“Let me see how we could heal this to start again at another level of life”

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 His earliest and at the same time most recent work, a collection of unpublished poetry from the late 1950s, will come out this year.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. The following text is the first part of the interview, in which Lovelace talks about his current writing projects, Black Power, and his thoughts on reparation. The second part of the interview also appears in this issue of sx salon and continues this conversation with reflections on Lovelace’s community involvement, the process of writing, and his choice of language.

Mario Laarmann: I’d like to start this interview with a somewhat nosy question about your current work. I know you’re working on two books at the moment . . .

Earl Lovelace: Well, at least two books. A novel, also some stories, as well as an autobiography. I’m trying to find my way through these things.

ML: Maybe we can start with the autobiography. I know you’ve been working on it for a while. What is it like to reflect on your own background, your own social development?

EL: I’ve already written out a lot of it so that I will remember things. So that for a few things I might forget, there is a place I’ll find them. To have me as an actor, my own biographer, is a different thing to just having me presented by somebody noting, “He was born in this place, on this date, this is his grandfather . . .” To indicate my own development . . . I think, this is one of the things that I’m thinking of, one of the ways of approaching it: to see my own development, or failure to develop certain things. [Laughs]

ML: In several interviews you say that you are happy for a failure, the failure of not passing the college exams. What would your life be like today if you had passed the exams?

EL: It would have been terrible! [Both laugh] I mean, I would probably have gone to QRC [Queen’s Royal College], a prestigious school in Port of Spain. I imagine I would have gone abroad and taken it from there. You know, sometimes a blindness takes hold of you, and you don’t do certain things. What would my life have been like? I don’t know for sure because I don’t know how much the life that I write about, the life I take as my own, is the life of the people I’ve met, the life of people that have been presented to me.

ML: When you say a blindness might take hold of you, are you talking about the desire for a middle-class life and success abroad?

EL: You see, in a way it’s really not true. It’s really a performance. A nice performance, big events, and so on. Justice, truth, fairness—these are important things. And we can judge ourselves by the degree to which we have been just and fair because that means we maintain the integrity of humanity, if you want. We will all arrive at some kind of end at one point, and ask ourselves: What have we done? I mean, we look at people uncovering the pharaohs in Egypt, we look at all sorts of discoveries, of life as it once was. All the grandeur, all the pomp. And not that these things are unimportant, but the importance of these people is affirmed with justice and fairness. If you don’t have that, if you knock the fellow down who is just not strong, if you impose upon the person who is weaker than you: Then what? And in a way I think that this is what, perhaps, writing might help us to see.

ML: How is this connected to the fact that you did not go abroad but that you stayed and moved to the countryside?

EL: I think that I can argue better for justice and equality than if I had gone abroad because I’ve met people, I’ve seen people. I’ve seen good people, I’ve seen terrible people . . . There are good people everywhere. But you have to experience them, you see? They might be there, but you have not put yourself in a position to experience them!

ML: You’re also working on a novel. What would you want to share about it?

EL: I’ve been working on this novel for a long time . . . In Trinidad, we talk about ourselves as a multicultural mix. But we’ve arrived here as a result of Amerindian slaughter, African enslavement, the indenture of a number of people. We have been maintaining something that is comforting, I think. It’s a comforting lie that makes us lose the opportunity to really get to the root of things and really deal with things. So that’s what I’m trying to do.

ML: You have always been a playwright, too, and a director of theater performances. Do you still write plays at the moment?

EL: I have directed; I’ve not been trained as a director. Well, at a certain stage of writing this novel I wanted to make it into a play. Now I think it’s easier to write it as a novel and then perhaps turn it into a play. But if you see early drafts of it, it will partly be a play. I don’t think we embrace the play here as much as we could. Since we have the possibility, in this landscape and given our history and the resources we have in singing and dancing and so on, we could put on some really good plays. But I haven’t seen that! Well, Derek Walcott lived here. He put on plays regularly.

ML: But you have written many plays yourself?

EL: Yes, I’ve written a few plays . . . Sometimes you write something and you feel it is heard, and sometimes you feel a bit like: I’ve written this, I have done my job, but I don’t know if it is the right way it has gone. I think a part of that might be me doing a lot of things alone and not being organized really.

