Beyond Manicheism: Derek Walcott’s Henri Christophe and Dream on Monkey Mountain

Abstract

This essay considers the way in which two of Derek Walcott’s earlier plays engage with the issue of finding an appropriate dramatic form for their Caribbean subjects, and relates this to their attempt to cross borders by moving outside the binary patterns in which colonial subjects find themselves inscribed. Much of Walcott’s work has stressed the doubleness of Caribbean experience; he constructs oppositions between Europe and Africa, Crusoe and Friday, art and landscape, and, in his early work, presents himself as ‘divided to the vein’¹ because of his split racial ancestry. However, from the outset, his writing attempts to dismantle the boundary fences of colonial discourse and dualistic modes of thinking, to arrive at a pluralist approach that could be seen as a literary staging of creolization. He has spoken of his early writing as an ‘apprenticeship’² in which he sought to emulate the work of European masters. Arguably, this apprenticeship ended not only when he moved beyond imitativeness and found his own distinctive voice as a writer, but also — and this is complementary — when he evolved strategies for moving outside colonial definition. The two plays discussed here, Henri Christophe (1950), the first of his three dramatic treatments of the Haitian revolution and its aftermath, and what is arguably his finest play to date, Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967), both engage with the binarism central to colonial classifications, demonstrating the tragic consequences of such definition and, in the case of Dream on Monkey Mountain, suggesting ways in which the borderlines between Europe and the ‘other’ may be eroded.