CU-MA-Eng-SEM-IV-Specialization I - Postcolonial Drama-Second Draft

 Weales, Gerald. “Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet).” Commonweal 119.21 (4 Dec. 1992): 20. Commonweal Foundation. Literature Resource Center. Web. 26 Oct. 2015.  Wilson, Ann. “Critical Revisions: Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight, Desdemona (Good Morning, Juliet).” Women on the Canadian Stage: The Legacy of Hrotsvit. Winnipeg: Blizzard Publishing, 1992. 1-12. Print. Textbook references  MacDonald, Ann-Marie. Goodnight, Desdemona (Good Morning, Juliet). Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1990. Print. Websites  https://brocku.ca/miwsfpa/dramatic-arts/wp- content/uploads/sites/40/39568studyGuide.pdf  http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-goodnight-desdemona-good-morning- juliet/themes.html#gsc.tab=0  http://allreaders.com/book-review-summary/goodnight-desdemona-good-morning- juliet-24940  https://www.cram.com/essay/Goodnight-Desdemona-Character- Analysis/P389URPNBXZW#google_vignette 151 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT – 8 PAKISTAN: HANIF KUREISHI: MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE STRUCTURE 8.0 Learning Objectives 8.1 Introduction to the Author 8.2 Introduction to the Play 8.3 Analysis 8.4 Post Colonialism in the Wash 8.5 Identity, Alienation and Sexuality 8.6 Summary 8.7 Keywords 8.8 Learning Activities 8.9 Unit End Questions 8.10References 8.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Analyse Pakistan Theatre and Drama  Identify their ideas of Hanif Kureishi  Examine the play in detail 8.1 INTRODUCTION TO THE AUTHOR Hanif Kureishi born 5 December 1954 is a British playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker and novelist of Pakistani and English descent. Kureishi was born in Bromley, South London, to a Pakistani father, Rafiushan Kureishi, and an English mother, Audrey Buss. His father was from a wealthy Madras family, most of whose members moved to Pakistan after the partition of Indo-Pak in 1947. Hanif Kureishi attended Bromley Technical High School and studied for A-levels at Bromley College of Technology. While at this college, he was elected as Student Union President (1972) and some of the characters from his semi-autobiographical work The Buddha of Suburbia are from this period. He went on to spend a year studying philosophy at Lancaster University. Later he attended King’s College London and took a degree in philosophy. In 2008, The Times included Kureishi in their list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”. 152 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

His 1984 screenplay for the film My Beautiful Laundrette was nominated for an Oscar. He also wrote the screenplays of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) and London Kills Me (1991). His short story ‘My Son the Fanatic’ was adapted as a film in 1998. Kureishi’s screenplays for The Mother in 2003 and Venus (2006) were both directed by Roger Michell. A screenplay adapted from Kureishi’s novel The Black Album was published in 2009. The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel and was produced as a four-part drama for the BBC in 1993. His second novel was The Black Album (1995). The next, Intimacy (1998), was adapted as a film in 2001, winning the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film festival. Gabriel’s Gift was published in 2001, Something to Tell You in 2008 and The Last Word in 2014. His first collection of short stories, Love in a Blue Time, appeared in 1997, followed by Midnight All Day (1999) and The Body (2002). These all appear in his Collected Stories (2010), together with eight new stories. His collection of stories and essays Love + Hate was published by Faber & Faber in 2015. He has also written non-fiction, including the essay collections Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and Politics (2002) and The Word and the Bomb (2005). The memoir My Ear at his Heart: Reading my Father appeared in 2004. Hanif Kureishi was awarded the C.B.E. for his services to literature, and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts des Lettres in France. His works have been translated into 36 languages. 8.2 INTRODUCTION TO THE PLAY My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) was the first screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, commissioned by Channel 4’s Film on Four. Set in South London in the 1980s, it concerns a second-generation British Pakistani man, Omar, renovating the Churchill Laundrette (a name clearly chosen by Kureishi for its nationalist associations) with the help of a white British childhood friend, Johnny. Partly by intercepting a drug deal, Omar draws in customers by equipping the laundrette with games machines and piped music. Though Johnny has at one point had connections to the racist National Front, his friendship with Omar develops into a sexual affair, despite the violence and prejudice they are surrounded by. Two other characters – Omar’s father Hussain and Omar’s uncle Nasser – are first-generation Pakistani migrants, and respectively represent the poles of cultural identity Omar is pulled between. Omar’s father is a disillusioned socialist intellectual, committed to the traditions of Pakistan and opposed to the prevailing cultural attitudes of contemporary Thatcherite Britain. Nasser, however, embraces the westernized capitalist ethos and has a white mistress; it is he 153 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

who is asked to find his nephew employment. Nevertheless, Nasser does maintain some non- westernized attitudes, returning to his family to arrange the marriage of his daughter. These cultural divides were to some degree reflected by the reception of the film; some Pakistanis took the film to denigrate their community. In New York a demonstration by the Pakistan Action Committee included banners which called My Beautiful Laundrette ’the product of a vile and perverted mind’. Directed by Stephen Frears and starring Gordon Warnecke as Omar and Daniel Day-Lewis as Johnny, the film did so well at the Edinburgh Festival that it was subsequently distributed internationally. Kureishi won the New York Film Critics’ Best Screenplay Award, an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay, and a nomination in the 1986 BAFTAS. An ambitious Pakistani Briton and his white boyfriend strive for success and hope when they open a glamorous laundromat. Much of the Pakistani Hussein family has settled in London, striving for the riches promised by Thatcherism. Nasser and his right hand man, Salim, have a number of small businesses and they do whatever they need to make money, even if the activities are illegal. As such, Nasser and his immediate family live more than a comfortable lifestyle, and he flaunts his riches whenever he can. Meanwhile, his brother, alcoholic Ali, once a famous journalist in Pakistan, lives in a seedy flat with his son, Omar. Ali’s life in London is not as lucrative in part because of his left leaning politics, which does not mesh with the ideals of Thatcherism. To help his brother, Nasser gives Omar a job doing menial labor. But Omar, with bigger plans, talks Nasser into letting him manage Nasser’s run down laundrette. Omar seizes what he sees as an opportunity to make the laundrette a success, and employs an old friend, Johnny - who has been most recently running around with a gang of white punks - to help him. Johnny and Omar have a special relationship, but one that has gone through its ups and downs, the downs fostered by anti-immigration sentiments of white England. Omar and Johnny each have to evaluate if their ideals of success are worth it at all cost. An Immigrant from Karachi, Pakistan, Nasser Hussein lives a fairly wealthy lifestyle in London, England, along with his wife Bilquis and three daughters, one of whose name is Tania. He owns and operates two businesses with his friend Salim; namely a garage, and ‘Churchill’s Laundrette’. When his widower and alcoholic brother asks him to hire his son, Omar, Nasser meets with him and initially asks him to wash cars. Subsequently he takes him to the laundrette and asks him to mop it’s floors, but decides to let Omar manage it, and hopes to wed him with Tania. Nasser does not realize that soon the laundrette will have a new look and name ‘Powders’, and the lives of the Husseins will also never be the same again. My Beautiful Laundrette is set within the Asian community in South London during the Thatcher years and displays those values of money but ‘anybody can make it.’ Omar gains the 154 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

running of his uncle Nasser’s laundrette. He is helped by his friend Johnny who is an outsider, white but not entirely accepted by either the white or Asian Londoners. There are many memorable characters: Tania, Omar’s cousin whom he might marry. Salim the manager of Nasser’s garage and sometime drug importer. Rachel, Nasser’s white mistress, who like Johnny seems to be another outsider. 8.3 ANALYSIS Omar Ali is a young man living in 1980s London. His father, Hussein, is a Pakistani journalist who lives in London but hates Britain and its international politics. His dissatisfaction with the world and a family tragedy has caused his alcoholism to take over, so that Omar has to take care of him. By contrast, Omar’s paternal uncle Nasser is a successful entrepreneur and an active member of the London Pakistani community. Omar’s father asks his uncle to give him a job and, after working for a brief time as a car washer in one of his uncle’s garages, he is assigned the task of running a run-down laundrette and turning it into a profitable business. At Nasser’s, Omar meets a few other members of the Pakistani community: Tania, Nasser’s daughter and possibly a future bride; and Salim, who trafficks drugs and hires him to deliver them from the airport. While driving Salim and his wife home that night, the three of them get attacked by a group of right-wing extremists shouting racist slogans. Among them but not taking part, Omar recognizes an old friend of his, Johnny. Omar tries to reestablish their past friendship, and Johnny decides to help with the laundrette, and they resume a romantic relationship which (it is implied) had been interrupted after school. Running out of money, Omar and Johnny sell one of Salim’s drug deliveries to make cash for the laundrette redecoration. The laundrette becomes a success. At the opening day, Nasser visits the store with his mistress, Rachel. They dance together in the laundrette while Omar and Johnny are having sex in the back room. Omar and Johnny are almost caught by Nasser, but Omar claims they were sleeping. Tania confronts Rachel about having an affair with her father, Nasser. Nasser and Rachel leave the laundrette and fight in the road; Rachel storms off because she feels humiliated by Tania and her presence. Later in the film, she falls ill with a skin rash apparently caused by a ritual curse from Nasser’s wife, and Rachel decides it is the best for the both of them if she leaves him. Omar, while drunk, proposes to Tania. She agrees on the condition that Omar gathers money. Johnny is told about Omar’s potential engagement and goes home to get drunk, but Omar finds him and tells him to get back to work. Omar’s father stops by late in the night and appeals to Johnny to persuade Omar to go to college because he is unhappy with his son running a laundrette. 155 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Omar decides to take over two launderettes owned by a friend of Nasser, with the help of Salim. Salim drives Johnny and Omar to view one of the properties, and he expresses his dislike of the British non-working punks (Johnny’s friends). Salim attempts to run over the group of punks who had previously attacked Omar’s car and injures one of them. The group of working class punks decides to wait for Salim around the laundrette. While the punks circle the laundrette, Tania drops by and tells Johnny she is leaving and asks if he will come with her. He refuses Tania by revealing his relationship with Omar, and she departs. When Salim enters the laundrette, the punks trash his car. Upon noticing their destruction, he runs out of the laundrette and is then ambushed and attacked. He is beaten and bloodied while Johnny watches from the window until he decides to save him, despite their mutual dislike. The punks turn their attention to attacking Johnny instead for supporting the Pakistani community, and as he refuses to fight back, they beat him savagely until Omar interrupts and saves him. The film cuts to Nasser visiting Omar’s father, and their discussion about Omar’s future. Nasser sees Tania at a train platform while she is running away, and he shouts to her, but she disappears. Omar proceeds to clean up Johnny’s wounds, but Johnny is still agitated from the fight and becomes frustrated with his playful affection and lack of seriousness. He lashes out at Omar, insisting he needs to go and telling him to stop touching him. Johnny walks to the window and stares outside in silence as Omar comes up behind him and kisses the back of his neck. The film ends with them both topless and playfully splashing each other with water from a sink, showing that they are continuing their relationship together. 8.4 MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE: POSTCOLONIALISM IN THE WASH Whereas it took a cluster of “kitchen sink” dramas to enfranchise the northern working class in the British cinema of the early 1960s, a single subversive movie did it for the Anglo-Asian community in the 1980s. My Beautiful Laundrette, written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, threw a Molotov cocktail of urban chaos, polemical ire, spiky comedy, and mixed-race queer sex into the so-called British Film Renaissance of 1984–86. Though A Private Enterprise (1974) is recognized as the first British Asian film, it was the success of My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985 that kicked open the door for such filmmakers as Ruhul Amin, Gurinder Chadha, Udayan Prasad, Meera Syal, Ayub Khan-Din, Shani Grewal, Firdaus Kanga, and Pratibha Parmar. Frears and Kureishi’s pungently written, grittily lyrical comedy-drama front-loads the refurbishment and reopening of a run-down washateria in a South London Asian community to explore how Margaret Thatcher’s enterprise culture fostered greed even as it created jobs (though not enough to keep pace with the unemployment caused by Thatcherism’s dismantling 156 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

