From the particular to the universal re-reading pessimism in dream on monkey mountain

Adaner Usmani
English 195: Marxism and Postcolonial Literature
Professor Jeyifo
01/11/08
From the Particular to the Universal: Re-Reading Pessimism
in Dream on Monkey Mountain
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Introduction
It is fair to say that a ubiquitous source of tension in anti-racist political endeavors concerns the
place of the particular in efforts towards total emancipation. The recognition that race is socially and
historically constructed has encouraged many to reconsider the progressive potential of claiming a
particular identity. Should the intention, instead, not be to transcend the pernicious grammar of identity
politics itself? At first glance, Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain seems to agree: in
chronicling this reclamation of identity as a neurosis peculiar to a mad context, one might readily argue
that it delivers a decidedly pessimistic rendering of the return to the particular in the form of the
African revival. In this essay, however, I argue that an attentiveness to the interstices of the failure of
this revival can complicate that pessimism in ways that prefigure the promise of the universal. I suggest
that Walcott's play helps us rethink, with Laclau, the initial and traditional temptation to diametrically
oppose the universal to the particular. In this way, Dream on Monkey Mountain, while condemning its
characters to the tumult of colonial racism, also makes possible the hope of escape.
Before beginning, a word: because it is important to the task of this paper that it engage the
theoretical ramifications of Walcott's text, I here attempt to integrate textual analysis and close-readings
into commentary on various theoretical frameworks. Naturally, while I have made every attempt to
never let the latter dominate the former, it may be argued that, in places, the integrity of Walcott's play
is compromised. Whether or not this proves the case, the reader should remember that it is never our
objective to suggest that Walcott himself might (or might not) intend the possibilities his play presents;
rather, we premise our analysis on an approach that problematizes the work more holistically.
Fanon on Mimicry and Negritude
With these leanings in mind, it makes sense to outline first the theoretical vocabulary at stake in
this paper. Initially, this task takes us to Frantz Fanon, and his famous 1956 speech later released as the
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essay “Racism and Culture”. There, Fanon incisively chronicled the advancing sophistication of the
forms of racism that accompanied progressively more elaborate structures of colonial domination. He
argued that, as colonialism comes to rely on more and more subtle systems of rule, the “racism that
aspires to be rational, individual, genotypically and phenotypically determined, becomes transformed
into cultural racism. The object of racism is no longer the individual man but a certain form of
existing” (32, Fanon 1988).
Concomitant to this advance, Fanon suggests, we notice also the emergence of new forms of
resistance—“defense mechanisms” (38, Fanon 1988). The initial stage of “vulgar, primitive, over-
simple racism” (32, Fanon1988 ), where efforts to establish a scientific basis for the superiority of the
oppressors prevailed, bound the subjugated to mimicry and imitation.1
Yet, as the increasing complexity
of social relations leads the colonized to discover the futility of this phase, a new pattern of resistance is
inaugurated, where “the inferiorized individual” rediscovers his origins; his old “culture, abandoned,
sloughed off, rejected, despised, becomes for the inferiorized an object of passionate attachment” (41,
Fanon 1988). Critically for this essay, Fanon—in an expectation that recalls the apotheosis awaiting the
oppressed at the end of most Leftist renderings of the “march of history”—commits here to a teleology
that leads the colonized to their inexorable liberation, as this “plunge into the chasm of the past” proves
itself “the condition and the source of freedom” (43, Fanon 1988).2
To adopt the terms this essay will
employ, the particular, through struggle, becomes a vehicle for universal emancipation.3
1 “In an initial phase we have seen the occupying power legitimizing its domination by scientific arguments, the 'inferior
race' being denied on the basis of race. Because no other solution is left it, the racialized social group tries to imitate the
oppressor and thereby to deracialize itself” (38, Fanon 1988).
2 Fanon's Marxist commitments, which he makes explicit in the essay, add to this sense of the inevitability of
emancipation, even though he does then engage thoughtfully the questions this raises about the relative importance of
the subjective element in historical transition.
3 “The occupant's spasmed and rigid culture, now liberated, opens at last to the culture of people who have really become
brothers. The two cultures can affront each other, enrich each other. In conclusion, universality resides in this decision to
recognize and accept the reciprocal relativism of different cultures once the colonial status is irreversibly excluded” (44,
Fanon 1988).
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Walcott and the “Defence Mechanisms”
Though Dream on Monkey Mountain explores the two types of resistance prominent in Fanon's
essay (mimicry and the African revival), the specific trajectory of his argument is upset. No longer does
the attempt to imitate exist antecedently to an eventual liberation via a return to “blackness”, but
instead both resistances seem to coexist impotently in an exploration of the madness of the colonized's
plight. As outlined earlier, this essay recommends that we complicate that pessimism by looking at the
nuances internal to this play's discussion of the alleged failure of this second type (the reclamation of
“blackness”). Even still, it makes sense to address briefly the first half of the claim (the futility of
imitation) before concentrating on Walcott's treatment of the “African Revival”, which is this essay's
focus.
Mimicry
This, the exposing of “imitation” as a futile survival strategy, we see most clearly in the follies
of the Corporal. The play inaugurates him as the torch-bearer of this ideal in the prologue, where he
very deliberately seeks to distance himself from the “blackness” of Tigre, Souris and Makak:
CORPORAL: Animals, beasts, savages, cannibals, niggers, stop turning this place to a stinking
zoo! [and later:] ... some of the apes had straighten their backbone, and start walking upright, but
there was one tribe unfortunately that lingered behind, and that was the nigger. Now if you apes
will behave like gentlemen, who knows what could happen? The bottle could go round, but first
it behoves me, Corporal Lestrade, to perform my duty according to the rules of Her Majesty's
Government, so don't interrupt. (216-217, Walcott).
The rub, of course, is that the Corporal's hypersensitivity to his own image derives from his racial
ambiguity as a mulatto: his short-lived “descent” into “blackness” toward the end of the play
notwithstanding, he finds himself trapped by the never-ceasing need to prove himself in the colonizer's
metrics. Hence we see him overdoing “whiteness” throughout the play.4
Partly, the very fact of the
4 “CORPORAL: My noble judges. When this crime has been categorically examined by due process of law, and when the
motive 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
4

