Dream on Monkey Mountain by Derek Walcott (B. A. III Sem. VI.)

Prologue
Dream on Monkey Mountain opens in a small jail on an unnamed West Indian island. Corporal Lestrade, a mulatto official, brings in Makak, an older black man. Makak has just been arrested for being drunk and smashing a local café while claiming he was the King of Africa. 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.

The corporal asks Makak for basic information, but the prisoner only wants to go home. Makak does reveal that he lives on Monkey Mountain and that he is ‘‘Catholique,’’ though he does not remember his real name. Next is a trial, where 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. Makak was inciting people when he was arrested. Makak asks to be released because he is old. 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. He claims to see her at that moment in the prison, but no one else does. Makak believes she gives him strength.

Scene One

The play shifts back to the time before Makak was arrested, though it is part of his dream. In Makak's hut on Monkey Mountain, he lies on the floor. He is found by his business partner and friend, Moustique, a small black man with a deformed foot. Moustique rouses him so they can go to the market and sell their coal. Makak does not want to go. He relates the experience he had the night before. A white woman appeared to him, singing. She knew all about him and wanted to come home with him. When they returned to his hut, she told Makak that he should not live there anymore, believing he was ugly, because he comes from a royal lineage.

Moustique grows frustrated by Makak's insistence that his experience was real. He asks where the woman is now, but Makak does not know. After Makak leaves to get the coal so they can go to the market, Moustique is shaken when he unexpectedly encounters a mother spider with an egg sack. He kills it, but both men believe this is a sign of Moustique's impending death. Moustique finds a white mask under a bench. Makak says that he has not seen it before. He orders Moustique to ready things for their journey to Africa. Moustique is now convinced Makak is crazy, but follows him down the mountain.

Scene Two

Moustique comes upon the family of a sick man. Sisters pray around him hoping to make him well. Moustique joins them in prayers, while asking them for bread. He learns that the sick man has a fever and his body will not break into a sweat. The sick man is basically given up for dead, and Basil, a local coffinmaker, lurks nearby. Moustique convinces them to let Makak help the sick man in exchange for bread.

Makak has everyone kneel around the sick one. He has a woman place a hot coal in his hand. As it sizzles, Makak prays over him. Nothing happens at first, which Moustique and Makak blame on those around the sick man. Still, the sick man's wife gives them food for their effort. Just as they are about to leave, the sick man begins to sweat and heal. After collecting gifts from those present, Moustique teases Basil and obtains his coat and hat. When Moustique and Makak finally depart, Moustique wants to exploit Makak's gift for healing for profit. Makak will only take as much as they need.

Scene Three

At a public market, people talk about Makak's healing miracles. In the meantime, the corporal and the market inspector discuss how they will keep order when Makak makes his rumored appearance. A man claiming he is Makak appears; it is, however, Moustique. Moustique plays to the crowd, asking for cash for his trip to Africa while promising to help them cure themselves. When a spider falls on his hand, he becomes upset. It is removed by Basil, who recognizes that he is not Makak but Moustique. Under duress, Moustique admits the truth and insults the crowd. They beat him for a few moments, before the corporal tells them to disperse. After they leave, Makak appears. Moustique tells him to go back to Monkey Mountain before dying.

Scene Four

At the beginning of Part Two of the play, still in Makak's dream, the action shifts back to the jail. It is the same night that Makak was arrested and the corporal is feeding the prisoners. Souris and Tigre ask him to release the old man, but he will not. Makak offers money to the corporal for his freedom. The corporal will not be bribed, and is disturbed by Makak. After the corporal leaves, Tigre convinces Souris that they might be able to escape from prison and steal Makak's money. To that end, they ask him about his dream and Africa. Tigre convinces Makak that he must kill the corporal—like the lion he claims to be—so they can escape together. Makak reveals that he has a knife. Tigre calls the corporal in, Makak stabs him, and they escape. The corporal is not dead and goes after them.

Scene Five

In the forest, Makak directs Souris and Tigre to rest while he makes a fire. Tigre is impatient, wanting to eat but also anxious to get to Monkey Mountain. Souris is afraid, wondering if there really is any money. As Makak lays out his plans, Souris begins to believe in his words. Tigre grows frightened and impatient. Makak makes him his general. While cooking food Souris has obtained, he and Tigre discuss how they are convinced that Makak is totally crazy.

When they hear someone coming, the three men hide in the bushes. The corporal appears, following their trail and talking in incomprehensible terms. Basil comes out of the bushes and tells the corporal he must repent. Tigre and Souris emerge from the bushes. Tigre encourages the corporal to confess his sins as well. Under pressure, the corporal admits his love of Africa and asks for Makak's forgiveness. Makak appears and declares that the corporal is one of them. Tigre and Souris want to take physical revenge on the corporal, but Makak will not let them. When Tigre wants to shoot the corporal, Souris intervenes for he is now firmly on Makak's side. Makak tries to convince Tigre to join them, but Tigre remains ready to kill. The corporal ends up driving a spear through Tigre with the help of Basil, killing him. Those who remain move on.

Scene Six

Makak is now a royal figure, perhaps in Africa, still followed by the corporal and Souris. Basil reads a list of the accused—figures from history and contemporary society—whom he mentions are all white. Basil lists many letters from those wanting their favor, including the Ku Klux Klan, and an apology from South Africa. None present are appeased. Moustique, now a prisoner, is brought in. Moustique asks Makak for mercy, pointing out that these men might betray him as well. He is taken away. The apparition of the white woman is brought in. The corporal insists Makak must kill her. Makak wants to do this alone, and after much prodding, the others finally leave. Declaring his freedom, he kills her.

Epilogue
The play returns to reality and the jail. It is the next morning. Makak reveals his true identity, Felix Hobain, and does not remember exactly why he is there. Some of his dream returns to his consciousness. The corporal sets the old man free. Just as he is about to leave, Moustique comes, hoping to free his friend. They go home to Monkey Mountain.

Themes and Meanings

In the essay “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” Derek Walcott recalled his own doubts about affirming a nativist tradition in the theater arts of the West Indies. As a young playwright born of mixed racial and ethnic heritage on St. Lucia, a West Indian island where French/English patois is spoken, Walcott was educated as a British subject and taught to speak English as a second language. Like many of the characters in his play, Walcott held an ambivalent relationship to the mysticism of the West Indian culture. He felt estranged from his African origins and skeptical about those West Indians who longed for a return to an “African Eden.” This longing for an obscure past, Walcott felt, placed many West Indians in a schizophrenic situation in which they were alienated from their truest selves. Because of his distance from an important part of his racial origins, however, Walcott, like many of his characters, held doubts about his legitimacy as a creative person. “Colonials, we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing could ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted backyards and moulting shingles,” he wrote. This self-doubt about the legitimacy of Caribbean life as a subject for literature led writers of Walcott’s generation to become “natural assimilators” of an English cultural tradition unrelated to “the outward life of action and dialect” that Walcott heard on the streets of St. Lucia in his boyhood. “We knew the literature of Empires, Greek, Roman, British, through their essential classics; and both the patois of the street and the language of the classroom hid the elation of discovery,” he recalled. The “discovery” of how to meld the two cultures into a meaningful literary statement about his own relationship to African, English, and West Indian traditions took place in Dream on Monkey Mountain, in which the author’s conflicted heritage of European and local Caribbean traditions becomes the thematic focus of the work itself.

Walcott’s primary theme in many of his plays and in his beautifully crafted poetry is the dichotomy between black and white, between subject and ruler, and between the Caribbean and European civilizations present in his culture and ancestry. This last theme, which he has described as “one race’s quarrel with another’s God,” is mirrored and reflected in Dream on Monkey Mountain. In the play, Walcott explores the question of how a colonial people living under the rule of Western Christianity and English law can affirm its own leaders, its own dialect, its own spiritual beliefs, its own relationship to an origin in Africa that remains remote even from its own experience. Walcott’s sense of divided loyalties, his ability to see the world through the eyes of the ruled and the ruler, is evident in his ambivalent portrayal of Makak. If Makak is, indeed, the recipient of messages from a mysterious white goddess, and if he does possess the power to heal, how do other West Indians who have already assimilated the language, customs, and beliefs of Europe trust in a figure who, in the light of waking reality, is not easily construed to be a reliable character? Makak, after all, has his hallucinatory vision during a night in prison, where he is sleeping off the effects of a drunken night. His relationship to Africa as a source of his feelings of power is, by itself, problematic. This source of nobility is illusory and is as distant from the current affairs on the streets of the village as are the original homes of the European rulers. The conflict for many characters in the play becomes the struggle to overcome doubts about their own sense of what is valuable and powerful, and to see in the least among them, Makak, the best possibilities of the self.

Themes and Meanings

In a production note, Derek Walcott calls Dream on Monkey Mountain “illogical, derivative, contradictory” and explains that “its source is metaphor.” It should be treated as an allegory, whose themes and meanings emerge on several levels that do not allow for a single, well-defined interpretation.

The play first takes up the theme that has occupied so many Third World writers: revolution. Makak dreams of rejecting the white world and its tattered vestiges of colonialism in order to reclaim his African heritage. He sets out to arouse the people and in his dreaming establishes an African kingdom. However, unlike other revolutionary works, Dream on Monkey Mountain goes a step further and depicts the kingdom’s ruination at the hands of lieutenants anxious for revenge and power. This apparent contradiction—the need for revolution versus its ultimate failure—sets the work apart from many such plays that call for an end to colonialism and foresee a utopia once the forces of white domination have been banished.

Thus, revolution may only be a metaphor to suggest another kind of change: that which takes place within the individual. On one level, Makak seeks to restore his black identity; on another, he reaches out purely for identity, neither as a black man nor as a white, but as a man. Early in the play, when he is asked his name by the jailer, he replies, “I forget.” He has thus far been called only by his nickname Makak, which means monkey and was intended to describe his ugliness. When asked his race, he answers, “I am tired.” At the end of the play, though, he says without hesitation, “My name is Felix Hobain.” He returns to Monkey Mountain a man who has changed nothing outwardly but whose inner vision has altered dramatically.

These two kinds of revolution—national and personal—make up the major dichotomy that marks a play abounding in opposites. The distinction between dream and reality blurs, as do the lines between purity and corruption, good and evil, ambition and passivity. However “illogical” and “contradictory” the play may be in its treatment of the struggle against colonialism, Dream on Monkey Mountain makes it clear that self-realization must precede communal change. Although the work has been interpreted as radically anticolonial, Walcott himself has pointed out in an interview that he held higher aims than political confrontation.

Themes

Identity/Search for Self

At the heart of Dream on Monkey Mountain is a search for and acceptance of one's identity. When Makak is questioned at the beginning of the play, he cannot tell Corporal Lestrade his real name or much about himself. To the question, ‘‘What is your race?’’ Makak replies, ‘‘I am tired.’’ Makak tells the corporal, Tigre, and Souris that he has not even seen his reflection in thirty years. During his night in jail, Makak has a dream, inspired by an apparition who came to him the night before. The white woman who appeared to him told him that he was a king of Africa and must go there. In his dream, Makak goes on this journey of self-discovery. He heals a sick man thought to be on his deathbed, and his reputation grows. Though Makak is jailed in his dream, he stabs his jailer, the corporal, and leaves with fellow inmates. The corporal and one of the escapees, Souris, join Makak's journey. When Makak wakes up in reality the next day, he knows his name and has a better sense of himself. He has more hope for his future.

Several of the minor characters have identity issues as well. They include the corporal, a mulatto who, at the beginning of the play, only identifies with the white, ruling side of his heritage. He speaks in disparaging tones to the black inmates. In Makak's dream, the corporal starts out the same way, but has a revelation of his own. He embraces ‘‘tribal law’’ over ‘‘Roman law’’ and falls in with Makak's journey. At the end of the play, when reality returns, the corporal still is disparaging towards the men of color, but also lets Makak go free.

Death and Rebirth

Throughout Dream on Monkey Mountain , there is also a complicated undercurrent of death and, in some cases, rebirth. The first significant event of Makak's journey is his healing of Josephus, a man suffering from a fever and near death. Though Makak initially believes that he has failed to heal the man, Josephus begins to sweat and lives. It is not the first time that Makak has saved someone. He befriended Moustique when he was a drunk in the gutter and made him his business partner. During the play, Moustique dies twice. The first time, he is caught impersonating the now-famous healer Makak in the marketplace and is killed by angry onlookers. He is alive again when Makak is a king in Africa. Moustique appears before Makak as a prisoner, and tries to tell Makak that the men around him will betray him. Makak allows him to be killed a second time. Yet at the end of the play, in reality, Moustique comes to get Makak out of jail. Though Makak is already free, Moustique escorts his newly reborn friend home. Earlier in the play, the corporal is assumed dead after Makak stabs him to get out of prison, but he lives and ends up joining Makak's journey in the woods on Monkey Mountain. In each of these instances, death had a physical symbol with the character of Basil. Each time death is imminent, Basil is present. The ideas of death and rebirth are linked to Makak and the others' search for identity. To understand who they are, they must directly face death in some form and emerge all the stronger. Those who do, survive.

