CHAPTER - 7
“Reconciliation and Adaptability”
PANTOMIME
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hile REMEMBRANCE, with its retrospective method, discusses the
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dignity of an individual, PANTOMIME runs as a “sort of the article
allegory representing the age-old debate on colonialism”.' The play is primarily
about the interaction of a white and a black man. It soon attains seriousness
when the black man suggests to change their roles, the black man becoming the
master and the white the servant.
In the words of Walcott “the play is about
Jackson besieging and darting in and out until the whole thing crumbles, the wall
is broken down”,2 and the black man’s yearning for his dignity.
In the rural festivities of ancient Italy there were dances and jocular songs,
speech containing abuse. There were also comic songs with gesticulation and
with the accompaniment of the flute. These were known in Italy as “Saturae”.
Long before 750 B.C., there was a very ancient order of priests known as the
‘Talic’ who sang religious songs as they danced. The same custom in Greece
was found and now we find it in India also. This practice was also introduced
into the early church. Once a pestilence broke in Italy in 365 B.C. The priests
thought that it could be averted by the plays of the ‘Istrains’ of Etruria whose
entertainments had their origin in religious rituals. They were, therefore, invited
to Rome where they performed a series of pantomimes with scenic effects. As
their speech was unintelligible they went on reciting songs with gesticulations to
make the people understand the story. From these the stage plays took their
origin in Rome.
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The ‘(strains’ from whom the ‘Histroinic art’ was named were only dancers
and pantomimists. They, in the long run, lost sight of the religious origin of their
entertainments and commenced entertaining people with comic songs and
stories with gesticulation. Some times a boy was made to sing while the actor
accompanied his song with motions of the hand and body to convey the
meaning. Hallam, in his “History of the Literature of Europe”, says “all nations
probably have at all times, to a certain extent, amused themselves both with
pantomime and oral representation of a feigned story ; the sports of children are
seldom without both and the exclusive employment of the former, instead of
being a first stage of the drama, as has been sometimes assumed, is rather a
variety in the course of its progress”.3
The Roman multitude encouraged pantomimists who confined themselves
to gesticulation and dancing, the chorus singing the text.
The introduction of
Pantomimes was a sign of the general moral decay of the Roman Empire.
These entertainments were encouraged by the recklessly sensual people, and
the natural consequence was that they were full of audacious immorality and
obscenity. Women called ‘Minas' took part in these performances. A celebrated
‘Mina’ was raised to the imperial thorne.
‘Lewdness of performances of the
Minas in pantomime’ made both the Christian and Pagan writers to denounce
their performance as prejudicial to morality.
It is during this period that the
women were by law prohibited from appearing on the stage. It is said.that under
Augustus, comic pantomimes were brought to perfection by Pylades and
Bathylus. Pylades was banished from the country for pointing with his finger at a
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spectator who had offended him.
He was, however, recalled.
favourite mimic and dancer of Augustus.
Pylades in tragic personifications.
He was a
Bathylus excelled in comic and
It was the policy of Augustus “to cultivate
other than political interest for the people and he passed laws for the protection
and privilege of the pantomimists”.4
Subsequently they used their freedom
against the peace of the city.
In the first century after Christ the Roman Emperor Domitian prohibited
pantomimists and to a greater measure theatres also.
From the reading of
Roman history it may be inferred that this Emperor had strong reasons to
prohibit dramatical representations. Paris was a favourite of the Emperor. He
was a good actor. He is said to have ‘corrupted the Empress Domitilla’ for which
crime he was assasinated. This instance gave cause for the justification of the
charge against the actors. During the time of the Roman Emperors ‘Trajan’ and
Aurelius’, the pantomimes were revived. In the year 217 A.D. the cruel Emperor,
Caracalla, who butchered his people as a butcher his sheep, and who
massacred all the inhabitants of Alexandria in one day, prohibited dramatic
representations of all kinds. After his death that very year, the pantomimes were
revived with redoubled energy.
The pantomime maintained its reputation from the age of Augustus to the
sixth century and expressed, without the use of words, the various fables of the
Gods and heroes of antiquity and the perfection of its art, which sometimes
disarmed the gravity of the philosphers, always excited the applause and wonder
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of the people. “The vast and magnificent theatres of Rome were filled by three
thousand women-dancers and by three thousand singers with the masters of the
respective choruses”.5
The dramatic elements once favoured and again denounced by the clergy
flourished in one shape or other for a series of centuries in Rome and Italy along
with the pantomimists who kept the dramatic art alive inspite of all disabilities.