comedy of these moments,5
coupled with various other slippages,6
renders him unconvincing as a
model that others can adopt.
Yet, at the same time, these shortcomings also exist independent of the ambiguous condition of
the Corporal, specifically: Dream on Monkey Mountain makes clear that immanent in the very ideal of
imitation is the irony that “whiteness”, even while it presents itself as open and accessible to the not-
white, depends for its security on the existence of “blackness”. In this sense, imitation can never
prefigure collective emancipation: the test of the individual's “whiteness” is precisely his distance from
the many who are black. Because the sections that follow specify the places that this notion of
interdependence appears in the text, here it suffices to state the thesis more generally. Of course, the
claim anyway is quite standard in postcolonial analysis: the subjugated always loom large in the minds
of the colonizers when the latter take to the task of cataloging and enumerating the details of their
superiority.
The Turn to “Blackness”
Naturally, this fact of the interdependence of “blackness” and “whiteness” reappears in the
second defense mechanism, as well. This is made particularly clear in the play at the level of its plot:
namely, the fact that the instigator of Makak's initial reclamation of his “kingliness” is his “essential”
opposite (a white woman).7
Makak's speech, where his account of this moment is first presented, makes
this clearer still: it is in the journey that most symbolically represents his “blackness” (through the
“charcoal pit”) that he discovers his white muse (227, Walcott). The audience's confusion about the
serve, will not only be done, but will appear, my lords, to have itself, been done... [The JUDGES applaud] Ignorance is
no excuse. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Ignorance of one's own ignorance is no excuse. This is the prisoner. I will
ask the prisoner to lift up his face. Levez la tête-ous!” (222, Walcott).
5 When, for example, the Corporal says “all and sunday”, intending instead “all and sundry” (220, Walcott).
6 Such as, in the passage above, his taking a swig from the rum bottle before handing it to the others.
7 This interdependence of essential opposites exposes the farce of fixed essentials, instead demanding that they always be
understood contingently, as constructions. This is later reflected in the notion of the “nervous condition”, which Walcott
quotes from Sartre's preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth: the anxiety that defines that state reflects also the
necessary messiness involved in assertions of “pure essence”.
5

