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emilymg_owen's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
jkornowske's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
robertlashley's review against another edition
1.0
Where are the black Mamet’s? Where are those Americans? Is that the multifaceted, multi racial drama of today?”
Derek Walcott, Evergreen Review, 1990.
Although Derek Walcott fills Dream on Monkey Mountain with more than enough ghosts and symbols, an uninvited one hangs over it’s every word. A protest play layered beneath references to myth and culture, It’s usage of interracial sexual violence as a vehicle for heroic triumph chains it to the psychodrama’s that poisoned African American theater in the late 60’s/early 70’s. Though more “literary” than Amiri Baraka’s and Ed Bullins’ blood-revenge epics, his usage of aesthetics(to swaddle his mythic killer in the clothing of black victim hood) makes the word seem perverse. Both slack and deeply pretentious, Mountain is an immense failure, reverberating all the more given his status as a brilliant poet.
The scouting report on Walcott’s plays is that, while well written, they suffer because of his refusal to create a character other than himself. Structurally, Mountain does nothing to dispel that notion. Walcott’s strength as a poet is, to paraphrase Conrad, “making you see” his version of the Caribbean, his grasp of his environment, his understanding of its history in relation to the world; and his
his vast, deeply learned command of the English language in doing so. In the theater, that style has done him few favors, as even his best plays (Henry Christophe ) have been plagued by his inability to let go of his persona.
In Mountain, the political aspects of his persona are a great deal of what he’s selling. Starting with the 36-page preface, assured, yet full of bombast, a sideswipe to Tennessee Williams, Walcott attempts to distinguish his story by making his hero/killer a cerebral, sophisticated figure. Unlike the horror core intellectuals of Baraka’s the slave, or the gruesome predators that populate Bullins’ screeds; Makak, the central character, is a trickster, a learned assured man smarted than both the black and the white people on the West Indian Island. Through the fill in the blank narrative populated so many black nationalist plays(Black man in jail? Check! Black man has no faults or weakness? Check. Symbolic Uncle Tom figure? Check! Black man triumphs over oppression? Check. White woman gets fucked up in the process? Check.) Walcott references Don Quixote, The underground man, and several Greek and African gods. Also, in another veiled cheap shot to Williams, Mountain is a dream play; but here the dreams (of Makak’s liberation from oppression) are bloody, cocksure, and triumphant, having nothing to do with the interior agonies of character or the subconscious.
What Mountain is most known for is it’s most symbolic act of all (if one wants to call it that): when Makak achieves his full freedom from racial oppression by…chopping off the head of his jailers white wife. Defenders such as Walcott’s biographer Bruce King will say Makak isn’t murdering a living woman but a mythic image; as at the end of the play, Makak transforms into a magical African trickster god and the jailers wife, who he titles “an apparition”, a moon goddess of white beauty (described here by the Jailer himself).
CORPORAL:
She is the wife of the Devil, that white witch. She is the mirror of the moon that this ape look into and find himself unbearable. She is all that is pure, all that he cannot reach…She is lime, snow, marble, moonlight, lilies, cloud, fame and bleaching cream, the mother of civilization and the co-founder of blackness…It is you that created her, so kill her! Kill her! The law has spoken!
The problem with that theory, ( outside of the obvious obscenity of the act) is that Walcott’s deigning of transformation is central to the murder, on the account that it is divorcing her from being a human being. Worse than that, in his reduction, she just doesn’t become one woman, but a “spirit” with the potential to be every woman that ever existed. The horror shown here, no matter the mytho-poetic form that encapsulates it, is one of the darkest moments in African American arts in letters.
Contrary to Walcott’s opinion, Mountain is part of African American arts and letters, if only to serve as an example of his warped view of it. For though Walcott has decried any commonality of experience with African American writers; in his plays he carries their banner in the most rote, cliched terms. Never does he hold his makeshift flag more than he does in Mountain, where his characters sing like black nationalists, throw pity parties like black nationalists, plot revenge like black nationalists, and in the end win like black nationalists, like Makak’s ( Jesus Christ, the symbolism of the name) final monologue to his two felon friends.
MAKAK:
"God bless you both. Lord, I have 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….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, the green beginning of this world"
An interesting question, full of thorny subtext’s for the playwright and academia, needs to be asked: Just what did Makak/ Walcott win? Riding a wave of white guilt, Mountain had a 48 show run on Broadway, but outside of what people call “the literary canon”, has it lasted? Walcott has raged about the standards of African American literature and political correctness, but how can you see this and so many of his other plays( The Last Carnival, Viva Detroit, soft core versions of Mountain. The Capeman, a vile defense of a cold blooded killer) as examples of the term at it’s most generic? Most pointedly, if African American culture is the haven for anti-intellectualism Walcott says it is, then why didn’t the said culture come to see this bloody, brutal play by the thousands?
