Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain: Crossroads, Crosswords and Cross-purposes, or the Impossible Straight Line into Freedom
p. 351-375
Résumé
In an account of Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain, Errol Hill deems it « a tangled, incoherent piece ». Yet, the plot seems unrecondite enough: a poor Black man living in the mountains, Makak, goes to town and ends up in a jail. From there, along with his fellow-prisoners Tigre and Souris, he travels back to his « monkey » mountain and endeavours to recreate an ideal African state until he commits murder and renounces. Set under the sign of manumission and recounting thrilling adventures reminiscent of slave narratives, the play grapples with the possibility of escape. Nevertheless, the latter is taken to its utmost instability, providing indeed for a « tangled, incoherent piece », describing a mad circle rather than a straight line into freedom. Dream on Monkey Mountain is, as the title indicates, a dream, a reverie, a hypothetical marronage, a journey which goes nowhere. However, we will attempt to show to what extent the play merely draws upon a deviousness which was already there in traditional narratives, a genre also indebted to the picaresque tradition. A text dealing with passages, metamorphoses, the surprise of contingency, the mutability of the world, Dream on Monkey Mountain also points to an ontological and ideological absence. The final part of this paper will then scrutinize the ways in which linguistic predicaments and metaphysical uncertainties depart from the genre of slave narratives, taking the rebellion one step farther, turning its back to didactic and moralizing discourses too far compromised with the white society.
Texte intégral
1Commenting upon Dream on Monkey Mountain1, a play by Derek Walcott first performed by the author’s troupe in 1967, Errol Hill deems it “a tangled, incoherent piece”.2 Yet, the plot seems unrecondite enough: on a Saturday, Makak, a poor Black man living in the mountains, goes to town to relate the vision which has visited him; he ends up wreaking havoc and finishes in jail. From there, along with his fellow-prisoners Tigre and Souris, he escapes and travels back to his “monkey” mountain, emboldened by his dream of a pure state of nature but hunted down by Corporal, a character embodying law and order who nevertheless eventually joins the ranks of Makak’s grotesque utopia. Up on Monkey Mountain Makak endeavours to recreate a presumably African and laughably savage kingdom until he commits murder and renounces. The play then takes us back to jail, which Makak had never left but in a dream and where he resolves simply to hail back to his hut and remain there, a lonely woodsman. The play is structured around the motifs of bondage and escape and stages the conflict between the individual and an oppressive, iniquitous society, the flight of an underdog onto the open road and into dignity. Dream on Monkey Mountain clearly draws upon the tradition of those slave narratives which so captivated the 18th and 19th century readership, and in which runaway slaves told of their self-granted manumission3. However, the escape in point remains an extremely ambiguous, elusive and provisory one, accounting for Hill’s statement to some extent. Whereas slave narratives were often texts geared towards the elaboration of a righteous discourse on man and society Derek Walcott’s play constantly oscillates between opposite values until, in his last cue, Makak expresses the wish to “be swallowed up in mist again”. Not only does his escape fail, sending him back to his derelict hut and his oppressed conscience, but it appears as altogether cancelled by a circular ending which infuses the play with everything that slave narratives were not: an equivocal standpoint, a nebulous voice, an unresolved identity. The dramatic genre itself, with the playwright’s enunciation inevitably shattered among the various characters, seems to rule out the model of slave narratives and their strong autobiographical vein. Furthermore no slave narrative is, however implicitly, made reference to in this play penned by an author who otherwise is a tireless quoter4, piling up citations with great exhilaration. One may wonder whether such an absence of allusions not be the sure sign that the play is written as a slave narrative, without the mediation of quotes, of pastiche or parody. We shall attempt to show how diffractions of voice and meaning do not so much distinguish Dream on Monkey Mountain from traditional slave narratives as they redeem what still holds true and can make them ring in postmodern fashion. With his sinuous trajectory Makak stands as a subversive heir to a genre which had to comply with the rigours of censure, allowing for a rewriting which is both a transposition and a prolongation. We will finally interrogate the ways in which Dream on Monkey Mountain is a play about tricks and viles revealed, but also and mainly about the unnamable and unspoken evil which sprang up after slavery was abolished without its unfairness being removed. A text perpetually at cross-purposes with itself the play saturates the stage with a criss-cross of voices, languages and meanings which fails to cover a gaping ethical and hermeneutic chasm.
