CHALLENGING LINGUISTIC IMPERIALISM: R.PARTHASARATHY’S ROUGH PASSAGE

Language and empires exist in close proximity to regularise the project of colonisation which requires not only political, legal control over other countries but also a cultural genocide. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s speech in 1835 on the Government of India is indicative of this process of linguistic imperialism where he justifies the supremacy of the English language thus:

Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may safely be said, that the literature now extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together. (Ashcroft 428)

This avowed superiority of English language is not only a pretext to make semi-educated interpreters but also a superstructural imposition on the natives to annihilate the cultural legacy of the native people.

        Postcolonial writers harbour a love-hate relationship with the language of the erstwhile rulers. Some thinkers like Ngugi Wa Thiong’o called for complete relinquishment of the English language. In Decolonising the Mindhe notes how the colonial rulers in Africa prohibit the use of native language Gikuyu in school and introduce English language to culturally remodel the natives. Ngugi writes categorically that the choice of a language defines the cultural life of people and it is through the device of language that the colonial power operates and hegemonizes the native Africans. That is why he articulates that language and culture have a symbiotic relationship. But for a colonial mind this link between culture and language is always in a state of jeopardy as the colonial rulers unleash the ‘cultural bomb’ to wipe out the innate harmony. As a form of counter-discourse Ngugi demanded the use of Gikuyu language. Bhalchandra Nemade also championed the use of native language against foreign language when imported customs and languages play havoc with native culture.

This dilemma of linguistic choice haunts the poetry of Rajagopal Parthasarathy. As a postcolonial poet he finds his inner psyche oscillating between two choices of language. During his early years in life he was attracted by the glory of English language that resulted in a cessation of ties with his native roots. He imbibed the foreign culture and language and became a British Council scholar at Leeds University. However, his journey to England was punctuated by sheer disillusionment. He found contemporary England defiled by racist prejudices and felt himself like a fish out of water. The erroneous choice of language and the resultant hankering after English culture created in him a deep remorse which occasioned the writing of Rough Passage, a semi-autobiographical poem that charts the spiritual journey of the poet’s mind.

Rough Passage is collection of thirty-seven poems. Like T.S.Eliot’s epic poem The Waste Landthe thematic similarity provides unity to the work. In his preface to the volume the poet writes:

This is a book where all the poems form part of a single poem, as it were. By revision and elimination –so that more than one text of the poem exists- I have at last composed, but not completed it. Rough Passage is that book. It should be considered and read as one poem. In it twenty years’ writing has finally settled.

In course of the book the poet tries to overcome the dilemma of using the colonizer’s language and resurrect the annihilated cultural ethos of his Tamil community. Through the tripartite structure of the volume (Exile-Trial-Homecoming) the poet undergoes a journey from self-imposed exile through manifold ordeals to reach a native space where he can commune with his own culture. In his essay ‘Whoring after English Gods’ Parthasarathy documented unequivocally his fascination for English culture and language and the resultant tempestuous encounter with English.

      The first section ‘Exile’ which comprises 8 poems juxtaposes the culture of England with that of India revealing the heinous aftermath of the British rule on India. Having spent thirty years of his life in England the poet introspects into his inner self and finds his psyche traumatized by the clash of two cultures. His guilty feeling is found manifested in the following lines:

That language is a tree, loses colour

Under another sky. (15)

We are reminded of an incident from Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manwhere Stephen articulates the burden of using the language belonging to another culture:

      The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home,Christ,ale,master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (Joyce189)

Despite his endeavour to overcome colonial hybridity in the poems of the first section the poet is unable to triumph over his exilic condition.

The creation of a persona helps the poet look at the burdensome journey with an objective stance. The poet reveals his return to his own culture through the image of a man returning to his lover. The following lines indicate his deep sense of attachment to his native culture in terms of sensual images-

All night your hand has rested

                      On her left breast.

