Dream on Monkey Mountain by Derek Walcott

First produced: 1967, at the Central Library Theatre, Toronto, Canada

First published: 1970

Type of work: Play

Type of plot: Surrealistic

Time of work: Unspecified

Locale: A West Indian Island

Principal Characters:

• Makak, an elderly charcoal burner who lives on Monkey Mountain in the Caribbean backcountry
• Moustique, a cripple, Makak’s best friend and business partner
• Corporal Lestrade, a mulatto officer of the English-speaking police force
• Tigre, and
• Souris, two criminals who share a prison cell with Makak

The Play

Derek Walcott has described Dream on Monkey Mountain as a “dream” that “exists as much in the given minds of its principal characters as in that of its writer.” This accurate description of the illogical progression of action must be taken into account when confronting this strange play. A surrealistic fable, the play does not adhere to the tenets of a realistic narrative. Since it concerns Makak’s belief in an unseen force (a white goddess) and the power of his imagination to will unnatural events to happen, it is appropriate that readers, too, should be asked to suspend disbelief in the improbable. Walcott asks his audience to accept the pleasures and possibilities for personal growth available to those who, like Makak, have given themselves over to an irrational force.

Many events in this play do not make sense in naturalistic terms. Characters such as Moustique die and then return to life with a renewed sense of purpose. The sick are healed by the humblest of men, Makak, an old charcoal burner who first appears in a prison for drunken conduct and petty thievery. A cabinetmaker named Basil turns out to be a figure for death itself. These strange occurrences must be accepted at the outset if the play’s symbolic meanings and political function are to emerge. The absence of naturalistic content also allows readers to pay attention to the beautiful lyricism and the rhythms of the West Indian dialect known as patois. An acclaimed poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, Walcott has suggested that the play should be “treated as a physical poem with all the subconscious and deliberate borrowings of poetry.”

In addition to its dreamlike plot and its emphasis on poetic language, the play is also designed to be produced in a highly stylized manner. The playwright has compared his play’s style to the ritualistic nature of Japanese Kabuki theater, but the origins of Dream on Monkey Mountain also reside in the folk customs, dances, and chants native to the Caribbean islands. There is a political reason behind Walcott’s employing a Caribbean setting and elements of West Indian folk traditions in his play. By using the West Indian theater as a showcase for the oral culture of the West Indies, Walcott hoped to create a more secure social identity for West Indians living under English rule.

The play’s ritualistic style is related to the system of belief held by many of the characters in the play. These characters, who live in the village near Monkey Mountain, accept on faith the healing powers of Makak’s magic. Walcott, therefore, creates an analogy through the style of the play between the villagers’ belief in Makak’s healing function and the significance of a nativist theater in enhancing the meaning and value of the lives of Caribbean villagers. Although the play does not, finally, portray a revolution against the colonial regime by the impoverished followers of Makak, the play’s style and setting do acknowledge a distinct Caribbean culture. In this sense, Dream on Monkey Mountain is a radical political statement that affirms the cultural autonomy of Walcott’s native Caribbean islands.

Like the setting, the play’s characters are presented in a stylized manner. They embody different, often ambiguous, responses to living under the yoke of colonialism. Many of the villagers, Moustique and Tigre among them, deny the mysteries of their own customs. They do not believe in Makak’s dream vision of descent from a line of ancient African kings. Moustique and Tigre are, for most of the play, interested only in how they can turn the phenomenon of Makak’s healing powers into their own economic profit. “You black, ugly, poor, so you worse than nothing,” Moustique tells Makak. Although he does not believe Makak, Moustique is quick to “sell [Makak’s] dreams” when he realizes that Makak’s powers are believed by other villagers. Makak tells Moustique that his ability to heal “is not for profit.”

Corporal Lestrade, a mulatto, presents a different response to the confusion of living in a racially mixed and culturally bifurcated society. The corporal identifies himself completely with his colonial oppressor by becoming part of the long arm of English law. Instead of taking pride in local traditions, the corporal believes he must “protect” the villagers from their own beliefs. Unlike Makak, the corporal thrives on the official rule of law and on a belief system based in Judeo-Christian religious principles. The corporal’s authority stems from what has been acknowledged to be true by the members of the society in power, rather than from what must be taken on faith. In the course of the play, however, Makak convinces the racist corporal that the lowly coal burner is worthy of being enthroned as a holy king.

