“I never looked down—I looked across!”

Trinidadian novelist, playwright, director, short story writer, and poet Earl Lovelace was born in 1935. For his first novel, While Gods Are Falling (1965), he won the BP Independence Award, which turned him famous overnight. His later novels, such as The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979) and Salt (1996), found international acclaim and have earned him further accolades, such as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. His earliest and at the same time most recent work, a collection of unpublished poetry from the late 1950s, will come out this year.

In the end of September 2022, Lovelace had the kindness to invite me to his house for a lengthy conversation about his work. He lives on the outskirts of Port of Spain, close to the forest, and the interview took place on the veranda, interrupted periodically by his little dog Leo’s success in biting through his leash. The house is large but simple, and there are paintings on the wall by his son, the artist Che Lovelace. We were drinking homemade lemonade he had prepared prior to my arrival. In the first part of the interview (which can be found elsewhere in this issue), Lovelace talks about his current writing projects, Black Power, and his thoughts on reparation. In the following, the conversation continues with reflections on his community involvement, the process of writing, and his choice of language.

Mario Laarmann: So far, we have been talking about your current projects and the notion of reparation. I would now want us to turn toward the context in which you wrote your novels. Wherever you lived, you were involved in the local communities. To begin with, where did you live when you wrote The Schoolmaster [1997], and what are the projects you were involved with at the time?

Earl Lovelace: Well, I lived in Valencia, and I was a forest ranger. There’s a place called Cumaca, which is a lovely village in the country, off the Valencia road. I had a friend whose sister was teaching there. I had been to Cumaca a few times before writing the novel. I’m not too sure which part of Cumaca, because I went up in the forest, and I don’t remember the buildings and all the rest of it. But there was this friend of a friend of mine whom I asked, “Well, so what you’re doing?” She said she’s teaching. Where? And she’s teaching at Cumaca. And that, for some reason, sparked in my head the story about the schoolmaster. I knew a lot of people who lived in Valencia and who had come from Cumaca. I knew the language the people spoke. It was remote, and these were things I had seen as a ranger in the bush.

ML: When you wrote The Dragon Can’t Dance you were involved in the Black Power movement. In his biography Earl Lovelace, Funso Aiyejina includes a description of your car, which had Black Power stickers all over it, and of you driving around the country telling people to join the marches.¹ What exactly was your involvement with Black Power?

EL: I was a member of a group. There were lots of groups at that time, concerned about Black Power. Concerned about how Black people were treated in this society. One of the big events that caused people to take action was that the banks did not have Black people working on the counter. A new government had just come into power in 1956, Eric Williams. And we were asking, Well, what had he done, or what would he be doing? We had a group called New Beginning. We met, we talked a lot . . . [Laughs] We went into the square and spoke to people.² The square was the kind of rallying point for people. So, I knew the principal actors on stage, and they knew me. Another group that a lot of people belonged to was a group that I formed along with another person. And I remained in contact with the leadership, if you want, of the Black Power movement.

ML: To this day?

EL: In the past, but also to this day. We . . . I would say we fell out . . . These were fellows who had marched, spoken, got arrested, and so on, and who felt that the movement belonged to them in a way. I was contesting that. Because I knew there were lots of people all over the country. While they took a very important and courageous role, there were also other people. That was wrong, and that’s what we fell out about. Others have disappeared . . . A couple of people are still around, but not many.

ML: Later on, you moved to the countryside again, to Matura. Aiyejina describes the house you built there as a place where your circle of friends met, including influential artists and academics.

EL: It was really a very wonderful place. I wanted to live in the countryside, to start with. I’d never been to Matura before, and I was talking to a friend of mine, saying, “You know, I’m thinking about going to Matura.” And he said, “I know a fellow who you could talk to about it.” And the same night I went down and spoke to Mr. Charles; it was his house and his place. And so it started.

There were at least two aspects of my being in Matura. One, I joined the village council, and they were putting on a play. They asked me to do something, and so I directed the play. This was a big event for the village. I was involved when, at Christmas, we paranged about the place. I played football for the team. I played cricket. All that was on the one side. And then on the other hand, I had come from Port of Spain. So I knew Derek. I don’t know when that started . . . Lamming came up, Leroy. A lot of people came up here . . . Lawrence, C. L. R. We cooked, we went to the river, we caught conch . . . A whole lot of lovely times! We had a little pond or pool that we all jumped in, so it was both active activity and talking and discussing. And Funso, and Ken, and so on. A lot of people came up there.³

I think it’s very, very important that people find a way into these places. I think that I had a good impact on the community itself. And there was something that they felt very proud of. But what I’m saying is, go, if you have the opportunity, and create these places!

