Renowned Mexican author Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) wrote his third play, Orchards in the Moonlight (Orquídeas a la luz de la luna), in both Spanish and English in 1982 (it had its Spanish premiere in 1992 at the Teatro Nacional in Havana, Cuba, and its English premiere in 1982 at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA).1 The play concerns two aging Chicanas, Maria and Dolores, who live in Venice, California. They both idolize two renowned Mexican cinema stars, María Félix and Dolores del Río, to the point where they self-identify with them, deluding themselves into believing they are actually the movie icons. They spend their time desperately trying to convince each other that they are who they say they are – the legendary performers. Their shoddy home is a desolate, windowless apartment with oversized mirrors, piles of clothes on racks in the center of the stage, an oversized bed, a white telephone that brings news from the outside world, their morning toilette, and the play opens on the day Orson Welles dies. According to the characters’ fantasy, Wells had allegedly been Delores’s lover. Delores refuses to accept his passing, just as she is in denial about her transition to an elderly has-been. Halfway through the one-act a nameless fan arrives, a writer of obituaries, claiming to adore Dolores but actually seeking information about the two former stars. Toward the end of the play the set transforms into an enormous banquet hall where Maria, clothed in Egyptian royalty, is accompanied by two Nubian slaves and a minister. Throughout the play the two women are lovers, sisters, rivals, friends, and helpmates, and follow a roller-coaster trajectory of people all too familiar with each other (they know how to push each other’s buttons). The mash-up of memories and the inconsistency in their relationship establishes a surreal environment not unlike Jean Genet’s The Maids. In both plays two women role-play, illuminating the theatricality of gender, relationships, and interactions common in daily life. The fact that they are named after two actual Mexican movies stars, María Félix and Dolores del Río, implies that the author frames a postmodern self-reflection: that these might actually be actresses portraying two aging superstars, or merely two women looking like or acting like these stars, adds to the delusional state of their identities.
Fuentes employs magic realism, a common thematic in Latin American art, literature, and drama. Magic realism’s complex use of reality and illusion combines the representational with the other-worldly; the pathos of human existence with the imaginative realm of dreams, myths, and even science fiction. In Orchards in the Moonlight, magic realism recalls actual movies and events of the real-life actresses (even going so far as to recall the names of their former lovers, such as Marlon Brando), yet we are made aware throughout that we are watching actresses perform these roles and that reality is seen through a misty ambiguity. Fuentes calls this form of magic realism “a very baroque artifice,” which means “horror of the vacuum, filling in the vacuum, desperation, abundance born of necessity, of not having anything, and having to invent the abundance. This plays into the ambiguity of the play, of the question: who are these women? Are they really two film actresses who are recreating their lives?” We are meant to observe the ambiguity of the play, uncertain if these are two fans of these actresses reenacting their existence, illustrating “the natural and truthful aspect of the play, whereby any artificiality, baroqueness, or caricatured aspects of the play are finally dissolved in the ambiguity which is nurturing the play.”2
Throughout his oeuvre, Fuentes examines myths of Mexicana and how these symbols inform identity self-formation. The dream-like atmosphere in Orchards in the Moonlight creates an unreality opposed to a naturalistic setting, lending credence to the mythological nature of the characters’ world, yet the play embraces reality on its own terms. Like any dream reproduced onstage, it needs to bear the hallmarks of realism as well as the fantastical if it is to have an emotional impact on the audience. Eduardo Elías’s moving description of the play summarizes the play’s emotional dynamic of reality and illusion:
Dolores and Maria are living in a hothouse environment, in their prisonlike Venice apartment, cautious of maintaining their fading beauty through milk baths and ice packs; they are no longer the powerful, domineering women they once were, rather they are in the evening of their years, fading as the light, or the hour, into a world of shadows where nothing that is observed is perfectly clear nor precise (witness the shifting nature of their ages, roles, and interpersonal relationships).3
At the play’s conclusion, Dolores leaves with the fan, pretending to escape with a new lover; in actuality she kills the fan in order to retrieve an old porn film Maria made that the fan threatens to use to expose Maria and sully her reputation.
