CARNIVAL

Traditional carnival theory, based mainly on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Victor
Turner, has long defined carnival as inversive or subversive. The essays in this groundbreak-
ing anthology collectively reverse that trend, offering a redefinition of “carnival” that is
focused not on the social hierarchies it challenges, but on the values and sense of com-
munity that it affirms. This book details its new theory with reference to a carnival that is
at once representative and distinctive: the Carnival of Trinidad – the most copied yet least
studied major carnival in the world.
Milla Cozart Riggio has compiled a body of work that takes the reader on a fascinating
journey exploring the various aspects of carnival – its traditions, its history, its music, its
politics – and prefaces each section with an illuminating introductory essay. This beauti-
fully illustrated volume features an introduction by world-renowned performance theorist
Richard Schechner and varied essays by leading writers and experts on Trinidad Carnival.
It provides an introduction to a festival that has been copied in more than five dozen
North American, European, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Australian cities, but that has
traditionally been described solely within the frame of West Indian culture. Carnival repre-
sents the first theoretical redefinition of its subject and will be essential reading for the
study of Trinidad Carnival in particular and for the general study of the carnivalesque in
performance.

Milla Cozart Riggio is the James J. Goodwin Professor of English at Trinity College,
Connecticut. She is the writer and editor of a number of books, and her essays and reviews
have appeared in a variety of journals, including The Shakespeare Quarterly and TDR: The
Drama Review. She has also worked as a consultant to the National Carnival Commission
of Trinidad and Tobago and in 1999 held a government-appointed post on the World
Conference on Carnival organizing committee in Trinidad.
WORLDS OF PERFORMANCE

What is a “performance”? Where does it takes place? Who are the participants? What
is being enacted? Does it make a difference if the performance is embodied by live per-
formers or represented on film, video, or digital media? How does the performance interact
with individuals, societies, and cultures? Not so long ago, many of these questions were
settled. But today, orthodox answers are misleading, limiting, and unsatisfactory.
“Performance” as a practice and as a theoretical category has expanded exponentially.
It now comprises a panoply of genres, styles, events, and actions ranging from play,
sports, and popular entertainments, to theatre, dance and music, secular and religious
rituals, the performances of everyday life, intercultural experiments, and more. And beyond
performance proper is the even more dynamically unsettled category of the performative.
For nearly fifty years, The Drama Review (TDR), the journal of performance studies, has
been at the cutting edge of exploring performance. In TDR, artists and scholars introduce
and debate new ideas; historical documents are published; new performance theories
expounded. The Worlds of Performance Series is designed to mine the extraordinary
resources and diversity of TDR’s decades of excellence.
Each Worlds of Performance book is a complete anthology, arranged around a specific
theme or topic. Each volume contains hard-to-get seminal essays, artists’ notes, interviews,
creative texts, and photographs. New materials and careful introductions insure that each
book is up to date. Every Worlds of Performance editor is a leader in the field of perform-
ance studies. Each Worlds of Performance book is an excellent basic resource for scholars,
a textbook for students, and an exciting eye-opener for the general reader.
Richard Schechner
Editor, TDR
Series Editor

OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES

Acting (Re)Considered 2nd Edition edited by Phillip B. Zarrilli

Happenings and Other Acts edited by Mariellen R. Sandford
A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and Performance: On and Beyond the Stage edited by
Carol Martin
The Grotowski Sourcebook edited by Richard Schechner and Lisa Wolford
A Sourcebook of African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements edited by
Annemarie Bean
Brecht Sourcebook edited by Carol Martin and Henry Bial
Re:Direction. A Theoretical and Practical Guide by Rebecca Schneider and Gabrielle Cody
Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook edited by Joel Schechter
CARNIVAL
CULTURE IN ACTION – THE TRINIDAD EXPERIENCE

Edited by Milla Cozart Riggio

First published 2004
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Selection and editorial matter © 2004 Milla Cozart Riggio; individual chapters © the authors.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Carnival: culture in action: the Trinidad experience / [edited by] Milla Cozart Riggio.
p. cm. – (Worlds of performance)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Carnival – Trinidad. 2. Trinidad – Social life and customs. I. Riggio, Milla Cozart. II.
Series.
GT4229.T7C37 2004
394.26972983 – dc22 2004001267
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0-203-64604-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-67571-1 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0–415–27128–2 (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–27129–0 (pbk)
For Carlisle Chang and Theresa Morilla Montano

The passing of Carlisle Chang in May, 2001, was more than the death of one man.
It was the stilling of a hand and the silencing of a voice that for more than half a
century exacted a standard of precision, accuracy, and honesty for himself and for
other Trinidadian artists, designers, and masmen. Carlisle’s voice was soft, gentle,
at times almost inaudible. But the absence of that voice is deafening. Though his
paintings were exhibited in Europe, London, and the US, leaving the island of his
birth never occurred to Carlisle. It is thus fitting that his memory should be
silently honored everywhere the Trinidad flag, which he designed, is flown or the
Trinidad coat of arms, also designed by him, is shown.

Theresa Morilla Montano, who styled herself as “born a long time but not old,”
lived with her husband Joseph on Morne Cocoa Road in Maraval, at the foot of
Paramin Mountain. There she sewed the village shrouds, taught French patois,
maintained a patois choir for the churches of Paramin and Maraval, cooked, and
cared for children. For more than sixty years she played mas, winning the Jouvay
Queen title sixteen times and leading her Minstrel Boys through grueling ten-hour
carnival days until in the fall of 2001 at age 84 she died with the same dignity
with which she lived. The hills around her home will for ever be filled with a voice
that death cannot silence.
CONTENTS

List of illustrations ix
Notes on contributors xi
Acknowledgments xv

Introduction: theorizing carnival

Carnival (theory) after Bakhtin 3

Richard Schechner
Time out or time in? The urban dialectic of carnival 13
Milla Cozart Riggio
Trinidad Carnival timeline 31
Dawn K. Batson and Milla Cozart Riggio

Part I Emancipation, ethnicity, and identity in Trinidad and Tobago

Carnival – from the nineteenth century to the present

1 The carnival story – then and now: introduction to Part I 39

Milla Cozart Riggio
2 Cannes brûlées 48
J.D. Elder
3 The Trinidad Carnival in the late nineteenth century 53
Bridget Brereton
4 The Martinican: dress and politics in nineteenth-century Trinidad Carnival 64
Pamela R. Franco
5 Indian presence in carnival 76
Burton Sankeralli
6 Chinese in Trinidad Carnival 85
Carlisle Chang

Part II Playin’ yuhself – masking the other: tradition and change in

carnival masquerades

7 “Play Mas” – play me, play we: introduction to Part II 93

Milla Cozart Riggio

vii
• CONTENTS

8 Peter Minshall: a voice to add to the song of the universe 109

An interview by Richard Schechner and Milla Cozart Riggio
9 Amerindian masking in Trinidad’s Carnival: the House of Black Elk in San
Fernando 129
Hélène Bellour and Samuel Kinser
10 The Blue Devils of Paramin: tradition and improvisation in a village carnival band 146
Martin W. Walsh
11 Paramin Blue Devils 157
Photographs by Jeffrey Chock
12 The jouvay popular theatre process: from the street to the stage 162
Tony Hall
13 Carnival people 167
Photographs by Pablo Delano

Part III Pan and calypso – carnival beats

14 We jamming it: introduction to Part III 183

Milla Cozart Riggio
15 The emancipation jouvay tradition and the almost loss of pan 187
Earl Lovelace
16 Voices of steel: a historical perspective 195
Dawn K. Batson
17 Notes on pan 204
Kim Johnson
18 Calypso reinvents itself 213
Gordon Rohlehr
19 On redefining the nation through party music 228
Jocelyne Guilbault

Part IV Carnival diaspora

20 The festival heard round the world: introduction to Part IV 241

Milla Cozart Riggio
21 Globalization in reverse: diaspora and the export of Trinidad Carnival 245
Keith Nurse
22 Carnival in Leeds and London: making new black British subjectivities 255
Geraldine Connor and Max Farrar
23 “New York equalize you?” Change and continuity in Brooklyn’s Labor Day
Carnival 270
Philip Kasinitz
Trinidad Carnival glossary 283
Carol Martin

Works cited 295

Index 307

viii
ILLUSTRATIONS

Intro. 1 Pieter Bruegel, detail of Carnival King from The Fight Between Carnival
and Lent 16
Intro. 2 A parallel to obese Carnival King, Trinidad, carnival Tuesday, 1997 17
Intro. 3 “Playing royal” – Carnival Queen costume, Port of Spain, 1996 18
Intro. 4 Map of Trinidad 32
2.1 Diagram of Stickmen with flambeaux 52
4.1 Mulatresse de la Martinique, late nineteenth century 66
4.2 Jean Michel Cazabon, Old Negress, French, in Gala Dress 67
4.3 Fashionable young lady, 1880s 68
4.4 Camille Dedierre, a Martiniquian mulatto, c. 1900 71
6.1 Carlisle Chang at home 86
7.1 Jab Jab with fol breastplate, Carapichaima, carnival Monday, 2002 96
7.2 Prison mas played on a lorry, 1935 98
7.3 Prison mas played on the streets of Port of Spain, 1940s 99
7.4 Prison mas played on the streets of Port of Spain, carnival Monday, 2003 100
7.5 “President Eisenhower” image in carnival tableau, Wilfrid Strasser,
carnival Monday, 1952 102
7.6 Children’s carnival performance on the stage at the Queen’s Park Savannah 103
7.7 Sheynenne Hazell, Junior Calypso Monarch, 2004 104
7.8 Buddha carnival float, Carapichaima, carnival Monday, 2000 105
7.9 The late Theresa Morilla Montano, leader of the white-faced Minstrel
Boys, 2001 106
8.1 Peter Minshall drawing for the Hummingbird masquerade costume, 1974 112
8.2 Peter Minshall drawing for the Imp of Paradise Lost, 1976 114
8.3 Peter Minshall drawing for Sweet Oil Butterflies of Paradise Lost, 1976 115
8.4 Mancrab from River, a carnival mas band, 1983 119
8.5 Gilded Pieta tableau, influenced by Wilfrid Strasser; Peter Minshall mas
band Tapestry, 1999 123
8.6 Tears of the Indies, George Bailey’s last mas band before his death in
1970 124
9.1 Red Indian in old time masquerade (Viey le Cou), Port of Spain, 1996 131
9.2 Black Elk crosses the Grandstand stage on carnival Tuesday, Port of
Spain, 1998 132
9.3 M. Prior engraving, carnival parade, Port of Spain, 1888 134
9.4 Black Elk warrior, San Fernando, carnival Monday, 1996 138
9.5 Warriors of the Black Continent on Port of Spain street, carnival 1996 143

ix
• ILLUSTRATIONS

9.6 Ramdin-Jackman group, carnival Tuesday, Port of Spain, 1996 145

15.1 Dr Eric Williams, first Prime Minister of the Republic of Trinidad and
Tobago 191
17.1 San Fernando SeaBees on the road playing “pan ’round de neck,”
carnival 1956 211
22.1 Sharon Clements in The Lost Ship, designed by Hughbon Condor, Queen of
the Leeds Carnival 2002 263
22.2 Transgressive bodies: Michael Paul and Hebrew Rawlins cross-dressing at
the Leeds West Indian Carnival, 2002 264
22.3 Carnival Messiah performed at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, 1999 268

x
CONTRIBUTORS

Dawn K. Batson is currently the Chairman of the Board of the Trinidad and Tobago
National Steel Orchestra. She holds a PhD and is Assistant Professor of Music at Florida
Memorial College and the Musical Director of the Florida Memorial Steelband, joint
winners of the 2000 World Steelband Festival Ensemble Class. She has long been involved
with the steelband movement as teacher, arranger, conductor, administrator, and composer.
Hélène Bellour is coauthor of Censure et bibliothèques au XXe siècle (Editions du
Cercle de la Librairie, 1989). Cofounder and contributor to Histoires d’Elles, a French
feminist periodical, she works as a translator, editor, and French instructor. Since 1996
she has pursued further research on Indian mas in Trinidad and supervised editorship
of Renegades: The History of the Renegades Steel Orchestra of Trinidad and Tobago
(Macmillan Caribbean, 2002).
Bridget Brereton is Professor of History at the University of the West Indies, St Augus-
tine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago. She is the author or editor of many books and articles,
mainly on the social history of Trinidad and of the anglophone Caribbean in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. A past President of the Association of Caribbean Historians, she
is editor of Volume V of the UNESCO General History of the Caribbean.
Carlisle Chang (d. 2001) was a native of Trinidad. Although he was better known in his
country as a mural and easel painter, he also designed for theatre and ballet. He
was involved in the promotion of art throughout his sixty-year-long career, holding the
Hummingbird Medal for Community Service, the bronze medal of the VII São Paulo
Bienal for painting (1963), and a citation from the Press Club of Lausanne (1972) for
Best Foreign Pavilion at the Comptoire Suisse. His paintings have been exhibited in group
shows in Europe, including London, and the United States. Carlisle Chang was also respon-
sible for designing his country’s flag and coat of arms.
Jeffrey Chock is a freelance photographer in Port of Spain, Trinidad, who for the past
three decades has photographed many aspects of his culture, particularly carnival and
other arts. He was the photographic editor of Renegades: The History of the Renegades
Steel Orchestra of Trinidad and Tobago (Macmillan Caribbean, 2002). He is affiliated
with the Trinity College in Trinidad Global Learning Site. His photographs have appeared
in a wide range of journals and books; they have been exhibited in Trinidad and the United
States.
Geraldine Connor is a freelance theatre director. An ethnomusicologist, she was Senior
Lecturer at the University of Leeds (1992–2004), and holds an MMus. (London), LRSM,

xi
• CONTRIBUTORS

Dip. Ed. She held a two-year appointment as Associate Director of Music at the West
Yorkshire Playhouse (2001–2003). A composer, performer, musical director, and vocal
animator specializing in mainstream rock and pop, Caribbean carnival, Caribbean folk and
African-American gospel, she conceived, composed, and directed Carnival Messiah, a rad-
ical theatrical reinvention inspired by George Frederick Handel’s Messiah (1999 and 2002,
West Yorkshire Playhouse; 2003 and 2004, Port of Spain), and also directed the acclaimed
premiere coproduction between the West Yorkshire Playhouse and Adzido Pan African
Dance, Yaa Asantewaa, Warrior Queen, which successfully toured Britain and Ghana,
Africa, in 2001/2. Most recently she has directed Blues in the Night (West Yorkshire
Playhouse, 2003), and Vodou Nation (UK Arts and West Yorkshire Playhouse, 2004).
Pablo Delano was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He holds a BFA in painting from Temple
University and an MFA in painting from Yale University School of Art. He has completed
numerous community-based public art projects, including commissions from the New York
City Department of Cultural Affairs and the US Department of the Interior. His photo-
graphs of Caribbean communities have been exhibited at galleries and museums in the US,
Puerto Rico, and Latin America. He is the author of Faces of America, a book of photo-
graphs published by Smithsonian Institution Press (1992). He teaches photography at
Trinity College in Hartford, CT, and is working on several books of photographs portraying
the rich cultural diversity of life in Trinidad.
J.D. Elder (d. 2003) received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania
in 1965. He did extensive field research in the history of kalinda, pan, calypso, and other
aspects of carnival. His publications included From Congo Drum to Steelband (University
of the West Indies, 1969) and, most recently, Brown Girl in the Ring (Pantheon, 1998),
which was coedited with Alan and Bess Lomax. At the time of his death he was building a
Heritage Village in Tobago.
Max Farrar currently teaches sociology in the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Metro-
politan University, Leeds, UK. He lived for nearly thirty years in the Chapeltown area of
Leeds. His PhD research on social movements in that area was published in 2002 by the
Edwin Mellen Press, titled The Struggle for Community in a British Multi-ethnic Inner
City Area. Prior to joining the university he worked in community education, legal advice,
publishing, and journalism. He has participated in and photographed the Leeds Carnival
since the early 1970s. Visit his website at www.maxfarrar.org.uk
Pamela R. Franco is an assistant professor in the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane
University. She teaches courses in the arts, both plastic and performance, of Africa and the
African diaspora, with special emphasis on the anglophone Caribbean. She is the author of
several articles on women maskers. She is currently working on a book on women and the
performance of gender in nineteenth-century Trinidad carnival.
Jocelyne Guilbault is Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Music Department of the
University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Zouk: World Music in the West
Indies (1993) and coeditor of Border Crossings: New Directions in Music Studies
(1999–2000). Her current research focuses on the politics and aesthetics of the calypso
music scene in the Caribbean and its diaspora.
Tony Hall is a playwright and moviemaker. In the theatre, he worked extensively in western
Canada and in the Caribbean with Derek Walcott’s Trinidad Theatre Workshop. With
Banyan he codirected and appeared in And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon (1992), an