of heavy industries). This issue is filtered through the working relationship of the laundrette’s second-generation Anglo-Pakistani manager, Omar Ali (Gordon Warnecke), and Johnny Burfoot (Daniel Day-Lewis), his white, working-class jack-of-all-trades and lover. The film’s larger concern is the struggle of Asian immigrants—represented by Omar’s father, Hussein (Roshan Seth), and uncle, Nasser (Saeed Jaffrey)—to maintain their ethnic identities while assimilating into a society that offers material rewards for those prepared to abandon their traditions. The intellectual Hussein, formerly a campaigning socialist journalist and friend of Pakistan’s reformist prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, has been unable to adjust. The rise of the racist National Front political party and the Thatcher government’s aggressive monetarism have sickened him. Since the suicide of his wife, he has become a mostly bedridden alcoholic, cared for by Omar in a miserable flat. Nasser, on the other hand, is a cheerfully corrupt Thatcherite entrepreneur and opportunist, whose main business tenet is knowing “how to squeeze the tits of the system.” As a Pakistani family loyalist, though, he has his values and principles, notwithstanding his also having a white mistress, Rachel (Shirley Anne Field). A true figure of contempt is his relative and henchman Salim (Derrick Branche), a sleek, nouveau riche drug trafficker who despises the unemployed white youths Thatcherism has consigned to the gutter. Hussein is anxious for Omar to go to college but enlists Nasser in finding him temporary work, and Omar is soon entrusted with managing the self-service laundry. He hires his newly reencountered childhood friend Johnny, a homeless sometime burglar, as his sole worker. If this sounds like a sociological tract, it is anything but. Nor did Frears give My Beautiful Laundrette a straightforwardly realist treatment. Despite the authenticity of its inner-city setting, the film has a dreamlike quality that suits its mythic structure. Once Omar takes charge of the laundrette, it becomes the center of the film’s labyrinth of thresholds crossed and uncrossed, of lurking “monsters” that must be “slain,” a magic space where psychological treasure as well as hard cash can be found. All that is below the surface. Above it are the deadpan comic situations and Kureishi’s lightly barbed dialogue. “That country’s been sodomized by religion,” Nasser says of Pakistan. “It’s beginning to interfere with the making of money.” Johnny jokingly calls Omar “Omo,” which conflates “homo” with the name of a popular brand of laundry detergent. Kureishi was born in suburban Bromley in 1954, the son of an immigrant from Mumbai and an Englishwoman. In the early 1980s, he was acclaimed as the author of plays confronting white working-class racism—which had come to a head with the 1979 Southall race riots— and its effect on the Indian and Pakistani communities. The broadcaster Channel 4, which had been launched in 1982 and provided for the making of programs for minorities, commissioned Kureishi to write My Beautiful Laundrette. He dropped the first draft of his script through Frears’s mail slot. 157 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Frears, born in Leicester in 1941, had already worked in film and TV for twenty years. He had assisted on movies directed by Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson, and Albert Finney, directed episodes of Yorkshire Television’s outstanding children’s period drama Tom Grattan’s War (1970), and, like Mike Leigh, directed his first feature film in 1971. Gumshoe, written by Neville Smith, is a drily humorous hard-boiled-fiction pastiche about a Maltese Falcon– obsessed bingo caller (Finney) who’s drawn into a murder and heroin-smuggling case on Liverpool’s mean streets. It demonstrated not only Frears’s eye for social decay and ear for casual racism but also his facility for nuanced genre appropriation (auguring his 1990 neonoir The Grifters). After this first feature, Frears returned to television, honing his craft and gaining a reputation for speed, economy, and an ability to prioritize story and character on dramas by the likes of Alan Bennett, Peter Prince, and David Hare. However, the Orwellian 1980 Bloody Kids, written by Stephen Poliakoff, borders on the expressionistic, and Walter, adapted by David Cook from his novel and aired by Channel 4 on its November 1982 opening night, is a harrowing depiction of a mentally handicapped man’s institutionalization, targeting Mrs. Thatcher’s uncaring society. Frears’s next project, the wry gangster road movie The Hit, was released theatrically. But it was his subsequent work, My Beautiful Laundrette, conceived for television though it was, that sparked his great run of cinema films over the rest of the decade—Prick Up Your Ears (1987), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), Dangerous Liaisons (1988), and The Grifters. My Beautiful Laundrette was not at first considered a special case by Channel 4. Shot on 16 mm by Oliver Stapleton (whose seven subsequent films with Frears include his and Kureishi’s combustible multicultural epic Sammy and Rosie), it was produced by Working Title on a six- week schedule and a shoestring budget of $900,000. It wasn’t until the film’s rapturous reception at the Edinburgh Film Festival in August 1985 that its backers realized they had a red-hot movie on their hands and decided it should get a UK cinema run, for which the prints were blown up to 35 mm. Mainline Pictures opened it on November 16, and rolled it out slowly and profitably (an approach Palace Pictures soon adopted for Letter to Brezhnev, the micro- budgeted Liverpool comedy completed with Channel 4 money). On March 7, 1986, Orion released My Beautiful Laundrette in America, where it grossed a handsome $2.45 million. Channel 4’s public-service remit enabled commissioning editor David Rose’s Film on Four wing to act as a studio for small British films about unprivileged or marginalized people, Walter and Leigh’s Meantime (1983) being early examples. This countered the panaceas of “heritage” costume and British Empire dramas, redolent of conservatism’s xenophobia and investment in the class system, which Frears has often criticized, describing it to me once as “the rattling of teacups.” 158 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

My Beautiful Laundrette rattles much more. Its specific critique of postcolonial Britain is achieved through Kureishi’s battery of conflicts—between whites and Asians, between whites and whites, between the Asian and African diasporas, between Asian brother and brother, between Asian parents and their adult children, between men and women. The fact that Omar and Johnny’s sexual relationship is not a source of social conflict, unlike that of Nasser and Rachel, is significant. It’s a masterful stroke of gay-straight taboo reversal that proposes that behavior conventional society has historically vilified may be the most likely to promote harmony. And not just in the film’s overlapping story strands does it reject the good manners and arid formalism associated with films that endorse middle-class and aristocratic values. Frears punctuates it with lurid nocturnal sequences and sudden poetic flights, as when a high tracking shot backs away from the distraught Rachel leaving the opening party at the neon-lit laundrette. One of the main sources of tension in the film is Johnny’s past membership in the National Front, which attracted “Paki-bashing” skinheads to its extreme-right-wing ranks at the height of its popularity in the mid-1970s. Hussein, who helped Johnny when he was at school, rebukes him for having become a “fascist,” one of the betrayals that broke the aging socialist’s heart. Omar himself uses Johnny’s transgression as a stick with which to beat him when problems surface in their relationship. Nonetheless, the constant shifts in power between the boys suggest their partnership is more balanced than Nasser and Rachel’s affair, which seems to be partially based on her financial dependence on him. The scruffy donkey jacket with waterproof orange plastic shoulders that Johnny initially wears confirms he has been a skinhead; his current image is confused by his peroxide quiff, which suggests a punk or New Romantics influence. In Frears’s first shot of him in the film, his head is bowed, apparently in regret. He and a friend are about to be evicted from the filthy squat in which they have been living. The next time he turns up in the film, he is standing apart from his old NF mates, refusing to join them in harassing Omar, Salim, and Salim’s wife as they sit in a car. These early images of Johnny reveal he is a youth in transition—one who rejects the system crushing his generation by rejecting the street violence that results indirectly from Conservative policies. Newly employed by Omar, he acquires a sense of self-worth and—if not quite a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis—swaps his too-long-lived-in tribal uniform for a brighter, cleaner look. Observed by Omar in the moments before the launderette’s opening, he mounts the table where customers will fold their spin-dried clothes and stands there like an Adonis, the brief pose showing that the slumped, disconsolate figure he was at the start of the film has regenerated himself. He has also become the film’s moral center, for he cautions Omar, who has “big plans” for taking over more laundrettes, not to become greedy. The film shares Hussein’s belief that, for the children of immigrants, education is the key to social enlightenment and integration. 159 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

More so than Rachel, the disgruntled Tania (Rita Wolf), Nasser’s daughter, is the pivotal female character. Kureishi introduces her as the Ali family conscience and scold, who despises her father for cheating on her mother, Bilquis (Charu Bala Chokshi). She’s also a disruptive comic force. She flashes her breasts at Omar to distract him from listening to her father smugly hold forth to his well-heeled cronies in his den. In a temper, she upends on Bilquis’s lap the witch’s potion she’s concocting to poison Rachel. “I’d rather drink my own urine,” she tells Nasser when he presses her and Omar to get married. Tania is not about to become a submissive Pakistani wife like Bilquis, so she leaves home. When last seen, she is standing on a train station platform. A touch of magical realism removes her from patriarchal control. My Beautiful Launderette’s initial acclaim at Edinburgh focused attention on Kureishi as the film’s shaping intelligence, but this underestimated what Frears brought to it, and not simply in terms of eliciting superb performances from the actors. As much the film’s author as Kureishi, Frears uses elements of the decor to show one character’s isolation from another—a spiked fence separates Johnny from Omar at their first encounter, Nasser is behind a grid in a bar when Rachel ends their affair. In many scenes, characters hover in doorways, symbolic thresholds of imminent emotional change or stasis. Night scenes are bathed in sulfurous reds and noirish blues, redolent of the dangers and excitements—sexual and criminal—of the metropolis after dark. Frears’s masterstroke was to deploy throughout a mise-en-scène that brings to the film a level of revelatory meta cinematic self-consciousness. The key to this is the launderette’s “Powders” neon sign, which makes its exterior resemble that of a small cinema. The interior is deep, as are those of many repertory theaters, and a “widescreen” window separates the washing, drying, and folding area (the space where the “action” takes place) from the back office (a darkened space from which the action can be viewed). Looking at—and through—the window, Omar admires Johnny doing his chores and standing on the table. As Johnny and Omar have sex in the back room before the opening, they become an audience watching Rachel and Nasser dancing in the front. The launderette’s paying customers contribute to the notion of its being an emporium in which secrets are revealed, stories evolve, and events come to a head. This visual self-consciousness extends beyond the laundrette: at home or in cars, the characters frequently look at other characters through windows or at their own reflections. The film is constructed as a Borgesian hall of mirrors for existential self-interrogation that demands the audience enter in. Frears and Kureishi do not provide solutions to the problems the film raises. At the end, Britain’s rich are still getting richer, and its poor are still getting poorer. The beautiful laundrette has been trashed, Nasser and Rachel have parted, and Tania has evaporated. Only Omar and Johnny’s unity is hopeful—they’re left flicking water at each other in a final positive image of hybridity, the cares of the day forgotten with its soapsuds. 160 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

8.5 IDENTITY, ALIENATION, AND SEXUALITY In his screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), the British Pakistani author, Hanif Kureishi chronicles the life of Pakistani immigrant, Omar Ali, in South London inner-city of Battersea. It depicts the reality of the place through the squalid imageries of crime, sex, and drugs, laced with the complexities of postcolonial racial identity that travels through the borders. The narrative of the screenplay is set against the backdrop of twentieth century’s post-war colonial immigration to Britain. Ali is the protagonist in this screenplay. And it is through Ali and his extended family in London that Kureishi creates a complex gallery of Pakistani immigrant life that in the first instance defies stereotyping. The narrative, in Leonard Quart’s words, “never indulges in the kind of patronizing sentimentality that turns the Pakistanis into either social problems or mere victims of English racism.” The themes running throughout the text of the screenplay revolve around multicultural identities that include alienation, exclusion, conflict, sense of belonging, and also the complexity of sexuality. Torn between the two extremes of tradition and modernity, each of these elements is represented by two characters of Omar’s family in the screenplay. While Omar’s father longs to go back to their home in Pakistan, Nasser, his brother, finds the country “sodomised by religion.” In the climactic conversation between the two brothers, Nasser tells him, “compared with everywhere, it [is] a little heaven here [London].” This is a powerful climax, which successfully attempts to bring to the fore the complexities of an immigrant life, the struggle to survive, and conflicts with the self. Kureishi brilliantly sums up the theme of his screenplay in the last five pages, leaving the reader to ponder over the profound questions of an immigrant identity – race, belonging, and sexuality. In Kureishi’s work, we see that the burden of immigration falls on British multiculturalism, that is, any policy paralysis at the level of the Government is quickly blamed on the immigrants, who find space in a culturally diverse society. As Whiteman argues, “…the resentful, marginalized and disillusioned working class [fails] to control and integrate post-war immigrants into Britain. This political sacrifice blamed multiculturalism for white working class socioeconomic disparities, when, in reality, they were marginalized through ineffective housing and employment policies.” He depicts a time when “inequality became almost exclusively understood through the prism of race and ethnic identity.” In My Beautiful Laundrette, one observes that the link between race, inequality, and the rise of multiculturalism has led the white working class to think of themselves as a new ethnic minority with their own distinctive culture. The tension between immigrant and indigenous groups within Britain is realistically represented in the screenplay, as is evident in the declaration of Johnny’s disgruntled friend and National Front member: 161 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