The play’s opening, like that in Genet’s The Maids, depicts two overdressed women (or, as Genet and Fuentes have both suggested, men playing the roles of women), amplifying their feminine attractiveness in theatrical terms.
MARIA:
DOLORES:
MARIA:
DOLORES:
Ascertaining the “they” – the people supposedly gazing at Dolores – is made obtuse by Fuentes, thereby highlighting the possibility that it is the audience itself, or an audience from before, or Dolores’s delusion (or a combination of all three) who observes these women. The play unfolds through role-playing, each of the women taking turns arguing, cajoling, comforting, insulting, complimenting, and kissing each other. Each plays at one-upmanship with the other, comparing the highs and lows of their film careers to assert who has a better grasp of reality. Dolores:
You have no idea what Hollywood was, what it was like to be a Latina in Hollywood, fighting first against prejudice, then against advancing age. Why do you laugh about age? Age is the climbing vine, age is the actress’ visible leprosy and an actress who had children had to hide or deny them and hated them and beat them. An actress betrayed by her children was like a goddess, not just a kneeling goddess, but humiliated, forced to run errands and come back loaded with tins, steaks, oranges and cauliflowers. … I wanted to be weightless, winged, a dark flame. (114)
As they delve into their memories, they reflect on the urgings of directors who encouraged their sexuality by using the metaphors of cats. Maria recalls that the directors wanted lots of “Ummmm.” Dolores chimes in and soon
They both start a parodic game of ummms, improvising scenes and dramatic situations until, still mumming, in crescendo, they embrace and kiss. From love they pass to hate. Pretending to claw at each other, they fall over and roll around the floor, and the ummms no longer designate either fury or laughter, but a constant interplay between the two. (115)
Not to be outdone, Maria breaks away from Dolores and says: “What are you staring at? Am I not desirable anymore? […] Am I no longer the cutest sex kitten you ever had the good fortune to lay yours sad eyes on? No longer? […] Is there not a bullfighter who will dedicate a bull for me, a cowboy who will ride me senseless?” (116). According to Fuentes, these characters are modern archetypes, icons, symbols, myths, and legends, figures who cannot leave the spotlight. Movie stars have replaced gods and goddesses culturally, and perhaps no more so than in the Latin American colonial image. Movie stardom was one of the few conduits for the colonized, especially in Mexico, where the proximity to Hollywood and the consistently warm climate made filming attractive to movie moguls. Movies overtake reality, where, as Dolores says, “Ah Hollywood, Hollywood, you’ve invented everything. Spencer Tracy discovered electric light, Greer Garson the radio, Don Ameche the telephone and Paul Muni pasteurized milk” (141) – a reference to actors who portrayed real-life figures. Unable to separate reality from the illusions of film, the two women, Dolores especially, live vicariously through their past beatification.
When the fan arrives carrying lamentations on the past – with film and projector – he brings the recognition the women desire. He offers flowers to the more susceptible and vulnerable Dolores, recalling her past fame and festooning her ego with exalting praise. Maria grows skeptical: “You are the public, popcorn boy! You’re the pale reflection of what you see in the dark cinema. Just look at yourself, paleface. […] You’re like an asshole: the sun never shines on you” (140). In one of the play’s most fascinating moves, the fan takes the projector and shows a reel of Dolores’s performance. The two women sit together, holding each other, seeing Delores projected on the screen. The images evoke their demise; death overtakes their vision as the juxtaposition of past glory with present banality is too much to bear:
MARIA:
DOLORES:
MARIA:
DOLORES:
MARIA:
DOLORES:
MARIA:
DOLORES:
MARIA:
The juxtaposition of film’s artifice and the reality of two women embracing as they watch their younger selves is what Lanin Gyurko calls the combination of “artificial Hollywood and sincere Mexico.” The cinema’s account of Mexico’s image to the colonizers is for Gyurko “the cinematic presence and not the degrading and brutalizing marginality of real-life existence of the two Chicanas that is most important.”4
What emerges here is the vicarious living through of two characters whose desires use film, and in turn the fan, as their mediating source of recognition. In accentuating living vicariously through the lives of film stars, the play is about “facing death,” since the loss of youth and beauty, Gloria Durán reminds us, “is more painful to bear for those who have become identified with them.”5 As the dialogue between the two women watching the film makes clear, it is the confluence of memory and jealousy that provokes their taciturn emotions. The “tapestry of their lives,” as Maria says, is bound up with competition, mediation, and the fortunes of one movie star with another, the conduit of which is the identity of Mexicana and Latin America in the realm of cinema. The artifice of Hollywood’s sculpting of these two women is revealed when Dolores tells of how she married a man when she was fifty and he was forty but replied to the judge that she was only “Twenty years old,” then “They both laugh and hug each other happily, their great intimacy restored” (149). Like two old friends, Maria says: “That’s nothing. When they launched me, they made up an official biography that wasn’t mine. Not my origins, not my husbands, not my son, nothing. I couldn’t believe it when I read it. I was another woman. My life had been wiped out” (149). The artifice of identity enveloped through the cinema is a universal condition, but for Fuentes it is especially evident in Hispanic-Mexican-colonized culture.