The questions regarding the culture that Dream On Monkey Mountain inadvertently ask take precedence to it’s sheer cruelty, it’s distance from humanity, creation, reason, or any of the characteristics one considers when they think of art. For although he attempts to distinguish himself from protest drama, his plays shows a tangled, brutal brotherhood with the genre and it’s history. Though in different ways-Baraka and Bullins, by cursing the African American history of the past, Walcott, by cursing the history altogether-they have divorced themselves from the standards and rituals black people have used to survive in America; resulting in works of art that have existed from a violent, ahistorical swamp. This, not racism, reverse racism, or low standards, is the reason Black Nationalist theater has failed as an idea, the reason Walcott is a failure as a playwright, and the reason that Mountain is one of the greatest obscenities the “canon” has flung upon the general public.
Derek Walcott, Evergreen Review, 1990.
Although Derek Walcott fills Dream on Monkey Mountain with more than enough ghosts and symbols, an uninvited one hangs over it’s every word. A protest play layered beneath references to myth and culture, It’s usage of interracial sexual violence as a vehicle for heroic triumph chains it to the psychodrama’s that poisoned African American theater in the late 60’s/early 70’s. Though more “literary” than Amiri Baraka’s and Ed Bullins’ blood-revenge epics, his usage of aesthetics(to swaddle his mythic killer in the clothing of black victim hood) makes the word seem perverse. Both slack and deeply pretentious, Mountain is an immense failure, reverberating all the more given his status as a brilliant poet.
The scouting report on Walcott’s plays is that, while well written, they suffer because of his refusal to create a character other than himself. Structurally, Mountain does nothing to dispel that notion. Walcott’s strength as a poet is, to paraphrase Conrad, “making you see” his version of the Caribbean, his grasp of his environment, his understanding of its history in relation to the world; and his
his vast, deeply learned command of the English language in doing so. In the theater, that style has done him few favors, as even his best plays (Henry Christophe ) have been plagued by his inability to let go of his persona.
In Mountain, the political aspects of his persona are a great deal of what he’s selling. Starting with the 36-page preface, assured, yet full of bombast, a sideswipe to Tennessee Williams, Walcott attempts to distinguish his story by making his hero/killer a cerebral, sophisticated figure. Unlike the horror core intellectuals of Baraka’s the slave, or the gruesome predators that populate Bullins’ screeds; Makak, the central character, is a trickster, a learned assured man smarted than both the black and the white people on the West Indian Island. Through the fill in the blank narrative populated so many black nationalist plays(Black man in jail? Check! Black man has no faults or weakness? Check. Symbolic Uncle Tom figure? Check! Black man triumphs over oppression? Check. White woman gets fucked up in the process? Check.) Walcott references Don Quixote, The underground man, and several Greek and African gods. Also, in another veiled cheap shot to Williams, Mountain is a dream play; but here the dreams (of Makak’s liberation from oppression) are bloody, cocksure, and triumphant, having nothing to do with the interior agonies of character or the subconscious.
What Mountain is most known for is it’s most symbolic act of all (if one wants to call it that): when Makak achieves his full freedom from racial oppression by…chopping off the head of his jailers white wife. Defenders such as Walcott’s biographer Bruce King will say Makak isn’t murdering a living woman but a mythic image; as at the end of the play, Makak transforms into a magical African trickster god and the jailers wife, who he titles “an apparition”, a moon goddess of white beauty (described here by the Jailer himself).
CORPORAL:
She is the wife of the Devil, that white witch. She is the mirror of the moon that this ape look into and find himself unbearable. She is all that is pure, all that he cannot reach…She is lime, snow, marble, moonlight, lilies, cloud, fame and bleaching cream, the mother of civilization and the co-founder of blackness…It is you that created her, so kill her! Kill her! The law has spoken!
The problem with that theory, ( outside of the obvious obscenity of the act) is that Walcott’s deigning of transformation is central to the murder, on the account that it is divorcing her from being a human being. Worse than that, in his reduction, she just doesn’t become one woman, but a “spirit” with the potential to be every woman that ever existed. The horror shown here, no matter the mytho-poetic form that encapsulates it, is one of the darkest moments in African American arts in letters.
Contrary to Walcott’s opinion, Mountain is part of African American arts and letters, if only to serve as an example of his warped view of it. For though Walcott has decried any commonality of experience with African American writers; in his plays he carries their banner in the most rote, cliched terms. Never does he hold his makeshift flag more than he does in Mountain, where his characters sing like black nationalists, throw pity parties like black nationalists, plot revenge like black nationalists, and in the end win like black nationalists, like Makak’s ( Jesus Christ, the symbolism of the name) final monologue to his two felon friends.
