The document provides an overview of Derek Walcott's play 'Dream on Monkey Mountain,' highlighting its characters, plot, and main themes such as dreams, identity, and race. Key characters include Makak, a charcoal burner who grapples with his hybrid heritage, and Corporal Lestrade, a mulatto who struggles with his racial identity. The play explores the oscillation between dreams and reality, ultimately addressing the complexities of postcolonial identity and the quest for freedom.

1. Dream on Monkey Mountain
Leonardo Andrade,
Lucas Lorran Modesto,
Maurício Coelho,
Nathália Negrão and
Willian Araújo
Seminar by:

2. Summary
The Playwright;
 Characters;
 The Play;
 Main Themes:
 Dreams;
 Identity;
Race;
 References.

3. The playwright
•Derek Walcott
•January 23, 1930 – Castries, Santa Lucia
•March 17, 2017
•Mulatto;
•Postcolonial
•European and African heritages
•Dream on Monkey Mountain
•Central Library Theatre – Toronto, Canada, 1967

4. Characters
•Makak (Monkey)
•Central character
•Charcoal burner
•Old man (sixty to
sixty-five)
•Ugly
•Monkey
•Monkey Mountain
Corporal Lestrade
Guard of the town jail
Mulatto
“White in mind and
black in body”
Racist

5. Characters
•Tigre and Souris
•Prisioners
•African descents
•Partners
• Basil
• “a cabinetmaker”
• “a figure of death”

6. Characters
•Moustique
•Makak’s friend and partner in business;
•“a twist foot God give me”.
•He was found drunk by Makak and was
saved by him.

7. Characters
•Apparatition, the moon, the muse, the white
Godness, a dancer
•Market Inspector Pamphilion, a government
servant
•A dancer, also narrator
•Litter bearers
•Sisters of the revelation
•Market women, wives of Makak

8. The plot
•A visual play;
•Is this real life or is just fantasy?
•Part One and Part Two
•Six scenes.

9. Prologue
• A West Indian Island
• Small jail
• Who is Makak?
• Trial
• Makak tells his dream.

10. Part I Scene One
• A time before Makak was arrested;
• “Today is Market day”;
• coal
• Makak relates the experience he had the night before;
• Moustique finds strange things
• A spider with an egg sack
• White mask
• Moustique follows Makak down the mountain.

11. Part I Scene Two
• Scene changes Makak’s hallucination
• Sick man
• given up for dead
• Basil appears
• Makak tries to heal him
• Moustique wants to exploit Makak’s gift for healing for profit.

12. Part I Scene Three
• Public Market;
• Moustique claiming he is Makak;
• Basil removes Moustique from the market;
• Moustique admits the truth and insults the crowd;
• They beat him before the corporal Lestrade interferes.

13. Part II Scene One
• Jail;
• Makak offers a money to Lestrade for his freedom;
• They escape from the jail.

14. Part II Scene Two
• Forest
• Tigre and Souris discuss;
• Souris starts to believe in Makak’s words.
• Corporal Lestrade follows them.
• Basil appears to him.
• Tigre and Souris revenge
• Lestrade, with the help of Basil, kills Tigre.
• The rest of them move on.

15. Part II Scene Three
• The play ends with Corporal Lestrade influencing Makak to kill the White
woman (apparition), so, in this way he would be free.
“Now, O God, now I am free.”
— Makak (p. 320).

16. Epilogue
• The play returns to reality and the jail. It is the next morning. Makak
reveals his true identity, Felix Hobain, and does not remember why he is
there. The corporal sets the old man free. Jus as he is about to leave,
Moustique comes, to free his friend. They go home to Monkey Mountain.

17. Main Themes
 Dreams;
 Identity;
 Race:
Power Colonialism Slavery

18. Dreams
 Dream Narrative:
 Non-linear plot;
 Many events in the play do not make sense from a realistic perspective.
“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, and contradictory.”
— Derek Walcott about the Play.

19. Dreams
 Dream vs. Reality:
 Oscillation between Makak’s hallucinations and our perception of reality;
 Confusing in a first reading.
“I am an old man. Send me home, Corporal. I suffer from madness. I does
see things. Spirits does talk to me. All I have is my dreams and they don’t
trouble your soul.”
— Makak (Prologue, p. 225).

20. Dreams
 Dream vs. Reality:
“Sirs, I does catch fits. I fall in a frenzy every full-moon night. I does be
possessed. And after that, sir, I am not responsible. I responsible only to
God who once speak to me in the form of a woman on Monkey Mountain. I
am God’s warrior.”
— Makak (Prologue, p. 226).
“(…) I will tell you my dream.”
— Makak (Prologue, p. 226).

