Is Just a Movie: A Novel

Praise for Is Just a Movie by Earl Lovelace

"Is Just a Movie confirms Lovelace as a master storyteller of the West Indies." —Ian Thomson, The Financial Times

Funny, moving, endlessly inventive. —The Times of London

Lovelace’s fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken. In his new novel, he turns his attention to the remote fictional village of Cascadu and the lives of ordinary individuals whose relationship to politics, their peers, and their own weaknesses provide fascinating material. . . . Lovelace is bursting with things to say about this complex, heterogeneous society in the late twentieth century. This he does with a flair that at its best reaches a soaring rhapsody. The scabs of racial tension are cautiously peeled back and we witness the community’s loves, aspirations, and machinations; their little victories and defeats, their best selves and worst selves. And when things become too difficult, there is always the spirit of Carnival that presides over their lives: recuperative, cathartic, communal, celebratory.

—Bernadine Evaristo, The Guardian

Vivid prose that seems to stroll effortlessly across the page. Lovelace’s writing is meticulously crafted but it retains its casual elegance. —The Times Literary Supplement

"Earl Lovelace’s genius is revealed in his capacity to consistently write characters of complex sophistication that remain fully believable as products of their landscape and time even as the author conjures up riveting and often unusual circumstances in their lives. Lovelace’s characters are compelling because of the care and profound empathy with which he explores their thinking and their feelings. Lovelace understands Trinidad and its people, its music, its history, and its psyche in ways that have made him one of the most important writers to have emerged from the Caribbean in the last seventy years. Is Just a Movie manages to combine all the elements of the best calypso—a postmodernist sense of the world, an earthbound wit, a capacity for complex tragedy, and a haunting humanity. Lovelace makes you want to be Trinidadian."

—Kwame Dawes

The publication of a new novel by Earl Lovelace is an event to celebrate. This satire, while biting, is tempered with a pathos and humor which direct us to the fundamental humanity we have come to recognize in all of Lovelace’s writing.

—Lawrence Scott, author, Night Calypso

"More than any other writer, the prose of Earl Lovelace is ‘Trini to the bone.’ And like the famed Cascadu river fish after which the village in Is Just a Movie is named, once its sweet flesh is tasted, the reader is destined to return to its shores."

—Robert Antoni, author, Divina Trace and Carnival

"Earl Lovelace is arguably the Caribbean’s greatest living novelist. In Is Just a Movie, he writes at the top of his considerable literary powers, picturing the Caribbean’s poor and powerless defending their ever-embattled humanity with resourcefulness and tenacity."

—Randall Robinson, author, Makeda

Music, broken hearts, revolution and scandal sway through the novel, which, like all of Lovelace’s books, is forged in the dizzying heat of Carnival and the hotbed of post-independence politics.

—Metro (London)

Winner of the Grand Prize for Caribbean Literature from the Regional Council of Guadeloupe

Praise for Earl Lovelace’s earlier novels

"The Dragon Can’t Dance is a landmark, not in the West Indian but in the contemporary novel. . . . Nowhere have I seen more of the realities of a whole country disciplined into one imaginative whole." —C. L. R. James, author, The Black Jacobins

Generous, torrential prose that seems to hold every complexity—of history, of ethnicity, of reason and magic alike—within its rushing energy. —New York Times Book Review

"Salt is a book of great beauty and force which is going to take its place as one of the classics of twentieth-century world literature."

—Judges of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize

Lovelace expresses powerful and often subtle ideas with memorable directness. —Chicago Tribune

A defining and luminously sensitive portrait of postcolonial island life. . . . A poignant, beautifully crafted tale. —Kirkus

[Lovelace is the] consummate Caribbean man-of-letters.

—Publishers Weekly

Distinguished Trinidadian novelist Lovelace writes fiction as syncopated, sinuous, and irresistible as the calypso music that punctuates the lives of his poor but proud characters. . . . Lovelace peers beneath the rigid structure of island society into the desiring hearts of men and women struggling for recognition, respect, and love. . . . As Lovelace masterfully choreographs the dance of each of his finely drawn characters, he reveals the conundrums not only of Caribbean life but of the human condition itself.

