The clothing economy of Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance

Abstract

This article positions chapter three, “The Dragon”, as the crux of Trinidadian novelist Earl Lovelace’s postcolonial novel, The Dragon Can’t Dance. Chapter three chronicles the ancestral narrative of protagonist and King of Carnival, Aldrick, in and through his carnival costume’s construction, demonstrating that the handicraft tradition of Carnival is central to understanding the sense of loss permeating the novel’s Afro-Trinidadian space. I use aesthetics and the anthropological concepts of symbolic capital and inalienable possessions to explore the tension expressed by the fact that costumes and clothing exist both inside and outside of capital. I consider why the economy of the fictional Calvary Hill neighbourhood restricts fiscal exhibition but uses clothing and costuming to articulate social condition, and how Lovelace invokes neoliberal economics threatening native costume craft traditions.

The third chapter of Earl Lovelace’s 1979 novel The Dragon Can’t Dance chronicles protagonist Aldrick’s ancestral narrative in and through the construction of his carnival dragon costume. Principally situated and carefully protracted, one would think this chapter — importantly tagged “The Dragon” — would attract more attention from material culture critics. The novel is, among many things, a story of stubborn tradition eroded by the colonial tragedy, and the dragon costume is central to Aldrick’s character development as well as the plot’s impetus. By inscribing the costume as both a repository of colonial history and a point of departure which offers foresight into a new colonialism, Lovelace makes clear that the handicraft tradition of Carnival is central to the novel’s postcolonial framework. It is essentially told through and around a piece of costuming, a decorative bodily object that bears in its very fibres a tale of ancestry, slavery, mobility, and a contested selfhood. It is at the same time a representation of a tactile piece of art, and one that is constituted by extant material and economic conditions necessary to its imagined production. The deep materiality of the novel’s costume motif is embellished by additional clothing references that punctuate salient social interactions, power exchanges, and judgements of taste.

Major theorists of colonialism such as Frantz Fanon and Anne McClintock have shown that material culture is a compelling and necessary companion field to postcolonial enquiry. McClintock’s seminal work, Imperial Leather (1995), maps a Marxist feminist material cultural critique over the South African colonial story. For Fanon, native handicrafts “reach out” in a newly independent nation as “forms of expression which formerly were the dregs of art, surviving as if in a daze” (1963: 241–2). I build on McClintock and Fanon to examine how the “dregs of art” in this fictional Trinidadian space communicate and aestheticize the colonial experience. I consider the rich textuality of costume and clothing in Lovelace’s novel in order to open it up to new avenues of enquiry that move toward a material theorization of the dragon costume. This should challenge critics to heed the demanding presence of the handicraft in this novel and other postcolonial texts, and to advance a mode of reading that considers the author’s detailed representation of artistic labour and bodily adornment — details which have been largely ignored by scholars in order to abstract literary objects simply into metonymies of power. The focus on abstractions of power elides the artistic display at work in the novel. Without the rigour of a material cultural reading, one misses in Lovelace’s work the important masculinization of the handicraft, and its role in articulating social condition and aesthetic value within the economy of the Hill, which otherwise restricts fiscal exhibition. My critique relies on an understanding of textiles as both symbolic and social capital in the novel’s Afro-dominant Caribbean space. Symbolic capital, according to Pierre Bourdieu (1980), and later articulated in terms of Lovelace’s novel by Masood Ashraf Raja (2006), is that which purchases rank while eclipsing its relationship to the market. If symbolic capital establishes social hierarchies and bonds it can be read also as social capital (Bourdieu, 1984; 1986). As I later refer to the dragon’s “symbolic currency”, I am invoking both of these concepts simultaneously.

“The Dragon” chapter proceeds from the introduction to Cleothilda, the Queen of the Band, whose opening chapter recounts the yearly Calvary Hill community preparations for the Carnival. Readers find out in the second chapter that Aldrick’s sexual tension with a local girl, Sylvia, is strained by his inability to provide for her. Thereupon the third chapter opens, and King of Carnival, Aldrick, sews his ancestral narrative into the infamous dragon costume. Lovelace writes, “Aldrick worked slowly, deliberately; and every thread he sewed, every scale he put on the body of the dragon, was a thought, a gesture, an adventure, a name that celebrated some part of his journey to and his surviving upon this hill” (Lovelace, 1998/1979: 36). ¹ As Aldrick works, memories of his lineage flow through him with metaphysical vigour, and the stitches absorb the transplantation story of his family — the broken promises of a dying agricultural industry and of the post-slavery inheritance of land:

And, working now, he sewed scales for his grandfather, who he remembered from the far distance of his boyhood on that browning green hill between the giant immortelle trees above the cocoa and dying bananas, a short man, stiff as the varnished straight-backed chair on which he sat in the front room, alone [...] alone in that front room, the altar of the house, the clean polished room with framed and passe-partouted photographs of members of the family on the walls (36)

Into the costume Aldrick sews this stoic image of his grandfather, narrating further his stubborn refusal to leave the gasping land to seek a livelihood in Port of Spain, and then his eventual reluctant acquiescence to the shocking assertiveness of Aldrick’s grandmother, who, breaking her years of deference, urges her husband to cut their losses and seek work in the city. The story takes on a biblical quality: Aldrick’s grandfather is like a lonely priest (sitting in the “altar of the house”), and the land, choked of its once rich fertility, is like an absent lover deferring her return. The “old man” (his mother’s father, Lovelace writes, in Judaic specificity) waits in “martyred hopelessness” for God to reward his faithful labour (37).