xii
• CONTRIBUTORS

award-winning Banyan Film for a BBC/TVE series. His plays include: Jean & Dinah . . .
(1994); Red House [Fire! Fire!] (1999), Twilight Café (2002), and the book for The
Brand New Lucky Diamond Horseshoe Club, a Blues Kaiso written in collaboration with
composer David Rudder, premiered in Indiana, July 2004. He is the Academic Onsite
Director of the Trinity College in Trinidad Global Learning Site each spring term and, in
most fall terms, is Visiting Artist in Residence at Trinity College. He lives in Tobago.
Kim Johnson is a journalist and cultural researcher who holds a PhD from the University
of the West Indies. He has authored several books, most recently Renegades: The History
of the Renegades Steel Orchestra of Trinidad and Tobago (Macmillan Caribbean, 2002).
His book-length study of the oral history of the steel band is forthcoming from Macmillan
Caribbean.
Philip Kasinitz is currently the Executive Officer of the CUNY PhD Program in Sociology
and associate director of the CUNY Center for Urban Research. He received his PhD from
New York University in 1987. His book Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the
Politics of Race (Cornell University Press, 1992) won the Thomas and Znaniecki Award
from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association.
In addition to numerous academic journals, his work has appeared in Dissent, The Nation,
The City Journal, The Wall Street Journal, Lingua Franca, and Common Quest: The
Magazine of Black Jewish Relations.
Samuel Kinser is Presidential Research Professor in History at Northern Illinois Uni-
versity. His books include Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (University of
California Press, 1990) and Carnival American Style, Mardi Gras at New Orleans and
Mobile (University of Chicago Press, 1990). His present project is a comparative history
of festive representations of Amerindians in Europe and the Americas from 1500 to the
present.
Earl Lovelace is a prize-winning novelist who was born in Toco, Trinidad, and grew up in
Tobago. He has taught at the University of the West Indies and Wellesley College; he
currently teaches at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. He has written
six volumes of fiction including the novels The Dragon Can’t Dance (Longman, 1979), The
Wine of Astonishment (André Deutsch, 1982), and Salt (Faber & Faber, 1996). He
received the British Commonwealth Prize for Literature in 1997 and was named the
Trinidad Express Man of the Year for 1997. He received an honorary doctorate from
the University of the West Indies in 2002. He is currently working on a collection of essays
and a new novel.
Carol Martin, PhD – books include: Brecht Sourcebook; A Sourcebook of Feminist
Theatre: On and Beyond the Stage; and Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture
of the 1920s and 1930s. Martin’s essays on performance and interviews with artists
have appeared in journals and anthologies, including the New York Times, and have been
translated into French, Polish, Chinese, and Italian. She has lectured and given papers
on theatre and performance in Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Paris. Martin is an
Associate Professor of Drama at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
Keith Nurse is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of International Relations, University of
the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago, and President of the Association of Caribbean
Economists (2004). He is the academic coordinator of the Arts and Cultural Enterprise
Management programme at the Festival Centre of the Creative Arts. Recent publications

xiii
• CONTRIBUTORS

include Festival Tourism in the Caribbean (2004). He is also the coeditor of Globalization
and Caribbean Popular Culture (2004).
Milla Cozart Riggio, James J. Goodwin Professor of English at Trinity College (Hartford,
CT) and coordinator of the Trinity-in-Trinidad Global Learning Site, received her PhD
from Harvard University. Her books include The Wisdom Symposium, Ta‘ziyeh: Ritual
and Drama in Iran (a monograph), The Play of Wisdom: Its Texts and Contexts, and
Teaching Shakespeare through Performance. She coedited Renegades: The History of
the Renegades Steel Orchestra of Trinidad and Tobago, as well as a special edition of
Mediaevalia on medieval drama; she edited a special issue of TDR: The Drama Review
on Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. Her essays and reviews have appeared in a wide range of
scholarly journals, including The Shakespeare Quarterly, Speculum, and TDR.
Gordon Rohlehr is Professor of West Indian Literature at the University of the West
Indies, Trinidad. Born in Guyana, he is author of Pathfinder: Black Awakening in the
Arrivants of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Gordon Rohlehr, 1981); Calypso and Society in
Pre-Independence Trinidad (Gordon Rohlehr, 1990); My Strangled City and Other Essays
(Longman Trinidad, 1992); and The Shape of That Hurt and Other Essays (Longman
Trinidad, 1992). He is also coeditor of Voiceprint: An Anthology of Oral and Related
Poetry from the Caribbean (Longman, 1989). His latest book is A Scuffling of Islands:
Essays on the Calypso (Lexican Trinidad Ltd, 2004).
Burton Sankeralli is a theologian whose area of research is religion, culture, and society
in Trinidad. He is a freelance writer for the Sunday Express newspaper in Port of Spain,
Trinidad, and the editor of At the Crossroads: African Caribbean Religion and Christianity,
a collection of conference papers for the Caribbean Conference of Churches.
Richard Schechner is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies at the
Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He is artistic director of East Coast Artists
and editor of TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies. He is general editor of the Worlds
of Performance book series. Schechner’s own books include Environmental Theater,
Between Theater and Anthropology, The End of Humanism, Performance Theory, The
Future of Ritual, and Performance Studies – An Introduction. His books have been trans-
lated into many languages, including Chinese, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, and
Serbo-Croat. He founded and directed The Performance Group, with which he directed
Dionysus in 69, Tooth of Crime, Mother Courage and Her Children, and many other works.
His most recent works for the stage are productions of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters,
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Schechner has directed
plays, conducted performance workshops, and lectured in Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia,
and the Americas. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards including a
Lifetime Achievement Award from Performance Studies International. He is an honorary
professor at the Shanghai Theatre Academy and the Institute of Fine Arts, Havana.
Martin W. Walsh is head of the Drama Concentration in the Residential College and
Professor of Theatre History in the Department of Theatre and Drama at the University
of Michigan. He holds a PhD from Cambridge University and is widely published in
early drama and popular culture, having recently coedited and translated the Dutch
morality play Mariken van Nieumeghen. Actor, director, and dramaturg for Ann Arbor’s
Brecht Company for many years, he is also the Artistic Director of the Harlotry Players, a
university-based early drama group.

xiv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My greatest debt for the production of this book is to my Editorial Associate Tracy Knight,
without whom the project could not have been completed. Also important was the clerical
assistance given by Dorothy Francoeur, Julie Decatur, and Erica Mace. Jeffrey Chock
offered irreplaceable help with graphic editing, choosing and assembling photographs.
Pablo Delano was, likewise, an invaluable graphic editor and adviser. Richard Schechner
provided the impetus for the creation of the book; his support saw me through a difficult
and sensitive process. Rosie Waters, Diane Parker, Talia Rodgers, and Ruth Whittington
of Routledge made the difficult task of assembling this text much easier with their enthusi-
astic support. John Banks provided excellent copy-editing. At Trinity College, I owe thanks
to our affiliated faculty Janet Bauer, Raymond Baker, Brigitte Schulz, Dario Euraque, Luis
Figueroa, Leslie Desmangles, Ellison Findly, Joan Morrison, Joe Palladino, and to Lise
Waxer, who lived more actively in her 37 short years than most manage in four score and
whose love of life and dancing energy continue to inspire me each day. In Trinidad, I owe
many debts of gratitude. John Cupid has since 1995 been my mentor; the National Carnival
Commission has consistently supported this work, through Carol Wolfe and a series of
NCC Chairmen beginning with Alfred Aguiton, including Roy Augustus, and the current
Chairman Kenny de Silva. Dr Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool has been a valuable friend and
adviser. At the University of the West Indies, Professor Bridget Brereton supported the
Trinity College in Trinidad Global Learning Site, which has helped to spawn this book.
Thanks are due also to my colleague Tony Hall, our administrative coordinator Naima
Mohammad, and our partners Lloyd Best of the Trinidad and Tobago Institute of the West
Indies, Bhai Ravi Ji for his continuing support and advice, Peter Minshall, Nestor Sullivan
of Pamberi and the National Steel Orchestra, Professor Gordon Rohlehr, Noble Douglas,
the late André Tanker, Wendell Manwarren, Earl Lovelace, the late Merwyn Williams,
Dr Joan Kazim of the Islamic Institute, Dr Rhoda Reddock, Halima-Sa’adia Kassim,
Rawle Gibbons of the Creative Arts Centre, Norvan Fullerton and Gemma Jordan of
the Malick Folk Performance Group, Eintou Springer, Christopher Laird of Banyan,
Narrie Approo, Felix Edinburgh, Brian Honoré, Michael Cooper, Jill and Sue Singh and the
Carapichaima Carnival Committee, along with others too numerous to name. My personal
thanks go to Ron and Jackie Rose, Gina Humphrey, and Ivan LaRose, and of course to my
own family, Thomas I, II, and III, Anna, Daniel, Rob, and Laura, all of whom have had an
opportunity to share with me the magic island nation with its richly sophisticated culture,
where I have found aspects of myself I might never have realized elsewhere.
The following chapters were previously published in TDR: The Drama Review, special
issue ed. Milla Cozart Riggio, Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, 42 (3) (Fall 1998) and are
republished by permission: J.D. Elder, “Cannes brûlées”; Carlisle Chang, “Chinese in

xv
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Trinidad Carnival”; and Burton Sankeralli, “Indian presence in carnival.” Earlier versions
of the following essays, likewise published in TDR: The Drama Review, 42(3) (Fall 1998),
have been edited or updated for this volume and are republished by permission: Hélène
Bellour and Samuel Kinser, “Amerindian masking in Trinidad Carnival: the House of Black
Elk in San Fernando”; Kim Johnson, “Notes on pan”; Earl Lovelace, “The emancipation
jouvay tradition and the almost loss of pan”; Carol Martin, “Trinidad Carnival glossary”;
and Richard Schechner and Milla Riggio, “Peter Minshall: a voice to add to the song of the
universe.” Portions of Milla Riggio, “The carnival story – then and now: introduction to
Part I,” were adapted from “Resistance and Identity: Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago,”
published in TDR: The Drama Review (T159); portions of Milla Riggio, “Time out or time
in,” were published as the “Carnival” entry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and
Performance (ed. Dennis Kennedy, 2003). Both are reprinted by permission of Oxford
University Press. Portions of Philip Kasinitz, “ ‘New York equalize you?’ Change and
continuity in Brooklyn’s Labor Day Carnival,” were published in Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean
New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1992) and are reprinted by permission.

xvi
INTRODUCTION:
THEORIZING CARNIVAL
CARNIVAL (THEORY) AFTER BAKHTIN
Richard Schechner

Bakhtin’s notions of carnival are founded on a settled, stratified society – a non-

democratic society. In such a setting, authority can be suspended or set aside
temporarily, and “the people” given a chance to act out their desires freely if tem-
porarily. But today’s world is not that kind of world. In the places where carnival as
a formal institution is performed (Trinidad and Tobago, New Orleans Mardi Gras,
and Rio de Janeiro, for example), the social “baseline” is democracy or the illusion
of democracy. It is not that “the people” really have power on a daily basis or
ultimately. But from time to time there are elections in which “the people” are
appealed to, their votes sought, bought, and manipulated. This kind of democracy
is both dysfunctional (in the US, nearly half the eligible voters do not vote) and
illusory. The image-makers provide a daily diet of patriotism linked to democracy.
But even if untrue, the “make believe” of democracy depends on the psychosocial
phenomenon that “the people” are sovereign. If people believe that they are collec-
tively sovereign, then against whom is carnival staged? From what overall authority
is carnival a relief ?
There are at least two ways to solve this problem. One is to wonder what the
actual power arrangements are in so-called democratic societies; and another is
to analyze carnival as an enactment that at one and the same time plays out demo-
cratic illusions, giving temporary relief from the authority (if not oppression and
downright tyranny) imposed in the name of “democracy.”
Prior to making such an analysis with regard to Trinidad Carnival, I need to say
a little about “the people” in Third World societies – cultures that have suffered
colonialism and whose current experience is that of postcolonialism and globaliza-
tion. Such societies are not the same as First World societies – or even Russia (and
other nations of the former USSR) – under whose auspices Bakhtin lived, thought,
and wrote.
Bakhtin’s model of carnival was developed in terms of the medieval European
practices as Bakhtin reconfigured them while living in the dangerous, totalitarian
world of Stalinism. Bakhtin stressed carnival’s rebelliousness as he explained
how carni-revellers act out their hatred for official culture. Trinidad Carnival

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• RICHARD SCHECHNER

developed under very different historical circumstances. Trinidad Carnival

emerged in the nineteenth century from the celebrations of liberated African
slaves embodying African ways and values and the carnival traditions of Catholic
Europe as carried to the Caribbean perhaps by Spanish and certainly by French
planters–slave owners. Ironically, Trinidad Carnival is a celebration of former
slaves and former masters enjoying – and to some degree satirizing – each other’s
cultural heritages. As Trinidad Carnival continues to develop in the twenty-first
century, its cultural complexity multiplies to include, and rebroadcast to the world
at large, musical and visual performance languages that are intriguingly Afro-
Euro-Caribbean-South-Asian-global. Thus Trinidad Carnival has become both a
centripetal hub and a centrifugal force for carnival, musical, and masking styles
that flow inward to the islands of Trinidad and Tobago and radiate outward from
them to the world at large. This kind of complexity confounds Bakhtinian theory.
Trinidad Carnival actually both critiques official culture and supports it. It is an
event both “of the people” and “of the nation.” As Allesandro Falassi (1987: 3) wrote:
If we consider that the primary and most general function of the festival is to
renounce and then to announce culture, to renew periodically the life stream of a
community by creating new energy, and to give sanctions to its institutions, the sym-
bolic means to achieve it is to represent the primordial chaos before creation, or a
historical disorder before the establishment of the culture, society, or regime where the
festival happens to take place. Such representation cannot be properly accomplished
by reversal behavior or by rites of intensification alone, but only by the simultaneous
presence in the same festival of all the basic behavioral modalities of daily social life,
all modified – by distortion, inversion, stylization, or disguise – in such a way that they
take on an especially meaningful symbolic character. [. . .] In sum, festival presents a
complete range of behavioral modalities, each one related to the modalities of normal
daily life. At festival times, people do something they normally do not; they abstain
from something they normally do; they carry to the extreme behaviors that are usually
regulated by measure; they invert patterns of daily social life. Reversal, intensification,
trespassing, and abstinence are the four cardinal points of festive behavior.