21. Dreams
 Dream within a dream:
 In Makak’s visions (dreams), he dreams of being an African warrior who is
the savior of his people.
“ Saddle my horse, if you love me, Moustique, and cut a sharp bamboo for
me, and put me on that horse, for Makak will ride to the edge of the world,
Makak will walk like he used to in Africa, when his name was lion!”
— Makak (Part One, Scene One, p. 240).

22. Dreams
 Dream: a journey in which Makak finds his true identity:
 He remembers his real name (Felix Hobain);
 He finally recognizes his hybrid origin and he goes back home (Monkey
Mountain).
“(…) Let me be swallowed up in mist again, and let me be forgotten, so that
when the mist open, men can look up, at some small clearing with a hut,
with a small signal of smoke, and say, “Makak lives there. Makak lives
where he has always lived, in the dream of his people.” Other men will
come, other prophets will come, and they will be stoned, and mocked, and
betrayed, but now this old hermit is going back home, back to the
beginning, to the green beginning of this world. Come, Moustique, we
going home. ”
— Makak (Epilogue, p. 326).

23. Dreams
 Dream: a journey in which Makak finds his true identity:
 The Epilogue leaves a similar sensation of those movies in which you find
out that every thing happened only in someone’s mind (Makak);
 And we question ourselves: is all that real or not?

24. • Felix Hoban – Makak
•Moustique
•Corporal Lestrade – Mulatto
The identity of the Charactes

25. Makak and his derogatory identity
•Opposite of Narcissus “ [...] I have live all my life like a
wild beast in hiding. […] I have look in no mirror, Not a
pool of cold water, when I must drink, I stir my hands
first, to break up my image. […]”
•Decades being slaved by his colonizers, he has lost his
identity.
•He assumes a wild identity. (nigger)

26. What was his freedom?
•“―Now, O God, now I am free” he declares.
•How is Makak free? – “―Felix Hobain, Felix Hobain …”
•He reminds his real name and who he really is.

27. Moustique, the conformed man.
• “He is the colonized man who accepts totally the inferiority
willed in him by the colonizer.” Raad Kareem Abd-Aun, 2014
• He is the result of colonialism, since he learnerd to obey by
coercion.

28. Lestrade, the mulatto pretending to be a
white man
• He was seduced and brainwashed by the colonial system.
• Lestrade’s Darwinian:
“In the beginning was the ape, and the ape had no name, so
God call him man. Now there was various tribes of the ape, it
had gorilla, baboon, orang-outan, chimpanzee, the blue-arsed
monkey and the marmoset, and God looked at his handiwork,
and saw that it was good. For some of the apes had
straightened their backbone, and start walking upright, but
there was one tribe unfortunately that lingered behind, and
that was the nigger”
Part 1, page 217

29. He recognized his identity
•“I return to this earth, my mother. [... ] i
was what I am, but now I am myself.
Now I feel better. Now I see a new light.
[... ] The glories of my race!“ Part two,
scene 2 (page 299)

30. “RACE” AND POWER
Supremacy of Whiteness vs Resistance of Black People
Eurocentrism Afrocentrism

31. Laws
Tribes law
Roman law
“RACE” AND POWER

32. CORPORAL LESTRADE
• An instrument of the law;
• Then, he recognizes his true identity as black man and he
becomes an advocate of the Black law;
• Finally, Makak demonstrates mercy and accepts Lestrade as one
of them.
“They (White) reject half of you, we (black) accept all”
— Makak (Part 2, scene 2, page 300)

33. RACE AND COLONIALISM
The west indies were colonized by british

34. References
ABD-AUN, Raad Kareem. Loss and Recovery of Identity in Derek Walcott’s
Dream on Monkey Mountain. International Journal of Science and
Research, Cidade, n. 11, p. 111-222, jan. 2012. Available at: <
https://www.academia.edu/17542724/Loss_and_Recovery_of_Identity_in
_Derek_Walcott_s_Dream_on_Monkey_Mountain>. Access on June 1st,
2018.
Ramin, Z; Monireh, A. Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain: A
Multifaceted Phantasmagorical Narrative. Journal of Language Teaching
and Research. vol. 8, n 6, p. 1161-1169, 2017.
Walcott, Derek. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York:
Farrar, Strause & Giroux, 1970.