The move to the city turns Aldrick’s father, Sam Prospect (a name aptly referential to the “promise” of land), impotent and wayward, forcing the women to be the sole providers. Aldrick sews this into the costume as well, rendering the threat of emasculation a component of the costume’s “manness”. We learn that it is when Aldrick is restored to the care of his Uncle Freddie that he discovers how to make the dragon costume, taking on the role of his uncle’s apprentice, initiating his turn in the dragon-making tradition. After this part of the narrative gets “work(ed) in”, Aldrick goes on attaching stitches “into his dragon and its growing story of lives of miracle and manness and faith” (41).

In this centrally framing chapter of The Dragon Can’t Dance, Aldrick, sewing his ancestral narrative into the carnival costume, performs an elaborate ceremony rehearsing his symbolic wealth in this Afro-Caribbean community, on which the neighbourhood of Calvary Hill comes to rely year after year. Worked into the novel is a blending of economics and aesthetics, where hierarchies of taste, which are not exploitable within the logic of Calvary Hill, are ultimately implicated in the fiscal powerlessness of a people in the face of a new corporate economy creeping its way onto the island (Goodman, 2010). ² The Yard’s costume economy offers communal solidarity and shared symbolic value for a people trying to subsist in opposition to a neocolonial system, which constantly threatens to appropriate them. A Kantian notion of aesthetics can help readers understand how art and costuming operate in the novel. Through an insistence on its intrinsic worth (Kant, 2007/1790), ³ the costume handicraft is mobilized to perform a native celebration but cannot be mobilized to fight corporate power. In order to fight power, the community would have to instrumentalize their art, appropriating their handicrafts for political and economic revolution before these art forms are consumed by Western tourism and investments.

If read for its comment on native craft as empowering, Lovelace’s narrative makes a potentially important intervention in the gendered discourses of textiles, globally. In the aftermath of independence movements, neoliberal initiatives in the third world have capitalized on textiles for new industries, feminizing labour by enlisting homebound women for sewing work. Fabric, more than ever before, has been further relegated to the private, feminized, domestic space. Mindful of this, it is becoming increasingly important to reinscribe fabric with public significance and native agency. Aldrick’s homemade costume provides an embodied and beautiful display of his rank and influence within his community, and ultimately he helps maintain his dignity by rendering it inert. This is a kind of power precisely because it does not register as power in the commercial understanding of that word.

Presently, there is very little scholarship concerned with the making of fibre artwork in Trinidad, and any work on the narrativization and aesthetics of Caribbean costume work is scant, specifically that of the Trinidadian male. A simple Google search yields an inexhaustive list of tailoring establishments peppering the island which are operated predominantly by men, yet one does not find the currency of men’s needlework highlighted in the scholarly literature. ⁴ It is not unsurprising, then, that there is no critical mention of Lovelace’s careful attention to the dragon costume’s history, nuance, and beauty. I treat the costume as an imagined work of art in itself rather than overemphasize how it projects a broader picture of the politics of performance. The dragon deserves aesthetic mention because its careful construction is essential to its implied success in the Carnival costume competition, during which committees give prizes to the most polished and creative handiwork. ⁵

I would like to draw critical attention to the ritual construction of costume as intrinsic to Trinidadian — specifically, masculine — identity. ⁶ Focusing on the object’s singularity is necessary to acknowledging the local specificity of Carnival’s unique manifestations, meanings, and productions, especially since Carnival at large is an appropriated mode, having been brought to the islands by the centuries-old Western European Catholic tradition of pre-Lenten bacchanalia, later transformed by slaves and natives into a politically complex and geographically varied form of protestation. Contrary to the feminine strain of writing about textiles, common to African American, Middle Eastern, and South Asian story-telling traditions which invoke quilt or dress-making conceits, Aldrick’s textile work is one specifically of “manness and faith” (41). By reemphasizing the importance of the native handicraft in the patrilineal structure, The Dragon Can’t Dance inscribes cloth with a civic role. Aldrick’s costume-making is a public act, though it is important to note that it is presided over by the community’s female sovereign, Cleothilda, whose own power as Queen of the Band depends on Aldrick’s continued participation as the dragon-maker and performer. Further, the dragon’s fibres bear the equally important role of the mother in constructing the social hierarchy within which Aldrick assumes kingship.

The Afro-Trinidadian government of the fictional Calvary Hill neighbourhood, colloquially called “the Yard”, negotiates, regulates, and publicizes social positions through costumes and clothing. The dragon purchases Aldrick’s status as Carnival King, but this status would be undermined by exposing the Trinidadian costume tradition to the consumer market. The private sector — largely perceived to be controlled by Indo-Trinidadians (Lewis, 2013) — violates the costume’s role, which is to animate the myth of African retrieval. This myth depends upon the aesthetic of the craft object as an inalienable piece of art, inoperative in the capitalistic domain (Weiner, 1992). ⁷ Aldrick tries to illustrate the dragon’s status to his calypso-artist friend, Philo: “I ain’t own house or car or radio or racehorse or store. I don’t own one thing in this fucking place, except that dragon there, and the dragon ain’t even mine. I just make it. It just come out of me like a child who ain’t really his father own or his mother own [...] They killing people in this place, Philo” (110). Aldrick articulates a tension between the inalienable, ancestral aesthetic of native carnival art — communally owned — and the necessary alienability of possessions in the Western market. Moreover, it is a market that is notably violent, with origins in the mercantile exploitation that enslaved Aldrick’s kinship circle. The novel implies that native art is a casualty of the mercantile colonial project on the island, which has given way to the corporatization of carnival art. It is a problem that confuses and immobilizes Aldrick, whose dragon costume, bearing his ancestral narrative in its very fibres, threatens to be the thing that restricts his mobility if he does not relinquish its native economic codes to corporate ownership.

