Is Just a Movie

A Novel

Earl Lovelace

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781608461769
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Karibische Literatur

A "funny, moving, endlessly inventive" novel of life in a Trinidadian town during a time of change and revolutionary fervor ( The Times ). In Trinidad, in the wake of 1970's Black Power Uprising, we follow Sonnyboy, Singer King Kala, and their town's folk through experiments in music, politics, religion, and love—and in their day-to-day adventures. Humorous and serious, sad and uplifting, Is Just a Movie is a radiant novel about small moments of magic in ordinary life. "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 of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks "Lovelace is bursting with things to say about this complex, heterogeneous society in the late twentieth century... with a flair that at its best reaches a soaring rhapsody." — Guardian " Is Just a Movie is not just a movie, it's a poem, too." —Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things "Confirms Lovelace as a master storyteller of the West Indies." — Financial Times "Starring two hapless almost-beens in search of movie fame, Is Just A Movie takes us on wild loving absurdist journey to the heart of a contemporary Trinidad." —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao "Vivid prose that seems to stroll effortlessly across the page." — The Times Literary Supplement Winner of the Regional Council of Guadeloupe's Grand Prize for Caribbean Literature

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...