2The very linear trajectory of the slave narrative comes to a fork in Dream on Monkey Mountain, a play in which, after all, Quatre Chemins is the most common topography, the name of the crossroads, of the jail and of the market place altogether. The circle figures as an obsessive geometrical shape in the play, both textually and visually (the—otherwise sparse—stage directions indicate a drum, a gong, a full moon, the sun as well as characters going round and round or forming a circle, and the drawings made by the author to illustrate his directing the play show an ongoing moon at the back of the stage). Equally central to the play’s semiotics is the coal which Makak sells for a living and which he uses to depict his vision, making it rhyme with the Black “soul”: coal is what has already been burnt but will reignite, a material whose transformation leads not so much to the other as to the same. Similarly, Makak’s journey turns round and round in a movement which stands for the specific experience of runaway slaves in the Caribbean. Short of sailing away to another island they were indeed condemned to roam through mountains and woods in an endless and restless marronage, trapped by the circularity of the territory5. Caribbean slave narratives are tales of the impossible North, of a bondage that will never really end, of an escape which needs to be reiterated, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word, every single day. Whereas the North American runaway slave followed a straightforward trajectory northwards, Makak’s lot is to walk around like a caged animal:
CORPORAL. Walk round the cage! Marchez! Marchez!
[Makak rises and walks round the bench, as the CHORUS begins to sing]
[...] CORPORAL. About turn!
[Makak turns around wearily]
CHORUS. Cause when I turn round, monkey turn around too. (prologue, 222)
3The circle which he describes is no symbol for fullness and completion but rather a frightening absence of progress, an impossibility to escape, a reduction to animality. Far from being cancelled by the flight into the forest, such circularity is maintained throughout the episode during which Makak becomes a nègre marron and invents a kingdom of his own:
SOURIS. He doesn’t know where to go.
CORPORAL. Put him in front. He’s a shadow now. Let him face the moon and move towards it. Let him go forward. [...] Forward, forward.
SOURIS. Where? The world is a circle, Corporal. Remember that. [They move off wearily. The CORPORAL remains behind in a single spot] (II, 2, 306-307)
4The action and plot of the play advance through a series of “weary” spirals winding into helplessness, represented on stage by such cosmogonic circles as the moon or the earth. The enlightening typology of neo-slave narratives coined by Robert Stepto would have Dream on Monkey Mountain fall into the category of the “immersion narrative”, in which the journey into freedom paradoxically makes no headway:
[T] he Afro-American pregeneric myth of the quest for freedom and literacy has occasioned two basic types of narrative expressions, the narratives of ascent and immersion. The classic ascent narrative launches an “enslaved” and semi-literate figure on a ritualized journey to a symbolic North; that journey is charted through spatial expressions of social structure, invariably systems of signs that the questing figure situated in the least oppressive social structure afforded by the world of the narrative, and free in the sense that he or she has gained sufficient literacy to assume the mantle of an articulate survivor. [... T] he immersion narrative is fundamentally an expression of a ritualized journey into a symbolic South, in which the protagonist seeks those aspects of tribal literacy that ameliorate, if not obliterate, the conditions imposed by solitude. The conventional immersion narrative ends almost paradoxically, with the questing figure located in or near the narrative’s most oppressive environment.6
5A dream indeed, the whole play presents a universe in which values and notions blur into one another, in which the one is bound to be turned into the other and vice versa: “I have become what I have mocked” (II, 2, 300). The declaration is a far cry from the traditional persona of slave narratives, one who seeks moral redemption and whose metamorphosis is definite; ontology, in Derek Walcott’s text, is inevitably caught in a maelstrom of carnivalesque revolutions.
6Circularity is conveyed, in the play, by the present time of the performance: no matter how far the chronological plot line may stretch, a dramatic staging will take place in the here and now, scorning past and future. The circle is also represented by the stage, the unique territory available to drama semiotics, while slave narratives took place in the reader’s imagination and could therefore convoke the whole American space. Furthermore, the stage is itself a place where revolutions and circumscriptions rule. Makak’s journey away from oppression is set under the sign of repeated passages and metamorphoses, of the mutability of the world and of the stage. Corporal thus exclaims with anger: “Stop turning this place to a stinking zoo!” (prologue, 216; the phrase is repeated almost exactly in II, 2, 301). The play resorts to visible tricks to transform the stage with, for example, the “cage is raised out of sight” (prologue, 226), then The cells rise [...] Makak lies alone in the hut (prologue, 230) and at the end of the following scene, The hut rises out of sight (I, 1, 242) to become a country road. Space is malleable, fully obeying the concept of transformability proposed by Keir Elam:
What has been termed the “generative capacity” of the theatrical sign—the extraordinary economy of communicational means whereby in certain forms of dramatic presentation, from the ancient Greek to Grotowski’s’poor’ theatre, a rich semantic structure is produced by a small and predictable stock of vehicles — is enhanced by a quality variously characterized by the Prague structuralists as its mobility, dynamism or transformability. [...] What appears in one scene as the handle of a sword may be converted, in the next, into a cross by a simple change of position, just as the set which stands in one context for a palisade is immediately transformed, without structural modification, into a wall or garden fence.7
7 A long way off the realistic landscape in slave narratives, space is slippery and maddeningly circular in Dream on Monkey Mountain, jettisoning the possibility of escape.
