Dream on Monkey Mountain

Dream on Monkey Mountain is a play by the Nobel Prize-winning St. Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott. It was first published in 1970 with a collection of short plays entitled Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. It was produced and broadcast on NBC in 1970.[1] Produced off-Broadway by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1971, it won an Obie Award that year for "Best Foreign Play".[2]

In a review of the Negro Ensemble production in The New Yorker, the journalist Edith Oliver called the play "a masterpiece" and "a poem in dramatic form or a drama in poetry", noting that "poetry is rare in modern theater."[3] Like most of Walcott's works, the play is set on a Caribbean island.

The plot centers on the black Makak, who despises himself for being black. After being imprisoned for destroying things in a local market, he has a vision in jail of a white goddess, who pushes him to return to Africa. In his dream, Makak dreams of becoming a great warrior in Africa, convincing others to join him, and receiving support from the Ku Klux Klan. Finally, he beheads the white goddess of his dreams, and wakes up free from his obsession with whiteness. Reconciled to his actual life, Makak begins calling himself by his real name (Felix Hobain) and resolves to return home to Monkey Mountain.[4]