Monkey Mountain Research Articles

Religious Possession and Self-Repossession: The Black Nationalist Movements and the Anglophone Caribbean Ritual Plays in the 1960s–1970s

Since achieving political independence in the 1960s, Anglophone Caribbean nations have faced the urgent task of exploring cultural independence. In the socio-cultural sphere, Black nationalism dominated, with Pan-Africanism and Rastafarianism exerting significant influence. In literary creation, writers and intellectuals sought to unearth local popular religions and folk traditions to produce literature that was distinctively Caribbean. In this quest, rituals—especially those involving religious possession—emerged as pivotal tools for writers to explore historical traditions and reflect on identity formation. Ritual plays, in particular, vividly represented these dynamics within the socio-cultural context. This paper examines the interaction between Black nationalist movements and ritual plays during this period, highlighting their significant role in shaping Caribbean identities. It reveals that ritual plays such as Dream on Monkey Mountain, Couvade, and An Echo in the Bone challenge Pan-Africanism promoted by Black nationalist movements. Instead, they employ ancestor possession rituals and elements from multiple religious rituals to construct a native Caribbean identity. These plays underscore the central role of Afro-Caribbean traditions while also highlighting the region’s diverse cultural heritage and the localized nature of Caribbean identity. Furthermore, they broaden the use of religious rituals in recalling and understanding traditions.

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

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

Race Defamation

As a postcolonial text, Dream on Monkey Mountain depicts the colonial discourses regarding the black. Derek Walcott has vividly presented the sufferings of the black in his play. The inferiority of the black is explicitly reflected in which the white is superior and the black is less than human beings. The best method to approach this text is from a postcolonial viewpoint. Major postcolonial concepts such as othering, mimicry and hybridity. The importance of this study is that major postcolonial legacies are mirrored in this play. The portrayal of racism and the weakness of the blacks are openly presented.

NGUGİ WA THİONG’O VE DEREK WALCOTT’UN POSTKOLONYAL OYUNLARINDA KÜLTÜREL ANLAŞMAZLIKLAR VE KİMLİK KARMAŞASI

Postcolonial studies contest the ideological discourses of modernity that seek to normalize the unequal development and frequently disadvantageous histories of nations, races, groups, and individuals by offering adjustments to cultural difference, social authority, and social, economic, and political discrimination. Postcolonial theory advocates for a society in which former colonies and colonizers may establish mutually beneficial relationships based on mutual respect and comprehension. Key to postcolonial criticism is deconstructing the supremacy and authority of colonial logic by exposing its compression, racism, and imperialism. The contributions of Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Caribbean author Derek Walcott to postcolonial studies are diverse, as they are both well-known authors with considerable and distinctive postcolonial settings who provide valuable resources for postcolonial studies. Although their focus is on separate continents, they share a strong anti-colonial conscience and concern for the identity and destiny of black people in this quickly changing world. Their seminal works, I Will Marry When I Want and Dream on Monkey Mountain, focus on the continuum of African oppression and West Indian servitude and share the comparable critical perspectives that are the subject of this research. Within this context, this study investigates the cultural disputes and identity dilemmas in the works of wa Thiong’o and Walcott through the lens of postcolonial criticism. The study undertakes a comparative analysis of the plays, focusing on the exploration of cultural identity, Otherness, and hybridity within the works of the two writers.

Frontispiece: Aza‐Ortho‐Quinone Methides as Reactive Intermediates: Generation and Utility in Contemporary Asymmetric Synthesis

Dedicated to NSYSU Chemistry Department's 40th Anniversary. The design incorporates some of NSYSU's distinct features. These are the scenic Sizihwan bay, famous for its beautiful sunset, and the Monkey Mountain, home to the endemic Formosan rock macaques. Starting from the Aza-o-QM mountain, different N-heterocycles were obtained through reactions aided by the representative chiral catalysts shown in the sun. The flapping of the birds’ wings cleverly depicts the flow of the process. For more information, see the Review by H.-H. Liao, M. Rueping and co-workers (DOI: 10.1002/chem.202201112)