8Words themselves appear as more than unreliable. “I can both accuse and defend this man”: one of the opening assertions (prologue, 120) points to the profound ambiguity of language. Words keep coming full circle and the play declenses all the various rhetorical figures of repetition, as if one were perpetually returning to the same crossroads to take a different direction, mapping out a territory but also locking up the open road. One of the most recurrent figures of repetition is that of the chiasmus, a rhetorical cross, crossroads and crossword: “The drum of the bull-frog, the blackbird flute [...] Not the blackbird flute, / Not the bull-frog drum” (prologue, 227). Elsewhere, minor changes intervene between identical blocks of text: Makak’s verse cue in the prologue (226-227) is repeated word by word in the first scene, in prose this time (234-235), and Moustique’s description of his adoption by Makak ( “you pick me up like a wet fly in the dust”, I, 1, 233) is taken up by Makak at the other end of the scene: “I pick you up like a wet fly from the dust” (I, 1, 241). Language is thus often structured around a call and response pattern; it is often the chorus which takes up some song or cue uttered by one of the characters. Just as circuitous is the question of Makak’s name: when the Corporal asks him what it is, Makak first states that he has forgotten it, then says that Makak is not his name ( “Makak is not my name”, I, 1, 236) and finally answers, a few lines before the end of the play, “Felix Hobain”, his official name, but also one which must have been inherited in the times of slavery and is no better than his infamous nickname ( “they calling me Makak for my face, you see? Is as I so ugly”, II, 3, 322). As one goes back and forth between one name and another, linguistic slippages accumulate. Such onomastic doubleness proliferates in a play where everyone is likely to become someone else at some stage in the plot. Doubles run galore in the play: Makak / Moustique, Souris / Tigre, Corporal / the woman in white. The latter is incidentally described in the dramatis personae as “APPARITION, the moon, the muse, the white Goddess, a dancer”, while “A DANCER” is also “NARRATOR” and “BASIL” is both “a cabinet-maker” and “figure of death”. Corporal tellingly compares Makak with Esau (prologue, 222), the twin brother of Jacob with whom he exchanged identities. One of the main crossroads in Dream on Monkey Mountain is not only linguistic but also semiotic, and has to do with the source of enunciation. On stage, the latter is at least two-fold, since the actor utters words penned by the playwright whereas slave narratives were most often first-person, lyrical confessions. Additionally, this play counts several characters, who all share the utterance of the text. Here, the play is quite the opposite of what Robert Stepto calls an “integrated narrative”, the later form of slave narratives:
When the various forms (letters, prefaces, guarantees, tales) and their accompanying voices become integrated in the slave narrative text, we are presented with another type of basic narrative which I call an integrated narrative. This type of narrative represents the second phase of slave narrative narration; it usually yields a more sophisticated text, wherein most of the literary and rhetorical functions previously performed by several texts and voices (the appended prefaces, letters, and documents as well as the tale) are now considered by a loosely unified single text and voice. In this second phase, the authenticating documents “come alive” in the former slave’s tale as speech and even action; and the former slave—often while assuming a deferential posture toward his white friends, editors, and guarantors—carries much of the burden of introducing and authenticating his own tale. (Stepto 1979: 4)
9The play has a choric and choral quality, it relies on polyphony, on ventriloquy even; the circle which structures it is also, prominently so, a multi-vocal one.
10Trapped in a circle, Makak still escapes. Moreover the epilogue does not so much conclude to a tragic failure, to a symbolic death of the main character and the restoration of order, as to a way out, as is outlined by Makak himself in a final declaration:
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 the world. Come, Moustique, we going home. (Epilogue, 326)
11The image of the hermit is highly reminiscent of the specific religious undertones that characterized many slave narratives which were written as spiritual autobiographies, as accounts of so many souls caught in a world of sin and depravation and seeking redemption. Makak’s journey might not be as circular as it is circuitous, staging a wanderer, a picaro who recalls those narratives where runaways were often caught over and again before a successful and final attempt (such suspense was a staple element of a genre which partly owes its claim to fame to its sensational dimension). Makak distinctly recalls a delusionary Quixote ( “Saddle my horse!” he tells a Sancho-like Moustique, whereas, naturally, he has no such animal, I, 1, 240). Raymond Hedin has shown the intimate links there exist between the picaro and the runaway slave: “The picaro could not disappear entirely because the survival techniques of the picaro were becoming even more important to the slave than they had been before”,8 and Frederick Douglass thus links his writing with his relentless and excruciating walking in quite striking fashion: “My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes”.9 Crossing rivers in Indian canoes, finding one’s way through the American wilderness, avoiding human dwellings and leaving society resolutely behind, experiencing thirst and hunger, dread and danger, chance encounters and recaptures: such is the stock-in-trade of the slave narrative. Similarly, Makak is a vagabond, as Moustique complains: “I tired begging. Look, look at us. So poor we had to sell the donkey. Barefooted, nasty, and what you want me to do, bow my head and say thanks?” (I, 2, 254). Derek Walcott goes back to the suspense of slave narratives, having Corporal hunt the three convicts, Makak, Souris and Tigre ( “So I let them escape. Let them run ahead. Then I’ll have good reason for shooting them down”, II, 1, 286-287) through a dense wood on the morne. Makak is, after all, the nègre marron condemned to a savage life far away from all human society: “I have live all my life / Like a wild beast in hiding. Without child, without wife” (prologue, 226). His predicament is a tribute to the (hi) story of these runaway slaves who were reduced to an animal, solitary life, eating roots and dwelling in huts and caves, but also a discourse on the fate of the postcolonial subject: “Makak is an extreme representation of what colonialism can do to a man—he is reduced to an almost animal-like state of degradation”.10 Through him, slave narratives echo and ripple into modern times, providing a frame which might take to task new forms of an oppression which has been looming and lurking, unnamed, ever since the end of slavery.