In contrast to these characters, who in different ways live in self-hatred and denial of their own racial and ethnic identity, many other villagers believe without equivocation in Makak’s powers. Makak tells them that his power is really a belief in their own powers of hope and imagination. In one scene, for example, Makak prays not that Joseph, a dying villager, will be cured, but that his people will believe in themselves. Joseph’s sudden recovery after Makak’s visit spurs a general recognition among other villagers that Makak is a savior.

The main action of the play’s first part is Makak’s quixotic sojourn through the West Indian countryside with his skeptical companion and business partner, Moustique. These scenes are framed by a prologue and epilogue that bring the action back to the oppressive circumstances of a West Indian village under colonial rule. No matter how uplifted the audience may feel when Makak is empowered to heal sick villagers such as Joseph, the two scenes that frame the play’s main action leave open the question about the communal value of Makak’s “dream” of African nobility. In the epilogue, Makak is released from prison after he slays the apparition of the white goddess. He is let free to resume his life as a humble coal salesman. There are strong indications that nothing has changed in a material or economic sense in the life of Makak or in the lives of any of the villagers who believed in him. The corporal, for example, thinks that Makak suffered a drunken fit in his night in jail and that none of the scenes of healing and liberation actually took place. Regardless of whether or not Makak’s powers were real or only imagined, he has experienced an internal transformation by the end of the play. In his last speech, Makak affirms that he has been touched by God and that he is on his way home to the origins of his people, which he now locates on Monkey Mountain, rather than in the distance of Africa. “This old hermit is going back home, back to the beginning, to the green beginning of this world,” he says. In the epilogue, Makak also for the first time recalls his legal name, Felix Hobain. Makak’s return to his home with Moustique as companion and his remembering of his legal name suggest his acceptance of a West Indian identity that is distinct from either a purely African or purely English identity.

Critical Context

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 Mountain embodies the major theme of much of Walcott’s work.

Bibliography

Baugh, Edward. Derek Walcott. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Comprehensive overview of Walcott’s life and career, including the dramatic and poetic works.

Baugh, Edward. Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision—“Another Life.” London: Longman, 1978. Baugh links Another Life (1973) to Dream on Monkey Mountain by noting the connection between Makak and the narrator of the poems, both of whom must struggle to gain their own artistic vision against a debilitating past that often leads to self-contempt.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Derek Walcott. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. Collection of essays on Walcott’s work by noted scholars in the field. Includes an essay on his role in founding a school of epic drama, as well as considerations of the importance of postcoloniality to Walcott’s drama and poetry.

Brown, Stewart, ed. The Art of Derek Walcott. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1991. Collection of twelve essays, plus an introduction and bibliography to Walcott’s poetry and plays. Among the contributions is Laurence A. Breiner’s “Walcott’s Early Drama,” which views Dream on Monkey Mountain as the culmination of a series of plays written by Walcott in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Breiner argues that Walcott’s trips to New York in 1957 and 1958 on a Rockefeller Fellowship enabled the playwright to formulate a view of what was distinctive about a West Indian theatrical style.

Keizer, Arlene R. Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. Analyzes the figure of the mulatto in Dream on Monkey Mountain and its implications for theatrical aesthetics the representation of identity.

Walcott, Derek. “Conversation with Derek Walcott.” Inteview by Robert D. Hamner. World Literature Written in English 16 (November, 1977): 409-420. Walcott discusses his feelings about the political involvement of the writer in a developing country, the use of patois in his poetry, and West Indian and foreign critics.

Walcott, Derek. “An Interview with Derek Walcott Conducted by Edward Hirsch.” Interview by Edward Hirsch. Contemporary Literature 20 (Summer, 1979): 279-292. Walcott discusses his early influences, the poverty of early West Indian poetry, and the problems of being a West Indian in the political and social climate of the time.