My Carnival #1 – The Road

IT’S THE Carnival season here in Trinidad — 27 days to Carnival Monday, in fact — though you’d hardly know that from reading or listening to CFR (okay, there was podcast #40 with 3canal, though we all confessed in that one that the Carnival spirit hadn’t yet grabbed us).

These past several years it’s taken me a while to get into the swing of things, or maybe it’s just that the parts of the festival I select in order to create my own personal version of the Carnival season don’t begin immediately after Christmas, as the commercial Carnival season does these days. Or maybe I’m just slow. It takes me ages, for instance, to get up to speed with the new music, and perhaps if commenting on music weren’t part of what I do for a living I wouldn’t care about getting up to speed at all.

If I were really arrogant I’d say that, somewhere along the way, Carnival lost me. But who I am, really, in the scheme of things carnivalesque? All-inclusive parties aren’t suffering because of my absence. They may not be my thing, but they’re a lot of other people’s thing, and there are worse business models. Every year, for instance, people willingly “donate” much-needed funds to my alma mater, because in Trinidad having a good time is a hot commodity, especially around Carnival time.

But while I can accept that things like festivals change and adapt according to needs (desires?) and circumstances, I can still be deeply disturbed by what those needs and circumstances represent.

I’ve always thought the line about Carnival being the great leveller, the eraser of class and whatnot, tends to be a bit overstated. (As the line about the majority of Trinidadian women having skin the colour of sapodilla — or a brown paper bag — certainly is.) But aren’t these kinds of ideas always less true in practice than in theory? In a sense, it is the absolute yearning we have for them to be true which gives them a good part of their weight.

Let us not be naïve: there have always been those spaces and places within the context of Carnival where, for reasons of snobbery (inverse or otherwise) or paranoia (misplaced or otherwise), many people feel they cannot go. I know people who regularly visit panyards, for instance, but who have never been to Despers’ panyard because it’s in Laventille; or who, long before these bad new days of pepper bullets, were convinced they’d be stabbed if they ventured into a public fete.

As a teenager, I had friends who went to the Country Club fete (which even back then seemed to me to be a bit of a throwback), though I myself wouldn’t ever have been caught dead there. And there have always also been groups within this society who do not see themselves as a part of Carnival at all, and sought refuge during the Carnival days in a beach house somewhere, or “down the islands”, or on another island.

I would maintain that the only space, in fact, where practically “everybody” has “always” felt at home (if not entirely “safe”), is the streets on Carnival Monday and Tuesday, by daylight. I am not saying, however, that this is not in and of itself a HUGE thing (and not already widely acknowledged as Carnival’s most important contribution). Kitch told us that “The road make to walk on Carnival day.” And as my friend Gillian Marcelle wrote the other day in an e-mail: “The capability to experience ownership of public space and to assert one’s right to dance in the streets is not to be taken lightly. I live in a country [South Africa] where the majority of the population has absolutely no sense of ownership of public space and their right to move freely in public space was hard won with blood.” (Gillian really needs to be blogging, doesn’t she?)

I’m not saying that the crime problem isn’t real – you need only read the newspapers, and one of my neighbours was tied up and robbed yesterday evening. Everybody in this benighted land feels besieged in one way or another. But it absolutely breaks my heart to see the Carnival space, as my friend Christopher Cozier would say, become even more fragmented, and to see the ease and willingness with which people from the community I ostensibly belong to fork out lots of cash to corral themselves into all-inclusive parties and Carnival bands which rope themselves off from spectators in the street — then wonder what happened to the values in this place.

But Minshall said all of this on Sunday, about which more later.

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