12Makak’s crossing the border into the unknown and the lawless in a truly devious (in both senses of the term) trajectory also fully illustrates the paradox which is at play in all slave narratives: their author is bound to be an outcast, a maverick endeavouring to make himself accepted through the confession of the misdeeds without which no escape was conceivable during slavery. Unable to submit, the author of slave narratives breaks the law in the full conscience of his own right, just as Makak flees a prison where he has been unfairly jailed to reach the forest and establish an ideal kingdom where injustice would be redressed.11 Transgression is a seminal element both in slave narratives and in Dream on Monkey Mountain; it prevents escape in a straight line, with the picaro standing not only for rootless and restless odysseys but also for law violation and rule infringement. Vagabonds contravening proper behaviour, refusing to “bow their heads and say thanks”, as Moustique puts it, Makak and his accomplices are such bold but apparently criminal characters. In Walcott’s play, the Fanonian theme of the set role in which the Black man cannot not be cast echoes: “Bastard, Hatchet-man, opportunist, executioner. I have the black man work to do, you know” (II, 2, 307). A wanderer but also a trickster at heart, Makak is an incarnation of the runaway left to his own devices, and he certainly does recall the monkey character in African tales, one who will outwit the lion or the elephant, the powerful kings of the jungle12. He incarnates a ruthless and pragmatic cleverness, he is on the side of dissent and of cunning ploys. Similarly, some authors of slave narratives described a universe of vice and debauchery judged by many as the only solution to their oppressed condition. Thus, Arthur fashions himself as a rebel in a colourful narrative13 telling of his thefts, his “whor [ing] and dr [inking] to great excess” in the West Indies, his vagaries and his crimes. Admittedly, such resolutely anti-Uncle Tom imagery remained unacceptable during slavery and would be censured, so that undaunted Arthur’s ends with contrition ( “And accordingly I was, on the 24th of September last, sentenced to be hanged, which I must confess is but too just a reward for my many notorious crimes”14), and slave narratives unfailingly showed—an apparent—acceptance of the ideals of the dominant white society. The moral constraints, the implicit censure exercised upon slave narratives are no longer there in Dream on Monkey Mountain, a text which stages a grotesque defilement of order, a venture into chaos, into cannibalism and savage rites. Such a process is far away from the sentimental form of romance which is, after all, one of the literary ancestors of the slave narrative. However, slave narratives often testified to the necessity to deceive others as long as the Mason-Dixon line had not been crossed:
In fact, the only weapon of self defence that I could use successfully, was that of deception. It is useless for a poor helpless slave, to resist a white man in a slaveholding State. Public opinion and the law is against him; and resistance in many cases is death to the slave, while the law declares, that he shall submit or die.15
13Deception is further emphasized in the play through a theatricality visible everywhere, a world of disguising, impersonating, role-playing and simulacra. Masks abound, hiding and distorting faces. They also embody the colonial alienation denounced by Fanon, who is implicitly quoted in the play ( “Black faces, white masks! I tried like you” I, 3, 271).
