Is Just a Movie

by Earl Lovelace

  “Yes,” said the experts from the university. “We don’t need to think again. There is no point in reinventing the wheel. The technology is available and we have the money to purchase. We just have to follow.”

  Yes. And they explained the frustration, stagnation and resentment that engrossed people with dreams and the freedom associated with people who had surrendered their dreams.

  It was for these very compelling reasons that a few days later the Ministry of National Security and Mental Health, at a ceremony in the County Council building, launched the program to buy up useless dreams. It was a grand occasion with the Prime Minister the featured speaker, with wine and cheese and crumpets and accra and those little things you eat with a toothpick. I didn’t go, but Aunt Magenta make Clephus put on his jacket and a tie and go with her. They come back and tell me about this new system where you could sell your dreams. Something about assigning to each dream a number and being paid for it. Clephus and Aunt Magenta tried to explain it to me but I remained confused. I watched the advertisements they had running on TV, in a video featuring the Carnival queen lying on a couch surrounded by luxurious furnishings and handsome young men singing the theme song, based on a popular melody by the Mighty Sparrow, that ended with:

  Dreams gone, development take over now.

  With Dream stations in supermarkets and drugstores, and advertisements running on radio, in the papers and on TV, the game captured the imagination of the population who at every turn were encouraged to exchange for money what were said to be old useless dreams that had no chance of being realized. People started to sleep early so they could dream, women started complaining about husbands and husbands started complaining about wives who wouldn’t let them sleep. Births went down and the smoking of marijuana and the sale of sleeping pills went up. Our novelist John de John was once again catapulted into the spotlight, the only protester, with a placard around his neck, on which was written the words of the poet Martin Carter,

  I do not sleep to dream

  I dream to change the world.

  But that didn’t stop the long lines of people waiting to sell their dreams.

  Reparation for Africans held in enslavement, a full and unqualified democracy, the removal of poverty, good housing, water for everybody, boats up and down the Caribbean, Caribbean Federation, a literature prize, the return of the pushing of steelbands on the streets at Carnival, all the steelbands in the world in the savannah for Panorama, a good bookstore, a bus to take poor people children out of the city to show them their country, a boat for them to sail to go down the islands, a victorious West Indies cricket team and various little dreams that people had kept in their family, for their children. But the selling of dreams did not stop the sacrificial slaughter of young men, nor the crimes of passion among the older folk. Everybody seemed to be on edge. It was as if in selling their dreams, people had been left empty. What had held them together was gone and they were left unbalanced and on edge and they rode or walked around ready to explode.

  My aunt Magenta returned from her tour of prayer to discover that the wind of sadness was circling our neighborhood in Cascadu. Mr. Maycock, the Creole fella who used to play all fours with Manick father was dead, Miss Dolly who was secretary to the village council was blind and one of Orville’s son had been stabbed and was in the hospital fighting for his life. Down the street from us Manick father had fallen ill. His daughter and son-in-law Doon brought a Hindu pundit to attend to him, and from his house came the chanting of prayers, the smell of incense and the fine tinkle of a bell. A day afterward we saw Doon victoriously planting a cluster of slim bamboo rods in a corner at the entrance to the yard and we wondered if that meant that Manick father was about to die. Aunt Magenta get busy right away. She had already prepared herself by having Clephus rub her down with a mixture of Vicks, soft candle, rosemary and coconut oil so the wind would not be able to get through her pores, she put socks on her feet and wrapped her head with a headtie, lock up the doors and windows of her house and went past the flags to see Manick father to offer her prayers. His wife, Elsie, called her to come up the steps to the gallery where Manick father lay in a hammock from which he could see the cricket ground. My aunt Magenta said her prayers with Elsie standing next to her. And then she sat down and began to talk with Elsie and Manick father.

  She came back shaking her head triumphantly. “He not going to dead,” she said.

