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Is Just a Movie

Right after Carnival, a fella from America come down here to Trinidad, say he making movies in the island. Big announcement. Big write-up. Front page. He building up the movie industry. Big talk. Local talent wedded to foreign technology, the set of shit you hear already. But with the help of the government and the business community, the movie gets under way.

They have auditions. I set out to go. As a well-known composer and singer of calypso, a real calypsonian, not just a fella who sing other people songs, I don’t expect a problem. I will show them. Forget calypso. I will be a movie star.

So I go down at The Carib where they picking people for the parts. Stanley, Errol, Claude, Wilbert, Ralph, fellars who act with the Theatre Workshop, all of them there. Fellars from Strolling Players, Best Village people: the Talent. The fella from America, he have his people, foreign industry, that he bring with him. They give all of us a little test, the audition. To recite from a literary work. Ralph do something from Hamlet, the big speech, “To be or not to be.” Errol do something from Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain. The Great Makak speech:

Sirs, I am sixty years old,

I have live all my life.

Like a wild beast in hiding.

And I do for them a piece of my Midnight Robber speech:

My name is Kangkala,

maker of confusion, recorder of gossip,

destroyer of reputations, revealer of secrets.

In the same skin, I am villain and hero, victim and victor,

I reduce the powerful by ridicule.

I show them their absurdities by parody.

I make their meanings meaningless and give meaning to meaning.

I am the Dame Lorraine presenting in caricature the grotesque of the wicked, the deformity of the stupid, the obzocky of gluttony.

I show the oppressors themselves misshapen, gros toto, gros titi, gros bondage.

Yes, I portray the big-stones man: a bag of boulders bulging from my pants,

I am the big-foot, sore-foot man, the big-bottom, big-breasted woman.

I am the dispenser of afflictions.

I dance Bongo on top the graves of the mighty.

Yes, Kangkala is my name.

But I was born again by a slip of the tongue

when one night in the calypso tent, as I am preparing to sing my song,

the Master of Ceremonies introducing me decided to make his announcement with an American twang.

He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the song and this is your singer, King Kala.”

So, suddenly so, in the interstice, or, shall I say, the interspluce of this mispronunciation of Kangkala brought on by this Trinidadian fella wanting to sound American,

calling Kang, king,

I was reborn to a new vision.

I had to find new histories to write, ignored heroes to celebrate.

I began afresh to sing.

I became the poet of the revolution.

“Marvelous,” the director say. “You fellars have talent.”

Talent, yes! So they pick me. So I have this role.

The role they give me, the same one they give the locals, is a role to die. Local talent. Our role is to die. The rest of the people, they bring from America. They is the stars, the ones that have lines to speak, lives to live, in the movie of course.

Though, to read what the newspapers have to say you would swear I had top billing: Local Calypsonian Featured in Foreign Movie. Yes. And now when I walking the road people looking at me, The Feature, The Featured, pointing me out to their friends. Woman who never talk to me waving at me, going out their way to come and ask me for my autograph: nice woman. Local movie star. Me.

So, I get this job to die. Is a kind of jungle picture, with a river in it and a trail and a rope bridge and a love story and natives with headdresses of colored feathers, their splendid bodies bare except for grass skirts, carrying bwana packs over the mountains. And they have donkeys. I mean, we have donkeys. Some of us tote the loads on we head. Around us is the enemy, another warring tribe. In the bushes. Crawling on their bellies. Shooting with expert marksmanship. They just shoot you and you supposed to fall. These shooters ain’t missing at all: the script.

When you’re a little boy and you playing stick-’em-up, the shooter does miss a few times at least before he connects. It is part of the convention of the game: the shooter shoots; you fall or dodge the bullets and make your escape. And since it is not real, since it is make-believe, it is left to you to confirm his marksmanship by agreeing to be wounded or shot dead. There is a certain give-and-take, reasonableness, like in a fiction, rooted in the idea that life gives everybody a chance, that leaves everybody satisfied, whether you are the one shot or the one doing the shooting. The shooter must miss a few times, since it is quite fatal when he connects. But here, in this movie, the fellars who shooting, they not missing at all. The only people who they missing is the fellars from the States: the stars.

“Their lives are charmed,” Errol says smiling, talking about the stars. “Their lives are charmed.”