But how is this accomplished in Trinidad? Carnival is financially, artistically, and

conceptually supported from the bottom up and from the top down. These two
systems – “top-down” and “bottom-up” – must be studied independently and in
relation to each other. Being a Third World country populated mostly by peoples of
color – African, South Asian, remnants of the Caribs – in relation both to Europe
and the US (the inheritor of the European desire for global hegemony), Trinidad is
“other.” This is borne out in Carnival, which – despite much boundary-crossing
interculturality – is partially a festival of “differences” demarking the urban from
the rural, the African from the European, the Asian from the African, and so on.
From this perspective, Trinidad Carnival is in its largest frame a Festival of the
Other, no matter how “official” it is within its own national-cultural boundaries. In
the Trinidad diaspora even more so, the spin-off carnivals are each regarded as
“exotic” within the cultures of the US, Canada, and the UK.
But what about the thousands of Trinidadians and other West Indians who come
back to this island for carnival? They are in a uniquely postmodern circumstance.
In the US, they are a minority within a minority within a minority within a
minority: “Trinidadians” amidst “islanders” amidst “African-Americans” amidst

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• CARNIVAL (THEORY) AFTER BAKHTIN

“people of color.” South Asian-American-Trinidadians are not regarded as

“Indians” because in the popular imagination they have been absorbed into the
African group. Nor do these designations take into account the equally complex
presence in carnival of people and practices that are Christian, Orixan (Yoruban
African), Hindu, and Muslim. For “West Indian Carnival” day in Brooklyn, cele-
brated in early September, all these differences and more are temporarily set aside:
warm weather trumps the church’s Lenten ritual calendar, Trinidad is absorbed
into “West India”, itself a bizarre designation founded on a geo-culture error.
In Trinidad and Tobago itself, even though carnival originated as a liberationist
exuberance celebrating emancipation from enslavement, it never was “freely free.”
From its very inception, the carnival was policed and controlled. Increasingly, the
culture of surveillance is penetrating to the heart of carnival – sometimes simply to
steal “good ideas” from rival bands or mas camps; sometimes as a means of social
control. Even the presence of interested scholars, of books like the one you are
reading, hedge in carnival’s spontaneity. Sometimes this kind of limitation can
take the form of “saving” carnival – as with the interventionist activities of those
who want to preserve and reinstate the “traditional” carnival figures regarded
collectively as an endangered species: Midnight Robber, Dame Lorraine, White
Faced Minstrels, and so on. But, as in zoos and game parks, or with animals
reintroduced into the wild, there is a difference both on the theoretical and on the
practical level between the wild and the protected.
In terms of Carnival, what appears to be free, licentious, and spontaneous – the
enactment of the most-of-the-time forbidden – upon examination proves to occur
between the three poles of the permitted, the perpetrated, and the reinstated. With-
out “excess” what would the Tourism and Industrial Development Company of
Trinidad and Tobago Ltd (TIDCO) sell? Without the traditional characters what
would Trinidad Carnival be? If the oil business is what underlies Trinidad’s wealth,
setting it apart from the other Caribbean islands, carnival runs an important second
as a “cultural product” of great market value. Too valuable to let run freely free.
This is not to deny the reality of the element of resistance in the evolution of
Trinidad Carnival, as freed slaves, later joined by enfranchised former indentured
laborers, combined African, European, and Asian celebratory techniques and prac-
tices to embody in the streets of Port of Spain and elsewhere on the island a range
of community values: individual and corporate (band) expression and artistic
creativity; release from the daily grind in an ecstasy of dancing, music-making, sex-
play, drinking, and other similar entertainments. Taken together these constituted
both a nonconscious and a highly self-conscious celebration of Trinidad and
Tobago (TT)1 as a “culturally diverse nation” emerging from colonialism. Official
promotion of its unique qualities helped sell Trinidad on the global tourist market.
These values cannot be reduced to a single overall item.
Some scholars argue that a “real” carnival is no longer possible because there are
no coherent communities to stage the carnivals or to rebel against. This may be true
on the grand scale. But one of the functions of Trinidad Carnival is to sustain
smaller, local communities. At least in Port of Spain what happens in the mas
camps, steel band yards, and the calypso tents is the formation and maintenance of
tight-knit communities. Unlike European carnivals or American Mardi Gras (but
like carnival in Rio de Janeiro), Trinidad Carnival dominates the national con-
sciousness and occupies the time, work, and imagination of many people for much

5
• RICHARD SCHECHNER

of the year. Next year’s carnival begins the day after this year’s ends. Not only are
local communities formed and sustained by carnival, carnival brings together per-
formance events that do not necessarily belong together. Masking, calypso, and
steel band are “natural” to carnival simply because they occur within the carnival
frame. Actually, carnival taken as a whole is a hybrid. Within the overall event
many different kinds of performances rub up against each other, sometimes
uncomfortably, such as when the Blue Devils of Paramin Village perform right after
the French patois Mass in the village. Or how the orderly processions of King and
Queen contestants and mas bands across formal stages compare to the bursting
chaos of the street celebrations and local parties. There are historical-traditional
rather than performance-logical reasons why mas, new characters and traditional
characters, various official competitions, calypso, pan, and kalinda are all per-
formed at carnival. In fact, multiplicity and contradictory intentions are the
hallmark of Trinidad Carnival. For the time being (carnival time), contradictions
are supported and not challenged. A “forgiveness of illogic” allows contradictory
values to be simultaneously expressed.
There are historical reasons, not inherent reasons of cultural affinity, that bring
together African, European, and South Asian practices in Trinidad. What’s even
more amazing is that, once thrown together by historical circumstances, the hybrid
arts that emerge make perfect sense and are coherent. Soca makes sense, even if its
causes could not be predicted. The convergence of Shango, Christian, Hindu, and
Islamic practices gives rise to both a unity and a tension that are extremely creative.
The tensions separating various cultural practices also require hard work to main-
tain at least a working cooperation among African, European, South Asian, and
Chinese individuals and groups who all exist cheek-by-jowl in a small territory.
Daily life in Trinidad requires a keen sense of both unique and shared social,
political, geographical, religious, and artistic histories and proclivities. No matter
how celebratory, Trinidad Carnival lives within the shadows of slavery, indentured
labor, colonialism, imperialism, and, now, globalization. Carnival is not sunshine
dispelling these shadows but a means of overcoming them, assimilating them, and
playing them out. Carnival is a celebration of freedom – yes, but not only or even
mostly, individual freedom, but social, collective, national freedom – a liberty that
is tenuous, hard-won, and still felt as threatened.
The contradictions, shadows, and threats mean that that Trinidad Carnival is not
now, nor was it ever, nor can it ever be, static. Today carnival is not what it was in
the nineteenth or the mid-twentieth century. I have no doubt that in 2050 it will be
much different than it is now. At first emancipation, then independence, and then
the emergence of TT on the world stage, have all affected carnival. TT is an
independent nation and a robust culture, but it also is a Third World developing
nation living in postcolonial circumstances in a period of rampant globalization.
Trinidad Carnival exists as a centerpiece in a vast diasporic network which circu-
lates mas, concepts, persons, and all kinds of specific carnival practices. The cele-
bratory imperative – and carnival can really happen only in outdoor spaces, in the
streets – overpowers the religious calendar. Also certain masks travel and therefore
carnival in different regions of the Trinidad and Tobago diaspora needs to be
scheduled at different times. In other words, the diasporic carnivals are not simply
exports but also redistributions and reinterpretations of the “original.” But what is
the original? Masks, music, dances, and styles happening in TT may, in fact, be very

6
• CARNIVAL (THEORY) AFTER BAKHTIN

influenced by what happens in the diaspora. People, masks, music, and ideas circu-
late. And behind the diaspora are Africa and the Indian subcontinent. African and
Indian cultures are a driving force in a process of retro-colonization whereby prac-
tices, styles, and beliefs from the former colonies are affecting the cultures of the
former colonial homelands.
Its hybridity gives Trinidad Carnival both its particular qualities and its edginess.
It is not only or even mostly the release of some kind of popular Bakhtinian voice
of the people. Instead, what is played out is a dangerous, almost about to come
apart, coalition of traditions and socio-political arrangements. This threat and
danger inherent in carnival explains why the TT government has tried to control
what calypsonians sing about – trying to make sure especially that they don’t
exacerbate tensions between Indians and Africans. It is why scholars argue so
heatedly about the various sources of Trinidad Carnival: is it “really” African, how
important is the European influence, what about the South Asians, the East
Asians? Are there any echoes of Carib culture in it? As in TT politics, each group
wants to claim its primacy without upsetting the balance. None of these arguments
can be settled. Trinidad culture, and carnival as the prime vehicle of that culture,
expresses dynamic relationship among contending components. A very tense, ener-
getic, and creative interculturality.
Unlike the popular democracy of Bakhtin’s model, Trinidad Carnival is fiercely
competitive and hierarchical. The official carnival, which climaxes with competi-
tors performing on the Queen’s Park Savannah stage to determine the kings and
queens, the top steel bands and calypsonians, involves fierce struggles decided by
judges. But whatever the judges decide, people supporting the losers aver that the
competition was fixed, that unfair influence swayed the judges, or something else
undercut their objectivity. At the same time, once the prizes have been awarded, the
winners take great pride in them. There is an almost obsessional quality about
hierarchy: “Am I eighth, am I ninth, am I tenth, am I first?” From the competitor’s
point of view – not necessarily from the point of view of individual players –
Trinidad Carnival is anything but fun as popularly defined.
There are, in fact, several great divisions separating out different kinds of par-
ticipation, different classes of people, different versions of “fun.” The Savannah
stage is itself a sharply binary space. The great runway where the competitors show
their stuff lies between the North Stand and the Grandstand. The more commodi-
ous Grandstand is full of people who have paid fancy prices, official guests, and
other VIPs (including visiting scholars). At the base of the Grandstand are the
judges. The North Stand has as its mythos that it belongs to “the people,” though
in reality it has become itself the more chic place for upscale middle-class celebra-
tion. The seats are cheaper and less comfortable, and the comportment of the
crowd is noisier, more boisterous. The style of dressing is different, also, south to
north – with fancier outfits more likely to be found in the Grandstand. The per-
formers, however, play both to the upper crust and to “the people.” The enormous
king full-body masks rotate and spin round; the calypso balladeers strut to the
north and to the south. Pan, of course, can be heard and seen from either perspec-
tive, though the primary “show” faces the judges. It is as if the competitors have
two audiences to satisfy: that of official culture and that of “the people.”
The street celebrations and the myriad of individual parties are a different
matter altogether. Once jouvay literally opens the official carnival in the wee

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• RICHARD SCHECHNER

hours of Monday, the streets are crammed with dancers, drunks, and assorted
masqueraders. But even here there is a big difference between the massed followers
of sound-blasting eighteen-wheelers, hard core “wining” through the night and into
the morning, crossing the downtown judging venue that is located on the street
itself, and the relatively more sedate bands who chip and wine through either Adam
Smith Square or onto the Queen’s Park Savannah stage (this venue tends to differ
from year to year).
If we consider only the period from Sunday to Tuesday night before Lent, what
we have, in practice (and therefore what needs to be better theorized), are at least
two masquerade carnivals running simultaneously and often intermixing with each
other: Carnival 1 focuses on the official stages and competitions and Carnival 2
erupting in the streets and permeating the many private parties and more hidden
venues that have been filled with carnival revelry for many weeks, dissolving the
boundaries between inside and outside, private and public, the church calendar and
the “real” calendar of celebration.
Carnival 1 is a climax of intense months of preparation, training, and highly
disciplined behavior leading to hysterical last-minute plans – very much like the
opening of a play where everything depends on the public’s and the critics’ reac-
tions on opening night. Carnival 1 is extremely hierarchical. Internationally known
calypsonians, band and pan leaders call the shots. Everyone appears according to a
pre-arranged sequence and schedule (often enough, dramatically late as the trad-
ition has it). Those in the stands know who the time-tested great ones are, who this
year’s favorites are, and who are ambitious upstarts. Carnival 2 is a letting go of all
that in a deliriously wild, paint- and mud-spattered, actually more dangerously
chaotic playfulness inaugurated in the dark of jouvay and, building on the
momentum gained throughout the carnival season, weaving through to las’ lap.
Before the masquerade carnival begins officially, most of the major competitions
have already been concluded – Panorama champions chosen, stickfighting cham-
pion, calypso and soca monarchs, and masquerade King and Queen of Carnival
crowned, multiple children’s carnivals concluded. Surrounding and in between all
these competing activities are the remnants of “traditional carnival,” the time-
honored figures who show themselves in Woodford Square during the day on
Friday before the official carnival starts, as well as at Victoria Square and other
“traditional character festival” venues. Some of these figures appear awkwardly on
the Queen’s Park Savannah stage. At the same time, these restorations have started
to take root. Children mask as Bats or Burroquites; a few Midnight Robbers can be
heard expostulating. The input of “lovers of the tradition,” such as John Cupid,
abetted by scholars both Trinidadian and foreign, plays no small part in integrating
the old with the new. There is, in fact, a flux of activities and priorities. Supporters
of the “tradition” are valued as much by the promoters of Trinidad tourism as by
those who value the beauty, wit, and historical fetch of figures such as the White
Faced Minstrels or Baby Doll.
One must never forget that Trinidad Carnival is played out on the world stage as
well as on the island. Far from being an eruption of “the people,” it is the signature
happening of an entire nation, the most prominent mark of its culture. And by
means of its carnival, Trinidad continues to make an impression on the world stage
far beyond its size geographically or its numbers in terms of population. Whether
Trinidad Carnival is a great art-form in itself, as mas master Peter Minshall avers,

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• CARNIVAL (THEORY) AFTER BAKHTIN

or whether it is an eruption of popular culture, or whether it is a marketable

performance commodity does not constitute a set of choices but a complex of
probabilities. Trinidad Carnival is all of the above.
The aspect of official carnival – like its counterparts in New Orleans Mardi Gras
or Rio de Janeiro Carnival – includes the active involvement of government, busi-
nesses, and educational institutions who want to understand, broadcast, exploit,
and sell Trinidad Carnival on the world markets – including the scholarship
market. That is, many persons both inside of and beyond Trinidad want carnival
to be “attractive,” both as entertainment and as a focus for serious scholarly work.
Oil and natural gas are depletable resources, but carnival is forever. This global
approach to carnival – its treatment as a cultural resource to be exploited as you
would any other marketable resource – is part of the postmodern phenomenon of
intellectual property, which assigns an economic value to the creation, ownership,
and buying and selling of information.
It is from this perspective that we must understand the desire to restore the
traditional characters. I am among those who strongly support such restoration.
But I am also keenly aware of the tensions marking such a preservation and
restoration. The past is restored in order to assure a future of carnival diversity.
What carnival was is posited as being performed within what it is and what it
ought to become. Carnival needs to be contemporary but it also needs to be old-
fashioned. It needs to include the formal competitions, the displays of the big
bands and masks, even as it needs also the wild street excesses and the much more
delicate exposition of the traditional characters. It needs to satisfy up-to-date
desires as reflected in the most advanced technologies, but it also needs to “remem-
ber” and replay its past, its honored originary traditions. It is precisely at this
juncture that the desires of scholars and promoters of tourism coincide. Only if
Trinidad Carnival includes all of the above can its supporters truly claim it is
“authentic.” And, of course, by including all of its components Trinidad Carnival
will appeal simultaneously to many different kinds of publics, both domestic and
foreign. It will be, in short, a better product.
Can the five key aspects (or themes) of Trinidad Carnival be explained by a single
theory? The five aspects are:
• hybridity
• competition
• hierarchy
• inversion
• playing on the world stage.
Don Handelman and David Shulman suggested that play or playing could be
theorized from two perspectives: top-down and bottom-up. Top-down playing
is based on the Sanskrit-Hindu notion of maya-lila, a concept meaning that the
whole world exists as the playing of the gods.
In such a cosmology, the presence of the ludic is what may be called a top-down idea.
Here, qualities of play are integral to the operation of the hierarchical cosmos, from
its very apex, throughout its levels and domains. In this regard, to be involved in
conditions of play, to partake of the qualities of play, is to be in tune with cosmic
processes and their self-transformations. To be in play is to reproduce, time and again,