apparition's metaphysical reality throughout the play only further emphasizes this same point: when
Moustique finds a “white mask” under Makak's bench, the suspicion that she is no more than a figment
of Makak's imagination again speaks to the interdependence of “whiteness” and “blackness”.
Critically, the fact of this interdependence would—as in the example of the first resistance—
seem to suggest the folly of the African revival. Because the tactic traditionally strives for an
“essential” purity, the revelation that “blackness” depends upon “whiteness” would seem to
compromise the very premise of these efforts. Indeed, this was part of Sartre's critique of negritude in
Black Orpheus. As related by Fanon in Black Skins White Masks, Sartre there located negritude as a
soon-to-be-transcended term in the dialectic leading eventually to universal emancipation. He
conceived the aforementioned interdependence teleologically; not unlike Fanon, negritude, for Sartre,
represented the negative antithesis to the thesis of white supremacy.8
In that sense, it reproduced
dynamics that paralleled what it opposed (an “anti-racist racism”, as Sartre put it).
Dream on Monkey Mountain certainly appears to confirm Sartre's claims: in the play, the apex
of the African revival is marred by irrationality and excess. At the presentation of the prisoners that
Makak's new tribe has taken, for example, Walcott stresses the regressive consequences of its
puritanical exclusivity: Basil reads from a list of individuals implicated in the crime of “whiteness”,
which becomes nonsensical as it comes to include history's great white antiracists (312, Walcott). Later,
he announces the arrival of “a floral tribute of lillies from the Ku Klux Klan” (313, Walcott), which
only further heightens the audience's conviction that the return to the “tribe” really has proved
reactionary madness.9
And perhaps the most striking moment comes earlier, where Walcott emphasizes
8 “In fact, negritude appears as the minor term of a dialectical progression: The theoretical and practical assertion of the
supremacy of the white man is its thesis; the position of negritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity.
But this negative moment is insufficient by itself, and the Negroes who employ it know this very well; they know that it
is intended to prepare the synthesis or realization of the human in a society without races. Thus negritude is the root of
its own destruction, it is a transition and not a conclusion, a means and not an end” (133, Sartre in Fanon 1967).
9 This, of course, refers to the Klan's delight in the early 1920's when Marcus Garvey launched the “back to Africa”
campaign.
6

the fact of interdependence by incorporating the quote that begins the play10
into Makak's lines: “...if
the moon is earth's friend, eh, Tigre, how can we leave the earth. And the earth, self. Look down and
there is nothing at our feet. We are wrapped in black air, we are black, ourselves shadows in the
firelight of the white man's mind” (304, Walcott, emphasis mine). Makak's acknowledgment of the
African revival's contingency upon white supremacy - particularly his admission that the sense of
“rootedness” it conveys is constructed and consequently false - nips Souris' nascent hopes (which
prompted this speech) in the bud.11
What follows is the tribe's descent into its own destruction.
Towards Optimism
However—and this is the crux of this essay's argument—I suggest that the pessimism which
these moments induce in an audience contemplating the merits of the African Revival threatens to
obscure the nuance within the play available to an attentive eye. It is possible, I argue, to employ the
dynamics of Dream on Monkey Mountain to explore a more subtle, alternative interpretation of the
relation between the universal and this particular.
For this end, it is first necessary to distinguish between two phases of the turn to “blackness”
that the play presents: Makak's own reclamation of “Africa”, from the earlier scenes, and the more
frenzied return to the tribe of the second-last scene. In the first, I suggest, the audience apprehends the
authenticity and honesty of Makak's cries: while Moustique's cynical second-guessing reminds us of
the follies of the particular (and this Walcott emphasizes by opening this part of the play with Sartre's
comment that this “defence...is the end of the story” (211, Walcott)), the scene stresses that the white
apparition does address Makak's very real suffering. When Makak first relates the story to Moustique,
10 “If the moon is earth's friend, how can we leave the earth? -- Noh Play” (207, Walcott).
11 The play also seeks to affirm the credibility of Makak's perceptions here, since this brief speech is also the one place
where he displays an awareness of the dreamed nature of the immediate narrative: “Soon, soon it will be morning, praise
God, and the dream will rise like vapour, the shadows will be real, you will be corporal again, you will be thieves, and I
an old man, drunk and disorderly, beaten down by a Bible, and tired of looking up to heaven. You believe I am lost now?
Shoot, go ahead and shoot me. Death is the last shadow I have made. The carpenter is waiting” (304, Walcott).
7

