a full moon, a common unnamed man rampages through the marketplace in a rage. Taken in custody for drunken misdemeanor and questioning, the man gets trapped in nightmares and hallucinations. Corporal Lestrade, a mulatto official, brings in Makak and questions him very methodically. Two other black prisoners already in cells, Tigre and Souris, try to undermine the corporal as he does his duty. The corporal grows frustrated and compares them to animals. Makak does not remember who he is or what he has done and can only say that his name is Makak and he lives in the Monkey Mountain. The protagonist foregoes his legal name (which he remembers to be Felix Hobain in the end of the play) for the derogatory and implicitly racial epithet “Makak, or “Monkey.” There is a change in scene, and Tigre and Souris don judge’s robes and the corporal defends Makak. The corporal presents the facts of the case to the judges. He reveals that Makak claims to have had a dream in which he was told he was a descendant of African kings. After telling them he has not looked at his reflection for thirty years, Makak relates a dream in which a white woman came to him. Parts of his life are slowly disclosed.

Part I, Scene i

In scene I, Makak is found by his companion Moustique in his hut, where he claims of having seen a white woman who calls him by his real name and urges him to come home. Moustique finds some ominous and unaccounted for things like a spider with an egg stack and a white mask. Makak asks Moustique to follow him to Africa, which he does without understanding.

Scene ii

In the second scene, in his hallucinations, Makak becomes a saviour of his people, the man who will revive their culture, return them to the time before colonial degradation lead them out of the cave where they see only shadows, and bring them into the light where they will see the truth. He links himself to his ancestry, proclaiming himself “the direct  descendant of African kings.” And he will save his race in part because he is “a healer of leprosy”; he can cure the disease that turns its victim white with decay and causes him/her to disintegrate bit by bit. The people he seeks to lead have, like Makak, lost their identity-their names, their link with a tradition. He believes that he has become a prophet and a healer and therefore, walks amongst the common people healing and tending the sick.

Scene iii

In the third scene, we are back at the courthouse, where the corporal Lestrade is again presiding over the trial. Many men and women come to testify about the various miracles promised by Makak. The scene changes back to Makak’s hallucinations of his role as a savior. In this dream, his one companion, Moustique, wants to exploit his power, impersonating a prophet himself, ignoring Basil, the coffin-maker who warns him he will die and enraging the people of the island. When confronted by Lestrade and the Inspector, Moustique defiantly admits that his identity. The crowd turns against him, beats him up and condemns his life. In his dying breath, he reconciles with Makak and bids him to go back to Monkey Mountain.

Part II, Scene i

In the second part of the play Scene I opens in the jail cell. In this scene, Makak, Tigre and Souris confront Lestrade for allowing the crowd to kill Moustique. Lestrade defends himself by rationalizing concepts like rights and laws, but denies the convicts any. Makak offers to bribe Lestrade with money he has hidden. Tigre and Souris hear it and try to provoke Makak in killing Lestrade and breaking from the prison. Makak stabs Lestrade in a frenzy shouting that he is a lion and that he wants blood. He urges Tigre and Souris to drink the blood to defy the racial bias against them which calls them apes with law. Then they start for Monkey Mountain or Africa, they are not sure. Lestrade rises clutching a towel to his wound and resolves to “hunt the lion” and exits with a rifle amidst drumming and chanting.

Scene ii

In the second scene, Makak with his two felon followers is back in the forest. The felons believe there are money and a new life in Monkey Mountain. But Makak still seeks a way back to Africa. The felons resolve to lose themselves in Makak’s madness to survive and later exploit him. They start rhapsodizing about Africa to please Makak. They start talking about how God is like a big white man who frightens them. They also talk about ways of going home and how they don’t know how to reach home. Tigre tries to ask Makak about his supposedly hidden money and how it might help them go home. Makak rants about him being the King of Africa and in a mock ceremony, the felons crown him. The corporal catches them but apparently loses his reason. He rants about how he is back to his roots in the forest of Monkey Mountain, not in Africa. He announces that he loved Africa of his mind, but also the African half of his heritage, and apologizes to Makak calling him the old father. Souris believes them but Tigre tries to threaten them with a gun. Basil the coffin maker distracts him, while Lestrade stabs him with a spear. They march out putting Makak in front of their procession.

Scene iii

In the third scene, there is a full indigenous ritual in which Lestrade convicts Moustique for abandoning their dream. The tribes people judge the politicians and world leaders and convicts them death sentences. Makak is punished for his false dream and the apparition of a white woman from his dream is beheaded to cure him of his madness. He finally announces that he is free and takes off his ritual robes.