—Booklist

"The Dragon Can’t Dance is a wonderful work filled with depth, insight, and truth. While the story is grounded in the milieu of Trinidad, its message is universal and timeless." —Multicultural Review

Superb lyrical writing and a moving sense of history being enacted in the lives of individuals. —Mail on Sunday

A deeply affecting and satisfying novel distinguished by intense lyrical writing. —The Observer

Carnival leaps out of these pages with deafening steel bands, pageantry and dance. —The Daily Telegraph

Lovelace writes with a singularly truculent acuteness, both in narrative and in the dialogue which captures West Indian speech rhythms so convincingly. . . . The Schoolmaster is quite unlike anything a British author could produce, being its own enviable thing, absolutely. —Robert Nye, The Guardian

Earl Lovelace’s writing has a picturesque yet dark energy, with a carnival snaking through the novel like a dangerous spine.

—The Guardian

Earl Lovelace writes like a man who has just discovered language and is amazed. Each word is a revelation. —The Times

A novelist of intelligence and sensibility. —Sunday Times

© 2011 Earl Lovelace

First published in 2011 by Faber and Faber Ltd in London.

This edition published in 2012 by

Haymarket Books

PO Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60626

773-583-7884

[email protected]

www.haymarketbooks.org

Distributed to the trade in the United States

by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com.

ISBN: 978-1-60846-175-2

Published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation

and the Wallace Global Fund.

Cover image by Jed Nichols.

Printed in the United States.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

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In memory of Errol Jones

For Funso Aiyejina

And for Tiy, Maya, Lulu, Che, and Walt—and all those who have waited long enough for this book to finish

ONE

I, Kangkala

My name is Kangkala, maker of confusion, recorder of gossip, destroyer of reputations, revealer of secrets. In the same skin, I am villain and hero, victim and victor.

I am a true-true kaisonian.

I reduce the powerful by ridicule. I show them their absurdities by parody. I make their meanings meaningless and give meaning to meaning. I dance bongo on top the graves of the mighty. I am the Dame Lorraine presenting in caricature the grotesque of the wicked, the deformity of the stupid, the obzocky of gluttony. I show the oppressors themselves misshapen: gros toto, gros titi, gros bondage. Yes, I portray the big-stones man: a bag of boulders bulging from my pants, I am the big-foot, sore-foot man, the big-bottom, big-breasted, big-belly woman. I am the dispenser of afflictions.

But I was born again by a slip of the tongue when one night in the kaiso tent, as I am preparing to sing my song, for the benefit of foreigners in the audience, the Master of Ceremonies introducing me, proceeded to make his announcement with an American twang. He said, Ladies and gentlemen, this is the song, and this is your singer, King Kala.

So, suddenly, in the interstice, or shall I say the interspluce of this mispronunciation of Kangkala brought on by this Trinidadian fella wanting to sound American, calling Kang King, I was reborn to a new vision. It was in the middle of the time of the uprising we called Black Power. I don’t remember exactly what song I was going to sing, which big shot I was going to lash, whose business I was going to expose; but, that night, inspired by the MC’s error of my name, a grander role fell to me. The mockery was over, the double entendre at an end. I take off my jacket and roll up my sleeves. I would become the recorder of the people’s story, singer of their praises, restorer of their faith, keeper of their vexation, embalmer of their rage. I became the poet of the revolution.

Then the state of emergency was declared. The heroes made their triumphant surrender. Then they disappeared. Some skipped over to religion, some ran back to their trade union, some fly back to Africa, some sailed into electoral politics, one take up a piece of chalk and with the walkway his blackboard began to lecture in the university of Woodford Square. But the stage was no longer our own. The show was over. I tried to sing them into presentness, to invoke them with song:

Oh, Mastifay, Mastifay, meet me by the Quay d’Osay

Cutouter, Cutouter, meet me by Green Corner

But everything was against me. I was singing, but nothing came of my songs. Then that too ended, not a sound came from my voice, not a new note spun from my head.