14The ultimate trickery resorted to in the play is a linguistic one, as Makak and the other protagonists are constantly talking in riddles, puns and quips: “the Mosaic tablets” (I, 3, 256); “Peace? Piece of what?” (II, 2, 292; the pun testifies here to an impossibility to use abstract notions and to the concomitant necessity to conceive of the world piecemeal); “Once I knew this jungle like the black of my hand” (II, 2, 296; blackness is here once more linked to an impossible movement forward and to the figure of the crossroads to which one keeps returning); “A figment of the imagination, a banana of the mind...” (II, 2, 297). These puns lay the emphasis on the “signifying”16 indefiniteness of the trickster’s idiom, and recall some passages in slave narratives in which biblical undertones and apparently sermonizing passages, for example, were taken at cross-purposes and made to mean something else entirely (the “Mosaic tablets” is a good example thereof, transforming a deferential allusion to Moses into carnivalesque contingency and plurality). In Dream on Monkey Mountain, language also jars with dramatic realities, so that semantics and semiotics are constantly at cross-purposes in the play. Such visible disjunction between enunciation and stage signs appears with Makak’s crown: “MAKAK. My crown / SOURIS. [Twisting a vine and crowning him] Crown” (II, 2, 294). Seemingly performative, the word is here a deceit, an illusion, a trick to fool the fool who would be king. The figure of speech resorted to here, a recurrent one in the text, is that of metalepsis, a dissociation between speech and fact, between the word and the stage17. The world presented to the audience is everything but what is described by the characters’ remarks and cues, projecting the play into comedy, triggering laughter. Such is, similarly, the fate of Makak’s boat, one which is entirely delusional as Tigre drily and pitilessly remarks:
MAKAK. Back into the boat, a beautiful boat, and soon, after many moons, after many songs, we will see Africa, the golden sand, the rivers where lions come down to drink, lapping at the water with their red tongues, then the villages, the birds, the sound of flutes. [...]
TIGRE. We will need money to go there, uncle. To buy a boat. (II, 2, 291)
15Such signifying is not to be found in slave narratives, which are based on the assurance that the thing and the word equal, beyond distortions which may be redressed, in any case, by he who is familiar with the codes used. If the trajectory of the runaway is devious in both cases, Derek Walcott’s play interrogates a hermeneutic crack which attempts to come to terms with new, postmodern forms of oppression.
16While everything in slave narratives was subsumed to escatology, to a broader perspective and hopes of redemption18, Dream on Monkey Mountain is, as the title indicates, a dream, a moonstruck reverie, an inner and very subjective experience of marronage. Derek Walcott writes in his note on production:
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. Its style should be spare, essential as the details of a dream. (208)
17It is a text without the linear, didactic, “logical” course which characterized slave narratives. With nothing but a maddening circle on which to stake his hopes, the character in the play vanishes into nothingness. Derek Walcott’s text repeatedly points to an ontological absence, to an aporia, to an identity that will not hold: “Once we letting him believe what he is, is all right. Otherwise... [Draws the knife across his throat]” (II, 2, 294). Deeply metatheatrical, the text designates roles as nothing more than roles: “I must play another part” (II, 1, 286). The end explicitly recalls that of The Tempest ( “we are wrapped in black air, we are black, ourselves shadows in the firelight of the white man’s mind” (II, 2, 304)), and similarly treats the world as an illusion best represented by dramatic artifice. Makak describes himself, in the third person and clearly romantic accents, as a fantasy: “Makak lives where he has always lived, in the dream of his people” (epilogue, 326), and Corporal Lestrade is fashioned around a dark hole, a baroque identity which hides a frightening nothingness:
And who stand in your way but your dear friend, Corporal Lestrade the straddler, neither one thing nor the next, neither milk, coal, neither day nor night, neither lion nor monkey, but a mulatto, a foot-licking servant of marble law? (II, 1, 283)
18Nothingness is, indeed, one of the main themes in the play, becoming visible ( [He points at nothing], prologue, 227) and grammatically positive, as the adverb “too” intimates in the following exchange:
TIGRE. Who de hell he talking to? I see nothing. SOURIS. I see nothing too.
MAKAK. He is talking to nothing. (II, 2, 299)
19The characters on stage are Beckettian19, they are bodies without substance, a mere voice, the last and least human presence: “My lords, as you can see, this is a being without a mind, a will, a name, a tribe of its own” (prologue, 222). The matter of the name notably crops up again and indeed, the real name of Makak remains unpronounced but by the woman in white: “she call out my name, my real name. A name I do not use” (I, 1, 235). Such emptiness is paradoxically furthered by a dense intertextuality: references to Fanon ( “black faces, white masks”, I, 3, 271) and Sartre, to Cervantes, to Shakespeare stand next to biblical undertones (Makak is, for example, explicitly presented as a Christ-like figure, and Souris and Tigre as the two thieves crucified along with him). All these appear as shreds and scraps clothing a text which doubts its own existence; conversely, the intertextuality there is to be found in slave narratives was most consistent, it described the perils, physical or spiritual, experienced by runaways with a great display of biblical allusions, drawing upon the New England sermonizing tradition and upon such devotional books as The Pilgrim’s Progress. In Dream on Monkey Mountain intertextuality works through cross-references rather than through a fully significant web, the tension between the various intertexts being stunted by their brevity and the whirling movements in which they are caught, producing an accumulation behind which an irreducible void lurks. Appended to such hollowness, there is in Dream on Monkey Mountain a reflexion about memory, or rather, the necessity to forget.
