Loss and Recovery of Identity in Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain

Dream on Monkey Mountain, by Derek Walcott (born in St. Lucia in 1930), takes place in a prison in a West Indian island in the Victorian Era where Felix Hobain spends a night for wrecking a local cafe. He spends the night hallucinating and dreaming of becoming a healer, moving from village to village, then an African king. Shocked by the corruption of his only friend, Moustique, and the bloody opportunism of his newly converted jailer, Lestrade, he turns into a figure-head to be manipulated. The protagonist Makak, who suffers of a degraded self-image dictated by decades of colonization and subjugation, says in the Prologue of the play Is thirty years now 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. (226) Makak, which means monkey, (Hogan 112) cannot look at his own reflection out of self-loathing. He is an anti-narcissus in that he hates himself that he cannot look at his own reflection in a pool when he wants to drink water. Using the arguments of Frantz Fanons The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, the researcher attempts to prove that Makak has lost his identity and is self-loathing because of the effects of colonialism on him, and that he only regains his identity after he sheds the trappings of colonialism.