Pantomimes commenced with dancing and music.
Wanton buffoonery
and mimicry prevailed also on festive occasions among the lower orders of the
people. “When that bloody monster Caracalla, Roman Emperor, visited its once
capital Alexandria in 215 A.D. many satires were performed and in one the
Emperor was indirectly mocked at. Taking offence at it the mad emperor put all
the inhabitants to death”.6
Derek Walcott’s play PANTOMIME was first produced by All Theatre
Productions at the Little Carib Theatre, Port of Spain, Trinidad, on April 12, 1978,
directed by Albert Laveau, and in January 25, 1979, it was performed over BBC
radio in England. It was produced by the Hudson Guild Theatre in Washington,
D.C., on 11 December, 1986...........4 January, 1987, and by Brenda Hughes in
Port of Spain, 26 December, 1991 — 25 January, 1992. This play revives once
more Walcott’s familiar Robinson Crusoe theme though it is not retrospective in
the sense of looking back.
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Walcott was in Tobago and suddenly in one creative gush that lasted a
couple of days, PANTOMIME was written. The play was a marvellous feeling of
wholeness. Walcott himself says :
I had been living in Tobago for a long time
and it was a lot to do with the experience of
being there in Tobago, looking around and
seeing the situation there. It must have been
gathering inside me. I got up in the middle of
one night and for about two or three days the
play just came.
remarkable,
is
And what,
that
it
for me is
cleared
its
own
obstacles as it progressed. The nearer a play
gets to this, the greater its chances of being
whole, being one piece.7
The plot of the play is simple and it involves a running argument between
Harry Trewe and Jackson Phillip.
Harry is a white hotelier in Tobago, and
Jackson, an erstwhile calypsonian, is his black ‘factotum’. Harry plans to present
a pantomime to attract visitors to his nearly defunct guest house, ‘The
Castaway’.
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Harry : It’s our Christmas panto,
it’s called : Robinson Crusoe.
We’re awfully glad that you’ve shown up,
it’s for kiddies as well as for grown-ups.
Our purpose is to please :
(P-93)
I’m rotting from insomnia, Jackson. I’ve
been up since three, hearing imaginary
guests arriving in the rooms, and I
haven’t slept since.
I nearly came
around the back to have a little talk.
I
started thinking about the same bloody
problem, which is, what entertainment
can we give the guests ?
(p. 97).
The play has a limited cast of two and has a light plot. The plot revolves
round a rehearsal of a pantomime of the Crusoe - Friday myth with which Harry
plans to entertain his European and North American guests. He asks Jackson to
participate as Friday. Jackson frustrates Trewe by opposing the latter’s all wellintentioned ideas for the performance.
The conflict progresses through and a darker atmosphere clouds the
stage. The narrative takes an ironic turn and quickly becomes seriously involved
when Jackson suggests that they switch roles in their Crusoe skit, he playing the
master’s role and Trewe taking Friday’s place. Jackson has a profound motive
for opposing Trewe and his ideas. Harry makes an attempt to play the servant,
but he balks at the extreme reversal of a black man’s culture and gods being
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imposed on a Christian : “I mean.......... he’d have to be taught by this...............
African ..................that everything was wrong, that what he was doing............ I
mean, for nearly two thousand years............ was wrong. That his civilization,
his culture, his whatever, was......... horrible. Was all...............wrong”. (p,126),
Jackson, who has quickly entered the spirit of just such an inverted order, does
not 1st the opportunity pass. While Harry wishes to keep the mood lightly
satirical, Jackson seizes on the fact that what is happening between them is
precisely the history of colonialism itself. Whenever the civilized native rises to
the level of his master, the master wants to “call the whole things off, return
things to normal”, (p. 128).
Both Harry Trewe and Jackson Phillip are actors, though they play their
roles differently.
Harry calls himself a “classical” actor as acting was his
profession in England. But, in Tobago Harry has to play Hotel Manager in the
new script of life. In England he was a poor actor and in Tobago he has to play
his social role now.
Nevertheless, he continues to identify himself as master.
Jackson is a retired calypsonian and he too is an actor.
