Within Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance, Earl Lovelace
centers the annual Trinidadian Carnival as the motivation, release, voice, and
symbolic subjectivity of the Trinidadian characters populating the play. Within
the two acts, characters like Fish-Eye (Belasco), Aldrick Prospect, Cleothida,
and Sylvia are all shaped both by the long-standing traditions that shaped how
each of the characters have interacted within the Calvary Hill Carnival space
as well as the ways in which this tradition is rapidly changing as their worlds
expand. This tension, I believe works itself into the very fiber of the text,
pushing questions of Trinidad racial identity, capitalism, and its relation to
the creation of a Trinidadian identity. In otherwords, as Pariag mourns to his
wife, “They not seeing me,” how can we look through The Dragon Can’t Dance for ways in which the characters are
obscured from being seen and seeing themselves and the surrounding world.
The Masquerade:
Pulling on the Past, Scale by Scale
ALDRICK Yes. Every year I do it again. Every threat I sew,
every scale I put on the body of the dragon is a thought, a name, a chant that
celebrate how I get here and how I survive on this Hill. Every year I trace my
life again” (18).
Aldrick’s dragon exists as a traditional character within the
Carnival mas tradition. Frightful, fierce, and ancient, the dragon mas is
entrenched within a longstanding Trinidadian folk culture (Traditional Mas
Archive 2016). As typically depicted the dragon mas enacts theatrical
aggression and transgression. As noted by scholar Max Harris in 1998 article, “The
Impotence of Dragons: Playing Devil in the Trinidad Carnival,” the dragon mas
is held in chains the equally frightful Imp and Devil traditional mas characters.
As Carnival is created within an intersection of transgression, the Devil,
Imps, and Dragon characters all collectively point towards a potential violence
that simmers on the surface but ultimately remains harmless. As Harris states,
“Although they were enacting danger, they themselves were not dangerous” (109).
This foiled potentiality is a particularly intersting way to think about the
character Aldrick. In many ways throughout the text, Aldrick sits perpetually
at the potentiality of events. He spends the time before and after Carnival
preparing his next Dragon costume, he can’t enter into a romantic relationship
with Sylvia because of the potential “woman things” she may need, his and
Fisheye’s fizzled revolutionary moment, down even to the potentiality that
informs the final scene of Act 2.
· Aldrick
states early on, “Is only when this dragon breathe fire that this city know
that it have people living here. . . If . . . if it wasn't for this dragon,
this island wouldn't even know we is people here on top this hill”, how does the text show the dragon as a
living archive?
· What does it mean that the
dragon is tied up within Aldrick’s growing revolutionary and rebellious
disposition and a seeming permanent temporal potentiality that staves off and
chocks Aldrick and Fisheye’s rebellion?
On Race . . .
The idea of masquerade is also
interesting when thinking about the ways in which racial differences created
seemingly uncrossable lines between characters. Thinking of interactions
between Pariag and Aldrick, the tensions between Indian and Creole are based
within silence that is continually willed forward by class differences and
supposed prejudice. The fraught silences between Pariag, Aldrick, and even
Fisheye are contextualized by Pariag’s lament that his neighbors simply
couldn’t see what type of man he was. In what other ways are racialized differences
intersected with class to create a deliberate silence between two characters
within arguably similar concerns and viewpoints? …I’m thinking Cleothida
and Olive.
FISHEYE Suspend me? You want to suspend me from
Calvary Hill Steel band so your sponsors could come in and put their name on
the flag? Reds . . . Reds, you know how I get to be in this band. Is you invite
me. I had nothing, no life, no place, and I come up this hill and join the
band. Out of old oil drums and rubbish bins and steel and old iron we make
something to sing, to sound, to ring for everybody living here on top this hill
. . . If we didn't have nothing in Calvary Hill, we had this band. And now you
telling me you want to put another name on this flag. For some fresh paint and
free jerseys, you want me to agree to sell out Calvary Hill people band. (36)
Lurking
within this text are the fears for what will come of Calvary Hill, its musicans
and its regional culture, as national borders that have localized artistic
forms expand and explode. Early in the text Philo, who goes on to become a
well-respected Calypso musician, dismisses concerns over white artists playing
the steel drum. However, by the last pages of the play he comes back to Calvary
Hill after international acclaim and travel stating, “ Oh, God. And to think I
is their own. I is what come out of their belly. Just where I am a traitor and
betrayer without memories of self I want to remember and hold you and love you”
(87). This shift is shcking, even as his international success “wins” him
Cleopthida’s affection, the shame that colors Philo’s tone here seems to
indicate a way in which the calypso he plays in Port of Spain and in Europe is
rooted in something distant from the calypso of Calvary Hill. I think this is particularly interesting when
thinking about the text deals in questions of racial identity when seeking out
a traditional Trinidadian identity. How
does sound interact within this space? What exactly makes Philo a traitor?