Despite their obvious devotion to celluloid illusions and their frequent abrasive self-promotion, Fuentes limns a sympathetic portrayal of these two women. They are formulating their identity via the few resources of national self-promotion: the image of the sumptuous Latina in the movies – the dark, exotic figure of colonial lust. Yet in Orchards in the Moonlight, Dolores del Río and María Félix, Lanin Gyurko argues, “emerge as positive national symbols, as exemplars of the cosmopolitanism and sophistication of modern Mexico, as well as its rich and variegated history.” As a consequence, the two main characters, even as surrogates to the real movie icons, “are evoked on myriad levels, as radiant and constantly changing cinematic images, as vibrant and authoritative exponents of the emancipation of women in Mexico, and as national institutions.”6 Their spirit of resistance can be interpreted as resistance to colonialism, male domination, and the subjugation of women as objects without personality or identity. Ultimately their love and devotion for each other becomes their overarching identity, superseding their superficial fame. A similar sense of resistance to cultural normalcy can be found in the next dramatist.
In his book, The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi contends that the “most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed from history and from the community.”7 One might add “removed from the self,” from ontological certainty. In Derek Walcott’s play Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967 in Canada, 1971 at the Negro Ensemble Company, where it received the OBIE award), characters are thrust from their sense of identity, effaced of self-worth, and cut off from their historical relationship to Africa, home, and origins. Born of mixed-race parents in Saint Lucia, Walcott (1930– ), 1992 Noble Prize recipient for literature, is mostly known as a poet; still, he is the author of over 20 plays, his two best known works being Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1970), and Dream on Monkey Mountain (the latter of which I will examine here). Walcott’s early career as a playwright was forged in the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which had its beginnings in 1959. Walcott and others founded the Workshop as a location for experimentation in dramas primarily germane to the Caribbean experience, fostering community outreach and education, and supporting the plays, poems, and art works of regional artists. The significance of this group and its work in the community influenced Walcott’s postcolonial outlook.
Dream on Monkey Mountain is, according to its author’s Production Notes, “a dream, one that exists as much in the given minds of its principal characters as in that of its writer, and as such, it is illogical, derivative, contradictory. Its source is metaphor and it is best treated as a physical poem with all the subconscious and deliberate borrowings of poetry.”8 Makak, the principal character in Dream on Monkey Mountain, is a 60-year-old black charcoal burner who lives isolated on Monkey Mountain and, as a result, replaces human contact with his imagination. In the play he symbolizes many things: Christ figure, Don Quixote-like dreamer, madman, savior, drunk, old and ugly charcoal burner, and ambivalent spiritualist who, as the play progresses, imagines himself a Moses-like figure returning his people to Africa. The play begins with his first arrest for drunken and disorderly conduct, where Makak finds himself incarcerated with two felons, Tigre and Souris. In his cell he is possessed by a spirit that causes him to dream. The play’s expressionistic style allows Walcott to incorporate in the dramaturgical structure elements of ritual, dance, mask, mime, faith healing, and other spiritual-religious themes from Caribbean and Western culture. In the play, Walcott says, “the frenzy comes out of a man’s relationship to his dream. If this had been realized more heraldically, its power would have been akin to the power of Shango [the cult of possession]. Yet this might have been impossible, for if the play becomes that powerful, it becomes the ceremony it is imitating.”9 In other words, this is a drama and not a reenactment of a voodoo priest; the depiction is in response to the complexity of Makak’s character, not as Makak representing the perfection of priesthood. Moreover, by placing Makak in the cell with two other itinerate criminals, Walcott immediately draws a symbolic (and sympathetic) image of Makak as Jesus flanked by the two thieves. Moreover, Makak’s acting out his spiritual “possession” is accompanied by frenetic drumming, whereby the drumming, dancing, and extreme physicalization of Makak’s “possession” reinforces the cultural myths of his indigenous culture. This combination of nativist and Europeanist mythology stresses the hybridized world view of postcolonial drama.