Race and Racism

Another theme in Dream on Monkey Mountain directly linked to the search for identity is race and racism. Makak's identity crisis is related to his status as a man of African descent. Makak means monkey, and the old man believes he is not worth looking at. This belief is reinforced by the racist attitudes expressed by Corporal Lestrade, a mulatto himself. Lestrade equates his black male inmates with animals in a zoo. Lestrade identifies only with the white, authoritative side of his heritage. It is only in Makak's dream that Lestrade embraces the African side of his background and joins Makak's journey. At the end of the play, Makak has come to terms with his race because of his dream, but Lestrade has not.

Characters Discussed

Makak

Makak, “an old Negro,” the hermit of Monkey Mountain. Sixty years old and ugly, he was named for the macaque monkey, which he resembles. He is by trade a wood-gatherer and charcoal burner, but in his dream he is also the king of Africa, following the instructions of an apparition of a beautiful white woman. Partly mad, partly possessed, and partly drunk, he possibly dreams the entire play in Lestrade’s cell, after a night of drunkenness in a local tavern. He is arrested for stealing coal and for disorderly conduct. In an elaborate allegorical configuration, he is the Christ figure at the beginning of his public life, performing miracles, collecting followers, and leaving behind exaggerated stories of his wonders, both betrayed and believed, as the Lion of Africa who will lead his black brethren back to Africa, but only after killing their “whiteness.” He experiences a sort of apotheosis when he kills the “white” woman who haunted him into this religious and political mission.

Corporal Lestrade

Corporal Lestrade, a mulatto guard of the town jail, “doing the white man’s work” in jailing and questioning Makak but finally “confessing” to his blackness in the final apotheosis. At first cruel in the use of his power, he forces the villagers into hypocritically agreeing to his absurd statements and pursues Makak to “hunt” him like an animal. The name of his rank suggests his allegorical function as the body of Christ/Makak. Stabbed and left for dead during the breakout, he follows Makak into the mountains, delirious from his wounds’ gangrenous infection, and is converted to the African “faith” of Makak. In the epilogue, he is a merciful jailer who frees Makak, releasing him to the care of Moustique.

Moustique

Moustique, a friend to Makak and a partner in the charcoal business. He is a black man who walks with a limp from “a twist foot God give me.” An allegorical composite of all the disciples, he was found drunk by Makak and saved from dissolution. Nonreligious and money-conscious, he disguises himself as Makak to exploit the people but is discovered and killed by the angry mob. At the apotheosis of Makak, he returns from the dead to be judged and to die again. In the epilogue, he remains a true friend to Makak after he awakes from his dream in the cell, leading him away, back to his mountain.

Tigre

Tigre, a young black thief in jail when Makak is arrested. He breaks out of jail and follows Makak to Monkey Mountain, ostensibly to follow Makak to Africa but actually to steal his money. When he tries to force Makak to lead him to the money, the corporal kills him with a lance. He represents the thief who was damned in the allegorical parallel.

Souris

Souris, “the rat,” another black thief. He is a partner in Tigre’s breakout and equally eager to get Makak’s money. Later, he is converted to Makak’s African Zionism. He represents the thief who was saved.

Basil

Basil, a young man, not only a carpenter but also a charcoal seller, and thus an alter ego of Makak. He is a figure of doom and enlightenment who appears mysteriously from time to time, a nemesis and judge for all the characters.

The Apparition

The Apparition, a beautiful white woman, “like the moon.” She entices Makak into his religious proselytizing and is beheaded as a sacrifice at the apotheosis of Makak. She represents the “Roman law” of white Western history.

Basil
Basil is a black man (or perhaps apparition) who appears when death is imminent for someone in the scene. Wearing a dark coat and hat, he is described by some as a cabinetmaker. Basil also plays a constant role in Makak's journey after he reaches Monkey Mountain. He compels Corporal Lestrade to confess his sins, resulting in Lestrade's personal epiphany. When the scene shifts to Africa, Basil reads the list of the accused.

Felix Hobain

See Makak

Josephus
Josephus is the sick man who is healed by Makak. He suffers from a fever without sweat until Makak saves his life.

Corporal Lestrade

Corporal Lestrade runs the jail and is responsible for the arrest of Makak. Lestrade is a mulatto and, at the beginning of the play, identifies himself with the white authority figures. He follows the rule of the law to the letter and is contemptuous of the three black men. At the beginning of Makak's dream, Lestrade remains like this. In the scene in which Moustique impersonates Makak in the marketplace, Lestrade emphasizes his beliefs on law and law enforcement to Market Inspector Pamphilion. Though Lestrade is stabbed by Makak during the prison escape initiated by Tigre, he later joins Makak's journey after finding the three on Monkey Mountain. Lestrade stabs and kills Tigre when he tries to kill them. Lestrade plays an even bigger role when the three are in Africa. It is he who insists that Makak kill the apparition that started him on this journey. At the end of the play, when the setting is again in reality, Lestrade is somewhat kinder than he was at the beginning of the play and lets Makak go free.

Makak
Makak is the central character in the play, the one who has the dream on Monkey Mountain. Makak is an older man, sixty to sixty-five, of African descent. He works as a coal cutter/burner, in a partnership with Moustique. Makak believes that he is ugly and repulsive, which is why he lives alone in a hut on Monkey Mountain. At the beginning of the play, Makak is thrown in jail for destroying a local café while drunk. He spends the night in jail, which is where he has the dream that forms the bulk of Dream on Monkey Mountain.

Makak believes that an apparition, a white woman, appeared to him and told him that he is descended from African kings. He is to go back to Africa to reclaim his heritage. In the dream, Makak begins this journey. He finds that he has healing powers when he cures a sick man's fever. Though Moustique wants to exploit this gift for commercial purposes, Makak is only concerned with the larger goal. After ending up in jail and escaping with the help of fellow prisoners, Makak adds followers to his cause and by scene three is a king, passing judgment on others. Makak's dream ends when he kills the apparition that led him there in the first place. By the end of the play, the setting returns to reality, and Makak is released from jail. Through his dream, Makak has gained a better sense of himself as he returns home to Monkey Mountain.

Moustique
Moustique is Makak's partner in business and sidekick in the play. He is a small black man with a pronounced physical deformity in his twisted foot. Makak rescued Moustique from the gutter about four years earlier. Moustique feels Makak is the only one who believes in him. Moustique sells the coal that Makak burns. The pair recently purchased a donkey, Berthilia, together for this business. In Makak's dream, Moustique plays a complicated role and dies twice. Moustique does not believe Makak's apparition was real, and only reluctantly goes on the journey. When Moustique comes upon the sick man and his family, he convinces them to let Makak try to heal the ill one in exchange for bread. It works, and Moustique immediately wants to exploit Makak's gift for commercial purposes. Moustique goes so far as to imitate Makak in the marketplace to make money. But he is caught in the deception and is killed, though Makak tries to save him. Later, when Makak is a king, Moustique is one of the prisoners brought before him. Moustique tries to tell Makak that he should not trust his new followers, but Makak does not believe him. Moustique is killed again. At the end of the play, when reality returns, Moustique shows up at the jail and begs for Makak's freedom, though Makak has already been released. The pair return to Monkey Mountain, their bond seemingly stronger.

Market Inspector Caiphas J. Pamphilion

Pamphilion is a law officer who is under the wing of Corporal Lestrade during Makak's dream. Pamphilion listens to Lestrade's theories and says very little.

Souris
Souris is one of the men in jail when Makak is brought there. He is a man of African descent who has been arrested as a thief. Souris and Tigre seem to be partners of some sort. In reality, Souris agrees with Tigre about Makak's insanity. But in Makak's dream, Souris is more concerned with getting his fair share of food from the Corporal than with Makak. Souris goes along with Tigre's plan and joins Makak and Tigre's jailbreak. Souris changes sides when the three are on Monkey Mountain together. Though Tigre wants Souris to help him find Makak's money, Souris believes in Makak's vision. Souris does not stand with Tigre when he pulls the gun, much to Tigre's chagrin. Souris follows Makak to Africa. At the end of the play, when reality returns, Souris is still kind to the old man, telling him to ‘‘go with God.’’

Tigre
Tigre is one of the men in jail when Makak is brought there. Like his apparent partner Souris, he is a man of African descent who has been arrested as a thief. Tigre is rather vulgar and, in Makak's dream, convinces Souris that they should take advantage of the old man. Makak tries to pay off the Corporal so that he will be set free, but the Corporal accuses him of bribery. Tigre wants to steal any money Makak has hidden on Monkey Mountain, and to that end convinces Makak that the three should escape together. Makak listens to him, and after leaving the prison the three make their way to Monkey Mountain. Though Makak makes him a general, Tigre is really only concerned with obtaining Makak's money. When the Corporal appears on the mountain and ends up joining them, Tigre pulls a gun on the rest. He is later killed by the Corporal, in part because of his short-sighted greed. Tigre does not understand the journey Makak and the others are on. At the end of the play, when the setting returns to reality, Tigre is in jail, only concerned with himself again.

Critical Context (Masterplots II: African American Literature)

Dream on Monkey Mountain is Derek Walcott’s most highly praised play. It won a 1971 Obie Award and is considered by many critics to be an important statement in dramatic terms about Walcott’s ambivalent relationship to his island’s folk traditions as well as to his colonial heritage. His theater work, however, has generally received only mixed reviews in the United States. Perhaps because the play is about Walcott’s own ambiguous relationship to African culture, some critics, such as Errol Hill, have found it to be tangled and incoherent. Other critics, such as Denis Solomon, have been more generous to Walcott, choosing to interpret the play’s ambiguities as the basis for its antithetical structure.

Critics including Laurence Breiner and Robert Hamner have understood Dream on Monkey Mountain to be the culmination of Walcott’s attempt in the 1950’s and 1960’s to produce and design an authentic West Indian theater through the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which Walcott began to direct in 1961. David Mason of The Literary Review has suggested the political function of the Theatre Workshop by arguing that Walcott’s plays were designed to create a “catalytic theater responsible for social change or at least social identity.” In terms of subject matter (the common West Indian villagers), style (the chants, jokes, and fables associated with Caribbean folk culture), and language (the patois or Creole language), Walcott affirmed his island roots, but not unequivocally or without strain. With its tense, questioning relationship of Makak’s African origins and personal identity in a bifurcated culture, Dream on Monkey Mountainembodies the major theme of much of Walcott’s work.

Critical Context (Comprehensive Guide to Drama)

 Although more widely known abroad as a poet, Derek Walcott has been the director and chief playwright of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop since he founded it in 1959. Dream on Monkey Mountain, his first play to gain international acclaim, won the Obie Award for a Distinguished Foreign Play when produced in New York in 1971, following its premier in Canada. As well as being staged in various parts of the United States and Europe, it was presented as part of the 1972 Olympics cultural program.

Walcott, in both his poetry and his drama, draws heavily upon his experience in the West Indies. Born in 1930 and descended from two white grandfathers and two black grandmothers, he grew up in a colonial environment on the tiny island of St. Lucia, where his mother was a headmistress in a Methodist grammar school. Walcott addressed this twofold identity in one of his poems, “A Far Cry from Africa”:

Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?I who am poisoned with the blood of both,Where shall I turn, divided in the vein?I who have cursedThe drunken officer of British rule, how chooseBetween this Africa and the English tongue I love?Betray them both, or give back what they give?

Walcott, the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature recipient, has managed to betray neither, but to meld the two parts of his heritage into a consistently humane expression through his art. Dream on Monkey Mountain, with its call for the revolution of self before the political revolution, remains central to an understanding of his work. The play shows that Walcott, although “divided in the vein,” has enlarged the colonial experience and given it universal meaning. He is not revolutionary in the mode of the angry, didactic writer; he is instead a revolutionary in the matters that concern the human spirit.

Critical Overview

Since its earliest performances, critics have been divided over Dream on Monkey Mountain. While most found much to praise, especially its poetic nature, some believed it to be bogged down by that very poetry. The complex play also compelled critics to offer their own widely divergent interpretations. Critics of the original New York production in 1971 exemplify this diversity.

