Dream on a Monkey

Mountain

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• SOURIS
• How you will take us to Africa? What we will do there? In the
darkness, now that I can see nothing, maybe, it is there I am. When I
was a little boy, living in darkness, I was so afraid, it was as if I was
sinking, drowning in a grave, and me and the darkness was the same,
and God was like a big white man, a big white man I was afraid of.
(141-290)

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• SOURIS
• Well, God help us. I really frighten. Like a child again. [MAKAK lights
the fire. They watch him] And that is what they teach me since I
small. To be black like coal, and to dream of milk. To love God, and
obey the white man. (142/290)

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• BASIL
• I am Basil, the carpenter, the charcoal seller. I do not exist. A figment
of the imagination, a banana of the mind …
• CORPORAL
• Banana of the mind, figment of the … ho! That’s pretty good.
Goodbye. [He goes] (144-297)

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• BASIL
• You have one minute to repent. To recant (repudiate). To renounce.
• CORPORAL
• Repent? Renounce what?
• BASIL
• You know, Lestrade. You know.
• [TIGRE and SOURIS emerge]
• CORPORAL
• My mind, my mind. What’s happened to my mind?
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• BASIL
• It was never yours, Lestrade.
• CORPORAL
• Then if it’s not mine, then I’m not mad.
• BASIL
• And if you are not mad, then all this is real.
• CORPORAL
• Impossible! There is Monkey Mountain. Here is the earth. Banana of the mind … ha … ha
… ha …
• TIGRE
• What happen to him? What he looking at?

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• SOURIS
• I don’t know, but he look crazy. It must be the wound. Or … Is the moon. Is
the moon …
• BASIL
• Confess your sins, Lestrade. Confess your sins. Strip yourself naked. Look at
your skin and confess your sins.
• CORPORAL
• Which sins? What sins?
• TIGRE
• [Stepping nearer] At the edge of death you’ll remember them. Confess!
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• CORPORAL
• [As the creatures circle him] Mooma, don’t cry, your son in the grave already.
Our son in the grave already,
• Mooma, don’t cry … But he’s crying, Mother. Mother India, Mother Africa,
Mother Earth, he is crying. Why?
• Why? [Tries to sing] “By the light of the silvery moon.” [Weeps] Whistle, boys,
it’s only death. [Whistles weakly]
• The earth, the earth was a black child holding a balloon, and somebody cut it.
• BASIL
• Fifteen seconds.
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• TIGRE
• Who de hell he talking to? I see nothing.
• SOURIS
• I see nothing too.
• MAKAK
• He is talking to nothing.
• BASIL
• Ten seconds.

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• CORPORAL
• [Flatly, like an accustomed prayer] All right. Too late have I loved thee,
Africa of my mind, sero te amavi, to cite Saint Augustine who they say
was black. I jeered (mock) thee because I hated half of myself, my
eclipse. But now in the heart of the forest at the foot of Monkey
Mountain [The creatures withdraw] I kiss your foot, O Monkey
Mountain.

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• [He removes his clothes] I return to this earth, my mother. Naked,
trying very hard not to weep in the dust. I was what I am, but now I am
myself. [Rises]
• Now I feel better. Now I see a new light. I sing the glories of Makak!
The glories of my race! What race? I have no race! Come! Come, all you
splendours of imagination. Let me sing of darkness now! My hands.
My hands are heavy. My feet … [He rises, crouched] My feet grip like
roots. The arteries are like rope. [He howls] Was that my voice? My
voice. O God, I have become what I mocked. I always was, I always was.
Makak! Makak! forgive me, old father.
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• MAKAK
• [Stepping forward] Now he is one of us.
• CORPORAL
• [Looking up] Grandfather. Grandfather. Where am I?
Where is this? Why am I naked?
• MAKAK
• Because like all men you were born here. Here, put this around
you. [He covers him with the sack] What is this?