Gender
Questions
The majority of my in-class presentation will deal with
gender, however, I would like to leave some food for thought pre- in class
discussion.
Within this text, there is a clear divide between the
masculine musicians and the women, who serve as Queens of the masquerade. Do we
perceive this divide to be organic or hinting at a larger sexist tradition?
How can we think about the interactions between women within
the narrative and the narratives of colorism and class that are encoded within
them?
What do we make of the princess and slave girl binary
attached to Sylvia’s choice in costume? While this works as a nod to carnival’s
transgressive roots, it is impossible to ignore that this exchange plays out in
relation to men seeking control over Sylvia’s body.
What is Philo and
Aldrick’s investment in Sylvia being as free and importantly untamable as they
claim? On first sight this appears as hotep logic (as in misogynoir), is that
reading unfair?
Amanda,
ReplyDeleteThank you for this post. I'm particularly drawn to your question about the dragon as a living archive and your teasing out of (masculine) visibility/non-visibility ("They not seeing me").
Of the latter, I'm reminded of Hortense Spillers's work and her argument about how ethnicity "de-genders" its subjects. Because Spillers was writing specifically about black (female) subjects in the U.S., I'm wondering how that theorization might or might not travel across the diaspora or within a meditation on masculinity. What aspects of the characters' personhood, specifically, are not being "seen" in this novel and how does that interact with silence/not being "heard"? I'm thinking specifically here of Pariag, whose struggles are textual, but also of the female characters, who grapple in a different way within the matrix of what makes a person's personhood knowable.
I'm curious also as to what might make an archive "living"? In Autumn Womack's Race and Visuality class last fall, we discussed Teenie Harris's Pittsburgh photos as a living archive because the project was impossible to "finish." That is, because it would never be "complete" (both in the sense of its content--Pittsburgh residents would continue to exist beyond the scope of Harris's own life--and the impossibility of locating the name of each photographed subject), it couldn't be settled/closed/"dead." It would always have gaps in it, and those gaps would be points of entry. The dragon(s) of this book, however, are (arguably) operating in a different way and I need to spend more time with your question to think through archiving practices. My gut reaction though is that your gut reaction is right, and I'm interested (again) in the relationships between archives, "seeing," and "hearing." Is it the job of the archive to create ways of knowing that are new, even radical or counter-, or to preserve ways that are historical, material, even transient or precarious within history's long arc? Must a single archive necessarily do both?
What moves me about the dragon-as-archive is that it's a self-administered archive. In a novel in which so many characters struggle with how to articulate themselves in a world with others (whether along racial, ethnic, gender, or alternate lines), the idea of the dragon doing the work of communal visualization is both affirming and sad.
Which brings me, side-ways, to the question that I feel haunts both of our responses to the novel: How does one archive gender, race, community (the bonds, I mean, not the collective bodies)?
