“Who You are, Negre?”: Gaze and Voice in Madness in Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain

Tohru Nakamura

doi:10.33596/anth.473

Abstract

In this analysis of the function of gaze and voice in Derek Walcott’s presentation of madness in Dream on Monkey Mountain, my starting point is Walcott’s questioning of the validity of Négritude in the Caribbean, where several cultures from Europe, Africa, and Asia are shared and uniquely cross-fertilized. Focusing on the gaze and the voice Makak encounters during the mad-journey, the essay explores how his repressed self-image returns to him through these two encounters. By examining Makak’s self-awareness as an Afro-Caribbean person, it shows that the color green, associated with the word negre, illuminates his Caribbean subjectivity. The essay ultimately argues that Makak is an emblematic character for Walcott’s reappraisal of the Caribbean hybrid creolized subjectivity that racial purists can never attain.

Publisher’s Note: A correction article relating to this paper has been published and can be found at https://anthurium.miami.edu/articles/10.33596/anth.518/.

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“Who You are, Negre?”: Gaze and Voice in Madness in Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain

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