Dream on Monkey Mountain The Dilemma of Identity

The research aims at discussing critically the thematic structure and the common techniques of Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain from a post-postcolonial perspective. It explores Walcott’s quest for cultural freedom to overcome the process of inferiorization that restricts the Afro-Caribbean identity within the socio-historical discourse. The research explains the dilemma of a hybrid individual who searches for his self-revival through ‘home’ returning psychologically or physically. It explores the hegemony of leadership that serves the colonial agenda. Also, it surveys the dramaturgy form of the dream and contradictory structure to explore indigenous psychology which includes a series of discursive formations such as diaspora studies, identity and social

The Sacred Art of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature

The Sacred Art of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature

Body and Gesture in Derek Walcott’s Theatre

Reflecting on Derek Walcott’s early relationship with movement, dance and ritual, this article sheds light on the centrality of embodied memory in Walcott’s work for the stage and reflects on the relationship between memory and materiality in his epistemology of performance. Walcott’s ideas shaped his approach to dramaturgy in the late 1950s and position his work in relation to global debates around materialism (Brecht) and ritualism (Grotowski) in the theatre. A discussion of two plays, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Pantomime, examines the use of gestural language in specific performances of each. Such an approach demonstrates that the importance of embodied memory, as reflected in the staging of these plays, relates to certain Afro-Caribbean belief systems, which have exerted much influence on Walcott’s work. The article also emphasizes how Walcott’s theatre functions as a decolonial praxis that fosters the emergence of empowered subjectivities and Africanist modes of humanness that challenge the cultural order of colonialism. Jason Allen-Paisant is a lecturer in Caribbean Poetics and Decolonial Thought at the University of Leeds, and Director of the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. He is currently at work on the monograph Staging Black Futures in the Twenty-First Century.

Goodbye Monkey Mountain

Goodbye Monkey Mountain Michael P. Williams (bio) My great-aunt Mary Anne was among the closest of distant relatives, a person met once and then twice removed, first from social occasions, and then from the active family conversation. She was in King Kong, my family had told me on the few occasions her name popped up. She was an extra, but maybe also, she was the heroine? Something vague and noncommittal but also insistent. Certainly she had been touched by the great ape in some shape or form, and that was all there was to know about it. As a kid, this was enough for me. I was thirty-four years old when Mary Anne died on November 8, 2016, barely memorialized, with a placeholder obituary probably issued by the coroner. They got her birth date comically wrong as “June 18, 2016,” and in the process created what looked like a tragic death notice for a newborn. The inaccuracy was vexing. For years I had been collecting death notices for my relatives with the obsession of a fanboy and a cataloger. The baseball-card-like funeral cards I’d piled up were only the barest of genealogical evidence, and my own free subscription to popular family history site Ancestry.com blocked me with paywalls at every turn. So when Mary Anne died—my first significant family death in the age of Web 2.0—I had hoped for something big, weighty, and useful, something to root my family tree deeper. But there was nothing there. Just a black hole of information. But a black hole is, at least in my rudimentary understanding of astrophysics, not an absence but an extreme presence. A density of matter so hungry for light that photons cannot escape it. So I shone my little light into this black hole, embodied by the local cluster of papers jumbled in my parents’ attic. So there’s me, Christmas Eve, 2017, with my iPhone’s flash-light shining in the dark recesses of the attic, hunched over old documents and photos heaped into a plastic tub. And there she finally was, Mary [End Page 77] Anne Scully, in a headshot copyrighted 1961. “E.P.L.P. Productions: King Kong.” ________ My mom had joined Ancestry.com and submitted a dna sample. What was revealed hewed close enough to our basic mathematical computation of her heritage: 75 percent Irish and 25 percent German. She had signed up for a high tier of service, in the two-hundred-dollar range, and had pursued her genealogy but only to the limits of what she could recall. That is, our family tree grew only as tall as her memory was long. I, shameless cheapskate and relentless quester, was only too happy to take over her account and start filling in gaps and extending the timeline backward into history. Baptismal records from Ireland started sharing a digital shoebox with portraits in mid-century yearbooks. I was finding relatives dating back to the age of scientific racism, when images of “Irish apes” adorned popular magazines just as Ireland’s population flooded foreign shores seeking relief from famine. And individual stories with casts of characters were emerging for me. Some were new, like how my great-great-grandaunt Mary Lavelle was murdered in her home on January 1, 1923, by her unstable husband, who later died in Philadelphia’s favorite Halloween ghost house, Eastern State Penitentiary. Other stories were known but starting to become documented, like how her nephew, Vincent—my great-grandfather and Mary Anne’s father—made his way from Manchester and finally to Philadelphia, where on one awful New Year’s Day at the age of eleven, he would hide himself away in an upstairs bedroom as his aunt was shot five times in the stomach. Compelling as they were, these stories always felt full of holes. My dead remained half known, half guessed. Completing their profiles became an obsession. I was visiting the Philadelphia City Archives on some days off, the Free Library of Philadelphia on others, and sneaking in research breaks at the university library where I work. Like a protagonist in an eerie horror film, I was scouring microfilm...

