ABSTRACT
Earl Lovelace in The Dragon Can't Dance has a wry dig at a 'Professor of English' who writes a learned review of a calypso 'Tarzan Man', sung by one of the novel's main characters, Philo. The Professor had seen it as a subtle subversion of European stereotypes; Philo thought it was a joke, for the Africans would have eaten Tarzan. Lovelace does not reject Carnival, but by the end a new voice of the people has emerged in Philo, a calypsonian. Philo creates his 'mask' not through paint and cloth, but in self-dramatisation within the ambivalent rhetoric of his calypsoes. Although Dragon is set in Port-of-Spain, Lovelace has remained committed to his rural roots in Matura, and when his community play My Name is Village was produced in the capital, it kept its local actors. Lovelace's complex, panoramic novel comes to its climax in an Independence Day celebration, part political rally, part Carnival.
