5 - American Visions II – Black Odysseys

Summary

Which Africa? Whose Africa? From Hokusai to Romare Bearden

In a handwritten prayer Walcott composed for Walker's widow to accompany an unpublished drawing in which the woman watches over her sleeping child, the mother and wife mourning her husband expresses her hope that his soul will travel back to Africa. In the published version of Walker, this prayer is not included, but it finds its visual counterpart in the transformation of the play's Chorus into a group of African warriors who, in the 2001 production, invaded the stage with colourful costumes, loud music, vigorous dancing and singing in Yoruba (W92–5, 114). The inclusion of African rituals in the economy of Walker pays homage to the fact that Walker was proud of his heritage and of the noble history of Africa: ‘When we take a retrospective view of the arts and sciences – the wise legislators – the Pyramids, and other magnificent buildings – the turning of the channel of the river Nile, by the sons of Africa or of Ham, among whom learning originated, and was carried thence into Greece’, he wrote, ‘the children of our great progenitor I am indeed cheered’ (WAP21–2). At the same time, however, Walker was vehemently opposed to the ‘colonizing plan’ which entailed the ‘repatria-tion’ of free Blacks by the American Colonization Society (WAP47–82), and Walcott had always shared Walker's rejection of the idea of going back to Africa as an answer for the descendants of the enslaved population. In Dream on Monkey Mountain, where the Chorus, at some point, also becomes the ‘tribes’, the ‘dream’ of a return to Africa is initiated by the White Goddess, who represents the white colonial world. Her beheading results in the destruction of the ‘white mask’ which represents the end of the yearning to be white that plagued colonial subjects – ‘this rage for whiteness’ – but is also an attack to responses to that mask that Walcott considered self-defeatingly separatist. The real home of the protagonist of Dream on Monkey Mountain, the play insists, is not Africa but Monkey Mountain or the Caribbean, and Walker seems to make a similar point regarding North America through Walker's wife Eliza who, when Walker declares that Africa is their ‘true land’, quickly rebuffs him: ‘Which Africa?