Often times our discussions on identity, gender, race, including some of our theoretical musings (sometimes byzantine discussions) deeply resonate with issues concerning traditional Latin American studies (understanding Latin American studies in the more general sense, as homogeneity is not one of the defining forces of Latin Americanism). From my non-English-centric perspective, our class discussions usually reach an impasse, whereas approaches concerning functionalism/structuralism and post-structuralism are overwhelmingly used in my discipline. For instance, last seminar, from my XIX century academic perspective, I felt that the discussion on theoretical applicability revolved around the evident: the formulation of a science/discipline is concomitant with the elaboration of a theory, i.e., sonic theory. I am saying this because I “read” these discussions from the XIX century, a period of deep economic adjustments that further the strength of Modernity as a set of intellectual strategies anchored in two interconnected principles: 1) capital is the language of cultural negotiation and 2) cultural negotiations are attached to capital. As suggested by Keith Nurse, globalization is not a recent phenomenon, but Nurse (mostly due to our disciplinary limitations, which apparently are a feature of intellectual modernity) understands Wallerstein’s world-system theory passively, as defined in canonical readings that place the binary periphery-core as a post-industrial theoretical foundation. Néstor García Canclini in “Imagined Globalization” (2014) suggests that many different intellectual collectivities, such as migrants, performers, entrepreneurs, among others, imagine and put into practice manifold strategies that suggest other forms of citizenship. Furthermore, Alejandro Mejías López, in “The Inverted Conquest” (2009), establishes how Latin American literary modernity “traveled” to Spain throughout the early XX century and imposed its aesthetic hegemony in the former colonial metropolis, thus articulating (from the very limited reach of printed literature) aesthetic and sociological strategies of understanding literary modernity as a cultural tool inherent to otherness. Reading Earl Lovelace’s “The Dragon Can’t Dance” (1979) not only referred me to classical Caribbean scenarios written in Spanish, such as Alejo Carpentier’s “The Kingdom of This World” (1949), but also helped me to imagine ritual (being carnivals, burials, or physical work) as a social space (mostly determined by the Gregorian calendar in our continent) where the performing collectivities are assumed as Postcolonial Subjects. I am saying all this because I believe, and I have been carefully listening to your discussions throughout the semester, that the possibility of an Afrosonic modernity necessarily traverses, or submerges itself, in the Latin American economic and cultural waters. Inter-disciplinary dialogue, in terms of intellectual egalitarian recognition, is at stake here. By no means Modernity can be understood from a monolingual resonant corpus, whereas the afro is also a Latin American root. Below I am attaching a photo from the ⎯deeply sonic⎯ carnival of Los Chinelos that every year takes place in the state of Morelos (during the long XIX century, Morelos was the top producer of sugar in Mexico; its sugar plantations used both black and indigenous labor as their main workforce, thus suggesting a complex and slow process of subaltern exchanges of nationness, to use Homi Bhabha’s term). Cheers to all, enjoy the sunshine!
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI cannot post the photo... I’ll describe it: lots of colors, huge masks, and people dancing.
ReplyDeleteI think we are running into problems with posting photos!
DeleteSYLVIA: You ever was in love, Aldrick?
ReplyDeleteALDRICK: (thoughtful pause) No . . . Love is on the screen.
SYLVIA: Me neither. I like to see love pictures though . . . you feel those people real on the screen? Or is something they make up? I find it does look so real.
ALDRICK: You like Guy?
SYLVIA: He buying a costume for me.
A line early on stood out to me—in talking to Aldrick about movies, Sylvia says “you feel those people real on the screen? Or is something they make up? I find it does look so real” (15). To me, this line speaks to the idea of being seen or not seen that we’re working on here in this thread so far. I’m struck by Aldrick’s denial in response to Sylvia’s question, and the way that he thinks of being in love, or at least what that turn of phrase means, as something limited to the world of the movies. A world related to but not the same as the world we inhabit in our day-to-day.
Additionally, this brief moment is an example of character reacting to different forms of media that bring to the world of Calvary Hill quite a different world, so it stands out to me for that reason as well. The world “on the screen” consists of something different—different opportunities and feelings seem to be available to characters in movies—or at least Sylvia implies something like that. But I’m wondering too about the other meaning of screen: to screen off. The world of Trinidad, and especially of Calvary Hill, feels like it’s almost “screened off,” however incompletely, from the outside world, which continues to encroach as the story unfolds. Zooming out on this little moment, the play seems to ask, more broadly: Is what we see real? Is there potential for a different kind of life to exist? Characters seem to teeter on the precipice of a different kind of life than the ones they actually live: a life where Aldrick is able to marry Sylvia, or where the band gets sponsored and acquires all new jerseys and pans, for example.
Tellingly, this brief discussion of love segues seamlessly into a conversation about costumes. “You like Guy?” Aldrick asks. “He buying a costume for me,” Sylvia replies, in a way that at once deflects and also maybe answers the question. Being in a costume seems to actually make the characters visible to each other in different ways. Aldrick, in particular, seems to be really “seen” only when behind his dragon costume (or at least he feels that to be the case). Aldrick is not hidden behind the costume but maybe only visible when in costume. Costuming, both economically and emotionally, is tied to Sylvia’s affiliation with Guy. Aldrick’s costuming efforts are only for himself—he can’t costume others and perhaps following from that can’t see others. I’m really struck by the dynamics behind costumes, specifically, in this text, and I’ve only just barely been able to brush the surface of it here in this post—maybe we can touch on this theme in class tonight some more.
Following our discussion this week, I was interested in Amanda's discussion of the varying intersections of identity that occur throughout the novel. Specifically, thinking about the gendered and class issues that occur throughout the novel leads us to determine the focused gaze throughout the work. I think these are points that many of us didn't know where to start because of the complicated nature of intersecting measures of identity when we want to discuss the ways in which being in the African Diaspora unifies in ways that we cannot explain. We talked specifically about the use of the steel drum throughout the novel, I wonder in what ways the steel drum can have classed elements as well.