Paralysed with the proposition that instrumentalizing the handiwork of the Hill will liquidate the logic of his people but will generate the possibility for liberation, Aldrick hangs up the dragon. He would rather freeze it than animate it at the service of the oppressor. Lovelace suggests that readers bear witness to the dragon’s disappearing past, making way for a future wherein native Trinidadian handicrafts are emptied out of their meaning by the privatization of the Carnival. Aldrick’s ultimate decision to hang up the garment, then, is more than a decision to demystify performative power as evasive of real political power — as critics of this novel have contended. It is a decision to preserve the dragon’s aesthetic value over its instrumentalized value. Rendered an installation, however, one might read a kind of tragic irony in Aldrick’s attempt to combat the private sector by withholding the costume from public consumption.

The recurrence of handicraft and clothing motifs in the The Dragon Can’t Dance are striking for their artistic, economic, and cultural implications in this highly theorized exemplar of Caribbean fiction. That Lovelace conceives of and positions chapter three as he does helps direct readers to understand the madeness of the dragon costume as significant to the logic of the novel — a logic that is ignored in Gerard Aching’s seminal work on Caribbean Carnival, which elides the materiality of the costume at the service of the mask’s larger symbolics. Aching’s book, Masking and Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean (2002), examines pageant politics through the lens of three Caribbean fictions, Lovelace’s included, and, in it, as Grant Farred notes, the mask acts as

the symbol through which the subjugated classes (in either their anticolonial or postcolonial instantiations) instill uncertainty, and temporarily even fear, into the ruling bloc, has been shucked off by Aldrick, its main practitioner. It is not simply that the dragon can no longer dance but that it does not matter that or how or whether (or not) Aldrick dances. Through his reading of Lovelace, Cabrera Infante, and Chamoiseau, Aching reveals the exhaustion of the mask as a strategy for oppositionality. (2004: 211)

Both Farred and Aching overdetermine the mask as metonymy, placing so much stock in it as a symbol of subversion and ambivalence that the novel’s aesthetic details are consumed by this one metaphor. The moment when Aldrick abandons the dragon is insufficiently theorized if we do not understand what exactly gets “shucked”. Indeed, Lovelace identifies not the performance of masking but the costume as the object of desertion — an object sutured with his boyhood and his mother’s patrilineal line, as well as all the masculine anxiety wrapped up in his frustrated feelings for his love interest, Sylvia, whom he contemplates while he works. There is far more narration getting “shucked” than just the failure of masking generally. Also worth noting is how the word “shuck” violates the action of the novel, effacing the important plot point when Aldrick soberly hangs up the dragon. This act evokes respect and an impulse toward conservation rather than theatrical disposal.

My argument that handicraft provides symbolic currency in this novel is indebted to Masood Ashraf Raja, who brings Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital to bear on the novel:

[F]or Bourdieu, while the symbolic capital does involve economic exchange, it must misread the economic exchange involved to function as symbolic capital […] With such an emphasis at hiding the functioning of economic/material capital within a native field, an outright display of material capital, as it challenges the very logic of the field’s symbolic economy, can be construed as the greatest outrage. […] the biggest threat to the logic of a native field is not material capital itself, for it forms part of the logic of the field, but any attempt at inserting the naked truth of capital in the functioning of the field. (2006: 118)

Raja builds on Kenneth Ramchand’s (1988) assertion that the novel’s Indo-Trinidadian character, Pariag, provides a foil to Aldrick because he stands for “the philosophy of capital accumulation”, while Aldrick is a “believer of non-possession” (Raja, 2006: 116–7). East Indian Pariag and his wife, Dolly, are unwelcome new neighbours in the Yard, cruelly ostracized despite every attempt to befriend the community and conduct a livelihood there. Raja asserts that the conflict between the two subjectivities actually operates on the tension between ideologies of material versus symbolic capital — the former belief system ascribed to by Pariag and the latter by the Afro-Trinidadians. Lovelace figures material capital in objects that signal Western capitalism, like Pariag’s bicycle and Sylvia’s appliances (given to her by her landlord and lover, Guy), while the hard-earned materials of Aldrick’s dragon and the repurposed material of Sylvia’s hand-me-down dress signal a sacred kind of wealth. Rather than detract from Raja’s argument, I would like to add what I find to be an overlooked detail, one that is also absent from other critical accounts of Calvary Hill’s economy: that is, the specific material incarnation of the Yard folk’s symbolic wealth, costuming, and clothing.