[T] he noblest are those who are trapped, who have accepted the twilight.
If I see these as heroes it is because they have kept the sacred urge of actors everywhere: to record the anguish of the race. To do this, they must return through a darkness whose terminus is amnesia.20
20Whereas slave narratives were meant as testimonies intended for the following generations, amnesia is the final victory of Makak’s, who wishes past indignities to pass out of recollection: “Let me be swallowed up in mist again, and let me be forgotten” (epilogue, 326).
21Emptiness is also prominently an ethical and metaphysical one in Dream on Monkey Mountain. Placed under the double authority of Franz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, respectively quoted at the beginning of the two parts of the play, Derek Walcott’s text conflates viewpoints without solving the oppositions brought about. It is a play dealing with, and steeped in, ambiguities, and images of mist and fog proliferate. Interestingly, such opacity is the means towards a better vision: “I will tell you my dream. Sirs, make a white mist / In the mind [...] A man swimming through smoke, / And the bandage of fog unpeeling my eyes” (prologue, 226-227). Here, Derek Walcott runs counter to the clear value frame, to the didactic content which lie at the core of any slave narrative, opposing the South and the North, delivering a discourse centered around the stability of human dignity, going far to show the legitimacy of their own right; slave narratives inevitably partook of abolitionist propaganda21 and displayed a forthright wish to forge a collective idiom and literature, to write back on behalf of the whole Black community, enslaved or otherwise22. In Dream on Monkey Mountain, no moral choice is made nor even merely formulated. Winnowing truth from lie appears impossible and clearly beside the point in this play, a very anti-Sartrian one from that standpoint. One never quite knows, for example, whether Makak is a drunk or a visionary, an epileptic or a dreamer: “Spirit does talk to me” (prologue, 225)23. If guaranteeing of the truth of the story but also the authenticity of authorship were very much at stake in slave narratives24, the whole of the play revolves around the question of Makak’s legitimacy without, this time, asserting it convincingly. He remains both a king and a jester, a lion and an insect, he encapsulates the whole ambiguity of man:
SOURIS. So how is the king?
[Makak has drawn apart, talking to himself]
TIGRE. Mad like an ant. He just make me general. (II, 2, 293)25
22The accumulation of monosyllables is not inadvertent here, exposing a language which is decomposing, falling apart, going to rack and ruin.
23Indeed, chaos is also linguistic in Walcott’s play, one which repeatedly veers towards babelic babble. It is a case in point how words, which are very much treated as they were in that theatre of the absurd which was coming to existence at the same time in Europe, and which Derek Walcott was among the first American directors to stage, are merely a stopgag solution, a signifier without a proper signified, an absence of substance. Languages are piled upon one another in a chaos of meaning: “CORPORAL [Infuriated] English, English! For we are observing the principles and precepts of Roman law, and Roman law is English law” (prologue, 219). Corporal’s linguistic alienation goes on to provide for a purple patch of absurdist legalese which criss-crosses jargons:
My noble judges. When this crime has been categorically examined by due process of law, and when the emotive of the hereby accused by whereas and ad hoc shall be established without dychotomy, and long after we have perambulated through the labyrinthine bewilderment of the defendant’s ignorance, let us hope, that justice, whom we all serve, will not only be done, but will appear, my lords, to have itself, been done... [The JUDGES applaud]
24In a quite farcical scene, in the market place, he misuses words deliberately as a further means to assert and wield his power:
CORPORAL. Morning. That’s a nice pawpaw, sir.
VENDOR. Oui, mon corporal. [They move on]
CORPORAL. You see?
INSPECTOR. That was a melon.
CORPORAL. I know. But in the opinion of the pistol, and for the preservation of order, and to avoid any argument, we both was satisfied it was a pawpaw.
INSPECTOR. I am beginning to understand the law. (I, 3, 260- 261)
25The spoken word and even more so, the written letter, are in the grip of power, embodied in the play by Corporal; the common slang phrase “shut your trap” (prologue, 214) also testifies to the danger there is in opening one’s mouth. Whereas slave narratives unfailingly told of a quest for literacy26, with confession of verbal deficiencies belonging to the genre, Dream on Monkey Mountain resorts to an improper gibberish (the term is used several times), to a language which is part-French creole dialect and part-standard English, with both idioms seamed into one ( “Tiens, what is that?”, II, 2, 292). Words are tangled, deformed and distorted, producing a crossword whose direction remains unclear. If an illusory African language is recreated27 by Makak ( “Dire, Abou-mala-ka-jonga”, I, 3, 266), it only goes to show how meaningless any language shift is bound to remain. Languages are criss-crossed once more to let the audience hear the emptiness which lies at the core of the entire play: “He lets out a terrible cry of emptiness” (I, 3, 274).
