Wilfred Cartey lecture, "Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott," at the University of Iowa, June 6, 1973

Speaker 1: If you do get through with it, you realized that even the dream, as far as I'm concerned, becomes a contortion, because what has been presented in the play is acceptance of a hierarchy and how we move to the social. That's the force that's more historical. We have moved to social hierarchy, in which a corporal who is mulatto is judging the black man who is black and a charcoal-burner. And in which two thieves become judges by the changes, by the metamorphosis and so on. And Makak is only given personality in a funny way, because at the beginning, he's eight, bent over. He's asked by Lestrade, let me see your hand. And if you know anything about some revolutionary things, your thumb is supposed to go a certain way, if not you're a monkey or not a man. Speaker 1: He's asked, "let me see your hand" at which point, "Yes, your thumb is all right, brother. You're cool." So therefore you can think. Therefore, "why did you beat up this man in this cafe?" What's the judgment. And then comes a very beautiful parody, he says march around the cage. And Makak goes on all fours around the cage. At the same time in between that comes the song, of which we've been speaking so long. In the sound you'll see a Calypso's and there's a very beautiful clip of it says "Anything that I do the monkey will do. I stand up, monkey stand up too. I sit down, monkey sit down too. Anything I do the monkey will do." And this song is played as a backdrop to the whole thing, the sense of the monkey moving around the cage. So the first part of the play Makak is a monkey. Speaker 1: And that as far as I'm concerned, the initial visualization of anything is the thing that sticks in the mind and stays there. The second part is the King... In the mountain. And he has a court, even as in Dance of the Forests, there was a court in Mata Kharibu, there is judgment. He's a judge who is criminal. And he is the judge, his friends, and judge of his relationship to the white apparition. At which point he says, he cannot really deal with it. Technically, "Let me deal with it," he says, "alone," not in the court, not in the sense of African gentleman, "let me deal with it alone." Of course he kills her and all that. But by this time you keep wondering, well, now, what's this happening here, my brother. What's happening here. The mulatto cat is ordering you around, making you a monkey in the cage. Speaker 1: I have to deal with them, with the white apparition, and you can't deal if you aren't [inaudible] with both of them. Yes, we've been made out to be kings, celebrating. All of this in the most beautiful poetry though, the landscape is evoked and the rain, the fog, the mist, and the mountain and the dream, and all of that is spiraling up, beautifully portrayed for us, and the staging. There's chorus, there's chorus on one side, and there's ritual presentation. And between the ritual, the chorus, the Anansi stories, the societal hierarchy, there is still in my mind a sense that at the bottom, the charcoal-burner, economically speaking, physically speaking and so on. And when I deal back in my mind, I say "Well now, Derek, look, man." Speaker 1: And so I say well... I say so. And as I say then to both of them, to Derek and Soyinka that we have been gifted with brilliance. Two very brilliant men who'd been caught, I sense, in that colonial syndrome of identification. I think Brother [Carten] said it was my identification problems, all that. Well at the same time, a gift of a [inaudible] ritual, because it invests the plays with all the movement of song and dance. Using song and dance to mark time, to give pace, set themes, to get movement and shifting grace and beauty and strength. To use the drum of the Calypso rhythms, which are ritualized forms of our living to delineate characters, to mark change of scene, to do lots of things, using animal shapes, which are still there. The cricket, the frog, the bird, whatever have you, to give backdrop and to present the Anansi spider theme, the whole animal belief, the whole ontological animal structuring within our living. Speaker 1: For, we still accept Earth at the center. We still accept man as man. In spite of all of that, because coming to work with both Walcott and Soyinka, is that wondering as to where to locate the self. Where must I locate myself, I think this is what is in Walcott's mind. Colonized mind, sense of mulatto, the hybridization of the Caribbean, the poverty and the economy of the Caribbean, the dream and the beauty of the Caribbean, the mountain, the sea, the land, the rain, the pact for the dance and the movement and the vitality of the Caribbean. And in Soyinka's mind, what is our independence? Is it worth anything? What was our history? Where are we going? What is our dream? What is the dance? Using the ritual of the dance to celebrate our belonging and our relationship. Linking us to that ontological realm of myth and history at the same time, of worship and belief, of family and ancestry, linking us to all the realms of all living and linking us to blackness in a very funny kind of questionable, chaotic way. But at the same time, linking us. Speaker 1: I thank you very much.