Edith Oliver of The New Yorker saw the play as pure, successful poetry. She wrote, ‘‘Dream on Monkey Mountain is a poem in dramatic form or a drama in poetry, and poetry is rare in the modern theatre. Every line of it plays; there are no verbal decorations. A word, too, must be said for the absolute trust that Mr. Walcott engenders in his audience, convincing us there is a sound psychological basis for every action and emotion.’’

The New York Times’ Clive Barnes shared Oliver's high opinion. Barnes claimed that this ‘‘beautiful bewildering play by a poet’’ is a ‘‘richly flavored phantasmagoria.’’ Even when interpreting Walcott's intentions, Barnes came back to the poetic aspects of Dream on Monkey Mountain. He wrote, ‘‘I think that what Mr. Walcott is counseling is a twentieth-century black identity rather than an attempt to impose a reversal to a preslave black identity. But much of the play's interest is in its spectacle and poetry.’’

Another New York Times critic, Clayton Riley, generally concurred with Barnes, though he believed the play to be too wordy. Riley argued, ‘‘The play is rich and complex; the author's use of fable interwoven with a stark elaboration of historical evidence of oppression illuminates his work, lends it an arresting weight and texture. Walcott's characters are drawn with bold, sometimes extravagant strokes and, prodded by the author, they have an inclination to talk a bit too much.’’ Riley's interpretation also differed from Barnes’. Riley believed that ‘‘the thesis, as proposed in Dream on Monkey Mountain, is that the West cannot—nor should it—exist forever, given its deplorable record of racist exploitation and butchery throughout the world.’’

Barnes and Riley's colleague at the New York Times, Walter Kerr, thought the poetic tendencies of the play were problematic. He wrote, ‘‘It would be easy to misread [the play], in spite of Michael A. Schultz's admirably composed production … because the author has a strong bent towards poetic digression. He is long over some scenes that the thread of essential meaning is lost altogether; forward movement is clogged by a waterfall of words.’’

After the initial productions, Dream on Monkey Mountain continued to be presented throughout the world, including regional productions in the United States. Critics’ issues with the play remained the same. In 1979, Joseph McLellan of the Washington Post reviewed a local production. He found it ‘‘a kind of play often written by poets.… It is too long, loosely organized and specialized in interest for commercial success in this country, but striking in its use of language, fresh and original in its ideas and symbolism.’’ McLellan's interpretation focused on the dream aspect of the title. He wrote, ‘‘In a colonial society, one way to compensate for lack of power is to dream. But dreams are also a source of power and a shaping force in its use, if enough people share the dream. This is the central statement of Dream on Monkey Mountain.’’

Fifteen years later, Dream on Monkey Mountain continued to be produced regionally in the United States. Of a Boston production at Playwright's Theatre, Kevin Kelly of the Boston Globe wrote, ‘‘Deliberately paradoxical, complex to the point of confusion, Dream on Monkey Mountain is so intellectually commanding—and emotionally loaded—that you're constantly being challenged.’’ In the same review, Kelly compared the play to the Bible and Walcott to Shakespeare. Like most critics, he saw Walcott's poetic touch. He wrote, ‘‘Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain is a great piece of work, a mesmerizing, multilayered riff that plays like a black version of the Bible with hardly any specific reference to Christian literature, but, rather, in its myth-making reach, allusive reference to all literature. It's a dense, demanding play, clearly the work of a poet posing inside the proscenium (the same posture applies to Shakespeare).’’

Makak and Corporal Lestrade: Their Journey of Self-Discovery

Most critics agree that Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain is an intricate play, full of complicated, sometimes contradictory images and metaphors. Because of the text's richness, Dream on Monkey Mountain has attracted numerous interpretations of its many aspects. At the center of numerous critics’ reading of the play is Makak and the dream voyage he goes on that leads to his self-acceptance. Some have compared Makak to Christ, while others have focused on his name—which means monkey—and how the play chronicles his emotional evolution to manhood.

From the beginning of Dream on Monkey Mountain, it is obvious that Makak is suffering. The old man of African descent has been put in jail for drunken and disorderly conduct after demolishing a local café. When questioned, Makak can only give the name he gave himself to the authorities: Makak or monkey. He has forgotten his real name, symbolic of his nonacceptance of himself. Makak also tells them that he has not seen his own image in over thirty years. In part one, scene one, as his dream begins, the play goes back to the beginning of the day that led to Makak's jailing.

As he relates to his only friend and business partner, Moustique, Makak was visited by a white woman, an apparition, in the light of a full moon. She told him that he was a descendant of African kings and lions, and advised him to live among men. Makak decides to journey to Africa. Moustique accompanies him despite his belief that Makak is crazy. Along the way, Makak learns that he has the power to heal the sick and lead other men. Souris and Corporal Lestrade join his cause.

When Makak makes it to Africa in part two, scene three, he is a tribal king who passes judgment on others and decides their fate. At the end of his dream, Makak must kill the white apparition to free himself from what she represents, that is, the oppression of his soul by white colonials. After he beheads her, he awakens to reality in his cell. Makak now accepts himself and his place in society. He remembers his name and who he is. With Moustique, Makak returns to Monkey Mountain a different man.

Thus Makak's dream is dense and complex. One particularly interesting aspect is how he incorporates Corporal Lestrade into it. Like Makak, Lestrade is a conflicted character. He is a mulatto, who at the beginning of Dream on Monkey Mountain identifies only with the white, English, authoritative side of his heritage. This is underscored by his job in both Makak's dream and reality. He is the jailer, the man who explains the ropes to the market inspector in part one, scene three. In the prologue, which is still reality, Lestrade expresses racist opinions about the black men he has jailed. Playing on Makak's appearance and a comment by prisoner Souris (calling Makak ‘‘some mountain gorilla’’), Lestrade states, ‘‘Now if you apes will behave like gentlemen, who knows what could happen?’’ Yet Lestrade is half ‘‘ape’’ himself.

Lestrade plays a prominent role in Makak's dream. Indeed, if we take the dream as solely a product of Makak's imagination, his way of working out his problems, he imagines that Lestrade goes on his own journey of self-discovery as well. It begins after Makak has a revelation of his own. He breaks a man's fever and saves his life. Wanting to cash in Makak's gift for profit, his friend Moustique impersonates him in a public marketplace. It is here, in part one, scene three, that the dream Lestrade is introduced.

The dream Lestrade is working with Market Inspector Caiphas J. Pamphilion. Lestrade carries a pistol while accompanying the inspector as he distributes certificates among the vendors. Lestrade tells the Inspector that he has to carry the pistol ‘‘to protect people from themselves.’’ Yet he also identifies with the mostly black people present, calling them ‘‘my people.’’ He says, ‘‘I would like to see them challenge the law, to show me they alive. But they paralyze with darkness.…They cannot do nothing, because they born slaves and they born tired.’’ Clearly, Makak imagines Lestrade in a kinder light than Lestrade presented himself at the beginning of the play.

Despite such sentiments, Lestrade remains primarily the white-leaning authority figure. He uses racist language similar to that used in the prologue. By part two, scene three, Makak is in Lestrade's jail. Lestrade arrested him when he endangered his friend, the market inspector. Though Lestrade still regards himself as ‘‘an instrument of the law’’ with ‘‘white man work to do,’’ he also believes, ‘‘In some places the law does not allow you to be black, not even black, but tinged with black.’’ The law is everything to Lestrade; it gives him his identity and his power.

To continue on his own journey, Makak must get out of jail. To that end, he tries to bribe Lestrade. When that does not work, he allows the other prisoners, Tigre and Souris, to talk him into escaping. Makak stabs Lestrade and they escape, leaving the Corporal for dead. Though Makak feels guilty about it, he still takes the opportunity that presents itself. Lestrade, however, does not die. He lives, claiming that he wants them to run ahead so he has an excuse to kill them. Lestrade knows that they are ‘‘attempting to escape from the prison of their lives.’’ He will hunt the lion.

In the forest, both Makak and Lestrade undergo further transformations. Makak seems more insane, yet more confident of his journey and his growing self-worth. He makes Tigre his general. As Makak, Souris and Tigre grow closer, Lestrade appears in the forest. The trio hides as Lestrade starts speaking in the same kind of crazy, illogical thoughts as Makak. Lestrade has his own epiphany at this point. Basil, the symbol of death throughout Dream on Monkey Mountain, appears and demands that Lestrade confess his sins on the implied threat of death. The other characters present do not see Basil, just like no one else saw Makak's white apparition.

Confessing to Basil, Lestrade comes to terms with his blackness. He tells Basil, ‘‘Too late have I loved thee, Africa of my mind, sero te amavi, to cite Saint Augustine who they saw was black. I jeered thee because I hated half of myself, my eclipse.… Now I see as new light. I sing the glories of Makak!’’ After this unbosoming, Makak sees that Lestrade has been transformed, though it takes Lestrade some time. The healer convinces Lestrade to join them, though Tigre immediately resents the Corporal's presence and Souris's loyalty to the old man. Lestrade stabs and kills Tigre with a spear. Though Lestrade and Makak's journeys now follow the same path, some things do not change.

Indeed, Lestrade now seems the leader in giving Makak his African crown. Lestrade pushes the old man forward, following him but acting as his primary advisor and support with the help of Souris. While Makak is unsure where to go, Lestrade remains fundamentally concerned with the rule of law. In part two, scene three, Makak finally reaches Africa and is a tribal king. Lestrade, however, really runs the show. As Makak's right-hand man, he gives the orders for the prisoners to be presented, asks the gathered tribes their opinions on the tribute offers, and keeps Makak making decisions.

The crowning moment of their joint path to enlightenment is when the apparition appears before Makak as a prisoner asking for forgiveness. The Corporal tells him what he must do—behead her—but Makak has a hard time accepting this. Lestrade uses manipulative imagery to get him to finish the deed. His language reflects his acceptance of his dual racial heritage, but also shows how his interpretation of the law is most important of all. Lestrade tells Makak, ‘‘She is the mirror of the moon that this ape look into and find himself unbearable. She is all that is pure, all that he cannot reach.… I too have longed for her.’’ Makak can only be free of what she represents when he kills her, but he insists on doing it alone. Only then, away from Lestrade's eyes, can Makak symbolically complete his journey. Lestrade has already gone as far as he will go.

At the end of Dream on Monkey Mountain , the scene shifts back to reality. Makak knows his real name and is freed by a somewhat kinder, gentler Lestrade. He tells Makak, and later Moustique, that they put the old man in jail because of his behavior but only intended to keep him overnight. When Lestrade frees Makak he tells him, ‘‘Believe me, old man … it have no salvation for them, and no hope for us,’’ and ‘‘our life is a prison.’’ Makak accepts himself for all that has gone on in his head. Lestrade is different, too, though he could not possibly know Makak's dream for him. To Makak, Lestrade will always be the law, but he imagines that the Lestrades of the world will realize their worth as well.

Source: Annette Petrusso, in an essay for Literature of Developing Nations for Students, Gale, 2000.

Mimeticism, Reactionary Nativism, and the Possibility of Postcolonial Identity in Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain

Establishing both a social and a personal identity which are not determined by the oppressor has been a recurrent theme of subaltern writers, from post-colonials, to women, to racial and ethnic minorities. Whether spoken of in terms of ‘‘decolonizing the mind,’’ ‘‘ecriture feminine,’’ or the ‘‘black aesthetic,’’ it has been a central task of literary artists from dominated groups. A number of writers have chosen to look at this issue from the other side, examining the ways in which oppressive ideologies undermine personal identity and even lead to madness. This approach has been particularly common in feminist critiques of patriarchy. Some of the more obvious instances from the post-colonial canon would include Antoinette in Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, the narrator in Atwood's Surfacing, Elizabeth in Head's A Question of Power, Annain Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Nyasha in Dangarembga' s Nervous Conditions, and the title character in Kincaid's Annie John.

Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain is a particularly complex and interesting example of this genre. Yet it has received relatively little critical attention. This is surprising not only because of Walcott's stature, but because the play presents an important variation on a common theme. Post-colonization literature treating the disintegration of personal identity in the face of oppression has tended to focus on women. Even the male authors who have addressed this issue have often dealt with female insanity (see, for example, Phillips's The Final Passage). One result of this is that the disintegrating effects of colonialism and racism have been less fully explored in post-colonization literature than one would expect. While a number of writers besides Walcott have dealt with racial or colonial issues along with patriarchy—Head has done this particularly effectively—the feminist concerns of their works, and the feminist focus of much of the criticism on these works, has tended to limit the literary study of racism and psychopathology. This is particularly unfortunate, because the topic is clearly and necessarily central to the post-colonial situation. Indeed, a number of writers have explored it in theoretical work, most obviously Frantz Fanon in ‘‘The Negro and Psychopathology,’’ Chapter Six of Black Skin, White Masks. Walcott is one of the few anglophone post-colonial writers to have taken up the problem of racism, identity, and madness, developing and extending Fanon's observations through a literary medium.