ReplyDeleteThe article I was talking about "Why do poor people waste money on luxury goods" is a couple of years old, but can be read here if you're interested: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/why-do-poor-people-waste-money-on-luxury-goods
-Candice C. R.
Post-Class Reflection:
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading Dragon Can’t Dance and learning more about the historical role of Carnival helped me to appreciate the book even more. Reading Dragon Can’t Dance and Corregidora has been possibly my favorite part of this class so far, and the discussions of both texts have been really interesting and thought-provoking.
There are two things I’m interested in thinking more about this week. First, we talked some about Piereg’s sense of isolation from those around him, but there’s a pervasive sense of isolation around all the characters in the book. As Amanda foregrounded in the title to her blog post and presentation, “They not seeing me,” the characters in this novel have a very hard time connecting. In part, there’s a gendered component to this, as we discussed last night—the men are not able to connect with one another but express less anxiety about connecting with women, women are used as tools to elevate and detract from other men as when we read about Fisheye, “[T]he truth was that he wanted nothing but to live, to be, to be somebody for people to recognize, so that [..] when they see someone who concerned him, [they would] say: ‘That is Fisheye woman!’” (59), or when Fisheye tries to hurt Philo by hitting one of the women who is with him on his last visit to the corner. But setting aside the racial and gender barriers that isolate the marginalized characters in the novel, there remains a lack of connection between Philo, Alderick, Fisheye, and even between the women, even other than Dolly. I’m curious if their isolation is suggested as coming from their condition as colonial subjects, if it’s about the intersection of all of these identities of difference, or if there’s something more being suggested about the possibility of connection—political mobilization, to be sure, but even just basic human connection.
I’m also thinking more about what Le’Mil and Treviene were talking about regarding capitalism and the participation of working-class people in the consumption of goods. I don’t know that I have anything to add, but I’m intrigued and it’s been buzzing around in my brain since we left class and I hope we’ll talk more about it. Basically, my understanding of Le’Mil’s argument was that there’s a way working-class/poor black people can participate in the very system designed to exploit them, but can participate in a critical way, using the markers of that system to assert their own status as valid agents in a system that attempts to deny them agency. I’m not sure if I have it totally right, and it sounds like some of my classmates are familiar with this or related ideas (Professor Imani mentioned the concept of adornment, which I haven’t studied), but I’m interested in talking more about it.
Great presentation, Amanda!
“‘I want to be with my friends,’ he said. ‘I want my friends to be happy for me. I want fellars who know me when they look at me to say, There is Philo! There is Me!…I is still Calvary Hill” (Lovelace 156).
ReplyDeleteI’m interested in the way the tying of sound to place is expressed through Philo and his launch into stardom in The Dragon Can’t Dance. It’s interesting how Philo tries to keep some sense of being rooted in Calvary Hill once he becomes popular, and how everyone (except for Aldrick at the beginning) is bent on denying him that space. Fisheye accuses him of “just playing a game…just come up here to fuck around, to show off” (Lovelace 158). Now, of course, part of Fisheye and others rejecting Philo is because of how he’s “given up on his own calypsos of rebellion” (Lovelace 121), gained fame and materials “in the service of the other world against which they were rebelling” (Lovelace 158). However, the denial of physical space of the Corner by Fisheye, the Corner that Philo tries so hard to still be part of and insists is part of him after finding that success, wounds Philo, so much so it becomes his next calypso hit.
In thinking of the role physical space is playing, I’m also thinking through the issues brought up regarding migration and diaspora that sprang up, the notion that part of what makes Philo a traitor is his bringing calypso (minus the old rebellious themes Aldrick laments him losing) to a European audience, and the question of whether an exile can ever return. In thinking through Philo I think about early thoughts on Puerto Rican migration, how Juan Flores, in “Crazy Minds Think Alike: My Long Symbiotic Duet with Tato Laviera” notes that moving the mainland US is seen as a moral corruption to Puerto Rican identity, with return to the island seen as the ultimate goal. And yet migration has also facilitated the formation of different Puerto Rican cultural items (salsa music, seen as the national music of Puerto Rico, is often quoted, but I think also of Rafael Hernández’s “Lamento borincano,” the island’s “unofficial anthem,” penned while the composer lived in New York City). This relationship only becomes more problematic as the population of stateside Puerto Ricans, already larger than the island’s population, continues to grow. While the content of Philo’s calypsos might be cause for some to worry, how does tying a sound or a music to a particular place in some ways belie a reality of migration faced in colonial and postcolonial spaces?