9
• RICHARD SCHECHNER

the very premises that inform the existence of this kind of cosmos. [. . .] It is worth
noting that in cosmologies where premises of the ludic are not embedded at a high
level of cosmos, and are not integral to the workings of cosmos, the phenomenon of
play seems to erupt more from the bottom. Bottom-up play means that the ludic is
often formulated in opposition to, or as a negation of, the order of things. This is the
perception of play as unserious, illusory, and ephemeral, but it is also the perception
of play as subversive and as resisting the order of things. [. . .] Bottom-up play has
deep roots in monotheistic cosmologies. In related societies, the bottom-up entry
of the ludic into routine living is often a battle for presence, a struggle over space
and time devoted to their practices, and a confrontation over legitimacy, apart from
those special occasions and places that indeed are set apart. So, play is often perceived
to lurk within the interstices and spill over from the margins. Although the effortless,
quicksilver qualities of play are always the same, the ontic and epistemic statuses
of these qualities differ radically between cosmologies that embed such qualities
at the top of the cosmic hierarchy and cosmologies that locate such qualities nearer
the bottom.
(Handelman and Shulman 1997: 44–5)

Playing, pretending, masking, or taking on different forms or appearances is

what the gods do all the time. The ever-changing forms of things and experiences
are all “plays” in both the theatrical and the playful senses. The whole cosmos
is a playground. From the top-down perspective, carnival is celebratory but not
rebellious. The “gods” are the various authorities and their official instruments.
They more than permit carnival; they encourage and indeed depend on it. Carnival
1 is a top-down set of events.
To some degree an African–South-Asian cosmology prevails over the European
–Judaeo-Christian. Or, perhaps, in a paradoxical conundrum each contains the
other, the Afro-Asian including and being included by the Euro-Christian. During
Trinidad Carnival what the gods do all the time ordinary people are allowed to do,
or cannot be stopped from doing, or are urged to do – for a brief time. Yet, even as
the people play, they are controlled by the authorities; their playing is channeled
according to what the authorities wish carnival to express and represent. Of
course, such control – especially when drunkenness and giddiness are let loose – is
potentially dangerous. The top can lose control; the bottom – Carnival 2 – can
suddenly surge outwards and upwards.
This outward/upward surge is bottom-up playing. Bottom-up playing is more the
Bakhtinian mode of rebellion, the mockery of authority, a freedom from con-
straints. Trinidad Carnival is both top-down and bottom-up playing. Carnival’s
deepest springs are the tensions between top-down and bottom-up playing. The
top-down predictable structured set of events is always on the verge of collapsing
into bottom-up chaotic unending creativity. Or is it the other way round? Is it that
the predictably bottom-up Euro-Christian pre-Lenten “permitted” carnival may
suddenly be transformed into an Afro-South-Asian never-ending cosmos-at-play?
Which will it be, Trinidad Carnival asks, top-down or bottom-up? Each kind of
playing wants to prevail over the other; but each needs the other. When successful,
the result is an ongoing creative tension between the top-down and the bottom-up.
Let me further complicate matters theoretically speaking. Trinidad Carnival
presents a peculiar situation, and perhaps not one that would be anticipated – given

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• CARNIVAL (THEORY) AFTER BAKHTIN

that the Europeans were the enslavers and colonizers. But I see in the intense
competitions, the stickfighting, the trance-inducing rhythms of pan, the public
displays of power-as-play Afro-South-Asian kinds of public social behavior.
Contrastingly, the drunkenness, the rejection of work, the rebelliousness, and the
inversion of social roles I see as European. I am not referring to who the performers
are, but to the structure of the performing itself. Of course, it is not so simple. To
put it more bluntly: the official competitions, the formal parades across the Queen’s
Park Savannah stage, the emphasis on a clearly demarcated hierarchy, the way the
carnival dominates the press during carnival season, the participation of the Prime
Minister and other top government officials, these are top-down activities and their
structures and origins ought to be sought in African practices firstly and Asian
practices secondly. The street playing, even jouvay itself, are bottom-up playing
whose structures and origins ought to be sought in European practices.
It gets complicated because, for example, while on the street, band members may
be acting bottom-up, once the band displays itself on the stage, where it will be
judged, the participants shift performance mode and play top-down. If you have
ever played, you know when you get close to the stage, the section leader says,
“Okay now jump this way, make sure you know where you are going, that everyone
is going to be watching you! When you are off the stage, hey, then you can let go.”
People are very flexible, they can play more than one kind of role in a very short
stretch of time.
Finally, let me note that Trinidad Carnival is more intercultural than multi-
cultural. Multicultural is where every culture performs in its assigned place. In New
York, for example, there is St Patrick’s Day, a Korean Day, a Caribbean Festival,
various feast days for specific Roman Catholic saints, Purim in Crown Heights, etc.
Trinidad Carnival as it has developed from Harlem earlier to Brooklyn these days
has become part of New York’s multicultural agenda. Intercultural is different. It is
where cultural practices are obliged to share the same time-space. In this situation,
things do not fit together neatly. There are tensions and ongoing (if sometimes
non-conscious) negotiations, like sharing space and air in a crowded elevator. By
deeming TT Carnival intercultural I mean it does not elide or alleviate differences
but boldly displays and highlights them. These differences occur on all levels –
individual, neighborhood, top-down/bottom-up, competitive, collaborative, and
generic (steel band is different than calypso is different than mas is different than
stickfighting is different than traditional characters . . .). What makes Trinidad
Carnival such a stupendously energetic and “global” event – culturally and person-
ally comprehensive – is its ability not only to tolerate but actually to raise to high
consciousness and put into play, in the actual practices of Trinidad Carnival, the
performances of these differences.

1 [Editor’s note]. The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, established at Independence in 1962 from
the former British colony of Trinidad and Tobago, will be collectively referred to in this chapter
as TT. Trinidad Carnival, which evolved throughout the nineteenth century, was not exported to
Tobago until the twentieth century; in form and substance it remains Trinidad Carnival.

11
TIME OUT OR TIME IN?
THE URBAN DIALECTIC OF CARNIVAL
Milla Cozart Riggio

Despising . . . the City, thus I turn my back. There is a world elsewhere.

Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 3.3.134–5

In his chapter in this volume (“Carnival (theory) after Bakhtin”), Richard

Schechner identified “hybridity, competition, hierarchy, inversion, and playing on
the world stage” as central aspects of Trinidad and Tobago Carnival. In so doing,
he differentiated between so-called democratic and non-democratic societies, past
and present concepts of play, and cultures with a cosmic sense of the ludic and
those without. Such distinctions are basic to understanding the function of festivity
in general and carnival in particular in any given society. By examining what carni-
val affirms rather than what it negates and focusing on its essentially urban nature,
both as a European pre-Lenten festival and as an African-influenced celebratory
ritual throughout the Americas and especially in Trinidad, this essay augments
Schechner’s argument.
More than a festival, carnival (from Italian carnevalare, literally “removal of
meat”) was in its European origins a period of ritualized conflict and celebration
identified with the pre-Lenten period between Christmas and Ash Wednesday.1
Thus celebrated at the crossroads between winter and spring, indulgence and
abstinence, death and rebirth, work and leisure, so-called civilization and what is
perceived as savage or “wild,” carnival has always licensed the crossing of many
kinds of boundaries – between classes or estates, genders, races, ethnicities, care-
fully guarded geographical territories or neighborhoods.
From its first recorded instances in the twelfth century to the present, carnival
history has been inseparable from the processes of urban expansion and capital
development that led to the Industrial Revolution, the colonial and postcolonial
plantation histories of the Americas, and to the nascent post-national globalism of
the early twenty-first century. During the European Renaissance when establishing
continuities with pre-Christian Greece and Rome was an important priority, carni-
val was erroneously traced to Greek and Roman celebrations, such as the Dionysia,
Lupercalia, and Saturnalia, festivals to which carnival may in certain respects be

13
• MILLA COZART RIGGIO

analogous but with which it has no verifiable historical links and from which it
differs in essential respects.
Carnival celebrations have always been distinguished by time and location.
Historically, European carnival traditions have been strong in France, Spain,
Italy, southern Germany and the southern areas of the Netherlands, primarily
though not exclusively in Catholic countries. Venetian masks embody the Italian
commedia dell’arte spirit. In Spain, carnival was and still is primarily a village event.
In France, elite aristocratic masquerade parties, especially at the Paris Opera,
and large public balls often outside the city had by the eighteenth century set the
tone for aristocratic and popular carnival, which maintained a strong tradition
of street masking (see Kinser 1990). Hans Sachs’s sixteenth-century Fast-
nachtspiele, or comic carnival plays, reflect the Burgher character of Protestant
Nuremberg.
Though literally hundreds of “carnivals” are chronicled in contemporary
England, almost all of them out of the official carnival season, ranging from
autumnal Guy Fawkes carnivals in Somerset to the August West Indian festivals
across the island (see Connor and Farrar in this volume), carnival as such never
fully reached early England, which has only scattered records of Shrove Tuesday
masquerading (alluded to in Norwich, 1443). However, carnival can be linked to
the season of masquerade balls and plays that began at Christmas and carried
through Shrovetide leading up to Ash Wednesday (see Introduction to Part II in
this volume). In its broader sense, carnival can also be linked to the Feast of Fools
or the Boy Bishop and to warm-weather festivities such as May Day or midsummer
games and St John’s celebrations as times of license, revelry, masquerading, often
associated with the social inversion that is but part of the carnival story.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, carnival emerged in the Americas.
Though individual carnivals differ as much in the so-called “New World” as they
do in Europe, carnivals throughout the Americas have encoded the processes
of cultural resistance and assimilation (at times annihilation) that constitute the
complex colonial and postcolonial history in areas ranging from Cuba to Brazil,
Uruguay, and Louisiana (especially the cities of Mobile and New Orleans). As
in earlier Europe (e.g. fifteenth-century Ferrara), masking was often allowed in
American plantation cultures only in the days leading up to Ash Wednesday. Thus,
Emancipation festivals of the street – as for example the cannes brûlées (canboulay
or cane burning; see Elder in this volume) harvest ritual in Trinidad – were
celebrated as carnival rites, often alongside the Governor’s ball, house-to-house
visits, or other European-style celebrations. Contemporary carnivals of the
Americas often reflect African influences, as in the Samba schools of Rio, the
calinda and calypso of Trinidad, or the St James the Apostle vegigante processions
in July in Loiza, Puerto Rico. At times, they subtly encode interactive relationships
between indigenous peoples and colonial/postcolonial cultures, as for example in
the Murgas of Uruguay (see Remedi 1996, 2004).
As in the development of carnival in Europe, the carnivals of the Americas –
positioned in the margins between the past and the future – both resist and assimi-
late a broad range of folk traditions and disparate cultural influences reflected in
the ethnic intermixtures of its celebrants (Amerindian and Asian as well as African
and European; see chapters in Part I of this volume). By creating a diaspora of
its own, in cities ranging from Toronto, London (Notting Hill), Tokyo, Brooklyn,

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Boston, Miami and fifty-odd other US, English, and European cities, with influ-
ences in Asia and Australia, West Indian Carnival has added a new chapter to the
carnival story (see Part IV of this volume).
Despite their independent history, carnival masquerades in the Americas involve
many of the same traditions and emblems as those of earlier Europe: phallic
symbols such as the Roman nasos longos et grossos in formam priaporum sive
membrorum virilium in magna quantitate (noses long and great like priapuses or
male members of an enormous size; Burchard 1502, see Twycross and Carpenter
2001; similar noses are attested in Fastnachtspiele in Germany), mud masking,
satirical songs that mock authorities (Venetian or Florentine canti carnascialeschi,
Spanish picardía, Trinidad calypso), wild man masking, and animal masks as well
as fancy masquerades. Cross-gender dressing and transvestism characterize both,
as does the presence of the grotesque (Bakhtin’s “laugher of the marketplace”). In
Caribbean-based carnivals, playing royal has a more serious, powerful, and often
beautiful significance – reflecting African notions of masking and festive play –
than the parodic concept of the Carnival King might imply in European festivals
(see figures Intro.1–3). But the essence of carnival remains its inherent capacity to
appropriate spaces and transgress boundaries in order to manifest and celebrate
aspects of human community.

TIME OUT OR TIME IN?

From the perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin, Victor Turner, and other twentieth-
century theorists, carnival is a liminal festival that reverses social hierarchies during
a circumscribed period of release, enthroning and then scapegoating temporary
carnival monarchs (see Bakhtin [1968] 1984, Turner 1988, Burke [1978] 1994; see
also Schechner in this volume). By taking “time out of time,” i.e. suspending what
is regarded as “normal” time, carnival is thought to temporarily release its revelers
from all that really matters in the world. As stereotypically portrayed, the Carnival
King is the figure imagined in 1559 by Pieter Bruegel in The Fight Between Carnival
and Lent: lecherous, gluttonous, parodic, and obese – fattened for the kill after a
short reign (see figures Intro.1 and Intro.2). This carnival subverts through parody
or as epitomized by wildness of many kinds – devils, demons, furred or feathered
Amerinidan or African warriors – threatens dangerously.
Indeed, this description is not essentially wrong. In burlesques, parodies, and
satirical songs or skits, carnival provides a stabilizing vehicle for critiquing social
authority and civic pretension. Moreover, carnival does partially ally itself with
that which is dirty, bestial, or mythically primal: feces, mud, menstrual blood are
parodically worn or demonstrated in many carnivals. Carnival “dirt” has both a
sociology and a mythos. Carnival devils, for instance, are simultaneously characters
of resistance to authority and emblems of primal essence: Trinidadian “molasses
devils” recall the cane burning on the plantations of the nineteenth century, evoke
the earth itself as that substance from which humanity emerged and to which it will
return, and embody the mutinous energy of forces mythically arrayed against
so-called civilization.
Nevertheless, despite its subversive elements, to describe carnival as liminal
(“time out of time”) is to see it as a photographic negative defined by the dark
shadow of what it displaces rather than by the positive images of what it affirms.

15
• MILLA COZART RIGGIO

Intro. 1 Pieter Bruegel, detail of Carnival King from The Fight Between Carnival and Lent.
Photograph courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; published by permission.

16
• TIME OUT OR TIME IN?

Intro. 2 In its display of pleasures, Trinidad Carnival provides a parallel to the obese Carnival King
image. The parallel here recorded is accidental; the man in the photograph is waving a flag for a
small band on a truck, not a carnival king competitor. Carnival Tuesday, 1997. Photograph by Pablo
Delano.

17
Intro. 3 “Playing royal” – Carnival Queen costume emphasizes grandeur and beauty. Carnival, Port of Spain, 1996.
Photograph by Pablo Delano.
• TIME OUT OR TIME IN?

