In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4 Shared Dreams and Collective Delirium in Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain In 1967, just prior to the play’s first production, Derek Walcott described Dream on Monkey Mountain as “an attempt to cohere various elements in West Indian folklore, but . . . also a fantasy based on the hallucination of an old woodcutter who has a vision of returning to Africa.”1 This first production occurred in Canada, but Walcott’s utilization of folklore grounds the play in the Caribbean without limiting it to stereotype; he avoids fruitless nostalgia by layering the “various elements ” of folklore within the experimental dreamwork of the play. If, as Édouard Glissant writes, “experimentation is for us [in the Caribbean] the only alternative: the organization of a process of representation that allows the community to reflect, to criticize, and to take shape,” then in Dream on Monkey Mountain Walcott’s mosaic of folklore connected by fantasy creates space for the newness that will allow for the psychological and material “shaping” of a Caribbean community.2 Walcott organizes the folkloric elements within the hallucinations of the play’s protagonist, Makak, allowing dreams and madness to create the glue that produces a cohesive Caribbeanness within the play.3 Dream on Monkey Mountain is uniquely situated for an examination of the “West Indian discourse” within which Walcott situates himself . In this play, and in most of his work, Walcott positions himself as participating in a Caribbean aesthetic, as building in the Caribbean, not in a larger diasporic tradition. He describes himself as “primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer,”4 and he is one of the few West Indian writers of stature who continues to live in the Caribbean.5 Regarding 94 Shared Dreams and Collective Delirium the Caribbean people and landscape as vital to his writing, he not only considers his muse Caribbean but also situates his primary audience in the region. In a 1994 collection of written comments in the Caribbean Writer, Walcott states, “I don’t care if people don’t understand what I write in England or in Paris as long as West Indians appreciate what I’m trying to do; that’s all I care about.”6 He envisions his work as speaking not only about but to a West Indian community. Although the majority of his publications are of poetry, Walcott has expressed an equal commitment to both art forms, seeing his plays as “large poems that are performed before an audience.”7 His desire for an immediate “roar of response” from the audience, however, highlights the major difference between his connections to his readers and to his theatrical audiences.8 It is this latter connection that I examine in my reading of Walcott’s exploration of mental decolonization through the staging of dreams and delirium in Dream on Monkey Mountain. What is it that Walcott communicates about and to West Indians during these independence years? He designates the setting of the play as “a West Indian Island,” which is simultaneously general and concrete. While not anchored to a particular nation, Dream on Monkey Mountain is specific to the nation-building process in the Caribbean, a process that lends itself to drama, dreams, and delirium. In Caribbean Discourse, Glissant asserts, “When a nation is taking shape, it develops a theatrical form that ‘duplicates’ its history (gives it significance) and provides an inventory.”9 In producing one vision of a balance between change and tradition during this “taking shape” period, Dream on Monkey Mountain “inventories” the problems and opportunities involved in building a new Caribbean nation, any new Caribbean nation. Walcott maintains the balance between specificity and universality in Dream on Monkey Mountain by staging these issues in a dream. In his “Note on Production,” which precedes the 1970 printed version of the play, he advises: “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.”10 This gives the reader, if not the past and potential audiences of the play, an insight into Walcott’s vision for Makak and his other “principal characters.” But Walcott’s wording also emphasizes the ambiguity inherent in the dream format of the play. By ascribing the dream to the “principal characters,” Walcott obscures the status of the remaining cast members. Are Makak and...

Share