Derek Walcott discusses his painting and poetry

Derek Walcott (1930-2017), Caribbean poet and playwright, wrote, among many other works, the play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967) and the epic Omeros (1990). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992. Walcott’s writing revolves around the West Indies, its national identity and European heritage, the theme of exile and betrayal, in a rich blend of verse, prose, Creole and English, filled with classical allusions as well as calypso rhythm. Donald Friedman recorded him in 2003. Below...

Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain: A Multifaceted Phantasmagorical Narrative

When identifying different strands of criticism on Derek Walcott’s play, Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970), one is pleasantly surprised by the scope of theoretical approaches towards his dramatic work. Almost every critical school of literary theory can be found in the writings on Walcott’s play. This diversity in form is paralleled by an even greater variety of content, making it all but impossible to tag Walcott’s drama with a single label. Most critics concur that Dream on Monkey Mountain is a complex play, full of complicated, sometimes, contradictory images and metaphors. Dangling between dreams and reality, Walcott’s play, according to the author of this paper, is a multifaceted narrative. Focusing only on the concept of “dream”, the present article, appreciating and reflecting some of the significant relevant interpretations (all about dreams), tends to add that the identity, thus destiny, of a (colonised) nation is shaped also by their collective unconscious shared in the psychic inheritance of all members of the human family.

Forget the Muse, think only of the (Decentered) Subject?

This essay involves an exploration of complex and fascinating acts of decentering and re-centering of writers in relation to traditional Muses as institutionalizations or sedimentations of artistic and intellectual inspiration in cultural tradition. Using the specific example of Wole Soyinka’s much discussed appropriation of Ogun, the Yoruba god of war, metallurgy and creativity as a point of departure, the paper gives what is intended as a far more complex and even more contradictory relationship between Soyinka and this chosen Muse than what we typically encounter in the criticism and scholarship on the Nigerian dramatist’s writings. This is done in two distinct though interlocking interpretive, discursive moves: first, by reading Soyinka’s positive appropriation of Ogun against Derek Walcott’s disavowal of the Muses of both Europe and Africa in the play, Dream on Monkey Mountain and in one of his most important essays, “The Muse of History”; and, secondly, by critically excavating Soyinka’s own scathing and revisionary critique of Ogun as a Muse in his first major play, A Dance of the Forests. Building on these readings of Soyinka and Walcott, the essay ends with a plea for paying as much attention, in the postcolonial Nigerian and African context, to re-centering as is given to decentering in Western postmodernist discourses, always with an eye to the interpenetrations and exchanges that take place among the diverse literary and cultural traditions of the world.

Stratigraphy of the Roraima Supergroup along the Brazil-Guyana border in the Guiana shield, Northern Amazonian Craton - results of the Brazil-Guyana Geology and Geodiversity Mapping Project

ABSTRACT: The Geological and Geodiversity Mapping binational program along the Brazil-Guyana border zone allowed reviewing and integrating the stratigraphy and nomenclature of the Roraima Supergroup along the Pakaraima Sedimentary Block present in northeastern Brazil and western Guyana. The area mapped corresponds to a buffer zone of approximately 25 km in width on both sides of the border, of a region extending along the Maú-Ireng River between Mount Roraima (the triple-border region) and Mutum Village in Brazil and Monkey Mountain in Guyana. The south border of the Roraima basin is overlain exclusively by effusive and volcaniclastic rocks of the Surumu Group of Brazil and its correlated equivalent the Burro-Burro Group of Guyana.

