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BARNOLIPI - An Interdisciplinary Journal - Volume - I. Issue IV. December 2011. ISSN 2249 2

www.reflectionedu.com/barnolipi.php REFLECTION Mentoring Services

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Re-Oriented Cosmovisions:

In-between Space & Cultural Hybridity

in Derek WalcottsDream on Monkey Mountain

Kaustav Kundu

Derek Walcott is one of the few Anglophone postcolonial writers to

have taken up the dialectical problematics of colonial racist ideology as

proposed by Bhabha in The Location of Culture, simultaneously developing

and extending Frantz Fanons observations inBlack Skin, White Masks using

the medium of the theatre. In exploring the nature of a postcolonial

Caribbean cultural identity through a dramatic framework, many of his

plays, particularly Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967) dramatizes the

region's hybrid relationship with Europe and Africa by fusing a wide range

of cultural intertexts. The play is also an allegory of racial identity based on

the visionary experience of the protagonist, Makak (French patois for

monkey or ape). Makak's mystical experience connects the play to what

Robert Forman describes as the Grassroots Spirituality Movement, which

professes a "panentheistic ultimate that is indwelling, sometimes bodily, as

the deepest self and accessed through not-strictly-rational means of self-

transformation."

1In the quest for a postcolonial Caribbean cultural identity,

the play transforms its schizophrenic main characters from mimic men

pulled in opposite directions by Europe and Africa into genuine hybrids who

transcend cultural oppositions toward an in-between-ness or a "void of

conceptions." This transformation, I suggest, emerges through Makak's


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visionary experience and its effect on the other characters, an experience

with a decontextual aspect that makes it less a multicultural than a

transcultural event. Walcott's dream play suggests that a visionary

experience is perhaps the most effective way to achieve cultural hybridity,

an in-between-ness defined in terms both of an international subject as well

as a conceptual void immanent within yet beyond culturally constructed

identity. In other words, hybridity is less a state of mind than a state of being

beyond conceptual boundaries.

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 inthat 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."2

As the Note indicates,

while the psychodrama originates in the consciousness of the play's main

character, Makak, it also becomes part of the collective consciousness of the

other characters, as well as a significant part of the dramatic structure. Each

of the play's two parts begins with an epigraph taken from Jean-Paul Sartre's

Prologue to Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, in which Sartre describes

how the colonized psyche, pulled in opposite directions, becomes culturally

schizophrenic. The epigraph for Part Two includes the line, "Two worlds;

that makes two bewitchings; they dance all night and at dawn they crowd

into churches to hear Mass; each day the split widens."3

As critics have pointed out, those victimized by globalization in

Walcott's drama try to adjust to the dominant culture of the West by

transforming, reinterpreting, and indigenizing it. In Dream on Monkey

Mountain, critics have noted that this adjustment involves a shift from the


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mundane everyday world to the abstraction of the sacred. Robert Fox and

Lloyd Brown, although taking different approaches, both underscore the

play's dream element and metaphoric dimension: Brown comparesDream

with Leroi Jone's The Slave (1964) and illustrates that both plays are

revolutionary and combine symbolism with fantasy, although Walcott is

more explicit. In spite of its Eurocentric style, he argues, Walcott's play

clarifies The Slave for critics who dismiss it as "naive and suicidal" and the

author as "an hysterical monomaniac,"4

insisting instead on the transcultural

unity of black American and Caribbean experience. Fox in turn emphasizes

the mythological aspect of Walcott's drama, arguing that Dream goes

beyond redeeming the downtrodden to dramatize "the disparities between a

consciousness that is creative and metaphoric, and one that is

straightforward and imprisoning."5

Makak's dream, which is collective and

universalized according to Fox, liberates Makak by allowing him to outgrow

and discard external values and thereby rediscover his personal roots. Robert

Hamner says that what is "original in Walcott is the use he makes of his

manifold voice, his particular combination of imagination and experience."6

Walcott, he argues, sees Makak as a potential warrior, a noble primitive

repressed by slavery.