ML: The time in Matura is also when you did a lot of theater and got involved in the Best Village competitions.

EL: Right. That was also very important. Strangely, the first work that I did, I realize now, was a play for independence. That was in 1962. I was in Rio Claro and, somehow, they wanted a play, and I said, “Okay, I’ll write it.” And so that was my first literary endeavor. You know what happened to the play? I can’t find a copy! I looked high and I looked low . . . I think when I went to work in Tobago, I left a box, or two boxes, with stuff in Rio Claro and asked some friends to protect this box. When I came back, the first thing I did was to go there. They told me they had burned them. It was old paper to them. That was the defeat of that. But that is the first thing I wrote . . . We did the play also in Tobago. When I went over to Tobago, I met some people, and we did the play there.

ML: Why are you so fascinated with theater?

EL: I don’t know what it is exactly. Well, I think that one can say it brings people together; a group, a lot of people, actors, directors, set designers, you know. A whole lot of people together for one thing, with one nice goal and with a possibly good output. And I wish in a kind of way . . . I’ve had a couple of plays done in London, but somehow I don’t think they received the attention that my novels received.

ML: Was it similar for the movie Joebell and America [1994] you realized together with your daughter, Asha Lovelace?

EL: Well, it was similar probably from her perspective as the person directing and organizing the people and so on. For me, it was interesting and useful. But a play is a different thing. Although in a movie you see people acting, somehow in a play they’re more present. They’re more . . . They’re alive.

ML: You have criticized repeatedly that there is not sufficient infrastructure for artists and writers in Trinidad. Do you think this has changed over the years, or is it still the case?

EL: Actually, they’re having a Best Village event very soon; I took a note of it. But I don’t know if there is any public presentation of infrastructure . . . I mean, I don’t know whether privately people are supported, but I’m thinking that when it’s public, you would know that “so and so receives money to do this and that,” you know, and I think that I miss that openness. An institution helping to keep people afloat, I don’t think that has ever been developed. They have something called a Sport and Culture Fund. I was a member on the board of that thing, and it never impressed me as doing a whole lot. At least looking from an onlooker’s point of view, I don’t feel that there’s been a whole lot done, and maybe the process by which these things are done is not known to me or hasn’t been presented clearly enough. So I think that there is something to be done there.

I also think that the Best Village group was dealing with what they call folk theater—what we call folk theater. I don’t know if philosophically we could start from the folk and grow. That’s one thing. But the growth is another thing; having people comment on it and criticize it. All of these are useful aspects. I think that this is something I would like to see done, and something that should be done because there’s a lot of talent. Just down the road there’s a community center that is being built now. And one would expect that there will be theater things inside there. So at least they start with this community! I hear that there are some other places where they are probably building centers. That would be a useful start. But I feel that they can’t look at it just as folk culture; they have to look at it as the starting place for theater generally!

ML: You have often been saying that 90 percent of cultural production in Trinidad is foreign; 90 percent of cultural goods are imported.

EL: 90 . . . maybe 95! [Laughs] Do we have TV shows? Do we . . . We still need to deal with that. And that is part of the question you asked earlier on about reparation and about maintaining in a culture an idea of itself that is not true. If you suggest that we’re doing something, that we all are one; we all are one and we don’t have to do nothing . . . It’s not true.

ML: You were the artistic director of Carifesta in 2006. Did you feel like you could make a change, when it comes to cultural infrastructure, during your involvement with Carifesta?

EL: Well, first of all, I don’t think that I did a very good job, as far as I remember. [Laughs] I feel that in the Carifestas, what we have now is government involvement; the government selects the director and other people. So it has become a political means of doing something, or letting something be seen as being done, and it has not developed enough good habits. Along the lines of, “Carifesta is coming. It will do this; this will be surrounding it . . .” To make it something a little more grande or substantial. So I think that while we have a few things, we have not institutionalized them to function for us without the government, you see?

ML: Is this the idea of the Earl Lovelace Foundation you are currently thinking about, to provide funding without the help of the government?

EL: I was thinking more of the village than artists as such. I would like to see something that the villagers run, and that there’s a board or something, and one is able to visit them, and do things related to the community and the surroundings. That’s basically what I’m thinking about.