Epilogue

In the Epilogue, things are apparently back to normal and all of them, dead and alive are back in the prison cells. Makak remembers his name – Felix Hobain and is bailed out by a now alive Moustique. Lestrade continues his verbal fight with Tigre and Souris and sets Makak free on account of this being his first offence. Makak decides that he will return home to Monkey Mountain.

Did You Know?

• In 1971, the play was produced off-Broadway by the Negro Ensemble Company and won an Obie Award that year for “Best Foreign Play.”

1. THEMES AND LANGUAGE

The principal themes involving “Dream on Monkey Mountain” are that of colonialism and the consequences. The aesthetic of the postcolonial world identifies with the past which generally frame their literature – the past that includes the traditions inherited together with the customs acquired from the colonial masters. Thus, in one hand, the tone of the past assumes a self-deceit as they feel that they must abuse the colonizers in their own language while on the other hand, the postcolonial writers unashamedly appropriate and reform the hybrid language as an inheritance from their colonial past.

The play explores the ways in which racism defines an unlivable identity for oppressed people, an identity which pushes toward madness. At various points, Walcott makes this theme explicit. For example, he draws the epigraph for Part one from Sartre’s prologue to The Wretched of the Earth: as a result of “always being insulted, “the self becomes” dissociated, and the patient heads for madness”(Dream, 211). Or, as the coloured Corporal Lestrade puts it later, in dialogue with the sinister Basil –“figure of death” (Dream, 208): “My mind, my mind. What’s happened to my mind?” he asks;” It was never yours, Lestrade,” Basil replies (Dream, 297). His mind, we may infer, was never his own because it was always defined by the attributed categories of racism, because his identity was always and necessarily a matter of what he was told he was. Walcott devotes much of the play to exploring the absolute valorization of whiteness, and the absolute devaluation of blackness, in colonial racist ideology. For example, Moustique explains: “when I was a little boy, living in darkness I, was so afraid…God was like a big white man, a big white man I was afraid of” (Dream, 290). But Walcott is less concerned with the details of racist ideology than with the effects of this ideology on black people. When all value is associated with whiteness, blacks almost necessarily seek to repudiate their blackness-which is impossible. As Lestrade puts it early in the play: “is this rage for whiteness that does drive niggers mad” (Dream, 228)

Hybridity and the Caribbean Identity

Radhakrishnan argues that hybridity in the Caribbean is fundamentally different from hybridity in the metropolis. He writes: “whereas metropolitan hybridity is ensconced comfortably in the heartland of both national and transnational citizenship, postcolonial hybridity is in a frustrating search for constituency and a legitimate political identity” (Radhakrishnan, 753). He argues that before we can ask questions about what kinds of change are desirable in the postcolonial world, “we need to have a prior sense of place which then gets acted on by the winds of change” (Radhakrishnan, 765). Hybridity is, as it seems, the default situation of the Caribbean. Hybridity is consistent with the Caribbean consciousness because the aesthetic of hybridity involves a starting-point of double consciousness – an experience which mirrors that of postcoloniality.

It is difficult to approach the idea of reclaiming an authentic Caribbean self (or any cultural self) in a postmodern age without meeting the claim that notions of ethnicity and national identity are socially constructed. For the West Indian, the inherited African-ness together with the perpetrated European- ness feels alien. Thus the only recourse left is to identify the self as a curious blend – a hybrid, a fluid position where they have drifted and been placed as a shifting indexical. Their identity as a hybrid culture is an acceptance of what has come to be.

Walcott emits the ages of history to record the anguish of a race foretelling possibilities in the future when “niggers everywhere could walk upright like men” (Dream, 254). This significant statement made by the hybrid individual Lestrade, rejecting his negritude and dissociates himself from the ‘niggers’ – “If you apes will behave like gentlemen, who knows what may happen…” (217). Through Lestrade, Walcott himself wrestles psychologically with the contradiction of being “white in mind and black in body”.

Use of Creole

Creole itself epitomizes the manner in which hybridity can operate as a mode of resistance in the Caribbean. Edouard Glissant’s writing suggests the possibility of a creative space for the carving out of a Caribbean self between languages. In this case we can say, French and Creole. This would be a space which develops as a function of postcoloniality lived between two episteme, attempting to create the hybrid Caribbean self between them. Creole also offers us a metaphor for understanding what is authentic about a constructed cultural voice.

