Unsettled accounts: Earl Lovelace.

• Author: Sankar, Celia
• Position: Trinidadian novelist and social justice spokesman calls for reparation for his fellow citizens - Interview

A boyhood memory and a commentary on race go a long way toward explaining Earl Lovelace's emergence as a major figure in Caribbean literature. Both have come up in previous interviews Lovelace has given, and as I sat in the breezy diving room of the Trinidadian novelist's home on a hill in the upscale Cascade neighborhood, I heard them again.

The recollection is of an early disappointment in life. Born of working-class parents, he looked to gaining a scholarship, called an exhibition, to progress to secondary school.

"I was supposed to have been bright," he says from behind the smoke from one of his ten daily cigarettes. "I was expected to win an exhibition. I remember when I was eleven I felt I could rule this country. But I failed the exhibition--twice. The whole world fell in. That supposed failure closed off that option, that particular route to training or education."

The commentary speaks of the indignities lingering from the Caribbean's history of slavery. "We've asked a people to accept a kind of second-crassness," he says. "A black man goes to a hotel and has to show credentials while a white man strolls by. I feel I don't have to show any more credentials than anybody else here."

Today Lovelace is the author of five novels, all of which have made strident protests against the humiliation Africans have suffered in the Caribbean. His latest work, Salt, won him the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize. His protest has culminated with his recent declaration that he will take the struggle beyond writing and will personally campaign for reparation.

The Caribbean movement for reparation gained momentum after the first international Conference on Reparation in Lagos, Nigeria, seven years ago. Those calling for reparation believe that all countries that engaged in and benefited from the slave trade and colonialism should make reparation for past crimes. While reparation advocates seek payment in monetary terms, they also want acknowledgment of guilt, an apology, and, where applicable, a return to Africa of stolen artifacts. In Trinidad, the campaign has been led by the National Joint Action Committee and other organizations concerned with African issues, with Lovelace their most prominent spokesperson.

"We are talking about human dignity, about how a community can deal with each other, about how a society can free itself from its past. Reparation is not just for the victim--it's also for the person who inflicted the wound, and for the bystanders. We must deal with the indignities of the past if we are to go forward."

The events of the much-repeated college exhibition anecdote left Lovelace (who was later to start and abandon studies at Howard University) with a resentment toward school. This is ironic, since he has a master's degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University and for a decade was a University of the West Indies (UWI) lecturer in English. Today he is a visiting lecturer at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

"School seemed to be school for an exam. Learning was something different. It never seemed to be that learning and school fit together. But I did learn something when I was in school: I learned what school was."

Lovelace calls his disappointment at age eleven "useful." "If I had won the exhibition I would have been a lot stupider than I am now," he says with a smile. "I am stupid, but I would have been a lot more so." Had he won, he imagines, he would have graduated to join the civil service and become just another cog in the machinery.

Instead, his parents arranged for him to...