I looked around to see those who had dreamed with me steaming into safe harbors. They rebuilt the pyramids, they reconstructed Hanuman, they parted the ocean and stuffed the Middle Passage back into oblivion. All that time my aunt Magenta is wrestling with the angel, saying with a fierce loyalty and hope that I could not fathom, I will not let you go until you bless me. The angel continued to struggle. I didn’t know what to do. I thought it was I alone who was left believing – in believing. I was beginning to panic. I didn’t know where I was going. I begin to look around for a harbor. And then I witnessed the exquisite choreography of Sonnyboy’s dying.

Starring Sonnyboy

When Sonnyboy Apparicio hear the government had declared a state of emergency and was arresting leaders of the Black Power demonstrations that our most illustrious historian had christened the February Revolution, his first instinct was to run. He exchanged his dashiki for a long-sleeved white shirt, patted down his halo of hair to fit under a bebop cap, left Rouff Street where he stayed by his brother Alvin when he was in Port of Spain and dodged his way to the village sleeping on top Hololo mountain to hide out by Daniel, an Indian pardner, where he felt sure the police wouldn’t look for him, there to wait for word of the resistance that the Black Power leader warned would follow, as faithfully as night follows day, if the government take God out their thoughts and try to stop the onward march of Blackpeople.

Throughout that day Sonnyboy listened to the radio give details of leaders captured, of leaders surrendered, of leaders on the run, and he spent a sleepless night on the canvas cot in Daniel’s front room, agonizing over the likelihood that the Black Power rebellion, after months of roaring, was whimpering to its end. But when next morning he see in the newspapers the compelling poetry of his leaders’ surrender, their clenched fists in the air, their bodies bristling with the authority of their outrage, the very policemen that had arrested them gazing at them with awe, it became clear to Sonnyboy that the Brothers, as he now called these men, had not crumbled, but, like the Flounce dancers in the Guyana masquerade, had leapt from their humbling to a more invincible height. Wanting to take his place beside them, Sonnyboy take off his bebop cap, pushed it into his pocket, teased out his hair to the previous halo of its fullness, said goodbye to his pardner on Hololo and rushed back to Rouff Street to wait there for the police to come to arrest him. But, at Rouff Street, the fellars usually congregated on the corner had melted and the few gathered there were not all that familiar with him. Not wanting to be arrested on a street where people didn’t know him, Sonnyboy take a taxi to the town of Cascadu, where he had lived in the house of his grandmother since he was fourteen, where he was sure he would find a multitude appreciative of an event as important as his arrest. In Cascadu, people who saw him out in public were alarmed at what they thought to be his foolhardiness, and his good friend Gilda grabbed him by the collar with an excess of force he expected to be excused because of his good intentions:

You crazy or what? The police looking for Black Power people, why the arse you not in hiding?

Sonnyboy portrayed himself as smiling and saying to Gilda and the people with him: Don’t worry. They could kill me, but they can’t kill the revolution, words of courage that so moved Gilda and the people with him that, at the risk of themselves being arrested for what was now unlawful assembly, since the state of emergency was in effect, they shepherded him into his grandmother’s yard and crowded around him with a sense of awed and prideful jubilation to wait for the police to come to arrest him.

His grandmother, whose pride in him had ballooned almost to bursting over the months of his involvement

with Black Power, thrilled that he was going to be arrested for championing a cause more noble than the personal misdeeds that usually landed him in trouble, cooked

for him a pot of rice and pigeon peas with ochro and saltfish, enough to offer the crowd that had gathered in

her yard to witness the occasion of Sonnyboy’s arrest,

to eat.

No police came that day, or the next, and the cheerful faces of Sonnyboy’s waiting supporters began to droop. They began to speculate that the authorities doing the arresting had him lower on the list for martyrdom than he had led them to believe he merited. They began to drop words for him:

Like they forget you, boy?

