NYU Black Renaissance Noire Summer/Fall 2011 | Page 19

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 sta rs, 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.

‘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. Blam! Blam! Blam! 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.

17

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
coloured 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.

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

‘Marvellous,’ the director say. ‘You
fellars have talent.’

BRN-FALL-2011.indb 17

9/18/11 10:19 PM