One immediate observation on examining the Walcott dramatic corpus is that he seems to have found Creole indispensable, though he laments all the time the difficulties in its creative appropriation. For instance, there is the problem of intelligibility across national borders. Walcott’s solution has been to theatrically dilute Creole forms to arrive at a median, “using syntaxes from various dialects” to articulate a “form that would be comprehensible not only to all the people in the region that speak in that tone of voice, but to people everywhere” with a knowledge of the basic component of the particular Creole (largely English and some French, in Walcott).

Our bodies think in one language and move in another, … the language of exegesis is English, that the manic absurdity would be to give up thought because it is white. … What to do then? Where to turn? How to be true? If one went in search of the African experience, carrying the luggage of a few phrases and a crude map, where would that end? We had no language for the bush and there was a conflicting grammar in the pace of our movement. … I was with and not with them. I watched them but was not among them. … I am bound within them. 

Did You Know the Difference Between Creole and Pidgin?

• A pidgin is a restricted language which arises for the purposes of communication between two social groups of which one is in a more dominant position than the other. The less dominant group is the one which develops the pidgin. Historically, pidgins arose in colonial situations where the representatives of the particular colonial power, officials, tradesmen, sailors, etc., came in contact with natives. The latter developed a jargon when communicating with the former. This resulted in a language on the basis of the colonial language in question and the language or languages of the natives. Such a language was restricted in its range as it served a definite purpose, namely basic communication with the colonists.
• Creoles are much expanded versions of pidgins and have arisen in situations in which there was a break in the natural linguistic continuity of a community, for instance on slave plantations in their early years.

The Dream Narrative

The deliberate technique of the dream as representative of the unconscious is therefore a particularly ingenious and dramatic device to explore and lay bare the angst-ridden sensibilities of the hybrid individual. It allows for the obtrusion of unconscious or suppressed urges: love/hate impulses, and all other attitudes that have been shaped or distorted by isolation or the memory of ancient grievances: childhood fantasies as well as mature instincts.

Reactionary Nativism and Return to the Roots

Reactionary nativism is a rejection of colonial racist ideology which presupposes the acceptance of that ideology. Put differently, reactionary nativism is the obverse of mimeticism – mimeticism being the formation of one’s identity in terms of the concepts and values ascribed to one by one’s oppressors. Mimeticism is what leads to racial despair, to the sense that one has no value, as well as to the imitation of white culture, devotion to white law and rule, white ideas and language (i.e., ideas and language which are categorized by whites as superior and as their own- even when those ideas had their origin outside of Europe).

Generally, the mimic seeks the respect of his/her oppressor. But here the imitation aims at love. And just as respect is definitive only if it comes from a white person, so too is love absolute only if it comes from a white person-a white woman, in this case. Thus, for Makak and for others whose identity has been formed by racism, the white woman becomes a sort of alternative to racial despair. To be loved by a white woman-that would mean one has value (cf. Fanon, Black Skin, 71).

The protagonist Makak attempts to return “home”. He starts for the memory of Africa which for him is the roots of his people, his culture. He is followed by his band dreaming the same dream of reclaiming the home. They finally realize their position as the hybrid, miming and appropriating their dual inheritance, illuminating the truth of their existence:

Like the cedars of Lebanon

…The hand of God plant me

On Monkey mountain …

And from that height

I see you all as trees,

…A forest with no roots.

DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THE “BACK TO AFRICA MOVEMENT?

• In 20th century, Marcus Garvey’s the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) founded in his native Jamaica in 1914, boosted emigration sentiment. Three years later, Garvey immigrated to New York and set up headquarters in Harlem. Garvey’s version of Black Nationalism argued that African Americans’ quest for social equality was a delusion. They were fated to be a permanent minority who could never assimilate because white Americans would never let them. African Americans, therefore, could not improve their condition or gain autonomy in the United States. Only in Africa was self-emancipation possible.
• The UNIA’s first convention, held in 1920 in New York, lasted for thirty-one days with many thousands in attendance. It issued a manifesto, the Declaration of Rights for the Negro People of the World, and developed plans for a settlement in Liberia. Three steamships were purchased, and black officers and crew were contracted to sail the emigrants across the Atlantic. Although his efforts at sending African Americans back to Africa ultimately failed, Garvey’s influence remained strong and inspired some to migrate, on their own, to the land of their ancestors.

1.  THE TWO PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

Corporal Lestrade

In “Dream on Monkey Mountain,” the state of hybridity is experienced by the corporal Lestrade whom Walcott presents as partly painted white and black to affirm his hybrid identity:

…From the opposite side of the stage a top-hatted, frock-coated figure with white gloves, his face halved by white make up like Baron Samedi, enters and crouches behind the dancer.

