Why The Dragon Can't Dance: an examination of Indian African Relations in Lovelace's "THE DRAGON CAN'T DANCE"
THIS PAPER EXAMINES the presentation of the Indian and of Indian African rela tions in Earl Lovelace's novel The Dragon Can't Dance (1979) Our concern is with part of the meaning or content, but in a great novel it is not easy to separate content from the artistic form which contains and shapes it; nor is it possible to pick up one theme without recognising its vital connections with others in the work. But these are lesser thorns threatening our grasp than tokens of the integrity of the content from which we seek to extract meanings. The populations of Trinidad and Guyana are fairly evenly divided between descen dants of Africans and descendants of Indians. Nearly one hundred years ago, an English historian, James Anthony Froude, wrote: "The African and Asiatic will not mix, and the African being the stronger will and must prevail in Trinidad as elsewhere in the West Indies" (The English in the West Indies, 1888, Chapter 6) and in 1963 the Bar badian poet, Edward Kamau Brathwaite could observe in Bim 37: "When most of us speak of 'the West Indian' we think of someone of African descent..we are thinking of..a more or less easily identifiable majority group, sharing, at least, a common his tory of slavery" Issues arising from the meeting of African and Indian peoples have never been the subject of open and rational discussion in these islands, and even twen ty five years after the death of the West Indian Federation, the presence of Indians as a major component in the structure of society in Trinidad and Guyana continues to be ignored in favour of a blind approach which makes itself respectable by taking an over all 'West Indian' view and regarding the Indians as minorities. The disappointments of Independence were covered up to some extent by the fast money that came to Trinidad and Tobago accidentally through the phenomenal in crease in the price of oil in the early 1970s, and then by an intemperate and uncir cumspect exploitation of the resource. But in the aftermath fundamental problems have begun to show. Independence as it arrived came as a kind of moral anti climax