Dream on Monkey Mountainpoints to a non-active, reflexive state of

consciousness beyond religious dogma, a "historyless" state through which

Makak symbolizes the power of agency behind cultural identity and change.

In "The Muse of History" (1974), as noted by Bill Ashcroft et al., Walcott

"takes issue with what he regards as the West Indian writer's obsession with

the destructions of the past, and makes a plea for an escape from a prison of

perpetual recriminations into the possibilities of a 'historyless' world, where

a fresh but not innocent 'Adamic' naming of place provides the writer with


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inexhaustible material and the potential of a new, but not naive, vision."7

As

I will show, this Adamic vision of a new universe based on the recollection

of the old springs from Makak's mystical experience as a first-person event

and not from Rastafari or other religious reasoning.

The play begins with a naturalistic Prologue that features an elaborate

mime within a non-verbal folk context of rituals and symbols. A conteur

(narrator) and chorus introduce Makak, whom Corporal Lestrade, the prison

guard, mockingly refers to as "de King of Africa."8

The Prologue and the

dream itself, as Antonin Artaud would say, has "its own language" identified

with the mise en scene, one formed by "the visual and plastic materializationof speech" and by everything "signified on stage independently of speech."

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Makak, a black charcoal burner arrested on a first offense for drunkenness

and disorderly conduct, finds himself in jail with two felons, Tigre and

Souris, symbolic of the two thieves crucified with Christ. Makak's situation

parodies that of Jesus and suggests that he serves as a Messiah figure for his

compatriots, who like himself are subjugated by colonial brainwashing on

the one hand while simultaneously pressured to return to the purity of their

ancestral roots in Africa on the other. In searching for their cultural identity,

figures like Makak, Tigre, Souris, Corporal Lestrade (a mulatto) and the

other subalterns do not know which way to turn, whether toward Europe or

Africa. They are often at risk of becoming mimics of one or more cultures

instead of genuine hybrids capable of rising above prescribed boundaries by

rediscovering the self.

Hybridity & a Void of Conceptions:

In his analysis of the play, John Thieme says that the responses

favoring either Europe or Africa are "psychologically damaging, because


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they involve the repression of the hybridized reality of the Caribbean

situation."10

Homi Bhabha defines cultural hybridity in terms of "difference

without an assumed or imposed hierarchy."11

The colonized live in-between

cultures, and by extension in-between different sets of conceptuality. As

Bhabha observes, the colonized inhabit "an international culture, based not

on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the

inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity. To that end we should

remember that it is the 'inter'the cutting edge of translation and

negotiation, the in-between spacethat carries the burden of the meaning of

culture."12

Bhabha contends that all cultural statements and systems are

constructed in a space that he calls the Third Space of enunciation. The in-

between-ness that I focus on here refers not only to the space between

cultures but also to the effect it has on attenuating the contents of

consciousness among the colonized. In addition to being able to identify

with more than one culture, a hybrid by this definition can also distance

herself from all cultureswhich suggests the innate human capacity to be

conscious of being conscious independently of culture. Furthermore, as

Sartre says in the epigraph to Part Two, "The status of 'native' is a nervous

condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people

with their consent."13

Globalization makes the colonized nervous in part

because the promised benefits often accrue mainly to the colonizer through a

process that undermines the colonized's traditional values. Makak is an

extraordinary example of such nervousness as revealed by the visionary

experience he describes in the Prologue during the mock trial staged by

Corporal Lestrade, who plays the role of constable with the two felons acting

as judges.


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During this interrogation, the Corporal, who at this point in the play

espouses European law, asks Makak to tell him his name, but he says, "I

forget"; then Lestrade asks, "What is your race?" and Makak says, "I am

tired."14

Makak, in the aftermath of his visionary experience, has already

begun the process of dropping his pre-formations about his identity.

