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“Makak lives where he has always lived, in the dream of his people.”
Monkey Mountain is not a real place: it is a point of view. The opening quotation is taken from the play “Dream on Monkey Mountain” by a leading contemporary Caribbean poet-playwright, Derek Walcott. In the play, Makak, a near-psychotic, epileptic woodcutter and coal burner, relives a dream sequence which illustrates some aspects of our identity conflict and our ambivalence about our African roots. The view from Monkey Mountain is Makak's point of view—the viewpoint of the rural Caribbean peasant. The relevance of this, is that treating Makak should involve understanding his dream. In order to achieve this understanding, our psychiatrists need to be well-grounded in the culture of the patients whom they treat; to be able to empathize with them, and to understand, even if they cannot always share, their ideas of the etiology of illness.
On the whole, our poets and novelists have contributed more to our understanding of Caribbean identity than have psychiatrists or psychologists. In particular the writers of the French speaking Caribbean, Haiti, and the French Antilles, have written extensively about the problems posed by the duality of being Frenchmen and black; Price Mars, Roumain, Aime Cesaire, and Franz Fanon for example. Of these, only Fanon was a psychiatrist. Recently Boukson and Edouard of Martinique have given us the combination