Carnival’s primary source of energy – and this has a lot to do with its flexibility –
is located neither fully in inversion nor in affirmation but in the tension between
subverting and affirming, or, put another way, in its dialectic between civilized
respectability and vagabondage. By expressing the tension between that which is
regarded as respectable, often embodied in civic and urban infrastructures
(town hall, corporate centers, policing authorities, the church as an institution,
the workaday world), and community (the family with its many rites of passage,
neighborhoods, carnival-producing societies, Krewes, or camps; see Table 1 below),
carnival may be said to affirm the village within the city. By privileging leisure
over work, it recalls pre-industrial social rhythms. By affirming the power of
imagination and fantasy against the logic of reason and by resisting the tyranny
of clock time in favor of an organic and seasonal temporal flow, carnival offers
what Goethe called “der Menschen wunderliches Weben” (the wonderful texture of
humanity; quoted in Catannés) – the “confusion, chaos . . . pushing, pressing, and
rubbing” not only of the neighborhood marketplace but even more potently of the
extended family, street festival, or artist colony as an alternative to the efficiency of
the producing, industrializing world.
Carnival is, thus, characterized by paradox and contradiction. Its lifeblood flows
from competition; it revels in the potential danger and threatened violence of
massing in public places or at sensitive social margins. And yet, it manifests
community. Its masks reveal identity as much as they conceal it. Indeed, in the
Americas the festival itself was often a disguise for emancipation celebrations
masked as carnival (see Introductions to Parts I, II, and III, Brereton, Elder, and
Lovelace in this volume). By calling basic bodily functions to parodic attention,
carnival reaches the human spirit through the flesh, fueled by too much food,
too much drink, and too much sex. Its feasts include rich and fatty foods such
as pancakes and sausages (in Koenigsberg in 1583 butchers carried a 440-pound
sausage in procession; see Twycross and Carpenter 2001). It releases the spirit of
intoxication inherent in aesthetic creativity and communion with fellow revelers
as much as in its free-flowing alcoholic libations. Though contemporary carnivals
are sometimes celebrated in seasons other than spring (particularly in northern
climates in mid or late summer), the festival retains its link with fertility, licensing
otherwise forbidden sexual freedom, even as its feasts affirm and reinforce com-
munal sharing.
Part of the carnival paradox – and one of its main boundary crossings – is its
positioning between pre-industrial, traditional cultural norms and highly indus-
trialized contemporary settings. Modern carnivals, despite their many particular
distinctions, collectively evoke the world of so-called “traditional” communities
which, in the words of French sociologist Roger Caillois, live “in remembrance
of one festival and in expectation of the next” (quoted in Burke [1978] 1994:
179). Despite nineteenth-century attempts to link carnival to agrarian origins
(epitomized by the Grimm brothers and Frazer2), carnival – though seasonal –
is neither agrarian nor essentially rural, even though many of its rituals com-
memorate harvest practices, such as slaughtering of fatted cows or pigs or
Caribbean cane-burning ceremonies. Centered in villages (Eastern Europe,
Spain), towns or settled regions (Bavaria, southern Netherlands, Bahia in
Brazil, the island of Trinidad), and cities (Venice, Rome, Paris, Cologne, Nice,
Nuremberg, New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Port of Spain), it is at base an urban

19
• MILLA COZART RIGGIO

festival, its history associated with the history of the cities with which it is largely
identified.
Carnival is not only often in cities, it is in some respects also “of” the city.
Grounded in antithesis and opposition, its driving engine is competition, often
with territorial implications. The festival ritualizes, sublimates, and sometimes
overtly threatens violence, often in defense of territory. Early carnival “bands”
in Trinidad were, essentially, paramilitary groups, “bands” in the sense of terri-
torial street gangs, rather than performing groups, defending individual turf,
primarily as determined by city streets: Henry Street, French Street.3 Fighting to
protect urban spaces bounded by city streets, or taking over city or town squares,
“clashing” or competing for artistic primacy are – like striking and massing
in protest – urban activities, functions of cohabiting with others in a densely
populated area.
Other aspects of urbanity in carnival include: its size and noise, its multiplex
character (pan, steel drums, calypso, folk dance, carnival plays, street festivals,
elite masquerade balls), its density and its intensity. In Trinidad, carnival has also
appropriated discarded objects of urban industrialization: wheel hubs, used as
percussive instruments in the “engine room” of steel orchestras; the discarded
American oil drums used to create the one new acoustic instrument of the
twentieth century, the steel drum. And, most recently, the highly controversial
use of the big truck, the eighteen-wheel semi-trailer flatbeds on which are mounted
the electronic bands (David Rudder and Charlie’s Roots; Byron Lee and the
Dragonaires) or dee jays who blare soca into the streets, in a thundering, driving
rhythm that shakes houses. Such is not a country sound (though it has been
imported to small village squares all over Trinidad).
In other ways, however, carnival does not initially seem to belong to the “city” as
we usually think of it. By affirming the values of neighborhood and community,
carnival may be said in a sense to bring the village, in the form of the neigh-
borhood, the ghetto, the family, the community, into the city.4 Carnival, thus,
affirms not only the restorative value of festivity but also a concept of cultural and
individual history, seen not as the story of public institutions, centralized govern-
ments, systems of law and order, governing economies, or even the conquering or
the subjugating of peoples, but as the encoding and imprinting of genetic, cultural,
and artistic legacies, of cultural memory embodied in dance, music, and fantasy.
Carnival in Trinidad offers any individual on the island an opportunity, in the local
parlance, to “play yuhself,” to find the authentic link between the person and the
disguise, which as often as not leaves the face painted but unmasked.
To put it simply, carnival does more than invert hierarchy or provide a socially
stabilizing, temporary outlet or relief. The festival manifests what Shakespeare
called “a world elsewhere,” a festive world of community, when community is
allied with artistic expression manifest in public celebration. As one of the basic
antinomies of culture, community/neighborhood always fights city hall, the local
against the central, private versus public, family versus government. Every time
a local organization tries to get money for neighborhood community centers,
or fights to restore art and music to public education, it is affirming an important
aspect of the carnivalesque.
To be sure, carnival allies itself with festive consumption, rather than with thrift:
Eat, drink, be merry and spend in a day what you may have worked a year to save,

20
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says the carnival reveler. And the prudent among us often cluck our tongues and
say, reproachfully, “But what about shoes for the children and bread for the table?”
No one condones poverty or neglect of the family. To the extent that the hedonism
of carnival may lead to such, its excesses are dangerous as well as attractive. But the
antithesis between consumerism and festivity, capital accumulation and festive
generosity, which is at the base of carnival, underlies many other social oppositions.
Those who have forgone large salaries, possible wealth, prestige, and visible social
position in order to produce theater, build masks, make films, or in some other way
to dwell in the world of the arts espouse values that carnival takes over the road
“make to walk on carnival day” to affirm in a festival mode (quotation from
Kitchener calypso).
Carnival is not always benign in claiming its space and affirming its values.
Indeed, without at least the threat of danger and a whiff of potential violence,
carnival loses its potency. Contemporary carnival violence is ordinarily ritualized
and sublimated in informal or organized competitions. However, the festival has
periodically provided the occasion for actual violence, sometimes as clashes
between organized groups of carnival celebrants, sometimes as social protest
arising from class or race conflicts (Romans in 1580, Trinidad 1881, Notting Hill,
London, 1976). Santiago de Cuba, celebrated each July, was used as a cover for an
unsuccessful Castro rebellion in 1953, and, when Castro came to power in 1959
under the cover of a raucous New Year’s Day celebration, carnival was officially
canceled (though subversively celebrated) for nearly forty years.
Though it revels in excess and may be subversive, carnival is not Saturnalian. Its
celebration is typically governed by a process of restraint – order within license –
amidst the excesses of consumption and revelry. It has its own sense of limits that
stops far short of the true Dionysian. In celebrating sexuality and fertility,
carnival affirms both the power of the libido and its inevitable result – the birth of
children (often, it is said, by producing them; the birth rate is presumed to go up in
carnival cultures nine months after carnival). Nevertheless, carnival has its own
rules, expressed through a sense of internal decorum that limits excess and creates
courtesy, even in the midst of what is called the bacchanal of its celebration.

“WOULD HE WERE FATTER” – THE FESTIVAL WORLD VS. THE WORKADAY WORLD

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look . . . Would he were fatter . . . He loves no
plays . . . hears no music; seldom he smiles . . . Such men are dangerous.
Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, 1.2.194–205

Like linguistic dialects that were once thought to be debased versions of a master
tongue but are now recognized as having their own internal structure, the carnival
ethos may best be understood in holistic terms, as part of what we may call
the “festival world.” Its epistemology and concepts of space, time, and value
resemble those often associated with festivity in writers such as Shakespeare. They
systematically contrast to values of earnestness and sobriety commonly identified
with what we may call “the workaday world,” especially in post-industrial capitalist
economies. The virtues of carnival, which reside partly in the healing power
of laughter, play, and fantasy, are, thus, embedded in an internally consistent
structure, which may be diagrammed as in Table 1.

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• MILLA COZART RIGGIO

Table 1 The festival world vs. the workaday world

The festival world The workaday world

Concepts of time: seasonal Concepts of time: clock time

Movements of the ocean Regularity
Diurnal – light Punctuality
Agrarian (mango, puoi) Steady measurement
Sense of the eternal Temporal materiality
Social structuring Social structuring
Family Urban infrastructures
Neighborhood Government
Community Policing agencies
Church as folk worship Church as institution
Significant social spaces Significant social spaces
Yards Factories
Streets as festive arenas Streets as thoroughfares
Domestic spaces Corporate/government offices
Public space, freely accessed Regulated public spaces
Epistemology Epistemology
Imagination, intuition Rationality, logic, logical cause and effect
Activities (vocations) of value Activities of value
Rites of passage Money making
Art in all its forms Commerce, trade, manufacturing
Music, painting, costume-making Consumerism
Poetry, drama Law and legal processes
Imaginative creativity Progressive development
Resistive/constructive play Obedient behavior
Transgressive behavior
Essences Essences
Spiritual, metaphysical Material
Fantasy, magic Science
The primacy of the unseen Phenomenology

Trinidad Carnival, the self-styled Mecca of Caribbean celebrations, exemplifies

the notions of time, concepts of space, sense of community, and epistemology
associated with the carnival world.

“Trini Time”

Time is basic to carnival theory. The concept of “liminality” (the word meaning
threshold) is usually glossed as time taken out of “real” time, a period of sus-
pension when the time clock stops. Conversely, what is called “Trini Time” – which
grants a license to disregard punctuality – is the defining feature of ordinary “time,”
not only in Trinidad but under other names throughout much of the Caribbean.
The term is often used deprecatingly, in a tone of apology, without recognition of

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the extent to which this simple phrase denotes a concept of time more fluid and
organic but no less “real” than that measured by the regularity of a clock.
The concept of a “time clock” is derived from modern industrial development,
particularly of nineteenth-century factories that required workers to be simul-
taneously present on the job. Modern weekends are a way of regulating labor by
keeping it at work during the week. The weekend, as an extension of nineteenth-
century Sabbatarianism, replaces festival and holy days as times of work stoppage.5
In this sense, the clock is and has always been the enemy of the festival world. Trini
Time, which disregards this clock, is antithetical to “production” in the modern
industrial sense of the term.
Trini Time – carnival time – is in itself a concept of time, with its own value,
not the absence of time or the suspension of time, but another way of measuring
time – the time scheme if you will, of carnival’s world elsewhere. As such, it is
“measured,” if at all, not by the clock but by the sun and the moon, the tides, the
seasons in a culture that still marks the seasons in festival terms, moving from one
festival to another, often cross-celebrated by peoples of diverse religions and races.6
How, one may ask, can the time scheme of an urban festival in Trinidad, a gas,
oil, and ammonia producing nation that is among the most industrialized of the
Caribbean, recall the pre-industrial, seasonal rhythm of the sun and the moon?
What have harvest festivals to do with the city? In this very contradiction lies
the essence of this paradoxical celebration as well as one key to the character
of Trinidad as a carnival culture. Just as Charles Dickens, the most urban of
English nineteenth-century novelists, used parables of “sowing,” “reaping,” and
“garnering” to affirm the value of imagination and fantasy as educators of city
children in Hard Times, so too carnival recalls the cyclical rhythms of the seasons
not as an echo of a lost way of life but as a reminder amidst the bustle of modernity
that there is a present cosmic temporality that supersedes the manufactured time
scheme of the factory world. It is again a way of affirming within the urban context
an alternative rhythm of life.
This festive sense of time resists the rational assumption that time marches along
a never-varying path. In contrast, from this point of view time varies with human
perception, rather than being controlled by the merciless regularity of the clock.
Ask any school child waiting for recess, and you will hear that not all minutes are
the same length, no matter what the clock says. Time, which “drags” and “flies,” is a
flexible commodity, to be valued, used, and spent in individual ways. Pace is
important, and it varies. For many Trinidadians, for instance, the pace of life
is speeded up, rather than slowed down, by carnival. For those working in mas
camps where costumes are made – all but the “factory” camps where costumes are
completed and neatly hanging in rows weeks before carnival – the pressure to
produce carnival forces both paid workers and volunteers to work long nights,
often “around the clock.” As any performer knows, intensely focused, sleep-
deprived concentration releases a level of energy and, epistemologically, a dif-
ferent kind of perception than one finds within the regularity of a controlled and
methodical routine: dangerous on the production line or in the hospital emergency
room, but effective for the artist.
What is important about Trinidad as a carnival culture is or has until very
recently been the fact that such a notion of time is not limited to the period of the
festival itself. One of Trinidad’s most influential and longest-lasting journals,

23
• MILLA COZART RIGGIO

the Trinidad and Tobago Review, published continuously since the mid-1960s by
distinguished economist and cultural activist Lloyd Best under the auspices of
Tapia House, has for years appeared in editions named for the fruit or flowers
of the season: the Mango edition, Puoi, etc. Best has long understood that social
and economic value for a culture such as that of Trinidad ought to adhere in the
potential distinction of a way of life that can incorporate the local into the
national, that uses steel pan as a teaching tool as well as a musical instrument, and
that moves to the rhythm of its own notion of the seasons more than its ability to
rival Venezuelan production of oil or to mimic the industrial output of larger
nations. An understanding of time is crucial to such knowledge. Carnival does not
stop the clock so much as it affirms this fluid and organic, seasonal, festive notion
of time.