                      In the morning when she is gone

                     You will be alone like the stone benches

                      in the park, and would have forgotten

                      her whispers in the noises of the city. (15-16)

Despite his endeavour to overcome colonial psychosis the poet, in the first section of the poem, is unable to triumph over his exilic condition as ‘Nothing can really/ be dispensed with. The heart needs all.’ Though he is returning to his beloved Tamil like a jaded traveller, the smell of ‘gin and cigarette ash’ still casts shadow over his mind. Having wasted golden years of his life craving for western culture he has gleaned a shaft of wisdom and like Coleridge’s the ancient Mariner, has become a sadder and wiser man. With this wisdom the poet is ready to ‘give quality to the other half’ of his life. Thus, unlike an average man who generally settles himself within the age of thirty, the poet is eager to undergo trials and tribulations to expiate for his mistakes.

    In the second section (Trial) the poet shows development as the persona created by the poet goes through ordeals and charts different periods of growth. This section, as Bruce King observes, ‘covers approximately the next fifteen years, from the age of thirty to forty-five, picks up some of the previous imagery while giving more emphasis to the fingers, smell, taste, breast, tongue as symbols of the senses achieving oneness with another, the closeness missing in exile which he will seek in ‘Homecoming’ through a return to the culture and language of Tamil Nadu and the senses of his childhood.’
(King 240) The opening poem describes the vulnerability of the protagonist:

Mortal as I am, I face the end

                         With unspeakable relief

                         Knowing how I should feel

                         If I were stopped and cut off.(29)

The subsequent poems of this section are replete with intense scenes of love-making. Through sensuous love scenes the poet allegorises his identification with Tamil. The language of love offers him momentary bliss and a creative space to transgress the circumscribed zone of aridity. The abundance of sensual images speak volumes for his connectedness to his traditional culture. The comparison of his love to the ‘stones of konark’ lends a primitive touch to his cultural inheritance. The poet acknowledges that his penchant for foreign culture is over-:

            in a corner, an umbrella

            now poor in the ribs. (37)

The umbrella is a metaphor for his earlier craving for the British inheritance which, though once found useful, now stands in a dilapidated condition. However, he is sharply aware of the fact that he cannot totally do away with his colonial legacy which reasserts itself sporadically. The events of the past ensnare him alike an octopus giving him little room to utilise his present condition.

           In the final section, Homecoming, the poet treats the theme of language and culture point-blank. Gone are his earlier hesitations which hitherto stopped him from embracing his traditional culture. The opening poem sets off by making a comparison between two cultures:

My tongue in English chains,

 I return, after a generation, to you. (47)

As Bijay Kumar Das aptly points out, this worry about language is reminiscent of Eliot’s inability to master the use of words as seen in the following lines:

      So here I am, in the middle way, having had

twenty years—

      Twenty years largely wasted, the years of

l'entre deux guerres—

 Trying to learn to use words (East Coker 172-174)

However, his homecoming is not at all easy as the poet faces rough ambience in his native world. He finds classical Tamil defiled by films:

Now, hooked on celluloid, you reel

 Down plush corridors. (47)

Tamil language which had its heyday in the time of Nammalvar and Valluvar now exists in a decaying state. That is why Parthasarathy’s condition is more complex than that of Michael Madhusudan Datta who also, having undergone hostile treatment in England, repudiated English language in favour of his native language. Unlike Parthasarathy, Madhusudan on returning home did not have to face the degenerated condition of his native language and found the ambience conducive to his poetic taste. But Parthasarathy encountered equal degeneration is his native culture that has vilified his native language. Therefore, he writes:

                  I fear I have bungled again.

                  The last refinement of speech

          terrifies me. The ballon

         of poetry has grown red in the face

                  with repeated blowing. (61)

Therefore the poet realizes the fatuousness of employing ancient Tamil for his poetic creation and the effectiveness of ‘humble newspaper’ to carry out his creative urge. He will have to invent a new language out of the remnants of an emasculated literary tradition and redefine his traditional heritage that will not play a second fiddle to western culture operating through the hegemony of language. Sivaram Krishna in his essay ‘That Last Refinement of Speech’ writes:

Rough passage is in this sense a departure from the usual stance perceptible in contemporary Indian poetry in English – for it suggests that the discovery of cultural roots is inextricably linked not with the choice of one’s language but also with the corresponding responsibility, as a creative writer of cleaning the language of his tribe.(163)