ML: For the last part of the interview, I would like to return to literature and the question of writing. I was wondering to what extent your own experiences in life but also in your upbringing—your childhood, your family—have influenced your writing?

EL: Family . . . The novel that has been developed here, I think, has developed out of the novel that comes from the family, the household. I’m thinking about the English novel where authors were talking about their families as a foundation from which they wrote. I don’t know if we have developed families in such a way here that they would be the precursors of the fiction that we write. My family was the people on the blocks—you see what I’m saying? So, I’m coming from another place entirely. People who you know a little less closely, but who you respect—or who you don’t respect . . . [Laughs] So that is where I think I’ve come from. I don’t know if that relates to me alone, but the social realm has influenced me more than the domestic realm, and I would want to say that this is probably a Caribbean thing. At least for the moment. As we go along, we might find novels relating more to families and people looking inside of them. But what people have been doing, I think, is looking outside. I mean, Lamming makes a statement about the Caribbean novel that is very complimentary: he said that the Caribbean novelist looked down and saw the peasant and so on, and the peasant became more than a laborer.⁴ I like the general idea, but in my case, I don’t believe I looked down—I looked across! [Laughs] So I don’t see myself as belonging to that class that could look down. I was of the class that could only look across, you know?

ML: Has that always been the case, or has it changed after you moved back to the countryside when failing the college exams?

EL: I think that I knew the city somewhat; I had good friends—all aspiring middle class—and was introduced around, because I didn’t grow up in that place. But it gave me that experience and those eyes. Later on, when I went into the countryside, though, I was able to see the people! And that was very useful.

ML: So this moment of looking across instead of looking down really started when you moved to the countryside?

EL: No—remember, I told you, when I was even younger, the whole question of slave and enslaved. This was always there as my background. So that these very people whom I was being educated away from were people I kept my eyes on all the time! So when I could see in the countryside their behaviors and actions it endorsed them for me.

ML: You grew up with your Methodist grandparents, which meant that folk traditions like carnival or calypso weren’t very present. At what point did you find your connection to these folk traditions?

EL: No, they weren’t present. That would be later. As I grew, I would be able to be exposed to them—the whole society would be exposed to them. I never played mas until much later. When I went in the countryside, I saw the dances, the songs, a lot of things that were totally African, that they had developed and that I had not seen anywhere. They had kept things alive. I wasn’t intimate with Port of Spain. I began to know things and had a certain understanding of things that the ordinary fellow didn’t have because I had these two branches: One, the grandparents and the Methodist upbringing. And the countryside, later on, and the tone of the countryside.

There was a certain aspect of the city I could understand only after I had understood the country. One of the things that we developed in the city was the badjohn, the warrior. And I would stay clear of them and anybody of that character. When I went in the country, these badjohns, if you want, were fellows who were my friends. I knew them, I was not afraid of them. Whereas in the town I might have been a little apprehensive toward them and what they did. Because I was hearing what they were and not seeing them. But when, in the country, I saw them—not the same people, but the badjohns in the country—I could now deal with those in Port of Spain. Not that I necessarily went and looked for them. But the point is, now I would be as free and dangerous or whatever as anybody. Because I saw them, I knew them. There’s a friend of mine who just died a few years ago who was a badjohn. He was a boxer; he was well known as a badjohn in the area, and he lived near to me in Matura. And we talked a lot. People would find that they couldn’t disagree with him—I deliberately went out of my way to disagree with him! [Laughs] We were good friends!

ML: Do you do a lot of research before you start writing a novel or is most of it pure imagination?

EL: Yeah . . . I didn’t even know that people did research . . . [Laughs again] I don’t think I do very much research. I think I was present at some things. In The Dragon Can’t Dance I was present; I was there in the marches and everything. I was present at the birth, if you want, of the novel, because I was present in the tone when we were going on marches, and it gave the novel its spirit. I mean, I did research as in finding out where things were, and so on. I went to the Baptist church, so I knew baptism, you know?⁵ Not very formal research, I would say.

ML: Which leads me to the question: What role does the setting play in your novel? Are the places in your novels based on real places?