He never identifies
himself with the role he is playing. He does not want to imprison himself in a
mythical black Crusoe and so he refuses to act the role of Friday. Though he
has chosen to play the role of servant in the guest-house, he knows that he is
more than a servant, that he is a free agent who cannot be cornered into a one
role. He will not accept the role of shadow. That is why he kills Harry’s parrot
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which keeps calling out ceaselessly what cannot be German in a colonial context
- “Heinegger! ., .. Heinegger
Harry, ridiculed by his learned Friday, utters in desperation :
You
people
everything.
create
nothing.
You
imitate
It’s all been done before, you see,
Jackson. The parrot. Think that’s something ? It’s
from THE SEAGULL It's from MISS JULIE. You
can’t ever be original, boy. That’s the trouble with
shadows, right ? They can’t think for themselves.
(p.156)
With this Walcott takes a swipe at his detractors both at home and abroad
for this is a criticism often levelled at Walcott himself.
Jackson acts the role of black Crusoe, but does not identify himself with
that role. He knows that if Harry commits suicide by jumping off the edge of the
cliff, he, the servant, will be charged with murder. The white rulers may have
departed now that Crusoe’s island is independent, but they are still very much
present. The black Crusoes are their agents, their neo-colonial shadows. The
reversal is only an appearance.
At one point in the play Jackson recalls the
history of his servitude :
For three hundred years I served you.
Three
hundred years I served you breakfast in ... .
in my white jacket on a white veranda, boss,
bwana, effendi, bacra, sahib.........
in that sun
that never set on your empire I was your
shadow, I did what you did, boss, bwana,
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effendi, bacra, sahib...............that was my
pantomime. Every movement you made, your
shadow copied .... and you smiled at me as
a child does smile at his shadow's helpless
obedience, boss, bwana, effendi, bacra, sahib,
Mr. Crusoe ...
(p. 112)
“White Crusoe knows that he can keep the colonized under control if he
allows them semblance of cultural identity and political power”.8
Walcott makes this point forcefully in THE STAR APPLE KINGDOM :
One morning the Caribbean was cut up
by seven prime ministers who bought the
sea in bolts................................................................
who sold it at a markup to the conglomerates,
the same conglomerates who had rented the
water spouts
for ninety-nine years in exchange for fifty ships,
who retailed it in turn to the ministers
with only one bank account, who then resold it
in ads for the Caribbean Economic Community,
till everyone owned a little piece of the sea,
from which some made saris, some made
bandannas,
the rest was offered on trays to white cruise ships
taller that the post office ; then the dogfights
began in the cabinets as to who had first sold
the archipelago for this chain store of islands.9
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However, Jackson is very different.
“He is able to step out of socially
defined roles and re-enter them also without confusing self and role”.’0 That is
why Jackson says with complete self-consciousness :
........... You see, two of we both acting a role here
we ain’t really believe in, you know. I ent think you
strong enough to give people orders, and I know I
ain’t the kind who like taking them. So both of we
doesn’t have to improvise so much as exaggerate.
We faking, faking all the time. But, man to man, I
mean.................
that could be something else.
Right, Mr. Trews ?
(p.138)
Jackson knows who he is and demands recognition as he understands that
Harry does not go beyond the surface roles to respect the man in his factotum,
though he plays ‘man to man’ game with him.
Jackson feigns stupidity just to dupe the master.
As stated by Harry
himself Jackson is a ‘stage nigger’ and behind his mispronounced words, his
smiling face and long toilet rituals lies a ‘bloody dagger’ (p,140). Patrick Taylor
in his “Myth and Reality in Caribbean Narrative : Derek Walcott’s PANTOMIME”
says:
.... Jackson plays the Quashee role the way
Hamlet plays madness.
It is done consciously,
with distance, in the interest of truth.
Jackson’s
ultimate goal is not to deceive Harry, but to cut
through the illusions of racial domination.11
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Jackson continues without caring for Harry’s objections, playing Crusoe’s
role in the pantomime, and, that too, he does not do the way Harry wants him to.
His self-consciousness finally makes him the master in reality. Harry interprets
Crusoe romantically in terms of his own anguish and loneliness.
If Jackson’s
self-consciousness is associated with Creole acting and Harry’s mystifications
with classical, the distinction between ‘Creole’ and ‘classical’ acting obtains
significance. Classical Crusoe is a cast a way. Creole Crusoe is a craftsman.