for example, he conveys this connection enthusiastically and explicitly:
MAKAK: Well, well... the things she tell me, you would not believe. She did know my name,
my age, where I born, and that it was charcoal I burn and selling for a living. She know how I
live alone, with no wife and no friend.... [and later:] That Makak is not my name. And I tell her
my life, and she say that if I want her, she will come and live with me, and I take her in my
arms, and I bring her here (236, Walcott).
Because she addresses his ugliness, his loneliness, his blackness, Makak's white muse speaks to him
genuinely and directly. In other words, even if the eventual efficacy of this emancipation can be called
into question, the authenticity of its response to his oppressed, miserable state cannot be disputed. We
see this kind of association made in his speech to Moustique, immediately before these lines, where his
description of himself as “this old man, ugly as sin” promptly transforms into a self-perception of being
“God self, walking through cloud” (235, Walcott): again, this form of emancipation emerges
immanently from his real suffering. All this also recalls the context of his first confession (226,
Walcott), which takes place immediately after his utter humiliation at the hands of the Corporal
(222-223, Walcott).
This, I argue, distances us from Sartre – his notion that this response is a self-destructing
neurosis threatens to obscure its importance as an authentic reaction. Indeed, this was Fanon's
impassioned objection to the Sartre presented in Black Skins White Masks: according to Fanon, when
Sartre demanded that negritude's ideologues recognize the movement's contingency, he threatened to
undermine the integrity of their efforts:12
“For once, that born Hegelian had forgotten that
consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute” (133, Fanon 1967)).
As suggested, the authenticity of these moments contrasts starkly with the play's second
engagement with the African revival (Part Two, Scenes Two and Three). Here, as has been argued,
12 “When I tried, on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me [by
Sartre]. Proof was presented that my effort was only a term in the dialectic...” (132, Fanon 1967, addition mine). And
later: “In opposition to rationalism, [Sartre] summoned up the negative side, but he forgot that this negativity draws its
worth from an almost substantive absoluteness. A consciousness committed to experience is ignorant, has to be ignorant,
of the essences and the determinations of its being... Sartre's mistake was not only to seek the sources but in a certain
sense to block that source” (134, Fanon 1967).
8

Walcott makes Makak's madness incontrovertible (whereas in the first phase, some seeds of doubt are
sown throughout—when he cures the ailing peasant, for example): from the moment of this
movement's instigation13
to the climax at the end14
, the audience is left in no doubt about the regressive
destiny of these efforts. Makak's own lamentations, while enthroned, add to this sense of the overall
distinction.15
And even the spatial dynamic of this second phase is different: where, before, Makak's
return to Africa was also a flight from the place that symbolized his alterity (the forest on Monkey
Mountain)16
, it is there that the tribal revival of the second part plays itself out.
Conceivably, this distinction we make here, between the first and the second phases, can be
worked into two different frameworks with distinct consequences. As the first, one might suggest a
'teleological' reading: with Sartre, it could be argued that this distinction indicates only that the
moments of hope of the first phase extinguish themselves inevitably in the madness of the second,
which in turn incriminates, in its entirety, the original notion of the African Revival itself. This is the
pessimistic reading we have referred to throughout. My interpretation, however, is different. I argue
that this first reading does not properly account for a dynamic in the play that proves very important to
explaining this transition from the first to the second phase: namely, that of co-option. Makak's
authentic reaction does not develop into the madness of the ending scenes entirely due to an
irrationality that is indigenous to it; rather, much of this “descent” follows from the fact that his efforts
are co-opted from without, in the first phase, by Moustique and then, in the second, by the Corporal and
13 “MAKAK: [Holding TIGRE and SOURIS and near-weeping with rage] Drink it! Drink it! Drink! Is not that they say
we are? Animals! Apes without law? O God, O gods! What am I, I who though I was a man? What have I done? Which
God? God dead, and his law there bleeding. Christian, cannibal, I will drink blood. You will drink it with me. For the
lion, and the tiger, and the rat, yes, the gentle rat, have come out of their cages to breathe the air, the air heavy with
forest, and if that moon go out... I will still find my way; the blackness will swallow me. I will wear it like a fish wears
water... Come. You have tasted blood. Now, come!” (286, Walcott).
14 Here, though the last scene ends with Makak beheading the apparition and dramatically pronouncing himself free,
Walcott tellingly opens the epilogue that follows with instructions directing the cell bars to descend.
15 “CORPORAL: Inventor of history! [Kisses MAKAK'S foot] MAKAK: I am only a shadow. CORPORAL: Shh. Quiet,
my prince. MAKAK: A hollow God. A phantom” (311, Walcott).
16 “MAKAK: She say I should not live so any more, here in the forest, frighten of people because I think I ugly. She say
that I come from the family of lions and kings” (236, Walcott)
9