To understand how the Yard’s clothing economy works, anthropological studies of gifting and kinship in native spaces are appropriately illuminating, especially considering how Lovelace foregrounds the sexual and social currency of the costume. In the novel, Sylvia has been intimate with her mother’s landlord, Guy, in exchange for rent forgiveness. His and Sylvia’s relationship is at first negotiated in terms of the costume gift:

“What costume you want?” he asked her now, talking in that deep whisper that barely moved his moustaches, his voice promising and pleading, hushing her, edging her into a moist darkness filled with burnings and the smell of sea water. “And [...] any costume you want, just tell me,” he said, his voice abandoning whatever remained of his elderly authority, investing itself with the full urgency and generosity and wanting of his giving. “Tonight! Come upstairs tonight, I will give it to you.” (27)

Amidst the dialogue exchanges concerning the costume, Sylvia has been utilizing her own dress as a flirtation device in descriptive detail. Their liaison is temporarily blocked by the female sovereign figure, Cleothilda. Her name and archetype, evocative of Cleopatra, reasserts her sexual seniority, interrupting Guy and Sylvia from the high perch of her verandah: “Miss Cleothilda intent on blunting Sylvia’s triumph and asserting her own power, calls out sweetly, ‘Sylvia, wait! I think I have a dress here that could fit you — if your mother would let you take it’” (27). Miss Olive, Sylvia’s mother, is summoned, and she heeds Cleothilda’s direction to confront Sylvia about the dress. The less deferential Sylvia fires back:

“Sylvia, you want the dress?” Miss Olive asked tiredly. “Dress? Which dress? I ain’t see no dress,” replies Sylvia, striking back with effortlessness a blow that Miss Cleothilda half-hoped would be the first in a battles to uphold her pride against the indignity of accepting the cast-off clothing. Miss Cleothilda smiled; she really didn’t care if Sylvia accepted, She was satisfied simply to establish that she (Cleothilda) was in a position to give, and Sylvia, even if she refused, to receive. (29; parenthesis in original)

Annette B. Weiner calls this type of native gifting dynamic, “keeping-while-giving”, stating that it is not the “hoary idea of a return gift that generates the thrust of exchange, but the radiating power of keeping inalienable possessions out of exchange” (Weiner, 1992: 150). The novel’s highly ritualized system of clothing/costume gift exchange is intended to manage sexual couplings through “keeping-while-giving”, and is, in a very powerful sense, controlled by the women of the kinship circle and participated in by the males with enough affluence to enter the game.

Costume is just as much a sexual invitation as it is a marker of lateral mobility — this is illustrated by the couplings that take place within the confines of the kinship circle, and within the contained space of the Yard. It also helps to explain why Aldrick hesitates to buy Sylvia a costume, thus deferring their courtship despite their intense sexual chemistry. Aldrick wants for Sylvia more than lateral mobility — he wants her to get out of the Yard. Buying her a costume would sanctify their relationship, but it would simply maintain the status quo, constricting Sylvia within the abject conditions of the neighbourhood.

Historically, cultures have mobilized fabric as political and sacred repositories of wealth, inscribed as “Inalienable possessions [which] are the representation of how social identities are reconstituted through time. The reproduction of kinship is legitimated in each generation through the transmission of inalienable possessions, be they land rights, material objects, or mythic knowledge” (Weiner, 1992: 11). Weiner argues that anthropologists — famously, Malinowski — continue to misread the dynamics of exchange, “discriminat[ing] between ceremonial and utilitarian gifts and countergifts” (1992: 43). ⁸ They take for granted that gifts are mystically coded, and miss the fact that reciprocity is actually energized by the desire to keep things out of exchange (Weiner, 1992: 43). The novel recites a game of power based on gifting, and, like other native economies, the textile — in this case the costume and clothing object — reigns highest in the keeping-while-giving exchange.

Wherever issues of ancestral maintenance and economic subsistence are invoked in this novel, clothing and costuming references consistently follow. Chapter three illustrates the pivotal role the dragon costume plays, both mnemonically and performatively, in the maintenance of the ancestral line. Additionally, when Aldrick finds out that Guy is the mystery suitor/provider for Sylvia, he calms his anger with the following confirmation: “That was how things were, and, in a way it was better it was Guy, who could give her a little money and buy her some clothes, than one of those rank little boys who ain’t working nowhere and whose panting, honest as it might be, brought to her neither space nor promise nor security” (31). When Philo chastises Aldrick for neglecting to get Sylvia, he says, “‘You shoulda really buy the costume for her, when you had the chance’”, to which Aldrick replies, “‘Yes, I shoulda really buy the costume for her’” (154). It would seem that to Sylvia the costume matters more than the amount of money spent on it. The quality or extravagance of the costume is not at issue, but simply that a costume is acquired and exchanged. The problem for Aldrick is that he has come to realize, be it hazily, that following the gifting codes of his community means he must also contribute to the economy of the oppressor. The novel first depicts a fictional space that is almost indigenous in its economic inflection, but Lovelace eventually exposes this as romance. Lovelace’s romantic protagonist identifiably resists the Western capitalist constitution in which an object’s value is determined by its relationship to other objects rather than by its role in the relationship between people. In Calvary Hill’s economy, the singular (textile) possession/gift accrues value for its ability to direct and maintain social memory. Unfortunately for Aldrick, he comes to understand that the modes of production and acquisition of the possession/gift are not owned by his people.

