The Caribbean Review of Books (New vol. 1, no. 19, February 2009)

The Caribbean Review of Books, February 2009
Lovelace’s politics and ethos would lead to the development
of a writer capable of conceptualising groundbreaking and
controversial novels.
Rohlehr is careful to detail that Lovelace had notions similar
to some of his literary peers, and that like the early V.S.
Naipaul and Derek Walcott he too felt a sense of despair and
dread about Trinidad society in the 1960s. In reference to Carnival,
often touted as our highest manifestation of culture and
nationalism, and used by Lovelace as a tool of self-definition
and meaning, Rohlehr reminds us that Lovelace once said, “A
Lovelace does not write back to any empire, and according
to Rahim he rejects the notion of exile. He has made his nation
his empire, and writes to and for it. His preoccupation
is not so much how we cope with postcolonialism, but how
we move from the postcolonial condition — contending with
our responses to and feelings about empire — and begin the
new phase of responding to ourselves and not some other, of
seeing ourselves as the subject, not the object. Rahim argues
that Lovelace, in making rootedness mandatory and choosing
to make “the island the real and imaginative centre from
In his essay in A Place in the World, Gordon Rohlehr is careful to
detail that Earl Lovelace had notions similar to some of his literary
peers, and that like the early Naipaul and Walcott he too felt a sense of
despair and dread about Trinidad society in the 1960s
society that glorifies waste is not and cannot be a serious society.”
Lovelace’s perception of Carnival was then one of waste.
Then came his famous ultimatum: “Do, die, or run away.” It is
from this point that Lovelace, almost monk-like in his dedication,
applied himself to the task of validating rural and grassroots
culture, attempting to build a new Caribbean out of the
shambles of the past, and, from Walter Castle to Uncle Bango,
building a case for reparation.
In Caribbean Literature After Independence, Aaron Love’s
essay “The Crisis of Caribbean History: Society and Self in
C.L.R. James and Earl Lovelace” echoes some of Rohlehr’s
sentiments, and goes even further in exploring the dialectic
between self and society. Love’s essay shows that Lovelace
and James had similar concerns about subjectivity and history.
Love takes the time to explain James’s troubled past with
the People’s National Movement, and Lovelace’s continued
analysis of their relevance to a post-independence nation.
James saw The Dragon Can’t Dance as a tool for cultural conception
and self-perception, because it helped to foreground
the historical consciousness of the Caribbean subject in search
of a new selfhood.
The term “transnationalism” is often bandied about
with reference to Caribbean literary discourse. Migration
is not only a theme in our writing, but a means
to existence for our artists. In order for them to carve out an
existence using their craft, they often have to find a metropolitan
country in which to do so. And many of our artists spend
their lifetimes as hyphenated individuals who write back
home from the empire, or the neo-empire. With all of this in
mind, in her essay “The Nation/A World/A Place to be Human
— Earl Lovelace and the Task of ‘Rescuing the Future’”
(included in A Place in the World), Jennifer Rahim lays a case to
show that Lovelace, in choosing to do, and to remain rooted
in Trinidad doing, has avoided the label of transnationalism.
which he views and speaks to the world,” has forged the way
ahead.
Kate Quinn puts a very realistic spin on the opportunity
cost of an artist’s choosing to stay rooted in the Caribbean.
There is no question that migrant artists have fared better
than those at home, primarily because government policies
in the Caribbean do not include the role of the artist, an issue
that Lovelace has argued passionately for in his essays. Quinn
uses very hard facts to show that Lovelace and others who
chose to stay in Trinidad, such as poet Anson Gonzales and
dancer Beryl McBurnie, paid a high price for their decision.
Bill Schwarz’s “Being in the World” also takes a look at
Lovelace’s ideas of self and place. Through an assessment
of several of Lovelace’s essays collected in Growing in the
Dark (2003), Schwarz looks at the importance of failure, the
folk, and folk practices to the author’s way of being in and
interrogating his home in the new world. Schwarz’s essay
seems an ideal segue into Sandra Pouchet-Pacquet’s paper
“The Vulnerable Observer: Self-Fashioning in Earl Lovelace’s
Growing in the Dark (Selected Essays)”, in the Aiyejina volume.
She assesses the development of Lovelace’s ideologies from a
chronological framework, as opposed to the thematic framework
with which Growing in the Dark was organised, and
examines the shifts and complexities of the personal voice,
issues of ideological self-placement, and the importance of
connection and otherness that is at the centre of all cultural
and historical representation. She sees Lovelace’s time writing
for the Trinidad Express as the development of a holy trinity of
the writer, his society, and the media organisation. In assessing
Growing in the Dark, Pouchet-Pacquet looks at Lovelace’s
familiarity with the critical works of James, Walcott, Naipaul,
Wilson Harris, George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, and
Franz Fanon; also his interpretation of historical events such
as the Civil Rights movement and Black Power, and the obvious
organic development of his own counter-discourse.
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