Acclaimed Trinidadian novelist Earl Wilbert Lovelace will celebrate his 90th birthday this Sunday, July 13th.
To commemorate this milestone, his close friends and family curated an exhibition displaying his life’s work at the Mille Fleurs Heritage House in Port of Spain.
The exhibition, themed ‘Grounding: Lovelace at 90,’ is open to the public until July 22nd.
Best known for his short stories and plays, Mr. Lovelace has made invaluable contributions to the Caribbean literary landscape for several decades. His works include the 1979 novel The Dragon Can’t Dance and Salt, the 1982 novel that won him the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for that year.
His son, Che Lovelace, paid his respects and expressed deep appreciation for the lessons that his father taught him as he reflected on a famous quote often repeated throughout his childhood.
“Many of the truths I received from Lovelace are deceptively simple, often uttered casually but quietly transformative. One of them is ‘You cannot do better than your best.’ It’s something he’d say before a task or in reflection after one, and though I’ve heard it from childhood, it has deepened in meaning as I have matured, especially as a painter.”
Quoting a line from one of the author’s novels, Is Just a Movie, close friend Wendell Manwarren mentioned that in his quest for understanding “what power is,” Mr. Lovelace’s wisdom played a pivotal role in shaping his knowledge on the topic.
“Lovelace says in asking for power, we would discover that we were indicating that we didn’t have any, in articulating our need for power, we had emphasised our powerlessness. So when in an earlier time we felt the tongue was our own and therefore to be defended by us, now we couldn’t defend a place we had come to believe we did not own. We had surrendered what we thought we didn’t have.”
Mr. Lovelace took to the stage, expressing heartfelt appreciation to family and well-wishers who honoured him by portraying his work through the exhibition.
“I have a lot I could say, and I was thinking of reading something but I wanted to get a book from here, but I think that the speakers we’ve had before have covered a lot of the area I would have wanted to cover. So let me just simply say thank you very much again for making this possible. It really has been appreciated. Thank you.”
Grounding: Lovelace at 90 is held in collaboration with the National Trust and supported by the Ministry of Culture and Community Development, through the Sport and Culture Fund.