Post Class Response:
ReplyDeleteAfter last week’s class I keep thinking about the structural significance of the novel. On my initial read I was struck by the different “chapters’” tendency to shift focus to a different character than the chapter that preceded it. After further rumination I think this highlights the separateness of the characters, despite their living in the same space—the national and racial identity of the island is so stratified, that even the stories of the various characters, though intertwined, are somewhat separate.
Some stray thoughts I didn’t get to bring up in class involved Nurse’s nuanced descriptions of the potential power (and relative level of subversion) that Carnival possesses. The following section stood out to me: “carnival breaks down barriers of colour, race, nationality, age, gender. And the police who would normally arrest us for doing those things (making noise, exhibitionism, drinking, or simply being black) are made to smile and be ever so courteous.” I thought this was both humorous and largely important. What a role reversal! Further, the discussion of the corporatization or commercialization of festivities seemed pertinent and reminded me of similar systems that I see in events that I have experienced (like when I attended the Chicago Pride parade, to see that most of the floats were of politicians trying to garner votes, or corporate sponsorships trying to sell their products). Another interesting aspect to Carnival is how, as the Nurse article states, “Transnational corporations are beginning to sponsor some of the festivals and are contributing to creating a mass commercialized audience under the guise of bogus multi-culturalisms.” This also has me thinking about social media’s role in the idea of “bogus multi-culturalism” and how Instagram and Snapchat can both corporatize or commercialize events and cities. Is this making “bogus” of things accelerated by technology and social media? It’s no longer just pictures that we can get in glimpses of these events, but videos and sound bites that make you feel like you are there.
Post Class Reflection
ReplyDeleteIn his article “Globalization and the Trinidad Carnival” Keith Nurse raises some interesting issues surrounding Carnival within the Caribbean diaspora with particular focus on Carnival’s origin, how it has deviated, and most importantly, the social and political connotations of race and class. He says that Trinidadian Carnival is localized through three perspectives: “the late entry of the colony into export-oriented plantation agriculture, the brevity of slavery and the varied cultural experience of the African population, and the size of the middle class and diversity of the ethnic groups in the immediate post-emancipation period.” (668).
So in thinking about The Dragon Can’t Dance, I am forced to consider the ways in these concepts have been portrayed through characterization and prose. And yes we see a low impoverished class on The Hill in which its inhabitants bear the scars of their ancestors. Pariag comes from a place where his family were indentured servants. Aldrick and Fisheye are male protagonists who ultimately seem lost. And then, we see women who are largely defined by the relationships they hold with these same male characters. Colonization and imperialism serve as lingering conflicts.
Carnival, for these characters is a place of genesis and rebirth. Aldrick uses his dragon costume as a symbol of rage and rebellion. It was interesting in Amanda’s presentation where she examined characters commonly associated with Carnival within the “devil band” where imps, devils, bats, dragons, and other illusions to hell represent the seedy underbelly of society. Nurse too mentions that in wearing costumes during Carnival the participation of masquerade “acted as a subversive form of street theatre that challenged the Eurocentric sociocultural and political order.” (671)
I have to wonder if Lovelace’s decision to use the dragon as a metaphor for Trinidadian struggle was itself a Carnival mas. If instead of using Aldrick as both literal and figurative form was an aesthetic choice, why the dragon? If we consider our discussion in class I believe that Le’Mil mentioned how Marxism and consumerism plays into the Carnival tradition where the most extravagant costumes depict an inherent wealth. If I think about other dragon stories, dragons always seem synonymous with wealth (A dragon with a gold lair, the price of the dragon’s head or heart being considered heralded with honor, etc). If the dragon is considered to be the “underbelly” of the Caribbean tradition, what, then, would hold the highest regard?
The one thing I kept coming back to the week after the class was, oddly enough, not something that was "brought up" during class. I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that Amanda had been working with a play version of the novel, especially since the sections of the book we read aloud were so light on dialogue and so heavy on internal characterization/the beauty of language. I was left wondering how that could be adapted to a play and how the very thing I'd taken the most for granted in the novel (its prose) might be the very thing that held it together. (This seems obvious, in hindsight, but I'd spent the actual reading process thinking about themes, modes, politics, etc.) This also opened up other questions for me--would this book make a good film?, etc. These questions surprised me because of how they re-routed me into the novel.
ReplyDelete