Dream on Monkey Mountain Study Guide

Derek Walcott and his siblings were born and raised in Castries, the capital of Saint Lucia. When Walcott and his brother were still infants, their father Warwick—a civil servant and painter—died, leaving his schoolteacher mother to raise the three children on her own. Walcott initially studied painting, but discovered a love early in life for poetry, publishing his first poem when he was 14. He later borrowed $200 from his mother to self-publish his first collection of poetry, which successfully launched his literary career. Walcott earned a scholarship to attend the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica. After he graduated, he moved to Trinidad and began his career as a journalist, writer, and teacher. Walcott divided his career between the Caribbean and the United States, where he taught for many years at Boston University. He co-founded the Trinidad Theater Workshop, to develop and amplify the voices of West Indian playwrights, in 1959, and the Boston Playwrights’ Theater in 1981. As a poet and playwright, Walcott explored Caribbean culture and literature through the history of colonialism. During his long and productive career, Walcott authored 24 books of poetry, 26 plays, and seven works of nonfiction. He received no fewer than 14 awards, including an Obie for Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur “Genius” grant, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Walcott married thrice and had three children, one of whom became a painter and another a writer and academic. He died in Saint Lucia at the age of 87.

Continuously inhabited by Indigenous people including the Arawak and the Caribs from around the 3rd century CE, Europeans first encountered Saint Lucia in in the early 16th century. Early 17th-century attempts by the French and English to establish a colony there were rebuffed by the island’s Indigenous inhabitants, but the French signed a treaty with the Caribs and established their first official colony in 1660. The English seized control of the strategically valuable island in 1664 and were then driven back out by the French in 1664. Between 1660 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814, the island switched between British and French control at least a dozen times. In the early 20th century, poverty was rife in Saint Lucia due neglect by the British government, the island’s small size, and the limited scope of its economy, which relied primarily on sugarcane. Saint Lucia was granted a representational government in 1924, and it achieved independence in 1979, although it continues to exist as a Commonwealth realm of Great Britain.

Related Literary Works: Walcott invokes postcolonial philosopher Franz Fanon’s 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth directly by highlighting quotes from its introduction at the beginning of each of the play’s two parts. The dramatic logic of the drama plays with ideas expressed in Fanon’s earlier book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), which explores the way in which colonized subjects experience a divided self-consciousness that tends to encourage them to seek integration by appropriating the culture of their oppressors—as Makak values and chases the whiteness represented by the apparition in the play. He even carries a literal white mask as a sign of his madness. Dream on Monkey Mountain also exists in the context of a flourishing of Caribbean writing during the mid-20th century. Among the many works of this period, the play aligns particularly well with those that engage in direct critiques of colonialism, especially those that assimilate and transmute the colonizer’s language and culture for that purpose. These include Jamaica Kincaid’s 1988 literary nonfiction essay A Small Place, about the history of her native Antigua and Derek Walcott’s Omeros, the Caribbean reimagining of Homer’s Odyssey. It was published to widespread acclaim in 1990.