Appropriating space

However central time is to understanding the ethos of carnival, space is equally

important – though less readily apparent. Whereas time might because of its
seasonal nature appear to link the festival world somewhat misleadingly with
agrarian rhythms, carnival’s relationship to space can best be understood as a
way of claiming, appropriating, and dominating urban spaces. Notions of time
were long ago associated with festivity. However, the debate about space still
belongs mainly to philosophers, city planners, and urban theorists, who though
they recognize the “physical form of the urban environment,” including its
aesthetic dimensions, as a “central aspect of the social world itself, contributing to
the constitution of the world through every dimension from the economic, to the
biotic, to the aesthetic,” have not dealt directly with the festive appropriations of
space (quotation from Martinez 2001).7
This makes our work a little harder and requires a bit of theoretical background
not necessary to the arguments about time. As the aesthetic equivalent of social
protest, carnival claims city streets and other urban spaces or village squares
not only for the momentary pleasures of play but also implicitly (and for many of
the participants probably unconsciously) to affirm its right to those streets. The
transforming energies of mas link the festival world to social practice, crossing
boundaries, defining territory, marking places as their own in a variety of ways.
Claiming the streets and replacing the corporate and governmental infrastructure
with festive exuberance for a day or two may seem like nothing more than a
temporary inversion of the classic kind. However, by bridging the gap between
the material and the aesthetic and by transforming the space itself, such an
appropriation creates a more lasting effect throughout the culture.
This is to say that just as time can be either linear or variably transformative,
so too space has a cosmic as well as a material dimension, an idea that Cecilia
Martinez de la Macorra, an architect and professor of urban planning, traces
primarily to Henri Lefebvre:
There has been a growing interest in theorizing space over the last two decades, and
the spatial lexicon (border, territory, place, mobility) is now part and parcel of debates
within social theory. Henri Lefebvre’s work The Production of Urban Space marks
the first attempt to bridge the gap between the theoretical (epistemological) realm and

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the practical one; between mental space and social structure; between the space of
philosophers and the space of people who deal with material things. Before him, this
connection presumed to be self-evident from the point of view of the scientific dis-
course was never conceptualized. With this new “knowledge of space” Lefebvre
moved from descriptions and cross sections to a “science of space . . . to discover or
construct a theoretical unity between . . . physical-nature, the Cosmos, mental [con-
cepts of space] . . . and the social. Lefebvre thus gave structure to the epistemological
space, as well as the space of social practice and to the space occupied by sensory
phenomena, including products of the imagination.
(Martinez 2001)

In a world so dominated by the notions of private property and ownership that

we lay legal claim not only to all our own ideas and words but often even to the air
around us, space itself has become one of the contested arenas of modern life:
gaining access to, then appropriating, dominating and finally creating (or “pro-
ducing”) space is – according to urban theorist David Harvey – a vital, ongoing
process. The very transgressive nature of the appropriation may add to its power.
To give a non-festive example, urban squatters, for instance, change the landscape
of the city in just this way, by creating the space they appropriate. Stumbling over
mattresses as one walks through the city changes the nature of the sidewalk and
impacts the surrounding architecture. Similarly though more positively, carnival
transforms the streets it claims as its own.
In Trinidad, where the festival has been appropriated as the signifier of the
nation and is thought to be national, democratic, free, and open, there is no barrier
between the masqueraders on the street on carnival Tuesday and the onlookers on
the sidewalk. Despite sometimes heavy-handed “security guards” hired by profit-
minded mas band leaders to prevent intruders from crashing their bands, the line
between those participating and those watching the festival is consistently blurred.
Indeed, while this massive street festival is boring to watch, it is a mesmerizingly
heady experience to play. The streets belong to the festival – to those playing
mas, who often rove between their own band and those of their friends, and the
thundering semi-trailers and smaller vehicles that carry their music. Such a massive
takeover marks the space permanently.
In contrast, in diasporic carnivals, such as those in Toronto, Notting Hill, or
Brooklyn, there is a much sharper line of division between the maskers who more
normally “parade” through the streets and the watching public (in Toronto an
actual fence separates the two). This line of division reduces or alters the ultimate
impact of the event. The “parade” may own the streets for a time, but always with
the awareness that this is either by permission or, conversely, in a hostile environ-
ment. The audacity of the transgressive appropriation is to some extent limited by
the powerfully countering corporate or ethnic force squeezing the masqueraders –
who are themselves sometimes seen as cultural intruders in territory not their own.
In Trinidad, where carnival is more naturally at home, the appropriation of space
has a somewhat different set of epistemological, spatial, and social dimensions.
Carnival leaves its indelible mark on the spaces it occupies, its aggressive freedom
and domination remembered throughout the year, whereas in cities where it is more
contained and restricted its effect seems more limited, or at least more contested
and controversial.8

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• MILLA COZART RIGGIO

Carnival and community

Carnival involves more than the festive takeover of public spaces. At the heart of
the opposition between the festival and the workaday worlds is the battle between
neighborhood and city hall – the community with its many needs for services
opposing what is normally thought of as the urban infrastructure, embedded in
corporate wealth, government, and institutional religion. Carnival manifests the
power of community within the urban sphere, in festive rather than ideological
terms. Time combines with space in helping to establish the sense of community
within the festive realm.
One of the important aspects of carnival’s allocation of space and time is the
nature of the communities created by or for the festival – and, conversely, the way in
which the presence of carnival impacts the idea of community itself. Pan yards, for
example, where steel bands rehearse, are often community centers, where food and
drink are sold, visitors come to listen to rehearsals, and pannists can hang out as
well as play. In the late 1940s and 1950s and into the 1960s, pan yards were terri-
torial strongholds, replacements in their way for the bands of stickfighters of an
earlier period, defended when necessary by violence. But even then, the yards pro-
vided a haven for young men who sought their identity on the streets (see Bellour
et al. 2002). The yard itself provided a sense of place, an alternative family that
understood the needs of young men at risk better perhaps than their own families.9
For many poor boys, pan provided the only meaningful “time in” in their lives.
The early steel bands not only provided a home and a haven for boys of the
street, but they also brought middle-class boys into forbidden pleasures, often
across class lines. In the inevitable period of rebellion against parental authority
that accompanies the rites of passage to adulthood, sneaking out to play pan
provided a creative world elsewhere for middle-class boys. Taking time out from the
disciplined training of a middle-class home provided constructive, rather than
destructive, time in the pan yard, a training ground for maturation (see Johnson in
this volume). Such training expands horizons, allows independence, and creates
social awarenesses that cross class lines at the crucial stages of adolescence when
youth develops autonomy, separating itself from parents to establish its own
identity.
Calypso and mas, the other two forms of carnival, also create communities. The
pan yard, calypso tents, and mas camps are strongest during the high carnival
season, from January 6 to Ash Wednesday, though they often function all year
round. But the effect of carnival on community in Trinidad is not limited to the
communities that carnival actually creates. It also impacts existing neighborhoods,
communities, and families in significant ways. The United States national, state,
and local governments spend millions of dollars, often unsuccessfully, attempting
to generate a link between art and community. In Trinidad and Tobago, such arts
spring as if from the soil itself: the narrow lanes of Belmont may now house folks
who live more apart from their neighbors than they were once wont to do. Yet,
these small houses still contain home-run businesses, such as tailoring or auto-
mobile repair shops. The neighborhood is internally secured by those who live there
more than by the police. And at the corner of Clifford Street and Belmont Circular
Road, a small steel band thrives each year in hope and expectation, until it falls
silent after the preliminary pan competitions.

26
• TIME OUT OR TIME IN?

Similar small pan yards can be found in Port of Spain, Woodbrook, Diego
Martin and throughout the island; children’s mas camps are set up in front rooms
of tiny houses or elaborate homes. Competitions in both impoverished and affluent
schools train students to write songs, draw carnival pictures, play pan, and develop
a sense of national pride through the festival. Indeed, the Michael K. Hall Com-
munity School in Tobago, which in 1998 won the Better Business Award as the best
small business in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, uses carnival arts as a
thematic center for teaching elementary-aged children the basic lessons they need
to learn: mathematics, reading, social studies.

Epistemology and social value

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your
philosophy.
Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5.166–7

Walking with a friend down Frederick Street in Port of Spain one day, I suddenly
slipped and fell for no apparent reason, badly injuring my foot. A well-known
Trinidadian singer, who came quickly to my rescue, later explained my fall by
saying that he had seen my friend and me generating a force field of energy
through our conversation. We then entered the energy field emanating from the
singer and his companions; while my spirit could handle the intense concentration
of energies, my body could not. And I fell. What was striking to me about this story
was the assurance with which the narrator described what he had seen. As surely as
I myself had seen him as he bent over to help me, he had seen emanations invisible
to me.
Such a story epitomizes the epistemology of the carnival world, which, because it
is centered in imagination and intuition rather than in logic or reason, privileges
things of the spirit over the material or phenomenological. Such an ethos is con-
sistent with attitudes toward time, space, and the creation of community within
carnival. Moreover, the emphasis on imaginative fantasy and intuitive knowing
reinforces carnival’s historical identification with the organic, seasonal rhythms of
the pre-industrial world, even in a modern urban setting. Sociologists have since
Max Weber assumed the link between capitalism and the Protestant work ethic,
with its attendant sense of duty (see Weber 1930, Tawney 1926). Similarly, the
development of modern industrial, corporate infrastructures emphasizes the
material and presumes a rational world ordered by logical cause and effect.
Such is not the carnival world. Indeed, one of the reasons that carnival provided
an important festive vehicle in the Americas for emancipated Africans in the
nineteenth century was the link between the sense of fantasy in the festival and a
powerful, ancestor-based belief in the primacy of the unseen among the Afro-
Trinidadians. Homage to the ancestors cohabits easily with a sense that life is
governed by energies and forces beyond the material. It is no surprise that the Afro-
Creole population in late nineteenth-century Trinidad – that group to which the
origins of carnival as we now know it are attributed – looked more to education
than to capital accumulation, shopkeeping, or property ownership as an avenue of
advancement for their children. Moreover, in a situation such as that of slavery or
its post-emancipation aftermath where the material world is arrayed against one’s

27
• MILLA COZART RIGGIO

culture, limiting advancement in many different ways, achieving through festive

media – through the arts (or sometimes sports) – provides an alternative path not
only to personal satisfaction but also to social recognition.
As in every other area of carnival celebration, production and performance
are not entirely dissociated from each other. Material success lures across the
carnival divide, echoing and continuing the dialectic between the festival and the
workaday worlds that is in itself basic to the very existence of carnival. This is
true in Trinidad, where large mas camps sometimes resemble factories more
than families, steel orchestras are partially seduced by corporate sponsorship,
and calypsonians and soca artists are eager to get their share of the pie of plenty.
Nevertheless, there remains throughout the culture of Trinidad – in keeping with
the carnival ethos – a sense that value finally adheres more in family (especially
extended families) and community than in vocation, in festive celebration at least
as much as or more than in work. Indeed, there is among many Trinidadians an
almost fatalistic belief in cosmic inevitability: “nothing happens before its time”;
“when you reach you reach.”
In such a society, power lies not in multinational corporate wealth but in the
extraordinary range and reach of the culture with its many arts and festivals.
These are hardly limited to carnival; they range across ethnic, religious, and racial
boundaries throughout Trinidad. Many in the culture, particularly the cohesive
Hindu and Islamic Indo-Trinidadian communities, might be offended by the idea
that carnival, which they may see as vulgar and secular, represents an ethos with
which they can identify. However, understood not as a debasement of the human
spirit but as an expression of imagination and fantasy that captures the essential
spirituality of the island, carnival epitomizes the link between festive epistemology
and social value.

CONCLUSION: CARNIVAL AND MARKET FORCES

Of course, the opposition between the festival and the workaday worlds is both
idealized and partial. Carnival is not free from market forces, especially in a nation
such as Trinidad that attempts to market the festival itself as a national product.
The impulse to make money, to mass-manufacture costumes, to develop the sort
of consumerism that would regulate behavior in the name of “decency” partly to
promote profit has from the beginning cohabited with the impulse to transgressive
behavior in carnival. It is this very opposition between respectability and vaga-
bondage that creates the central paradox of the festival and that to some extent
accounts for both its flexibility and its essential urbanity. For all its link to
tradition, its organic and seasonal sense of time, its ability to appropriate and
transform space, its grounding in community, and its preference for imagination
over reason, carnival is not at its base nostalgic. Governed, finally, by the laws of
hospitality, which are always more courteous than the laws of production, carnival
welcomes its revelers to its feast. But the feast itself embodies all the contradictions
and paradoxes of modernity.

28
• TIME OUT OR TIME IN?

NOTES

1 Portions of the opening section of this chapter were previously published in Milla Cozart Riggio,
“Carnival,” an entry in Dennis Kennedy (ed.) Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Perform-
ance, and are used with permission of Oxford University Press.
2 Sir James Frazer in particular was eager to see in carnival the universal agrarian myth of the
burial and resurrection of a god that for him underlay all religions: “We have seen that many
peoples have been used to observe an annual period of license, when the customary restraints of
law and morality are thrown aside, when the whole population give themselves up to extravagant
mirth and jollity, and when the darker passions find a vent which would never be allowed them in
the more staid and sober course of ordinary life. Such outbursts of the pent-up forces of human
nature, too often degenerating into wild orgies of lust and crime, occur most commonly at the
end of the year, and are frequently associated, as I have had occasion to point out, with one or
other of the agricultural seasons, especially with the time of sowing or of harvest. Now, of all
these periods of license the one which is best known and which in modern language has given its
name to the rest, is the Saturnalia . . . The resemblance between the Saturnalia of ancient and
the Carnival of modern Italy has often been remarked; but in the light of all the facts that have
come before us, we may well ask whether the resemblance does not amount to identity” (Frazer
1922, chapter 58).
3 This same kind of rivalry extended to the early steel band movement, when, following World War
II, steel bands were “Bad John” enclaves fighting for their space, a struggle that climaxed in
the 1970 Black Power movement, when all but one steel band in Port of Spain boycotted
carnival in a collective moment of protest.
4 The distinction, basically, is that defined by Victor Turner as “communitas” vs. “societas,” with
communitas that place of communal “flow” that breaks the boundaries of society and is set
against the corporative and centrally governing urban infrastructures, or societas.
5 Sabbatarianism was the practice of isolating the Sabbath (usually Sunday rather than
Saturday) as a day away from work, as a replacement for midweek festivals and holidays. The
practice gained widespread currency during the period of highest industrial development in
the nineteenth century, though in England it is foreshadowed as early as the sixteenth century.
Because the Sabbath itself was often appropriated by evangelical ministers and others as a
day of worship and spiritual reflection rather than play, the effect of Sabbatarianism among
the working poor was effectively to remove (or attempt to remove) almost all vestiges of play
from their lives. Dickens deals with this issue, and also with the contrasting concepts of time,
in Hard Times, when he portrays the churches of his industrial town as “pious warehouses” of
red brick.
6 For a study that focuses on the Trinidadian concept of time, placing it in relationship to
contemporary theoretical debates about the nature of time and its possible variants see Birth
(1999).
7 Theorizing space has been a crucial preoccupation of urban specialists and philosophers of the
last two decades of the twentieth century, just as theorizing about time was in the beginning of
the century (see Martinez 2001). But those dealing with space have not developed theories
linking space to festivity as Turner and others did for time.
8 The history of diasporic carnivals may challenge this rather simplistic opposition (see Part IV of
this volume). Conflicts between various ethnic groups, as for example the Hasidic community
and the West Indians in Brooklyn, are played out partly in the festive arenas of the city. And, in
contrast, there are those in Trinidad who resist the ethos of carnival, from either religious
persuasion or the opposite extreme, a commitment to the ethos of the workaday world.

29
• MILLA COZART RIGGIO

9 The concept of family in this festive setting is extended to include an informal, non-biological
family. Such a concept carries to an extent throughout Trinidad culture, in which nurturing adult
women, such as teachers, are consistently called “Tanti” or “Aunty.” The notion of a “family”
composed of cultural relatives – brothers, sisters, aunties and so forth – is characteristic of
many societies, and especially of Afro-Creole peoples in the Americas.

30
TRINIDAD CARNIVAL TIMELINE
Dawn K. Batson and Milla Cozart Riggio

Encounter and early settlement 1498–1782

1498 – Columbus encounters Trinidad and its Amerindian population.

1530 – Spanish establish limited settlements in Trinidad.

Pre-emancipation era 1783–1837

1783 – Cédula de población allows Catholic colonists and free people of color to
settle in Trinidad. French planters migrate with their slaves to Trinidad, mainly
from other West Indian islands. French planters probably initiate Mardi Gras
Carnival, partially excluding slaves.

1797 – British capture Trinidad.

1802 – Treaty of Amiens formally cedes Trinidad to British.

1806 – First immigration of Chinese indentured workers.

1807 – Abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire.

1811 – Trinidad has largest free non-white population in the British Caribbean.

1834 – Emancipation Act passed in Britain, with stipulation of a five-year “period

of apprenticeship” to last until 1840, when full emancipation was expected to take
place.

Emancipation 1838
1838 – August 1, abolition of slavery. Unrest cut apprenticeship short, with
full emancipation gained August 1, 1838. Cannes brûlées (burning of the cane)
celebrations may have been initiated, later evolving into canboulay, though verified

31
• DAWN K. BATSON AND MILLA COZART RIGGIO

Intro. 4 Map of Trinidad. Photograph provided by Jeffrey Chock.

records are not available this early. The drum trinity – bull, foulé, and the cutter –
provide the rhythm for the songs and dances.

