Is Just a Movie

by Earl Lovelace

  “There is not an iota of discrimination intended. What are being highlighted are cultural forms that were developed here in the island and shared by people of all ethnic persuasions. If any community would identify any of their cultural creations that we have ignored we would be happy to include them in the program.

  “Let me repeat: in order that nobody feels left out or overlooked or offended, we want to encourage people to wear their native dress and present their native culture. Wear your own clothes, eat your own foods, display your own culture. Do, as you say in your local parlance, do your own thing. And, yes. We will pay. We will stand the cost of your costumes.”

  “You mean they will be paying for everybody to play mas?” asked my aunt. “That will cost a lot.”

  “Money is not the problem,” said Clephus. “Now we will see who we are.”

  “So what mas you playing?” Aunt Magenta asked.

  I pretended not to hear her.

  In the first few days following the PM’s speech, libraries were bombarded with requests for books on Africa and India, so people could determine which part their fore- parents had come from, so they would know what costume to wear. Overnight, fabric merchants descended on the town selling scarves and cow whisks and headties, ohrinis and sandals, displaying styles from Ghana and Nigeria and India and China. And soon, all over the land, there would be the whistling of sewing machines stitching fabric, the rustle of hands sticking sequins and feathers onto papier-mâché constructions.

  Many of the mixed population went about in a daze wondering which side of their ancestry to relate to but others were signing up for the Fancy Sailor band that was to be brought out by the Cascadu steelband. Some were playing jab-jab with the gambler Japan and others had signed up with big bands in Port of Spain, where the covering of a costume made everybody the same human.

  In Cascadu the Ministry of Culture set about constructing a tourist village that would be a permanent attraction for even people living in the island. In it was a calypso tent, a stickfight gayelle and a steelband yard where they had pan tuners demonstrating the process by which oil drums were turned into musical instruments. They mapped out a route along which steelbands would parade at certain hours and play tunes of their choosing but would as well engage in the steelband clashes as obtained in the early days of steelband history. In what they were now calling interactive culture, visitors would be allowed (for a fee) to join a band (Desperadoes, Invaders, All Stars, San Juan) and play the instruments. Those not wanting to play the pans would be invited to take part in the reenactment of steelband clashes in which visitors armed with bottles and stones would be given the opportunity (for a fee) to pelt bottles and stones at their opposing brethren or have stones or bottles pelted at them. In the stickfighting arena tourists would be able to sit and watch the duels but would also be offered the opportunity to learn the art of stickfighting from the Joe Pringay School of Stickfighting, where those so minded could taste the delicious experience of busting a man head or having the thrill of getting their own head busted.

  Limbo dancing taught by the Julia Edwards School of Dance, King Sailor by Jeff Henry, iron beating, Midnight Robber, bat and moko jumbie performances as well as blue devils from Paramin and Fancy Sailors from Jason Griffith, tassa drumming and chutney singing with sessions on how to wine were all on offer. The calypso tent had appearing Valentino, Superior, Mudada, Stalin, Brigo and I, King Kala, was invited to sing.

  While all this going on, the political parties were screening candidates, organizing motorcades, holding meetings, decrying corruption, promising a new world. Everywhere I turned the New National Party was booming its slogan, The Time of Miracle is Now. This was the time for me to sing. But at this momentous time in the history of Cascadu, I was dumb.

  Dumb

  I suppose there were those who were glad that I couldn’t sing; but I like to think that everybody was sorry for me. People from my neighborhood brought me cures, honey and lime, chandelier bush tea, soft candle and nutmeg, aloes and egg. None of it had any effect on my head or my voice. My aunt Magenta got an Indian man to come and gharay me. He placed a burning candle on my chest to draw out the bad spirit. He twist my hands behind my back, turn my head wrong side, but still the pounding in my head continued and the emptiness of my voice prevailed. And I went back to sitting in front the television, watching people going into the rest house where Dorlene had been installed. It was unbelievable. People who had gone in bent over in pain come out skipping, throwing away crutches, and bandages. Eventually, my aunt said, I better carry you to see Dorlene.

