Is Just a Movie Read online

  So, on that Sunday, when he looked up from the station diary, it was with a sense of personal relief that Sonnyboy’s name was not in the book. But, hearing the disappointed grumble of Sonnyboy’s supporters, and the hum of jubilation from those behind them, he advised that if Sonnyboy wanted to be sure of his status, he should go to the savannah, where he would find the corporal in charge of the police station looking at the cricket match; or he could sit down and wait, on the chance that the inspector who was handling the Black Power business might drop in and clarify whether or not he was to be arrested. “Or, you could go home.”

  Sonnyboy recalled smiling. Even the police were doing their best not to see him. He decided to wait.

  I would meet him sitting on the bench in the charge-room when I was brought in with two revolutionary brethren, Ibo and Marvin, who, bad luck for us, were apprehended in a roadblock on the Toco Road as we were making our way to the hills of the remote village of Kumaca. As soon as I sit down, Sonnyboy strike up a conversation with me, affecting a familiarity that we really didn’t have, and he continued talking to me for the half-hour it took for the three army officers to come to fetch Ibo, Marvin and me to detention on Nelson Island. As they signaled for me and my two brethren to get up and follow them, Sonnyboy, still talking to me, got to his feet as if he was one of our party and calmly strode out with us to the waiting army jeep.

  As we were about to enter the jeep, the newspaper photographers who had been waiting outside the police station to catch a glimpse of the Black Power detainees, as we were called, aimed their cameras at us. I was tired with worry. I turned away, to give the impression of nonchalance but really because I didn’t want my photograph appearing in the newspaper with me, a revolutionary, looking so harassed.

  But Sonnyboy, not quite smiling, brought himself erect, lifted his right hand, fist clenched, above his head, and with a sense of honor, and a deserved delight, shouted, “Power to the People!” in a salute so rousing that I thrust my own right hand, fist folded, in the air and shouted: “Power!” When I looked, I saw that my comrades had done the same.

  I didn’t know Sonnyboy all that well. I knew him as a badjohn, a man who had his problems with the law. I had seen him at one or two of the Black Power rallies in Port of Spain and, meeting him there in the police station, I assumed he was one of us, one of the detainees. But later, when I heard his story, I was glad that my presence there that day had enabled him to save face before his grandmother and his brethren and allow him, for the first time, to enter into the custody of the police not as a common criminal but as the freedom fighter he knew himself to be.

  Poet of the Revolution

  When I am released from detention, Port of Spain is a changed place. The People’s Parliament where in the time of Black Power we had assembled before we set out on our daily marches is back to being just Woodford Square. The day I went there, the roar and babble of brethren at the gate, passing out pamphlets for rallies, is replaced by neatly dressed women and men silently holding up copies of the religious magazine Awake. At the side of the fountain, where the Grecian nymph is turning a dirty green under the unsteady drip of water, the leader of a band of Shouters, barefooted, in a yellow robe and red head tie, is delivering a sermon to a single diligent listener, a vagrant whose torso, arms and legs are wrapped in cellophane, bulking him up to look like an astronaut without a helmet. On the railing near to the urinals, a gray-haired man, his hair plastered down on his skull and his beard neatly trimmed, is arguing for the divinity of Marcus Garvey and the immortality of Haile Selassie. I look in the listening crowd for regulars from ’70, men who had talked revolution, who had raised their fists and shouted Power. One is selling snow-cone, another one have in his hands a book of lottery tickets for sale, and one is sitting on a bench by himself alone, curled up and quailed like callaloo bush in the hot sun, the heave and bounce gone out of his step, the light in his eyes dimmed, about him the exhausted look of a routed combatant glad to embrace the chastening rebuke of his defeat. None of them seem to recognize me and I choose not to trouble them. I their poet and prophet was now a stranger.

  For Carnival that same year, in the Victory Calypso Tent where I had spent the last five years as the lead calypso singer, the crowd no longer want to hear my songs. They sit quiet enough while I am singing, and continue their forbidding silence when I am done, and it is only out of his sense of gratitude that Jazzy, the manager of the tent, is keeping me on the program, since, thank God, he ain’t forget that in the two years leading up to ’70, I was the big name pulling in the crowd. But even Jazzy’s loyalty was wearing thin.

  This night he called me into the little booth he called his office and he say to me, “King . . .” That is how he call me: King. That is how he call those of us who win the Calypso crown already.

  He say, “King, how you feeling?” in this tuneless falsetto that put me on my guard right away.

  “How I feeling? Since when you is a doctor, Jazzy? Tell me, Jazzy, how you expect me to be feeling? No encores, no appreciation. Most times I feel like I singing to myself.”

  “King, don’t think I don’t appreciate the songs you singing.” His words slow, heavy, like they weighing down his head, have him looking not at me but down at his hands, the fingers of one pulling carefully at the others, like a pay-master singling out and counting hundred-dollar bills.

  “Jazzy, why you don’t stop beating around the bush and tell me what you have to tell me?”

  And now he drop the bomb: “King, we going to have to put you on the bench.”

  “You taking me off the program, Jazzy?”

  “Because, King, the revolution, the rebellion, it finish,

  it done. And, those songs you singing, the people . . .”

  pausing for the eternity of two-three 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, Errol, Claude, Wilbert, Ralph, fellars who act with the Theatre 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.”

&nb
sp; 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.