Errol is an actor who looked on at the rebellion of

’70 and kept his distance. He feels deeply. So much of life pains him and delights him. He is alarmed, astonished, outraged and for him that is enough; I mean, he doesn’t feel the need to go beyond feeling to action. His job is to feel, to bear witness with his heart. He emerges less a moral superior than a barometer of emotion. Now he had taken grief to a new height. His words sound like poetry. His laughter is deepest pain: Their lives are charmed.

I going over this ravine on a rope bridge. Blam! Blam! Blam! Shots all around. Fellars falling, except fellars from the States. All around me fellars falling, left and right. Blap! Blap! Blap! Like flies. Like how you see natives fall in a Tarzan picture. As the people shoot, they falling. They falling. They dropping dead just so. Then I get shot.

Even in a movie, I don’t want to die on a rope bridge with bwana pack on my back. But this is the script. They shoot you, you have to die. That is what they paying me to do. To die.

I get shot. I hold my shoulder, wounded, and I scramble across the bridge and Blam! They shoot again and I start to fall. I have to fall. But something holding me back. My conscience, my pride. Something is not right. And I look across at Stanley and Errol and them for a cue, how to die, since they are experienced actors, real actors. But Stanley and Errol, all of them, all these fellars, good men, good actors, they just falling down and dying just so. And I in confusion looking at them fall, thinking how could an actor, a man like Errol, fall so? “But wait!” I say when it hit me what was happening. “Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! What is this?” And for a moment, I am torn. I don’t want to upstage Errol and Stanley and them. But same time there is a voice in my mind shouting, No. No. No. No, I ain’t falling so. I can’t follow them. I ain’t dying so, No, man. Um-um. No.

Even when I was a kid playing stick-’em-up and I get shot, I composed my dying like a poem. There was poetry in my dying. When I get shot and I start to die, I hear the theme music of the movie, I turn to the bite of the bullets, my knees buckle, my hands reach out and I hold on for the last, a little piece of the world – the sky, the air, my eyes open and I fill them with the wonder of trees, singing birds in the verandas of their branches, the roar of women in the marketplace, the noise of children at the playground, people quarreling, lovers undressing each other, I move into a dance, feeling the blood of life leaving my head, I breathe in, the fragrance of ripe guavas turning to the smell of crushed corraili leaves, hearing the last drumroll, cymbals crashing, seeing the lights growing dim, waves beating onto the shore, fish leaping silver. That was when I was a little boy playing. Dying was a performance. I was at the center of my own dying.

Now, here was I, a grown man, in a real movie and I was dying like ah arse, like a fool. And I actually see myself beginning to fall, following the lead of fellows who I respected. I see myself falling when, out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse this man, one of the fellars, one of our fellars get shot. And this man flings up his arms as if he is lifted by the shot. And he holds them spread out there above his head like a stickfighter whose charge is arrested by his parrying of a blow and he sways, stretching them away from his body like he crucifying a cross or like is Carnival day and he playing a big mas, a big hooray of a Wild-Indian – The Rise of Montezuma or something – with a tepee for a headpiece, the tassels on the sleeves of his jacket hanging down like a curtain of fern, his cape spread out behind him, the music blaring dar-da dar-dar: dar-dar, dar-dar, and he in front the audience in the savannah and he straining to hold the headpiece, to hold it steady to prevent it from toppling. And he remained balanced there for an eternity, then he sink down slow to his knees, his hands on his heart, the blood leaking out his chest, his eyes gazing at the ground with that look that those paintings show Columbus and Cortez and those conquistadors have in their eyes when they about to kiss the ground of the land that they just discover and conquer and claim in the name of Isabella the Queen of Spain. But this fella’s eyes is not an ocean of arrogance; they don’t have in them the greed, or bombast; in them is the piety, the awe, the pity, as if just as he was discovering the land, discovering life, he had to leave it. I applauded him. There was the death I would have died.

The man dying so magnificently, the author of that extravagant and magnificent dying, was Sonnyboy. Inspired, I fling out my arms too in the beautiful movements of the dance of my childhood and begin the exquisite choreography of my dying.

“Cut!” the director says. Cut it. Because the director don’t like how we dying at all. He doesn’t like it. And even the fellars there, the same fellars, my countrymen, who go through a boyhood like my own, and who should know, who must know the conventions of the shooting game, the same very fellars looking at me and Sonnyboy, as if we commit some kinda crime. The quality of our dying is an embarrassment to them. We dying too slow. We wasting too much of the Whitepeople time.