  They had spent a long time talking. When she was leaving he had offered her cassava sticks, bodi beans and dasheen plants from his garden, and invited her to come over and help herself to whatever other plants she wanted. They had talked about cricket, about Franklyn and of the offer made by the Prime Minister to pay for the costumes of all who wanted to play in a band for that Carnival. She humored him by asking him if he was playing. He surprised her. He hadn’t been waiting on the Prime Minister’s offer. He had been preparing to join a band long years earlier.

  “And what happen? You didn’t have a costume? You didn’t have a band?”

  He lay back in the hammock as if contemplating how to answer. Then he said, “I was making my costume.”

  “I don’t believe you,” my aunt Magenta tell him. “I see you watching cricket. But I didn’t know you wanted to have anything to do with Carnival.”

  “You don’t believe me? Elsie,” he called, “go and bring it for me.”

  Elsie hesitated, “But I thought you said you didn’t want anybody to see it until it finish.”

  “Bring it. Let me see it.”

  What Elsie wheeled onto the gallery was an unfinished Carnival costume of bright red, yellow and black stripes, with mirrors on the chest and a sun on the back and a headpiece with three faces looking in three directions.

  Aunt Magenta couldn’t believe her eyes. “The man had a costume in truth,” her astonishment palpable as she spoke to Clephus and me.

  “So how come you never finish it?” she asked Manick father.

  “Every year he would work on it,” Elsie said. “But when Carnival come and he look at it he would find it not ready. And he would put it off ‘till next year.’”

  “Every year, hot and sweaty, and when Carnival come he find he don’t like it.”

  “But it looking good,” my aunt Magenta say.

  “Good for you, but not good for him.”

  “It looking real good. With that costume you coulda join any band,” Aunt Magenta tell him.

  “Joining for him was not like jumping into a band, it was not joining a band, it was bringing something to the band,” Elsie again. “He had to have something to give. That was the problem.”

  “You was shy?” my aunt Magenta ask him.

  “Not shy. The costume was just not ready.”

  “He wanted it too perfect. ‘You too perfect,’ I tell him,” Elsie said.

  “Neighbor, you know how hard it is to come into a place where you meet so much things: Carnival, calypso, the steelpan. You see the great costumes them other fellars make and bring.

  “I couldn’t go with a half a piece of a thing. I had to bring something worthy – of me.”

  “That was something you keep to yourself. You never tell nobody. I living nearly next door to you and never suspect you was building a Carnival costume.”

  “And that is why it had to be something good, neighbor.”

  “Good or perfect?” asked Elsie.

  “Time. I didn’t have the time,” Manick father said.

  “And what time you had to make anything? Whole day you on the tractor and when you come home in the evening is your garden. Bring what you have, I tell him. People will appreciate it once you bring it.”

  “I didn’t have the time.”

  “Now he have the time, he laid up in bed,” Elsie say, trying to laugh. “Now you have the time.”

  “So he find himself in a funny position. What he had to give is not perfect enough. So he put off joining a band until. Because if he join a band he would lose the chance to develop what he wa
s developing. It would be our loss too. You understand?

  “So he never joined. He never played,” my aunt Magenta said, talking now to Clephus and me. “Because joining was not just jumping into another band, it was bringing something of his own to link with it.”

  As my aunt Magenta recounted to me and Clephus the details of her conversation with Manick father and Elsie, it occurred to me how little we knew of each other.

  “I wasn’t looking for him there,” Clephus said. Then he added, “This Carnival going to surprise plenty people.”

  My thoughts turned to Manick.

  Since going up for elections on a Hard Wuck Party ticket, Manick had gained increasing acceptance among Settlement people, the majority of whom were supporters of the National Party, not because he had done anything special but because of what they construed as his neutrality. So in any matter requiring community representation he was one of the first chosen because he had no special allegiance to either the National Party or the Democratic Party. It was this neutrality that evoked an unease from his brother-in-law Doon who insisted on reminding him of 1970 when we supposedly “spit him [Manick] out like a plum seed.” But others of us were mistrustful of a man who didn’t belong anywhere.