26In the main, Dream on Monkey Mountain is a rewriting of slave narratives which concentrates on showing to what extent the trajectory of their structure was already crooked, further sending the text into circles rather than straight lines, recuperating their often disregarded picaresque dimension, intimating that escape was never possible in a world where prejudices were, after all, the same everywhere. The play merely goes one step farther, finally emptying their didactic discourse to let emptiness invade the ideological frame. The text is a homage to the roughness and unruliness of slave narratives, drawing upon some aspects of the tradition which were speaking of transgression to the careful reader. Derek Walcott’s play reinvents a captivity which has no other outlet than moral, philosophical and literary blurriness, one which is made of a very Caribbean flotsam indeed:
Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent [...] That is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong.28
27 Dream on Monkey Mountain is a text whose complete exegesis is impossible, whose meanings fork and circle and whose structure criss-crosses as much as the Quatre Chemins crossroads where most of the action takes place, a crossword always at cross-purposes with itself.
Bibliographie
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Works cited
Allsopp, Richard. Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. 1996. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Arthur. The Life and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro Man: Who Was Executed at Worcester, October 20th, 1768, For a Rape Committed on the Body of One Deborah Metcalfe. Boston: Printed and Sold in Milk Street, 1768.
Bibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself. New York: 5 Spruce Street, 1849.
10.4159/9780674053755 :Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. 1845. New York: Penguin Classics, 1986.
10.4324/9780203993309 :Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Routledge, 1980.
Fanon, Franz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil, 1952.
Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Antebellum Slave Narratives. 1979. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.
Glissant, Édouard. Le Discours antillais. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
10.3917/kart.maxim.1996.01 :Maximin, Colette. Littératures caribéennes comparées. Paris: Karthala, 1996.
Starling Wilson, Marion. The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History. Washington: Howard University Press, 1982.
Stepto, Robert. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
Walcott, Derek. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.
Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says, Essays. New York: Faber, 1998.
Notes de bas de page
1 Walcott, Derek, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970). References to the play will be made, in the text, as: (act number, scene number, page number).
2 Hill, Errol, “Emergence of a National Drama in the West Indies”, Caribbean Quarterly 18, 4 (December 1972): 33.
3 We shall see in the course of the present paper that the fate of runaway slaves was quite different in the Caribbean on the one hand, and in the United States on the other; in the former area, they had to cross not only borders but also seas to find a space where they could be free men, and very often resorted, instead, to fleeing to the mountains and the woods in an enterprise which came to be known as “marronage”. Return to civilization was made possible by the constitution of whole maroon communities, but also by reaching England, as is the case for example in The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, F. Westley and A.H. Davis (Stationers’ Hall Court, London, 1831).
4 It fell to another, later play by Derek Walcott, Walker (first performed 1993), to resort to that specific intertextuality, the hero being a thinly veiled incarnation of Frederick Douglass, a runaway now living in Boston, the editor and printer of an abolitionist paper. Quotations of slave narratives are numerous in the play.
5 Cf. the runaway slave whose fate is told by Édouard Glissant in his Discours antillais, in an attempt at rewriting a—third-person—slave narrative: “Il avait tracé un chemin, de cache en cache, et tournait en rond: c’était sa seule chance d’échapper aux autres [...] Chaque nuit, il revenait vers les cases [...] Il n’avait pas d’avenir, n’ayant pu atteindre la mer et voler une barque. Il mourrait bientôt. Mais il courait en rond sans arrêt, comme un soleil noir [...] Il allait de cache en cache, sur une trace qui tournait sans fin [...] Il tournait, s’efforçant de retrouver les caches qu’il avait aménagées [...] Il ne savait pas qu’il fermait le cercle”, Glissant, Édouard, Le Discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, 1997): 276-278. The text interestingly closes upon a footnote sending the reader back to one of Derek Walcott’s texts, “History is Sea”, as indeed, this recurrent circle figure is quite Walcottian). The whole of Glissant’s works, and notably his novel Le Quatrième siècle (1964), is haunted by the figure of the nègre marron, or runaway slave.
6 Stepto, Robert, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979): 167.
7 Elam, Keir, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Routledge, 1980): 12.
8 Hedin, Raymond, “The American Slave Narrative: The Justification of the Picaro”, American Literature, 53: 4, (January 1982): 636.
9 Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845. New York: Penguin Classics, 1986): 72.
10 Walcott, Derek, The New Yorker (26 June 1971): 30.
11 In this comical episode, Makak notably undertakes to sue those famous figures who have been found guilty of racial prejudice, starting from Noah and Plato up until Sir Cecil Rhodes and Mandrake the Magician, who had a Black servant, Lothal.
