Book: Is Just a Movie
Author: Earl Lovelace
Publication Year: 2011
Genre: Historical Fiction
Country: Trinidad and Tobago
Book: Trinidad Noir: The Classics
Author: Earl Lovelace et. al (Editor: Earl
Lovelace)
Publication Year: 2007
Genre: Short Story Collection
Trinidad and Tobago is a rich literary island and one in which this first pass cannot even begin to scratch the surface. I will return with a deeper dive later in the project (special edition to come).
That said, let’s talk about Earl Lovelace and then make a sweeping arc through the islands’ best writers via Akashic’s City Noir series.
Earl Lovelace is perhaps the perfect writer embody the two islands of Trinidad and Tobago. He was born in Trinidad (in Toco in the north east), but grew up in Tobago. Like Arto Paasilinna (see Finland), he worked as both a journalist and in forestry and agriculture (though he seems to have been less hands-on than his Finish counterpart). He studied and taught in to the United States, before returning to Trinidad. Yet even before he began his studies, Lovelace was already a published novelist.
While Gods Are Falling was published in 1965, the year before Lovelace began his studies at Howard University in Washington DC. The novel was awarded the British Petroleum Independence Literary Award, which is another way of saying that Trinidad is an oil and gas rich nation and has been active in extraction for over a century. Unusually, the government has actually used the profits to invest in the country’s infrastructure, making it one of the more prosperous nations in the Antilles. I digress.
Since While Gods Are Falling, Lovelace has published infrequently (novels at least; he is also a playwright and essayist). Just six books in total have appeared over the previous sixty years. Is Just A Movie, released in 2011, is his most recent novel. Though it is very much a book rooted in the past.
Is Just A Movie takes place in the fictional fishing port of Cascadu (the name taken from a species of fish). It opens in 1970, following the failure of the island’s Black Power movement. This was a series of demonstrations led by students and trade unionists to protest the elements of colonial repression that had survived the country’s independence from Great Britain in 1962.
What followed was a violent crackdown and the declaration of a State of Emergency. We don’t have to look very far in this project to find parallels in international history. Indeed, it is a mirror image of Kenya (see: Kenya), which gained its independence from Great Britain the following year in 1963. There, however, the repression took place in the years leading to independence.
It’s a timely reminder that public will can be repressed no matter who is in charge. As Noam Chomsky reminds us, whereas protest should be seen as the manifestation of democracy, those in power refer to such actions as ‘The Crisis of Democracy’. They cannot be allowed to stand.
The main narrator of Is Just A Movie, Kangkala, tells the interweaving stories of Cascadu’s villagers. Into this Lovelace weaves politics, cricket and religion, as well as Calypso with its rich history and societal function quite beyond Harry Bellefontaine singing The Banana Boat Song, which is as much as most westerners think about it.
Indeed, calypso music originated in Trinidad, born from the Kaiso music of West Africa, especially Nigeria (though we once again bash our heads against the arbitrary, colonial question of what a country is). Kangkala is a calypso musician. Literary personifications of the communicative function of calypso appear at various points in the book in block capitals.
It’s a decent enough novel and certainly makes me curious to read his other 5 novels. Lovelace’s small town tragic comedy is in the fine tradition of Dubliners, Canary Row/Sweet Thursday and Player Piano to name but a few.
I’m sure I’m not well versed enough in Trini culture to get all of the references and might need to reread it when I’ve been through more of the island’s novels and novelists.
One previous Trinidad book was published in
2008. 2017’s Trinidad Noir: The Classics, edited by Earl Lovelace and Robert
Antoni, includes stories and poetry written between 1927 and 2015. Included are
many of the giants of Trinbagonian literature, not least Novel Laureate, V. S.
Naipaul with his story, Man-Man. Naipaul is at the top of my reading list when
I return to the islands. A Bend in the River in particular is one of those books that appears on every list of the greatest novels ever written.
Earl Lovelace also contributes a story to the collection. In Joebell and America, the eponymous Joebell attempts to enter the USA by pretending to have been born in the country. A simple test of his pronunciation by Immigration officers proves his undoing.
Other stories include Samuel Selvon’s The Cricket Match, a comic sketch set in England in the 1950s. Windrush generation factory workers, proud of the West Indies cricket team being in England, challenge their English colleagues to a match, even though few of them have actually played crickt before. A lucky shot sends the ball flying (as well as the bat) well beyond the boundary before rain stops play.
The vast majority of the early stories in the collection are penned by men. The final, post millennial, section, is given over entirely to female writers. In Sharon Millar’s The Dragonfly’s Tale, a 17 year old boy disappears and his mother prays to both Orisha and Christian gods for his safe return. Her quest to find him reveals the violence and corruption of island society.
In Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw’s The Party,
another mother is preparing for her daughter’s birthday party against the
background of a spate of recent kidnappings. In The Bonnaire Silk Cotton Tree
by Shani Mootoo, an ambitious photographer travels into the wilderness, hoping
to meet a jumbie, a mythical creature of the underworld and ask it to make her
famous. The parallels with the blues musician meeting the devil at the
crossroads to sell his soul for fame should be obvious. Indeed, these stories probably have a lot to do with African religion, demonised by the church.
Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw
All in all, it’s a good collection of prose and verse and a useful primer for gaining a working knowledge of Trini literature. Looking through the list of other island nations (Cuba, Haiti etc.) covered by the Akashic series, I’m sure it won’t be the last time I turn to their publications for a foothold in a particular literary culture.
Likesay, I haven’t done more than to scratch
the surface of the many writers to have emerged from Trinidad and Tobago. Along
with everything else, I will return here periodically, especially through the
oeuvre of V. S Naipaul. We will land back on these shores in the not too
distant future.
Earl Lovelace
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