Earl Lovelace's 'Is Just a Movie' launched at UWI

Mel Cooke, Gleaner Writer

Trinidadian-born novelist Earl Lovelace had a crammed schedule in Jamaica last weekend. He was slated for a writing workshop at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, on Saturday morning into the afternoon, followed by a reading with Velma Pollard and Monica Minott at the Wyndham Hotel that evening.

Then there was a double on Sunday - delivering the Fifth Edward Baugh Distinguished Lecture at the Sir Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts, UWI, and the launch of his new novel Is Just a Movie before close to a full house.

Dr Norval Edwards, head of the Department of Literatures in English, (which, along with WIACLALS - West Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, put on the lecture and launch), went back to Lovelace's earlier work to the word 'imaginator' in analysing Is Just a Movie. "I love the term 'imaginator' and I think it is the term most applicable to Earl Lovelace's Is Just a Movie," Edwards said.

In the vein of Lovelace's work, Edwards said Is Just a Movie is located in "the sights, sounds and performances of Trinidad". However, as the making of a movie is at the core of the novel, performance is intertwined on different levels and there are performances within the larger performance. However, in its presentation of performance, Is Just a Movie becomes a "thought-provoking analysis" of post-Independence Trinidad and, by extension, the rest of the Caribbean.

It is, Edwards said, "a poignant post-mortem of the aftermath of the moment of Black Power in 1970". And, in treating with the "ordinary people", Lovelace continues the effort to position them as "subjects, rather than objects". The writing lives up to the title, Edwards saying "you will see lots of cinematic techniques".

"I love the book and I recommend it highly," he concluded.

Keith Noel's reading from Is Just a Movie was a very good recommendation, not only because of the content but Noel's delivery, filled with vocal inflection even as he minimised body language, standing at the lectern as he read. The extensive passage that Noel read included the book's title, a combination of entreaty, apology and dismissal as two members of a Trinidadian cast objected to the mandated insignificant manner of their death in a movie being directed by a foreigner.

And in his response, Lovelace read another excerpt from Is Just a Movie.