The Dragon Can't Dance by Earl Lovelace

First published: 1979

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: Late 1950’s-1960’s

Locale: Port-of-Spain, Trinidad

Principal Characters:

• Aldrick, the protagonist, who is skilled in making the intricate dragon costume
• Fisheye, the supreme “bad john” of Calvary Hill
• Cleothilda, the mulatto woman who plays the queen of the band on Carnival day
• Philo, a calypso singer who courts Cleothilda
• Sylvia, a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl
• Pariag, an East Indian

The Novel

The Dragon Can’t Dance is the story of the existence of the people of Calvary Hill and the culture they create in the process of surviving. The novel is episodic, with a greater emphasis on character portrayal than on story line. Earl Lovelace uses a prologue to focus on those special elements that are responsible for and are manifestations of the culture of the Hill’s inhabitants.

The Hill attracts people from throughout Trinidad, who are quickly absorbed into the life and culture of the Hill, except the East Indian Pariag and his wife, Dolly. Carnival, a festival marked by steel band and calypso music, totally transforms the Hill and its occupants, so that even a snob like Miss Cleothilda can claim “All o’ we is one.” The time is the late 1950’s, a period marked by violent clashes between the politicized steel bands and between toughs known as “bad johns.” In this environment, Fisheye and the other bad johns assert their manhood and act out the aggression that colonialism has nurtured in them. Aldrick uses his Carnival dragon costume to threaten and intimidate.

All this is not to last, however; sponsorship and commercialism step in. The steel bands are quieted down, and their warriors are “emasculated.” Fisheye is asked to behave, and when he refuses, he is thrown out of his band. Aldrick’s dragon is unable to dance, Philo gives up on his “calypsos of rebellion,” and Carnival, once an expression of rebellion, becomes placid and empty.

The bad john and the dragon, major symbols of rebellion, resist the change and, for a while, perpetuate their warriorhood. They terrorize the community until their continued defiance leads to confrontation with the police. Fisheye seizes a police jeep with two policemen as hostages, and for two days, he and his gang ride through Port-of-Spain in a futile attempt to stir the people to rebellion against the system. Fisheye and Aldrick’s failure results in their trial and imprisonment and brings about a transformation in Aldrick, who henceforth rejects the notion that playing a dragon once a year for two days is sufficient to constitute living.

Older and wiser, Aldrick returns to see whether there is still a life for him and the beautiful Sylvia, only to discover that the Hill has already claimed her. She is on her way to being married to Guy, not out of love but because he can provide her with material comforts. For Aldrick, it is also late for a rapprochement with Pariag, who has become a shopkeeper. Both Aldrick and Pariag pass up the opportunity to connect. Aldrick stops before the shop and moves on, while Pariag admits that “I had a chance to call him in. I didn’t do it. I paused too. Just like him—and moved on.”

The author begins with the depiction of life in the community known as “the yard,” where most of the major characters live, and the story line returns to the yard at the conclusion of the text. The yard community has disintegrated with the departures of Fisheye, Aldrick, and Pariag. Philo has moved away, and Basil, Aldrick’s apprentice in costume making, is about to join the police force. Cleothilda, now looking her age, no longer spurns the advances of the now successful and popular Philo.

The Characters

Lovelace’s technique is to present his characters one after another in successive chapters, imposing upon each chapter the title of the role the character plays, both in the actual Carnival and in the life of the yard, itself a carnival. This role is crucial to an understanding of each character.

“Queen of the Band” may be a sufficiently appropriate title for Miss Cleothilda, who believes that her mulatto complexion and her fading beauty entitle her to be queen not only on Carnival day but throughout the year as well. “To her being queen was not really a masquerade at all, but the annual affirming of a genuine queenship that she accepted as hers,” Lovelace writes. The role assigned to Aldrick, though, falls far short of encompassing his total character.

As protagonist, Aldrick is the one character who is connected to everyone else on the Hill, as well as being the one character who undergoes a profound change in the course of the novel. Like Miss Cleothilda, Aldrick takes his Carnival role seriously, but unlike her, he knows that it lasts only two days of the year. While it lasts, however, the role becomes the means through which he asserts himself, through which he demands that “others see him, recognize his personhood, be warned of his dangerousness.”

Lovelace focuses on Aldrick’s attitude toward his skill and toward the significance of what he weaves into his costume in order to make a statement about Aldrick himself. The author invokes religious imagery to describe Aldrick’s attitude toward his dragon costume. He is “Aldrick the priest,” for “it was in a spirit of priesthood that Aldrick addressed his work.” Aldrick’s costume depicts the racial past and the cultural struggle that has made survival possible. With this kind of knowledge, Aldrick grows and develops.