Corporal Lestrade describes the reason for Makak's arrest, his drunkenness

and disorderly conduct, his damaging the "licenced alcoholic premises of

one Felicien Alcindor," and mentions his story of a dream in which a voice

tells him he's "the direct descendant of African kings, a healer of leprosy and

the Savior of his race."15

In his own defense, Makak says, "I suffer from

madness. I does see things. Spirits does talk to me. All I have is my dreams

and they don't trouble your soul."16

At this point the play switches from

naturalism to the expressionistic structure of a dream as Makak relates his

visionary experience, while the prison cage, as indicated by the stage

directions, "is raised out of sight":

Sirs, I am sixty years old. I have lived all my life Like a wild

beast in hiding. Without child, without wife. People forget me

like the mist on Monkey Mountain. Is thirty years now I have

look in no mirror I will tell you my dream .17

While Makak recounts his dream, the apparition of a White Goddess appears

to him and the audience (but not to the other characters) and then withdraws.

In his vision she tells Makak that he is destined to become the racial

redeemer of his people by leading them back to Africa. Walcott uses the

paradox of a European muse impelling Makak back to Africa not only to

heighten the irony of the binary forces acting upon the schizophrenic

colonial psyche, but also to reveal how the "two bewitchings" spur the


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colonized to reject the boundedness of bothpropelling colonial

consciousness from a cultural in-between-ness toward a void of conceptions.

Although constructed in part by African influences, Makak's visionary

experience as we shall see also has a decontextual aspect that makes it more

of a transcultural than a multicultural phenomenon.

Visionary Experience & Hypoaroused Events:

In analyzing Makak's visionary experience, we find a distinct

correspondence to Robert Forman's definition of mysticism. Forman

distinguishes two aspects of mysticism, which characterize all mystical

traditions around the world: hyperaroused states of schizophrenic visions or

hallucinations, and hypoaroused states "marked by low levels of cognitive

and physiological activity,"18

and ultimately by a void in thought, the basis

for panentheistic experience. As distinct from pantheism ("the doctrine that

the deity is the universe and its phenomena"), Forman defines panentheism

as the doctrine "that all things are in the ultimate, that is, all things are made

up of one single principle, but that one principle is not limited to thoseworldly phenomena."

19 All things, including humans, "are made up of a

single 'stuff or substance,"20

but this "stuff," while including the beings

within it, also extends beyond them. "It is both transcendent (in the sense of

beyond) and immanent (within). As the early Hindu Upanishads put this,

'having pervaded the universe with a fragment of myself, I remain.'"21

Although sacred events as a void of conceptions fall mainly on the

hypoaroused, trophotropic side, the visionary experience dramatized by

Walcott inDream on Monkey Mountain combines both sides of the scale. In

Makak's vision we thus find two aspects of mysticism, with the hypoaroused

state setting the stage for the hyperaroused hallucination or vision, which


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propels him after the fact toward his schizophrenic activity. While the dream

story interfuses the two states, we can tease their features apart to see how

they interrelate. All the sensory data in the dreamthe sound of birds, the

brushing against the spider's web, the sight of the woman singingmakes

up the visionary experience. But this vision emanates from something else:

the "white mist / In the mind," the "confusion of vapour, / Till I feel I was

God self, walking through cloud. / In the heaven on my mind / . . . the

bandage of fog unpeeling my eyes." What Walcott describes here suggests a

dematerialized world in which everything solid melts into air, which

symbolizes the attenuation of the content of consciousness. In other words,

Makak's dream with its subsequent activity begins from a hypoaroused state

of reduced cognitive and physiological activity, with everything covered by

a "white mist" in which "my feet grow roots. I could move no more." This

description, which is post-experiential, implies a settling down of the mind

and body to a state of restful alertness, such as that associated with a void

awareness or pure consciousness. Hence, the two stages of Makak's

experience suggest what is known as "introvertive mysticism" followed by

"extrovertive mysticism," although in his dream account they seem to

alternate. Postmodernists may misconstrue the decreation of his dream as

undermining the transcendental state of hypoarousal through "disintegration,

deconstruction, decenterment, displacement, difference, discontinuity,

disjunction, disappearance, decomposition, de-definition, demystification,

detotalization, delegitimation,"22 but this would only apply to the intentional

content of the mind, not to Makak's visionary experience of going beyond

the mind and the personal self.