  Manick continued to straddle the two worlds. He was a member of the Eastern Cricket League, and represented Chutney Bands on the New Cultural Council, as manager of Cascadu Chutney Band which was captained by his nephew, Baldeo. Of late, I had seen him more and more at Sonnyboy’s place, talking mostly about cricket and the disaster that the West Indies team was becoming.

  I hadn’t tried to talk to him before and I couldn’t do it now. The distance created between us since ’70 and the red flag he wanted to carry still remained.

  If Manick really wanted something new and wanted to bring something of his own, why couldn’t he say so? He was different from his father. He had grown up here. He had played cricket with us. He had limed on the corner with us. He was at one time ready to march with us.

  Why had he not spoken? Why had he not corrected Doon, who was giving the impression that We spit Manick out like a plum seed, when he knew that the problem was not only with us, it was with him as well? Why didn’t he speak? And I began to wonder if what kept us from moving out of our different harbors was that we were perfecting our offering to the world we had to enter.

  But I had begun to stop trying to second-guess people. What Manick would do, I had no idea. He had not made his speech in ’70 and he had not made it as a candidate of the Hard Wuck Party. I really didn’t know where he stood. Well, soon he would have another opportunity to make his position clear. I found myself looking forward to the Carnival.

  The Visitors

  And then they came, the visitors, in planes at Piarco airport; and in Port of Spain three cruise ships, each one the length of the island, anchored out in the ocean, ferrying visitors ashore by dinghy. From every part of the globe, photographers and journalists, from Rome, from Paris, from London, from various parts of the United States of America, with cameras, camcorders and cell phones, in short pants and bush jackets with big pockets, businessmen, academics, sightseers, financiers, entrepreneurs, evangelists and is only when the camera (for I seeing this on TV) focused on the tags swinging from their necks I see the names of some of the people that had been invited: Christopher Columbus; Sir Francis Drake; General Sir John Hawkins; William Wilberforce, liberator of the enslaved; Friar Bartholomew de las Casas, protector of the Amerindians; Roume de St. Laurent, organizer of the settlement of French planters

  in Trinidad; John Steadman, painter of portraits; Sir Ralph Woodford, governor and developer of Port of Spain, after whom streets and our biggest public square were named; Gertrude Carmichael, who wrote one of our first histories; Governor Hill, who read out the Emancipation Proc-lamation. Architects from the World Bank, city planners to take us into the Developed World.

  In those first days, they visited Dorlene. They had lunch with the Chamber of Commerce, made courtesy calls on the President and on the Prime Minister. They were taken to see the bird sanctuary at Caroni swamp, the Point Lisas industrial estate, the oil refinery. In Cascadu we welcomed them at our official welcoming post, the County Hall, where the Minister of Festivals and our Carnival queen, wearing her crown and the Miss Cascadu sash across her chest, embraced them and a line of girls all with the same slimness, the same hairstyle and complexion, contestants in the Miss Cascadu beauty pageant, gave them miniature steelpans as tokens of our appreciation of their coming. I saw them on the news responding to welcoming speeches:

  We are indeed pleased to see how well your country has developed . . . Happy to know the success that your society so wonderfully demonstrates is an achievement whose foundation is your stable labor force and your educated elite . . . laid by us in an earlier time . . . Glad to see that you appreciate our wisdom . . . Thrilled to hear that unlike many developing countries you have not allowed the recalcitrant and the delinquents to compromise your development . . . Delighted that the cultural forms, which had been used by delinquents and rebels to challenge and disturb the peace and welfare of the law-abiding citizens, have now been fashioned to provide us with such marvelous entertainment . . .