In the following pages, then, I should like to consider not only what is going on in Dream on Monkey Mountain, but what insight this play can provide into the problems of colonialism and identity. In other words, in thinking about the play, I also hope to use the play to think about the world, about the problems which Walcott tries to represent and work through. Before going on to the play, however, it is important to consider some of the more general principles of social and personal identity as they relate both to madness and to the post-colonial condition.

Personal Identity and Social Stratification

Following Lacan and others, we may understand personal identity not as some direct and immediate sense of self, but rather as a ‘‘constitution’’ of the self, a sort of synthetic self-conception. When I think of an object—my car, for example—I think not of some particular isolated detail, but of a complex of elements and relations: its color, its shape, how it runs, when it was last serviced, etc. As some cognitive scientists would put it, I ‘‘access’’ a ‘‘schema’’ of my car. When I think about another person, a friend perhaps, I do much the same thing; I access a schema which includes not only his/her appearance, but also typical and particular behaviours, attitudes, beliefs, preferences, etc. When I think about myself, I do the same thing. I access a schema of myself. This too includes a representation of my appearance, my attitudes, my behaviours, etc. What is perhaps most important to note about this self-schema is that it is in large part not the product of introspection, but rather of external attribution. In other words, to a considerable degree, I have been told what I am. My self-schema is formed by the statements and attitudes of others to a far greater extent than we are usually aware. As Lacan put it, our self-image is ‘‘more constituting than constituted’’ (my translation), more a construction of us than a construction by us.

As a simple example, consider body weight. I cannot know by introspection or even observation if I am overweight or underweight or neither. This is, in effect, something I am told, directly or indirectly. And, as research on eating disorders has demonstrated, the advertising and entertainment industries lead many women (and some men) to form a false (and debilitating) conception of themselves as overweight. As Naomi Wolf recently pointed out, a 1984 study indicated that 75% of young women believe that they are overweight, while only 25% are medically overweight; indeed ‘‘45 percent of the underweight women thought they were too fat.’’ This is a particularly interesting case, because it illustrates the degree to which even one's perceptual self-constitution, one's conception of one's own appearance, is shaped by attribution, by being told what one is like. People with eating disorders tend, in effect, to see themselves as overweight. Even when looking in a mirror, we do not simply see what we actually look like. Rather, we see what we are told we look like.

The ascriptive character of self-understanding is particularly clear in the case of evaluative terms—such as ‘‘overweight,’’ as well as ‘‘beautiful,’’ ‘‘ugly,’’ and so on. The person who is told he/she is beautiful, treated as beautiful, and so on, will see beauty when he/she looks in a mirror. The same holds for ugliness. Less obvious, but equally true, is the fact that when we look in the mirror we see ourselves in terms of attributed descriptive categories. A white person does, most often, have light skin. But it is due to an attribution of race that he/she sees him/herself as white. A black person does, most often, have dark skin. But it is due to an attribution of race that he/she sees him/herself as black.

More exactly, our self-constitution or self-conception or ‘‘ego’’ (as we might call it, following one usage of Lacan) is organized by a hierarchy of physical, mental, and other properties. We believe a range of things about ourselves, but some of these things are more important than others. For example, it is much more central to my self-conception that I am a teacher than that I own many pairs of shorts. The higher we go in this hierarchy, the more important the property is to our sense of our own identity. At the highest levels of this self-schema are the properties which were attributed to us in childhood, the first properties and relations which formed the basis of our later self-conception. These fundamental attributes are themselves determined by a social hierarchy. Specifically, they are the attributes which function to structure the society into which one is born, especially those attributes which structure a society hierarchically. In every society, sex is one of these properties, for it defines a crucial principle of social stratification. Thus being male or female is universally a central property of personal identity. Race, ethnicity, religion, economic class are common and powerful elements of personal identity in societies hierarchically structured by these categories as well.

Clearly, then, the basis of personal identity is nothing other than social identity: being male or female, white or black (or coloured or Indian), European or African (or Asian), Christian or Yoruba (or Ibo or Hindu or Jewish), etc., defines our personal identity as social identity. Whatever one may think of it—whether one finds it a fact to celebrate or to deplore—each of us begins his/her self-constitution on the basis of a series of social categories which are the result of attribution, not experience, and which locate us in one or more social hierarchies. Equally clearly, such a location is problematic, especially for those who have been placed in a socially devalued position. Their basic principles of identity—often undeniable principles concerning the colour of their skin or the nature of their reproductive organs—are not only devalued in themselves, but linked with a series of other devalued attributions which are either putatively absent from the dominant group or are more variable and temporary. For example, in a certain racist aesthetic, which has only recently begun to lose its dominance, black skin is considered to be ugly in and of itself. Individual white people, in this view, may be ugly or may be beautiful; even an ugly white person has some hope of improving his/her looks. But black is ugly by necessity; to be black is necessarily to be ugly. As a result of this sort of constitution, racist, sexist, and other oppressive structures may define a subaltern personal identity which is pervaded by self-denigration and self-hatred.

In considering the social constitution of personal identity, we may distinguish both conceptual and perceptual components of particular relevance to the present study. Specifically, since race (as well as sex) is a socially visible property—in a way that, for example, religion or economic class need not be—we would expect that perceptual self-constitution would be of particular importance in connection with the constitution of a racial subaltern identity. In addition, at the conceptual level, we would expect a close connection between racial identity and social history. Since racist stratification typically justifies claims of racial inferiority by reference to putative cultural inferiority—that is, these two social hierarchies are typically identified—one's relation to one's forebears and to ancestral traditions becomes as definitive and as denigrated as one's face and mind.

Lacan outlines a similar structure of perceptual and cultural/familial factors in identity when he isolates the mirror image and the Name-of/from-the-Father as the two crucial moments in the constitution of the ego. We need not follow Lacanian psychoanalysis in its details to see the particular relevance, to colonial and postcolonial identity, of the mirror image and the ancestral name (whether patronymic, as Lacan assumes, or not), the ways in which these may serve as pivots of subaltern self-constitution. Indeed, in many ways, Lacan's emphasis on naming fits colonial societies, such as those of West Africa or South India better than it fits European societies. Take, for example, traditional Yoruba culture, to which Walcott frequently alludes as a major force in Afro-Caribbean identity. As Roland Hallgren points out, the name given to a Yoruba child fixed not only sex, but a range of other social relations: ‘‘occupation, family traditions, which deity was worshipped,’’ etc. Indeed, Lacan is in a sense recapitulating Yoruba beliefs in his system, for the traditional Yoruba view is that ‘‘the name has a psychological effect on the behaviour and character of the bearer.’’ The name thus becomes a particularly important node of social and personal identity. As we shall see, both the name and the image figure importantly in Walcott's exploration of colonial and postcolonial identity.

The Whiteness of Blackness: Mimeticism and Reactionary Nativism

As we have already indicated, Dream on Monkey Mountain is a play which 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.’’ Or, as the coloured Corporal Lestrade puts it later, in dialogue with the sinister Basil: ‘‘My mind, my mind. What's happened to my mind?,’’ he asks; ‘‘It was never yours, Lestrade,’’ Basil replies. 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.’’ 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.’’

In connection with this, Walcott explicitly defines the issue of subaltern identity in terms of the sort of perceptual and ethnic self-constitutions which we have been discussing. The play centers around a character who foregoes his legal name for the derogatory and implicitly racial epithet ‘‘Makak,’’ or ‘‘Monkey.’’ When arrested for disorderly conduct, he actually forgets his legal name. The delirium from which he suffers is clearly connected with this inability to link himself to family or culture. He has, in effect, been formed by an ideology which strips him of the individual and human identity implicit in the name and which seeks to structure his personal identity around a racial typology according to which black is to white as monkey is to human. Lestrade summarizes Makak's condition: ‘‘this is a being without a mind, a will, a name, a tribe of its own.’’ Lestrade is adopting a colonial and racist perspective, but he nonetheless articulates Makak's complete alienation from any culture which might provide a positive alternative to colonial, racist ideology.

Unsurprisingly, Makak also repudiates any visual self-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: ‘‘Is thirty years now I have look in no mirror.’’ The reflection only brings him face to face with his own blackness, thus the impossibility of value in a colonial situation. Indeed, he even takes care not to glimpse himself in water: ‘‘Not a pool of cold water, when I must drink, / I stir my hands first, to break up my image’’ (the fragmentation of the reflection foreshadows Makak's related fragmentation in madness). When Makak looks at himself, he sees what a white racist sees. He is, in effect, a metaphor for those legions of colonized subjects who, in Walcott's words, ‘‘looked at life with black skins and blue eyes’’ (‘‘What the Twilight Says’’), suffering the ‘‘contradiction of being white in mind and black in body’’ (or, more accurately, white in self-perception and black in body). His identity, his understanding of the world, his evaluation of himself and of others, all have been determined by white perceptions, white ideas—which is to say, by ascriptions which serve to support racial hierarchies.

Late in the play, Makak comes to consider the situation of blacks in a society structured by white racism. In a moment of despair, he says: ‘‘we are black, ourselves shadows in the firelight of the white man's mind.’’ Here, Walcott is alluding to Plato's allegory of the cave, in part to develop the points we have just been considering. One meaning of this line is that, in a world dominated by whites, blacks have no more free volition, no more power, than shadows. It also suggests that the selves or egos of blacks are reduced to shadows by the white racist's perception of them. Whites are like the men in Plato's cave who confuse shadows with reality. The white understanding of blacks is as distant from black reality as the understanding of a shadow is from the understanding of a man or woman. But Makak does not say, ‘‘We are black, appearing to whites like shadows in the firelight of their minds.’’ Rather, he says that ‘‘we are … ourselves shadows,’’ implying that blacks have accepted and internalized the racism which reduces them to shadows. In this sense, Walcott presents blacks as prisoners in the cave. And the shadows they see on the wall are not images of others, but of themselves, the only images they have of themselves.

Of course there is more to Makak than a disvalued and disrupted constitution, a disintegrating ego formed from shadows deep in the mines of racist ideology. Makak experiences himself and other blacks as human, and whites as a force of natural or supernatural evil. Indeed, this is what brings about his delirium, for he can neither resolve this contradiction nor live with it. 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 addresses them: ‘‘I see you all as trees, / like a twisted forest, / like trees without names, / a forest with no roots!’’

Elsewhere, 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,’’ 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.’’ Later, he tells his followers, ‘‘We will see Africa’’; he explains that they will be transported, suddenly, when they open their eyes after making a wish, just as if they ‘‘have eaten a magic root.’’ 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.’’ A good thing? It is hard to say. As Lestrade asks: ‘‘What did the prisoner [i.e., 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.’’ The alternatives are significant, but none is satisfactory. As to the last option, even those who do not believe in God are likely to admit that a despairing loss of faith is not a good thing. And if Makak has lost his faith, it is almost certainly not a positive development—an achievement of human community, for example, a turning away from the promises of an afterlife to a social affirmation of this life. It is, rather, a sign of racial despair. On the other hand, suppose Makak has decided that God is black. Certainly, this is better for Makak, and for other people of African descent. But one thing that Souris makes clear is that the first problem with thinking of God as white is that it racializes divinity, and thus value. To make God black is to repeat this racialization, if in an inverted form.

Asserting God's racial blackness is part of what I refer to in the title as ‘‘reactionary nativism.’’ By ‘‘reactionary nativism,’’ I mean the general inversion of colonial and racist hierarchies such that members of the oppressed group affirm their racial and cultural authority in precisely the manner of the colonizers. This is a reactionary tendency in that it is a reaction to the physical and mental brutality of the oppressors, which it denies but does not overcome. As I am using the term, the relation between reactionary nativism and colonial racism is analogous to the relation between conscious and unconscious impulses in ‘‘reaction formation.’’ Suppose, for example, that I have strongly aggressive impulses toward someone, which disturb me so much that I repress them. As part of my defense against these impulses, I may develop a ‘‘reaction formation’’ and come to behave toward this person with excessive affection and care. Though my outward behavior and conscious attitude are solicitous and loving, they are both in fact determined by my defense against aggression and hatred. Reactionary nativism is similar in that it is an affirmation of one's racial and cultural superiority which is based upon and guided by an underlying denigration of one's race and culture. In other words, it is a sort of reaction formation against colonial racism.

Thus 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). Mimeticism creates both Makak's madness and Lestrade's pathetic and cruel conformity. It is also what creates reactionary nativism. Anti-colonial and post-colonial theorists from Frantz Fanon to Ashis Nandy have noted the close connection between a desire to become European and a subsequent repudiation of all things European. As Walcott puts it, ‘‘Once we have lost our wish to be white we develop a longing to become black, and those two may be different, but are still careers.’’