In the novel, costumes are emblematic of an African heritage — they articulate and bear witness to the internal logic of tribal life trying to subsist in spite of colonial intrusion. They stand as permissible sources of currency in a community that is suspicious of outward displays of wealth; while the bicycle, purchased by Pariag, represents the intrusive economic and colonial other. Chinua Achebe famously denotes the bicycle in Things Fall Apart as “the white man’s horse” — also referring to it as an “iron horse” — and when a white missionary tells the Ibo crowd that they will have an opportunity to ride an iron horse when more are brought to the village, this signals the missionaries’ intent to settle (Achebe, 1996/1958: 102). Tribal garb of distinction in colour and texture is reiterated throughout Things Fall Apart as an important component of the world into which the missionaries trespass. The regalia of the tribal leaders are positioned in opposition to the neutral uniforms of the occupying English soldiers. In Achebe’s novel, clothing helps inscribe difference on the body beyond the outward signs of skin pigmentation in order to make vivid not only the European social organization and how it encroaches on its “others”, but how uniforms transform individuals into mechanisms for the state.

In The Dragon Can’t Dance, apparel is also transnaturing. Miss Olive acts in deference toward the manipulative Cleothilda for fear that her assertiveness would “unclothe, unveil” Cleo, “perhaps even to her own self” (20). Further, Lovelace writes, “the moment she lifted her head and saw Cleothilda on her veranda, with her costume on and with that sense of gleeful delight, her resolve fell away” (23). The policeman who helps to suppress Aldrick’s and Fisheye’s demonstration in chapter thirteen, “The Dragon Dance”, is figured as “a cowboy in a Western movie”, using the “power of his uniform” to “not so much to lend a hand as much as to add his physical presence […] to the situation” (172–3). Achebe and Lovelace conflate clothing and costuming to characterize the colonial story using stock images of folk authority versus state authority — for example, Achebe’s egwugwu in masks collide with the uniformed soldiers, while Lovelace’s Carnival King collides with the uniformed policeman.

Given the shared material logic of these transatlantic narrative heritages, cloth motifs in The Dragon actually skirt the line between symbolic and real currency. As textile anthropologists Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider affirm,

Cloth has often become a standard of value, circulating as money, so it should come as no surprise that cloth wealth has enriched the treasuries of many kingdoms and chiefdoms, conferring credibility on political elites along with gold, silver, jewels, and exotic shells. (Weiner and Schneider, 1989: 2)

For the African-Creoles in Trinidad, the “legitimating myth” of a heritage of slavery via capitalism provides the foundation for the community to engage in symbolic performances that are fiscally restrained, but for the Indo-Trinidadians, who were brought to the Caribbean to fill the labour gap left by emancipation, the “myths of authenticity” are predicated on “patient labor and industry” (Raja, 2006: 115). This is why, Raja asserts, the East Indian Pariag’s procurement of the bicycle registers the greatest offence in the Afro-dominant Yard. In examining the inner divisions of this Calvary Hill neighbourhood’s marginalized community, Raja deemphasizes the Carnival, as critics who focus on it tend to elide important internal tensions in order to develop the Carnival as a site of mass solidarity and group resistance (2006: 114). I would like to reemphasize the Carnival as an important site of enquiry, given that it is constituted out of the ritual production of handicrafts.

It is precisely this ritual which complicates and divides the Carnival, because the materials that produce it are three things, each posing a problem to the other: they are misrecognized by their own possessors, the Afro-Trinidadian characters, as outside of capital (Raja, 2006); they are also misrecognized by the doubly marginalized “other”, the Indo-Trinidadian, as non-symbolic (Raja, 2006); and they are under threat of being consumed wholesale by Western tourism and corporate sponsorship. Thus the novel expresses a tension between the conflicting realities that clothing and costume textiles exist both inside and outside of capital in the Yard. Consequently, the dragon costume is caught within an artistic and fiscal gridlock because the modes of producing and acquiring fibre artwork and costuming are not owned by the artist. Moreover, they are owned by an institution the artist resists.

Lovelace’s vision does not offer a way out of artistic and fiscal oppression on the islands, but an anachronistic demand of the novel would be to suggest that the co-operative, i.e. fair trade, system might be one solution to Aldrick’s problem, especially because it takes into account the untidy relationship between native and colonizing economies, and symbolic and material currency. Local co-op movements work within the inescapable system of capitalism to fight corporate consumption of native arts and labour. Anthony Appiah might affirm such a solution in his charge to the postcolonial author/critic in “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial”:

If there is a lesson in the broad shape of this circulation of cultures, it is surely that we are all already contaminated by each other, that there is no longer a fully autochthonous, echt-African culture awaiting salvage by our artists […] And there is a clear sense in some postcolonial writing that the postulation of a unitary Africa over against a monolithic West — the binarism of Self and Other — is the last of the shibboleths of the modernizers that we must learn to live without. (1991: 354)

The co-op, fair trade movements’ dual purpose of building foundations for independent enterprise and funneling money back into the artisans’ communities are still hinged upon foreign investments and cultural assimilation, to be sure. They also burden the handicraft with instrumentalizability, which I have argued is offensive to Aldrick’s jurisdiction.