I don’t like to see one of our blokes [Johnny] groveling to Pakis. Look they came over here to work for us. That’s why we brought them over, okay? This colonialist mentality illustrates the resentment against mass post-war immigration, which many white working class people feel has resulted in their economic and social downturn. This story – a richly textured and most original account of a Pakistani immigrant life in London – is of particular interest because of Kureishi’s experiential epistemology. It recounts the author’s first trip to Pakistan, where he found a combination of servility towards Western culture and troglodytic calls for a return to Islamic purity. It is in Pakistan that Kureishi becomes aware of his British identity, but he returns to Britain only to see once again how he is still perceived by the English as the “other” – a “Paki.” Alexander Whiteman writes that the text also “portrays the multifaceted relationship of two homosexual men, one of middle class, British-Pakistani ethnicity and the other of a white British working class background, struggling to live in multiracial London.” Here, Omar represents the British-Pakistani ethnicity and Johnny, his school friend, the indigenous white working class. In My Beautiful Laundrette, one notices a negotiation of sexuality. The two men rekindle their teenage relationship when they are alone together in the laundrette. It is illustrative of how they escaped the ethical and moral boundaries that both society and Omar’s family had imposed on them. When they are left alone in the laundrette, they are able to surpass Omar’s family’s cultural expectation of a heterosexual arranged marriage between Omar and Tania. Similarly, Johnny is able to detach himself from his racist group of resentful white working class peers and form a relationship with the supposed “other” – the son of a Pakistani immigrant. In this sense, the laundrette further serves as an analogy for the individual fulfillment the two men feel, regenerating it from an abandoned, misused business to a successful one. Their relationship, like the laundrette, demands hard work and commitment through adversity, symbolized by their secretive relationship, which only allows them to show affection for each other in darkness, outside of the “real world”. The dominant discourse on ‘correct’ model of sexuality foregrounds the importance of spatiality in the screenplay. It is in these spaces, which are hidden and dark, that the less dominant form of sexuality finds form and expression. My Beautiful Laundrette further illustrates the general ignorance attached to homosexuality – that is, it can be a conscious decision rather than always being a natural occurrence in human nature. This is evident when Omar’s uncle, Salim, questions whether his nephew’s penis is in working order, when he shies away from the idea of marriage with Tania. It did not occur to Salim that possibly his nephew chose to be a homosexual. However, some scholars have argued that there is very little scientific evidence that sexuality is a state we are born into. This means that homosexuality is still a choice. The film seems to critique this when Omar drunkenly proposes to Tania in an effort to both please his family’s expectations of heteronormativity and 162 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

to deny his homosexual feelings. Both Omar and Johnny, however, are seen to struggle with their feelings of homosexuality after hearing the news of Omar’s engagement. In an attempt to bury his feelings for Omar, Johnny leaves the laundrette and decides to drink all by himself. The engagement unsurprisingly falls through, and Johnny, after failing to abide by expectations of heteronormativity, confesses his secret relationship to Tania. This illustrates how Omar and Johnny could not successfully deny their genuine sexuality. The case for innate sexuality is, thus, still unclear, both academically and scientifically. This means that any such investigation into the issue is limited. In this ironic, intelligently structured screenplay, Kureishi succeeds in dealing with issues that still hold relevance in twenty first century. My Beautiful Laundrette provides a satirical, comic portrait of upper middle-class Pakistanis in twentieth century England, where young, native Cockneys have only the dole and street violence to console them. The Pakistanis are ambivalent about Thatcher’s England, but are not put off by its racism, knowing that “there is money in the muck.” They feel contempt for the English, who lack the energy and drive to “squeeze the tits of the system.” Still, they become nostalgic about their past privileged life in Karachi. Nasser continues to run his home in the traditional way, with an illiterate wife and daughters clipping his toenails, while he holds court like an eighteenth-century Raja in an undivided India. In the screenplay, the immigrant and indigenous idiosyncratic lives vividly reflect the social realities of the time – ambiguous and dark. 8.6 SUMMARY  My Beautiful Laundrette is a new type of cinematographic product, very different from the so-called “third world cinema.”  Even though it is completely opposed to racism and colonialism, it has to be included as a part of the Western cinema.  It is a cosmopolitan film intending to portray the racial conflicts of the outskirts of London during the 1980s.  The film that reflects the postmodern urban perspective of its creators.  The film is the perfect synthesis of the aesthetic, social and cultural concerns of both the director and the scriptwriter of the film: Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi.  Stephen Frears is one of the most productive and well-known film directors of the last decades.  He started working as an assistant for some famous “Free cinema” directors like Lindsay Anderson. 163 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 He was initially linked to this cinematographic wave characterised by a strong social and political commitment Frears has been able to develop his own artistic personality 8.7 KEYWORDS  Prejudice- discrimination  Disillusion-disappoint  Comical-humorous  Interrupt-disrupt  Persuade-influence  Splash-display  Renovation-restoration  Extremist-revolutionary  Radical- fundamental  Hedonistic pleasure seeking 8.8 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Examine the paradox of conflicting Identifications in the play. ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 2. Analyze hybridity in the play ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ 3. Hanif Kureishi's 'My Beautiful Laundrette' explores race and capitalism - Interpret. ________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ 8.9 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. What type of literary creation is My Beautiful Laundrette? 2. What is the theme of My Beautiful Laundrette? 3. Where is My Beautiful Laundrette set? 164 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

4. Give the character analysis in the play My Beautiful Laundrette Set. 5. Elaborate the theme Alienation in the Play My Beautiful Laundrette Long Questions 1. Sketch the character Omar Ali in 'My Beautiful Laundrette' 2. Explain the plot and style of \"My Beautiful Laundrette\" 3. Sketch the character Nasser in \"My Beautiful Laundrette\" 4. Explain the aptness of the title of the play \"My Beautiful Laundrette\" 5. Summarize the story of 'Goodnight, Desdemona' B. Multiple Choice Questions 1.In the early 1970s and early 1980s, Hanif Kureishi was starting out as a __ a. playwright b. poet c. novelist d. feminist 2._____ Asians were rarely spotted on the stage, screen or in the pages of literary fiction a. British b. American c. Indian d. Pakistani 3. British Asians were represented in current-affairs coverage of __ disputes a. industrial b. cultural c. gender d. colour 4. My Beautiful Laundrette' was originally conceived as a __series in the beginning a. television b. film 165 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

c. journal d. newspaper 5. My Beautiful Laundrette' soon after its release it bewitched and bewildered __ a. audiences b. film makers c. journals d. televisions Answers 1-a, 2-a, 3-a, 4-a, 5-a 8.10 REFERENCES Reference books  Park, James (20 November 1985). \"London Fest Pulling Full Houses; West End Venues Boost Business\". Variety. p. 5.  My Beautiful Laundrette . British Board of Film Classification. 18 September 1985. Retrieved 10 June 2012.  \"Back to the Future: The Fall and Rise of the British Film Industry in the 1980s - An Information Briefing\" (PDF). British Film Institute. 2005.  My Beautiful Laundrette at Box Office Mojo British Film Institute - Top 100 British Films (1999). Retrieved 27 August 2016 Textbook references  Frears, Stephen (Dir). Kureishi, Hanif (Writer). My Beautiful Laundrette. Film 4: UK. 1985. Websites  file:///C:/Users/DELL/Downloads/Dialnet-MyBeautifulLaundrette-821033.pdf  https://riull.ull.es/xmlui/bitstream/handle/915/14414/RCEI_54_%28%202007%29_10 .pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y  https://www.bcu.ac.uk/media/research/research-groups/creative-industries/research- projects/diaspora-screen-media-network/blog/falling-for-daniel-day-lewis-and- thatchers-britain-in-hanif-kureishis-my-beautiful-laundrette 166 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091578/ 167 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT – 9 INTRODUCTION TO CARIBBEAN THEATRE STRUCTURE 9.0 Learning Objectives 9.1 Introduction to Caribbean Theatre 9.2 The Caribbean Stage Now 9.3 The Perspectives in Caribbean Theatre 9.4 Summary 9.5 Keywords 9.6 Learning Activities 9.7 Unit End Questions 9.8 References 9.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Understand Caribbean theatre and drama  Identify their ceremonies held in theatre  Examine the perspectives in in Caribbean theatre 9.1 INTRODUCTION TO CARIBEAN THEATRE To understand the nature of the development of Caribbean theater over the centuries, as well as the form of theater that is now evolving in the region, it is important to know something of the history of the Caribbean. The experience of colonization and the type of slavery that existed there have left an indelible mark on the creative impulses of the people. Theater in the Caribbean, therefore, must be seen as having various stages of development. These stages are defined by historical periods, beginning with the meeting of African and European cultures, then the period after Emancipation, followed by a more classical form of theatre, and finally a period of ritualistic and popular expression. The source of Caribbean drama is in the folklore, myth, and rituals of the people. There are two types of rituals: (1) the sacred rituals, which include a variety of social, spiritual, and religious actions performed privately by and for the participants who are integral to the ceremony; 168 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

(2) profane rituals, which are those that make everyday life meaningful, predictable, and comfortable. Spectators are allowed to watch these profane rituals, and they may even participate in them. Included in all these rituals are the religious practices of the Indians, the Chinese, and the other peoples who were brought to the Caribbean. Unlike the indentured laborers who were brought to the region with a promise of returning home, the Africans, who were chattel slaves, suffered a violent sense of dispossession after being prevented from returning to Africa. Loss, dispossession, alienation, and a lifetime of imposed poverty resulted in a search for a cultural identity, which is a major theme in the literature of the Caribbean. In their early theatrical presentations, slaves took the opportunity to ridicule their oppressors, and to console themselves, by presenting the victorious efforts of small, cunning animals. They also sought relief in entertainment through drumming and dancing. This entertainment took place on days when they were free from work, such as Sundays, Christmas, and Easter, as well as on certain work-related holidays, such as the end of the sugarcane harvest. Many of the communal festivals of black people in the Caribbean—such as Papa Diable or Papa Jab in Trinidad, La Rose and La Marguerite in Saint Lucia, Jonkunnu in Jamaica and the Bahamas, Crop-Over in Barbados, Masquerade in Guyana, and even the short skits performed during the renditions of calypsos have their origin in these entertainments. Freedom and voting rights gave the masses the opportunity to question what had been presented to them as theater, providing a chance to found a theater that expressed their own aspirations. It was obvious that this would require that they ignore the theatrical fare given to them by the plantocracy. The first National Hero of Jamaica, Marcus Garvey, was the first proponent of black pride in black culture, and between 1930 and 1932 he produced four plays with large casts. Unfortunately, these plays have been lost to posterity. In 1941, Greta and Henry Fowler founded the Little Theatre Movement and introduced the Pantomime, based on the traditional English Pantomime. The Jamaica National Pantomime remains faithful to the structure of the traditional English Pantomime, presenting the same type of traditional characters and a pervading theme of good overcoming evil. Louise Bennett, the grande dame of Jamaican theater, was the leading Pantomime figure for many years. She played alongside Ranny Williams, and these two actors remain unforgettable icons of the Jamaica Pantomime. The Little Theatre Movement still produces the National Pantomime, though the social commentary, the content, and artistic form are more definitively Caribbean than when it was introduced by the Fowlers. Also in the 1940s, the Yard Theater was founded in Barbados, as was the Theatre Guild in Guyana. In the early 1950s, Errol Hill (1921–2003), a leading Trinidadian playwright, called for a national theater that truly represented the cultural attitudes, expressions, and aspirations of the 169 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

people of Trinidad and Tobago. Over the course of his life, he produced and directed over 120 plays and pageants in the West Indies, England, the United States, and Nigeria. He wrote eleven plays, of which Man Better Man is considered a Caribbean classic. The poet and playwright Derek Walcott, from Saint Lucia, made his appearance on the scene in the 1950s. A winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, Walcott sometimes writes plays in verse, and his work, though firmly aligned to the ancient classical drama of Europe, is unmistakably Caribbean in content. He founded The Little Carib Theatre in Trinidad. One of the outstanding modern Caribbean playwrights is Errol John (1924–1988) of Trinidad. Two of his plays, The Tout and Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, have become Caribbean classics. Other playwrights who wrote works that can be classified as social realism also came to the fore at this time. These writers dealt not only with the social issues affecting low-income communities, but with those important to a cross-section of Caribbean society. Among these playwrights are Basil Dawkins, Ginger Knight, Carmen Tipling, Pat Cumper, and Trevor Rhone from Jamaica; Stanley French from Saint Lucia; Ronald Amoroso from Trinidad; and Rudolph Wallace from St. Thomas. Of these playwrights, Trevor Rhone has received the widest international acclaim. His most famous work, written largely in the vernacular, is Old Story Time, which makes use of significant Caribbean folk forms. His other well-known works are Smile Orange, School’s Out, Two Can Play, and the screenplay for the 1988 film Milk and Honey. He is also an actor, and his performance in his own play Bellas Gate Boy (2002) was a one-man tour de force. Another playwright who is highly esteemed is Earl Lovelace (b. 1935) from Trinidad. He came into prominence first as a novelist. In both his novels and his plays, he is deeply concerned about the human condition. Another prominent playwright is Dominican artist, actor, and director Alwin Bully. His most memorable plays are Streak, Folk Nativity, Pio-Pio, McB and The Ruler of Hiroona. Under the aegis of the Little Theatre in Kingston, the Jamaica School of Drama was established in 1969, and a permanent home for the school was erected in 1976. This is the only theater school in the English-speaking Caribbean, and it has brought together theater practitioners from all over the region. It has, however, been plagued by a lack of funds from its inception. In 1979, Jean Small, a tutor at the school, devised a course titled “A Caribbean Laboratory,” which explored Caribbean folk forms in order to arrive at a Caribbean theater aesthetic. The research done in this laboratory influenced much of the ritual theater that took place in that period. Dennis Scott, a poet, playwright, dancer, choreographer, and theater director, was the then director of the school. 170 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

