Mental Conflict In Makak's Identity
The indifference or the failure of Makak to reveal his identity in the first act of the play itself throws light into the intensity of mental conflict in Makak’s mind. He forges his name and opts the derogatory name ‘Makak’ that means monkey inordrer to conceal his real personality. When arrested for disorderly conduct, he actually forgets his legal name. Walcott through his character Makak clearly portrays the tug of war in a black men’s mind and his efforts to make an escape from his real identity: Corporal : “What is your name?” Makak : “I forget” Corporal : “What is your race?” Makak : “I’m tired.” Makak stands as a prototype for any black man who tries to forge his real identity in order to wear a mask of ‘whiteness’. The delirium from which he suffers is to a family or culture. He has, in effect, been formed by an …show more content…
Fanon brings forth many examples of this: “Torturer is the black man, Satan is black, one talk of shadows, when one is dirty one is black – whether one is thinking of physical dirtiness or of moral dirtiness.... The archetype of lowest values is represented by the Negro” (Black Skin 190). The Negro symbolized the lower emotions, the bases inclinations, and the dark side of the soul. As Fanon points out, in the collective unconscious of home occidentalis, the Negro or the colour black symbolises evil, sin, wretchedness, death, war, famine. Continuing to intermingle Freudian with Jungian elements, Fanon contends that the source of this colour symbolism and the negative stereotyping of the Negro lie within the psyche of the white person. In the collective unconscious of white European, he suggest, the Negro plays the role of the shadow, that part of our personality which, because it embodies all that is reprehensible in human beings, must at all costs be repudiated. Involved in all this, on the part of the white European is the phenomenon of
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