“Too extravagant,” Errol says. “Too colorful!”

“Rookie,” Claude says.

As if they have some superior notion of how a man who is shot is supposed to die, all of them start to laugh that heh heh heh laugh by which the less courageous of us were subdued.

“What you expect from a calypsonian?”

I spoke to them. I said, “Gentlemen, I want you to know that this is the last moment of my life. This is the last moment. This is not my dying. This is my last living moment.”

But no. The director don’t want it so.

“No?”

“Sir,” I ask him. “Sir? You think it is fair to ask somebody to die just so, to fall and crumble just so without leaving

at his dying some memorable gesture? You think it right

in a situation where all that you have been given to do, where the total span and compass of the work you are employed to perform is to die, to do it, to die so . . . so unremarkably?”

But he swing his head and toss his mane. Budget. Shooting schedule. Time constraints. He believes that that kind of dying, that expression of meaning belongs to the stars. He has stars to do that, he tell me.

“But,” I pointed out to him, “I do not see the stars getting killed.” Something that we in this part of the world have been familiar with over a lifetime of watching movies: Star-boys don’t die. They are the ones that endure. And even at the end if one dies; if perchance, according to my friend Bispat, quoting what he remembered of his Shakespeare, if perchance one should be killed, you know him, he doesn’t need his death, you have seen him live his life. I am the one dying. I need my death to live.

“And, sir,” I said.

“Call me Max,” he says.

“Call him Max,” the Trinidadian natives echo, jubilant as if they just get a holiday.

“Max,” I said, the word like a weight on my tongue, “Max, I feel misled. Here I am a native, robbed of my life and now of my dying. Remember,” I continued, “that after this death I have no further part in the picture . . . unless you need me to die again. I know is your picture. I know I am not the star-boy. But, even so, you can’t rob me of that . . . of that . . .”

“Honor?” Errol challenged, his voice gurgling with sarcasm, his cheeks bunching, his teeth showing.

“Not honor. Right. No matter what your plot, we are human who would each like to leave our individual mark, our human signature, on our efforts and it is as human we must die.”

“Hear! Hear!” cried Wilbert and Claude in unison. “Hear, hear!”

“You talking, boy!”

Yes, I was talking now, I was speaking. In full flight, I had a voice now, I was on the floor:

“And if it is your pleasure, if, according to your script, according to your script-writer, if is your pleasure that I must get shot . . . if I get shoot . . . if you shoot me, indiscriminately and casually, letting me die so obscurely that people watching this picture can’t even see me in the background in the bush toting the loads for your expedition on my head . . . if you say I must die, at least allow me the space to die how I want to die.”

But he wouldn’t budge. And the Trinidadian fellars, my countrymen, not giving me no support.

I tried to talk to them, “Listen, fellars,” I say, “Stanley, Errol, Claude, Ralph, Davindra, Errol, is like you don’t know who you are? You are among the best actors in the world. You have, at least, earned your dying. Don’t let this joker treat us so.”

“It is just a movie,” Errol say. And as if to point us away from the pathos, the pain in the statement, he say it again, this time with half a laugh to give us the direction we should take: “It is just a movie.” And you had to listen past the chuckle in his laughter to the subtle agony bubbling in his voice, the sadness, the grief, the truth, the tears of a capped-down rage: “Is just a movie.”

“Let us get together,” I plead, “and live the last moment of this life with some dignity. He can’t fire everybody.”

“It is just a movie,” they answer in chorus, something between the corrective sternness of a parent and the mindless recitation of children on a school stage.

“Max is the director. He is the boss,” they chorus.

“Max is the boss,” Errol says with that double and triple meaning.

“And you?” I ask. “Who are you?”

“We?”

“I?”

“Me?” And I could hear the metallic ring of the me, like a note struck on a steelpan: Mee-ee?

“I just putting in a day work.”

“I can’t sing calypso, like you.”

“And I certainly not a badjohn. Like your revolutionary pardner Sonnyboy.”

Now they were ridiculing me. “Heh heh heh,” they laughed.

“Worry with Sonnyboy,” they said snidely. “Sonnyboy just doing this for kicks.”

“For the excitement.”

“For sport.”

“Sonnyboy just showing off.”

“You getting pay to die how the director say to die.”

Now they were vexed with me. And more vigilant about the man’s business than their own.

“Just dead and get on with it before you muddy the water for everybody else.”

“If you want to die in style, make your own picture.”