One of the interesting outcomes of the work done at the Jamaica School of Drama was the formation in 1983 of Groundwork Theater, a company formed by graduates of the school. They performed in schools using the popular form of theater that marks this period of theater, particularly in Jamaica, in which the structure of the African ritual, the use of significant ritual objects, the function of ritual agents, and the use of sound and movement were all studied and applied to relevant everyday Caribbean human issues. Scott displayed his adeptness in using ritual as an act that binds human communities in his outstanding play An Echo in the Bone. His other major play is Dog. Following in this mode of ritual theater was the Trinidadian playwright Rawle Gibbons. His first full-length play, which made use of ritual, was Shepherd, which opened at the Jamaica School of Drama in 1981. Gibbons also became the director of the Centre for Creative and Festival Arts on the Saint Augustine Campus of the University of the West Indies. In 1991 he staged his calypso musical Sing de Chorus, which won five national Cacique Awards. The show is a docudrama on the development of calypso and Trinidadian society. Other ritual playwrights are Marina Omowale Maxwell, whose Play Mas is based on Trinidad’s Carnival, while her Hounsi Kanzo is based on a Haitian ritual of consciousness. Zeno Constance Obi, a secondary school teacher, writes mainly for his student actors, and his play The Ritual has become the play of choice for teenagers. A splinter group of the Theatre Guild in Guyana commissioned the multitalented Guyanese playwright Michael Gilkes to write a play. The result was Couvade, which was performed at the first Carifesta, held in Guyana in 1972. The uniqueness of this play is that it makes use of an Amerindian ritual, and that it deals with the subject of Caribbean integration. In 1979 Gilkes settled in Barbados as a member of staff of the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies. He became the founder and first artistic director of Stage One, the leading theatre company in Barbados. Popular theater was a reaction to the middle-class proscenium-arch type of theater. There were two important factors that identified popular theater: (1) it was led by an academic with formal knowledge of theater; and (2) it utilized the culture and aesthetics of the working class. In Jamaica, Ralph Holness was the founder of a sub-genre of popular theater called “roots theater,” which focused on the lives of the working-class populace and the inner city. These plays were performed in unconventional spaces, such as a cinema that was no longer used as such, a section of a bar, or a space in a restaurant close to a bar. The proximity to a bar seemed to be very important as an adjunct of the performance, and the intermission of the included light entertainment of singing and dancing. Roots theater placed emphasis on the use of nation language, such as the Creole languages of the region, and it was usually done in a humorous way. This theater of the masses spread all over the Caribbean. 171 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

In 1977 in Jamaica, under the Michael Manley government, an “Emergency Employment,” or “Crash,” program was introduced. A number of inner-city women found employment in this program as street sweepers. Under the same government, the Bureau of Women’s Affairs was set up, and that office decided to put on a show to celebrate the Annual Workers’ Day. The street sweepers were invited to participate in this show, and when asked what they would like to do, thirteen of them decided that they wanted to act in memory of plays they had done as children in Sunday school. As they had no theater experience, the Jamaica School of Drama was approached to assist, and a member of staff there, Honor Ford Smith, volunteered to work with them. As the women could not read or write, she developed a form of oral theater using Jamaican Creole, the medium of expression with which they were most confident. The group dubbed themselves the Sistren Theatre Collective, and they were the first to proudly use Jamaican Creole in theater. Their first performance, Depression Get a Blow, lamented the abandonment of a move to improve the conditions of factory workers. The early work of Sistren was mainly improvisational, and the content of their plays was based on their life experiences. Their second major production Belly woman Bangarang, produced in 1978, was an award-winning play that established Sistren as the new grassroots voice for women in the 1970s. Sistren’s work concentrated on the plight of women, as well as the universality of women’s issues. They became internationally recognized, although their plays were performed in Jamaican Creole using symbols, colors, dance forms, music, and ritual that came directly from their culture. An oral history project on their personal lives, their hardships, and their courage was documented by Honor Ford Smith in the publication Lionheart Gal. Some of their other important plays are Bandool-oou Version, and Muffet Inna Alla Wi. Hertencer Lindsay directed QPH, a play on the lives of three well-known women living in a retirement home. In 1980, Jean Small directed Nana Yah which was based on the life of the Jamaican National Heroine, Nanny of the Maroons, and from then on Sistren started creating plays on subjects outside of their personal lives but relevant to the lives of all women. During the turbulent period of the 1970s in Jamaica, this type of activist theater had its place and was very popular, but with the change of government in the 1980s the mood changed and the freedom of expression that was experienced under the Manley government disappeared. Sistren had by this time acquired a home base, and they had created an income-generating screen-printing business. Their cushion covers, bags, curtains, and wall hangings depicted themes from their work. Unfortunately, as the activist leaders of the group moved on to other jobs, and as members of Sistren themselves started to look for opportunities outside of Jamaica, the original group fell apart and the screen-printing work came to an end. Sistren now mainly conducts workshops in communities and schools, and only four of the original thirteen members are currently residing in Jamaica. A later production, directed by Jean Small, 172 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

was Mirro Mirro, a play about women’s sexuality and incest. In the 1990s, however, the audiences in Jamaica were searching for entertainments that offered relief from the stresses and strains of life, and serious discussions of women’s issues were no longer appealing. The play, therefore, was not financially successful. In Guyana in the 1990s, a few stalwarts, such as Al Creighton and Ron Robinson, kept theater activities going in spite of the inactivity of the Theatre Guild. Directors turned to the National Cultural Centre as the main theater space. Theater at the center gave rise to a large proletariat audience. The Link Show, a satirical commentary on current events in Guyana, is the only current annual production. A committee has been set up, however, with the support of the government, to refurbish the Theatre Guild. In Jamaica, the commercial theater production company Jambiz International was formed in 1996. Their productions take place at the Centerstage Theatre, in Kingston, and they concentrate on humorous entertainment with actors such as Oliver Samuels, Glen Campbell, Christopher Daley, and Claudette Pious. Their main playwright is Patrick Brown. They also take their work to places such as London, New York, Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Toronto. Most theater practitioners in the Caribbean cannot afford to be engaged on a full-time basis in theater. In Jamaica, the prolific playwright Basil Dawkins is one of the few practitioners who works professionally in the theater. Most of his plays are directed by Buddy Pouyat, and he regularly takes his productions to England, the United States, and other parts of the Caribbean region. His work analyzes serious current social issues in an entertaining manner. His plays feature such well-known actors as Charles Hyatt, Karen Harriott, Volier Johnson, and Leonie Forbes. In Grenada, the Heritage Theatre Company offers light fare in the form of situational theatrical performances. Grenada also stages an annual Spice Festival, which consists of productions in which laughter is the main ingredient. The Cultural Division of the Antigua government promotes theater activity and exports their productions to neighboring islands. In 2001, theater practitioners in Jamaica came together to form the Jamaica Association of Dramatic Artists (JADA), with the determination to improve the quality of theater in the island. In 2002, JADA organized their first Script Festival as a first step to acquiring a stock of quality plays. A genre of theater that is becoming increasingly important in the Caribbean is storytelling. Louise Bennett, through her poetry and storytelling written in Jamaican Creole, has helped give the Jamaican people a sense of self and a cultural identity. The Trinidadian storyteller Paul Keens-Douglas has similarly used Trinidadian Creole in his poems and stories, and he has helped to establish storytelling as a respectable form of theater. Storytelling is maintained in 173 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Saint Lucia by George “Fish” Alphonse, while Ricardo Keens-Douglas has been an important practitioner in Grenada. In Guyana, Desrey Foster, an academic in the Amerindian Research Unit of the University of Guyana, is the only established Amerindian storyteller in the region. There are also other young storytellers in the region, such as Joan Andrea Hutchinson, Amina Black-wood-Meeks, and AdZiko Simba. Storytelling has influenced Jean Small’s one-woman performances, and her Black Woman’s Tale has been performed internationally. Twelve of the Caribbean islands came together in 1997 to form the Caribbean Regional Alliance (CARA) which is the regional representative body to the International Amateur Theatre Association (IATA). The first CARA Theater Festival was held in Trinidad, hosted by the National Drama Association of Trinidad and Tobago. Since CARA was established, IATA has been forced to include Spanish as one of its working languages. Since 2000, the University of the West Indies has been organizing an Inter-Campus Foreign Language Theatre Festival, which takes place each year at one of the three campuses of the University—Mona Campus in Jamaica, Saint Augustine Campus in Trinidad, and Cave Hill Campus in Barbados—and only Anglophone students who are studying a foreign language are allowed to participate. 9.2 THE CARIBEAN STAGE NOW Judy S.J. Stone’s theatre published in 1994, was hailed as a pioneering text at the time, and has since attained the status of seminal work in Caribbean theatre studies. Stone delivers a comprehensive history of theatre arts and production – particularly in the English-speaking Caribbean from its seventeenth-century beginnings to the then contemporary period of the mid1990s. For Stone, the tumultuous period of the 1930s – marked by labour strikes which would rock the very foundations of the British colonial enterprise in the region – provided the conditions of possibility for the development of a West Indian theatre. Coalescing around anti- colonial and nationalist struggles, early theatre practitioners such as Una Marson (Jamaica), C.L.R. James and Errol Hill (Trinidad), and Norman Cameron (Guyana) emerged. Stone goes on to identify a series of broad genres into which playwrights and productions can be organized: realism, theatre of the people, total theatre, classical theatre, and ritual theatre. It is the eighty- page bibliography documenting plays and playscripts, reviews of signature productions, related novels and poetry that, perhaps most of all, renders this book an important source text. Stone’s identification of the founding of Caribbean theatre in the crucible of regional proto-nationalist movements highlights the unique political and poetic possibilities that emerge from the Caribbean experience. Errol Hill, established playwright, theatre historian, and an early proponent of the necessity of linking Caribbean popular traditions and the scripted text, has 174 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

pride of place in Stone’s project. Hill is singled out particularly for his 1972 treatise The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National theatre, which would influence the work of playwright Derek Walcott, among others. Of equal importance is the development of ritual theatre through an experimental performance laboratory at the Jamaica School of Drama and concretized in the work of Dennis Scott, Rawle Gibbons and Honor Ford Smith. Their collective productions draw on the region’s ritual and festival traditions in order to tap the psyche of the people. For Gibbons, rituals “can speak with absolute faithfulness to an audience in any part of the Caribbean” through familiar actions that foster greater (self-)awareness. It was therefore against this backdrop, and under the theme “the Caribbean Stage: From Traditional theatre to Modern Performances”, that the second staging of the annual Critical Caribbean Symposium Series was organized at the University of the Bahamas in November 2012. A central focus of the two-day gathering was the question of the necessity and even the relevance of Caribbean theatre practice in our contemporary period given the rather lackluster regional efforts to celebrate, fund and even enshrine in national development initiatives the rich and complex legacies of Caribbean performance traditions. Symposium participants were asked to interrogate the shifting roles of knowledge, culture and economy in the region while repositioning the vexed relationship between Caribbean culture and Caribbean development historically and in our contemporary moment. In fact, Rawle Gibbons’s keynote address “Answering Ancestors: Caribbean theatre Praxis in the Crossroads of Now” made clear the urgency of the intersection of the historical and the contemporary. Gibbons’s challenge to attendees was that the concrete conditions of our contemporary moment compel us to revisit those traditions, and even those ancestral performance spaces which were, are, and continue to be the “groundation” of community-building and national development in the Caribbean. The first three essays in the present collection set the tone by foregrounding the fact that in order to talk about a “Caribbean theatre”, one has to acknowledge the colonial roots of the institution and that the question of relevance requires a return to historical contexts. Louis Regis’s opening essay “Rawle Gibbons and the theory and Practice of the third theatre” takes us to the heart of the struggle to elaborate “an authentic indigenous Caribbean theatre which is grounded in the Caribbean experience”. Regis proposes an in-depth analysis of Gibbons’s “theory and practice of a third theatre” which “embraces the dramatic heritages and resources of the Caribbean”. Regis argues compellingly that Gibbons is “a creator of ritual-as-theatre” and analyses I Lawah – Gibbons’ re-presentation of Trinidad’s Canboulay Riots of 1881 – showing how “spirit possession functions not as a ritualistic mounting of humans by spirits of the dead but as the exchange of cosmic energies”. As Regis makes clear, Gibbons’s third theatre “serves as a means of extending the script beyond the actualizations on the stage: it is also a means of involving the audience as actors in this exercise of re-creating history”. For Gibbons, as Regis shows, theatre “is about creating community, and community is constructed on an awareness of the interrelatedness of space, home, and history”. My own essay “theatre, Memory and 175 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