Within Lovelace’s dystopian depiction of a mas artist’s resistance à la inaction, one finds an unfortunate subtext that reifies traditional gender and racial binaries in order to mobilize Aldrick’s resistance to capital. In this fictional, localized space of a Trinidadian neighbourhood, costume construction is a distinctly manly enterprise. Its fibres are of “manness and faith” (41), and it is inalienable in that it has the power to recall the patrilineal order; however, the tenuousness of that order is implied by the negligence of Aldrick’s father and the emasculating rhetoric of slavery. Its singularity and its madeness is foregrounded in its relationship to the novel’s other bought costumes which are associated with the feminine domain, revealing the gendered rhetoric of economics. Hence, one reads the masculine inflection of the value of craft and recycling over consumption. Aldrick finds Sylvia at her most beautiful when her clothing is the least instrumentalized, when she is dressed in obvious hand-me-downs:

Then, yesterday evening as he worked on his dragon costume, she had appeared before his open door, with high heeled shoes a size too big on, and one of those dresses that used to be fashionable seven years before, a white dress with no band at the waist, a bow at the back, three-quarter length sleeves, and long down to just below her knees, an ancient, almost bridal dress that someone, some aunt or cousin had handed over to her mother who had passed it on to her. [She] stood there looking at him sew scales onto the cloth of the dragon, stood there with a warm virginal softness. (41–2)

Sylvia’s white dress characterizes her as a potential bride-to-be, but it is important that, to Aldrick, her maidenhood requires that her clothes be re-gifted. Bought clothing implies a transaction of prostitution.

Lovelace’s poetics of thrift are problematized by its reliance on black male nationalist tropes of female power. Sylvia’s chapter, “The Princess”, is a coming-of-age profile that ultimately genders the economic sphere. Her chapter is introduced with Cleothilda’s elaborate one-woman fashion show, such that Cleothilda is positioned as a womanly foil to Sylvia’s tenuous girlishness on the edge of her two options on the Hill: the “virgin” and the “whore” (41–2). Lovelace’s female characters express power through their dress — both the wearing and the gifting of it — as power is arrogated to the female characters through their participation in the fashion system; however, as shown, subjects benefiting from capitalism overtly are treated suspiciously by the community. Since the poverty of this Calvary Hill neighbourhood forces women seeking mobility to use their bodies in the pursuit thereof, their participation in the market is inflected with prostitution. New clothes are the most obvious signal of this exchange.

Lovelace foreshadows this idealization of production over consumption by cathecting poverty with adornment imagery. The Yard’s inhabitants are

holding their poverty as a possession [...] clasping it to their bosom as a pass-key whose function they only half-remembered now, and, grown rusty, they wore as jewellery, a charm, a charmed medallion whose magic invested them with a mysterious purity, made them in blue-bloods of a resistance lived by their ancestors all through slavery (10)

Moreover, their aversion to work is a practiced disavowal of the consumerism driving mercantile interests in slavery — their “laziness” is “refusing to be grist for the mill of the colonial machinery that kept on grinding in its belly people to spit out sugar and cocoa and copra” (10). Aldrick’s role as the Carnival dragon is balanced by Cleothilda’s role as the queen of the band. Cleothilda’s sovereignty, while also expressed through dress, is problematized by her status as a mulatto, which she holds over the Hill with narcissistic satisfaction, as well as by her status as a participant in the consumer market:

husbanding her fading beauty, flaunting her gold bangles and twin gold rings that proclaim that she was once married, wearing dresses, showing her knees, that if you give her a chance will show her thighs, walking this street on her way from market with her overflowing basket, displaying her more expensive purchases — the crab and the callaloo bush and the bound legs of the white chicken and that fat fingers of yellow plantains — her nose lifted high above the city, her long hair plaited in two plaits, like a schoolgirl, choking with that importance and beauty which she maintained as a queenship which not only she, but the people who shared the yard with her, had the duty to recognize and responsibility to uphold. (17)

Her sartorial authority is allied with her consumables on display — she owns “a little parlour stocked with goods ranging from haberdashery to groceries, and she ran it as if she were doing a favour to the Hill rather than carrying on a business from which she intended to profit” (17). Her livelihood serves to depict her character’s sensuality as well as to evoke a greedy consumerism rendered ironic in such poor conditions as this Trinidadian slum. Cleothilda’s high position in the community is in tension with Aldrick’s as an unabashed consumerism looms behind her manipulation of symbolic wealth.

Though it does so at the behest of sexual commonplaces, the conservation of the dragon and the virginal purity of Sylvia’s hand-me-down dress express an aesthetic irreducible to exploitation on the market. Through the logic of repurposing, fabric operates as allowable currency on the Hill. The presence of other bought textiles, which clearly function to purchase status in the community beyond the logic of recycling, threatens to interrupt the symbolic field with the “naked truth of capital” (Raja, 2006: 118). While Pariag’s bike represents barefaced capitalism and is therefore suspect, clothing masks its own situatedness within a capitalistic system, being that it is regularly invoked in discourses of aesthetic judgement, as though taste is transcendent of social privilege. For example, Miss Cleothilda “began to be called upon to be the adjudicator in matters of manners and taste, and as any of the Yard bought a new dress she would put it on and parade before Miss Cleothilda for her approval” (148–9). In Cleothilda’s expository chapter, “Queen of the Band”, which follows the preface to open the novel, Lovelace describes how she asserts her sovereignty over the neighbourhood:

she would portray the queen — the queen of the band — though the Hill was by now certain that she would never appear in any other costume; for the Hill knew that it was not only a habit [...] nor that she could afford it; the Hill knew what she knew: that to her being queen was not really a masquerade at all, but the annual affirming of a genuine queenship that she accepted as hers by virtue of her poise and beauty. (18)

To maintain the image of queenship, Miss Cleothilda makes daily appearances on her veranda wielding her sexually and politically symbolic shawl, and she reasserts her power where it wanes through the parade of a new dress, as well as the regulation of other women’s dresses.