How come you ain’t get hold yet?

Faced by the prospect of being marooned in the freedom of oblivion, Sonnyboy decide to take matters into his own hands. On a brilliant Sunday afternoon when most of the villagers were heading to the parched savannah to see the cricket match between Cascadu and Dades Trace, and others were on their way to the blue sunshine of the beach, he laced up his boots, put on his black headband, his red dashiki, his green dark shades, and, with the halo of his hair like an open umbrella over his face, set out for the police station, behind him his grandmother, his good friend Gilda, another pardner Dog and in the back of them a group that was making the journey to see him brought low.

I hear all-you looking for me, he said to the single policeman on duty.

And to avoid the indignity of being asked who me was (since, at his words, Constable Stephen Aguillera, the policeman on duty had raised his eyebrows in puzzlement) he added his name: Sonnyboy Apparicio. Without a word, the policeman opened the huge station diary in front of him and began turning its pages. Sonnyboy held his breath. And he only exhaled when Constable Aguillera raised his eyes to his.

Five years earlier, hearing the news that Ramona Fortune, the girl he loved, would be leaving for England on the day immediately after Carnival Tuesday, Constable Aguillera, himself a youth just two years on the police force, had left the Matura Police Station unattended, released the single prisoner whom he had made promise that he would return by the midnight ending of the festivities, and had gone to look for Bucco Reef, the McWilliams Carnival band in which he was told Ramona would be playing. He spent half the day searching for the band and, when he found it, trying, without luck, to get past the guard of relatives and friends surrounding her. When he returned to Matura just after midnight, with a heart dripping with grief, it was to find the station blazing in light, and waiting for him the corporal in charge of Matura Police Station, the sergeant and inspector up from Sangre Grande, and the prisoner he had released, back in his cell, on a new charge of wounding.

Pleading guilty to Dereliction of Duty, Constable Aguillera at first accepted the penance of his exile to Cascadu as punishment that was deserved and had worked hard to make up for that single blunder by efforts to present himself as a conscientious officer. His boots, belt and buttons were always shining, his stance erect, his voice firm, his notebook in order, the language of the charges for misdemeanors clear; and in less than two years he had Cascadu straight, his presence enough to bring calm to the bedlam of Main Street on a busy payday Friday, a flash of his eyes sufficient to direct men to give over money due the mothers of their children who had come to the rum shop to intercept them before the rum shop or gambling club take it from them, and a voice with the quality of force and sternness to order the most enthusiastic troublemaker to go to the police station charge-room and sit there and wait while he made up his mind what charge to place him on.

But when Constable Aguillera observed that his good works had gone unrewarded, and officers his junior with nothing approaching his record of arrests were promoted ahead of him, a certain resentment began to eat at him. For two years and a half he went on a spree, drinking rum, gambling and enjoying the favors of women who, drawn to the neatness of his uniform, the uprightness of his stance and his overall power and good looks, were falling all over the place for him. At one time he found himself friending with a woman in nearly every village of his district and had two of them at the same time big-belly for him. He mended his ways somewhat when six months after the two babies were born, the mother of one brought the baby to the police station, put him in his hands and walked away. He gave the baby to his mother to mind, cut down on his drinking and made an effort to keep his head straight when he see a nice woman passing. However, the unfairness of the administration still rankled and he continued to refuse to arrest anyone. Fellars used obscene language within earshot of him. Taxi drivers double-parked, and numerous skirmishes took place within clear sight of him. On Main Street, two badjohns, Big Head and Marvel, had a fistfight that started in front the gambling club and ended up in front the rum shop where he was drinking, bottle and stone pelting, people dodging, the whole street in disorder for an hour and fifteen minutes. Constable Aguillera maintained his resolve not to make an arrest until justice was meted out to him.