Creole brings together the dualism of African and European heritages in the
framework of popular culture for Edward Brathwaite. But, there is no historical or
liberal consciousness necessarily implied in this process. For Brathwaite Creole
culture becomes just another form of mythical narrative. That is why the
liberating sense of ‘Creole’ should be distinguished from the aesthetic sense of
‘Creole’ found in Brathwait’s
“THE DEVELOPMENT OF CREOLE SOCIETY IN
JAMAICA 1770-1820"12
Harry’s Crusoe is Adam without Eve in Paradise.
alienated man far from his home and family.
This Crusoe is an
Jackson, though mimes first a
classical black Crusoe, goes beyond classical Crusoe to make manifest the
Creole Crusoe. He demands that a goat be added to the set. He ridicules and
breaks through the melancholia in Harry’s language and imagery. He insists that
for reality’s sake Crusoe must kill the goat for clothes, build a hut and achieve
something.
Crusoe must face the situation boldly waiting for a sail to appear
someday.
For Jackson the story of Robinson Crusoe is “the history of
imperialism”
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......... This is the story............ this is history. This
moment that we are now acting here is the history
of imperialism ; it’s nothing less than that. . .
(p. 125).
History must be followed faithfully and creatively.
The Creole Crusoe is the
liberated Friday.
Harry :
Look .... We’re trying to do something
light, just a little pantomime, a little satire, a little
picong.
But if you take this thing seriously, we
might commit Art, which is a kind of crime in this
society ... I mean, there’d be a lot of things there
that people . . . well, it would make them think too
much, and well, we don’t want that ...
want a little .... entertainment
we just
(p. 125)
Thus, Harry objects to Jackson’s emphasis on imperialism and black culture.
But, Jackson wants to bring truth to human experience. He intends to create a
new history and for that purpose he wants all the past in all its various
dimensions to be recovered. To those who refuse to think and realise, Jackson’s
story, which is that of liberating narrative, and not of myth, seems to be an
affront.
In Act 2 of the play both Harry and Jackson discuss in more specific terms
the implications of racial and cultural equality.
heightened.
Now Harry’s awareness is
Jackson contends that Robinson Crusoe would be a practising
realist and not the lonely Romanticist as imagined by Harry. A final pantomime
is acted out in which Harry relives the traumatic death of his son and subsequent
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divorce from his wife. Harry’s repressed history unfolds, Jackson plays the role
of Ellen, Harry’s wife. Harry voices his resentment against her for killing his son
in a car accident. In the past Harry’s wife played a dominant role as Crusoe and
he was cowed down as Friday. Now Harry’s sentiments of mastery seem to be
attempts to cover up his inferiority complex and impotence.
assumes the role of a psychoanalyst.
Jackson here
Instead of pining over his lost wife and
son, “Jackson’s Crusoe would take control of his situation and hew a new life out
of the raw material of his environment. He sees him as the first true ‘Creole’
because of the practical efficacy of his faith”.13 The conclusion of his argument is
that Harry must adapt himself to the circumstances as they exist in the present if
he is to survive on the island. Jackson breaks through the transference to call
Crusoe back to reality : Crusoe must get up to face the next day again, “man
must live”. Jackson says :
......................................................You finish with the
play ? The panto ? Crusoe must get up, he must
make himself get up. He have to face a next day
again.
(Shouts)
I tell you : man must live ! Then, after many years,
he see this naked footprint that is the mark of his
salvation ...
(p. 164)
Friday brings Crusoe back to reality : Jackson makes Harry confront
history.
Jackson presses Harry into acting out some of the frustrations he
suffers over his having failed as an actor and a husband. The play closes with
Jackson’s last words : “Starting from Friday, Robinson, we could talk 'bout a
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raise ?” (p. 170). The innumerable meanings in this question donot suggest that
Jackson is merely a servant asking for an increase in salary, but all Fridays that
demand for a raise in their statuses. They demand recognition. In the end two
men acquire a more quitable relationship through deeper understanding.
Harry now begins to address Jackson with respect as Mr. Phillip because
role-playing has brought about a significant change in him. The spectators and
the readers of the play similarly come into relation with history. “The mythical
form, the Prospero-Caliban archetype, is transformed by the content of the play,
the reality of man in history. PANTOMIME is a mimesis or creative imitation of a
social drama structured in terms of mimicry”.’4
The history of slavery, colonialism and imperialism and the struggle to
overthrow these forms of exploitation and domination are recurring themes in
Derek Walcott’s works. PANTOMIME seems to be a theatrical allegory
representing the age-old debate on colonialism. It appears to be symbolising the
cultural, social and political interactions of the white and blackmen. But, Walcott
says it is not his primary interest:
It is an entirely human drama between two people
and though there are infinite resonances that
spring from their conflict, these did not interest me
directly.15
The play is an interaction between a white and black man.
describes the interaction between Trewe and Phillip thus :
Walcott
195
There is that stolid facade, that mask of the
Englishman, that wall behind which there is much
horror and fear and trembling.