Domination of the skin drum; growth of jamette carnival 1838–81

1840–8 – Canboulay celebrations moved to carnival Sunday night. Immigration
from neighboring islands, Europe, and America. French Creoles appear to be with-
drawing from carnival.

1843 – Carnival limited to two days.

1845 – East Indian and later new wave of Chinese indentured laborers arrive.

1857 – First working oil well in the world outside the Caspian Sea region dug at La
Brea in Trinidad by The American Merrimac Oil Company. Closed in 1859.

1866 – Chinese immigration ends.

1867 – Paria Oil Company formed; oil well dug; produces 60 gallons a week.
Quickly closed down.

1881 – Canboulay riots.

32
• TRINIDAD CARNIVAL TIMELINE

Carnival 1881–1934: tamboo bamboo, emergence of English as language of calypsos;

middle-class influence in carnival; competitions developed
1881–3 – Conflict between the authorities and the canboulay celebrants. Canboulay
riots in 1881.

1883 – Music Ordinance effectively banning the drum, the calindas, and the
canboulay processions.

1884 – Peace Ordinance establishes j’ouvert from dawn of carnival Monday. Indian
Muharram Hosay riots. More rioting at Carnival.

1885 – Tamboo-bamboo bands replace the drums’ boom, foule, and cutter with the
bottle and spoon.

1898 – Process of replacing French Creole with English as language of choice in

lavways well under way.

1901 – “Calypso” accepted as name of music.

1902 – The Oil Exploration Syndicate of Canada strikes oil. Beginning of

industrial production in Trinidad.

1915 – Newly appointed Governor Sir John Chancellor declares intention to

prohibit carnival because of war but does not do so.

1917 – Masking at carnival time prohibited. East Indian indentureship ends.

1919 – “Victory Carnival,” masking permitted; carnival prizes established by the

Trinidad Guardian and Argos newspapers.

1923 – “Sly Mongoose,” a song brought to Trinidad from Jamaica in 1911,

described by the Trinidad Guardian in terms that suggest the beginning of the Road
March style of spontaneously using common melodies for bands on the street,
rather than relying on compositions by the chantwell of each band (Rohlehr
1990: 117).

1934 – Theatres and Dance Halls Ordinance regulates safety features and prohibits
“profane, indecent, or obscene songs or ballads” in theatres and dancehalls licensed
for public entertainment, including calypso venues.

Biscuit tin bands; attempts to “improve” carnival 1935–39

1937 – Labor riots. Tamboo-bamboo bands start incorporating metal cans.

1939 – Trinidad Calypso and Musicians Advertising Association founded by

calypsonians, including Hubert Raphael Charles (Lion), Raymond Ignatius
Quevado (Atilla), Charles Grant (Gorilla), and W. Wilkinson; Trinidad
Calypsonians Union founded; Carnival Improvement Committee attempted

33
• DAWN K. BATSON AND MILLA COZART RIGGIO

reorganization of festival; Alexander’s Ragtime Band comes on the road with

dust bins, cement pans, paint cans, biscuit tins and brake drums. Two to four
notes heard.

War years and aftermath 1940–50

1941–5 – World War II. Carnival suspended, though calypsonians continued to
perform. Experimentation with steel drums goes on in the “yards.” More notes
added to pans and more instruments created. Cuff boom or slap bass; du-dup or
bass kettle, kettle, and later the ping-pong were the main instruments. Pans convex
in shape until 1941 when Ellie Mannette sinks pan to create concave instrument.
Burning of pans to remove chemicals improves sound. VE Day (May) and VJ Day
(August) 1945 bands attract the attention of the public at victory celebrations.

1945–50 – Steelband development: 55-gallon drum now used for instruments.

Larger surface, more notes. Pans still held in one hand and played with a stick held
in the other. Run-ins with the law continue. Red Army band tours British Guiana.

1946 – Carnival resumed after war. Carnival Bands Union led by Patrick Jones
rivals Savannah Carnival Committee, under James H. Smith. Rivalry between
downtown and Queen’s Park Savannah venues continues throughout decade. First
Carnival Queen contest sponsored by the Trinidad Guardian.

1950 – Steelbands clash; Invaders and Tokyo, Casablanca and Invaders. Steelband
Association formed.

Developments in period leading up to independence 1951–61

1951 – Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra formed to go to Festival of Britain.
Eleven of the top ping-pong players from Trinidad. Members: Sterling Betancourt
– Crossfire, Belgrave Bonaparte – Southern Symphony, Philmore “Boots”
Davidson – Syncopators, Andrew de la Bastide – Hill 60, Orman “Patsy” Barnes –
Casablanca, Winston “Spree” Simon – Tokyo, Dudley Smith – Rising Sun,
Ellie Mannette – Invaders, Granville Sealey – Tripoli, Theo Stephens – Free
French, Anthony Williams – North Stars. Lieutenant Griffith of St Lucia
Police Band – Musical Director. Toured Britain and France. Chromatic range
established.

1952 – Steelband classes (soloist and orchestra) included in the Trinidad and
Tobago Music Festival.

1953 – First national Calypso King competition, replacing competing king

contests.

1956 – Anthony Williams introduces pan on wheels.

1957 – Government establishes Carnival Development Committee. The Mighty

Sparrow boycotts the Calypso Monarch competition in protest against disparity in
prizes given calypsonians and the Carnival Queen.

34
• TRINIDAD CARNIVAL TIMELINE

1958 – Steelband Association officially registered. George Goddard, President.

Trinidad Guardian cancels Carnival Queen show, ending its sponsorship.

1959 – Carnival Queen show sponsored by the Jaycees. Eric Williams snubs Queen,
in favor of newly established Queen of the Carnival Bands.

Musical war and peace 1962–70

1962 – Independence within the British Commonwealth. First Prime Minister of
Trinidad and Tobago – Eric Williams of the People’s National Movement (PNM)
party. Steelband Association now National Association of Trinidad and Tobago
Steelbandsmen. Anthony Williams introduces the Spider Web pan, forerunner of
fourths and fifths pan.

1963 – Launch of the Panorama Competition. Establishment of National Steelband

with government aid. Errol Hill Dimanche Gras plays to Celebrate Independence
(1963–1964).

1965 – Bertie Marshall introduces amplified pans.

1969 – North Stars perform with acclaimed pianist Winifred Atwell “Ivory and
Steel” recording.

1970 – Prime Minister Eric Williams meets with steelband leaders. Greater
corporate sponsorship of bands. Black Power demonstrations.

A decade of innovation and invention 1971–79

1971 – National Association of Steelbandsmen becomes PanTrinbago. Bertie
Marshall invents the Bertphone – combined tone control and amplification
(lost in fire in 1980). The Carnival Queen contest ended because of Black Power
demonstrations of previous year.

1975 – Rudolph Charles of Desperadoes introduces the quadrophonic pan. Also

introduced chromed pans, nine bass, triple tenor, rocket bass, and aluminum
canopies. DJs begin to supplant steelbands on roads and in parties. Steelband
Music Festival in decline. Ras Shorty I records Soul Calypso Music.

1977 – Ras Shorty I names “the soul of calypso” music SOKAH.

1979 – Panorama boycott.

Consolidation and expansion 1980–2002

1980 – Denzil “Dimes” Fernandez creates bore pan. Grooves of pan bored by small
holes giving a brighter sound. Steelband Music Festival reintroduced – as “Pan
Is Beautiful Too,” staged at Jean Pierre Complex. School Steelband Festival
introduced. Number of innovations in pan world.

35
• DAWN K. BATSON AND MILLA COZART RIGGIO

1986–8 – Jimi Phillip introduces collapsible pan stand, porta bass.

1991 – National Carnival Commission Act no. 9 created the National Carnival
Commission, replacing the Carnival Development Committee.

1993 – First Soca Monarch competition established with Superblue as winner.

1995 – Election of United National Congress (UNC) candidate Basdeo Panday

as first Indo-Trinidadian Prime Minister; A.N.R. Robinson swings three Tobago-
based National Alliance for the Republic (NAR) seats to the UNC after a tied
election to create majority. UNC comes in with a theme of “national unity.”

1996 – First Chutney Soca Monarch competition established. Primary oversight

of carnival placed in the hands of the three interest groups: PanTrinbago; Trinbago
Unified Calypsonians’ Organization (TUCO); and National Carnival Bands
Association (NCBA), rather than the National Carnival Commission.

1998 – Trinidad and Tobago National Steel Orchestra formed.

2000 – World Steelband Festival held in Trinidad with bands from Europe, North
America, the Caribbean, and Trinidad and Tobago.

2001 – Election tied between PNM and UNC. President Robinson appoints Patrick
Manning of the PNM as Prime Minister for an interim period.

2002 – Election gives clear majority to PNM, with Patrick Manning as Prime
Minister. In November, challenge to the National Carnival Bands Association
(NCBA) under the leadership of Richard Afong (of Barbarossa) created by new
“Carnival Improvement Committee” formed by leaders of large mas bands. The
National Carnival Commission asserts its control of the “parade of the bands” on
carnival Tuesday. Panorama prelims for the first time held in the panyards rather
than the Queen’s Park Savannah.

36
Part I

EMANCIPATION, ETHNICITY, AND

IDENTITY IN TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO
CARNIVAL – FROM THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY TO THE PRESENT
1
THE CARNIVAL STORY – THEN AND NOW
Introduction to Part I1

Milla Cozart Riggio

Fact evaporates into myth. This is not the jaded cynicism which sees nothing new
under the sun, it is an elation which sees everything as renewed.
Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History”

The history of Trinidad Carnival is essentially the history of the peoples of Trinidad
– embedded in the stories of conquest, enslavement, resistance, and indentureship,
and in commercial, cultural, and ethnic exchange among the many who were
forcibly brought to the place or settled there after Columbus first named the
island Trinidad in 1498: Spanish, French, English, Africans, (East) Indians, Irish,
Germans, Corsicans, Chinese, Syrians, Portuguese, Canadians, Lebanese, and
probably more. Also present are the vestigial influences of the estimated forty
thousand indigenous people who lived in the island as of 1500, from five known
groups (Nepuyo, Aruaca, Shebaio, Yaio, and Garini), with some evidence of the
Warao from the Orinoco region and “increasing incursions of Island Carib, the
Kalipurna or Califournians” (Elie 1997: 3). It is not clear exactly when enslaved
Africans were first brought to Trinidad, but trading in human lives remained legal
from the mid sixteenth century to the British Abolition Act of 1807, and was
carried on illegally for several decades after that. Public records indicate that most
of the enslaved were Igbos, Mandingoes, Yorubas, Asantes, Hausas, and Alladas
from West Africa and Kongos from the Congo Basin (Public Record Office,
Slave Registration Returns T1, 501–3, cited by Liverpool 1993: 11; see also Elder
1969: 5–6).
The Spanish controlled Trinidad from 1498 until 1797, when Governor Don José
Maria Chacon surrendered to the British General Sir Ralph Abercromby, with
Spain formally ceding the island to the British in the Peace of Amiens in 1802.
The Spanish never fully inhabited the island. After almost three hundred years of
neglect, in which Trinidad – valuable mainly for its location some six miles off the
coast of Venezuela – served primarily as a jumping off place in the persistent search
for El Dorado, the fabulous city of gold (not only for the Spanish but for others
such as Sir Walter Raleigh (see Naipaul 1969)), the 1873 Cedula of Population

39
• MILLA COZART RIGGIO

invited Roman Catholic settlers who were willing to swear an oath of allegiance to
the Spanish to settle in Trinidad. Catholic planters were given land according to the
numbers of persons in their households, including the enslaved: white planters
received approximately 30 acres each, with half as many for each laborer; African
and free coloured planters were given roughly 15 acres each, again with half as many
for each laborer. In this way, large numbers of French Creole planters and African
workers came to Trinidad from neighboring Caribbean islands in the late eight-
eenth century, along with free coloured planters and some African estate owners,
many of whom were rewarded for fighting with the British in the war of 1812.
Faced with the problem of administering a largely Roman Catholic French-
speaking population that, if given home rule, could easily vote their conquerors
out of power, the British fashioned for Trinidad (later including Tobago) a Crown
Colony system of government, by which these islands – the only Crown Colony in
the Caribbean – were ruled from Britain. This political, social, and religious climate
was already complicated by the presence of many peoples. Into the rainbow of
merging cultures others quickly migrated.
Spanish Capuchin monks from Aragon had established the Mission of Santa
Rosa de Arima by the mid eighteenth century (Elie 1990: 2). The Germans, who
had attempted to bargain Trinidad away from the Spanish in 1680, came in
force with Abercromby in 1797, leading the attack on the Laventille hills (De Verteuil
1994: 1–2). In 1802, twenty-three Chinese laborers arrived, with approximately 190
following in 1806 in anticipation of the 1807 abolition of slave trade (Millett 1993:
17). Many of these early immigrants returned to their homelands, but they were the
vanguard for later arrivals; most of all, they helped to set the character for an island
that at no point in its history has been dominated by one clear hegemonic authority.
Against this background is set the story of the emerging African presence in
carnival. The British Act of Emancipation was enacted in Trinidad on August 1,
1834, with an “apprenticeship” period that was to last until 1840. Unrest shortened
the period, and full emancipation came throughout the British West Indies on
August 1, 1838. With Africans fleeing the sugar plantations for the city, new labor
had to be found. After an attempt to import free Africans from other islands as well
as from Africa had failed to meet the labor need, (East) Indian indentured laborers
– mainly Hindus and Muslims from Uttar Pradash, Bihar, and south India – were
brought in to work the estates. Between 1845 and 1917, approximately 117,000
Indians came to Trinidad.
As a result of the interlaced patterns of migration and mission activity, and the
persistence of African, Hindu, and Islamic cultural rituals, twenty-first-century
Trinidad has a constellation of religions as well as a kaleidoscope of cultures:
Roman Catholicism (French, some Spanish, along with others, such as Irish priests
and nuns), Anglicanism, Hinduism, Islam (primarily Sunni), the Church of
Scotland, the East Indian Presbyterians, African religions (initially called Shango,
later Orisha), Spiritual Baptists and the emergent Pentecostals and fundamen-
talist Christians – all with their own religious rites and festivals, celebrated by
Trinidadians who in festivity cross both religious and ethnic boundaries, playing
and praying together: Siparia Mai – thousands of Hindus pay homage annually to
a Black Madonna in a Catholic church on Good Friday in the borough of Siparia
in the south central part of the island; Divali – the YMCA, a Christian organiza-
tion, burns its name in lights on the Brian Lara promenade in Port of Spain as one

40
• THE CARNIVAL STORY

of the sponsors of Divali, the Hindu fall festival of lights; Hosay – a Shi’ite funereal
event in St James mainly by devout Muslims – is performed in the fishing village of
Cedros primarily by Hindus and Christians. Despite such openness and cross-
cultural sharing of festivals and holidays, Trinidadians do struggle to maintain a
sense of ethnic as well as cultural identity, in a society in which politics themselves
are to a large extent based on race and religion.
Crucial to the evolution of carnival has been the conflict among the elites of
Trinidad, particularly between the Anglican bureaucracy that ruled the country
and the Roman Catholic planters who owned many of the estates. The Cedula of
Population of the 1780s had been designed largely to maintain the primacy of the
Roman Catholic faith. Initially, the British reinforced the Catholic dominance,
particularly during the period of Sir Ralph Woodford’s governorship (1813–28).
Determined to protect Spanish laws and customs, Woodford selected the site for
the Catholic, as well as for the Anglican, cathedral. The British governor assumed
a role as an officer of the Roman Catholic Church in Trinidad. However,
this situation changed. In 1844, an Ecclesiastical Ordinance replaced the Roman
Catholic Church by the Anglican Church, thus making the Anglican – often called
the English Catholic (or EC) – Church the official religion of Trinidad until this
ordinance was rescinded in 1870. During much of this period, Anglican priests
were the only legal religious officers of the island; Catholic sacraments (such as
marriage) were periodically unrecognized by British authorities.
Under British domination, there were effectively two – or if one counts the
British as a Creole population, three – Creole traditions in Trinidad: the French
Creole, of planters who had mostly been born in the Caribbean (Martinique, etc.),
and the African Creole, created by enslavement. As carnival became associated
with African-based street celebrations, a common Catholic sympathy as well as
antagonism toward British rule evoked a partial tolerance among the French
Creole elites for the canboulay revelry of the African Creole population, who after
all largely spoke Afro-French patois and were Catholic-influenced if not converted.
Such tolerance was on the whole not shared by the British, and often not by the
industrious Bajans (Barbadians) whom the British – partly in need of an Anglican,
English-speaking underclass to serve its clerical, educational, and policing needs –
encouraged to enter the underpopulated island in the second half of the nineteenth
century as policemen, teachers, and clerks.

