Earl Lovelace —The salt of our earth
In 2020, before the pandemic, I was among several writers to attend a workshop run by Earl Lovelace. The arrival to his home in the afternoon standing on a pitch-hot road at his gate, to be ushered past a dog that feels fierce, and finally, to sit at his table on his porch, dappled and green as a rainforest. To hear him read out loud, feel your hammering heart as he gives a sentence you have written his full attention, you feel like you have been admitted into a holy space of essential work.
Amidst the cracking of bamboo, creatures darting, here a butterfly, there a bright bird, Lovelace’s piercing gaze, looking past the words into who you are, asking what your writing is doing here, now, for us Lovelace gives you the feeling that writing about our islands is as close to the work of the Gods as we can get. The weeks passed as if in an alternate reality. His books were around us in our folders, on the table lit up by bouncing daylight, and by lamplight by our own beds at night.
I reread his book Salt then (which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1996 and 2022 and was included in the Big Jubilee Read among 70 books by Commonwealth authors to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II platinum jubilee). Salt centres around Alford George, the son of a poor farm labourer in Trinidad who does not speak till age six and whose ancestor Guinea John led an 1805 slave rebellion before flying back to Africa. The other slaves could not fly with him as they had eaten too much salt. Of Salt, The Times (UK) declared that Lovelace’s language is “a carnival of Creole sounds ... the deepest ideology of the novel, the display of the power of West Indian speech, the emancipation of the West Indian tongue from the shackles of the English sentence”.
Salt brought to mind what Lovelace is to us: salt of this earth, salt of our sea, salt of our breeze–Toco born, Tobago, Belmont, and Morvant bred. I did what any aspiring writer would do. I interviewed him. I wrote down what he said. When Lovelace was a child, he lived with his grandparents in Tobago in the 1940s.
“My grandfather was strict, a planter who loved the land and we were selfsufficient. We had goats, cows, mangoes, avocados, chennets, guava, and cashews. My grandmother made things for sale–sweetbread and pone. My grandparents were Methodists. My mother was Baptist. My background provided a moral sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice, also related to the church.”
As a child, Lovelace read a lot, went to church, and through his grandfather, got interested in politics which intertwined with his sense of justice.
“My people were what Lamming would call peasants and farmers. These were my people who had to have a voice in my writing. I didn’t know all this then. I would see people I encounter along the way as helping to shape a voice, who am I speaking to, and to whose behalf I am speaking. The politics was there in my writing, but also in my being. I wondered what, as a society, large or small ideas we all wanted to address, what it meant to be African, Indian, European, Chinese, Arab. Apart from the usual visuals of cricket and Carnival, it was challenging to find any one thing we all wanted together.”
As I do now, I thought then that Lovelace is the rarest streak of fiery brilliance among us, a man who grew and spread his sparkle here amidst the rain, the heat, the rough baking roads in remote places. Born in 1935, he is three years younger than VS Naipaul and five years younger than Walcott. Like them, he worked briefly for the Trinid ad Guardian. Unlike them, he never left. His books were born here, lived here, and flew from here. His first novel, While Gods Are Falling, published in 1965 just three years after T&T became an independent country, was met with accolades from CLR James, who called his writing a “new type of prose”, and Lovelace, “a new type of writer”.
It was new because we, a small island nation of people, were new, long before August 1, 1976, when we became a republic. Before it was decided the day would be celebrated on September 24, when the first Parliament met under the new Republic Constitution. Lovelace, who could have easily, with his talent, left for big publishers or looked upon our nascent country with Naipaul-like contempt, with the eye of the coloniser, wrote about things we had not even named yet in this strange new world percolating with inhabitants from far-flung continents.
The Wine of Astonishment (1982-Waveland Press) deals with the struggle of a Spiritual Baptist community from the passing of the prohibition ordinance until the ban. Is Just a Movie, (2011, Faber and Faber) which won the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature was described by the president of the Royal Society of Literature, and Booker Prize winner Bernadine Evaristo in The Guardian as a novel of a complex society where he peels back “the scabs of racial tension” and “when things become too difficult, there is always the spirit of carnival that presides over their lives: recuperative, cathartic, communal, celebratory”.
A serious writer whose work has the honesty and intensity of a chronicler whose history is in danger of sinking; Lovelace has never played to the gallery of the West. He does the opposite. He writes for us, about us. No writer (Nobel prize winners Walcott and Naipaul are no exception) passes muster without many questions being asked. It is not just Lovelace’s technical grasp of writing that must pass the test but the honesty of who the writer is and which gallery he plays to.
Are you West Indian? Are you Trinidadian and Tobagonian? What does it mean to you to live in a place where you were brought in chains or indentured, colonised? What does the community, the spring of the culture that emerged from this trauma, mean to you? Are you an upstart who unconsciously looks up to Yankee or colonial values that brutalised nations? Do you think about where you came from, your place in this place, and how you feel about your fellow immigrants? What language do you look up to? Do you notice the rhythms of our shared language? Do you feel tenderness at the language of our grandmothers, at the dialect that carries the memory of where you came from, or are you secretly contemptuous of who we are? There are so many layers to what Lovelace is, but the true test of writing about us is, do you love who you are, who we are? He will work with you if the answer is “yes” and your writing is decent.
So, two years later, when I delivered my manuscript to him, I worried for a month, thinking if it did not pass muster, my life’s work would be dead. Back came the response, “A compelling memoir of the binding power of love and the liberating beauty of forgiveness.”
I wept because, on that day, I felt like I belonged here like I never had before. I realised then, that Lovelace’s work is about belonging. “This is difficult for me to say. The impression we give is we have one, all of us playing mass. We’ve all been running on instinct. I am curious to know how Africans, Indians, different races, and our new world people deal with the situation.” I assume he means enslavement, indenture, and a brutal arrival. I asked Lovelace which of his books was dearest to him.
“Every book has its own story. I’ve always loved what I’ve been writing. The Dragon Can’t Dance (Andre Deutsch 1979) is a good starting point. It seeks the whole country, all the different groups, and presents them in terms of their own problems, each with a sense of goodwill. There is no big villain here. “The Dragon was trying to present rebellion as a way of dealing with history, and to say the ‘Dragon can’t dance’ suggests rebellion is not enough. In this novel, you see the little boy and Sylvia as people needing support, treasuring, approbation, and self-love. It deals with the questions we neglect and the complexities we try to escape. We must deal with ourselves —different groups, each with their own positions. Then we can collectively deal with the national position.”
Lovelace believes our national purpose is greater than harmony. It’s the opportunity to teach the world how to be human. “The Caribbean challenge to the Caribbean is on behalf of a new humanness, a larger humanness. We have a greater burden and opportunity to solve this problem than those countries that have been more fixed and can claim to have achieved something as they have things to show. What we have to show is an approach to dealing with one another. We cannot be together until we understand why we are not together. We must face how we relate to each other and situations within ourselves on behalf of Africa, India, and Europe. “My responsibility is what I have been doing for the place sympathetically and honestly. We have to discover ourselves. We always give space. We hang around people and let them discover we are one. We need to spend more time with ourselves, discover who we are, and how we relate to hard questions. We buy into what others think of us, are lied to, and believe their ideas of our worth. We need to start with the concept of worth. We see it piecemeal in sports, writing, and the world’s acclaim, but who is this world? We have to be more honest and patient with ourselves.”
As we celebrate Republic Day 2023, surely we can take the council of our literary doyen to heart—to learn and teach the world how to be more human.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian columnist and the winner of the non-fiction OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023.