The cracks
appear and it is where these cracks appear that
Jackson darts in end widens. The play is about
Jackson besieging and darting in and out until
the whole thing crumbles, the wall is broken
down and we look into his room and see Trewe
naked and exposed.
This is how confessional
psychodrama works.18
Initially one sees nothing of Trewe but the superficial wall that shields the raw
nerve ends which Jackson strives to locate. As the catharsis looms and Jackson
batters the final bricks in the wall, Trewe’s disturbing truth of affliction reveals
itself in an overwhelming climax speech.
The most cynical and very intelligent healing energies of Jackson work
effectively on Trewe. Walcott says that is “the kind of energy which looks coarse
and unsophisticated and may be, but which has at its source a very revitalising
element.
It is an energy which cannot be bossed or put down, the Creole
energy”.17
There are two types of narratives.......... mythical and liberating narrative.
Mythical core established narrative unity or basic plot.
To render the new
contradictory lived experiences meaningful, the core myths draw on the
archetypal patterns of a culture or society. The cultural order, provided by myth,
opens up new realms of experience which must be encompassed by its mythical
196
structures. Myth functions to legitimate the status of particular classes or groups
in society.
Mythical narrative “may be used either to defend an oppressive
status quo, or to justify a rival group destined itself to become the agent of
domination”.18
Liberating narrative also makes new experiences of reality meaningful in
terms of a cultural tradition. But, the difference is that the Liberating narrative
goes radically beyond the mythical narrative to assert the historical character of
the human condition. It grounds itself in the story of individuals and groups to
reveal the ambiguity and multilayeredness of socially constructed reality.
Insisting on the fundamental unity, and even in diversity, of all humanity
Liberating narrative lifts us out of or closed realms to bring us into universal
histoyr. In PANTOMIME Walcott has taken the European myth of Crusoe and
Friday and transformed it to bring the Caribbean man to a true confrontation with
his freedom in history.
In PANTOMIME Jackson’s attempt to recapture his African tradition
represents the choice of an African heritage in the face of colonial culture and
mental domination. The metamorphosis from Friday to Crusoe has an irony in it
which does not escape Jackson. Jackson uses the image of child’s shadow to
describe the parrot-like servant.
The ‘black magic of the sahdow’ starts to
dominate the child and it cannot get rid of the shadow.
starts ‘dominating the master’.
It means the servant
Jackson inverts the classical Crusoe myth to
show the servant’s way of taking control over the master. The servant tells the
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master what to say, orders him to put on his clothes and so forth. Though the
servant dominates the master, he is a servant only. The white power structure,
economic reality and ideology bind that servant to the master. The assertion of
the ‘classical’ African Crusoe is a reaction to the dominant white ideology and its
traumatic impact.
The African myth is determined by its opposition to the
hegemony of the European myth.
Makak also comes
to this realization in
DREAM ON MONKEY MOUNTAIN. "The romantic appeal to the black Golden
Age is a form of narcissism found in many ‘negritude’ writers, but sharply
denounced by Caribbean thinkers like Fanon”.’9 Fanon also argues that it is not
enough to “replace the colonial myths with new myths of the Golden Age".20 Just
to juxtapose African mythical narrative to European mythical narrative is to fail to
confront the totality of contemporary Caribbean reality. Walcott also refuses to
be part of the creation of a new myth, and for this his work is often criticized.
PANTOMIME “encapsulates a much more engrossing and dialectical
frame of referents of epistemic Eurocentrism and its demythologization than
DREAM ON MONKEY MOUNTAIN”.2' It does so by employing the dramaturgic
trick of introducing small cast of characters constantly changing roles,
constructing and deconstructing social fragments.
The ‘text’ deployed in
PANTOMIME is devised out of Defoe’s ROBINSON CRUSOE, a classic
‘megatext’ of Eurocentrism. This establishes the play as a different paradigm of
epistemic demythologization than DREAM ON MONKEY MOUNTAIN.
Harry
Trewe devises an imrpovisational script reversing the roles, the identities, the
figural binarisms of Defoe’s classic text. According to this reversal of roles, the
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white Trewe will play Friday and the black Phillip will play Crusoe. But, Trewe’s
project comes only partly out of business calculations.
