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.
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