The ghost of Carnivals past
Friday, March 6 2015 (T&T Guardian)Yesterday, we featured the first part of writer and filmmaker Dalton Narine’s look at old-time Carnival. Today, Narine concludes with a scathing look at present-day Carnival.
Ah, The Ghost.
In such company, how sated was your humbled one? Does guava cork?
A chant of “We want more” was floated by the dragonflies of yesteryear buzzing around our heads. So the Ghost of Carnival Past and I crossed town to a popular photo studio where Stephen Lee Heung’s Paradise Lost was museumed.
Milton’s legendary poem served as designer Minshall’s big-big-big-time launch on the road. It was 1976, mas in Panavision, a technique of cinematography that afforded the band a wide-angled view of a brand new Eden of costumery and storytelling. I remember jabbing at the old muse’s elbow. “This band was the best I’d watched in all my born days.” Hardly surprised, was he.
Back on the pavement, we reached Maraval Road in two-twos. Less than a blink and we were combing TTT’s copious (in those days, yes) files for Callaloo Company classics, such as Jungle Fever; Danse Macabre (including The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – the finest collection of characters, my heart tells me); Carnival of the Sea (Devil Ray, Splash, Oil Slick…), Papillon, River, Callaloo and The Golden Calabash.
Fully arrayed were other spectacular presentations, like most of Edmond and Lil Hart’s bands, especially Flag Wavers of Siena, some Raoul Garib gems and Wonders of Buccoo Reef, a depiction by Irwin McWilliams that still mystifies for its pre-Cousteau ecology theme.
Fast track to the general mas in the post-Mancrab era. It’s Saturday. Time to catch the Children’s Carnival celebrations. Show off the new kids on the block to the Muse. Even boast about the cleverness of the generation for perpetuating the art form through the youth movement. Carnival Past embracing Carnival Future.
By dawn the following morning, though, the old fella looked drawn out and withdrawn. Hours earlier, he’d struggled to bring himself to fathom Panorama, to little avail. He’d scoped out supporters of various steelbands who thought theirs had won.
As we drove past the hospital on the way to champion Renegades Pan Theatre, a weak lamp-post bulb barely picked up a shell-shocked figure bearing the cross of defeat as he stumbled to his own panyard down the street. It was All Stars’ flag man.
As we drove past the hospital on the way to champion Renegades Pan Theatre, a weak lamp-post bulb barely picked up a shell-shocked figure bearing the cross of defeat as he stumbled to his own panyard down the street. It was All Stars’ flag man.
The Muse sighed, then unravelled his emotions about a competition that had become so grand, its scale of importance left so much melancholy for the losers.
But, there it was in the rearview, larger than life, bigger than the imagination—the crowds, the psychedelia, myriad drums, a million notes, stellar egos, stylish arrangements, tongues tripping like trapped mice. How to regard the breadth of this Trini cacophony—this post-modern circus for the Pontius Pilate in all ah we?
Yet, if it’s in we blood, as composer/arranger Ray Holman believes the man in the street believes, who am I to equivocate?
Back in the car, we had a good laugh, the Muse and I, when a soul man DJ popped up on the radio to bray: “In a competition like this there are no losers. It’s a victory for culture.”
What???
Speaking of which, Dimanche Gras, a well-intentioned, though most boring Carnival event performed on a titanic stage situated between parallel streams of pappyshow and we-culture, an iceberg audience bobbing and weaving like flotsam and jetsam pushing south, past the abattoir (no metaphorical offence given) near the estuary of the Dry River - well that show came and went like death on a slow boat to China. Wouldn’t you know that the Kings and Queens packed sparklers to doll up their acts like cheap lipstick, and the Calypso contest left even the house lights on doze? A collective nod-off it was. We got the hell out of there, sanity intact, and waited for tomorrow, please God.
The intent was to lime till J’Ouvert woke up, though she never really sleeps as much as recover from a pre-party buzz, hit, whatever; drink-ah-rum, even. So we had was to put that event in a nutshell, as well. The mudders and painters coming down like the ol’ Dry River in heat and no bands such as Sheppy’s or Carl Blackman’s to love up. No Blackman ole mas trilogy of The Wedding, The Christening and The Funeral coming out from Darceuil Lane, Belmont. No pan to rev the engine. No Bomb classic to explo. Ay, man, the DJs with their big trucks had hoarded all the dynamite. They’d sucked the energy out of the room. Out of Carnival Monday, too. Dem and the masmen.
And so we broke “biche” that dreary day. Twas the T-shirt and no bra(ss) festival, you hear me.
Tuesday jumped up early, and I took the Ghost of Carnival Past to Woodbrook to view the mas, gay nineties in style. He took it all in snide: how noisy the soca, how pelvic its mind; so ear-splitting the jam, so head-spinning the wine; how lissome the women, how tight their gear; how few the man tribe, how light their care.
The Muse watched as one largely pawpaw-skin mas follow another pawpaw-skin mas, leaving him depressed over the schlock - and concerned about the future.
Brothers and sisters of the soca road march era, the Ghost of Carnival Past swore up and down, like Britain, a cuss-bud ol’ lady from the 50s forever uniformed in a tattered Union Jack smock, that it was the same band passing and passing and passing. In his day, he said, his brow furrowing like the graveyard, masqueraders achieved more with less.
By noon, we’d seen enough waylay waylay. But at nightfall we returned for las’ lap. Even that was out of step and character.
Wading through the frenzy, we met a journalist from Singapore. His views of Trinidad in the Carnival?
The Good (and raunchy): “Rich, poor, black, white and people of colour all go down on the ground to party. That’s where they show their equality.”
The Bad: “Too much liming.”
The Ugly: The Ghost of Carnival Past put up his palm to the visitor’s face, interrupting him. There was a sense of staleness, he said. Ideas and themes brought off too much static. Maybe, he brain-farted, a pause to reflect on Carnival history might help alter direction. He cited the Bailey era when masqueraders participated in the production of mas, organising and choreographing their own colour plate. When lil boys would flock Samaroo’s on Observatory Street, Behind the Bridge, for swansdown to trim Native American costumes and diamond-shaped miniature cuts of looking glass to add decorative art. And a Callaloo stew turning its nose up at the stench next door - the faux-mas, the cook brewing the best the world would come to appreciate; when .... And the old muse paused, looking for the appropriate words to boil it down like bagee.
“The most frightful thing about Carnival,” he said, taking the shortcut, “is the Carnival machinery.”
The Carnival machinery. Government, masmen, PanTrinbago, The Savannah Stage. Why not parade the mas and pan around the Savannah? Which, by the way, was an idea I floated in 1970 in a newspaper piece.
Anyway, the Muse was dead serious. Like a heart attack.
Because, just so, Boop! the apparition drop down, like Kaisoman Spoilo had bragged about himself all his life in his songs.
Look ah want to fall, the Ghost. Dead as a herring. Piss and vinegar leaching out. All the flesh in the mas running from the Muse’s brain like maggots. The maggots turning away from all that flesh, bath suits, bikinis, baubles, bangles, beads, and faux feathers and trinkets, to boot. Was as if, like speed, flesh really kills.
You ever see more? Flesh had callously victimised Old Carnival. The brain could take it no longer, the rudeness. The slackness. And yet, that’s how the ting began – well before the manger materialised into carol. Bacchanalia was cool then, but bacchanal?
Ha! Till death do us part, pardner. We’re in the moment.
Farewell, then.
To the flesh dem.
And so it hang, so it swing, brothers and sisters in the Carnival. Yuh could blame yuhself.
Or the business. But don’t blame mas. Eh-eh.
Even though all mas is devil mas.
See?
Thank you.