  At first, I was reluctant to go, believing that I did not have the faith required for this kind of healing, but when fever start to burn up my body and ague start to rattle my teeth, I agreed. As soon as we stepped out the door and walked a few yards we could see the traffic, backed up for what looked like miles. We walked through the town, which was being decorated with national flags and buntings. Along the road, on foot or riding bicycles were members of the Hard Wuck Party, giving out pamphlets announcing power to the Hard Wuck, picking up crutches and other items thrown away by the people who had been healed and shouting: The miracle will not happen without the hard work. We will not achieve anything by miracles. We have to take the hard road forward.

  “You see why I can’t vote for these people,” my aunt said, looking at me as if I was guilty of the crime she was accusing them of. “The miracle is here. What they talking about? It is here. We can’t send it back. The question before us is not how to avoid miracles, but how to deal with the miracle.”

  “All these people can’t be ill,” Clephus said when we drew closer to the rest house and saw the size of the crowd.

  “Ill?” Aunt Magenta said. “These people not ill. They have other things they want to see her for.”

  Politicians wanted to know their future. Trade-union leaders had come to find out when was a propitious time to strike, aspiring politicians in dark shades and hats with the brim turned down wanted to know to which political party they should apply to put them up for election. Parents

  had come to get their children to pass examinations, calypsonians wanted to know what song to sing to win the crown. Reginald Reddy, a local scientist, had produced a pill from the bark of the bois bande tree that was three times as potent as Viagra. He wanted to know how he could get his work known to the Nobel Prize committee so he could be in the running for the prize in chemistry. Filmmakers with scripts, painters with great works, John de John with two cloth bags full of manuscripts of his twenty-four unpublished novels, all of them just for a blessing, just for her to put her hands on them. It looked impossible for me to get to see her that day. On top of that my head was bursting. I wanted to go back home. I couldn’t make it that day.

  Clephus saw my distress, but Aunt Magenta had a different focus.

  “Try. Remember,” she warned. “This miracle could run out any time.”

  But I really couldn’t wait.

  My aunt dispatched Clephus to walk along the line to see if he knew somebody who would let me slip into the line, but it was clearly something he felt uncomfortable doing and I myself wasn’t too keen on it. People had been waiting there since before dawn.

  Soon it was dark. I looked at my watch. It was five in the afternoon. I looked up at the sky, but I couldn’t see it. There was a haze almost like fog or dust in the air above.

  “It is a storm coming,” Aunt Magenta said. “Don’t tell me they get the PM vexed again.”

  “Not a storm, dust. Look how it sticking on my skin,” said Clephus.

  That was the first time I noticed the cloud over Cascadu.

  I didn’t get to see Dorlene that day. On that evening’s news we saw the PM announcing the discovery of new gas and oil finds that would give us the means to take our place at the center of the world . . . and give us here everything they have there. That is why I am going to keep it all in my hand, Corporation Sole. The sole and only hands, because I know if you get your
hands on this . . . He was addressing the Opposition benches.

  “Live forever then,” said the Leader of the Opposition who was good for himself too. “Live forever.”

  “Well, my friend,” said the PM with a smirk of delight,

  as he spread open his hands expansively as if to show

  the evidence of this ability, “what do you think I am

  doing?”