MAKAK:
"God bless you both. Lord, I have 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….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, the green beginning of this world"
An interesting question, full of thorny subtext’s for the playwright and academia, needs to be asked: Just what did Makak/ Walcott win? Riding a wave of white guilt, Mountain had a 48 show run on Broadway, but outside of what people call “the literary canon”, has it lasted? Walcott has raged about the standards of African American literature and political correctness, but how can you see this and so many of his other plays( The Last Carnival, Viva Detroit, soft core versions of Mountain. The Capeman, a vile defense of a cold blooded killer) as examples of the term at it’s most generic? Most pointedly, if African American culture is the haven for anti-intellectualism Walcott says it is, then why didn’t the said culture come to see this bloody, brutal play by the thousands?
The questions regarding the culture that Dream On Monkey Mountain inadvertently ask take precedence to it’s sheer cruelty, it’s distance from humanity, creation, reason, or any of the characteristics one considers when they think of art. For although he attempts to distinguish himself from protest drama, his plays shows a tangled, brutal brotherhood with the genre and it’s history. Though in different ways-Baraka and Bullins, by cursing the African American history of the past, Walcott, by cursing the history altogether-they have divorced themselves from the standards and rituals black people have used to survive in America; resulting in works of art that have existed from a violent, ahistorical swamp. This, not racism, reverse racism, or low standards, is the reason Black Nationalist theater has failed as an idea, the reason Walcott is a failure as a playwright, and the reason that Mountain is one of the greatest obscenities the “canon” has flung upon the general public.
casparb's review against another edition
3.0
A sharpish little read of the Crucifixion or Christlikeness. It scans quickly - the pace is appreciated though I do have mixed feelings about the very last scene. 3.5?
I suppose there's an issue here for me in that Walcott appears very Nietschean here - drawing from his accounts of the Crucifixion in Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. I would dismiss this if it weren't for his surprisingly accurate reading of the doctrine of the Eternal Return (not, as it is popularly misconstrued, an endless repetition of one's life - we have a little more philosophical sophistication xoxo).
I think the moon-character is a really rich source of interpretation and I enjoy that even if it's not entirely coherent, or perhaps Because it's not entirely coherent.
yes it's... odd to see him on the syllabus. I don't regret the time with the play. It's enjoyable as an experience, putting aside the problematic final scene.
I suppose there's an issue here for me in that Walcott appears very Nietschean here - drawing from his accounts of the Crucifixion in Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. I would dismiss this if it weren't for his surprisingly accurate reading of the doctrine of the Eternal Return (not, as it is popularly misconstrued, an endless repetition of one's life - we have a little more philosophical sophistication xoxo).
I think the moon-character is a really rich source of interpretation and I enjoy that even if it's not entirely coherent, or perhaps Because it's not entirely coherent.
yes it's... odd to see him on the syllabus. I don't regret the time with the play. It's enjoyable as an experience, putting aside the problematic final scene.
mbomersheim's review against another edition
dark
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
Maybe I’d appreciate this more if I read some literary responses to this, but I don’t think I should have to do that to enjoy a work.
Dream on Monkey Mountain by Derek Walcott is a black play published in 1970 and primarily follows a mentally unstable man known as Makak of Monkey Mountain as he goes on a “quest” to reach Africa. I am fully aware that this is a horrible synopsis of the play, but to be fair, the line between reality and the dream is intentionally a bit blurry. This play says some thought-provoking things about religion, the law, and racism that are wrapped up in a story reminiscent of a folk tale. I get that the shock value of some of the statements in this play is intentional; however, I thought this went a bit overboard at times. Simply put, I was not a fan.
Dream on Monkey Mountain by Derek Walcott is a black play published in 1970 and primarily follows a mentally unstable man known as Makak of Monkey Mountain as he goes on a “quest” to reach Africa. I am fully aware that this is a horrible synopsis of the play, but to be fair, the line between reality and the dream is intentionally a bit blurry. This play says some thought-provoking things about religion, the law, and racism that are wrapped up in a story reminiscent of a folk tale. I get that the shock value of some of the statements in this play is intentional; however, I thought this went a bit overboard at times. Simply put, I was not a fan.
errina2's review against another edition
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
alanffm's review
3.0
This should have been four stars, but the inclusion of other plays nowhere near as good (perhaps with the exception of Ti-Jean) as Dream on Monkey Mountain really brought this anthology down. Dream on Monkey Mountain's opening essay What The Twilight Says is a real gem, and in my opinion, was the highlight of the anthology. In conjunction with Walcott's other essay (not included in my edition) called The Caribbean Culture of Mimicry, I feel like I've slightly unraveled the genius of his works - it's inclusion is truly necessary for framing the context in which all his plays take place. In this, it is a tragedy that his essay is not included in this anthology.
anosha_khan's review against another edition
4.0
Did not expect it to be this good. Beautiful prose and very poetic.
readingoverbreathing's review against another edition
3.0
"Who's there? The moon, the moon, the pock-marked moon alone, the syphilitic crone."
hjung's review against another edition
challenging
funny
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5