The ending tone of the poem does not suggest that the poet will give up writing in English for Tamil as some critics have expressed. He wants to acclimatize his native language to the English language creating a mode of resistance that will not imitate the foreign language but create a language imbued with native flavour. He takes inspiration from the poems of A.K.Ramanujan who, earlier, tried to fuse Kannada and Tamil tradition with the English. His poem ‘A River’ stands as a supreme achievement of this exquisite confluence. Parthasarathy’s Rough passagealso becomes a manifesto for tolling the death-knell of linguistic imperialism and parading a rich cultural tradition that will not lose colour under another sky.

   In a postcolonial country like India, thus, complete disavowal of English, the lingua franca of the world is hardly feasible. In order to challenge the linguistic imperialism Raja Rao attempted an indegenisation of the English language by infusing local colour which found culmination in Kanthapura. R.K.Narayan also endorsed his concept of a Bharat brand of English which will evince a swadeshi stamp. Parthasarathy,too, tried to indegenise English by channeling the exilic condition into an ensconced place of belonging. In his essay ‘Whoring after English Gods’ Parthasarathy articulates his vision clearly:

               One of the basic problems for the poet is to find an adequate, and above all a personal language. In spite of one or two commendable efforts, it has not been possible to extend the resources of the English language or even indianise it, although it is used with distinction for literary purposes. (81)

Works cited

1.     Philip, Marlene Nourbese.  She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly       Breaks. Prince Edward Island: Ragweed, 1989. Print

2.     Ashcroft, Bill et al. The Post-colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge,   1995. Print

3.     Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1916. Print.

4.     King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English. New Delhi: Oxford, 1987. Print.

5.     Sivaramkrishna, M. ‘That Last Refinement of Speech-The Poetry of R. Parthasarathy’. The Literary criterion,xii:2, 1976. Print

6.     Parthasarathy, R. ‘Whoring After the English Gods’ in Writers in East-West Encounter. Hong Kong: Macmillan, 1982. Print.

7.     Das, Bijay Kumar (ed.). Perspectives on the Poetry of R.Parthasarathy. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 1983. Print.

8.     Parthasarathy, R. Rough Passage. Delhi: Oxford, 1977. Print.

TECHNICAL INNOVATIONS IN THE POETRY OF E.E. CUMMINGS

The most conspicuous quality of Cummings’s poetry is their technical originality. It has been pointed out by numerous critics that among the American poets, with the exception of Vladimir Nabokov, Cummings has most effectively expanded the domain of diction and syntax. His jugglery with words is almost unparalleled. It is mainly as a result of his technical improvisation that he is called an ultra-modern poet. Cummings once remarked, ‘The artist’s country is inside him.’ It shows that he would abide by his own rules rather than letting his verse be governed by traditional, jargon-ridden features. His innovative experimentations with language does not aim at bewildering the readers but to evoke a proper setting for his message.

     Among his experimentations the most important is the use of the lowercase i. Critics have split upon rocks to come to a unanimous thought about the employment of lowercase personal pronoun. Some critics consider it as Cummings’s desire to turn conventional vocabulary and syntax upside down. Some claim that it was his protest against the self-exhibiting whim of the people. Some critics tell that Cummings was imitating the handyman his father employed to take charge of their summer home.

   Some of Cummings’s poems make use of the ‘pattern poetry’ where no adherence to rhyme or meter is maintained. They are arranged according to the thought of poet’s mind. This pattern was in vogue during the Elizabethan time. Cummings reintroduced this trope in the twentieth century. His poem ‘Little Tree’ suggests the shape of a Christian tree.

    Another noticing feature is his gift of word-coinage. Sometimes Cummings found the available words ill-equipped to describe his thought pattern. Therefore he adds new suffixes to existing word. His new words with novel suffixes such as ‘riverly’, ‘birdfully’, ‘downwardishly’ produce an intensity of perception. This novel usage also suggests his attempts to transgress the boundary of the mundane world and reach a transcendental world.