  Next day the buildings the PM had ordered from a catalog displayed on the internet began to arrive, with the plans for their construction, and the workers to assemble them, apartment buildings and office buildings in different colors and in different sizes, city or rural, upscale or downscale. He brought in technicians from the global marketplace to reinstall the railway system that he had closed down thirty years before, experts to establish a new health service that had been allowed to fall into disrepair, advisers from Cuba to reconstruct a new agricultural industry that had been abandoned, a school building program to have places for all the children, a new police service equipped with the latest equipments and retired Scotland Yard officers to show how to use them, cell phones, bullet-proof vests, helmets, burly woollen sweaters marked Police, guns. In the area of culture, he created a symphony orchestra from the steelbands and set about building an opera house, a monstrous structure to dwarf the savannah to produce the operas he had been writing in his spare time, to host the National Ballroom Dancing Competition and the contest for singers of sentimental songs, which as a young man he had participated in, winning with “Unforgettable,” a song by Nat King Cole. He completed the horse-racing complex that earlier he had to abandon because corruption exhausted the funds. He constructed a Disneyland with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. The country was humming. Yes, builders from China, planners from Canada, policemen from the UK, Trinidad and Tobago nationals working abroad who he invited to return to apply to development the techniques they had learned from the world.

  In the days to come, the experts continued to work feverishly in preparation for the influx of tourists. They tilted the savannah to face the sea. They take what used to be Shannon cricket ground, where Learie Constantine, C. L. R. James and Pascal used to play, and make a car park. They build a curtain of buildings to drape the waterfront so that the working population would not be distracted from their labors by sight of the sea. They hang buildings over the street to block out the sun so that we would have the gloom of the city of London. They had wanted fog, but they discovered that due to a clerical error it had not been budgeted for. But that would be a problem easy to correct, the contractors said, since once the paperwork was done and the money allocated, it would be a simple matter to pipe in the vapors of sadness from the reservoir hanging over the slum settlement we knew as The Beetham.

  I sat there in that front room before the TV, sometimes with Aunt Magenta and Clephus and sometimes with Claude.

  “I suppose this is what you call moving on,” Claude said. “However, we still have Carnival. We still have the big steelband show, where every band from whatever part of the island would assemble to proclaim and celebrate and exalt the creativity and ingenuity of the human. We still have a festival that anybody could enter in whatever costume they decide on. I still have my Jouvay band where I could go dressed in rags, covered in mud, beating pan and old iron. Let them build their buildings.”

  But even as we sat there, the announcement came that in order to put on an efficient show for the visitors, the number of bands in Panorama was to be reduced from fifty to twenty-five so that the program would be completed no later than midnight when the luxury buses would arrive to take visitors back to their hotels. For the same reason the Dimache Gras show that had featured ten calypsonians each singing two songs was to be changed to twelve calypsonians singing one song. Events traditionally held in the North would be put in the South. Those held downtown were now to be staged in the West. The whole place was turned upside down.

  The wind and all start to blow in different directions.

  One evening I am walking home from Sonnyboy’s when I feel a chill in the breeze. I start to shiver. I didn’t know then that it was the wind of sadness whose origin John de John had traced from the madhouse in St. Ann’s. From St. Ann’s, it had come over the Lady Young Road, passed over Laventille, through Morvant and down Caledonia. At the Eastern Main Road, one part of the wind turned left and swing up the Priority Bus Route, the other part turned right and headed for downtown Port of Spain, via The Beetham. At Laventille it met eighteen-year-old Akeil Blackman coming out of a snackette with a beer in his hand, a good-looking smooth-faced youth with his hair cut down to his skull, his sideburns tapered to a point just in line with his ears. He was wearing three-quarter-length pants without a belt, the waist falling down and resting on his buttocks so you could see the waistband of his jockey shorts. A set of tattoos covered his arms, the motif something between a serpent and dragon; but instead of looking fierce the dragon looked more like a worm breathing fire; and that was the observation made by Marvin Baird, a youth maybe a year older than Akeil, not as neat, nor as decorated, standing among three friends: “Hey, Sadist, what that worm doing on your hand? I never see a worm breathing fire.”

