As we have already indicated, Dream on Monkey Mountain is a play which explores the ways in which racism defines an unlivable identity for oppressed people, an identity which pushes toward madness. At various points, Walcott makes this theme explicit. For example, he draws the epigraph for Part One from Sartre's prologue to The Wretched of the Earth: as a result of "always being insulted," the self becomes "dissociated, and the patient heads for madness." Or, as the coloured Corporal Lestrade puts it later, in dialogue with the sinister Basil: "My mind, my mind. What's happened to my mind?," he asks; "It was never yours, Lestrade," Basil replies. His mind, we may infer, was never his own because it was always defined by the attributed categories of racism, because his identity was always and necessarily a matter of what he was told he was.

Walcott devotes much...