Seroprevalence of tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) in naturally exposed monkeys ( Macaca sylvanus) and sheep and prevalence of TBE virus in ticks in a TBE endemic area in Germany

In a recently published study, a clinical case of severe tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) in a monkey ( Macaca sylvanus) was described after natural exposure (tick bite) in a TBE endemic area in Germany, and from the tissue of this monkey the strain ‘Salem’, closely related to the strain ‘Neudoerfl’, was isolated and characterized. In this study, it was our aim to test all the available data for characterizing a TBE endemic area like TBE cases in humans and animals, TBE virus (TBEV) in ticks, and TBE-positive sera from animals. Sera from 283 monkeys and 100 sheep as well as 294 unfed ticks were collected at the monkey mountain Salem and its surroundings. A seroprevalence of 2.6% in monkeys and 9% in sheep were found. Furthermore, a new real-time RT-PCR method was established and used, in combination with an already published RT-qPCR, for TBEV genome detection in field-collected ticks, but no TBEV could be detected in the ticks tested.

Dreams, Delirium, and Decolonization in Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain

Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967) places emphasis on the connections between what Walcott terms the “given minds of the principal characters,” their possible madness, and their ambiguous dreams. Walcott takes full advantage of the dramatic form to explore madness and dream, creating a doubled division for his characters and audience between fantasy and reality, madness and sanity. In this essay, This article reads Walcott’s choice of the theater, rather than poetry, as necessary in engendering a collective response to, and responsibility for, envisioning a postcolonial West Indian community. It also examines the ways in which the play combines various influences with the representation of dreams and madness to stage visions of Caribbean unity.

Roots and routes: tracking form and history in African diasporic narrative and performance

Much Black diasporic scholarship is beholden to one or the other of these two claims: the first locates Africa as origin, by way of anthropological verification and corroboration, while the other tends to erase it in the name of an anti‐essentialist articulation of hybridity and creolisation. The consequence of their self‐representations within the binary discourse of essentialism and anti‐essentialism is that each portrays itself as being in conceptual opposition to the other. In this article, I suggest that this binarism is a false one and attempt to chart a path out of these two paradigms by destabilising and undermining their binary self‐positioning. I argue for a model that at once transcends this binarism and takes care of the ‘deficiency’ of each model; the model I propose simultaneously foregrounds Africa in a non‐essentialising manner and recognises the trajectories and transformations of history in the reading of African diasporic narrative and performance. I suggest that we deploy the concept of genre in the reading of these narratives because genre at once inscribes origin as discursive and thus erases the fixity and truth claims of singular origins, while simultaneously disclaiming and de‐authorising any notions of singular determinations. I consolidate this suggestion with a genre‐based reading of Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain.

‘A sound that is missing’: writing Africa in the anglophone Caribbean

Early twentieth-century figures from the Caribbean sometimes looked to Africa as both a source of Caribbean cultural identity and a political cause. Recent anglophone writers have explored imaginatively the meaning of Africa for Caribbean culture beyond a distinctly Afrocentric optic. This involves the rethinking of Africa's relationship with the Caribbean, as in Derek Walcott's poetry and his play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967), and also in Caryl Phillips's novel Crossing the River (1993) and other writings. Focusing on the sonic metaphors used by each writer, this article uncovers the new envisioning of Africa and the Caribbean in recent creative texts.

Monkey Research in China: Developing a Natural Resource

China's contribution to primate research is no longer limited to supplying monkeys to scientists abroad. With an abundance of wild rhesus macaques, low labor costs, and a nonhostile environment for animal research, scientists are finding that China is the place to be for research using macaques as models of human disease.