  Everybody laughed, but Akeil was not amused. He had put on the tattoos, selected his trousers and shorts and cut his hair in the style not really to establish difference, to emphasize sameness, to help mask his loneliness and confusion and poverty, but as the wind begin to blow, he felt exposed. He could barely read, he yearned to be valued, he had doubts of his sexuality, his manness, the quality of his courage. He tried to laugh it away, but the wind held him and twisted his mind and he was trying to hold on to himself, to be calm, to join in the laughing, but he didn’t know how to laugh and he didn’t have the quickness of mind to make the incisive repartee the situation required. He saw Marvin laughing. Akeil felt himself shrinking. He felt disrespected. Marvin was still laughing. Akeil could see his gums. The other fellars were laughing too. Akeil wanted to talk but his mouth was dry of words. He began to walk away but the laughing walked with him. He walked faster, the laughing kept up with him. He started to run. He had a pardner with a gun. He went to where it was in the hollow of a brick behind the water tank. He put down the beer and he take up the gun and turned back in the direction of the snackette. The group of fellars were still where he left them. They saw him coming toward them, his two hands at his sides, his body leaned to one side like a dancer about to glide, one of them said. Like an angel, said the other eyewitness. Like a ghost. Nobody didn’t see the gun. In any event, their laughing was over, they were now talking football. Marvin had a smile on his face, not a smile of ridicule, a smile to placate. Marvin now wanted to cool it down. He saw that Akeil had tears on his face. He said, by way of apology, “Dude, don’t worry with me, the worm is a dragon. Is just a joke I was making.” Is a joke, Marvin said again. Marvin bent down to pick up a piece of paper that the wind had blown to his feet, as he righted himself, a cloud passed under the sun, Akeil lifted his right hand with the gun and aimed it at Marvin. Even then he might not have fired, but not to shoot was to confirm himself as a joker. He placed his finger over the trigger. There was nothing else to do but to pull it. That was the first one.

  Mervyn Delice had come out of the house at the corner of Erica Street and Old St. Joseph Road. He was wearing his new sneakers and a gold chain round his neck and a wristband of gold. He had just come back from checking out his girl when a voice ordered him to give over his gold chain. Mervyn Delice hesitated. The shot made him sit down. When he was found he was sitting on the side of the road. He had no shoes on and his gold was gone. In the week it take for the wind of sadness to reach Cascadu, twelve young men lay dead, shot by other young men.

  There were kidnappings, rapes, violent acts that I don’t even want to bring myself to mention, crimes that Pastor Prue and other pastors said were the work of the devil, who had entered the hearts of idle and unambitious youth and given them guns and starring roles in gangster movi
es in which police arrived in speeding cars with flashing lights and sirens, and helicopters appeared hammering the sky above the buildings, in a confusion in which ambulances screamed and reporters shoved microphones in the faces of grieving mothers and sisters and girlfriends who were about to discover that their menfolk were dying real deaths in a movie that was unreal.

  The Selling of Dreams

  That week, Aunt Magenta and a few of her followers, as part of the national effort to clean up the embarrassment of crime, set out on a pilgrimage of prayer that would take them around the island. For their part, the government purchased a blimp that floated above the city and could see everything that was happening on the ground. They also brought in Scotland Yard.

  They acquired the services of Professor Matthew Wrinkler of Nova Scotia, Canada, a criminologist of exemplary credentials who had done research in Haiti, New York and Johannesburg that demonstrated that it was not poverty or television violence or poor education or desperate communities that bore the responsibility for crime. His research had shown that 93 percent of those committing crime were people who wanted the impossible. They had allowed old, unreal dreams to clog up their head. His recommendation was simple. The state and private enterprise needed to join together to rid the people of unrealistic and stifling dreams.

  “That is what I have been saying,” said the Minister of National Security: “We need as a society to follow the example of the successful citizens, who, even though they endured servitude no less severe than that of some others, managed to get rid of their encumbering dreams.”

  “Yes. Yes. Yes.” The politicians, the clergy, the business community, the police all agreed.

  “Yes,” said the PM at an election rally. “The world is

  not going to change. At least not in a hurry. This is the age of technology. The leading nations have everything down to a science and there is no longer any need for their people to dream. Everything has already been thought through.”