National Consciousness in the Work of Édouard Glissant” seeks to open an important dialogue between the multiple linguistic spheres of Caribbean theatre practice and theorizing. Where Gibbons – working between Jamaica and Trinidad – locates theatre in the practices of home, history and community, I attempt to show French Antillean Glissant expanding theatrical space within processes of nation-building. Returning to Glissant’s critical essay “theatre: Conscience du people”, I make explicit Glissant’s fundamental thesis – “the inherent theatricality of the complex cultural creation of the multiple interrelated cultures of the Caribbean [which is] the foundation of the theatrical form as a catalyst for critical collective consciousness”. Glissant, I suggest, proposed a new form of creativity as cultural resistance which is the essential ingredient for collective community formation and nation-building because, as Glissant declares, “there can be no nation without theatre”. In “ e Anancy Technique: A Gateway to Postcolonial Performance”, Eugene Williams takes up the matter of elaborating a performance technique capable of giving full expression to the “popular cultural capital of orature and body- cognition of the Caribbean performer”. A trained actor and former director of the School of Drama at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Williams walks us through his personal journey leading to the articulation of his Anancy technique, “a method enabling a liberatory Caribbean performance”. Williams draws inspiration from Wilson Harris’s proposition of the “limbo and masquerade, which are both performance- oriented and body-centred cultural forms”. through detailed sketches and concrete examples, he demonstrates the founding principles of the technique: the limbo dancer’s “low centre”; the “coolness” of Caribbean body attitudes; and an Africanist element of movement and musicality. For Williams, the Anancy technique “attempts to theorize and establish some foundational principles . . . for the [Caribbean] actor and the postcolonial Caribbean theatre of this new century”. Moving from the larger context of theorizing theatre’s relevance, role and performance techniques, the next group of essays focuses on playscripts by signature playwrights and/or seminal public events and cultural practices in the Caribbean performance repertoire. Rosana Herrero-Martín proposes a reading of Eugenio Hernandez Espinosa’s Cuban masterpiece Una pasión compartida: María Antonia. Herrero-Martín brings to the fore Ori, the Yoruba concept of human consciousness which is the cosmic cornerstone of Afro Cuban religious syncretism. A daughter of Oshun, the play’s main character María Antonia “is a product”, as Herrero-Martín shows, “of the complex encounter between the divine and the human, even more so in a context of postcolonial and post-slavery collective consciousness”. e metaphysical aspects of the Afro-Cuban syncretism recur, according to Herrero-Martín, “distinctively in Hernandez Espinosa’s dramaturgy” and are a constitutive element of Cuban/Caribbean theatre practice. Justin Haynes’s “Mancrab’s Enlightenment: Posthuman Prosthetics and Performance in Peter Minshall’s River and Callaloo an de Crab” confronts the monumental work of Peter Minshall, perhaps the most important Trinidad Carnival mas designer of any generation. Minshall harnesses the traditions of playing mas – a live 176 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

performance experience in which individuals are given over fully to the “body-cognition”, to use Eugene Williams’s terminology, of music and dance as a crucial medium through which to reverse the impact of lingering colonial legacies. Haynes undertakes a close reading of Minshall’s River – in particular the celebrated live performance of 1983 – and Callaloo an de Crab – the similarly themed novella published the following year. Haynes’s analysis teases out the “discrepancies between the story of the stage performance and the novella” to show Minshall’s end goal of a form of stage resistance founded in the circum-Caribbean carnival performances. Honor Ford-Smith’s “The Ghost of Mikey Smith: Space, Performance, and Justice” expands the principle of “staged resistance” to the wider frame of Caribbean performance space and the question of justice. As Ford-Smith states from the beginning of the piece, “I use performance here not to describe a theatrical production but rather to explore the ways in public actions can become statements about power.” Ford-Smith’s essay re-engages the 1983 public stoning of celebrated Jamaican poet Mikey Smith as he walked through the suburban Kingston community of Stony Hill. The space and place of Mikey Smith’s death by stoning reveal, as Ford-Smith argues, “the enduring presence of the violent legacy of the plantation – both transnational and local – and what it does to certain bodies”. Ford-Smith’s larger point is that “in the case of Jamaica, the history that produced performance was that of conquest, plantation culture and resistance to it”. Space and performance then, offer opportunities to imagine change, to imagine forms of justice in the aftershocks of colonial violence in the contemporary Caribbean. The final essays of this collection tackle the practical matter of the viability and sustainability of theatre, theatre/festival arts and performance practice in the Caribbean today. Jo-AnneTull’s “Caribbean Festival Arts: Exploring Praxis for the Future” tackles recent policy initiatives by Caribbean governments to position festivals more prominently in the national heritage and cultural landscape. Tull notes that often, these initiatives fall short in their “understanding of the underlying significance of festival arts as practice and performance culture”. Using CARIFESTA – the regional roving arts festival established in 1972 – Tull lays the groundwork for a festival arts platform of operational quality, stakeholder engagement, and festival market leadership. For Tull, this “praxis” will go a long way in quelling debates about culture which “ought not to be subjected to the rigours of value analysis” as regional governments seek avenues through which to jump-start growth and economic development while valorizing national heritage and cultural forms. Nicolette Bethel offers an in-depth analysis of the creation, development and launch of the Shakespeare in Paradise Theatre Festival, first organized in Nassau, Bahamas in October 2009. One of the founders of the festival, Bethel notes that an impetus for its creation was the fact that “the Bahamas has not yet prioritized either cultural activity or festivals when investing in its tourism product”. Shakespeare in Paradise was thus created as a “private enterprise in some measure to test the sustainability of the twenty-first-century economic model of investing in festivals as an engine of revenue production”. Bethel peels away the multiple layers of this festival project in 177 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

a detailed case study of its concept, partnerships, performance spaces, productions, talent mobilization, expenditures and revenues, and economic impact. the real challenge, however, as Bethel makes clear, “is the cultivation of new audiences with an abiding interest in theatre, thereby building the next generation of theatregoers and theatre practitioners”. As the creative arts venue manager at the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus in Barbados, Carla Springer is intimately aware of “the steady decline in the number of young patrons, including those who are actively pursuing the study of the performing arts”. Springer’s title brings into stark relief the urgent need to “create theatre for an iPad Generation”. “Plays”, she says, “must not be written just for the sake of the art form of playwriting; they must also have significance to the lives of our people in our concrete historical moment.” Springer’s essay is a personal call to action, insisting that the written word can be infused with music, movement and even technology as a way of joining our collective past to the present and future of “our theatre world”. What emerges from this brief journey through the Caribbean theatre repertoire is the fundamental idea that theatre – as a form of cultural expression – offers a crucial site of national contestation and struggle for and with cultural meaning in our contemporary Caribbean moment. Theatre and drama propose and promote a framework for self-determination by mobilising political and cultural agency. Caribbean theatre, then, offers a means to reflect on lives lived and avenues through which to imagine difference, and to imagine change. Indeed, if Caribbean theatre is to reflect on lives lived, it must incorporate the historical, religious and cultural repositories of the multiple and diverse societies that make up the region and the opportunities of the “iPad” (digital) lives we are living now. 9.3 PERSPECTIVES IN CARIBEAN THEATRE Few events can be more engrossing than a people’s conscious effort to determine and define their identity. The anglophone Caribbean, for centuries culturally dominated by Europe, began its quest for identity in the 1930s when the whole region experienced marked social upheaval. Hard hit by the Great Depression, the export economies of the territories shriveled as sugar prices fell and wages plummeted. The traditional escape valve of northern migration was shut tight by stringent immigration laws. These conditions prompted the calypsonian, Growling Tiger, to compose his “Workers Appeal” calypso which he sang in the carnival season of 1936: We are not asking for equality To rank with the rich in society To visit their homes in their motorcars Or to go to their clubs and smoke their cigars We are asking for a living wage To exist now and provide for old age Our kindhearted employers, I appeal now to you Give us some work to do. Many a day persons haven’t a meal They too decent to beg, too honest to steal They went looking for work mostly everywhere But saw signboard marked “No hands wanted here” The Government should work the wastelands and hills Build houses, factories 178 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

and mills Reduce taxation and then we would be Really emancipated from slavery. In the year, 1958, the short-lived experiment in West Indian Federation came into being. It was destined to last only four years. The event was marked by the writing and staging of a commissioned drama by the region’s premier poet and playwright, Derek Walcott. His drama, titled Drums and Colours, attempted to trace the history of the Caribbean lands as pawns in the power struggle between western imperialist nations, until finally the old sugar colonies emerged into some form of nationhood. But what kind of nation? How to define the identity of Caribbean peoples? That is a quest that has been going on with increasing urgency and passion. In its checkered history the Caribbean has been inhabited by many different races and cultures. First were the aboriginal Amerindians, now practically extinct. Then there were the voluntary immigrants from Europe and America, the Far East and the near East. Some came for profit or pleasure, others to work as replacements for slave labor, but all had the option of returning to their home countries when their work or play had ended. Finally, there were those whose arrival, historically, was not voluntary. They came in chains and had to abandon thoughts of returning to an ancestral home across the sea for there was no fixed period to their labor. These were the people of Africa, known first as slaves, then blacks, then Afro-Caribbeans. They formed the base of Caribbean society. For centuries they constituted that section of the population for whom the Caribbean was the only home they knew; that other home from which their ancestors were torn long ago survived only in racial memory Without denying the contributions made by other immigrants, I would submit that there exists today a significant body of Afro-Caribbean traditions that can be utilized by native dramatists, choreographers, music makers, and theatre practitioners if the theatre is truly to represent the needs and aspiration of Caribbean people. As the Jamaican scholar and cultural leader Rex Nettleford has written: “The African Presence must be given its proper place of centrality in that dynamic process of adjustment, rejection, renewal and innovation. For the products of this cultural process are what constitute the mandates for a national cultural expression.” The purpose of theatre is, in the first analysis, salutary. It began as a rite aimed at assuring the well-being of the tribe. By killing the actor dressed as a stag, his fellow actors were using sympathetic magic to capture the spirit of the real animal. This ritual would ensure a successful hunt thus providing food for the tribe. The death of the principal actor was a terrible sacrificial act solemnly undertaken by the victim for the good of his community. Theatre must appeal to the whole community and was more than a pleasant diversion from the daily routine. It was central to the business of living. Without it life was not simply “stale, flat and unprofitable,” in Hamlet’s phrase; instead, the community’s very existence was threatened. A theatre that approximates its ancient meaning justifies its claim to public recognition and support. A more recent theory on the theatre’s origin is that it began in a different kind of ritual, namely, shamanism. The shaman, or proto-priest, as the argument goes, is a “master of spirits” who puts himself in a trance and in this state performs many wonders. With elaborate use of voice, chant, dialogue, gesture, pantomime and dance, 179 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

the shaman divines the future, cures the sick, expels evil, and conveys souls to the realm of the dead. In his trance, a phenomenon that most Caribbean people recognize as spirit possession, the shaman’s body is occupied by a god. He manifests a supernatural presence to his audience, who witness the transformation that is occurring and believe in the efficacy of the god’s presence among them. The shaman does not, as is the case with the Hunt Ritual, offer up his life for the good of his people, but he does temporarily surrender his will to the will of the gods for a similarly worthy purpose. It is generally accepted that theatre developed from ritual, whose function was to reach an accommodation with powerful forces or gods without whose aid life would be intolerable. As settled communities developed, three principal means were adopted to achieve this basic aim. They are: 1. petitioning the gods to grant some communal need: be it a bountiful harvest or protection from a threatening disaster; 2. placating the gods against the evil in society that offends them, seeking their aid in purging the evil and asking forgiveness for wrongdoing as well as for reinstatement in the god’s favor; 3. thanking the gods for their gifts and protection: for example, for a year that is free of disease, plague, famine, or wasteful war. Although I am here referring to ritual drama, it is possible to argue that all good theatre through the ages retains these fundamental aims. Possibly some of us no longer believe in the power of gods to affect our daily lives. We may scoff at the notion of participating in rituals that seek the active involvement of supernatural beings in human affairs. For such skeptics, one may rephrase the function of theatre in secular terms that are no less essential to our well-being. Suppose, for instance, we were to substitute: 1. for petitioning the gods - the coercive power of the theatre; 2. for placating the gods - the corrective power of the theatre; 3. for thanking the gods - the celebrative power of the theatre; we would retain the theatre’s ancient purpose to secure communal well-being without mention of the supernatural. The fact is that the large majority of Afro-Caribbean people are not religious skeptics. Religion continues to hold a significant place in their daily lives. Most important, the practice of their religion binds them, consciously or unconsciously, to their African past. Edward Brathwaite, poet-historian of the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, has written pertinently on this topic. He reminds us of the well-documented fact that “African culture survived in the Caribbean through religion” and that “African culture is based upon religion. There is no separation between religion and philosophy, religion and society, religion and art. Religion is the form and kernel or core of the culture. What we should alert ourselves to is the possibility, whenever ‘religion’ is mentioned, that a whole cultural complex is present.” One of the major differences between ritual and theatre is that in ritual one communicates with the gods whereas in theatre communication is established with a human audience. In the former case, participation of the audience, often comprising the whole community, could be taken for granted since everyone knew that the enactment was in their behalf and, if properly performed, would achieve the desired result. Members of this audience would be aware of what had to be done and how it should be done. They were vitally concerned it should be done right, and the 180 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