   Cummings played with typographical rhetoric. He introduces spaces within single word to add density to his thought. Sometimes he did not give space between two words to suggest the association of thought.

   Cummings’s various uses of parentheses are worth noticing. They are used sometimes for an interpolated comment or for the purpose of splitting words. In his ‘go(perpe)go’ (in No Thanks) we see a typographical juxtaposition. The parenthetical sentence is a surrealist collection of ‘perpetual adventuring particles’ showing the action of a muddled ant heap and an anteater getting his dinner. In his poem ‘Memorabilia’ we see the last two lines within parentheses that shows the poet’s separation from the materialistic society.

     Another technical innovation of Cummings’s poetry is his emphasis on the role of the reader. Much before the advent of Reader-Response school his verse evinced the way for getting the reader’s response. For example, his poem ‘in Just-’ invites the response of the reader to fill in the missing gaps.

Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain as a Postcolonial Play

The question of identity has plagued the characters in the postcolonial world. The colonial context inevitably gives birth to the notion of identity. The confrontation between the coloniser and the colonised ends up damaging the cultural and material heritage of the colonised. It also destroys the mental equilibrium of the colonized. The assertion of power is not always coercive and violent but at times interpellative too. As a result of different techniques of domination, the native finds himself enmeshed in an existential crisis and suffers from an identity complex. It has been the task of postcolonial writers to reveal the effect of various forms of domination. However, writers like Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka not only explore the various facets of this crisis but also endeavour to infuse the dominated people with courage so that they can overcome this colonial hangover.

Constructing identity is an uphill task in the Caribbean world. Bill Ashcroft and others have written in The Empire Writes Back:

        In the Caribbean, the European imperial enterprise ensured that the worst features of colonialism throughout the globe would all be combined in the region. (1989:144)

Within a span of 25-30 years after Columbus’s arrival the aboriginal population comprising Caribs and Arawaks was all but exterminated. Their legacy was zeroed in by the Spanish colonizers. With the introduction of sugar trade, a demand was created for a large number of labourers. As a corollary, black people from Africa were imported to be used as labourers. Even the situation did not improve after the abolition of slavery in the 1800s. New forms of domination sprouted in the name of indentured labourers who were imported from India and China. This variegated forms of domination annihilated the true culture of the Caribbean and made it a place virtually sans history.

Dream on Monkey Mountain is a representative play by Walcott that projects the emasculated psyche of the black Caribbeans living in a world where identity, in Lacanian term, is an ever- elusive signified. This play unfurls before our eyes various ramifications that arise from long history of colonial domination. In his "Note on Production," Walcott says that '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, contradictory. Its source is metaphor and it is best treated as a physical poem with all the subconscious and deliberate borrowings of poetry’ (1970:208). This intermingling of dream and reality helps Walcott delineate the colonial psychosis and the way to get over this psychosis. In his epic poem Omeros Walcott has given the Homeric epic a postcolonial twist to establish an identity for the oppressed people. This journey motif is also dominant in Dream on Monkey Mountain.

A cursory glance at the storyline of the play reveals that the plot is simple enough to comprehend. Makak, a charcoal burner, is arrested on a charge of vandalism and put to prison. In his dream he sees the apparition of a white woman who tells him that he is the king of Africa. Towards the end of the play he realizes that he cannot form an identity of his own until he kills the white apparition. As soon as he kills the apparition of a white woman Makak wakes up and realizes that he has called up his real name.

Under the apparent simple plot line are entwined a number of complex key themes related to the issue of identity in a postcolonial world. The opening scene of the play shows the crisis of identity as a result of colonial subjugation. When Corporal Lestrade enquired Makak of his race, he replies, ‘I am tired’. This reply is suggestive enough of his fractured identity which is a corollary of long subjugation. Makak wants to bypass the question of race as he wants to take shelter in the realm of oblivion that can only offer him some solace amidst the ossified existence. Colonialism not only plunders wealth but also robs the colonized of his true self. It is therefore an emasculating enterprise too. Colonialism has uprooted Makak from any sense of belonging and creates in him an inferiority complex. He is assigned the name of an animal (‘Makak’ stands for monkey) and is downgraded in the rank of the Great Chain of Being. Fanon in his opening chapter (‘Concerning Violence’) of The Wretched of the Earth speaks about this dehumanising aspect of colonialism:

  In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow man’s reptilian motions, of the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn, of gesticulations. (1967: 32-33)

What is most noteworthy is that Makak has internalised his subordinate position and as a result, tries to hide his identity. Lakoff and Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By have shown us that life is not what we construct but it is shaped by manifold societal constructive norms. And in this construction metaphors play a pivotal part. In Dream on Monkey Mountain the metaphor of blackness has constructed a world for Makak where to be a black signifies to be devoid of identity.

           Walcott shows in detail how colonialism has fractured the identity of Makak. He loathes his own image. He tells Lestrade that he has not seen self-image in the mirror for thirty years. Moreover, he also refuses to see his reflected image in water:

Not a pool of cold water, when I must drunk,

        I stir my hands first, to break up my image. (1970:226)

Makak sees his own image from the perspective of a white coloniser. Patrick Colm Hogan rightly observes:

       He is, in effect, a metaphor for those legacies of colonized subjects who, in Walcott’s words, ‘looked at life with black skins and blue eyes’ (“What the Twilight Says” 9), suffering the ‘contradiction of being white in mind and black in body. (12)’ (1994:108)

The Manichean compartmentalisation of the world into the black and the white reduces the colonized to an extent that he becomes enamoured of whiteness. A classic example of this aspect is the case of Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Under the prevalent hegemonic ethos, Pecola pines for blue eyes like those of white children because she has internalised the rhetoric of colonial master that makes her adulate whiteness. In Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Condition Nhamo refuses to come back at home during his vacation from the mission as he has taken up the white value as an apotheosis of culture and now loathes his native existence. In Dream on Monkey Mountain Makak also longs for whiteness. This aspect of psychosis is clearly hinted by the epigraph of the play which is culled from Sartre’s Preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth:

 Thus in certain psychoses the hallucinated person, tired of always being insulted by his demon, one fine day starts hearing the voice of an angel who pays him compliments; but jeers don’t stop for all that; only, from then on, they alternate with congratulations. This is a defence, but it is also the end of the story. The self is dissociated, and the patient heads for madness. (1970:211)

When Makak is arrested in prison, he is said to have carried a white mask; a literal symbol of his desire for the west. His quest for identity is supported by the apparition of a white woman who acts as a kind of muse figure to Makak. Makak feels elated by her message, ‘She say that I come from the family of lions and kings’ (236). Corporal rightly diagnoses the malady as ‘rage for whiteness that does drive niggers mad’ (228). However, it must be noted that Lestrade also suffers from this kind of complex. He is a mimic man for whom salvation lies in imitating the white world. It is proved by his remark to Souris:

        I am an instrument of the law, Souris. I got the white man work to do. (1970:279)

His desire is representative of the departure syndrome that bedevils the Caribbean society. In this way both Makak and Lestrade are the two sides of the same coin. Both try to escape from an overwhelming feeling of non-entity in different ways.

Walcott not only describes the psychological emasculation of the colonized but also affirms the dignity and identity of the colonized through decolonisation of the mind. By dint of various dream sequences the playwright shows the way for the redemption of the black Caribbeans. The vision Makak sees helps him shake off his Eurocentric vision that invaded his inner space. The visionary experiences help him regain his true identity unencumbered by the dictation of the West. Makak undergoes a complete journey in his dream. He finds his true abode in Africa where he becomes the king of his tribe and passes judgement on others. In his dream he embraces an alternative world where he finds a ground beneath his feet. The make-believe world of dream proves more substantial than the real world. In scene one of the first part Walcott shows Makak healing the sick people with his magical power in a dream. This is the first tentative step he takes towards achieving the emancipation from colonial bondage. He is accurate in diagnosing the psychological disease of the first peasant when he says, “Remember, is you all self that is your enemy” (1970:249).