by Tigre. Attention to the nature of their interventions, I argue, can resuscitate an optimistic
interpretation of the African revival's relation to universal emancipation, provided we do acknowledge
the critique of this turn to the particular explicit in the acts of co-option.
Co-Option
As such, Moustique's co-option of Makak's efforts, most notable in the scene at the Market,
serves two purposes for our argument. First, it reaffirms our contention that Makak's reclamation of
“blackness” is initially authentic, but then corrupted from without. After all, Moustique exploits
Makak's reputation for profit, despite Makak's honest protestations: “MAKAK: Move that from me.
You don't understand, Moustique. This power I have, is not for profit” (254, Walcott). This honesty
reenacts the sense that Makak's reclamation of his “blackness” has an integrity that the efforts of the
latter parts of the play lack. Yet, second, Moustique's actions here, I argue, also attest to the
shortcomings of Makak's sentiments: Moustique, in his dissent, diagnoses a deficiency that lies in the
very form of the African revival—namely, its incapacity to address the material misery of the colonial
world.
MOUSTIQUE: What you kneeling again for? Who you praying for now? [MAKAK says
nothing] If is for me, partner, don't bother. Pray for the world to change. Not your friend. Pray
for the day when people will not need money, when faith alone will move mountains. Pray for
the day when poverty done, and for when niggers everywhere could walk upright like men. You
think I doubt you, you think I don't respect you and love you and grateful to you? But I look at
that moon, and it like a plate that a dog lick clean, bright as a florin, but dogs does chase me out
of people yard when I go round begging, “Food for my master, food.” And I does have to stoop
down, and pick up the odd shilling they throw you. Look, turn your head, old man, look there,
and that thing shining there, that is the ocean. Behind that, is Africa! How we going there? You
think this... [Holds up mask] this damned stupidness go take us there? Either you let me save
money for us, or here, at this crossroads, the partnership divide. (254-255, Walcott)
This objection to the impotency of the return to Africa reappears in the second phase, where a co-opted
Makak fervently tries to defend this earlier idealism: “SOURIS: How will we go [to Africa], old
man? ... MAKAK: Once, when Moustique asked me that, I didn't know. But I now know. What power
10