Cleothilda and her adorer, Philo, are treated judiciously in the novel. Cleothilda’s sartorial charm is at once endearing as well as dictatorial and narcissistic. Philo’s rise to stardom via his band’s winning corporate sponsorship is promoted by and made vivid through his increasingly colourful and silky new shirts. Aldrick’s unconsummated and painfully arrested relationship with Sylvia is expressed through his failure to buy her a costume, which is further frustrated by Guy’s ready sartorial gifts. Aldrick, who is king of the old clothing/costume economy, has two options — to conservatively refuse to stimulate the new economy, losing Sylvia in the course of this resistance, or to abandon his patrilineal kingdom built on poverty, and buy Sylvia a costume. Both choices risk emasculation.

The conservation of the dragon determines its aesthetic value. In a space within which textiles pose as symbolic currency but in effect function as material vehicles through which characters purchase social rank, enshrining the dragon complements it as witness to history while respecting its political powerlessness, rendering it visual rather than utilitarian. Until this moment, it has been unclear whether the dragon, which Lovelace designates quite vividly as a piece of art, operates in the realm of the Kantian beautiful or the instrumentalizable. In Kant’s estimation, the beautiful is that object of “delight” transcendent of any interest on the part of the beholder (Kant, 2007/1790: 42). The prose romanticizing the dragon’s construction offers that delight for the reader: the beautiful is rendered through the telling of a tragedy — the colonial tragedy, specifically — and spun into an imagined fibre artwork. Until he hangs it up, the dragon is implicated in both the maintenance of Aldrick’s social rank and the political expectations of the Carnival; this responsibility toward instrumentalization is there before he even begins the process of construction. However, the costume’s vulnerability to exploitation was restrained within simpler economic systems — withstanding mercantile capitalism and even advanced capitalism — and it was able to function, relatively autonomously, for the people by and for whom it was produced. Aldrick’s costume art is problematized in an increasingly instrumentalized world, with symbolic capital at risk in an incontrovertible neoliberal economy, invoked by references to the corporatization of calypso — to which Philo, Aldrick’s chum and calypso singer who endures alienation and depression in seeking stardom through corporate sponsorship, becomes prey. ⁹

I am not suggesting that the dragon’s Kantian value effaces its position as a product of labour that is imposed by the codes of the Yard. It is, in a sense, commodified for Aldrick as it secures his social position and provides a source of respectful envy, like that experienced by his hopeful apprentice, “the boy”. It also promises potential prize money and the emotional and financial support of the community. The tension between aesthetics and instrumentalization in this post-slavery story is nicely critiqued by Shalini Puri. Puri restates Paul Gilroy’s (1993) assertion that, given their historical memory of abuse through labour, the descendants of slaves cannot then build their dreams on labour, but rather, liberation must happen through artistic expression. Puri notes that Gilroy’s

point is a suggestive one, and goes a long way in explaining the intense outpouring of creative energies and the concentration of artistic expertise and expressive desire in carnival. But it does shrug aside the complex contemporary cultures of work in the Caribbean. (2003: 24)

The dragon’s fiscal value is conducive to maintaining its symbolic value but only as it remains an inalienable possession. What I am suggesting is that any fiscal or symbolic wealth it accrues for Aldrick or the community is under threat of being consumed by tourist envoys, made apparent by the steady privatization of the Carnival.

Dress in the novel is always on the verge of being an instrument of capitalism even while it poses resistance. The background of the Carnival on the verge of appropriation murmurs threats to commercialize this non-instrumentalizable world. Also, the Kantian beautiful foregrounds the “other” in its universalistic imperative, presupposing his aesthetic judgement; but Pariag destabilizes the Yard’s stratums of taste, as he proves he cannot be schooled in the specialized knowledge necessary to reading the non-instrumentalizable aesthetic value of the Yard and its costume economy. It is also a problem that, through costume, bodies are disciplined on the Hill, in the Foucauldian sense, in order to maintain the symbolic pecking order. This threatens the Kantian beautiful because it assigns it a social telos. For instance, Sylvia’s fate is described as follows: “With Guy keeping her now, she had shoes and new dresses” (137); this can be read conversely as, “to have shoes and new dresses, she had to be kept by Guy”. The plural nature of this description of Sylvia’s clothing accumulation, combined with the qualifier “new”, show that what was once an inalienable possession has been transformed into an alienable one, capable of being produced, amassed, and discarded rather than loved for its singularity, recycled, and/or preserved.