He is also a liberal, a
progressive who insists on the edifying potentiality of such an entertainment for
both the white tourists to the island and the local black Creole community :
Harry :
Look, I’m a liberal, Jackson.
I’ve done the
whole routine .... I’ve even tried jumping up
to the steel band at Notting Hill Gate, and I’d
no idea I’d wind up in this ironic position of
giving orders, but if the new script I’ve been
given
says
:
HARRY
TREWE,
HOTEL
MANAGER, then I’m going to play Harry
Trewe, Hotel Manager, to the hilt, damnit. So
sit down ! Please. Oh, goddamnit, sit...........
down...
.(Jackson
sits,
Nods)
Good.Relax. Smoke. Have a cup of tepid
coffee............
(p. 108)
Trewe’s script envisions a revision of Robinson Crusoe. But, Phillip
renames Friday Thursday.
He renames all the props and paraphernalia of
survival and ‘civilization’ that master and servant, colonizer and colonized have
to share. Both men have been actors, performers and entertainers. Hence, all
the twists and turns are made bearable. “The performance idioms of the English
music hall and the Trinidadian calypsonian carnival become vehicles of thorough
going textual revisions of Defoe’s classic novel and de-constructive assault on a
vast array of cultural systems and codes which have defined the encounter of
the colonizer and the colonized”.22
199
However, both Trewe and
Jackson finally abandon the distance
completely and give up all formality and protocols of employer and employee
that have prevented them from playing the revised text of ROBINSON CRUSOE
to the end. There is Eurocentrism in history. We can neither enact the texts of
the ‘old’ history, nor shake the texts of the ‘new’ history completely free of the old
texts. Walcott seems to suggest that the point is not lapse into despair or mutual
isolation, but to acknowledge the violence of that history with integrity.
Both
Trewe and Phillip back off from a complete engagement with the logic and
dynamics of the ‘power’, or the will-to-power, that inheres in both the
construction of Eurocentrism and the deconstructions of oppositional nativist
texts, codes and languages and this is very significant.
In DREAM ON MONKEY MOUNTAIN we find nativist moralism in which
the rejection of ‘Europe’ and Eurocentrism is taken to its extreme limit.
The
falsity and pitfalls of the ‘decolonization’ claimed by nativism are effectively
dramatized in that play.
PANTOMIME implies a relativism in its complete
deconstructions of both Eurocentrism and nativism.
It recalls certain forms of
post-structuralist assault on essentialism and the ‘metaphysics of presence’ in
the canons and the celebration of indeterminancy.
This position invites its own
‘deconstruction’ and interrogation in PANTOMIME.
The interrogation and
contestation that we see in PANTOMIME do not exhaust the range of the literary
exploration of epistemologies and discourses of colonization and decolonization
in contemporary postcolonial writing.
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PANTOMIME is farcical commentary on the helpless obedience, the
shadow-reflector tangledness existing
in the
master-servant
relationship.
Walcott implies that conscious living of the life of a shadow figure is not the first
step toward self-liberation. “Consciouness of the intricate and pervasive lifeexistence of the shadow as a cultural, social, economic, political, philosophical
force may very well lead to madness’’.23 This is especially so when the servant
perceives that he may very well have become the fortification of his disease.
Jackson :
But after awhile the child does get frighten of the
shadow he make. He say to himself, That is too
much obedience, I better hads stop.
shadow don’t stop, no
But the
matter if the child stop
playing that pantomime, and the shadow does
follow the child everywhere; when he praying, the
shadow pray too, when he turn round frighten, the
shadow turn round too, when he hide under the
sheet, the shadow hiding too. He cannot get rid of
it, no matter what, and that is the power and black
magic of the shadow, boss, bwana, effend, bacra,
sahib, until it is the shadow that start dominating
the child, it is the servant that start dominating the
master..........
(p.113).
If the servant does manage to reverse the psychohistorical act enabling
himself to start dominating the master, the servant may be freed of his problems,
but he is not totally freed from a general world of madness. “The world order is
reversed, but not the order of the world, not the historical tragedy of repetition
which interests Walcott much”.24
201
In PA^NpMIME the vehicle of revelation is a black calypsonian.
“Assuming the dominant role early in the play, he undertakes to instruct his white
employer in the art of becoming an integral part of the land. The play has to do
with identity and with self-possession”.25
By the end of the play, Harry comes to appreciate equality. He befriends
Jackson —“Mano a mano”.
