Earl Lovelace, I’m happy to report, is very much still with us, and he’s writing with as much verve and rhapsodic wonder as ever. Is Just a Movie is the story of two friends, Kangkala, an out-of-fashion calypsonian, and Sonnyboy, a badjohn turned radical, who meet during Trinidad’s Black Power heyday of the seventies and whose trials and tribulations over subsequent decades—including ill-fated bit parts in a foreign film—come to reflect some of the larger changes sweeping the island. But that hardly gives you a sense of the breadth of this swaggering, cheeky, joyful book, with its lively cast of walk-on characters, from the smooth-batting cricketer Franklyn, whose every stroke is a defiant statement of self-assertion (“How you going to stop we? How you go keep we down?”) to Clayton Blondell, a polarizing black nationalist who arrives from the U.S. well after the movement has petered out in the Caribbean.
And there’s much more—this is a full-throated medley about identity and independence; love and community; the “selling of dreams” and the “wind of sadness”; about Trinidad, steel-pan music and the towering figures of Carnival, 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.”
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