Lestrade accuses the blacks for their “rage for whiteness which does drive niggers mad”, but like Beminger, his very mind is a “colony, an island outpost of the hypocritical white”. Lestrade manifests clearly the desires, the anguish, the desires and the psychological needs that had been echoed in the earlier works of Walcott.

Makak is described by Lestrade as a “being without a mind, a will, a name, a tribe of its own, and one whose very dream does not distinguish God as black or white. But he himself is described by Tigre as:

Neither one thing nor the next,

Neither milk, coal, neither day nor night

Neither lion nor monkey, but a mulatto,

A foot-licking servant of marble law.

Lestrade, who before his ‘conversion’, had conceived of himself as a white man. He was a corporal, “an officer of British rule” and insistently asserted that he had the “white man’s law” to uphold. With a typical colonial attitude, he took perverse pleasure in restricting and penalizing the ‘natives’: “There’s nothing quite so exciting as putting down the natives.” It is in the forest, in the heart of darkness that experiences a kind of conversion, when he is confronted by death (also a man named Basil, the cabinet maker). Then and only then, does the ‘Mulatto’ acknowledge the blackness of his identity which he had hitherto rejected:

Too late have I loved thee, Africa of my mind, … I jeered these because I hated half of myself, my eclipse. But now in the heart o the forest at the foot of Monkey Mountain. I kiss your foot O Monkey Mountain…

Lestrade moves from one extreme to the other – almost “one death to another”. His previous hatred of the blacks is now replaced by a hatred of the whites, because his act of self-discovery is still not complete. In the scene of the apotheosis, it is he who insists that it is necessary for Makak to kill the white goddess who is “the confounder of blackness”. He tells Makak: “She is the white light that paralysed your mind.” But having himself wielded the sword of a white man, it would appear that Lestrade, in a reversal of roles, would “chop off her head” in ‘canceling out of the white blood with the black blood.”

Lestrade deploys the rhetoric of nativism in order to support westernization. He urges, “Onward, onward. Progress” and, in keeping with his idea of progress, faces Makak toward the moon in order to “go forward”. And as he approaches his conversion, Lestrade cries out to “Mother Africa, Mother Earth”(“Dream”, 298); as he removes his clothes in preparation for his rebirth as African, he announces, “I return to this earth, my mother”.

Makak

Makak, is the embodiment of a more instinctive, more primitive, less rational being, could be the projection of Lestrade’s black self – his black alter ego; so that goaded on by Lestrade, he commits the act and kills the white goddess. Makak also repudiates any visuals elf- representation, any image which will remind him of his blackness. Shortly after explaining that he lives “without child, without wife,” hence without links to a family and to the culture which such a family might imply, Makak explains that he has also lived without an image of himself, When Makak looks at himself, he sees what a white racist sees. His identity, his understanding of the world, his evaluation of himself and of others, all have been determined by white perceptions and white ideas which serve to support racial hierarchies.

Walcott speaks about “racial despair”, by which he seems to mean the sense of complete human denigration which drives Makak mad. He links this to the sense of being “rootless,” of having no connection with a tradition which gives one personal value-even of having no home, of being a stranger in a home owned by someone else, by whites. After Makak is arrested Lestrade mockingly asks him: “Where is your home? Africa?” The implication is that he has no home, no homeland. Makak replies, “Sur Morne Macaque which he translates as “on Monkey Mountain”(“Dream”, 219), but which means something more like “on despondent Makak”-he lives, in a sense, on racial despair.

In his delusions, Makak’s first project is to return to Africa, to find his home, his “roots.” Africa is, in effect, that magic root which he wishes will fix him deep in the soil of a homeland. But this project is always uncertain. Unlike Souris, when Makak looked at God, he saw not “a big white man,” but “blackness”. As Lestrade asks, “What did the prisoner [Makak] imply? That God was neither white nor black but nothing? That God was not white but black, that he had lost his faith? Or…or…what…

When Makak begins to go mad, he hallucinates the visit of a white woman who loves him. This love inspires him, seemingly returns his identity. First, he explains, “she call out my name, my real name” (Dream, 235), thereby restoring to him his culture, the sense of ethnic and racial connection he had lost. In addition, her love gives him pride in this heritage: “She say that I come from the family of lions and kings” (Dream, 236). Further Makak accepts the colonial view of black Africans as living in a natural state, at one with the jungle. His romantic nativism tends to be a romantic naturalism related to his new self-image as the (white) lion, king of the jungle. Specifically Makak urges Souris to find himself “at home” as “One of the forest creatures” and makes himself, in the words of Souris, “Half-man, half-forest”

Reference

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