actors who performed the ritual were expected to live up to their audience’s expectations. The dynamics of this situation explain the quality of excellence in ritual performance. Here the celebrant performers sought perfection, not to please their audience or to boost their egos but because the success of the enactment depended on it. The gods are jealous and will be satisfied only with the best. In a very real sense, the audience were participators in the action. Often, they became, or were represented by, a chorus that was involved in the performance through singing, chanting, clapping, or other forms of group response. And there would be music, of course, and dancing. Audience recognition and participation were essential features that contributed to the efficacy of the ritual enactment. The Nigerian scholar Joel Adedeji has explained the process by which ritual theatre becomes festival theatre, and festival theatre fragments into professional and amateur productions of secular theatre. Over time the religious purpose may diminish but the seasonal enactment would continue because people have become accustomed to it as a traditional event. Thus, we have the conditions for festival theatre. Examples of this are multifaceted types of carnival that are held regularly in the Caribbean. The carnival festival may have been transplanted to the region by European settlers; but, once adopted by the Afro-Caribbeans, it was transformed into an expression of surviving African traditions, colored by local experience. Other festivals associated with the vegetation cycle, such as Crop-over in Barbados, or with the liturgical calendar such as the Christmas Jonkonnu in Jamaica, or the La Rose Flower Festival in St. Lucia, all contain strong traditional expressions drawn from Afro Caribbean life. Religious and festival performances by no means exhaust the sources of African continuity that provide ingredients for a Caribbean theatre. To give another example, there is the area of storytelling that involves idiomatic speech and idiosyncratic pantomime, when the teller of tales assumes the characteristics of all the active participants in his story, whether they be human, animal, bird or plant, objects animate or inanimate. After ritual and festival enactments, the next logical phase in the emergence of an indigenous Caribbean theatre should have occurred when gifted individuals began to perform in and out of season for the edification and entertainment of spectators. In constructing their plays and designing their performances, these individuals would normally have built their theatre on the traditions of the past. They would have incorporated the meanings and methods, signs and symbols associated with the religions, rites, festivals, myths, storytelling and other forms of enactment belonging to their culture. Had this development occurred, the present quest to identify and establish an indigenous Caribbean theatre would probably be unnecessary. It did not happen that way, of course, for reasons that are now understood. The formal theatre adopted in the Caribbean came neither from Africa nor from Afro-Caribbean experience, but from Europe. It came as a ready-made package, wrapped in the glory of its acknowledged achievement. It was peddled by touring professionals from abroad and ardently imitated by local amateurs, many claiming links to whatever little European ancestry they could trace. It was admired by the learned and taught in the schools. It became the model on which the 181 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Caribbean theatre was wont to be fashioned. This theatre was art. It enjoyed the status of the imported over the homegrown product, which, when not totally banned, was disparaged and relegated to inferior status. Often, the Afro-Caribbean theatre had no buildings other than a backyard shed or a village pasture to house it, no playwrights other than the old storyteller or calypsonian, no professional actors, singers, dancers, musicians or technicians trained in the academies abroad. What the native theatre produced was deemed to be at the level of quaint folkways, stuff for anthropologists. The art theatre was something quite different: it was the product of a people of greater sophistication belonging to a superior culture. That this allegation is not mere rhetoric can be instanced by developments that arose in Afro-Caribbean festivities following the end of slavery. Ironically, among those who worked hardest for slave liberation were people prominent in demanding the suppression of so-called slave culture. Reasons given for suppressing the Christmastime masquerade in Jamaica in 1842, for example, were that they obstructed the progress of civilization and were derogatory to the dignity of freemen. At the other end of the Caribbean, similar attitudes prevailed regarding the Trinidad Carnival. Once it was taken over and transformed by the black freedmen, the leading newspaper castigated the festival in the severest terms throughout the Nineteenth Century and urged its abolition. These attacks served only to alienate the revelers and to stiffen their resistance to any form of control. The results unsurprisingly were more riots and a widening gulf between Government and the people. In most communities one finds historically two streams of theatre, just as there are two streams of most cultural expressions. These two streams are characterized as the informal and the formal, the subconscious and the conscious, the folk and the art. Informal theatre embraces all types of traditional enactments deriving from ritual, festival, and other inherited theatre forms that spring from group consciousness. This type of theatre is rooted in customs that manifest a community’s ethos. Formal theatre, on the other hand, represents a conscious attempt to create theatre as an art form. In one sense it is a way of conserving, enhancing, and disseminating the products of folk theatre. In another sense, it represents an attempt by a single individual, the playwright, scenarist, choreographer or musical composer, assisted by interpreters, to communicate through the medium of the stage some personal vision, insight, or understanding of the life experience as he or she has perceived it and hopes will be of value to audiences. Since the artist is creating, in the first place, for his society, the experiences he seeks to interpret and those of his audience will coincide. Since he wishes to communicate effectively, he will use the means of communication indigenous to that society - language, movement and gesture, song and dance, patterns and rhythms, images and icons, that belong to, and have meaning for, his people. We call this kind of theatre “art theatre” for a special reason. In the realm of art, creators and interpreters are not content simply to represent faithfully the folk forms of expression but will consciously strive to reconstruct and reinterpret them in a particular style most fitting to the personal vision of the artist involved, and most resonant of the life being presented on stage. The folk theatre enriches the art theatre, gives it 182 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

validity and meaning, while the art theatre seeks to interpret folk performance, to give what is a communal, traditional form an individual and personal voice and vision. In truth and in qualitative terms, the distinction between folk and art is often blurred. Many folk artists achieve a high degree of individuality in their performances which can rise to the level of true art. On the other hand, there are professional artists whose work is of little consequence and soon forgotten. But whether we speak of informal or formal theatre, folk or art, the fundamental purpose of both should be the same - namely, to preserve, nurture, and uplift the community to which it belongs and from which it draws its sustenance. The art theatre of Europe had helped to inculcate a love of stage plays in Caribbean audiences. Dominant in Caribbean playhouses for centuries, it could not, however, fulfill the theatre’s essential function as we have defined it. Although its repertoire included some plays that dealt with universal human problems, such plays did nothing to solve the problem of cultural identity. This theatre was alien to its environment and spoke only to a small segment of the population. The vast majority were ignored. It said nothing of their gods or their religion; it did nothing to enhance, to amend, or to celebrate their lives. It was exclusive, not unifying. It separated the privileged from the underprivileged, the well-educated from the partly or non-educated; the townie from the country-bookie, the Creole from the Black. The European and Euro-American theatre had for centuries used black characters in subordinate positions. They were the fetchers and carriers, often the villains; only occasionally would one appear as a romanticized noble savage. Thus, the first step on the road to a truly indigenous drama was for Caribbean dramatists to write and perform plays about black people as central rather than peripheral figures in the stage action. The dramatic pageants of Marcus Garvey, staged at Edelweiss Park in Kingston, Jamaica, in l930, and the drama of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the slave who led the victorious Haitian revolution, written by the Trinidad historian C.L.R. James and performed in London in 1936, are among the earliest examples of this development in the anglophone Caribbean theatre. A prevailing view in the imported Western theatre was that the concerns of black folk were most suited to comedic interpretation. Thus, a further step for Caribbean playwrights was to choose issues that were part of the common experience of the folk and, not to remove all comedy, but to give these concerns the serious consideration they deserved. The 1938 drama Pocomania, by Una Marson, showing the impact of a Jamaican religious cult on a staid middleclass family, is an early witness of this development. A third step in the effort to bring home the art theatre was the initial experiment with language. At the beginning this took the form of a journalistic recapitulation of vernacular expression, too often employed as a way to ridicule peasant or working-class characters who could not use what passed for standard English speech. This attitude contributed to a further widening of the cultural gap between the educated upper layer and the broad base of Caribbean society. Occasionally, however, an author would capture the rhythm and emotive power of folk language in a way that raised the speaker to tragic grandeur The late Jamaican playwright Archie Lindo, in his 1945 dramatization of Herbert De Lisser’s 183 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

novel The White Witch of Rosehall, achieves this level of folk speech in a crucial scene of the play. Takoo, the obeahman, and a group of rebellious slaves capture the witch, Annie, who has been accused of killing several of their people. Her white bookkeeper, cognizant of her evil deeds, threatens the slaves with hanging if they should harm her. Takoo replies in his proud, authoritative dialect: Who deserve hanging more, she or me? She kills Millicent. I pass sentence on her tonight over the grave of me dead grand-daughter. I sentence her too dead. You talk about me hang, Mr. Burbridge. It is white man who got to look out for themself now for we are free tonight. Every slave in Jamaica is free and we are trekking to the mountains to fight. I expect’ to die one day but me spirit will live forever. An’ before I die, this dam’ woman mus’ dead ... no power from heaven or hell can save her. Advocating that young people should write and perform plays in local dialect was certain to provoke an outcry from teachers of English who spent their lives trying to get students to use standard Southern English in order to pass school-leaving examinations which at that time were prepared by examining boards in England. The vehemence of their anger can be gauged by a letter to the Press in which one teacher urged “all people, from the artisans up, found speaking broken English would be thrown into jail, and anyone found daring to introduce it into the higher literary forms like the drama would be hanged.” I hasten to assure you that the threat was not taken seriously and is not responsible for at least one dialect advocate leaving the sunny Caribbean for cold New Hampshire. A fourth innovation in the drive to establish an indigenous theatre is the conscious effort to synthesize dramatic dialogue, music, song, and dance in a single expressive theatrical event, thus challenging the conventional separation of these allied performing skills into specialized types of production. The American musical comedy comes close to this integrated form, although too much emphasis is often given to musical and dance numbers at the expense of language and to spectacle to the detriment of story. The most notable instance of Caribbean integrated theatre is the Jamaican Pantomime, first introduced by the Little Theatre Movement in 1941 in imitation of the English version. Eight years later, under the inspired direction of Noel Vaz and folklorist Louise Bennett, the Pantomime produced Bluebeard and Brer Anancy. The experiment of moving to the popular folk character Anancy - the spider who lives by his wits - was so successful that he reappeared in successive productions. In the process the annual Pantomime has evolved to become identifiably Jamaican in its use of indigenous material including song, drama, improvisation, and pithy commentary on the contemporary social and political scene. It plays to audiences in the tens of thousands over several months. The Trinidad Carnival has produced a number of traditional masquerades each with characteristic oration, gesture, mime, and dance. In her 1948 show Bélé, the choreographer Beryl McBurnie was the first to create novel and arresting modern stage dances based on the movements and gestures of the different masquerades. Miss McBurnie, the acknowledged pioneer in Caribbean dance forms, has influenced the work of successive generations of dancers and choreographers throughout the region. In productions of the Jamaican National Dance Theatre Company, 184 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

which observes the principle of integration of theatrical elements - vocal, choral, musical, visual and kinesthetic - indigenous dance arguably has reached its highest level of achievement. Carnival is also responsible for retaining the primacy of the mask, an ancient theatrical device that has largely disappeared from the modern theatre. On stage it remains a symbol of tremendous power, more so for audiences that harbor a belief in the efficacy of gods and spirits. Several plays have been written within recent times using the carnival experience as a focal point. Time will permit mention of only one. In Devil Mas’, written in 1971, the playwright Lennox Brown has his hero assume the Devil masquerade in defiance of church caveat. Descending into hell, he brings back the bodied souls of ancestral freedom fighters to indict the established religion that continues to enslave the minds of his people. In the matter of spirit possession, it is readily seen how this most significant transformation of an individual’s appearance and conduct can be reinterpreted in drama and dance. Summoning the presence of supernatural beings through the trance state speaks to the traditional belief in ancestral spirits who protect the community and in guardian spirits of all living things who demand to be recognized and reverenced by human beings. Spirit possession places man in his proper context in the natural universe, not as super-creature who abuses nature out of indifference or greed, but as part of the balance of nature, paying his dues and respecting the rights of other natural things to their way of existence. In his play An Echo in the Bone (1974), the late Jamaican playwright Dennis Scott finds an ingenious use for the phenomenon of the trance state. An estate owner has been killed by a peasant gardener who then commits suicide. The celebrants in a dead-wake ceremony want to know why this tragedy occurred. They become possessed by the spirit of the gardener and reveal untold parts of his story. Unconsciously they assume the personas of different people and reenact conflicts and antagonisms that have existed between the races in time past. The moments of possession become climactic episodes. They provide historical perspective and serve as transition points from one scene to another. Time and place are fused and compressed with the present by the force of spirit possession. No truly indigenous theatre can afford to ignore the role of the audience or, rather, the relationship between audience and performer. We have seen that in ritual drama, audience members are participants in the unfolding action primarily because they have an interest in the outcome of the performance. How may one translate that interest into a communal theatrical experience? One area of great relevance to this question is the physical arrangement of the place of performance. It is hardly necessary to state that the old-fashioned proscenium or picture frame stage with darkened auditorium, inherited from Europe in the last century, is the least suitable arrangement for involving an audience. Space-staging has become fashionable of late in the Caribbean; a few platforms and boxes painted gray on an otherwise empty and uncurtained stage are often used to supplant costly representational scenery. The problem with this approach, which is usually adopted for reasons of economy, is that the stage space is seldom transformed into a setting that captures the imagination and evokes the empathy of an audience. Designers and directors 185 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