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Introvertive & Extrovertive Mysticism:

W. T. Stace, in distinguishing between introvertive and extrovertive

mysticism, describes the former as a nonspatial experience of pure

consciousness and the latter as the experience of a unity between oneself and

the external world.23

Forman, however, believes that Stace as well as others

miss the key fact about this distinction; namely, that the extrovertive is an

extension of the introvertive into activity, as suggested by Makak's vision

and the allegorical dream play itself. Forman clarifies this distinction

through a similar one made by the 20th

-century Hindu mystic Ramana

Maharishi betweensamadhi

andsahaja samadhi:

Samadhi is a contemplative state, and is thus "introvertive" in

Stace's sense of the term. Sahaja samadhi is a state in which a

silent level within the subject is maintained along with

(simultaneously with) the full use of the human faculties. It is,

in other words, a state that is continuouseither permanent or

lasting a long timethrough activity. The distinction between a

state maintained only during meditation and one maintained

along with activity seems to be key here.24

Walcott describes the play as a dream because introvertive and extrovertive

events are physiologically distinct from ordinary waking consciousness, and

because the psychodrama of a dream perhaps best serves in theater to

metaphorically render the nonordinary experience of Makak and the other

characters. According to Walcott's note, the entire play, including the

Prologue and Epilogue, belongs to the dream. Moreover, everything from

Part I, Scene I, to the end of Part II comprises an extended flashback that

dramatizes Makak's story up to the Prologue. In the Epilogue, after having


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exorcised the White Goddess who appears in his vision, Makak finally

remembers his real name, Felix Hobain, and longs for the blessedness of

once again being "swallowed up in the mist."25

The Prologue and Epilogue

thus symbolize an introvertive event, while everything in between can be

understood as an allegory of an extrovertive experience in which certain

elements of the introvertive event are continuous.

Part I, Scene I, begins on Monkey Mountain with Makak's crippled

friend and fellow charcoal burner, Moustique, arriving to bring him to town

for market day to sell their charcoal. Makak, having obviously undergone a

psychic transformation, repeats the story of his vision that in prison heinitially describes as madness. In the ensuing dream that constitutes the play,

Makak and eventually Moustique and the other characters experience an

attenuation of their colonial identities as they shift from the dissociated

psyche of the cultural schizophrenic toward the postcolonial ideal of in-

between-ness. Bhabha regards hybridity as an "international" culture

involving the "national, anti-nationalistic histories of the 'people,'"26

but as

mentioned earlier, other postcolonial writers allow for the possibility of an

"historyless" worlda world experienced in trans-political, trans-historical,

nonspatial terms, as suggested by Makak's introvertive and extrovertive

events.27

When Makak retells his vision to Moustique, he makes the same

declarative statements he made in the Prologue: "Make a white mist in the

mind; make that mist hang like cloth from the dress of a woman."28

These

statements do not merely describe his experience but in a way also

constitutes it for his listener. It produces a change in the onstage audience, as

well as the theater audience, exerting what J. L. Austin calls a

"perlocutionary force"29defined as the effect of an utterance on the


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addressee or hearer. Indeed, Makak seems to be instructing others on how to

empty the content of consciousness.

From Cultural Schizophrenia to Liminality:

Makak alternates between saying that he's going mad and that his

vision is a dream, and then denying his madness"Moustique. I am not

mad. To God, I am not mad"30and declaring that his vision "Is not a

dream"; "I tell you is no dream."31

These contradictions imply that visionary

experience, although a lesser mystical state, still involves going beyond

rationalizations and logical discourse. From an ordinary third-person

perspective he may appear to be mad and his vision to be an illusion. But in

Part I, Scene II, his actions manifest the supernatural power associated with

mystical states when he revives Josephus, the victim of a snake bite, by

holding live coals in his hand over the victim's forehead. This power seems

to associate Makak with shamanism and the African witch doctor, but during

the healing he also includes the European tradition by invoking Moses and

the "blazing bush."32

He not only successfully tells Josephus to sweat in

order to break his fever, thus producing an outer change in a word-to-world

fit; he also tells him and his entourage to "believe in me. Faith, faith! Believe

in yourselves."33

As Paula Burnett notes, "When Walcott's drama enacts

such rites as a healing, a quasi resurrection, as in Dream on Monkey

Mountain, a miracle performed by the least respected person of a

hierarchical racialized community, it does so as part of its strategy to mark

the social deprivation but spiritual strength of a real, historic group."34

Through rituals such as this Walcott suggests that any change in the material

world depends on a transformation of the self, like that experienced by

Makak and, to a lesser extent, by the other characters.


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In Part II, Scene I, inspired by the two felons, Makak stabs Corporal

Lestrade with a knife. The three prisoners then escape and head into the

forests of Monkey Mountain. In the next scene, Tigre and Souris by

necessity align themselves with Makak and pretend for safety's sake to

conform to what they perceive as his African spirit. Tigre says, "Let's mix

ourselves in his madness. Let's dissolve in his dream."39

When they ask him

what they should do next if their intention is to return to Africa, Makak says,

"Once, when Moustique asked me that, I didn't know. But I know now.

What power can crawl on the bottom of the sea, or swim in the ocean of air

above us? The mind, the mind."40

As Makak knows from experience, if one

can control the content of consciousness, one can control the world, for as

Coleridge says, "the mind half-sees and half-creates."41

At this point, as

Makak relates a series of visions transporting them as saviors back to Africa,

the forest suddenly comes alive with Corporal Lestrade in hot pursuit.

Lestrade, however, like the felons, quickly undergoes a transformation and

exchanges European law for tribal law and adopts a communal African

identity. Even the paragon of the colonizer's oppressive rule, the upholder of

European law and order, succumbs to Makak's visionary power. Although

initially this power has the effect of reshuffling the content of Lestrade's

consciousness in favor of negritude, in the end it is he who takes the

initiative and persuades Makak to divest himself of the White Goddess, the

ironic instigator of his quest for Africa. Arguably, she symbolizes not only

European/African binaries but also the very presence of conceptual content

itself.


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Death of an Archetype:

Makak's visionary experience, as we have seen, has two sides:

introvertive and extrovertive. The fleeting initial introvertive side, which is

one of hypoarousal, is more closely associated with a void of conceptions or

pure consciousness, while the extrovertive side that emerges from it in the

dream play (pure consciousness continuing through activity) is partially

influenced or constructed by the play's two opposing sets of cultural

contexts, European and African. In this way the play generates hybridity in

two phases. The twin "betwitchings" of Europe and Africa provide the

context of a cultural in-between-ness, which in turn impels the characters

toward the void of conceptions, thus rendering in-between-ness a

knowledge-by-identity rather than a mere thought or belief. In the

Apotheosis scene, the climax (Part II, Scene III), the chorus returns to set up

a dream-within-a-dream in which Lestrade initiates in Makak a readiness to

return to a pure visionary or introvertive state free of cultural/ conceptual

content. Leading up to this, however, just as Walcott earlier mocked the

Caribbean mimicry of European traditions, he now parodies African customs

through another trial. This time Lestrade imposes tribal law in exacting

black revenge on European "prisoners," whose shared crime is judged to be

their whiteness. The prisoners range from Abraham Lincoln, Alexander of

Macedon, and Shakespeare, to Plato, Galileo and Christopher Marlowe.42

This comic catalogue is followed by another in which "petitions,

delegations, ambassadors, signatories, flatterers" arrive and "offer to revise

the origins of slavery. A floral tribute of lilies from the Ku Klux Klan. An

offer from Hollywood,"43

tokens of reconciliation from the white world that

Makak summarily rejects. Until now the characters have been trapped in the


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binaries of their conceptual content, but things change when Lestrade

inadvertently liberates Makak from the allure of his African heritage.