Miss Cleothilda reveals the collapsing Yard economy in an itemized list of Sylvia’s commodities, emblematic of her mobility: she tells Sylvia not to be ashamed to announce to Aldrick her engagement to Guy, since “He is a man treat you good from the beginning: TV, radio, fridge, stereo, dress, show” (201). At this point, clothes have lost their inalienability to become simply a part of the material culture of capitalism. The clothing/costume exchanges in the novel ultimately translate to real material limitations for its characters, to the extent that subjects in the Yard are subjugated and immobilized within its symbolics.

The characters’ wilful misrecognition of capitalism’s objects, to which Raja refers, further immobilizes the Yard’s citizens in that it bars their access to the economic playing field. It is, to use Gayatri Spivak’s chastisement of high French theory for being out of touch, a willed “nostalgia for lost origins [which] can be detrimental to the exploration of social realities within the critique of imperialism” (2010: 87). In chapter fourteen, “Prison Dance”, Fisheye illuminates the reason for the miscommunication that leads to the disappointment of the demonstration: he, unlike the others, understands that “you have to have real power, and if you don’t have it, man, you have to survive with them that have it” (190). Aldrick gets a sense of this on the way to Woodford Square for their illegal demonstration, when he suddenly has the “feeling of being imprisoned in the dragon costume” (177). The imprisonment is in one sense the inability of the local handicrafts and textile traditions to promise mobility (compare, again, the Afro-Caribbean adornment to the literally mobile symbol of Pariag’s bike). The dragon is aesthetically and culturally important but it cannot be mobilized toward liberation or economic gain; if subjected to exchange outside the native circle, a kind of violence to its inalienable, anti-consumerist (read anti-colonial) narrative occurs.

Though the aesthetic logic of the Hill in The Dragon Can’t Dance favours costume and clothing as allowable currency due to their Kantian artistic value, which is necessarily disinterested, Lovelace complicates their status as beautiful by challenging their inviolability; for they exist in lieu of real cash exchange, implying that there is money trading hands sometime someplace, hidden from the reader’s vision. Those who write about material culture in the multicultural literary text tend to bifurcate native handicraft and commodity culture, as if the two live in separate spheres. For example, the image of the quilt, common to African American and Native American writings, often gets positioned as transcendent of the capitalistic domain. Deborah Weagel locates “the quilt” in William S. Yellow Robe Jr.’s The Star Quilter in the margins of commodity culture, despite the obvious fact of its inextricable connection to textile labour (2011: 46–64). Lovelace also questions the power of textiles to be part of any real subversive enterprise in a failed postcolonial state, where the fabric of the Carnival is under threat of Western appropriation, and where the longer it is mobilized to articulate native retrieval the higher the risk of it falling into inert mockery. Lovelace implies, tragically, that the Afro-Caribbean handicraft tradition, as it stands, cannot seriously thrive in an encroaching neoliberal market and also cannot liberate its producers from such encroachment.

Adorned fabric is allowable in the Yard because it does not literalize mobility. It expresses status within the confines of local solidarities, while not threatening to disown the responsibilities of that locality. In the Yard, costume and clothing are made to evade the globalized market, despite their inexorable implication within it. The dragon is incompatible with the encroaching neoliberal economy that haunts the narrative. Without national and economic liberation, a colonized group cannot pass through Fanon’s (1963) third stage, which allows locals to possess their own native art and to own the sources of production, which in turn allows for the native community to attain self-actualization and legitimacy. Beyond the dragon, the Yard’s economic codes sanction clothes as allowable — though regulated — currency because they materialize roles within the community transparently. This is also incompatible with the menacing neoliberal market, which masks and disperses power by owning but being unchained to the sources of production. Zygmunt Bauman, in Globalization: The Human Consequences, calls this the “new ‘bodyless-ness’ of power”, or “power in its mainly financial form”, where “the power-holders become truly exterritorial […] cut off from whatever may be called a local community, inaccessible to whoever is, unlike them, confined to it” (1998: 19). The non-symbiotic relationship between the native economy of the Yard and the new world order paralyses the romantic, tragic hero Aldrick, who would be “king” in an otherwise uncontaminated economy.

In Lovelace’s novel, the system of symbolic currency, wielded through clothing, perpetuates the lack of real capital; but, importantly, this subjugation arises out of the extrinsic conditions of a corporate, definably Western tourist system imposing its will on the island. “The dragon can’t dance” can be read as “the dragon can’t circulate”, as the coerced logic of global privatization strips its meaning, and empties it out of its buying power. The novel is, in a way, an homage to a dying art form on the verge of becoming a machine. The other clothing exchanges in the Yard provide emphasis to this larger symbolic loss by rehearsing power dynamics on a micro-level, within an isolated environment, safe from the global outside. These micro-dynamics are marked by a fundamental hopelessness as they distract their practitioners from enacting real political and economic change. Aldrick, who is in some respects a Caribbean Hamlet, withholds his talents from an exploitative market by hanging up the dragon and prizing thrift over production, which I have read as a gesture that freezes the native in a state of static conservation. For lack of a clearer purpose, he turns to his maternal grandfather’s legacy to justify his inaction; like his grandfather he is “unyielding to the last, as if he knew that whatever route they took their fate would be worse than to keep faith with a promise that he could not, if he were sane, expect still to be honoured” (41). A reader’s dissatisfaction with the dragon costume’s unyielding retreat from the public sphere should confirm how meaningfully textile craft signifies across men’s as well as women’s work in the Caribbean and beyond.