12 Often called “Anancy” in the Caribbean and North American lore, the trickster appears in the play as the spider, a current representation thereof, and which, here, haunts Makak’s dreams ( “Make the web of the spider heavy with diamonds”, prologue, 226) and whose poison kills the unfortunate Moustique.
13 The Life and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro Man: Who Was Executed at Worcester, October 20th, 1768, For a Rape Committed on the Body of One Deborah Metcalfe (Bostone: Printed and Sold in Milk Street, 1768).
14 Quoted in Starling Wilson, Marion, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History (Washington: Howard University Press, 1982): 55.
15 Bibb, Henry, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: 5 Spruce Street, 1849): 17.
16 On this concept, one which goes back to times of slavery, see Gates, Henry Louis Jr., “The ‘Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey” in Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the “Racial” Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987): 235-276.
17 Cf. Elam, Keir, op. cit.: 176-178 ( “Such logical and referential figures (as opposed to semantic and syntactic ones) are named metalogisms by Groupe µ [and] are context-bound devices to the extent that they depend on the audience’s ability to measure the gap, as it were, between reference and referent”).
18 “The plot of the nineteenth-century slave narrative is informed by the Judeo-Christian mythological structure on both the material and the spiritual levels. The action moves from the idyllic life of a garden of Eden into the wilderness, the struggle for survival, the providential help, and the arrival into the Promised Land. In addition, the plot of the slave narrative incorporates the parallel structure of birth into death and death into birth which also distinguishes the Judeo-Christian myth”, Foster, Frances Smith, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives (1979. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994): 84.
19 The numerous links between Walcott’s and Beckett’s dramas have been systematically underlined in the dissertation of Corina Martin-Iordache, “Modernism, Postcolonialism and the Experience of a Place: A Study of Samuel Beckett and Derek Walcott” (University of Toronto, 2001). The two playwrights are exactly contemporary, and Derek Walcott has staged Krapp’s Last Tape in Port-of-Spain in 1962, just a few years before writing Dream.
20 Walcott, Derek, “What the Twilight Says” (What the Twilight Says, Essays, New York: Faber, 1998): 5.
21 “Oh the horrors of slavery! - How the thought of it pains my heart! But the truth ought to be told of it; and what my eyes have seen I think it is my duty to relate; for few people in England know what slavery is. I have been a slave - I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what a slave knows; and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains, and set us free”, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, F. Westley and A.H. Davis (Stationers’Hall Court London, 1831): 11.
22 “Consider, my dear friends, that it is but a very few years since any body could be found that had courage enough to step out of the common road of thinking and object to the insufficient, unsatisfactory, and unsubstantial arguments used against us”, The Address of Abraham Johnstone, a Black Man, Who Was Hanged at Woodbury, in the County of Glocester, and State of New Jersey, etc., quoted in Starling, op. cit.: 89
23 Colette Maximin aptly notes that whereas standard English would privilege “spirits” (singular) as meaning “alcohol”, Caribbean English resorts to “does” even in the plural form, so that both “alcohol” and “supernatural apparitions” are possible here. She concludes to a final reconciliation of both meanings: “Dissociées d’abord, les deux fonctions de l’alcoolisme se rejoignent enfin dans les dernières scènes: à son arrestation en état d’ivresse, Makak doit d’avoir découvert son nom—sa véritable identité. Les turbulences du rhum lui fraient une voie nouvelle, lui assurant, parallèlement, au bénéfice des autres, un rôle de médiateur”, Littératures caribéennes comparées (Paris / Pointe-à-Pitre: Jasor-Karthala, 1996): 287-288.
24 One need merely look at titles, which very often included a phrase indicating that the narrative had effectively and indeed been written by its main protagonist: “written by himself / herself”.
25 Here, the pun relies on a Caribbeanism: in Jamaica, the island where Derek Walcott studied, mad-ant is the common name of Iridomyrmex inquus, and it is known for “its erratic ‘this-way-and-that-way’ movements as it forages for food, always seemingly in a hurry but never quite making up its mind where it wants to go”, Allsopp, Richard, Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (1996. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 360.
26 See Stepto, Robert, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, (op. cit.), on the correlation between freedom and literacy in slave narratives.
27 After all, many slave narratives have been penned by Africans having been brought to the Americas, and whose mother tongue was African; it is the case for example of Gronniosaw (A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself, Bath, 1772), of Equiano (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, London, 1789), of Venture Smith (A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa; But Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, New London, 1798).
28 Walcott, Derek, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” (What the Twilight Says, Essays, op. cit.): 69-70.
Auteur
-
Kerry-Jane Wallart
Université Paris IX-Dauphine
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