Three Moments of Subaltern Identity

To a great extent, the plot of Dream on Monkey Mountain is organized by reference to mimeticism and reactionary nativism. It in effect maps the development of the latter out of the former. More exactly, Walcott implicitly isolates three stages of development in the social and personal identity of his characters. Moreover, in each stage he implicitly distinguishes what we might call ‘‘popular’’ and ‘‘anti-popular’’ versions, which is to say, versions which arise out of or in solidarity with the people (or some sub-group of the people) and versions which arise out of an individualist or careerist alignment with the foreign oppressors. (As shall become clear, the ‘‘popular’’ versions do not necessarily contribute to the well-being of the people; the fact that they are ‘‘of the people’’ does not imply that they operate in the objective interests of the people.) In exemplifying these alternatives, Walcott presents us with a valuable, if tacit, anatomy of subaltern identity.

Specifically, Walcott begins with mimeticism divided into the figures of racial despair and mimetic collaborationism. The former—exemplified in Makak—is what I am calling the ‘‘popular’’ tendency, for those who suffer racial despair identify themselves with the people. Though they see themselves and the people through ‘‘blue eyes,’’ they do not set out to distance themselves from the people. In contrast, the collaborationist tendency—exemplified in Lestrade—is marked by an insistence on difference. Lestrade is proud of being part white and he repeatedly refers to blacks in brutally racist terms: ‘‘Animals, beasts, savages, cannibals, niggers.’’

Makak's mimeticism manifests itself in many ways. Most obviously, his ‘‘name’’ alludes not only to the racist identification of blacks with apes, but also to the adage ‘‘Monkey see, monkey do.’’ Indeed, at one point, Lestrade—representing white power and authority—has Makak imitate him in a series of meaningless actions. He concludes: ‘‘Everything I say this monkey does do, / I don't know what to say this monkey won't do. / I sit down, monkey sit down too, / I don't know what to say this monkey won't do.’’ But the most significant image of Makak's mimeticism is probably the mask. When arrested, Makak is carrying a white mask. This is the mask of mimicry, the mask which imitates white people. Makak is, of course, not unique in wearing such a mask. It is a mask that all blacks learn to wear as children. When Moustique finds the mask in Makak's hovel, he calls it ‘‘cheap stupidness black children putting on.’’ Later, Moustique confronts a crowd seeking release from oppression, and makes the connection explicit: ‘‘you all want me, as if this hand hold magic, to stretch it and like a flash of lightning to make you all white.’’ Of course, he cannot. All he can do is train them in mimicry. ‘‘All I have is this,’’ he says, pulling out the mask, and explaining: ‘‘blackfaces, white masks!’’

Mimeticism manifests itself not only in relation to authority and divinity, but also in relation to desire. Within a racist society, the dominant racial group assumes official authority for all evaluation, and enforces that authority. In the cases we have been discussing, the mimic seeks the respect of his/ her oppressor. But there are other cases in which 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. In Dream on Monkey Mountain, the white woman is represented by the moon. Thus, Tigre imagines Makak ‘‘masturbating in the moonlight,’’ which is to say, fantasizing the carnal love of a white woman. And later, in a moment of despair, Makak explains that ‘‘I can [never] reach that moon; and that is why I am lost.’’ Connecting the desired white woman with the mother—a connection which will become important later on—Souris explains what ‘‘they teach me since I small’’: ‘‘To be black like coal, and to dream of milk,’’ milk being the whiteness he can never achieve, but also the white woman and the white mother he can never have.

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,’’ 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.’’ And, yet, this new ethnic valorization is not unproblematic. Makak is still linked with nature, not humanity; as a lion, he is ‘‘king of the jungle.’’ More importantly, in making him a lion, this imaginary white woman makes him white. Later in the play, Walcott sets up three parallels: milk and coal, day and night, lion and monkey. The primary significance of ‘‘lion’’ in this sequence is as a signal of whiteness. Through the imagined love of the white woman, Makak has to some extent gained access to values which need not constrain his identity to that which is worthless. But even so, those values are defined precisely by their whiteness. Indeed, the substitution of ‘‘lion’’ for ‘‘Makak’’ is colonial in another way. Etymologically, ‘‘lion’’ derives from Greek and Hebrew roots, making it firmly Judeo-European, ‘‘Makak,’’ in contrast, derives from Fiot, a Bantu language; indeed, ‘‘Makak’’ avoids the French/English, Portuguese, and Latin spellings (‘‘macaque,’’ ‘‘macaco,’’ and ‘‘macaca’’), employing instead the standard transcription of the Fiot (see, for example, the entry for ‘‘macaque’’ in The American Heritage Dictionary). Thus, while the value placed on Makak by the white woman does give him a sense of worth, it is worth which in virtually every way derives from colonial valorization of whiteness and European culture. This is why Moustique identifies her with the white mask. The values she allows Makak to celebrate are ultimately mimetic, however anti-mimetic they may appear.

Nonetheless, Makak does move out of mimeticism per se into a form of reactionary nativism—a transition adumbrated at the beginning of the play through the identification of ‘‘the round moon’’ (representative of whiteness and, particularly, the white woman) with ‘‘the white disc of an African drum’’ (representative of a rediscovered African tradition). Specifically, Walcott represents two stages of reactionary nativism. The first, which tends to precede national independence, is what I will call ‘‘Romantic Nativism,’’ in its popular form, and ‘‘Opportunistic Nativism’’ in its anti-popular or individualist form.

Romantic nativism is a celebratory idealization of (what one perceives to be) the culture and history of the subordinated group. Walcott is harshly critical of this view. Elsewhere, he calls it ‘‘a schizophrenic daydream of an Eden that existed before … exile’’ (‘‘What the Twilight Says’’). Unsurprisingly, 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.’’ Along similar lines, when Lestrade is converted to nativism and affirms his race rather than rejecting it, he is suddenly naked in the jungle. Makak then identifies him and all his African forebears with nature, asking: ‘‘Don't you hear your own voice in the gibberish of the leaves? Look now how the trees have opened their arms. And in the hoarseness of the rivers, don't you hear the advice of all our ancestors?’’

In connection with this turn from law to nature, from the court to the jungle, from civil authority to natural authority, the object of love shifts from the nubile white woman and inaccessible moon to Mother Earth or Mother Africa, black with fertile soil, the true home, always there, always waiting. In this context, love becomes a return to the patient, ever-loving mother or motherland, one's origin and destiny. Though only humoring Makak, Tigre presents this theme when he exclaims, ‘‘Ah, Africa! Ah, blessed Africa! Whose earth is a starved mother waiting for the kiss of her prodigal.’’ And as he approaches his conversion, Lestrade cries out to ‘‘Mother Africa, Mother Earth’’; as he removes his clothes in preparation for his rebirth as African, he announces, ‘‘I return to this earth, my mother.’’

In contrast with this naive view, opportunistic nativism is the cynical manipulation of the people's hopes and desires through an insincere celebration of non-European values and customs—a celebration aimed merely at one's own advancement. The obvious example of this is Moustique' s fraudulent preaching and impersonation of Makak, after Makak has achieved success as a political and religious leader. Walcott criticizes such demagoguery. But at the same time he allows Moustique alone to recognize the close connection between romantic nativism and mimeticism (in the passage already quoted concerning the Fanonian ‘‘black faces, white masks’’). Moustique's cynicism is not entirely misplaced.

Indeed, the kernel of truth in Moustique's cynicism is made evident when there is a sudden change in the situation. Independence has been achieved. But instead of the expected peace and harmony, Africans are fighting against Africans. There is violence and brutality everywhere. Makak is at the head of an unstable state with many enemies. This is the third moment of post-colonization identity, and it too has a communal and an individual version. I will refer to these as Sectarian Nativism and Neo-Colonial Nativism. Neo-colonial nativism here is in effect a version of the mimetic collaborationism of the first moment. The primary difference is that it is not overtly mimetic. Neo-colonial nativists celebrate indigenous traditions in order to advance their own interests as junior partners of the former colonies. They frequently do so by supporting sectarian nativism, the affirmation of small-group identities within the former colony. Sectarian nativism involves the affirmation of narrow linguistic, religious, ethnic, or other identities—for example, Hindu vs. Muslim in India or Yoruba vs. Ibo in Nigeria. This is clearly the same sort of affirmation as initially created the broader sense of identity in romantic nativism, where an identification with Africa relied on a specific repudiation of Europe. In other words, sectarian nativism continues the identification of all value with one particular culture, but narrows that identification (e.g., from ‘‘Africa’’ to ‘‘Yoruba’’). Indeed, it narrows the identification in a way which can be extremely brutal. Finally, it maintains the mimetic basis of romantic nativism. Value is still understood as white value—even though both sectarian and neo-colonial nativists may violently reject all whiteness (the former sincerely, the latter cynically).

Makak describes the situation after independence, as sectarian nativism spreads: ‘‘The tribes! The tribes will wrangle among themselves, spitting, writhing, hissing, like snakes in a pit … devouring their own entrails like a hyena.’’ He also explains that this is the direct outcome of the racist ideology of colonialism and the mimeticism of the colonized. They devour ‘‘their own entrails’’ because they are ‘‘eaten with self-hatred.’’ ‘‘The tribes! The tribes!,’’ he laments, ‘‘One by one they will be broken.’’ But Makak too succumbs to sectarianism. The people who ‘‘rejected’’ his ‘‘dream’’ ‘‘must be taught, even tortured, killed.’’ The reign of terror begins: ‘‘Their skulls will hang from my palaces. I will break up their tribes.’’

Unsurprisingly, Lestrade, formerly the mimetic collaborationist, is now the neo-colonial nativist. He names himself: ‘‘Hatchet-man, opportunist, executioner.’’ He initiates the sectarian violence by killing Tigre, and encourages the reign of terror, telling Makak: ‘‘those who do not bend to our will, to your will, must die.’’ His work is to manipulate the nationalist leader (Makak) and the people in his own interests, and implicitly in the interests of the former colonizers. Now when he says, ‘‘I have the black man work to do,’’ we can hear, echoing just below the surface, his earlier statement: ‘‘I got the white man work to do’’; the repetition is not accidental. He establishes his cynical strategies: ‘‘Wow, let splendour, barbarism, majesty, noise, slogans, parades, drown out that truth. Plaster the walls with pictures of the leader.’’ But even in this, they all remain mere shadows in the fire of the white man's mind. Speaking of Makak, he says: ‘‘He's a shadow now.’’ The pomp and circumstance only thicken the shadows, but do not make them real. Referring to Makak's coronation, he calls out, ‘‘magnify our shadows, moon, if only for a moment.’’

Perhaps most interestingly, 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,’’ clearly connecting ‘‘forward’’ movement and progress with the ideal of whiteness. Makak has a brief vision of what this means: the breaking of the tribes, the replacing of tradition by commerce, ‘‘the gold and silver scales of the sun and the moon … that is named progress.’’ But his response to this is mistaken, a deepening of reactionary nativism which continues to accept colonial racist ideology even as it denounces whiteness more vehemently and completely. When praises are sung in the new kingdom, they are pervaded with the images of whiteness. Makak is lauded as he ‘‘Whose plate is the moon at its full, / Whose sword is the moon in its crescent.’’ His peace is ‘‘gentler than cotton; his ‘‘voice is the dove,’’ his ‘‘eye is the cloud,’’ and his ‘‘hands are washed continually in milk.’’ And yet, as emperor, Makak proclaims whiteness to be guilt. He presents a list of names, explaining: ‘‘Their crime … is, that they are … white.’’ He continues, explaining the new official history which parallels and inverts the official histories written by whites: ‘‘a drop of milk is enough to condemn them, to banish them from the archives of the bo-leaf and the papyrus, from the waxen tablet and the tribal stone.’’ Again, the nature of this rejection is clear. It is a reaction formation; its vehemence is directly proportionate to the force of the mimeticism which it simultaneously represses and manifests.