ML: To dive a little deeper into your work now, why don’t we start with one of the central notions in your writing: the notion of reparation. How would you describe the concept? What does reparation mean to you?

EL: Well, before you get to reparation, the question is: Reparation for what and for whom? Who has to pay what and ought to make what reparation? I think that we have to answer these questions even before we begin to talk about the end, where reparation is the procedure by which you try to say that you regret this or that. Because human beings have always done each other wrong—I wrote this someplace . . . [Lovelace searches in his copy of Salt.] Okay, I got it:

“Understand from the start,” he said. “I ain’t come here to make the Whiteman the devil. I not here to make him into another creature inhabiting another world outside the human order. I grant him no licence to pursue wickedness and brutality. I come to call him to account, as a brother, to ask him to take responsibility for his humanness, just as I have to take responsibility for mine. And if you think it is easy for either one of us, then you making an error. This business of being human is tougher than being the devil, or being God for that matter.”¹

So let me go back to the question. I was saying that we have to start with the offense before we get to the action that is required in reparation. It’s a big action! It’s at the heart of everything!

ML: One of the things that strikes me is your argument that several groups might require reparation. It’s not just the Black community in Trinidad, it’s also the Indian community. And sometimes you say it’s even White people who need to repair their own humanity, like in the quote you just read.

EL: Right . . . But it’s too easy to say, “Well—all of us!” There was a situation, here in this country, where the people were saying that a government minister had stolen. And the minister in question was saying on behalf of his colleagues: “All of we thief! [Both laugh] This relates to all of us!” No, that is not the kind of answer I’m looking for, an answer that satisfies everybody in their criminality. “All of we thief!” [Laughs again] I think, at first, we need the big thing because it tells you what is power, what is might. I’ve spent most of my life going along with the reality of empire and power. If the game is one in which the more powerful wins just by being more powerful, you have no problem with that unless you try to become powerful, too. Is this what we are saying? And the nature of the world is that we’re constantly fighting each other. At various levels, in very different levels of power.

ML: So is this what reparation is about—becoming powerful too?

EL: Well, reparation is becoming equal. Is that the same as becoming powerful too? It could make you powerful. Actually, it does make you powerful, in the sense that it repairs the loss. But my point is: We have to have a relationship! Somebody do you something and you lick them down, or do the best you can to run away. Then we don’t have to be together. Reparation comes in when you have to be together. Reparation comes in when you say, “You are my brother.” Reparation isn’t, “You over here and I over there.” Reparation is an intimacy. Reparation is saying, “Let me see how we could heal this to start again at another level of life.” And it doesn’t mean it wipes out the wrong. It says: “I’m sorry I have wronged you.” It doesn’t mean to give back all your riches, if you got rich. Or all your achievements. It’s like the match has been played, and we are saying now, “This is not very good.” We say, “We could do better now. Next round.” And we see from looking at history that there are many other wrongs. We see all that as we start to talk about justice and equality and these wonderful ideas. You see, we’re living in another time now, and how do we engage this time? Part of the problem, I suppose, is the ease with which people feel that this could be done. But it’s very difficult! If you do somebody wrong, there are so many stages that you have to go through before you feel you could even go in his presence and say, “I’m really sorry about that.” And, “Let us go again.” Because it presumes, “Let us begin anew!” 

ML: Today, people in the whole world talk about reparation, but you started writing and talking about it very early on. Where did your inspiration come from?

EL: When I was a boy, I read a lot. I lived in Tobago with my grandparents who were Black. My father was mixed, with skin a little lighter than mine. I wanted to find out who I was. And I realized that a hundred years before now, I myself would have been a slave! From that time, I was concerned about these matters. So when I began to write later on, I used the word slave no more than once since The Dragon Can’t Dance. I remember thinking about this one time, and for the rhythm I let it pass. But since this, I have been using the term enslaved. Because growing up, as I said, I wanted to find out about African people. I found a book on the Underground Railroad. And I had been, of course, reading many other things—there wasn’t a lot, but enough for me at the time. I wrote then about slave revolts, or what people viewed as “revolts.” But then I realized that slaves don’t revolt! Later on, I gave a talk at the Hilton, years before Salt came out, in which I remember fainting.² That was memorable because I had remained up all night writing this thing, just drinking some coffee, and when I went to talk, I collapsed. That was the first time I spoke about “reparation,” and I remember that occasion because the first two persons to respond were two Black people. And they didn’t agree with me at all! Of course, it was a new idea to them.