The terms of the drama are resolved on an
individual basis. It is a basis that offers extensive application. Walcott contends
that Crusoe is a more appropriate symbol of the West Indian than Shakespeare’s
Prospero and Caliban : being a craftsman of humble beginnings, he acts by
conscience rather than authority, and as a castaway he “does not possess the
land he inhabits”.26
There seems to be a basic premise in some plays of Walcott like DREAM
ON MONKEY MOUNTAIN, REMEMBRANCE, PANTOMIME and Ti-JEAN AND
HIS BROTHERS.
It is that the blacker a person’s skin, the more of his sweat
and blood that have permeated the soil he works. But the lighter the skin, the
more one’s right to citizenship is in question. Independence from colonial status
requires further indepedence from blind racism and blind nationalism.
Answering Edward Hirsch’s question whether PANTOMIME was a
“parable about colonialism", Walcott said,
202
The point of the play (PANTOMIME) is
very simple.
There are two types.
The
prototypical English man is not supposed
to show his grief publicly. He keeps a stiff
upper lip.
Emotion and passion are
supposed to be things that a troubled
English man avoids. What the West Indian
character does is to try to wear him down
into confessing that he is capable of such
emotion and there is nothing wrong in
showing it.
Some sort of chatharsis is
possible. That is the main point of the play.
It’s to take two types and put them
together, put them in one arena and have
that happen.
I have never thought of it
really as a play about racial conflict. When
it’s done in America, it becomes a very
tense play because of the racialsituation
there.
When’t it’s done here, it doesn’t
have those deep historical overtones of
real bitterness. I meant it to be basically a
farce that might insruct. And the instruction
is that we can’t just contain our grief, that
thre’s cpurgation in tears, that tears an
renew. Of course, inside the play there’s a
point in which both characters have to
confront the fact that one is white and one
is black.
history.
They have
to
confront their
But, once that peak is passed,
once the ritual of confrontation is over, then
that’s the beginning of the play.
I’ve had
203
people say they think the ending is corny,
but generally that criticism has come when
I’m
in
America.
The
idea
of
some
reconciliation or some adaptability of being
able to live together, that is sometimes
rejected
by
people
as
being
a
facile
solution. But I believe it’s possible.27
PANTOMIME “is a kind of black / white fable where Walcott explores the
humour and irony in the two characters’ reversal of Robinson Crusoe and Friday.
It is a reprise of several themes------ that of the Castaway, of racial division
(black body/white mind) and West Indian identity, and the larger theme of illusion
and reality.
Like Ti-Jean or Makak the characters struggle through to an
understanding not only of themselves and their relationship to each other, but
also of the forces and attitudes historically responsible for the social divisions of
the Caribbean ; the humour in the play balances a serious message concerning
the encounter of slave and colonial master and all the consequent problems of
the relationship”.28
Walcott’s PANTOMIME received only mixed reviews because of critics’
unfamiliarity with the Caribbean reality which Walcott describes in his plays. For
example, while Walter Goodman, writes in the ‘New York Times’ that Walcott’s
PANTOMIME “stays with you as a fresh and funny work filled with thoughtful
insights and illuminated by bright performances”, Frank Rich’s comments on the
play in the same
Newspaper are not really favourable.
Rich observes :
“Walcott’s best writing has always been as a poet............ and that judgment
remains unaltered by PANTOMIME.
For some reason, (Walcott) refuses to
bring the same aesthetic rigor to his play-writing that he does to his powerful
204
dense verse”.
In James Atlas’s ‘NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE’ Essay on
Walcott, the critic confronts Rich’s remarks head on, asserting that the poet
would respond to Rich by commenting "that he does not conceive of his plays as
finished works but as provisional effects to address his own people. The great
challenge’, he says, ‘was to write as powerfully as I could without writing down to
the audience, so that the large emotions could be taken in by a fisherman or a
guy on the street, even if he did not understand every line’’.29
It may be difficult to judge how well PANTOMIME fares on the stage.
Christopher Gunness, reviewing a Trinidad production of this play,
“was
impressed with the brilliant verbal exchanges in early scenes which gradually
gave way to a somber, highly intensified emotional closing”.30
In print, at least, PANTOMIME appears to rely rather heavily on
exposition, and it seems too ambivalent in intention.