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• MAKAK
•…
• They reject half of you. We accept all. Rise. Take off your boots.
Doesn’t the floor of the forest feel cool under your foot? Don’t you
hear your own voice in the gibberish (babble) of the leaves? Look
how the trees have opened their arms.
• And in the hoarseness of the rivers, don’t you hear the advice of all
our ancestors. When the moon is hidden, look how you sink,
forgotten, into the night. The forest claims us all, my son.

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• They are Noah, but not the son of Ham, Aristotle, I’m skipping a bit,
Abraham Lincoln, Alexander of Macedon,
• Shakespeare, I can cite relevant texts, Plato, Copernicus, Galileo and
perhaps Ptolemy, Christopher Marlowe,
• Robert E. Lee, Sir John Hawkins, Sir Francis Drake, The Phantom,
Mandrake the Magician. [The TRIBES are
• laughing] It’s not funny, my Lords, Tarzan, Dante, Sir Cecil Rhodes,
William Wilberforce, the unidentified author
• of The Song of Solomon, Lorenzo de Medici, Florence Nightingale, Al
Jolson, Horatio Nelson, and, but why go
• on? (152-312)

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• Their crime, whatever their plea, whatever extenuation of
circumstances, whether of genius or geography, is, that they are
indubitably, with the possible exception of Alexandre Dumas, Sr. and Jr.,
and Alexis, I think it is Pushkin, white. Some are dead and cannot speak
for themselves,
• but a drop of milk is enough to condemn them, to banish them
from the archives of the bo-leaf and the papyrus, from the waxen
tablet and the tribal stone. For you, my Lords, are shapers of history.
We wait your judgement, O tribes. (152-312)

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• MOUSTIQUE
• Look around you, old man, and see who betray what. Is this what
you wanted when you left Monkey Mountain? Power or love? Who
are all these new friends? You can turn a blind eye on them, because
now you need them.
• But can you trust them for true? Oh, I remember you, in those days
long ago, you had something there [Touching his breast], but
here all that gone. All this blood, all this killing, all this revenge. So
go ahead, kill me. Go ahead. Is for the cause? Go ahead then. (153-
314)

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• MAKAK
• Who are you? Who are you? Why have you caused me all this
pain? Why are you silent? Why did you choose me?
• O God, I was happy on Monkey Mountain.
• CORPORAL
• She, too, will have to die. Kill her, behead her, and you can sleep in
peace. (153-316)

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• CORPORAL
• She, she? What you beheld, my prince, was but an image of your
longing. As inaccessible as snow, as fatal as leprosy. Nun,
virgin, Venus (Roman goddess of beauty and love), you must
violate, humiliate, destroy her; otherwise, humility will infect you.
You will come out in blotches (imperfections), you will be what I was,
neither one thing nor the other. Kill her! Kill her!
• MAKAK
• I cannot! I cannot! (154-318)

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• CORPORAL
• She is the wife of the devil, the white witch. She is the mirror of
the moon that this ape look into and find himself unbearable. She
is all that is pure, all that he cannot reach. You see her statues in
white stone, and you turn your face away, mixed with abhorrence
and lust, with destruction and desire. She is snow, marble,
moonlight, lilies, foam, the mother of civilization, and the
confounder of blackness. I too have Slonged for her. (155-319)

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• She is the colour of the law, religion, paper, art, and if you want
peace, if you want to discover the
• beautiful depth of your blackness, nigger, chop off her head! When
you do this, you will kill Venus, the Virgin, the
• Sleeping Beauty ( a classic fairy tale). She is the white light that
paralysed your mind, that led you into this confusion. It is you who
• created her, so kill her! kill her! The law has spoken. (155-319)

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• MAKAK
• I must, I must do it alone.
• CORPORAL
• All right!
• [SOURIS, CORPORAL and BASIL withdraw]
• MAKAK
• [Removing his robe] Now, O God, now I am free.
• [He holds the curved sword in both hands and brings it down. The
WOMAN is beheaded] (155-320)
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• Makak

• …The branches of my fingers, the roots of my feet, could grip nothing,

but now, God, they have found ground. … now this old hermit is
going back home, back to the beginning, to the green beginning of
• this world. Come, Moustique, we going home. (158-326)

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