Makak (French for “ape,” or macaque, the monkey) is a metaphoric Christ figure, suffering so that his compatriots might be liberated, mentally and physically, from oppression. Questioned by the mulatto Corporal Lestrade as to his identity, Makak says he lives on “Monkey Mountain,” and is generally taciturn in response to the Corporal’s aggressive inquiries. Lestrade represents the acquiescent colonized, quick to see the virtues and values of Western Roman law and other entities from modernization. His language embraces the entirety of the West – its laws, religion, and rules – as he reads Makak his “rights” and reviews his notes on Makak:
You forgot your name, your race is tired, your denominational affiliation is Catholique, therefore, as the law, the Roman law, had pity on your blessed Saviour, by giving him, even in extremis, a draught of vinegar, what, in your own language, you would call vinegre, I shall give all and sundry here, including two thieves, a handful of rum, before I press my charge. (220)
Makak, who suffers, as he says, “from madness,” sees things, and claims that “Spirits does talk to me. All I have is my dreams and they don’t trouble your soul” (225), makes his bid to be released. But the Corporal, sensing perhaps the mystic and spiritual nature of the old man, pressures Makak to reveal who he is. In the vein of self-confession, Makak reveals his isolation in the world of Monkey Mountain, where his imagination shows him a mythic white woman: “You don’t see her?,” he implores the others; “I see her! She standing right there (He points at nothing). Like the moon had climbed down the steps of heaven, and was standing in front of me” (227). The Corporal summarizes his condition: “My lords, is this rage for whiteness that does drive niggers mad” (228).
Makak reunites with his comic and disabled companion, Moustique, a fellow coal burner. When Makak again raises his vision of the mystic white woman, Moustique replies: “Which white lady? You is nothing. You black, ugly, poor, so you worse than nothing. You like me. Small, ugly, with a foot like a ‘S.’ Man together two of us is minus one” (237). Makak tries to persuade his friend Moustique of his vision (and it appears there is some shamanistic value to Makak as he is able to heal Josephus of a snake bite), but Moustique, a pragmatist and survivor, goes to the marketplace alone disguised as Makak in order to sell more coal. His ruse fails and he is beaten to death. Makak seeks some answers for his spiritual journey in the eyes of his dead friend, but finds, like Christ, no pristine answer. Robert Fox contends that “The dream that transforms Makak is, in a very real sense, Walcott’s own dream, his artistic vision which espies the potential for greatness in a ‘degraded man.’” Makak is a representative “of the downtrodden and impoverished blacks who long to be redeemed.”10
In the scene back in the reality of his jail cell, Makak attempts to bribe the Corporal for his freedom. He claims he has a hidden cache of money (not true), which inspires the two thieves. The Corporal, appalled, grabs Makak through the bars and says:
Listen, you corrupt, obscene, insufferable ape, I am incorruptible, you understand? Incorruptible. The law is your salvation and mine, you imbecile, you understand that. This ain’t the bush. This ain’t Africa. This is not another easy-going nigger you talking to, but an officer! A servant and an officer of the law! Not the law of the jungle, but something white man teach you to be thankful for. (280)
The Corporal’s self-lacerating indictment of the colonized ironically nullifies his own heritage, resorting to stereotypes absorbed by the colonizer. He has been inculcated to an internalized sense of his own identity as “white,” powerful and omnipotent, claiming the Anglo-European values of whiteness as positive values: law, order, structure, reason, and virtue. Makak, enraged, stabs the Corporal, grasps the keys and frees himself and his two cellmates, who follow him in hopes of uncovering the money. Together in the forest, Makak and the two thieves make their way onto Monkey Mountain where Makak converts their greed into spiritual salvation. There he also encounters