The Dragon Can't Dance - Life Experiences Reflected in Literature

Life Experiences Reflected in Literature

Lovelace's literary work emerges out of his personal life experiences with diverse social groups in different areas of Trinidad and Tobago and reflects the difficulties of having to negotiate an independent present with a colonial past. While the author currently dedicates much of his time to advocating for reparations to be made to descendant slaves, the legacy of his writing continues to resonate within Trinidadian society in the efforts to rebuild a positive sense of identity in the Caribbean. Lovelace acknowledges this notion as a sense of "personhood", through which each individual whatever their social, cultural, or racial status can be an active participant in the creation of identities.

While most of the plot in The Dragon Can't Dance takes place in Port of Spain, many of its characters are migrants from rural areas that attempt to create individual lifestyles in the unsettling and dislocated slums of Calvary Hill. The migrant nature of these characters is a clear reflection of Lovelace's diverse experiences throughout his native country. After being fired from a job at the Guardian, one of Trinidad's local newspapers, Lovelace took a job as a forest ranger in Valencia. Here, he would accompany and supervise laborers who ventured into the forest, which helped him develop an appreciation for the locals: "the real advantage to staying was getting to know the place and the people intimately. And this helped me to develop a love and respect for ordinary people and to want, although I did not necessarily think so, to tell their stories, to establish their validity and their values". After Valencia, he accepted a post as an agricultural officer in the remote village of Rio Claro, where he noted that "the whole culture of Trinidad unfolded". Lovelace felt as if he was able to become deeply immersed in a culture where he would "see stick fighting and… go and sing with the drummers for the stick fights".

Out of these experiences, Lovelace adopted a view that there were two basic spaces in which people entered when they arrived in Trinidad and Tobago: the ethnic space, in which members of a group carried on the religion and cultural practices they brought with them, and the creole space, encompassing the general meeting place of cultures. Lovelace notes that within the groups that came to occupy these spaces, Africans were the only ones not allowed an ethnic space in which they could maintain the religion and culture they had come with, since cultural and religious forms that were considered to be African, were banned at one point or another. Therefore, Africans had to find ways of bringing religion and culture into ways that were legitimate. Carnival would become one such space because it was a legal and legitimate festival and what now seem to be independent activities like calypso, stickfighting, or carnival characters, were actually linked to a deeper cultural and religious sentiment.

Lovelace also highlights the importance of calypso in his novel. He notes that even though calypso and drumming were previously banned, they were both powerful forces within society as they were linked to Carnival, which was also seen at the time as "a relic of barbarism and the annual abomination and so on". Having calypso identified with bacchanal meant that calypso was linked and limited to the bacchanal season of Carnival: "Once upon a time the entire Carnival was an expression of rebellion. Once there were stickfighters who assembled each year to keep alive in battles between themselves the practice of warriorhood born in them; and there were devils, black men who blackened themselves further with black grease to make of their very blackness a menace, a threat."

Lovelace hopes that his work will help create an environment that will break the residual impasse of the colonial hangover. Drawing back from his idea of "two spaces", the ethnic space and the creole space, he argues that Africans have poured a lot of themselves into that creole space because they were denied a legitimate ethnic space, which thus provides them with the opportunity and responsibility of seeing that this space is made into a real meeting place for all.