Gunness remarked this
same ambivalence in the staging. “It is as though Walcott were no more decided
than his characters were as to how serious their seriocomic play should be”.31
Thus, PANTIMOME, a compact and searing play, discusses a running
argument between
Harry and Jackson who share their suspicions and
resentments. The two act out different roles and positions. Though the plot is
apparently light it has many serious overtones. The narrative becomes seriously
involved when the characters assume different poses ‘until a new social relation
forms’.32
The play explores succinctly the racial and economic side of the
relationship between Harry and Jackson.
205
NOTES
1. Christopher Gunness, “White Man, Black Man”. CRITICAL
PERSEPECTIVES ON DEREK WALCOTT, ed. Robert D. Hamner, Boulder
& London : Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997. p. 290.
2. Ibid.
3. Kolachelam Sreenivasa Rao, THE DRAMATIC HISTORY OF THE WORLD,
Bellary: Vani Vials Press, 1908, p. 27.
4. Ibid., p. 37.
5. Ibid, p. 58.
6. Ibid., p. 248.
7. Christopher Gunness, “White Man, Black Man" CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES
ON DEREK WALCOTT, ed. Robert D. Hamner, Boulder & London : Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 1997, p. 291.
8. Patrick Taylor, “Myth And Reality In Caribbean Narrative : Derek Walcott’s
PANTOMIME”, CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON DEREK WALCOTT, ed.
Robert D. Hamner, Boulder & London : Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997, p.
296.
9. Derek Walcott, THE STAR APPLE KINGDOM, New York : Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1979, p. 136.
10. INVITATION TO SOCIOLOGY: A HUMANISTIC PERSPECTIVE, New York:
Anchor - Doubleday, 1963, p. 136.
206
11. Patrick Taylor, "Myth And Reality In Caribbean Narrative : Derek Walcott’s
PANTOMIME”, CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE ON DEREK WALCOTT, ed.
Robert D. Hamner, Boulder & London : Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997, p.
297.
12. Ibid., p. 299.
13. Robert D. Hamner, DEREK WALCOTT, Updated Edition, New York : Twayne
Publishers, 1993, p. 110.
14. Patrick Taylor, “Myth And Reality In Caribbean Narrative : Derek Walcott’s
PANTOMIME’’, CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON DEREK WALCOTT, ed.
Robert D. Hamner, Boulder & London : Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997, p.
298.
15. Ibid., p. 290.
16. Ibid., p. 290.
17. Ibid., p. 291.
18. Ibid., p. 293.
19. In “Black Skin, White Masks”, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, (New York :
Grove Press, 1967), for example Fanon States that “There is no Negro
Mission”, p. 228.
20. Fanon’s Critique of the national bourgeoisie in Chapter Three of THE
WRETCHED OF THE EARTH is to be seen available in translation by
Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968).
21. Biodun Jeyifo, “On Eurocentric Critical Theory: Some Paradigms From the
Texts and Sub-Texts of Post-Colonial Writing”, CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES
ON DEREK WALCOTT, ed. Robert D. Hamner, Boulder & London : Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 1997, p. 382.
207
22. Ibid., p. 384.
23. Erskine Peters, “The Theme of Madness in the Plays of Derek Walcott”, CLA
JOURNAL, 32 (2), Dec. 1988. Atlanta, G A, p. 159.
24. Ibid., p. 160.
25. Robert D. Hamner, "Exorcising The Planter - Devil In The Plays of Derek
Walcott”, COMMONWEALTH, 7.2 (Spring. 1985), p. 99.
26. Ibid., p. 100.
27. Edward Hirsch, “The Art of Poetry (1986)”, CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON
DEREK WALCOTT, ed. Robert D. Hamner, Boulder & London : Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 1997, pp. 74-75.
28. Mark A. Me Watt, “Derek Walcott: An Island Poet and His Sea”,
CONTEMPORARY LITERARY CRITICISM, ed, James P. Draper, vol. 76,
1992, p. 275.
29. “Walcott, Derek (Alton), 1930-------”, Contemporary Authors, Gale Research
(Detroit), 1997, p. 6 of 9.
30. Robert D.Hamner, DEREK WALCOTT Updated Edition, New York : Twayne
Publishers, 1993, p. 110.
31. Ibid., p. 111.
32. Lowel Fiet, “Mapping a New Nile : Derek Walcott’s Later Plays”, THE ART
OF DEREK WALCOTT, ed. Stewart Brown, Dufour; Seren Books , 1991, p.
146.