the Corporal again, only now observes that Corporal Lestrade has been transformed, coming to Makak for self-awareness. This transformation symbolizes Lestrade’s rejection of European values and law for a tribalist-communal law of African identity. Makak turns the others toward a healing spiritualism; as Paula Burnett asserts, “When Walcott’s drama enacts such rites as a healing, a quasi-resurrection, as in Dream on Monkey Mountain, a miracle performed by the least respected person of a hierarchical racialized community, it does so as part of its strategy to mark the social deprivation but spiritual strength of a real, historic group.”11
The play’s use of masks theatricalizes the sense of oscillating identity formations, which Walcott calls a “totem” and a useful product of Caribbean Carnival.12 The mask of the illusive white woman becomes a potent image for Makak, a catalyst that inspires his spiritual journey. It also represents a visual symbol of Fanon’s well-known book, Black Skin, White Masks (in original French, Peau noire, masques blancs). Makak’s friend Moustique ridicules Makak’s vision of the white goddess, denuding the totemic power and mocking its child-like attraction as something Makak will never possess. Ironically, Moustique will don the mask of Makak, impersonating him in the marketplace in order to sell his goods. Defending himself against the mob that has unmasked him, he says:
You know who I am? You want to know who I am? Makak! Makak!, or Moustique, is not the same nigger? What do you want me to say? “I’m the resurrection, I am the life?” I am the green side of Jordan,” or that “I am a prophet stoned by Jerusalem,” or you all want me, as if this hand hold magic, to stretch it and like a flash of lightning to make you all white? God after god you change, promise after promise you believe, and you still covered with dirt; so why not believe me. All I have is this (Shows the mask), black face, white masks! I tried like you. Moustique then! Moustique! (Spits at them). That is my name! Do what you want! (270–1)
In the end, Makak, too, must heal by symbolically beheading the ghost of the white woman who appears and reappears to haunt his desires and vex his loneliness. The haunted beauty must be terminated as it represents a social construction of beatification – the glorified white woman in the vision of the black man – that has inhibited spiritual growth and development. Yet to acknowledge the white goddess as merely a sexual object or a symbol of white power is to reduce the meaning of the image one-dimensionally. It is she who inspires Makak’s vision of his heritage, self-awareness, racial pride, and his role as prophet. Makak’s journey is a painful one; the effort at self-awareness is a form of rebirth and an ability to face the truth of his consciousness. As the chorus implores him, “Descendre Morne Makak” (Go down to Monkey Mountain, Makak) (264). Like Christ, Makak, the Caribbean everyman, knows that the image has caused him great anguish, that the task before him is arduous: “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” (316). Despite his resistance, the Corporal claims that the goddess is “As inaccessible as snow, as fatal as leprosy. Nun, virgin, Venus, you must violate, humiliate, destroy her; otherwise, humanity will infect you.” He therefore must “Kill her! Kill her!” (318–19). The image of the white goddess is complicated by its admixture of sexual desire, symbol of power, and iconic status. The vision of the white goddess also informs its counter-image, Africa, which, as Renu Juneja writes, “requires [Makak to take] a journey back into the self and into the bush. The return to Africa is a symbolic return to roots. It is necessary step to empower Makak but, like much else in the play, this recovery of the past brings its own ambiguities.”13 If the Corporal now embraces Africa as he earlier rejected it wholeheartedly, Makak’s friend Moustique represents the voice of non-spiritualty and rationality, a self-promoter who takes on Makak’s appearance to sell his goods. The three characters all represent aspects of Caribbean life, each as important as the other and each part of the fabric of this world’s mosaic.