can crawl on the bottom of the sea, or swim in the ocean of air above us? The mind, the
mind...” (290-291, Walcott). Yet the general sentiment conveyed throughout this second phase—of the
movement's madness—only affirms Moustique's contention that Makak's intentions are truly
misplaced. Almost immediately after Makak acclaims the powers of the mind, Tigre re-voices
Moustique's critique: “TIGRE: We will need money to go there, uncle. To buy a boat. A big, big boat
that will take everybody back, or otherwise, is back to jail. Back where we were!” (291, Walcott).
Walcott again captures the crux of this disagreement later, in a cleverly-worked exchange between
Makak and Tigre: “TIGRE: What I will find in Africa? MAKAK: Peace. TIGRE: Peace? Piece of
what?” (292, Walcott). The play on “peace/piece” again identifies the same shortcomings in Makak's
movement.
To the Universal
One might want to argue that these deficiencies lead us back to the pessimistic Sartrean position
on the place of the African revival in the task of universal emancipation. Yet I suggest instead that we
incorporate this critique into our earlier affirmation of the authenticity of Makak's sentiments. What
Dream on Monkey Mountain provides, then, is the opportunity to declare the relevance of the turn to
the particular while also concentrating on the very real necessity to engage the universal (by addressing
what claims made from the position of particularity cannot tackle in a compelling way—such as these
real-material grievances).
Partly, as we have suggested, this was Fanon's point: no exhortation to transcend the negativity
of particularity and hurtle towards universal emancipation can succeed, unless it remembers always the
authenticity of that turn to the particular. Yet Dream on Monkey Mountain also helps us re-frame
Fanon's objection in a way that upsets his teleology: the absence of any direct attempt at universal
emancipation in the play, I argue, concentrates our attention on the possibilities the particular presents
11

itself.17
In this sense, the task of emancipation cannot take these moments of authenticity of the earlier
parts as naivete-to-be-transcended, but must instead regard them as endlessly important to the task of
constituting the universal. In other words, even while we recognize the limitations of the particular, it
makes minimal sense to dismiss it in pursuit of a final apotheosis: the particular must instead always be
allowed to 'haunt' the universal.
Laclau and Democracy
According to Ernesto Laclau, this sort of reconception of the boundaries dividing the universal
and the particular leads to the paradox that is “the very precondition of democracy”: in his article
“Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity”, his suggestions complete the argument
above. With Makak, Laclau affirms the integrity of identity politics, but also—with Moustique and
Tigre—argues that certain demands simply cannot be made from within a politics of particularism.
(88-89, Laclau) What we arrive at, then, is a demand that “the particular [exist] only in the
contradictory movement of asserting a differential identity and simultaneously canceling it through its
subsumption into a nondifferential medium” (89, Laclau). In other words, while pure particularism has
its regressive tendencies, we must remember that no one can ever quite arrive at the universal, either:
rather, all claims to occupying the universal are inevitably marked by their own contingency—their
own inevitable particularity. Instead, the dynamism that engenders democratic politics, according to
Laclau, emerges when we agree to reside in the interstices of this divide: never claiming the universal
completely, yet never satisfied with the particular. Dream on Monkey Mountain, I have argued, can be
interpreted in a way that inaugurates the journey taking us to this point.
17 This, I suppose, presumes some optimism: committed pessimists will likely regard this fact as confirmation of their
approach to Dream on Monkey Mountain.
12

Conclusion
This essay suggested that Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain can be used to guard against
the tendentious temptation to discount the African revival as reactionary. We offered this argument
cognizant of the fact that the play seems to suggest precisely this dismissal: since within it, the turn to
the particular seems symptomatic of the “madness” that colonial racism engenders, pessimism with
respect to the prospects of a politics of emancipation emerging from it seems most sensible—at the
very least, an agenda for true liberation would need to distinguish itself decisively from the follies of
Makak's movement. Yet, with Laclau and Fanon, we have suggested that recognizing the authenticity
of Makak's reaction requires us to think differently about how we dismiss the turn to the particular: this,
as we have suggested, leads toward a re-conception of the relationship between the particular and the
universal that is itself productive of democracy.
Even still, it might rightly be noted that many pressing questions remain insufficiently
theorized: even if this new particular/universal model be desirable (as we believe it is), what will
motivate today's many varying “turn to the particulars” to make demands as a more consolidated
universal? In other words, how does this reconfiguring of the boundaries between particular and
universal still convey the urgency of the need to avoid fragmentation? And indeed, can this exhortation
exist and be heard without a structure that calls back old universals (i.e., the party vanguard)?
Regardless, commitment to the two imperatives of our argument here – striving for the universal,
affirming the particular – do seem a necessary starting-point for any and all progressive attempts to
address these questions.
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Works Cited
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove P, 1967.
Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove P, 1988.
Laclau, Ernesto. "Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity." October 61 (1992):
83-90.
Walcott, Derek. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
1971.
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From the particular to the universal re-reading pessimism in dream on monkey mountain

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