  I listened to our Minister of Festivals letting them know that it was a privilege and an honor to welcome you back, albeit in a slightly different capacity . . . stlll a lot to learn from you . . . immense appreciation of the help with our challenges . . . pleased that you will get to see what we have done . . . since you have laid the foundations of the society we now enjoy.

  I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t say anything. But I was thinking: Then what about the ordinary people who resisted the colonial pressure, whose resistance gave us a sense of self, whose artistry speaks for our humanity and whose struggle turned plantations into the battlefields for humanness? The stickfighters and the masquerade players, the dragon and jab molassie, the Midnight Robbers, King Sailors and moko jumbie, all those maskers who come out of nowhere to speak for who we are, the caisonian and the creators of the steelpan, the dancers of Orisha and the Shouters?

  If we accept the contribution of Columbus, Drake and the colonizers’ systems and governors with laying down the foundation of the society, how can we ignore the input of people who have made the society much more than the plantation they had in mind? It is to them we must answer. What have we done with what they have done? What have we made of their sacrifice, their inventions, their fight for freedom? What have we done with family, with the generosity, what have we done with steelband and calypso and the mas, what have we done with their love?

  I heard a calypso coming:

  Big big party, rum, food and music hototo

  They invite people from Biche, Arima, Grande, Rampanalgas

  and Oh-hi-oh-ho

  But is only when they looking to make the toast

  The party realize that it forget to invite the host.

  The Season of Dreams

  Before the Carnival could get under way in Cascadu, a dark heavy cloud appeared over the rest house where Dorlene was curing people, and spread over Cascadu. Some said it was dust from the Sahara, some said it was the spirits of Amerindians who jumped off the cliff in Arena, some talked about the Hosay riots in which a number of Indians indentured on the estates were killed, some pointed back to 1970 when Basil Davis and Franklyn and two revolutionists, Guy Harewood and Beverly Jones, were killed, some believed it to be the spirits released into the town from the people cured by Dorlene. Claude was certain it was the spirits of the old masquerade characters that had appeared to see what was being done with Carnival. Whatever it was, we only had to look to my aunt Magenta to be clear that something was not right in the world. Such things affected her keenly. If she was all right, then the world was all right; but once she began to sneeze, look out.

  I knew something was seriously wrong when I hear my aunt Magenta quarreling with Clephus. Where he put the soap, if he bathe the dogs, little unimportant things. I watched Clephu
s respond with his patient smile, his extraordinary expression of love, doing everything he could to set her at ease, to get her out of that mood. He sapped her head with Limacol, massaged her shoulders and rubbed her swollen legs with soft candle and coconut oil but somehow she still managed to strike a discordant note, it is my left shoulder, not the right . . . you don’t have to be so hurry. If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. He prepared her meals. She liked her rice strained and not sappy the way it is when you leave the water in it, the chicken had too much salt. Poor Clephus, as if he knew something was not right with her, saying little but forced to answer lest his silence be the cause of another onslaught. Now she resumed talking to Franklyn, not asking him for an explanation for his actions, but talking with a surrendering patience, wishing he was all right where he was, telling him of the seasons, that the calabash tree he had helped her plant was bearing at last, of the pain she had in her shoulder, of swelling in her legs, of all the things she wanted to do, bewailing the small scores the West Indies cricket team was making. As if they forget who they is. You should be there batting. Oh, I hope you playing cricket in Lord’s over there. She sang loudly consoling hymns and Clephus joined in,

  I must have my Savior with me

  Cause I cannot walk alone,

  singing and sapping her head or anointing her feet, all of it a sweet sad melancholy that I wished I could render in calypso.

  She carried on dialogues with the PM, questioning him and commenting on whatever was the current business. If anyone opened their mouth to criticize any action of his, she would enumerate all the things he was doing: the schools he was building, the free secondary education he was giving, free tertiary education he was spending money on, money to help people start business, entertainment center, look at how much money he giving calypsonians, the place of importance given to the Shouters Baptist faith. I recognized that the one she wanted to convince was herself.