By combining Makak’s reality and dream world, Walcott delves into the subjectivity of his principal character, representing the external and internal values of Makak’s psyche as they evolve in the play’s arch. As Walcott says, “Getting rid of his [Makak’s] overwhelming awe of everything white is the first step every colonial must take. The error is that when you translate this into political terms it leads – wrongly, disastrously – into acts of murder, and eventually genocide. Makak realizes this when he wakes up from a dream that has become a nightmare.”14 The floating dream-image reappearing to Makak throughout the play is both a sexual object and a reminder of what Makak cannot attain. The dream is a transcendence, what Foucault calls a “counter-meaning” or a “dream fire” to reality:
The dream fire is the burning satisfaction of sexual desire, but what makes the desire take shape in the subtle substance of fire is everything that denies this desire and ceaselessly tries to extinguish it. The dream is a functional composite, and if the meaning is invested in images, this is by way of a surplus, a multiplication of meanings which override and contradict each other. The imaginative plasticity of the dream is, for the meaning which comes to light in it, but the form of its contradictoriness.15
The dream is also a means of theatricalization, “externalizing [the play’s] action,” Bruce King writes, that utilized “all the shifting and jumping, fragmentation, and dislocation common to dreams,” translated to “visual stage images.”16 The dream serves the dramaturgical structure of the play, enabling audiences to observe the subjectivity of the protagonist, illustrating as well the phenomenology of his consciousness coming to terms with the conflicts of colonialism, self-assertion, and self-worth.
Makak not only salvages the spirituality of the other characters, he must also raise his own consciousness in order to discover his personal roots – roots which are hybrid, creole, and multifaceted. John Thieme notes that when the characters in the play favor either whiteness or blackness, Europe or Africa, the one-sidedness created is “psychologically damaging, because they involve the repression of the hybridized reality of the Caribbean situation.”17 This hybridity defines the Caribbean identity; its roots are European, African, and ultimately native Rastafarian. A penetrating analysis of Walcott comes from William Haney, who argues that Dream on Monkey Mountain is “an allegory of racial identity based on the visionary experience of the protagonist,” whereby in the mystic quest for a postcolonial cultural identity, “the play transforms its schizophrenic main characters from mimic men pulled in opposite directions by Europe and Africa into genuine hybrids who transcend cultural opposition toward in-between-ness or a ‘void of conceptions.’” While Haney’s argument is for a play that urges identity “beyond cultural boundaries,”18 it is largely a play that takes its main character as a surrogate for the journey of self-scrutiny. Frantz Fanon writes that “It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize the self, it is through the lasting tension of their freedom than men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.”19 Dreams for Walcott become a kind of Kantian “noumena,” a place where human action, awareness, and freedom thrive; human action can be simultaneously validated and free from colonial binarism (freed from making the stark either/or choice).20 Such a vision of Caribbean, postcolonial humanity depicts individuals as homologous and isomorphic – existing in corresponding structures toward a kind of organic and original harmony. The very essence of “Monkey Mountain” is what Okwui Enwezor calls an “imaginary locale,” where both “within the western metropolitan psyche and in the critical strategies of postcolonial discourse, the daydream of a diasporic community is always lodged in an imaginary locale, in an elsewhere, far from the articulate inscription of native utterance. It is usually symbolically invested, and ceaselessly organized outside the principalities of any ordinary geography.”21
Walcott maintains that the play is “about the West Indian search for identity, and about the damage the colonial spirit has done to the soul.” Throughout the play Makak and the other characters are “working out the meaning of their culture; they are going through an upheaval, shaking off concepts that have been imposed on them for centuries.” Makak, Walcott adds, “is an extreme representation of what colonialism can do to a man – he is reduced to an almost animal-like state of degradation. When he dreams that he is the king of a united Africa,” Makak relies on this romanticized version of the past as a way of freeing himself from colonial burdens. However, for Walcott’s character the “problem is to recognize our African origins but not to romanticism them.”22 This multiple and complex view of colonialism adds to the three-dimensionality of the play, and informs the next set of plays as well.