In the opening scene of part two we find Makak, in the course of his dream, stabbing Corporal Lestrade and then running into the forest along with Tigre and Souris. Tigre and Souris join Makak only for personal profit. They want to steal the money from Makak and are not concerned with his vision. Here Walcott pokes fun at the dishonest national leaders who only think of hoarding wealth under the façade of mass regeneration. In the forest episode we find an alternative kingdom by the blacks where conventional Eurocentric norms hardly get validity. Corporal Lestrade also undergoes a parallel journey to reclaim his identity. His encounter with Basil, a black apparition the concept of which is culled from Haitian mythology helps him regain lost identity. This confrontation scene reminds us of Simon’s hallucinated encounter with Beelzebub in Golding’s Lord of the flies that brought epiphany to him. In Dream on Monkey Mountain Lestrade imbibed the mimetism of the white denying his own identity. The following conversation between Lestrade and Basil is instrumental in bringing out the hollowness of this slavish imitation:

Corporal: My mind, my mind. What’s happened to my mind?

Basil: It was never yours, Lestrade.                 (1970:297)

This encounter helps Lestrade get back his lost self and like Milton’s Samson, he begins to feel rousing motion within himself. Elated by his new found identity he makes an address to Africa of the mind that becomes indicative of his recovery of self:

I kiss your foot, O Monkey Mountain…I return to this earth, my mother. Naked, trying very hard not to weep in the dust. I was what I am, but now I am myself…Now I feel better. (1970:299)

In scene three of the second part (Apotheosis scene) we see an application of anti-colonial views. Walcott presents in detail various cultural practices of the tribal community. Protesting against the racist vilification thrusted upon the black people, Walcott celebrates precolonial ethos. However, it must be remembered that the precolonial ethos is not described in idealistic terms but along with its pros and cons. Walcott describes the setting thus:

Bronze tropies are lowered. Masks of barbarous gods appear to a clamour of drums, sticks,the chant of a tribal triumph. A procession of warriors, chiefs and the wives of Makak in splendid tribal costumes gather, chanting to drums. (1970:308)

We find Shakespeare, a representative figure of European cultural sobriety deployed by the political masters for political reasons, tried and hanged for having committed injustice to humanity. This scene culminates in the beheading of the white goddess whose image obsessed Makak in such a way that he forgot his real name and lineage. That is why Corporal remarks accurately:

She is the wife of the devil, the white witch. 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. (1970:319)

It is only after beheading the apparition of the white woman that Makak is finally restored to the status of man. Makak calls up his original name which is Felix Hobain. We are reminded of the case of Bertha in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea when she realizes that her real name is not Bertha but Antoinette Cosway:

     Names matter, like when he wouldn’t call me Antoinette, and I was Antoinette drifting out of the window with her scents, her pretty clothes and her looking glass. (1977:147)

It is true that Walcott is advocating, like Fanon, violence to uproot the colonial regime and unify the oppressed people. Fanon in his The Wretched of the Earth tells unequivocally:

   At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his superiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect. (1967:74)

To conclude, we can say that Walcott in his Dream on Monkey Mountain tries to hold up an alternative world for the black Caribbeans; a world free from the influence of the colonisers. It is true that at the end of the play Makak is harked back to the real world where nothing is found to have changed. But it does not suggest the futility or fatuousness of his vision. Like Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale this play gives us a glimpse of the fact that the other world is possible. Edward Baugh aptly remarks that, ‘The dream is purgatorial, bringing him to self-acceptance and psychic wholeness .(2006:85)’It is only as a result of that visionary dream that Makak is able to regain his lost identity that elevates him from the derogatory status of an animal to a man.

Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, et al. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Print.

Baugh, Edward. Derek Walcott. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New Delhi: Penguin, 1967. Print.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Mimeticism, Reactionary Nativism, and the Possibility of Postcolonial Identity in Derek Walcott's ‘Dream on Monkey Mountain’.” Research in African Literatures Vol. 25, No. 2 (summer, 1994): Jstor. Web. 26 November 2013.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. Print.

Walcott, Derek. Dream on Monkey Mountain. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Noonday P, 1970. Print.

_____."What the Twilight Says: An Overture." Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Noonday P, 1970. Print.