EL: Well, Cumaca is a real place. In The Wine of Astonishment [1982], it’s also a real place: Bonasse. Bonasse is a real place I never went to! [Laughs] It just was a far enough place; I was looking for a place that looked far from town, and this was a name that came up on the map . . . So in that sense I did research! [Laughs again] In The Dragon Can’t Dance, I knew what I was talking about. I just had to visualize going up the hill. I called it Calvary Hill, and there is a Calvary Hill. But this is Laventille Road, the hill going up to the Desperados Panyard. Desperados have moved out of the village, and they now have a place in Port of Spain, which is unfortunate. I actually lived on Laventille Road. The interesting thing is: I never went beyond the house to go further up the hill where the pan was played. It’s after I went to the countryside that it became much easier for me to go up the hill. I then went a few times, but almost as a visitor; not as someone living in the place.

ML: When I read your novels I have the feeling that your language and your style have changed over time. How would you describe this change?

EL: Okay . . . What I’m thinking about is the voice of authority. When you’re writing in Standard English, the voice of authority clearly is the whole English language with its colonial legacy and power. I’m using English to find a way in, so that I can present this place. So the struggle is to find a language that is able to address these things and show you these things affirmatively. In The Wine of Astonishment I write in a language that is not the language that the intellectual would use. That’s the language of the people, or the folk, if you want. When you go to Dragon, it’s closer to finding a voice of authority that is not limited to class. Salt is more complicated because there is more than the straight story. I’m calling upon whatever is at my disposal to present the story.

ML: Funso Aiyejina proposes that your writing in Salt is inspired by African tradition and spirituality and that this is where the polyphony of the novel is coming from.⁶ I was also thinking that it occurs at the same moment as poststructuralist theory and postmodern writing, where novels get more fragmentary?

EL: What does that mean, fragmentary . . .? It’s what I was saying earlier: I was always looking for a voice of authority, and you draw upon your own voice—I’m not saying a literary voice but a voice that is yours as well, because of what you put into it. So it’s not entirely in Standard English; that would not be quite your voice. The Creole is also a language that becomes what you put into it. So when you talk about the Creole and African culture—the Creole has African in it, but it has not been acknowledged!

ML: So you’re trying to bring out the Africanness in the Trinidadian language?

EL: No, I’m trying to bring out me in it. But I am also African! I’m trying to bring us out in this novel, into this world. All the people who live here.

ML: This reminds me of a note I found in the archives that you wrote when writing The Wine of Astonishment, which reads: “I wanted to show how profound thought is capable of expression in the vernacular which we speak in Trinidad.”⁷

EL: Right, that’s true, partially . . . That is in The Wine of Astonishment. But I think it goes beyond that as well. If you read Samuel Selvon, for example, you see that he writes in the vernacular, one would think. But there is a lack of complexity. I’m aiming at something a little bigger.

ML: There’s a final question I would like to close on: Is there a Caribbean writer you would particularly recommend reading?

EL: Well . . . There is Austin Clarke . . . , who died recently.⁸ I think that in terms of branding the language of the people, he has done very well. The political story could be updated, but the story that he tells and the language in which it is told is marvelous.

Mario Laarmann is a doctoral researcher for the Chair of Romance Literatures and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and a lecturer in the Department for Romance Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Saarland University, Germany. He is part of the collective barazani.berlin and a member of the executive board of the Society for Caribbean Research (Socare). mario.laarmann@uni-saarland.de

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[1] Funso Aiyejina, Earl Lovelace (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2017), 60.

[2] Woodford Square in Port of Spain (popularly referred to as the “University of Woodford Square”) was the central venue for political meetings in the period leading up to independence in 1962 and again to the Black Power revolution in 1970.

[3] In order of mention: Derek Walcott, George Lamming, Leroy James, Lawrence Scott, C. L. R. James, Funso Aiyejina, and Kenneth Ramchand.

[4] “[The West Indian novelist] looked in and down at what had traditionally been ignored. For the first time the West Indian peasant became other than a cheap source of labour.” George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Pluto Press, 1960), 39.

[5] Lovelace makes reference to The Wine of Astonishment, his 1982 novel about a “Spiritual Baptist” congregation in a small Trinidadian village during and after World War II.

[6] See Funso Aiyejina, “Myth, Memory and Masks: Sankofa Aesthetics in Wole Soyika, August Wilson, and Earl Lovelace,” in Olásopé-O. Oyèláràn and Kwame S. Dawes, eds., Gem of the Ocean: Essays on August Wilson in the Black Diaspora (Chicago: Third World Press, 2015), 102.

[7] Lovelace’s papers are held at the Alma Jordan Library, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus, Trinidad and Tobago.

[8] The Barbadian Canadian novelist and essayist Austin Clarke died in 2016.