In this context, the object of desire again becomes the white woman. But here, in a reaction formation, she is reconstrued as the object of hate and violence. Before his execution, Moustique accuses Makak: ‘‘Once you loved the moon, now a night will come when, because it white, from your deep hatred you will want it destroyed.’’ In reply, Makak asserts his blackness, his rejection of whiteness: ‘‘My hatred is deep, black, quiet as velvet.’’ But Moustique, as always, recognizes the mimeticism just below the surface: ‘‘you are more of an ape now, a puppet’’ and he sings ‘‘I don't know what to say this monkey won't do,’’ recalling the earlier scene with Lestrade and implicitly indicating Lestrade' s manipulative and collaborationist role in the new society. Subsequently, Lestrade does drive Makak to kill the white woman—indeed, not merely to kill her, but to brutalize her: ‘‘Nun, virgin, Venus, you must violate, humiliate, destroy her.’’ Like all successful propagandists, Lestrade mixes truth with lies. He is right that this idealization of whiteness ‘‘is the mirror of the moon that this ape look into and find himself unbearable’’; it is ‘‘white light that paralysed [Makak's] mind’’ and Makak must free himself from whiteness, ‘‘as fatal as leprosy,’’ if he is ever to achieve ‘‘peace.’’ But this repudiation of an idea is too easily mixed up with the repudiation of people—in this case, a woman, then all women. It turns too easily to misogyny—a frequent component of reactionary nativism, and yet another hierarchization which mirrors or repeats the stratification of colonial racism. Lestrade tells Makak that he must strive ‘‘to discover the beautiful depth of [his] blackness,’’ but such a project remains squarely within the racist problematic of colonialism: all self-understanding and value are based on race. Moreover, the supposed purity and ‘‘blackness’’ of this project is denied by the sectarian brutality of the regime and by its imagery of whiteness. Indeed, when Makak beheads the white woman, he does so with ‘‘the curved sword,’’ which was described at the beginning of the scene as ‘‘the moon in its crescent’’ (though it is at the same time reminiscent of Islam; perhaps Walcott is also criticizing the reactionary violence which Islam has been used to justify).

And yet, for Walcott, this reactionary, sectarian, misogynist brutality seems not to be entirely negative. When beheading the white woman, Makak announces, ‘‘Now, O God, now I am free.’’ Immediately thereafter, he recalls his name. It is now dawn—with all the symbolism this implies. Suddenly, he is part of no organized religion, but ‘‘I believe in my God’’—he has found an alternative to both religious despair and religious mimeticism. Most importantly, when Lestrade offers him the white mask, Makak refuses it. He leaves, perhaps for the first time since childhood, without the mask. In his final monologue, he claims that he has now found ‘‘roots’’ and a ‘‘home’’ and the chorus sings that he returns to his ‘‘father's kingdom,’’ which, one is left to assume, he finds by accepting himself, his image, his name, rejecting the white mask.

I am not the only critic to be uncomfortable with this ending. Jan R. Uhrbach tries to solve the problem of the execution by maintaining that the decapitated woman ‘‘is not the same figure who spoke to [Makak] in his dream,’’ but is instead ‘‘Lestrade's vision.’’ In this view, the execution is more like an attack on Lestrade than on any woman. Uhrbach's argument rests on her claim that the white woman is identified with the moon only late in the play. However, she is identified with the moon in the same sentence in which she is introduced: ‘‘I behold this woman … / Like the moon.’’ On the other hand, even if she were not immediately identified with the moon, Uhrbach's conjecture seems unsupported and implausible. In the only lengthy recent treatment of the play, Samad also addresses the execution, maintaining that the white woman represents ‘‘the polarized and static romanticized vision of his ancestral past,’’ a polarized vision ended by the execution. But, as we have seen, the brutality of the execution, its association with Lestrade and sectarian nativism, and the imagery surrounding the act, all indicate that it is necessarily part of such a polarization.

Perhaps Walcott is following Fanon here in linking violence with catharsis. Fanon wrote: ‘‘violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair’’ and ‘‘is closely involved in the liquidation of regionalism and tribalism.’’ It is what prevents demagoguery, for ‘‘When the people have taken violent part in the national liberation they will allow no one to set themselves up as ‘liberators.’’’ People are ‘‘Illuminated by violence.’’ Indeed, ‘‘Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them.’’ Unfortunately, this does not really solve the problem. Admittedly, revolutionary violence is often unavoidable. And we should not fall into the trap of condemning the small violence of the revolutionaries while ignoring the massive violence of the oppressors. Yet, Fanon seems to be just wrong here. The history of revolutions hardly indicates that violence ends mimeticism or demagoguery, that it leads to social harmony or justice. Violent revolution brings the most violent leaders to the fore, habituates everyone to conceiving of problems and solutions in terms of force, power, weapons, terror. At best, violence is an unfortunate necessity. But it will almost invariably function to perpetuate itself. Moreover, it will tend to operate through and thus support the sort of stratified thinking, and thus identity, promulgated by colonial racism.

Elsewhere, Fanon presents a different solution to the problem of colonial identity: ‘‘the individual should tend to take on the universality inherent in the human condition.’’ More exactly,

As I begin to recognize that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognize that I am a Negro. There are two ways out of this conflict. Either I ask others to pay no attention to my skin, or else I want them to be aware of it. I try then to find value for what is bad—since I have unthinkingly conceded that the black man is the color of evil. In order to terminate this neurotic situation, in which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution, fed on fantasies, hostile, inhuman in short, I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged round me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.

Here, Fanon advocates the universalism also found in such writers as Bessie Head and Rabindranath Tagore, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Samir Amin. Though unfashionable amongst academics (except, of course, those in linguistics), it is perhaps the one option which need not presuppose and repeat the structure of colonial racism.

But that is the topic of another essay, for universalism is not a solution which Walcott considers in Dream on Monkey Mountain. In 1967, when the play was first produced, perhaps the consequences of revolutionary violence were not so obvious. Perhaps the resolution, the discovery of name and roots, the rejection of mimeticism through the humiliation and murder of the white woman, would not have seemed so mistaken, so brutal, so close to misogyny. In any event, whatever one's view of its problematic ending, Walcott's play presents us with a powerful literary analysis of the constitution of colonial identity, its varieties and development (or dialectic). And the anatomy we have sought to abstract from his work should be of value not only in understanding other literature, but, one might hope, in conceptualizing and responding to the far more important issues of social and personal identity in the real world—the issues toward which, after all, Walcott sought to draw our attention and inspire our action.

Source: Patrick Colm Hogan, ‘‘Mimeticism, Reactionary Nativism, and the Possibility of Postcolonial Identity in Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain,’’ in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer, 1994, p. 103.

Dream on Monkey Mountain: Fantasy as Self-Perception

Derek Walcott, a Third World poet and dramatist, born in the Castries, St. Lucia, began writing poetic dramas in 1948 with his first play, Henri Christophe, a play about the Haitian Revolution. Walcott has written 15 plays, which have been produced and published, and 10 volumes of poetry, seven of which must be called major collections. His own life as a ‘‘divided child’’—he is the son of parents of mixed European and African descent—embodies one of the prime tensions of the West Indian experience.

Walcott' s arch hero, Makak, in Dream on Monkey Mountain is taken from the author's early years in St. Lucia where Walcott recalls a childhood memory of an old, undisciplined woodcutter, who reflects regional history. Two of the major themes of the play are racial inferiority (Makak's French Patois name implies an apelike figure) and the thwarted potential of an independent spirit, ‘‘living on his own ground, off its elemental resources.’’ Walcott's drama illuminates the tragic struggle of Makak, his hopes, his fears, and his temporary freedom, which is itself a dream. Makak is a microcosm of all poor West Indians who suffer; he is offered a seeming identity only to return to his mountain hermitlike life, with dreams defeated again. The play, however, leaves the audience with a hopeful vision: Makak must and will descend again from his mountain isolation to face reality, regardless of the cost.

Walcott, in his introduction to Dream on Monkey Mountain, credits the theater as an outlet to show the legacy of racial oppression and subjugation of the West Indian natives. ‘‘[B]eing poor, we already had the theatre of our lives which we share with the agony of actors of all time.’’

Dream on Monkey Mountain is a mythic drama, a ritualized play of the West Indies, combining fantasy, obeah, music, dance, and poetry to expose the deeper, unconscious sources of identity and the nature of freedom. The cast includes seven black men, one white woman dancer-singer, a male chorus, drummers, and music. The play was first presented by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in Toronto in 1967. Other productions were presented in the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theatre in Connecticut; the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles; and in New York, where the play won the Obie Award for the best foreign play in 1970-71. In the 1971 production at St. Mark's Theatre, the White Goddess appeared singing in a huge cutout of the moon. When Makak's hallucination is over, the moon sinks into the sea. Edith Oliver, in her review of the play, tells how the setting, choreography, costumes, and lighting enhance the mood of the play. In this play, characters exchange roles, assume aspects of the protagonist's dominant personality traits, and serve as symbols; one who is twice killed returns alive again in the epilogue.

The play, ripe with satire, is structured around a series of interrelated themes within dream sequences echoing Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In these dream episodes, the protagonist, Makak, discovers his true self, neither God nor beast, only a man, an old black man who eventually learns his name and identity.

Walcott generously credits Brecht, Oriental artists, and Robert Graves's The White Goddess, who appears in Makak's dream as the white apparition representing inauthentic and limited African identity, for his inspiration. The play is also rich in puns, metaphors, and verbal play of fast-paced Calypsonian rhetoric. Unlike Brecht's productions, Walcott's plays demand a different kind of disciplined actor, dancer, and singer more like those who perform in Kabuki theater. All of these elements, including dream sequences and the introduction of the White Goddess, merge in Dream on Monkey Mountain.

Walcott's protagonist, Makak (monkey), who is an extension of Walcott's hero in his drama Henri Christophe, is a coal-burner who represents not only the blacks' righteous rebellion against the white master but also the heretical step of rejecting the equally oppressive role imposed by black racists. In a note on the production, Walcott, somewhat reminiscent of Strindberg, allows the producer freedom to amplify: ‘‘The play is a dream, one that exists as much in the given minds of its principal characters as in that of its writer.’’ Walcott also suggests Sartre's prologue to The Wretched of the Earth as another source of his theme: ‘‘Thus in certain psychoses the hallucinated person, tired of always being insulted by a demon, one fine day starts hearing the voice of an angel who pays him compliments.’’

In the Prologue, Makak has been jailed for being drunk and disorderly. He shares his cell with two fellow prisoners, Tigre and Souris, who merge with his hallucination and share his quixotic experiences, as does Makak's jailer, Lestrade. The names of the characters suggest fable: Lestrade, neither black nor white, is a straddler. Makak means monkey, taken from the name of the mountain where he lives. His two companions are the tiger and the mouse. Corporal Lestrade, like Charles Fuller's Sergeant Waters in A Soldier's Play, ridicules backward blacks. He attempts to prove that Makak is an old ape who must be told how to act and what to do: ‘‘Animals, beasts, savages, cannibals, niggers, stop turning this place into a stinking zoo.’’

When Lestrade interrogates Makak about his race, Makak replies, ‘‘Tired,’’ a one-word declaration of long-standing prejudice. Then Makak relates his dreams, claiming ‘‘All I have is my dreams and they don't trouble your soul.’’ The prisoner goes on to tell about his vision of the White Goddess on Monkey Mountain who calls out his ‘‘real’’ name and not the one he uses.

In Scene One, Makak is on Monkey Mountain with his friend, Moustique, whom he tells about his dream and the lady, the root of his problem, in his vision. Makak declares that the lady, after talking all night, commands him to regain his African birthright. He has been living all of his life, without a wife or children, on Monkey Mountain, working at his charcoal pit. Moustique does not believe his story but, like Sancho Panza, decides to accompany his ‘‘king’’ on his misadventures. The two men mirror the play's black consciousness in that both lack any positive identity, underscored by Moustique: ‘‘You black, ugly, poor, so worse than nothing. You like me, small, ugly with a foot like an ‘S.’’’ Obviously, Makak had one identity throughout his life—subhuman. His hallucinations slowly give him dignity and eventually his God-given identity of a man. The two travelers set out to prove Makak's birthright in a series of misadventures. The episodes are laced with satire and humor: ‘‘Saddle my horse, if you love me, Moustique, and cut a sharp bamboo for me.… Makak will walk like he used to in Africa, when his name was Lion!’’ Reluctantly, Moustique agrees to follow his master, but adds, ‘‘Is the stupidest thing I ever see.’’ To the music of flute and drum, they sally forth down the mountain to glory.

On their first encounter, Makak is instrumental in restoring a dying man to life. Corporal Lestrade, informed about the local ‘‘savior’’ appears in wig and gown, deriding the crowd's delusions: ‘‘It's the cripples who believe in miracles. It's the slaves who believe in freedom.’’ Moustique is quick to seize the opportunity for gain, like many other trickster heroes of West Indian folklore who convert faith and trust into a profitable enterprise. Caught impersonating his master, Moustique is beaten to death by a crowd of villagers who discover his attempt to be the miracle-working Makak.