ML: This means you were inspired to the topic of reparation through your reading?

EL: Well, nobody mentioned it. Probably they did, but I don’t remember . . . I think, reparation was for me: What to do now? I was challenging the idea of “slavery,” and therefore: How do we proceed together?

ML: One of the early cases of reparation is about land rights: the American question of forty acres and a mule. Would you say that this original question of land and reparation is relevant in your novels? And is it still relevant today?

EL: I think, because I was in agriculture, land became kind of important for me. And land distribution, or redistribution, was also an important aspect of our political development. And they didn’t have too many Black people with too much land here, you know . . . Still don’t!

ML: Earlier today, we were discussing if literature can change things in the world. You write about reparation as a topic, but do you think your novels in themselves can also be acts of reparation?

EL: Well, I think they can, in the sense that they are saying, “Look, these are equally people. These are equally human beings. The other side is equally human.” Think of a person like Aldrick.³ To the degree that this person is fully portrayed as human, it gives you an opportunity to see another person. To see this person, to take that person from the book and put the person in the country, in the place . . . I’m trying to answer the question of what I think is the act of writing... [The little dog Leo breaks loose from its leash, and Lovelace spends a while catching it again.]

ML: Where were we? [Both laugh]

EL: The question is whether writing could be seen as . . . I would probably say no. Because I would want to focus on what we are talking about: the experience of people with each other. The experience in the Caribbean of people taken from Africa, the Middle Passage, and so on. Writing could help to do things differently, but I think that writing can’t be reparation. I am writing, and I am not asking for reparation. I think we must keep reparation clear.

ML: You’re mentioning Africa and the Middle Passage—what about Indian people?

EL: Well, I think these are two different things. The difference between Indians and Africans. And this is one of the things that I’m trying to deal with in the new book. Well, it’s dealt with to some degree in Salt, in which the Indians (1) had a contract, and (2) had a culture that directed them in how to take care of their life. Every time Africans sought to put their head up, society was there to cut it off. I think there are two different things there. And I think that is an important distinction that needs to be made. Because if you don’t make that distinction, this becomes part of the story we were talking about earlier.

ML: The story of “All of we thief”?

EL: Right.

ML: Funso Aiyejina observes in his biography Earl Lovelace that in your first two novels the question of “Africanness” does not come up directly, and it’s only later on, starting with The Wine of Astonishment [1982] and The Dragon Can’t Dance, that skin color and culture are something you address directly.⁴ Why?

EL: Well, the word African was actually hardly used. I told you I was reading these books about Africans, but the terms used were “Negro revolt” or “Negro” this, “Negro” that. The Dragon Can’t Dance was written partly when I was at Johns Hopkins, where African began to be used more regularly since Black Power.⁵ And I suppose that I was following that kind of thing. I suppose in the Black Power movement we moved from being “Negro” to being “African.” And I was involved in it, both in the US and here.

ML: Were you one of the people who brought the ideas of Black Power from the United States to Trinidad?

EL: To some little degree, maybe, but people were already following it here. When I came back, I remember going down Frederick Street [in Port of Spain] and there were some fellows sitting on the pavement, dressed up, with powder all over them. They were Flower Power . . . [Laughs] I had seen the hippie movement in the United States; the hippie movement preceded the Black Power movement. And it opened up the imagination, I guess, as we went forward. So that even in Trinidad, people hearing about it, without knowing anything about it, were ready to identify with it. Later on, when Black Power came, I was one of those persons who went in the square;⁶ there were regular conversations going on.

ML: Coming back to the questions of inter- or transcultural relations: Unlike the Martinican créolité movement, for example, you are very critical of the notion of “Creoleness”—the idea that contemporary society would be neither African nor Indian . . . but creolized, transcultural. What is your criticism?