“Yes. Star in it. You and your pardner Sonnyboy.”

“Heh heh heh,” Errol say again and the others laugh: “Heh heh heh.”

“Yes. Is just a movie. You don’t need to make style.”

“Style? Style? Style? You want to deny me style? Errol, I am dying and you want to deny me style?”

“What he so serious about?” they ask.

“What else do I have but style?”

“Yes, what you so serious about?”

“No, no, no, fellars, what else but style?” I found myself screaming. Then I caught myself. Yes, what was I so serious about? What the hell! I mean, I didn’t want to appear to be superior to them, to embarrass them. They were my pardners. I wanted to be one of them, one with the crowd. And for a moment, I try. I seek refuge in laughter, in the joke that would absolve me of any deeper responsibility and give me the support of their company.

“What they paying you to do?” they ask.

“They paying me to die,” I said loudly, my whole head on fire, the crowd spurring me on: “I will die how he say to die. Yes,” I say aloud. “It . . . it . . . it . . . It is . . . it is . . . It is just . . . It is just . . . It is just . . . It is just . . .”

“Yee-es!” they encourage, relieved that I had fallen in line.

“Yes,” they cry. “Yes. It is just a movie.”

“It is just . . . it is just a movie.” And I join them in the laughter, “Heh heh heh!”

But I still uneasy.

Then in the next scene, we had to die again. In the bush this time, obscured by plants and vines, part of the foliage. I am just a blur in the background. Just ahead of me is Sonnyboy. And the shooter, a native from another tribe, release bullets to his heart, to his head, the shots so intense that he start jumping and dancing and walking in that electric break-dance spasm like you see those fellars perform in gangster movies when shots slam into their body, and the inevitable death is delayed by this frenetic dance in salute of life. And in the middle of his ballet, the director calls:

“Hey, you. Cut! Cut! That is not what we want.”

Sonnyboy does not move. He stand up there, his body coiled in an inexpressible anger and outrage and surprise and grief. I thought he was going to speak. Sonnyboy is calm. He lifts both hands, palm open. Like in surrender.

The cameraman stop filming. They turn off the lights.

The men look at each other.

And right there Sonnyboy take off the feathered headpiece of the costume, unhook the rings from his nose. From his waist, he unbelts the band of the grass skirt they had given him to wear and he drops them with his spear – his spear – right there. And for a moment he stand-up there in his shorts, slightly comic, looking bemused, as if he had surprised himself, and now didn’t know what other move to make. It was as if the spontaneity of his action had faced him with the self hidden in himself. It was a self that he was thrilled with and alarmed by, and almost in a daze, as if he now had no choice but to be the fella he had unclothed, he made one step, then another, and with that fella’s legs, he walked away.

I could see the others, the crowd of them, their grass skirts below their bellies, gathered together like the members of a choir of penguins in a helpless flutter of alarm. Sensing what might have been his bewilderment, they gather the courage to laugh at Sonnyboy, at the fool he had made of himself: “Heh heh heh!” Until I begin to take off my headpiece too and my nose rings and my amulets and my leggings and my grass skirt. We stand facing each other, me and they, as in a pantomime in which they are portraying the righteous members of a tribal council and I am the dissident member they are ordering into exile. In a pantomime, I would leave the stage for this number and would return for the next one. But I am not going to return. This is not a pantomime. I am not playing. As I walk off, I could hear them serious, then outraged, as if I had assaulted them, the laughter dying in their throats. I hear Errol’s voice, frustrated, angry, insistently pleading what he believes to be a truth I had not grasped:

“It is just a movie, King! It is just a movie!” screaming the words at me, tears in his voice. “King, it is just a movie.” As if he is pleading for his life.

I felt quite sad. I didn’t say anything. I hated to leave Errol like that; but I had to. Because I had my point too. How to say it: Yes. Yes, because if . . . if indeed it was just a movie, did he, did they not consider that I was . . . we were just actor? But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t look back.

I was outside the building when I heard my name called. When I look around, it was Sonnyboy. He was leaving as well.

“King!”

“Listen, pardner,” I tell him. “You don’t have to leave your job because of me. You’re working. I don’t want you to jeopardize your employment just for me.”

He didn’t respond immediately. He just looked at me with what I suppose was patience. I had totally misread the man. “Sorry! Sorry!” I said. “Sorry,” I said again.

“Yes,” he said, talking to himself. “You hardly know me.”