need to be more adventurous in creating environments that place actors in evocative and workable settings that will excite an audience’s anticipation of the theatrical event to come. Other aspects of production offer opportunities to enlist audience participating. One of these is the use of the chorus, a device known to the ancient Greeks, passed down to Elizabethan dramatists, and current in African theatre today. The chorus is the communal voice. It ensures that the action on stage is relevant to the body politic. It joins past and present by its recital of historical incidents pertinent to the plot. It invites the audience to consider its point of view against the conflicting claims of the central characters. It expresses communal hopes and fears, joys and tribulations. The chorus, seldom seen on the modern western stage, may well be reactivated for the Caribbean theatre. The most recent experiment in audience involvement was undertaken in February this year by Rawle Gibbons, director of the University’s Creative Arts Center in Trinidad. He created a show called Sing De Chorus that was based on well-known and renowned calypsoes of the 1930s and ‘40s. Each calypso was introduced by a group of performers who, by changing roles, acted out the event that inspired its composition. When the calypso was eventually sung, members of the audience, many of whom recalled the lyrics, simultaneously joined in singing the chorus, as they might have done in a calypso tent or on the streets at carnival time. Although the format made for an episodic script, the underlying theme of the calypsonians’ personal and professional lives and their defiance of official censorship gave the performance a unity of its own. Two final components of a theatre rooted in the Caribbean experience are the salutation and closure. Traditional societies are aware of the importance of greeting and of showing hospitality. In West Africa when travelling players approach a town, they sing praises to the townspeople and to the town itself in expectation of a warm welcome. The traditional storyteller invariably prefaces his tale by greeting his audience. What form shall the salutation take in Caribbean theatre? Since the play about to be acted is for the audience, should not the performers begin by recognizing its presence? Perhaps the production might be dedicated to some worthy representative of the community. If there is an overture of words or music, the piece might be chosen as much for audience recognition as for relevance to the play being presented. Applause at the final curtain is a conventional way of bringing a performance to a close. But a joyous ending could be marked by a festive dance on stage to which the audience members would be conducted by the actors. This used to be standard practice in dance performances at the Little Carib Theatre in Trinidad; and it never failed to have an electrifying and bonding effect on the assembly. It has also proved effective, where appropriate, to end a play with a celebrative dance, the audience being invited to participate. The reverse is possible; the audience might join in a choral chant of sorrow when the play ends in tragedy. Although I have emphasized the importance of indigenous forms in the making of Caribbean theatre, I do not suggest that Caribbean theatre artists should become cultural chauvinists and isolate themselves from the rest of world theatre. They need to be versatile, not only in technical skills but also in their ability to understand and appreciate other 186 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

cultures. World literature contains great works of theatre that should be regularly rediscovered and reinterpreted in the Caribbean as elsewhere, and theatre artists must be accomplished in their craft in order to stage such works with intelligence and sensitivity. In any event, the western stage tradition remains strong in the region, for it too is part of Caribbean history. Yet the words of the late Norman Manley, Jamaican statesman and national hero, written in 1939 and still cautionary today, apply not only to British but to all foreign influences: “We can take everything that English education has to offer us, but ultimately we must reject the domination of her influence because we are not English, nor should we ever want to be. Instead, we must dig deep into our own consciousness and accept and reject only those things of which we, from our superior knowledge of our own cultural needs, must be the best judge.” The Caribbean theatre needs the assurance of its own idioms; it needs to speak with its own authentic voices, to move to its own rhythms, to shape its own images, to captivate its own audiences. To reach these goals it must be grounded in its own traditions. That is the challenge facing contemporary Caribbean dramatists, choreographers, composers, and theatre practitioners as they look towards the Twenty-first Century. 9.4 SUMMARY  Cross-Cultural Studies is the culminating effort of a distinguished team of international scholars who have worked since the mid-1980s to create the most complete analysis of Caribbean literature ever undertaken.  Conceived as a major contribution to postcolonial studies, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, and regional studies of the Caribbean and the Americas, Cross-Cultural Studies illuminates the interrelations between and among Europe, the Caribbean islands, Africa, and the American continents from the late fifteenth century to the present.  Scholars from five continents bring to bear on the most salient issues of Caribbean literature theoretical and critical positions that are currently in the forefront of discussion in literature, the arts, and public policy.  Among the major issues treated at length in Cross-Cultural Studies are:  The history and construction of racial inequality in Caribbean colonization  The origins and formation of literatures in various Creoles  The gendered literary representation of the Caribbean region  The political and ideological appropriation of Caribbean history in creating the idea of national culture in North and South America, Europe, and Africa  The role of the Caribbean in contemporary theories of Modernism and the Postmodern  The decentering of such canonical authors as Shakespeare 187 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 The vexed but inevitable connectedness of Caribbean literature with both its former colonial metropoles and its geographical neighbours. 9.5 KEYWORDS  Caribbean-the Caribbean region is mainly a chain of islands surrounding the Caribbean Sea, to the north, the region is bordered by the Gulf of Mexico  Colonization-the action or process of settling among and establishing control over the indigenous people of an area  Slavery-condition in which one human being was owned by another  Emancipation-the fact or process of being set free from legal, social, or political restrictions, liberation  Ritualistic: relating to or characteristic of rituals followed as part of a religious or solemn ceremony  Folklore-is the expressive body of culture shared by a particular group of people  Myth-a story from past times, especially one about gods and men of courage. Myths often explain natural or historical events  Spectators-a person who is watching an event, especially a sporting event  Dispossession-the action of depriving someone of land, property, or other possessions  Alienation-the state or experience of being alienated 9.6 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Analyze the Alienation of Caribbean people ___________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ 2. Examine the place of women in the society in Caribbean Literature ___________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ 3. Interpret the Crime and immorality in Caribbean Literature ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 9.7 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions 188 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Short Questions 1. Explain the evolution of drama in the Caribbean 2. Who is the Caribbean most famous playwright? 3. Explain the perspectives in Caribbean Theatre 4. What are the features of Caribbean literature? 5. What are the distinctive features of Caribbean poetry Long Questions 1. Write about any two leading writers in Caribbean Theatre 2. Summarize the influence of Littele Theatre Movement in Caribbean Theatre 3. What are the major themes of Caribbean Theatre? 4. Give note on the two types of rituals in Caribbean Theatre 5. Describe the historical background of the Caribbean Theatre B. Multiple Choice Questions 1.The Caribbeans also sought relief in entertainment through drumming and __ a. singing b. Dancing c. playing d. fighting 2. Caribbeans entertainment took place on days when they were free from __ as well as on certain work-related holidays a. culture b. master c. family work d. work 3. Many of the communal __of black people in the Caribbeans such as Papa Diable or Papa Jab in Trinidad a. Performances b. Practices c. Festivals d. Dancing 189 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

4. The first National Hero of __, Marcus Garvey, was the first proponent of black pride in black culture, a. Jamaica b. Zambia c. Africa d. Kenya 5. In 1941, Greta and Henry Fowler founded the Little Theatre __ a. Culture b. Drama c. Movement d. Writing Answers 1-b, 2-d, 3-c, 4-a, 5-c 9.8 REFERENCES References book  Agloo-Baksh, Stella. Austin C. Clarke : A Biography. Toronto : ECW Press, 1994. Print.  Allen, Walter. Reading a Novel. London : Phoenix House, 1940. Print.  Ellis, Pat. ed. Women of the Caribbean. London : Zed Books Ltd., 1986. Print.  Powell, Dorian. “The Role of Women in the Caribbean”. Social and  Economic Studies. 33.2 (1984) : 100-04. Print. Textbook references  Baugh, Edward. ed. Critics on Caribbean Literature. London : George Allen and Unwin, 1978. Print. Websites  https://www.britannica.com/art/Caribbean-literature  https://www.grin.com/document/346417  https://www.jstor.org/stable/40653115 190 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 https://benjamins.com/catalog/chlel.xii 191 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT – 10 CARIBBEAN: DEREK WALCOTT: DREAM ON MONKEY MOUNTAIN STRUCTURE 10.0 Learning Objectives 10.1 Introduction to the Author 10.2 Introduction to the Play 10.3 Characters 10.4 Summary 10.5 Themes 10.6 Metaphors and the Reclamation of Blackness in Dream on Monkey Mountain 10.7 Summary 10.8 Keywords 10.9 Learning Activities 10.10 Unit End Questions 10.11 Reference 10.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Understand the works of Derek Walcott  Identify their themes of the play  Analyse the play in detail 10.1 INTRODUCTION TO THE AUTHOR Derek Walcott, in full Derek Alton Walcott, (born January 23, 1930, Castries, Saint Lucia— died March 17, 2017, Cap Estate), West Indian poet and playwright noted for works that explore the Caribbean cultural experience. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. Walcott was educated at St. Mary’s College in Saint Lucia and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. He began writing poetry at an early age, taught at schools in Saint Lucia and Grenada, and contributed articles and reviews to periodicals in Trinidad and Jamaica. Productions of his plays began in Saint Lucia in 1950, and he studied theatre in New York City in 1958–59. He lived thereafter in Trinidad and the United States, teaching for part of the year at Boston University. 192 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Walcott was best known for his poetry, beginning with In a Green Night: Poems 1948– 1960 (1962). This book is typical of his early poetry in its celebration of the Caribbean landscape’s natural beauty. The verse in Selected Poems (1964), The Castaway (1965), and The Gulf (1969) is similarly lush in style and incantatory in mood as Walcott expresses his feelings of personal isolation, caught between his European cultural orientation and the black folk cultures of his native Caribbean. Another Life (1973) is a book-length autobiographical poem. In Sea Grapes (1976) and The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), Walcott uses a tenser, more economical style to examine the deep cultural divisions of language and race in the Caribbean. The Fortunate Traveller (1981) and Midsummer (1984) explore his own situation as a black writer in America who has become increasingly estranged from his Caribbean homeland. Walcott’s Collected Poems, 1948–1984, was published in 1986. In his book-length poem Omeros (1990), he retells the dramas of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in a 20th-century Caribbean setting. The poems in The Bounty (1997) are mostly devoted to Walcott’s Caribbean home and the death of his mother. In 2000 Walcott published Tiepolo’s Hound, a poetic biography of West Indian-born French painter Camille Pissarro with autobiographical references and reproductions of Walcott’s paintings. (The latter are mostly watercolours of island scenes. Walcott’s father had been a visual artist, and the poet began painting early on.) The book-length poem The Prodigal (2004), its setting shifting between Europe and North America, explores the nature of identity and exile. Selected Poems, a collection of poetry from across Walcott’s career, appeared in 2007. Aging is a central theme in White Egrets (2010), a volume of new poems. Of Walcott’s approximately 30 plays, the best-known are Dream on Monkey Mountain (produced 1967), a West Indian’s quest to claim his identity and his heritage; Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958), based on a West Indian folktale about brothers who seek to overpower the Devil; and Pantomime (1978), an exploration of colonial relationships through the Robinson Crusoe story. The Odyssey: A Stage Version appeared in 1993. Many of Walcott’s plays make use of themes from black folk culture in the Caribbean. The essays in What the Twilight Says (1998) are literary criticism. They examine such subjects as the intersection of literature and politics and the art of translation. Walcott has been an assiduous traveller to other countries but has always, not least in his efforts to create an indigenous drama, felt himself deeply-rooted in Caribbean society with its cultural fusion of African, Asiatic and European elements. For many years, he has divided his time between Trinidad, where he has his home as a writer, and Boston University, where he teaches literature and creative writing. For many of us, images of the Caribbean’s sand and surf might conjure thoughts of pirates or Spring Break parties. However, to many, the hundreds of islands in the Caribbean Sea are a source of endless inspiration - that is, other than for pillaging and debauchery. Among them 193 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

is Derek Walcott, a decorated and beloved poet of the Caribbean Islands, whose works have been capturing the culture and history of this maritime paradise for decades. Derek and his twin brother Roderick (later a playwright himself) were born on January 23, 1930, in Castries, St. Lucia. Growing up, both of Derek’s parents - his mother a teacher and his father a painter and poet - were major supporters of the arts, and Derek was himself originally trained as a painter. He discovered his passion for writing at an early age, though, and decided to devote himself more to its pursuit. At the age of only 14, Derek published his first poem (‘1944’) in the Voice of St. Lucia. By the time he was 19, his mother had helped him raise the money to self-publish two poetry collections: 25 Poems and Epitaphs for the Young: XII Cantos. These early endeavors no doubt helped Derek secure the Colonial Development and Welfare scholarship, which allowed him to attend the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. After college, Derek moved to Trinidad, where he worked as a critic and educator and founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. While working in Trinidad, Walcott continued to write, eventually compiling a collection of poems exploring the culture and history of the Caribbean, particularly in the context of colonialism - the theory and practice of seizing territory, typically for the purposes of national expansion and economic exploitation. This anthology (In a Green Night: Poems 1948- 1960) was published in 1962 and was Walcott’s major breakthrough into the literary world. Since the 1960’s, Walcott has taught at a variety of schools across the world, including Boston University, where he established the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in 1981 and from which he retired only in 2007. Through the years, he also maintained a steady stream of publications, both in poetry and drama. Walcott’s impressive body of work and inexhaustible dedication to Caribbean culture have earned him a number of awards and honors. These include British royal honors (i.e. knighthood) as well as a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ award. Perhaps most importantly, though, Derek Walcott became the first Caribbean native to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. Even now at the age of 85, Walcott is still teaching, currently holding the post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex. He’s still even publishing work, with his latest anthology (The Poetry of Derek Walcott: 1948-2013) coming out as recently as 2014! Keep reading to get a glimpse at just a few of these many works that have made Walcott the quintessential Caribbean poet. 194 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