So, on that Sunday, when he looked up from the station diary, it was with a sense of personal relief that Sonnyboy’s name was not in the book. But, hearing the disappointed grumble of Sonnyboy’s supporters, and the hum of jubilation from those behind them, he advised that if Sonnyboy wanted to be sure of his status, he should go to the savannah, where he would find the corporal in charge of the police station looking at the cricket match; or he could sit down and wait, on the chance that the inspector who was handling the Black Power business might drop in and clarify whether or not he was to be arrested. "Or, you could go home."

Sonnyboy recalled smiling. Even the police were doing their best not to see him. He decided to wait.

I would meet him sitting on the bench in the charge-room when I was brought in with two revolutionary brethren, Ibo and Marvin, who, bad luck for us, were apprehended in a roadblock on the Toco Road as we were making our way to the hills of the remote village of Kumaca. As soon as I sit down, Sonnyboy strike up a conversation with me, affecting a familiarity that we really didn’t have, and he continued talking to me for the half-hour it took for the three army officers to come to fetch Ibo, Marvin and me to detention on Nelson Island. As they signaled for me and my two brethren to get up and follow them, Sonnyboy, still talking to me, got to his feet as if he was one of our party and calmly strode out with us to the waiting army jeep.

As we were about to enter the jeep, the newspaper photographers who had been waiting outside the police station to catch a glimpse of the Black Power detainees, as we were called, aimed their cameras at us. I was tired with worry. I turned away, to give the impression of nonchalance but really because I didn’t want my photograph appearing in the newspaper with me, a revolutionary, looking so harassed.

But Sonnyboy, not quite smiling, brought himself erect, lifted his right hand, fist clenched, above his head, and with a sense of honor, and a deserved delight, shouted, Power to the People! in a salute so rousing that I thrust my own right hand, fist folded, in the air and shouted: Power! When I looked, I saw that my comrades had done the same.

I didn’t know Sonnyboy all that well. I knew him as a badjohn, a man who had his problems with the law. I had seen him at one or two of the Black Power rallies in Port of Spain and, meeting him there in the police station, I assumed he was one of us, one of the detainees. But later, when I heard his story, I was glad that my presence there that day had enabled him to save face before his grandmother and his brethren and allow him, for the first time, to enter into the custody of the police not as a common criminal but as the freedom fighter he knew himself to be.

Poet of the Revolution

When I am released from detention, Port of Spain is a changed place. The People’s Parliament where in the time of Black Power we had assembled before we set out on our daily marches is back to being just Woodford Square. The day I went there, the roar and babble of brethren at the gate, passing out pamphlets for rallies, is replaced by neatly dressed women and men silently holding up copies of the religious magazine Awake. At the side of the fountain, where the Grecian nymph is turning a dirty green under the unsteady drip of water, the leader of a band of Shouters, barefooted, in a yellow robe and red head tie, is delivering a sermon to a single diligent listener, a vagrant whose torso, arms and legs are wrapped in cellophane, bulking him up to look like an astronaut without a helmet. On the railing near to the urinals, a gray-haired man, his hair plastered down on his skull and his beard neatly trimmed, is arguing for the divinity of Marcus Garvey and the immortality of Haile Selassie. I look in the listening crowd for regulars from ’70, men who had talked revolution, who had raised their fists and shouted Power. One is selling snow-cone, another one have in his hands a book of lottery tickets for sale, and one is sitting on a bench by himself alone, curled up and quailed like callaloo bush in the hot sun, the heave and bounce gone out of his step, the light in his eyes dimmed, about him the exhausted look of a routed combatant glad to embrace the chastening rebuke of his defeat. None of them seem to recognize me and I choose not to trouble them. I their poet and prophet was now a stranger.

For Carnival that same year, in the Victory Calypso Tent where I had spent the last five years as the lead calypso singer, the crowd no longer want to hear my songs. They sit quiet enough while I am singing, and continue their forbidding silence when I am done, and it is only out of his sense of gratitude that Jazzy, the manager of the tent, is keeping me on the program, since, thank God, he ain’t forget that in the two years leading up to ’70, I was the big name pulling in the crowd. But even Jazzy’s loyalty was wearing thin.