In what appears to be reality, Makak is back in his cell with Souris and Tigre, enduring Lestrade's pointedly contradictory defense of white justice. In an attempt to sublimate his own problem of racial identity, Lestrade—once again echoing Fuller's Sergeant Waters—screams: ‘‘This ain't Africa. This is not another easy-going nigger you talking to, but an officer!’’ Angered, Tigre plans an escape for himself, Souris, and Makak, who pretends madness to bring Lestrade to his cell where he stabs him. After they leave the jail, the corporal rises and explains to the audience that the act is only what they dream of—their dream of revenge. As Lestrade begins his hunt for the fugitives, he warns: ‘‘Attempting to escape from the prison of their lives. That's the most dangerous crime. It brings about revolution.’’ Going through the forest on their way to Monkey Mountain (Africa), the fugitives become hungry. Makak dries ganja to smoke and tells Souris and Tigre that they will not need food when they smoke the plant. As the chorus chants, ‘‘I am going home to Africa,’’ Makak announces ‘‘The mind can bring the dead to life. It can make a man a king. It can make him a beast.’’

Lestrade, searching for the escaped prisoners, meets Basil, another apparition, a coffin maker and spirit of death, who admonishes the corporal and demands he repent his sins. Lestrade does not know if he is in the real world or in a dream himself. Coming upon Makak and the others, who see Lestrade apparently talking to himself, the officer, thinking of his sins, ‘‘goes native’’ and becomes the most fanatic convert to Makak's back-to-Africa movement. At this point, Makak himself is caught up in the frenzy for power and revenge. Makak promises to make Tigre a general when they arrive in Africa. Meanwhile, Makak is crowned king by his three followers. Souris is also converted totally to Makak's dream. Throughout the play all of the major characters, at one time or another, question their racial identity, their place in life. Makak wavers between reality and illusion. Another dream-death takes place when Lestrade drives a spear through Tigre, who, like Moustique, seeks only monetary gain from his newfound position of power.

In a quick change of scene, they are transported to Africa, and Makak sets up court and judgment is passed on the history of racial oppression. Lestrade insists on death for all the accused, including Makak's White Goddess. In one of the wittiest and most entertaining scenes in the play, Basil, who reappears in Africa, reads a list of the offenders, including Aristotle Shakespeare, The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, and Al Jolson.

The revolutionists then consider the enemies' fate. Basil asks if the Pope is to be spared. A unanimous negation is the tribe's response. The same reaction is rendered at the names of the President of the United States, the Republic of South Africa, and the Ku Klux Klan. Also in this dream sequence, congratulatory letters arrive from several golf and country clubs. A gilt-edged doctorate from Mississippi University arrives, along with the Nobel Peace Prize, an autograph of Pushkin, the Stalin Peace Prize, an offer from the United Nations a sliver of bone from the thigh of Lumumba, and an offer from Hollywood. The scene then shifts from satire to ‘‘tragedy.’’ With the beheading of the White Goddess, Makak gains his total freedom—by killing his ‘‘problem’’: ‘‘She is the white light that paralysed your mind, that led you into this confusion. It is you who created her, so kill her! Kill her!’’ Moustique is also executed (his second death) for having betrayed the original dream. In this court, there is no room for personal relationships; there is only racial retribution.

The Epilogue makes it clear that the play's action has been real only in Makak's mind. He has cut through illusion to discover his essential self. Makak, the ‘‘Being’’ without an identity, without manhood, now has rejoined the world, taking on his ancestral name. His name is his identity; Makak, as the world has considered him, is a new man, equal to all other men and women. When he wakes in his jail cell, he recollects that his legal name is Felix Hoban. Moustique comes to take him from the jail and discovers Makak to be a new man. Together they set out for Monkey Mountain. Makak's last words are a prayer for the future: ‘‘Makak lives where he has always lived, in the dreams of his people! Other men will come, other prophets will come, and they will be stoned, and mocked, and betrayed. But now this old hermit is going home, back to the beginning of this world.’’

Walcott dismisses revenge as uncreative. Makak, after experiencing his dream, realizes he is a man, a man living off his own land and its native resources. He has found his own roots, which are just as sacred to him as the white man's roots are to the white man. It is his self-imposed image that Makak has learned to dismiss, not by seeking revenge on the oppressors such as Lestrade but by seeking in himself a positive image. His racial identity has been made up of a complex historical legacy, but this should not deter him from creating a new vision of renewal with dignity and purpose. This theme is reiterated throughout Walcott's work.

Makak has thus gone through the whole cycle from woodcutter to king to woodcutter again, but his experiences will keep alive the dreams of the people of the Caribbean, a dream of freedom that must be maintained in the colonized world. The play reawakens the anger at the legacy of bondage in the minds of the oppressed, but it also, in glorifying and idealizing Africa, displays the power of the theater in everyday life. The awakening of the colonized consciousness is seen in the acting out of the hallucinations of this old charcoal maker who refuses to accept the forced identity of a subhuman.

As the play ends and the house lights go on, the audience may doubt the fantasy of the play, for outside of the world of the theater, humans are still irrational. They still consult the astrologer; they still cross their fingers and knock on wood; and they are still, in a sense, religious. Then, as the house lights again dim, the actors renew their cult of nakedness. Life begins again every night when the house lights go out. Rehearsals are also life. They have accepted the twilight. Walcott teaches us that in the theater all the races are one race. He believes that there is no such thing as black or white literature. He notes that the reception of this play in New York (the critics viewed the play as part of the ‘‘Get Whitey Syndrome’’) would not be acceptable to a West Indian audience. What Makak recognizes after he awakes from his nightmare-dream is the lesson he learned from the horror of the blacks’ actions in Africa—tribes slaughtering each other—that human cruelty is raceless. Makak has come to realize that the first step in getting rid of his fear of everything white is his need for freedom and identity. The world can and must dispossess prejudice at all levels. Makak has given us a new meaning of life.

Source: Robert J. Willis, ‘‘Dream on Monkey Mountain: Fantasy as Self-Perception,’’ in Staging the Impossible: The Fantastic Mode in Modern Drama, Ed. Patrick D. Murphy, Greenwood Press, 1992, pp. 150-55.

Big Night Music: Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain and the Splendours of Imagination

In Derek Walcott's own words, ‘‘The play is a dream, one that exists as much in the given minds of its principal characters as in that of its writer, and as such, it is illogical, derivative, and contradictory. Its source is metaphor.…’’ This statement is crucial to any profound understanding of the work, and my purpose in this essay shall be to examine the nature and function of dreams in the play in an effort to elucidate one essential level of meaning in Walcott's magnum opus.

I
In the world of the work—that is, within the context of the play itself—we are presented with a dream and a dream-within-a-dream. But in the context of the work within the world—that is, beyond the text or enactment of the drama—we are also confronted with a dream: Walcott's creative vision which informs the play, and which is itself a part of a larger dream in the mind of mankind, an edenic dream of elemental freedom. Beginning on a ‘‘realistic’’ level in the play we move rapidly into the realm of poetic reality, spiraling evermore inward toward an essential core of meaning before ascending once more to the ‘‘logic’’ of the waking world. But this essential core of meaning, discoverable by the individual through an internal voyage, exists beyond the individual—or any individual work of art—in a collective consciousness which Art as a spiritual endeavour has always striven to articulate. So, at the play's conclusion, when we are told that ‘‘Makak lives where he has always lived, in the dream of his people,’’ the world within the work and the work within the world merge at the crossroads of the imagination. Makak comes from, and he returns to, the world of myth.

One of the perennial motifs of myth is that of the seeker, the defier of odds and gods, and his redemptive quest; and one of myth's lessons to mankind lies in the articulation of the rhythms of recurrence, the repetitive nature of experience. Walcott grasped these concepts early. He ‘‘recalls the familiar scene in his childhood when the story teller would sit by the fire to narrate stories involving a ‘hero whose quest is never done’, and explains how it became necessary for him to appropriate the image of that hero in his plays.’’ And his brother, Roderick Walcott, has noted that ‘‘The legends of Papa Diablo, Mama Glos, lajables, and the sukuya can remain if only we tell them over and over again.’’

Imagination solidified itself in the ambiguous person of an actual individual whom Walcott vividly remembers. ‘‘My Makak comes from my own childhood. I can see him for what he is now, a brawling, ruddy drunk who would come down the street on a Saturday when he got paid and let out an immense roar that would terrify all the children.… When we heard him coming we all bolted, because he was like a baboon.… This was a degraded man, but he had some elemental force in him that is still terrifying; in another society he would have been a warrior.’’

These images from Walcott's past, folkloric and literal, are fused in the character of Felix Hobain, whose metaphoric identity is Makak, the monkey-man, the lion and king. Makak, one of the lowliest of the low, is the one in whom the dream is invested. The dream that transforms Makak is, in a very real sense, Walcott's own dream, his artist's vision which espies the potential for greatness in ‘‘a degraded man,’’ which recognizes the raw power behind seeming impotence.

These dead, these derelicts, that alphabet of the emaciated, they were the stars of my mythology.

Makak then becomes representative of the downtrodden and impoverished blacks who long to be redeemed, and of the transformation that brings about, or at least prefaces, such redemption.

II
Speaking specifically of the anguish of the West Indian, Walcott says, ‘‘we have not wholly sunk into our own landscapes,’’ thus defining an inherent rootlessness. It is a concern that numerous writers share, but Walcott, like Wilson Harris, attempts the absorption into the indigenous landscape along with a corresponding exploration of a mind—or dreamscape: ‘‘a country for the journey of the soul’’ as Walcott calls it. Both of these geographies—the literal and the imaginative—are recreated and fused through language.

It is through language, in fact, that Walcott envisions the salvation of ‘‘the New World Negro.’’ ‘‘What would deliver him from servitude was the forging of a language that went beyond mimicry, a dialect which had the force of revelation as it invented names for things, one which finally settled on its own mode of inflection, and which began to create an oral culture of chants, jokes, folk-songs and fables.…’’ The poet in his primal role as maker is the one who can forge this recreative language that will provide a vehicle for the liberation of consciousness from its colonized state. But it is obvious here that the way forward is the way back: to roots. ‘‘For imagination and body to move with original instinct, we must begin again from the bush. That return journey, with all its horror of rediscovery, means the annihilation of what is known.… On such journeys the mind will discover what it chooses.…’’ But a choice made via the annihilation of the known can only be instinctual, unconscious, intuitive; it will not be rational.

The true arena of the drama, then, is that of the mind, of imagination. Its vehicle is dream, which enables Walcott to dispense with normal logic, linearity, literalness, and emphasize instead myth, recurrence, ambiguity. When the cages rise out of sight during Makak' s deposition—his first recital of his dream—we have a graphic representation of the liberating power of the imagination. This is Walcott's strategy throughout: to demonstrate the disparities between a consciousness that is creative and metaphoric, and one that is straightforward and imprisoning. Makak, for instance, is said to be in a state of ‘‘incomprehensible intoxication.’’ He may literally be drunk, or this could be merely a pejorative characterization of his dream and madness by someone who remains untouched by them. Especially the dream is described as ‘‘vile,’’ ‘‘obscene’’ and ‘‘ambitious.’’ The charges of being ‘‘uppity’’ and sexually depraved are those traditionally levelled at blacks by racists, and Corporal Lestrade has absorbed this mentality, or rather, he has been possessed by it.

‘‘Incomprehensible intoxication’’ might be one label a modern, scientific mind would apply to the trance states of mystics, seers and shamans. When Makak declares, ‘‘Spirits does talk to me,’’ a ‘‘rational’’ person would perhaps dismiss this as hallucination, but a ‘‘primitive’’ individual would know that Makak is in touch with the traditional world, which encompasses a nonmaterial reality. Makak is a visionary, and the visionary stance is fraught with peril. He is able to exorcise a dying man's sickness when ‘‘priest,’’ ‘‘white doctor,’’ and ‘‘bush medicine’’ fail, and he tries to do the same with his people, only to be rejected by them because they are incapable of belief. Makak is struggling with a pejorative limitation on his psyche and being which his dream helps him transcend. Failure to ‘‘dissolve in his dream’’ means that one remains imprisoned. Moustique, for example, masters the rhetoric of salvation but he lacks vision; he has not experienced the power of the dream but merely wishes to exploit it. Hence Basil says of him, when unmasking him in the marketplace, ‘‘The tongue is on fire, but the eyes are dead.’’

In his recital of his dream, Makak describes himself as walking through white mist to the charcoal pit on the mountain. He is ascending the slope of consciousness, journeying through whiteness to blackness, through vagueness toward a solid identity. ‘‘Make the web of the spider heavy with diamonds / And when my hand brush it, let the chain break’’—that is, the chain of slavery, both psychological and actual. The spider's web represents the entanglements of history, racism, colonialism; the diamonds are the oppressed. In his role as saviour, Makak is able to shatter this evil beauty with an almost casual gesture. The dream transcends time, telescopes spiritual and physical evolution, so that Makak moves, in the infinite space of a poetic moment, from ape to God:

I have live all my life / Like a wild beast in hiding … / And this old man walking, ugly as sin, / In a confusion of vapour, / Till I feel I was God self, walking through cloud.