As Makak prepares to go to Africa after the trial, Lestrade persuades

him first to behead the apparition of the White Goddess, which now also

appears to Lestrade. As we have seen, she is responsible both for inducing

the preconceptions of negritude and for blocking the characters' passage to a

healthy state of hybridity. Corporal Lestrade, who wants to prevent Makak

from being like himself as a mulatto "neither one thing nor the other," says,

"Kill her! Kill her!"

She is the wife of the devil, the white witch. She is the mirrorof the moon that this ape look into and find himself unbearable.

. . . She is lime, snow, marble, moonlight, lilies, cloud, foam

and bleaching cream, the mother of civilization, and the

confounder of blackness. I too have longed for her. She is the

colour of the law, religion, paper, art, and if you want peace, if

you want to discover the beautiful depth of your blackness,

nigger, chop off her head! When you do this, you will kill

Venus, the Virgin, the Sleeping Beauty. She is the white light

that paralyzed your mind, that led you into this confusion. It is

you who created her, so kill her! kill her! The law has spoken.44

As we have seen, in the aftermath of the hypoaroused event of the "white

mist in the mind," the White Goddess appears to Makak as part of the

hyperarousal of his vision. As such she represents the postexperiential

characterization of the thinking mind, that is, a culturally induced flavor

experienced simultaneously with the lingering taste of the vision proper that

extends into and becomes part of the dream play as it unfolds. As Burnett

says, "the authority figure of whitenessof white culture's hold on the self-


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image of black peoplehas to be sacrificed."45

This characterization of the

White Goddess, therefore, is not unique to Makak, not part of a transcultural

void of conceptions represented by the "white mist," but shared by the

Corporal as an archetype of the African collective consciousness. It is this

conceptual component of the dream vision that needs to be purified of binary

predispositions if the mystical event is to retain its effective power for self

transformation. By beheading the Goddess, after first removing the African

robe he put on during his Apotheosis, Makak repudiates the Afrocentric

cultural essentialism that she instills in the extrovertive phase of his

visionary event. In this way he rejects the twin "bewitchings" of Europe and

Africa that contaminate the purity of his self transformation. Only at this

point in the dream is Makak prepared to adopt a hybrid consciousness,

which as defined here suggests an in-between-ness not only in terms of

opposing cultural values but also in terms of a void in thought.

Because the extrovertive phase of Walcott's theatrical dream is

partially constructed by multicultural influences, the only way to insure a

disinterested balance between cultures is through a continuum of the void of

conceptions first encountered during the introvertive "mist in the mind." In

the Epilogue Makak seems to intuit the need for this continuity. Although he

appears in the Epilogue to emerge from his dream, Walcott's Note implies

that the dream encompasses the entire play. In any case, having beheaded

the White Goddess and transcended the thrall of the twin "bewitchings,"

Makak now remembers his name, Felix Hobain ("Felix" means "happy").

Just as Makak is about to be released from prison, Moustique, who is still

alive, arrives looking for his friend: "He is a good man, Corporal. Let me


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take him where he belong. He belong right here,"46

that is, not in Africa.

Makak agrees:

Lord, I have been washed from shore to shore, as a tree in the

ocean. The branches of my fingers, the roots of my feet, could

grip nothing, but now, God, they have found ground. Let me be

swallowed up in mist again, and let me be forgotten, so that

when the mist open, men can look up, at some small clearing

with a hut, with a small signal of smoke, and say, "Makak lives

there. Makak lives where he has always lived, in the dream 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 back home, back to the beginning, to

the green beginning of this world. Come, Moustique, we going

home.47

In Dream on Monkey Mountain, then, home has a literal as well as an

anagogic meaning. It refers not only to the Caribbean world but also to

something else suggested by the line, "but now this old hermit is going

back home, back to the beginning, to the green beginning of this world."48

The source of Makak's dream is the home within, "the white mist in the

mind" that he longs to be swallowed up in again in the Epilogue, going full

circle from where he began. This experience, in fact, corresponds to a

primal level of artistic expression that Walcott as a writer finds so

appealing. The trajectory ofDream on Monkey Mountain has led full

circle back to this source of creative intelligence, from which the "mind

half-sees and half-creates." Thus, with Makak and Moustique heading

back to the Mountain, the chorus sings the refrain, "I going home, I going

home."49


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Coming Home to the Self:

For Makak, therefore, home includes neither Africa nor the dualism

of being for or against Europe. It does, however, include being established

in the self within a cultural context. Makaks vision and its dream rendering

are homegrown in more ways than one. As Fox says, "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.'.

Makak then becomes a representative of the downtrodden and impoverished

blacks who long to be redeemed."50

Home, as the play suggests, is not only a

place but also something residing within each one of us, regardless of ourposition in society or the nature of our socially constructed identities.

Simultaneously, through Makak's spiritual inclination and its powerful

influence of inducing hybridity among his Caribbean countrymen, Walcott

suggests a growing interconnectedness between the drama of living and

sacred events in theatre.

Although in analyzing Dream on Monkey Mountain I have looked

mainly at the self-discovery of the characters, the same experience of going

home would also apply for the spectators. Through the structure of a dream

play, Walcott uses the power of suggestion to give the audience an aesthetic

taste of their own spiritual strength. When the play dramatizes the rite of

healing performed by the lowest person in the hierarchy of a racialized

community, the audience intuits the possibility on a grassroots level that

anyone, including themselves, can achieve a sacred transformation of the

self. In addition to Makak, we see that Corporal Lestrade (as a foil to Makak

like Moustique) also undergoes a transformation. In the Apotheosis both

Makak and Lestrade are symbolically emancipated from their roles as

mimics of Europeans and Africans. In this way they open a hybrid space of


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in-between-ness that the audiencewhether European, African, or

Caribbeancan appreciate as accessible within themselves.

NOTES

1. Forman, Grassroots Spirituality, 51 (Forman's emphasis).2. Walcott, "Note on Production,"Dream on Monkey Mountain, 208.3. Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 277.4. Brown, "Dreamers and Slaves," 194.5. Fox, "Big Night Music," 204.6. Hamner, "Introduction to Critical Perspectives," 18.7. Ashcroft, et al, The Empire Writes Back, 33.8. Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 214.9. Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 68-69.10. Thieme,Derek Walcott, 71.11. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 4.12. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 38 (Bhabha's emphasis).13. Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 277.14. Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 219.15. Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 224-25.16. Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 225.17. Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 226-2718. Forman,Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness, 4.19. Forman, Grassroots Spirituality, 52 (Forman's emphasis).20. Forman, Grassroots Spirituality, 52.


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21. Forman, Grassroots Spirituality, 52.22. Hassan, The Postmodern Turn, 92.23. Stace,Mysticism and Philosophy, 62-133.24. Forman,Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness, 6 (Forman's emphasis).25. Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 326.26. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 38-39.27. Ashcroft, et al., The Empire Writes Back, 33.28. Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 235.29. Austin,How to do Things with Words, 102.30.Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 241.31.Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 237.32.Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 248.33.Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 249.34.Burnett,Derek Walcott, 103.35.Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 274.36.Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 274-75.37.Turner, "Universals of Performance," 65.38.Turner, "Universals of Performance," 65.39.Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 289.40.Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 291.41.Coleridge,Biographia Literaria, 304.42.Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 312.43.Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 313-14.44.Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 319.45.Burnett,Derek Walcott, 199.46.Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 325.


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47.Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 326.48.Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 326.49.Walcott,Dream on Monkey Mountain, 326.50.Fox, "Big Night Music," 202.

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(This article is a modified version of a paper orally presented at the International

Conference on Decolonising the Stage: Paradigm, Practice and Politics held at the

Department of English, Benaras Hindu University, as on 15 17 November, 2011.)

- Kaustav Kundu is an M. Phil. Research Scholar at the Department ofEnglish, University of Calcutta.

domm - walcott

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