This night he called me into the little booth he called his office and he say to me, King . . . That is how he call me: King. That is how he call those of us who win the Calypso crown already.

He say, King, how you feeling? in this tuneless falsetto that put me on my guard right away.

How I feeling? Since when you is a doctor, Jazzy? Tell me, Jazzy, how you expect me to be feeling? No encores, no appreciation. Most times I feel like I singing to myself.

King, don’t think I don’t appreciate the songs you singing. His words slow, heavy, like they weighing down his head, have him looking not at me but down at his hands, the fingers of one pulling carefully at the others, like a pay-master singling out and counting hundred-dollar bills.

Jazzy, why you don’t stop beating around the bush and tell me what you have to tell me?

And now he drop the bomb: King, we going to have to put you on the bench.

You taking me off the program, Jazzy?

"Because, King, the revolution, the rebellion, it finish,

it done. And, those songs you singing, the people . . ."

pausing for the eternity of two-three seconds, his eyes flashing, his voice going up with the scratch of a new harsh rhythm (and I could hear him forcing back the distaste, the disappointment). The people, the people, straining to restrain himself lest his blood pressure boil over. The people? In his voice a chuckle, a sneer, steering him away from the chasm of his disappointment. The people paying their money, they have the say. You have to give them the songs they say they want. That is democracy. Left to me . . .

"Left to you? Jazzy, it is you it’s left to. And look where you put me – in the calypsonian’s cemetery."

Cemetery, King? with a sense of hurt that make me lighten up.

OK, purgatory.

Jazzy smiling his contemplative Jazzy-smile at the clever-

ness and accuracy of my retort, You good, you good . . . Left to me . . . spreading open his two hands, palms upward to demonstrate his good faith, his voice soft like a baby’s, so, if you don’t know the hardhearted fucker you dealing with, you’d think he going to cry.

Left to me, I’ll keep you singing until these people come to their senses and start applauding you. But they say they want calypsos to make them dance. They leaving here and going to the other tent. You see our tent last night and tonight, how it empty? We have good calypso, but the people say they want to dance. You have any song for them to dance to?

Jazzy, Jazzy, Jazzy. I tell you this already. Let me tell you it again. I am a poet. A poet, you hear? And the reason I sing calypso is because poetry don’t have no real following here in this island. Lots of calypsonians recite their calypso, I sing my poems.

Poet?

He look up at me as if what I say sweeten him and he start to smile – not yet to laugh. Poet and Prophet, eh, rubbing with an open hand one side of his face, the better, I suppose, to contemplate the idea: Poet and Prophet.

Poet, he say again, opening his two empty hands in what I suppose he expected me to interpret as his pantomime of regret at not having the fictitious money that he acting as if I asking him for. Don’t vex with me, King. We have to wait on the people.

Jazzy, how long I singing in this calypso tent?

King, if is reproach you come to reproach me, now is not the time. I trying my best. For the tent. For everybody.

No, Jazzy. Tell me how long I singing here.

"How you could ask me how long? Is right here in the Victory Tent that your career begin. Nine-ten years ago, without a calypso name. Is I who give you the name Kangkala. Come in here a slim little fella with your cap turned backwards and your head tie-up like a Baptist, singing something about the Blackman cry. And though it was no big song, you had a voice, you could carry a tune. And after that you sing something about racial unity, dress up like a Indian bridegroom, a doolaha with a little Indian dancer dress up like the doolahin. And then with Black Power, you start to sing about the injustices to Blackpeople, Black is beautiful and that big one about South Africa. People full up the tent to hear you."

And you know why, Jazzy? I show people who they really is. I show them that they bigger and more grand, that they have more heart and guts and stones than what people give them credit for. I show them what nobody else show them.

King, I didn’t call you here for a lecture.

No, you call me here to tell me you taking me off the stage.

"We have to survive, King. The tent have to survive.