10.2 INTRODUCTION TO THE PLAY 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. Produced off-Broadway by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1971, it won an Obie Award that year for “Best Foreign Play”. 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.” 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. 10.3 CHARACTERS • Makak- (Monkey) Poor, Ugly, Old Charcoal Burner • Carporal Lestrade- A Mulatto • Fellow Prisoners •Tigre (Tiger) •Souris (Rat) • Friend Of Makak- Moustique (Mosquito) • Basil- A Carpenter, Coffin Maker (A Symbol of Death) •A Singer, A Male Chorus, Two Drummers Makak, “an old Negro,” the hermit of Monkey Mountain. Sixty years old and ugly, he was named for the macaque monkey, which he resembles. He is by trade a wood-gatherer and 195 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

charcoal burner, but in his dream, he is also the king of Africa, following the instructions of an apparition of a beautiful white woman. Partly mad, partly possessed, and partly drunk, he possibly dreams the entire play in Lestrade’s cell, after a night of drunkenness in a local tavern. He is arrested for stealing coal and for disorderly conduct. In an elaborate allegorical configuration, he is the Christ figure at the beginning of his public life, performing miracles, collecting followers, and leaving behind exaggerated stories of his wonders, both betrayed and believed, as the Lion of Africa who will lead his black brethren back to Africa, but only after killing their “whiteness.” He experiences a sort of apotheosis when he kills the “white” woman who haunted him into this religious and political mission. CORPORAL LESTRADE Corporal Lestrade, a mulatto guard of the town jail, “doing the white man’s work” in jailing and questioning Makak but finally “confessing” to his blackness in the final apotheosis. At first cruel in the use of his power, he forces the villagers into hypocritically agreeing to his absurd statements and pursues Makak to “hunt” him like an animal. The name of his rank suggests his allegorical... BASIL Basil is a black man (or perhaps apparition) who appears when death is imminent for someone in the scene. Wearing a dark coat and hat, he is described by some as a cabinetmaker. Basil also plays a constant role in Makak’s journey after he reaches Monkey Mountain. He compels Corporal Lestrade to confess his sins, resulting in Lestrade’s personal epiphany. When the scene shifts to Africa, Basil reads the list of the accused. FELIX HOBAIN See Makak JOSEPHUS Josephus is the sick man who is healed by Makak. He suffers from a fever without sweat until Makak saves his life. CORPORAL LESTRADE Corporal Lestrade runs the jail and is responsible for the arrest of Makak. Lestrade is a mulatto, and at the beginning of the play identifies himself with the white authority figures. 10.4 ANALYSIS After a short epigraph (a quote by Martinican post-colonial political philosopher Franz Fanon), the play opens with a chorus singing a call-and-response while dancers cross the stage. Two jail cells appear. One holds Tigre and Souris, black men in jail for thievery, and the other is empty. The biracial Corporal Lestrade appears, dragging Makak, an older black man, whom he throws into the empty cell. Lestrade argues with the other prisoners, whom he views as animals, 196 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

and then hosts an improvised trial. Makak, tired and confused, just wants to return to his home on Monkey Mountain. He claims an apparition of a white woman inspired him. Makak dreams of a time before his arrest. His friend Moustique finds Makak on the ground outside his house, recovering from a fit. Moustique encourages Makak to come to the market, where they will sell the coal Makak has produced. Makak remembers a dream in which the apparition of a white woman told him to go back to Africa. Makak announces his desire to do so. On a country road, Moustique finds a group of people gathered around a sick man. They light hot coals beneath him, hoping to sweat out the illness caused by a snakebite. Moustique offers to fetch his friend, a healer, in exchange for bread and money. The people accept, and Moustique returns with Makak, who performs a healing ceremony. The people are so grateful that they shower Moustique with gifts. Moustique wants to use Makak’s healing power for financial gain, but Makak refuses. They head toward the market. At the market, Lestrade and an Inspector survey the scene. Rumors of a powerful healer have preceded them. Moustique appears, dressed as Makak, and puts on a show as a healer. When his identity is uncovered, the crowd surrounds him and beats him mercilessly as Lestrade watches. Makak arrives and runs to his stricken friend, but Moustique dies of his injuries, passing away in Makak’s arms. Makak falls to the ground in a fit. After another short epigraph by Franz Fanon, Makak wakes up in a jail cell again. Lestrade wakes him, along with Tigre and Souris, who notice that Makak has money and decide to rob him. They convince Makak to kill Lestrade, and Makak agrees. He feigns illness and then, using a hidden dagger, stabs Lestrade. Makak releases his fellow prisoners, and they escape into the forest. Lestrade recovers—his wound is only minor—and gives chase. In the forest, Makak’s behavior becomes erratic. He promises to take Tigre and Souris to Africa and make them generals. Makak leads the others into hiding when they hear Lestrade approach. Becoming increasingly distraught, Lestrade repents his sins and joins Makak’s quest. Makak has also convinced Souris, who now also wishes to go to Africa with him. Only Tigre refuses when given the chance to accompany them. In response, Lestrade stabs Tigre. The others leave for Africa, where the Corporal announces that he will enforce the law on behalf of Makak. A crowd carries Makak into an African court as a conquering king. Lestrade leads the calls for praise, and the crowd responds jubilantly, but Makak is not happy: He sees himself as a hollow ghost of his old self. Lestrade calls prisoners before the king. The first is a list of historical white people, many of whom are already dead. They are condemned for being white and written out of history as punishment. Next, Moustique is dragged before the court and accused of 197 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

betraying Makak’s dream. Though he pleads with Makak, claiming that Makak has grown mad, old, and blind as king, Makak looks away. Moustique is taken away to be executed. Finally, the apparition of the white woman is brought forth. Lestrade demands her execution as she is a temptation. He hands Makak a sword. Makak insists on privacy, and, when everyone leaves, he executes the apparition. In the Epilogue, the dream has ended, and Makak is once again in his jail cell. This time, when Lestrade asks him his name, he answers that he is Felix Hobain. He accepts his identity and, when Moustique arrives, Makak and Moustique return happily to Monkey Mountain. This is the portentous and surrealistic dream around which the whole action of the play centers. Makak, an old hermit, has lived alone on Monkey Mountain his whole life. The dream he dreams one night forces him off the mountain and on a journey toward Africa. How Makak will get from a small Caribbean island to Africa does not seem to trouble him in the least. With his only friend, Moustique, unwillingly accompanying him, Makak becomes a sort of faith healer. When Moustique is killed in a marketplace riot, Makak is jailed and once he manages to escape with two other convicts, he only wants to go home to Monkey Mountain. The play represents Makak’s search for home, but it is also about native man being oppressed by colonial rule and the clash of West Indian and English culture. The play ends not with a beheading, “but with a man’s reaching an accommodation with his environment. Makak returns to his mountain retreat a new man because of his increased insight. Makak (monkey), a poor, ugly, old charcoal burner, is in prison on “drunk and disorderly charges.” While being interrogated by Corporal Lestrade, the mulatto enforcer of white laws, he tries to tell his story to the military and his two fellow prisoners, Tigre (tiger) and Souris (rat). They will not listen, but the audience relives Makak’s dream. In his dream on Monkey Mountain, Makak experiences a visitation from a white Apparition. She declares that he is the son of African kings and as such, he should return to Africa. Empowered and acting like a prophet, Makak and his friend Moustique (mosquito) set forth for the village. The doubtful Moustique at first humors his friend, but when Makak cures a villager of fever, Moustique becomes his disciple and agent and, if the price is right, his impersonator, for Makak’s growing renown precedes him. Moustique’s impersonation of Makak is exposed by Basil, the carpenter and coffin maker. This swindle costs Moustique his life at the hands of an angry mob. Again, we see Makak in his cell, but he escapes after wounding Corporal Lestrade. Along with Souris and Tigre, he sets off for Africa to claim his kingship but is pursued by Lestrade into the forest at the foot of Monkey Mountain. There, the Corporal experiences a revelation that leads him to accept his blackness. With his transformation, he becomes the advocate for black law and condemns all that is white. Meanwhile, Makak rethinks his back-to-Africa decision and, in a 198 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

dream-within-a-dream, foresees the violence that will result from the frenzy for power and revenge. Makak, a black charcoal-burner, has been imprisoned for his own safety, after getting drunk and smashing things in the local market. In jail he has a vision of a white Goddess, who urges him to return to Africa. Unhappy about the way the mulatto warder Corporal Lestrade approves of ‘white man’s law’, Makak despises himself for being black and longs to lead his people back to Africa, where, in his dreams, he will become a fearless warrior. Even Lestrade will join his exodus, while various hangers-on pretend to lend Makak his support while trying to undermine and rob him. Amazingly, he receives a floral tribute from the Ku Klux Klan. Finally, he beheads the white apparition. Waking from his drunken dream, he finds he has overcome his obsession with whiteness and calls himself by his real name, Felix Hobain. Reconciled to life on his Caribbean Island, Makak resolves to return to his home on Monkey Mountain and looks forward to a new life. In it the playwright, himself of mixed race, urges his fellow countrymen neither to imitate the whites nor to get trapped in dreams of returning to Africa. Instead, he encourages his audience to embrace the multiracial, multicultural character of Caribbean society and celebrate its richness, which is reflected in the mixture of languages and theatrical styles, including song and dance. Monkey Mountain is about many things. It’s about the West Indian search for identity, and about the damage that the colonial spirit has done to the soul. Makak [the central figure] and the people he meets in the play are all working out the meaning of their culture; they are going through an upheaval, shaking of concepts that have been imposed on them for centuries. Dream on Monkey Mountain is a hero/quest myth. The motif of the hero/seeker Makak, who must defy odds and gods to achieve his quest, is to find his selfhood. Makak becomes the representative of all downtrodden and impoverished blacks who long to be redeemed, and of the transformation that brings about such redemption. The transformation comes in the form of a dream in which Makak describes himself as walking through white mist to the charcoal pit on the mountain. He is traveling through consciousness, going from whiteness to blackness, through vagueness toward a solid identity. He envisions a spider web heavy with diamonds, and “when my hand brush it, let the chain break.” The chain symbolizes the chain of slavery, both psychological and actual, while the spider’s web represents all the problems resulting from history, racism and colonialism. The diamonds are the oppressed people. Thus, in his dream, Makak transcends time and space and moves from being almost an animal to royalty and God-like. 199 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

The author sees Makak’s dream as a revolution. “[It] projects the psychological realities of the Black man’s relationship with both the White West and with the African past.” The fantasies belong not just to Makak, but to Moustique, Tigre, Souris, and the jailer, Corporal Lestrade. In a sense, the dream is a kind of escape, but it is also an affirmation of self, black selfhood. Makak affirms his human identity because he has the capacity to dream; from a despised and self-hating hermit he emerges from the dream with a triumphant sense of his own humanity. So when he is released from the prison, the gaining of his physical freedom is like a new life, a revolutionary beginning for Makak and his people. In the progression of the dream, Walcott creates characters who are altar egos to show the contradictions of Makak’s undeveloped Black consciousness. Moustique’s ugliness is a physical reflection of Makak’s selfloathing. However, when Moustique tries to turn Makak’s healing powers into a quick dollar, he represents the exploitative motives that are present in Makak’s early development. “Makak and Moustique together represent the ambiguity of the undeveloped revolutionary self.” By the same token, the extreme anti-Black stance of the mulatto Lestrade represents Makak’s self-hatred. Lestrade (meaning “stand” or “platform” in French) who straddles the middle ground, and when he is converted to Makak’s Black cause, he urges him to destroy all that is white, including his white Apparition. Lestrade’s confession is also Makak’s and propels him into beheading the Apparition so that he can enter black selfhood. 10.5 THEMES The Source of Disillusionment The Source of New Wisdom and Accommodation With Present Diaspora Of Caribbean Negros Denial Of Self, Space and Power When the playwright was asked about his play, he replied: “Monkey Mountain is about many things. It’s about the West Indian search for identity, and about the damage that the colonial spirit has done to the soul. Makak and the people he meets in the play are all working out the meaning of their culture; they are going through an upheaval, shaking off concepts that have been imposed on them for centuries. Makak is an extreme representation of what colonialism can do to a man—he is reduced to an almost animal like state of degradation. When he dreams that he is the king of a united Africa, some sort of spiritual return to Africa can be made. The romanticized pastoral vision of Africa that many black people hold can be an escape from the reality of the world around us. The problem is to recognize our African origins but not to 200 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)