Is Just a Movie. Earl Lovelace
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Workshop, all of them there. Fellars from Strolling Players, Best Village people: the Talent. The fella from America, he have his people, foreign industry, that he bring with him. They give all of us a little test, the audition. To recite from a literary work. Ralph do something from Hamlet, the big speech, “To be or not to be.” Errol do something from Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain. The Great Makak speech:
Sirs, I am sixty years old,
I have live all my life.
Like a wild beast in hiding.
And I do for them a piece of my Midnight Robber speech:
My name is Kangkala,
maker of confusion, recorder of gossip,
destroyer of reputations, revealer of secrets.
In the same skin, I am villain and hero, victim and victor,
I reduce the powerful by ridicule.
I show them their absurdities by parody.
I make their meanings meaningless and give meaning to meaning.
I am the Dame Lorraine presenting in caricature the grotesque of the wicked, the deformity of the stupid, the obzocky of gluttony.
I show the oppressors themselves misshapen, gros toto, gros titi, gros bondage.
Yes, I portray the big-stones man: a bag of boulders bulging from my pants,
I am the big-foot, sore-foot man, the big-bottom, big-breasted woman.
I am the dispenser of afflictions.
I dance Bongo on top the graves of the mighty.
Yes, Kangkala is my name.
But I was born again by a slip of the tongue
when one night in the calypso tent, as I am preparing to sing my song,
the Master of Ceremonies introducing me decided to make his announcement with an American twang.
He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the song and this is your singer, King Kala.”
So, suddenly so, in the interstice, or, shall I say, the interspluce of this mispronunciation of Kangkala brought on by this Trinidadian fella wanting to sound American,
calling Kang, king,
I was reborn to a new vision.
I had to find new histories to write, ignored heroes to celebrate.
I began afresh to sing.
I became the poet of the revolution.
“Marvelous,” the director say. “You fellars have talent.”
Talent, yes! So they pick me. So I have this role.
The role they give me, the same one they give the locals, is a role to die. Local talent. Our role is to die. The rest of the people, they bring from America. They is the stars, the ones that have lines to speak, lives to live, in the movie of course.
Though, to read what the newspapers have to say you would swear I had top billing: Local Calypsonian Featured in Foreign Movie. Yes. And now when I walking the road people looking at me, The Feature, The Featured, pointing me out to their friends. Woman who never talk to me waving at me, going out their way to come and ask me for my autograph: nice woman. Local movie star. Me.
So, I get this job to die. Is a kind of jungle picture, with a river in it and a trail and a rope bridge and a love story and natives with headdresses of colored feathers, their splendid bodies bare except for grass skirts, carrying bwana packs over the mountains. And they have donkeys. I mean, we have donkeys. Some of us tote the loads on we head. Around us is the enemy, another warring tribe. In the bushes. Crawling on their bellies. Shooting with expert marksmanship. They just shoot you and you supposed to fall. These shooters ain’t missing at all: the script.
When you’re a little boy and you playing stick-’em-up, the shooter does miss a few times at least before he connects. It is part of the convention of the game: the shooter shoots; you fall or dodge the bullets and make your escape. And since it is not real, since it is make-believe, it is left to you to confirm his marksmanship by agreeing to be wounded or shot dead. There is a certain give-and-take, reasonableness, like in a fiction, rooted in the idea that life gives everybody a chance, that leaves everybody satisfied, whether you are the one shot or the one doing the shooting. The shooter must miss a few times, since it is quite fatal when he connects. But here, in this movie, the fellars who shooting, they not missing at all. The only people who they missing is the fellars from the States: the stars.
“Their lives are charmed,” Errol says smiling, talking about the stars. “Their lives are charmed.”
Errol is an actor who looked on at the rebellion of
’70 and kept his distance. He feels deeply. So much of life pains him and delights him. He is alarmed, astonished, outraged and for him that is enough; I mean, he doesn’t feel the need to go beyond feeling to action. His job is to feel, to bear witness with his heart. He emerges less a moral superior than a barometer of emotion. Now he had taken grief to a new height. His words sound like poetry. His laughter is deepest pain: Their lives are charmed.
I going over this ravine on a rope bridge. Blam! Blam! Blam! Shots all around. Fellars falling, except fellars from the States. All around me fellars falling, left and right. Blap! Blap! Blap! Like flies. Like how you see natives fall in a Tarzan picture. As the people shoot, they falling. They falling. They dropping dead just so. Then I get shot.
Even in a movie, I don’t want to die on a rope bridge with bwana pack on my back. But this is the script. They shoot you, you have to die. That is what they paying me to do. To die.
I get shot. I hold my shoulder, wounded, and I scramble across the bridge and Blam! They shoot again and I start to fall. I have to fall. But something holding me back. My conscience, my pride. Something is not right. And I look across at Stanley and Errol and them for a cue, how to die, since they are experienced actors, real actors. But Stanley and Errol, all of them, all these fellars, good men, good actors, they just falling down and dying just so. And I in confusion looking at them fall, thinking how could an actor, a man like Errol, fall so? “But wait!” I say when it hit me what was happening. “Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! What is this?” And for a moment, I am torn. I don’t want to upstage Errol and Stanley and them. But same time there is a voice in my mind shouting, No. No. No. No, I ain’t falling so. I can’t follow them. I ain’t dying so, No, man. Um-um. No.
Even when I was a kid playing stick-’em-up and I get shot, I composed my dying like a poem. There was poetry in my dying. When I get shot and I start to die, I hear the theme music of the movie, I turn to the bite of the bullets, my knees buckle, my hands reach out and I hold on for the last, a little piece of the world – the sky, the air, my eyes open and I fill them with the wonder of trees, singing birds in the verandas of their branches, the roar of women in the marketplace, the noise of children at the playground, people quarreling, lovers undressing each other, I move into a dance, feeling the blood of life leaving my head, I breathe in, the fragrance of ripe guavas turning to the smell of crushed corraili leaves, hearing the last drumroll, cymbals crashing, seeing the lights growing dim, waves beating onto the shore, fish leaping silver. That was when I was a little boy playing. Dying was a performance. I was at the center of my own dying.
Now, here was I, a grown man, in a real movie and I was dying like ah arse, like a fool. And I actually see myself beginning to fall, following the lead of fellows who I respected. I see myself falling when, out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse this man, one of the fellars, one of our fellars get shot. And this man flings up his arms as if he is lifted by the shot. And he holds them spread out there above his head like a stickfighter whose charge is arrested by his parrying of a blow and he sways, stretching them away from his body like he crucifying a cross or like is Carnival day and he playing a big mas, a big hooray of a Wild-Indian – The Rise of Montezuma or something – with a tepee for a headpiece, the tassels on the sleeves of his jacket hanging down like a curtain of fern, his cape spread out behind