In spite of Aldrick’s commitment to playing the Carnival dragon, thoughts of Sylvia keep “nagging at his brain”; but he cannot go after Sylvia decisively, because it would mean having to accept an unwanted level of responsibility. He is unable to buy her a Carnival costume, just as he is unable to pay his rent. His sole responsibility is to the dragon. Because of this, he has to look on while Sylvia prostitutes herself to Guy, who, unlike Aldrick, is incapable of fully appreciating the real self in Sylvia.

Although Aldrick joins Fisheye in perpetuating “warriorhood” and in rebelling blindly, he is never comfortable with that role. Of those who have been imprisoned, jail has the most profound effect on Aldrick. It gives him an opportunity to think through the social situation. Aldrick understands the full significance of the aborted rebellion. He also knows that the action was a demand for recognition, a struggle for self, and an insistence upon the Hill residents’ “peoplehood.”

The quality of change that Aldrick experiences increases the distance between himself and Fisheye, making communication almost impossible. He is called crazy by the others, because they are unable to make the analysis that he does. When he visits Sylvia after leaving prison, the change manifests itself in the way he deals with her. She recognizes it and exclaims “you know, you change.” The new Aldrick has come to Sylvia “not to claim her, but to help her claim herself.” His new awareness allows him to understand that “one is saved only by one’s self.” No one else on the Hill understands the new Aldrick.

Lovelace develops each of his major characters as a full human being, with no one subordinated to the others. As the omniscient author, he fills in all the little details of character, including personal backgrounds, which are revealed through flashbacks. Analysis and commentary are also used for character revelation.

In presenting many of his characters, Lovelace had specific personalities in mind. Many facts of his characters’ lives parallel the real-life experiences of individuals. In fact, some characters in the novel appear unchanged from real life. In an interview given in 1980, Lovelace admitted that he portrayed these characters because he wished “to celebrate real people in a kind of way that other West Indian writers have not done.” The basis for his characters is his own experience.

Critical Context

In its frank discussion of the Indian-African theme, The Dragon Can’t Dance broke new ground. Lovelace examined critically the position of the East Indian as an outsider in West Indian society and considered what could be done to reverse this position. In this, he showed a remarkable sensitivity toward the Indian reality.

In his use of the language of the ordinary folk as the medium of expression, Lovelace distinguished himself as a pioneer, infusing into folk language the rhythms of steel band and calypso music. To do this, he eschewed grammatical convention, focusing instead on capturing the sensations of music and dance in his writing. Lovelace also gave literary value to the speech of the carnival people of the Hill.

When The Dragon Can’t Dance was published in 1979, Caribbean critic and scholar C. L. R. James stated that nowhere had he seen “more of the realities of a whole country disciplined into one imaginative whole.” James was merely expressing what so many others saw as the supreme achievement of Lovelace’s novel. Until that time, no novel had focused so directly and so comprehensively on the historical basis for and evolution of a people’s culture within the English-speaking Caribbean. The novel, like no other before it, explained the critical social function of culture in the Caribbean.

Bibliography

Barratt, Harold. “Metaphor and Symbol in The Dragon Can’t Dance.” World Literature Written in English 23 (Spring, 1984): 405-413. Argues that the rebellion and Carnival are forms of expression by those seeking to claim their “personhood.” Explores the larger theme of the quest for identity in the major characters.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Black Literature and Literary Theory. New York: Methuen, 1984. Overview of the subject that includes a discussion of Caribbean literature. Useful for placing Lovelace’s work in context.

Ilona, Anthony. “’Laughing Through the Tears’: Mockery and Self-Representation in V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas and Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance.” In Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial, edited by Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein. New York: Rodopi, 2005. Argues that derisive humor in The Dragon Can’t Dance tears down individual characters’ egos in order to make possible a more authentic representation of the complexity and diversity of collective Caribbean identities.

King, Bruce Alvin, ed. West Indian Literature. Hamdon, Conn.: Archon Books, 1979. Survey of the West Indian literary scene published contemporaneously with The Dragon Can’t Dance. Index, bibliography.

Meeks, Brian. Narratives of Resistance: Jamaica, Trinidad, the Caribbean. Mona, Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2000. Compares the representation of resistance in The Dragon Can’t Dance to that in Michael Thelwell’s Harder They Come (1994).

Nazareth, Peter. Review of The Dragon Can’t Dance, by Earl Lovelace. World Literature Today 56 (1983): 394-395. Argues that Aldrick carries the message of the text. His development as a character demonstrates that self-understanding, which comes from looking inward and not from material possessions, is the key to life.

Ramchand, Kenneth. “Why the Dragon Can’t Dance: An Examination of Indian-African Relations in Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance.” Journal of West Indian Literature 2 (October, 1988): 1-14. Argues that it is possible to focus on Pariag and still offer a response to the whole novel, since the theme of the African-Indian relationships allows for an examination of the concepts of alienation and selfhood.