EL: I think that we’ve had that idea here too, but this is what I was trying to write about . . . You see, the Creole still has to go to Africa. Let’s look at what it is to be African, first of all. We might say that Africa is a culture, the culture of African people who have come here. A culture gives us a way to understand what life is. What to do when you want to get married, what to do when a baby is born. That is essentially what a culture does. What the removal of people from Africa to the Caribbean did was to take them away from the mechanics, if you want, of the culture. And one of the things that Africans have been doing has been to reclaim Africa. This reclaiming of Africa is what we are talking about now, and it will answer a lot of questions that we have. That’s why I said the Creole will have to become African. Do you see what I mean? If by “Creole” we mean people who have been brought here and domiciled here, What culture do they have? Creole culture meant imitating, borrowing from the people around them. And because the people around them were generally people who were opposed to them in a certain way, they were seen as imitators, even though borrowing goes on between people anywhere. And my view is that to reclaim themselves, they have to reclaim the African.

ML: So for you Creole is not a fitting word to describe society? To describe how to avoid a false pretense to racial harmony?

EL: You could use it, if you want, but you have to be sure what you mean! We pretend that there is racial harmony, and that is one of the things I reexamine. The importance of that is that until we understand the problems, we can’t solve them. And this is where the enslaved and their struggle, their resistance, becomes important not only in the sense that we value this struggle. You can’t just have a thing that is nice and convenient. If you have a problem, it is a problem until you solve it.

ML: I find your way of writing about this very powerful. It’s a question of justice, but for you it’s also a question of humanity: of humans, their interactions; of societal issues. I’m thinking of Pariag, the Indian boy in The Dragon Can’t Dance, as an example for how differently racialized people struggle to be seen and affirmed in your novels.

EL: I can see . . . Now that you say that, I understand how you can see reparation as extending from one group to another. When I had written Dragon and went abroad to talk about the book, I found that people understood reparation through my talking about Pariag. I don’t know if it’s reparation, but certainly the question of the outsider. I mean, the presentation of Pariag connects to a whole other culture. Pariag doesn’t have the problem of his culture being taken from him. He’s still Hindu, or Muslim. This Sunday, I was at some event in which people were talking about the future. In Trinidad, Eric Williams, the prime minister, had said, “There should be no Mother India and no Mother Africa.” And we had gone along with that for a long time. Believing or thinking that this brings you together. I don’t believe that. Being critical of it, I was saying, This is something we have to revisit! And this person, an economist working at university, was applauding the “no Mother India and no Mother Africa” idea. And this is a Black guy, too. I mean, there has been so much misrepresentation. And what it has also done is to make us feel we don’t need to know the real truth. We can get along.

ML: Aimé Césaire argues in his Discourse on Colonialism that when Europeans destroyed the humanity of the African, at the same time, they destroyed humanity as such.⁷ They themselves cannot be human—how can you be human if you are treating somebody this way? Does this connect to your ideas?

EL: You see, I would hesitate a little bit to say they destroyed the humanity of Africans. I couldn’t say that. I think enslavement destroyed their freedom; it gave them no access to the result of their labor. But to say it destroyed their humanness . . . There are certain things that, when we get down into the details, we have to spend a little time with. Because these are tough situations for anybody. You know, looking at African kingship, the Obas, and so on: How have they treated people? One wants to ask that question, too. Which doesn’t justify anything! But which is to say that human beings, given the opportunity, will do things . . . We can also look at it from that perspective, but this is not to say, “How do I get away from the responsibility?”

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] Earl Lovelace, Salt (New York: Persea, 1996), 167–68.

[2] Hilton Trinidad and Conference Centre, Port of Spain.

[3] A main character in The Dragon Can’t Dance.

[4] The Dragon Can’t Dance was published as Lovelace’s third novel in 1979, even though he had first finished writing a major part of The Wine of Astonishment, published in 1982. See Funso Aiyejina, Earl Lovelace (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2017), 63–64.

[5] Lovelace taught and studied at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1973 to 1974.

[6] 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 to independence in 1962 and again to the Black Power Revolution in 1970.

[7] “Colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; . . . colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it.” Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review, 1972), 41. Originally published as Discours sur le colonialisme in 1955.