By Tanya Batson-Savage, Staff ReporterWITH SELECTED readings highlighting his flowing prose, which elegantly and eloquently captures the Caribbean experience, distinguished author Earl Lovelace delighted the audience at Undercroft of the Senate Building, University of the West Indies, Mona, on Tuesday evening.
Lovelace is the author of The Dragon Can't Dance, The Wine of Astonishment and While Gods Were Falling. Lovelace's public reading at the university was one in a series of residencies sponsored by the Ford Foundation to the Institute of Caribbean Studies. Lovelace began with three excerpts from Salt, his most recent novel. The excerpts selected showed that Salt deals with the colonial and post colonial West Indies. As with the best tales, Lovelace began at the beginning. "I usually read this first piece," Lovelace explained, "because I like it, and there's singing in it." The first segment of the novel summarises the colonial project with clear cutting ironic wit.
MADNESS
"It have no brooding inscrutable wilderness here," Lovelace read. The novel argues that it must have been a madness particular to the West Indies which seized the old world conquerors when they decided to convince the Caribs that they were gods. Unfortunately, soon "they begin to discover how hard it is to be gods."
This first excerpt of Salt summed up wittily that "it was hard for white people," as their attempt to be gods found them burdened by the powdered wigs, naming of all the plants, taming of animals, building churches, dealing with the foliage and then dealing with Black people, who refused to be led.
"Four hundred years it take them to figure out that you can't keep people in captivity and it didn't happen just so," the tale continued. While the first excerpt looked at the task of governing the unruly in captivity, the second excerpt dealt with the trouble of governing the unruly in freedom. This perspective came from a Prime Minister, who was frustrated with his attempt at governance.
The third excerpt dealt with a more commercial aspect, detailing the rise to prominence of Moon, an Indian man with immoral cunning and a wife with a good head for business, a combination well-suited to a quick rise in the commercial world.
"I just have some water here," Lovelace told the audience as he reclaimed his bottle of Red Stripe to wet his throat. At that point, the witty irony which characterised Salt was abandoned for a while, when Lovelace read the poignant story of disillusionment, 'The Fire Eater's Return', taken from A Brief Conversation and Other Stories.
'The Fire Eater's Return' tells the story of Blues, a fire eater, who set out with the confidence that he could conquer the world by conning it, only to realise that the world had conned him, leaving him with "a torture mask" with a smile on it.
Lovelace ended the entertaining evening with a segment from a yet untitled novel that he is working on. The protagonist this time around is a calypsonian, who decides to take on the world of movies and gets a part in an American movie being shot in Trinidad.
The hilarious excerpt, dealt with the issues of representation, especially as the calypsonian decides to die like a poet rather than the blip on the screen that the American director wants. "The quality of our dying is an embarrassment to them," he laments, "We dying too slow, we wasting the white people time."
It was a poignant message, even more relevant as the Caribbean begins to realise the value of telling our stories not just in texts, but also in film. As the protagonist learns, it is never just a movie.