Again, in the healing scene, Makak stands with a burning coal in his palm, chanting a formula for salvation, striving to save the sick man from an actual death and his people from the living death of degradation and despair. ‘‘Faith! Faith! / Believe in yourselves.’’ The energy released by the burning charcoal symbolizes the spiritual energy released by Makak's positive confirmation of his blackness. ‘‘You are living coals,’’ he tells them, ‘‘/ you are trees under pressure, / you are brilliant diamonds.…’’ The decomposed matter from primeval vegetation was transformed into coal, and diamonds are the result of coal under enormous pressure, over great periods of geological time. Burning coal brings light; diamonds reflect and refract light. Hence Moustique's echo, in the marketplace, of Makak' s metaphor: ‘‘One billion trillion years of pressure bringing light, and is for that I say, Africa shall make light.’’ Here, of course, Moustique is speaking better than he knows. The ‘‘revelation of my experience’’ that he talks of is that of his people, the broader dimensions of which Makak's dream calls back from a darkness of oppression, forgetfulness and ignorance.

The dream which redeems, the imaginative reversal that transforms a poor charcoal burner into royalty, has its roots in historical fact. In his book The Loss of El Dorado, V.S. Naipaul relates how the black slaves in Trinidad at the beginning of the nineteenth century created kingdoms of the night, with their own kings, queens and courtiers, elaborate uniforms, and other regal paraphenalia. During the day the blacks laboured and endured the cruelty and contempt of their masters; but beneath the moon these same slaves were for a time themselves metamorphosed into masters, issuing commands and miming splendours, while their white owners became the objects of mockery and fantasies of revenge. One of these nocturnal regiments, led by a King Sampson, was known as the Macacque regiment. In light of the condemnations meted out during the apotheosis scene in Dream, it is significant to note as well from Naipaul's account that ‘‘the role of the Grand Judge, who punished at night as the overseer punished by day, was important.’’

This nighttime pageantry was redemptive drama, an elaborate masquerade which enabled the oppressed to vivify their ancestral memories while at the same time reversing, if only momentarily, the bitter realities of the present. Naipaul remarks, ‘‘Negro insurrection, which seemed so sudden in its beginnings and so casual in its betrayals, was usually only an aspect of Negro fantasy; but an adequate leader could make it real.’’ It never came to this. In 1805, the imaginary kingdoms were revealed— practically voluntarily, as if the secret were too good to keep—and the slave aristocracy was executed or whipped. Still, until such time as the powers of rebellion proved to be sufficiently substantive, the dream remained as a possible vehicle of escape from despair; and, while they lasted, the kingdoms of the night must have been a positive force, a means of sustaining the slave in what were otherwise intolerable circumstances. There are those who would argue —and indeed the same criticism has been directed against Dream—that the blacks would have been better off had they refrained from fantasy and resorted instead to violence. But this is itself a form of romanticism. When you have been reduced to a dehumanized state, you must first regain your dignity; when you have been relegated to physical toil, the mind must sometimes soar above the body. If you are an animal, why not be a lion? If you are a slave, why not dream of being a king (especially when you may be the descendent of kings?) Dreams may be attacked as nothing more than dreams, but in the beautiful words of Delmore Schwartz, ‘‘In dreams begin responsibilities.’’

III
Monkey Mountain is depicted in the Prologue as ‘‘volcanic,’’ which suggests unpredictability, slumbering violence, submerged and smouldering energies that will one day demand release. Makak's dream touches and taps these hidden energies and gives them form and substance in a way that the criminality of Tigre or Souris or the oppressive mentality of the corporal (themselves crude manifestations of the need for self-assertion, of a refusal to accept identitylessness) cannot. Makak repeatedly insists that his dream is not a dream, whereas others characterize it, not only as a dream, but a bad one. They are literalists, fatalistic and unimaginative, like the politicians whom Walcott describes as ‘‘generation after generation / heaped in a famine of imagination.’’ Even though the charges that the corporal addresses against Makak clearly include incitement to rebellion, even though Makak himself declares that it is ‘‘better to die, fighting like men, than to hide in this forest,’’ Dream on Monkey Mountain cannot be said to advocate revolution in the circumscribed political sense. What Walcott thinks about colonialism, racism, oppression—the ‘‘dream of milk’’ as he calls it—ought to be evident from the play; but Walcott is equally clear about an opposite but attendant danger, characterized by him as ‘‘Witchdoctors of the new left with imported totems.’’ The solution is not politics. ‘‘The future of West Indian militancy lies in art.’’

One reason why this should be so can be adduced from the tension in the play between a fulfilling, integrative sensibility—represented by Makak and his dream—on the one hand, and divisive, reductionist tendencies—manifested in the likes of the corporal and Moustique—on the other. Plurality of experience is suggested by the number of doublings and pairings we find in the play. Makak and Moustique provide one dual, complementary partnership; Tigre and Souris present another pair who offer a similar contrast. Basil seems sometimes to be paired with the dancer, sometimes with the white apparition. The corporal is really a double in himself: he is both black and white, and shifts from one pole of being to the other partway through the play. The sun and the moon form another pair, the former representing ‘‘reality’’ and the latter ‘‘dream.’’ The prevailing tendency—which the play implicitly condemns—is to emphasize oneaspect of identity or experience at the expense of all others. The corporal tries to be white, then reverses the process and strives to be as black as possible. The pragmatic aspect of Makak, symbolized by Moustique, dies twice. The moon is slain in order to free the sun. White supremacy is established on the myth of black inferiority, then black supremacy asserts itself.

According to Walcott's stage directions, the moon reversed becomes the sun; the two are opposed but joined, Janus-like. Makak ‘‘kills’’ the moon so that the sun can rise and free them all from the dream in which they are locked ‘‘and treading their own darkness.’’ Sun and moon each have their particular clarity; it is only that all things appear equal under the sun (Makak, Moustique, the corporal, the thieves are all ‘‘imprisoned’’). It is the moon and its attendant world of dreams beneath which we experience vital contrasts, revealing differentiations.

In the contradictory dreamworld, these differentiations become ambiguous; distinctions between things keep shifting, altering. But characters with restrictive, "logical" mentalities keep struggling to reduce things to simple black and white, and Corporal Lestrade is perhaps the pre-eminent example of this behaviour. In his role as the upholder of the rules of Her Majesty's government, the corporal functions as Makak's prosecutor. Later, in the important apotheosis scene, where the power of shaping history now lies with Makak and his retinue, the corporal is still functioning as a prosecutor, but this time upholding the law of the tribes against the threat of whiteness. He has changed his allegiance but retains his legalistic devotion, with its logic and rationalism. (When the corporal says of Makak, ‘‘I can both accuse and defend this man,’’ he is articulating his ability to switch sides easily, a testimony to his innate opportunism and uncertain sense of identity.) For him, the white goddess, who represents the negative aspect of his own previous possession (by ‘‘English’’ and all that it implies), is much more of a threat than she is to Makak, for whom she functions as muse. The corporal has reduced her to one (especially for him) damaging context: the mother of (Western) civilisation—in other words, Europe. (Eur-opë = ‘‘she of the broad face’’—that is, the full moon.)

IV
Walcott himself characterizes the apparition as having four roles (or phases): the moon, the muse, the white goddess, a dancer. All of these manifestations coalesce into a simultaneous complex of meaning, splendidly articulated by Robert Graves in The White Goddess. He writes, ‘‘Her name and titles are innumerable. In ghost stories she often figures as ‘The White Lady’, and in ancient religions, from the British Isles to the Caucasus, as the ‘White Goddess’.’’ She is the Muse, ‘‘the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust—the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death.’’ The Night Mare is one of her cruellest aspects. But it is she who inspires the magical language of poetic myth which ‘‘remains the language of true poetry.’’ Hence the goddess has complementary moods of creation and destruction.

One of the further aspects of the muse is Mnemosyne, ‘‘Memory,’’ and this is important for the play in that it is through the dream inspired by the white goddess that Makak journeys back to the roots of his heritage, to the time when he was both ‘‘lion and king.’’ Before his inspiration, Makak could declare, like the speaker in Walcott's poem ‘‘Names’’: ‘‘I began with no memory. I began with no future.’’ And when he does make a beginning, it is ‘‘where Africa began: / in the body's memory.’’

Since Makak is clearly posited in the play as a kind of Christ-figure, one is likely to question the simultaneous emphasis on the rather pagan white goddess, since, as Graves reminds us, the concept of such a creative anima was banned by Christian theologians nearly two thousand years ago and by Jewish theologians even earlier. But if we move outide the mainstream of orthodoxy, as artists are wont to do, there is no real contradiction or incompatibility, for the ancient Irish and British poets ‘‘saw Jesus as the latest theophany of the same suffering sacred king whom they had worshipped under various name from time immemorial.’’ Furthermore, the Gnostics held that Jesus ‘‘was conceived in the mind of God's Holy Spirit, who was female in Hebrew’’—which is enlightening in view of the fact that Makak refers to himself as ‘‘responsible only to God who once speak to me in the form of a woman on Monkey Mountain.’’ Graves goes on to remark that the ‘‘male Holy Ghost is a product of Latin grammar—spiritusis masculine—and of early Christian distrust of female deities or quasi-deities.’’ The corporal's indictment of the apparition—‘‘She is the wife of the devil, the white witch’’—contains strong echoes of this intolerance.

Makak in his role as the King of Africa and the saviour of his people is an image of the Sacred King who is the moon goddess's divine victim, who dies and is reborn in the cycle of perpetual renewal; and, as the madman, the dreamer, the visionary poet, he is also the muse's victim, for the two roles interpenetrate. But Makak refuses to die this death, slaying the white goddess instead, under the pressure of the corporal's vehement prosecution and the collective animosity of the tribes. In doing so he frees himself from the dream, but only on one level—a level on which, as Moustique correctly diagnoses, a betrayal of the true cause is taking place, blindness replacing vision, maleficent madness driving out beneficent madness. It is Moustique who dies, and, in so doing, attains wisdom; he who had himself betrayed the dream by attempting to market it is later able to see that the dream is now being prostituted by others for political ends. And the corporal has to go to the verge of death before he experiences a necessary (but not thoroughgoing) transformation.

Makak has to kill the white goddess for several reasons: one, because he cannot forever go on depending upon his source of inspiration but has to begin to rely upon himself (just as he had earlier insisted that the people have faith in themselves as well as in an outside force); two, he has to come back from the world of visionary truth to the everyday world, in order to translate and transmit the fruits of his experience; and, three, he has to escape from the somewhat perverted role of tyrant which the corporal and others have thrust upon him, as well as from the complementary role of saviour that is so fraught with agony and peril.

When Makak divests himself of his royal robe before he beheads the apparition, he is symbolically freeing himself from the bondage of kingship as well as that of the dream and all externally-imposed definitions of selfhood. Indeed, Makak's real name, Felix (‘‘happy’’) is only revealed in the epilogue, after he has finally discovered who he is. It is not quite as simple as waking up, because, paradoxically, on one level the dream continues right to the play's end. What happens is that Makak moves from his personal dream back to the realm of collective dream, where his experience becomes universalized and undifferentiated.

In an early poem by W. B. Yeats, Fergus of the Red Branch tells a druid of his desire to ‘‘Be no more a king / But learn the dreaming wisdom that is yours.’’ Taken as an admonition, these words could apply appropriately enough to Makak, who in the apotheosis scene witnesses the clarity of his vision being distorted by the blindness of revenge, the salvational role of leadership reduced to a rallying-point for fanaticism. Just as he must escape from the thrall of the muse, Makak must free himself from the perversions of power. The recognition of kingliness, the possibility of triumph, are sufficient for the satisfaction of the psychic hunger for reinforcement. It is similar to the realization that it is enough to travel to Africa in one's mind; indeed, that such an imaginative journey may be ultimately preferable to an actual one. Ironically, the dream seems to reassert reality once more, though on a higher plane of recognition. Makak, after all, is no king; he is merely himself—but that self is now endowed with dignity and a certain prophetic wisdom. As long as the dream remains a dream, we can awaken from it or dream it again. The danger is when people like Corporal Lestrade try to make the dream literal. Then there is no more imagining and no more awakening; no true freedom, only another confining structure.

Source: Robert Elliot Fox, ‘‘Big Night Music: Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain and the ‘Splendours of Imagination,’’’ in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. XVII, No. 1, 1982, pp. 16-27.