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.1 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. The Professor’s review is close enough to a celebrated essay on the Mighty Sparrow’s ‘Congo Man’2 to caution anyone who attempts a purely academic analysis of Lovelace’s writing. Like Selvon, Lovelace came from a Trinidad village, and writes out of a popular tradition, suspicious of intellectual sophistry. Where Selvon’s demotic sensibility was cosmopolitan, Lovelace is regional and Trinidadian, tuned to the virile rhetoric and vision of the island’s Shouter Baptist tradition. ‘No one of us is bom into the world’, Lovelace has said. ‘Every one of us is bom into a place in the world, in a culture, and it is from that standpoint of that culture that we contribute to the world’.3 At the centre of his work is an exploration of what he has termed ‘person hood . . . man’s view of himself, the search as it were for his integrity’,4 focused specifically on the traditional culture of the Trinidad peoples.