Monkey Mountain as a Megazoo: Analyzing the Naturalistic Claims of "Wild Monkey Parks" in Japan

AbstractIn Japan, yaen kōen or "wild monkey parks" are popular visitor attractions that show free-ranging monkey troops to the paying public. Unlike zoos, which display nonhuman animals through confinement, monkey parks control the movements of the monkeys through provisioning. The parks project an image of themselves as "natural zoos," claiming to practice a more authentic form of displaying animals-in-the-wild than that practiced by the zoo. This article critically evaluates the monkey park's claim by examining park management of the monkeys. The article shows the monkey park's claim to display wild monkeys to be questionable because of the way that provisioning changes monkey behavior. Against the background of human encroachment onto the forest habitat of the monkey, the long-term effect of provisioning is to sedentarize nomadic monkey animals and to turn the wild monkey park into a megazoo.

Of Men and Heroes: Walcott and the Haitian Revolution

Of Men and Heroes:Walcott and the Haitian Revolution Edward Baugh (bio) The Haitian Revolution has exercised the Caribbean literary imagination to significant effect. It has spawned major works by some of the region's most distinguished writers. Outside of Haiti itself, there is the Cuban Alejo Carpentier's El reino de este mundo (1949), and, from the French Caribbean, two plays: Edouard Glissant's Monsieur Toussaint (1961) and Aimé Césaire's La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1970). Walcott has returned to the subject again and again, over a period of nearly forty years. His Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes (1950), first produced in 1949, was his first substantial play. The Revolution provided one of the four major segments of his historical pageant Drums and Colours (1961), first produced in 1958. His major work on the Revolution, The Haitian Earth, was first produced in 1984. These works reward comparison, which, in a limited way, is the project of this paper. They constitute a fertile microcosm in which to explore Caribbean imagination, its continuities and variations. We must also put alongside these fictive works C. L. R. James's famous historical account, Black Jacobins. What is more, his little-known play of the same title was first produced even earlier, in 1936. Walcott's The Haitian Trilogy conveniently collects all three of his dramatic engagements with the Revolution: Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours and The Haitian Earth. To compare his treatment of the Revolution in the three is to enhance understanding of his evolution as a dramatist, a Caribbean dramatist, both in content or world view and in style, as well as to enhance understanding of the hold of the Haitian Revolution on Caribbean imagination. The development reflects his foundational contribution to a Caribbean theater rooted in the experience of the common people, drawing on their arts of performance, including their language, and in the context of the colonial experience of the region. A central motive in this endeavor was to address the apparent or supposed absence or dearth of home-grown heroes. In chapter 12 of Another Life, Walcott recalls how, still a teenager, he was fired by the dream and difficulty of making a new world of art in his island(s). It was to be an art made out of native materials, like the "plain wood" (Collected Poems 216) with which the carpenter, Dominic, worked, giving off "the smell of our own speech" (Collected Poems 217), and taking the Caribbean artist beyond a hankering after "the marble [of] Greece" ("Ruins of a Great House," Collected Poems 19) and all that it stood for, the hankering after "heroic palaces / netted in sea-green vines" ("Royal Palms" 16). The train of thought in chapter 12 of Another Life reaches a crucial point when the poet exclaims: [End Page 45] Christ, to shake off the cerecloths, to stride from the magnetic sphere of legends. To change the marble sweat which pebbled the wave-blow of stone brows for the sweat-drop on the cedar plank, for a future without heroes, to make out of these foresters and fishermen heraldic men! (Collected Poems 217) The "gigantic myth" and "the stone brows" of Classical sculpture connote the heroics that attach to the "great tradition" of Classical art and literature. It was in his plays that Walcott was most directly and definitively to take the "stride," a shaping movement in his effort to make a Caribbean drama. "To make of these foresters and fishermen / heraldic men," instead of "heroes," is "a succinct statement of what [Walcott] aimed to do in plays like The Sea at Dauphin, Malcochon, Ti-Jean and His Brothers and Dream on Monkey Mountain" (Baugh 43).1 The stride may be traced in the movement from Henri Christophe and Drums and Colours to the four plays in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (1970), as well as The Haitian Earth, even if the movement is not neatly chronological. Further, whatever meaning Walcott may be understanding from the term heraldic man will retain perhaps more than a trace of "hero." In other words, in resorting to the former term, Walcott retains some of the connotations of the...