Is Just a Movie. Earl Lovelace
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seconds, his eyes flashing, his voice going up with the scratch of a new harsh rhythm (and I could hear him forcing back the distaste, the disappointment). “The people, the people,” straining to restrain himself lest his blood pressure boil over. “The people?” In his voice a chuckle, a sneer, steering him away from the chasm of his disappointment. “The people paying their money, they have the say. You have to give them the songs they say they want. That is democracy. Left to me . . .”
“Left to you? Jazzy, it is you it’s left to. And look where you put me – in the calypsonian’s cemetery.”
“Cemetery, King?” with a sense of hurt that make me lighten up.
“OK, purgatory.”
Jazzy smiling his contemplative Jazzy-smile at the clever-
ness and accuracy of my retort, “You good, you good . . . Left to me . . .” spreading open his two hands, palms upward to demonstrate his good faith, his voice soft like a baby’s, so, if you don’t know the hardhearted fucker you dealing with, you’d think he going to cry.
“Left to me, I’ll keep you singing until these people come to their senses and start applauding you. But they say they want calypsos to make them dance. They leaving here and going to the other tent. You see our tent last night and tonight, how it empty? We have good calypso, but the people say they want to dance. You have any song for them to dance to?”
“Jazzy, Jazzy, Jazzy. I tell you this already. Let me tell you it again. I am a poet. A poet, you hear? And the reason I sing calypso is because poetry don’t have no real following here in this island. Lots of calypsonians recite their calypso, I sing my poems.”
“Poet?”
He look up at me as if what I say sweeten him and he start to smile – not yet to laugh. “Poet and Prophet, eh,” rubbing with an open hand one side of his face, the better, I suppose, to contemplate the idea: Poet and Prophet.
“Poet,” he say again, opening his two empty hands in what I suppose he expected me to interpret as his pantomime of regret at not having the fictitious money that he acting as if I asking him for. “Don’t vex with me, King. We have to wait on the people.”
“Jazzy, how long I singing in this calypso tent?”
“King, if is reproach you come to reproach me, now is not the time. I trying my best. For the tent. For everybody.”
“No, Jazzy. Tell me how long I singing here.”
“How you could ask me how long? Is right here in the Victory Tent that your career begin. Nine-ten years ago, without a calypso name. Is I who give you the name Kangkala. Come in here a slim little fella with your cap turned backwards and your head tie-up like a Baptist, singing something about the Blackman cry. And though it was no big song, you had a voice, you could carry a tune. And after that you sing something about racial unity, dress up like a Indian bridegroom, a doolaha with a little Indian dancer dress up like the doolahin. And then with Black Power, you start to sing about the injustices to Blackpeople, Black is beautiful and that big one about South Africa. People full up the tent to hear you.”
“And you know why, Jazzy? I show people who they really is. I show them that they bigger and more grand, that they have more heart and guts and stones than what people give them credit for. I show them what nobody else show them.”
“King, I didn’t call you here for a lecture.”
“No, you call me here to tell me you taking me off the stage.”
“We have to survive, King. The tent have to survive. Calypso have to survive. People don’t want those Black Power songs again. People want a break from this seriousness, King. I running a calypso tent. I can’t tell the people what songs to like.”
So now I am a reserve calypsonian at the Victory Calypso Tent. No room for me on the singing team.
I have a couple new songs I working on. But for some reason they not coming out right, and in any event I not getting the chance to sing them. Eventually, one night I get called up to sing; Jazzy conscience pricking him. He call me up. And I sing one of the new ones which I entitled “Nobody Will Tell You Who You Are’:
Because they want to own you, they want to control you
No matter what you show
you will be the last one to know that you are a star.
And I could hear the crowd. Like the truth of my words embarrass them, they just waiting for me to finish the song for me to disappear. I make it to the end and out of respect for me, the band start up, playing the refrain of my song, and in the audience the scattering of people who remember me when I was king – like they sorry for me – start up clapping in a rhythm that leave me unsure whether or not they want to call me back for an encore. And the hypocrite MC, his voice dripping with this false magnanimity, like he is a captain in the Salvation Army giving out charity, call out my name, “King Kala!” And all is left for the people to do is to speed up the tempo of their clapping to demonstrate their wish to have me back on stage to sing another verse and, as it were, take a bow, since they know this is what calypsonians sing for, to satisfy the patrons, to make them want to hear our song again. I stand up on the edge of the stage ready to go back on, waiting on the people.
The people? The people just remain silent, the drops of applause tailing off one by one, like rain in the hot sun. So, if I didn’t know it before, the message reach me loud and clear: King Kala, you have to get out of here. Get out.
That night after I come off the stage, I lean-up by the bar, sipping a beer and watching the people in their chairs, trying very hard to be amused, and the entertainers on the stage singing song after song attempting to amuse them. I feel a presence at my side; when I look round, is Jazzy standing next to me. He have a Malta in his hand. He doesn’t drink hard liquor – his pressure. I don’t even want to look at him, I so vex.
“The people not conscious like you, King,” he say in his soft, pleading baby voice so I can’t tell for sure whether is sympathize he sympathizing with me or is fuck he fucking me up.
He speak again, talking to himself more than to me, “The music change.”
“Yes, Jazzy,” I tell him. “The music change. The music change.”
I had to get out of there. Jazzy was right. Black Power was done; the shouting of power hadn’t brought the old house down. The raggedy voice of the people was indeed the voice of God. The revolution was over. The world some of us had set out to change in order to claim our place in it was pretty much the same. For just a moment, we in Black Power had parted the silence that curtained the biggest issues in this land – the dignity of Blackpeople, opportunity, equality, what was to be done, how to go on.
“It coulda been worse, King,” Jazzy say, like he read my mind. “Nobody is in prison. The fellars that they lock up, they now free . . . I think in all is only one fella get killed, and the only tragedy it have is the few crazy fellars out there parading as guerrillas on the hills. The army and police closing in on them.”
“Tell me something I don’t know, Jazzy. My cousin is one of them.”
I wasn’t really listening. I needed a rest. It was getting harder to sing. Even I didn’t like how I was sounding. I had to stop punishing myself. Yes. I had to get out.
Is Just a Movie
Right after Carnival, a fella from America come down here to Trinidad, say he making movies in the island. Big announcement. Big write-up. Front page. He building up the movie industry. Big talk. Local talent wedded to foreign technology, the set of shit you hear already. But with the help of the government and the business community, the movie gets under way.
They have auditions. I set out to go. As a well-known composer and singer of calypso, a real calypsonian, not just a fella who sing other people songs, I don’t expect a problem. I will show them. Forget calypso. I will be a movie star.
So I go down at The Carib where they picking people for the parts. Stanley,