The Dragon Cant Dance
Two bold claims
Claim 1: The dragon Can’t Dance could easily have been called The Search for
Taffy.
Claim 2: Liberation is a problematic act of defiance that carries complex
notions of resistance that are confined to a continuing circle of anti-
colonialism. (Here I paraphrase Harmeet Dhiraj (2013) in ‘Earl Lovelace The
Dragon Can’t Dance in relation to Edward W. Said’s understanding of Culture
and Resistance’. Find this source via Google
Lecture 1
Postcolonial themes are entangled with themes of slavery, emancipation, and
further slavery through colonisation, and despair experienced by postcolonial
societies who are betrayed by the leaders who led the fight against
colonisation. Earl Lovelace captures these experiences in lyrical prose.
Africa as the original home of black people who found themselves in the
West Indies (after being captured on the African continent and sold as
slaves). Borrowings from African memory include the drum, masquerade, and
oral story-telling prowess.
Slavery and the Middle Passage (the Atlantic which was central to the
movement of slave ships) is a bitter memory . See for example (via Google)
The Zong Massacre of 1781
The Slave Triangle (from 1400 to 1865) and residues of slave culture are
central to the construction of the Prologue in Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t
Dance.
History and the memory of the horrors of dispossession and slavery influence
the fight for a sense of home, belonging, and the idea of possession.
(Characters in the novel struggle with how to own/possess things, history,
themselves and their Yard. Possession, as we shall see in the novel, takes
many dimensions, some of them destructive when it leads to cycles of
violence and poverty. Possession can also be a traumatising experience,
when you think of Aldrick’s grandfather, waiting upon a piece of dead, rocky
land, just so he can be said to be in possession of something. Or it can be
comic and sad, when you think of Aldrick’s father, who died with his hands in
his pocket at a construction site because he wanted to possess himself in the
face of extractive capitalist labour.)
Torture and Trauma are central memories, which lead to questions of how to
recreate the self and have a role to play after experiencing maiming and
uprootment. (Even trying to descend from The Hill and leave it to become
someone is fraught with uncertainties. ‘All o we is one’ is very much like a
crabs-in-a-bucket philosophy, which seeks to create a community of those in
pain but at the same time rejects those who want to uproot themselves from
the pain. (Think of Philo the Calypsonian). A stranger, such as the Indian,
Pariag, finds that trying to find common ground and residence with fellow
sufferers is a dangerous and misguided dream, as the community on The Hill
, possessively hugs to itself its own trauma and victimhood, which it considers
inviolable and unshakeable.
How to build a new nation that does not recreate or replicate the slave
master’s rule or the colonizer’s behaviour, is at the centre of the novel. (Later
we hear that the new leaders who fought against colonialism have betrayed
the people. Their ideas are ironically compatible with those of the former
oppressors, hence they have no idea how to cut links with the inherited
institutions that oppressed and enslaved them. The voices on the Radio (see
Chapter 4) still sound very British. But then, those who oppose the new
leaders are only rebels and tyrants who have no plan or vision beyond staging
violent acts and hijacking a police car. They cannot convert rebellion into a
revolution.(see Chapter 12 &13) They are eventually caught and imprisoned
after chanting revolution and going in circles without embarking on the
revolution. Nxaa!)
Therefore, how to deconstruct the language, images and institutions they
inherited from the slave master and the colonizer remains a challenge.
There are examples of creativity/innovation that is uniquely West Indian
(Caribbean) in Lovelace’s novel: Taffy as a character is uniquely West Indian;
so is calypso. The borrowing and remodelling of African ancestral memory
that is seen in the making of masks during carnival, the dramatizing of
warriorhood in steelband gangs recalls stick fights in Africa. These are
examples of hybridity and cultural syncretism, adaptation and appropriation.
The challenge is when traditions are copied but not transformed to assist
with cultural revival and survival. You see this when Fisheye borrows from
the Wild West cowboy movies and postures to threaten his own people
rather than to protect them. The Dragon (Aldrick) also wears a mask to
breathe fire at onlookers; beyond that it is just a masquerade. Here is the
problem: role-playing becomes an enemy of progress and development, as
everything is reduced to mere mimicry, and acting. Taffy pretending to be
Jesus on the Cross is a telling example of the tragi-comedy that dissipates the
community’s productive energies.
Last, but not least, is the need to develop an inward look versus an outward
look for cultural emancipation. Pariag and Philo are good example of
entrepreneurs who introduce change from within.
Lecture 2: the prologue and Taffy
Themes to be commented on via The Prologue and Taffy are: the use of
laughter; role-play; heroism and martyrdom; individualism and opportunism;
symbolic actions, masks and lunacy; philistinism and the cynicism of the
community; and how laughter restores stability (but what kind of stability?)
Taffy:
Notes on the Prologue: Taffy and Man-Man (the latter is a character in
Naipaul’s Miguel Street. )
Story of Taffy: folkloric hero; prototype of role-playing, masking, dragon
culture of post-emancipation post-colonial Trinidad.
