In this essay on Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain, author Patrick Hogan examines the themes of colonization, poverty, and the search for social and personal identity in a world where racial subjugation is absolute and blackness absolutely devalued.

Establishing both a social and a personal identity which are not determined by the oppressor has been a recurrent theme of subaltern writers, from postcolonials, to women, to racial and ethnic minorities. Whether spoken of in terms of "decolonizing the mind," "ecriture feminine," or the "black aesthetic," it has been a central task of literary artists from dominated groups. A number of writers have chosen to look at this issue from the other side, examining the ways in which oppressive ideologies undermine personal identity and even lead to madness. This approach has been particularly common in feminist critiques of patriarchy. Some of the more obvious instances from the post-colonial...