CARNIVAL – THEN

Reminding us that “history” is the inevitably biased construction of those who

configure our reading of the past, usually in their own image, Trinidad Carnival
emerges as much from the mythology as from the history of the island. Docu-
mentary records, enmeshed in varieties of cultural mythos, weave an evolutionary
narrative that merges two parallel festivals: first, that imported from Europe,
primarily by French Creole planters, and including the fancy English governor’s
carnival balls, together with some street masking of elite and possibly plebian
participation; second, that which emerged from the African Creole emancipation
ritual that came to be known as cannes brûlées (canboulay).
Even this simple opposition must to some extent be qualified. Canboulay,
the ceremony celebrating the burning of the cane (cannes brûlées), may help to

41
• MILLA COZART RIGGIO

explain the difficulty. On the one hand, this ceremony is thought to re-enact the
extinguishing of illegal cane fires by “bands” of slaves with torches and drums in
the night, as a form of emancipation celebration transferred at some point from
August 1 to the two days before Ash Wednesday (when masking was allowed).
From this perspective, canboulay is purely a festival of resistance, celebrating
freedom and independence and linked to the notion of the reveler as vagabond. On
the other hand, the cane was also burnt – as it still is today – as part of the harvest
ritual. From this perspective, canboulay may be thought of as a harvest festival that
in the pre-emancipation period may well have allied the planters with their field
hands. Resistance existed, of course, and was feared even in its absence, but there
was also at times a sense of collective destiny by a set of peoples who assimilated
patterns of behavior and even moral codes that they simultaneously abhorred.
The narrative of nineteenth-century carnival has to a large extent been put
together by connecting the historical dots established by relatively few eyewitness
accounts (e.g. Bayley 1833; Borde 1876; Day 1852; Carmichael [1833] 1961),
newspaper editorials that frequently complain about the vulgarity of street
performances, and colonial records. Those who have attempted to find the figures
buried in this sometimes scattered data are in themselves key shapers of the
carnival story: Andrew Pearse, Andrew Carr, Daniel Crowley, Barbara Powrie,
Errol Hill. In this volume, anthropologist J.D. Elder and historian Bridget
Brereton, who helped to establish this historical reading, describe the structure
of African canboulay celebrations and narrate a history in which carnival shifts
from the elite celebrations of the first half of the century (from which the Africans
and sometimes the free coloureds are to a large extent supposed to have been
excluded) to the “jamette carnival” of the streets that emerged during the second
part of the century, leading to what one commentator called the “legalized
saturnalia of revenge” on the part of the police and especially the Barbadian Police
Chief Captain Baker in the canboulay riots of 1881 (New Era, November 28, 1881),
the interlocking histories of carnival and the (East) Indian Muharram celebration
of Hosay, especially in the 1880s, and the middle-class takeover of carnival during
the remainder of the century and into World War I. More and more complex
competitions developed between the wars.
With reference to nineteenth-century carnival, this narrative has been both
reinforced and complicated by the research of scholars such as John Cowley and
the Afro-centric perspectives of historians such as Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool
and Ian Smart. For instance, one must take into account the Afro-Creole fiddle-
playing, drumming, probably territorial dancing societies of the early nineteenth
century, with internal hierarchies ultimately reflected in the notions of what
it means to be a “Carnival King” or “Queen” (see, for instance, Cowley 1996: 8,
17–18, 60; Liverpool 1993: 199–209; 1998: 30–1; 2001; Rohlehr in this volume).
The linear evolution is further troubled by the criss-crossing currents of history,
the push and pull from one governor’s reign to another, the infusion of Barbadians
as teachers and policemen, and perhaps most of all by the awareness of what it
means for an oral culture to have its history recorded by the literate: the deep divide
between those describing the events and those whose experience is being described.
In this regard, Pamela Franco’s essay on the spectacular decorative quality of
clothing styles and headdresses identified as “Martinican” – worn not in emulation
of the ladies of the plantation culture, as has so often been assumed, but out of

42
• THE CARNIVAL STORY

a daily sense of personal pride – qualifies our assumptions about the presumed
inversive nature of “dressing up” as a carnival style among the so-called “jamette”
women.
The unfolding picture is not yet clear. No one has fully evaluated, reconciled, and
moved beyond the existing historical narratives – or considered those narratives
within the perspective of specific ethnic populations. In particular, the story of the
(East) Indian presence in Trinidad Carnival is yet to be explored from within
the diverse Indo-Trinidadian community, though the essay by Burton Sankeralli,
reprinted in this volume from The Drama Review (TDR) of 1998, does outline
some of the major issues presented within the context of a particular sensibility
and ritual structure. The late Carlisle Chang, in another essay reprinted from TDR,
outlines but does not assess the significant Chinese presence in carnival since the
1920s. The roles of the Syrians, the Portuguese and the many ethnic “others” in the
history of carnival have not been documented.
Much remains to be done. Among the many issues we are as yet unable to factor
into the history of carnival is a clear understanding of the role of education in the
nineteenth century, particularly among the African Creole population. What are
the implications, for instance, of John Jacob Thomas – the son of freed slaves who
was fluent in French patois (which he calls Creole), English, French, Latin, and
Greek – at age 29 in 1869 writing The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar, a
language that he characterizes as “framed by Africans from a European tongue,”
the grammar of which he formulates from “bellairs, calendas, joubas, idioms, [and]
odd sayings” (see Thomas [1869] 1969, Buscher: Introduction, iii, “Preface,” v)? Or
of the existence of The Trinidad Sentinal, an African-owned newspaper in the late
nineteenth century (see Cowley 1996: 54)?

CARNIVAL – NOW

Since it was initially marketed as a tourist attraction by the newly established

Carnival Improvement Committee, headed by the Mayor of Port of Spain and
chaired by Captain A.A. Cipriani in the late 1930s (see Rohlehr 1990: 295, 328),
carnival has been increasingly claimed as the signature event of the emerging
nation. Sustaining this claim required cleaning up the festival, eradicating its vul-
garity, violence, and danger in the name of “decency” and respectability. In the
words of Eric Williams in 1962: “Play mask, stay sober, and do not misbehave”
(Trinidad Guardian, February 3, 1962). In this vein, Panorama, first established to
celebrate Independence in 1962, began the process of marketing steel drums as the
national instrument of the newly independent Trinidad and Tobago, but at the cost
(it is claimed) of taming the fiery “warriorhood” of the street-fighting gangs that
formed many of the first steelbands. Errol Hill, who dramatized the link between
nationhood and carnival in scripted Dimanche Gras plays in 1963 and 1964,2 like-
wise struggled to bring a sense of decency and decorum into the carnival arena.
Not that this impulse was new. It was, in fact, a characteristic remnant of Victo-
rianism, epitomized by L.A.A. De Verteuil, who in 1884 blasted female members of
“bands notoriously formed for immoral purposes” for “singing . . . as if in defiance
of . . . all decency” (De Verteuil [1858] 1884; quoted in Cowley 1996: 75). Indeed, the
dialectical opposition between respectability and vagabondage lies at the heart of
an event that is as competitive as it is celebratory. The vitalizing tension of Trinidad

43
• MILLA COZART RIGGIO

Carnival results partly from the vulgarity that opposes even as it aspires to join so-
called “civilized society.” The struggle has a complex dialectical duality. Partly, it
expresses the human need to resist authority, to “get on bad,” to idealize the outlaw
who has the nerve to break the rules. Such need is compounded in situations of
racial or class oppression, in which those who make the laws impose them on
groups or cultures other than themselves. In such situations, the outlaw becomes
more than mythic lawbreaker. Almost inevitably masculine, he is also an avenger of
wrongs. This energy, which operates throughout carnival, along with the more
general impulse to “free” oneself from disciplined and legal constraints, associates
the local history with the broader human impulse. It is no surprise that even in the
United States during the masquerading season of 2002, among the most popular
adult Halloween masks was that of Osama bin Laden.
On the other hand, the motivating impulse is also to obtain respectability:
very few vagabonds treasure their poverty or their pariah status; mostly, they
want to be respectable, to be enfranchised, to have a stake in the system they take
so much pleasure in metaphorically (and sometimes literally) mooning. Once
they have achieved such status (as for instance when steel drums ceased to be
the forbidden pleasure of youth or the enclaves of the bad johns and became the
highly marketed national instrument), then some other form of vulgarity inevitably
arises to replace that which has been subsumed. The history of the festival –
from the mid nineteenth century, when street vendors with the glint of profit in
their eyes first began to defend carnival, to the present – is the continuous story
of commercialization, assimilation, and nostalgia for a purer, if sometimes
rougher past.
Part of this story that remains is the resistance to, as well as embracing of, the
festival. There are those who still see it today as many saw it in the nineteenth
century as degenerate, racist, and wasteful. These include many fundamental Chris-
tians, those who signed a petition in 1995 to try to force Peter Minshall to change
the name of his mas band Hallelujah on the grounds of sacrilege; many devout
Muslims and Hindus resist what they see as the debauchery of the event and the
waste of money and national resources. Often those who feel this way take their
children camping on the beach or in town centers for the two days of carnival to get
them away from the festival, even on the television sets. This side of carnival is
almost as complex as the event itself, since it involves resisters from many different
walks of life, religions, and social positions. Even for the detractors, however, the
period of carnival is a time away from the regular daily routine. For some, the event
has a kind of historical and cultural significance that the – to them – “profane” and
debauched street festival lacks: teach it in the schools; boycott it on the streets is
one answer. For others, the event itself represents the failure of the island to achieve
its potential either morally or socially. This critique, too, is part of the ongoing
story of carnival.
What may be new – and dangerous in a different way – is that contemporary
vulgarity in a carnival marketed as the culture-bearer of the nation does not in the
main originate among the huddled masses. It is a function instead of the global
commercial success of a festival now heard round the world. The new “vagabonds”
– if you wish – are those who defy respectability not with mud, rags, or whips but
with glitter, glamour, partial nudity, bikini costumes (as, for instance, the five to
eight thousand masqueraders that each year swell the ranks of middle-class mas

44
• THE CARNIVAL STORY

bands such as Poison) or, alternately, with loud, loud “party” music that for the
most part eschews social commentary in favor of celebrating sexuality and youth,
intruding “foreign” rhythms into the local soca. How carnival will vitally assimilate
and move beyond this Philistinism – which may, of course, be one source of future
energy (see, for instance, Guilbault in this volume) – is the story unfolding at the
beginning of this new century. Some parts of it will be told in the later chapters of
this book.

THE CARNIVAL SEASON

Despite its economy driven by oil and natural gas and its position at the economic
center of the West Indies, Trinidad still marks its seasons with festivity, moving
from festival to festival. And among its many celebrations – Eid, Divali, Ramleela,
the Muharram Hosay, Phagwa, Easter, Christmas with its two months of Spanish
parang music – carnival is the biggest and most engulfing. Violence – once a serious
threat – is largely sublimated in a myriad complex of competitions, divided among
the sometimes overlapping three main divisions, each with its own organizing
union: Masquerade (under the auspices of the National Carnival Bands Associ-
ation, which in 2002 came under serious attack), Calypso (Trinbago Unified Calyp-
sonian Organization), and Pan (PanTrinbago). For the past few years, these interest
groups replaced the National Carnival Commission as the primary organizers
of carnival events, thus to a large extent increasing the sense of chaos that has
always attended the structuring of a festival that will not allow itself to be
contained.
It is impossible to pin Trinidad Carnival down. Always on the edge, always
threatened by commercialization, the festival spins on, twisting and shifting in ways
that are neither predictable nor essentially comforting. Nothing characterizes car-
nival more than its perpetual sense of change. Mostly, whatever one says today will
not be true tomorrow. The essence of the event is ephemerality and endless renewal
– death and rebirth of many kinds. Though in the past some old-time traditional
characters took pride in storing and reusing their costumes, currently competitions
require annual reconstruction: the costume must have been built, the calypso or
soca composed the year it is performed.
Nevertheless, there is an almost predictable carnival season that stretches from
Christmas to Ash Wednesday, a time determined though not limited by the Chris-
tian calendar. Pre-Lenten carnival is traditionally a Catholic, not Protestant festi-
val, French or Spanish, not English. The British have few, if any, specific carnival
traditions. However, English gentry of earlier centuries customarily filled the
Christmas to Lenten period with gay indoor revels, including masqued balls, plays,
dances, and so forth. This not only made it easy for English governors such as Sir
Ralph Woodford annually to host a carnival masquerade ball but may well have
helped to establish the extended carnival season that exists even now in Trinidad.3
In the broadest sense, this is the festival that never sleeps: it officially ends sharply
at the stroke of twelve midnight that signals the beginning of Ash Wednesday and,
for the planners and masmen and women, starts again the following morning.
However, though costume designs are drawn, mas bands launched, calypsos and
socas written and recorded throughout the year, the “carnival season” begins on or
around Three Kings Day, just as the Christmas season fades out.

45
• MILLA COZART RIGGIO

During the “hotting up” weeks of January, footfalls across the island quicken
with expectation. Mas bands that have not already launched do so; pan yards come
alive; calypso tents are opened; radio stations play soca more steadily; carnival fetes
are held. The season is on. The latent energy explodes during the Panorama prelims
that ordinarily take place some two weeks before carnival itself. For this event the
red metallic north stands, which are constructed annually, stand ready to rock with
the energy of their prelim magic4. From that day through the next two weeks,
competitions are held at a dizzying rate – stickfighting, soca, calypso, pan in all its
forms, traditional character festivals, King and Queen competitions, massive chil-
dren’s carnivals – and the frenzy of preparation continues in mas camps hastening to
prepare for the street theater of carnival Monday and Tuesday.
Carnival itself – the event for which the nation stops for two full days despite the
fact that it is not even yet an official holiday – is inaugurated by a proclamation
from the Mayor of Port of Spain in the pre-dawn witching darkness of Monday
morning: jouvay with its elemental mud masking ushers in the dawn and then gives
way to the street festivals of Monday and Tuesday. The season itself has a madden-
ing kind of elasticity, somewhere between four and eight weeks long. This para-
doxical festival begins its high season on a somewhat fixed calendrical date (roughly
January 6) and ends as a movable feast, keyed to the paschal full moon, expanding
and contracting with the rhythms of this natural cycle.
Finally, it is impossible to track the contours of such an event that simul-
taneously enacts the mythos of unity – “All ah we is one” – and affirms the reality
of separation and otherness. Trinidad Carnival reflects the energies of a nation that
is entrepreneurial, individual and contrary and, at the same time, assimilative,
intercultural, and buoyant. The massive carnival of today continues in some ways
to radiate the energy of its myriad mythical and real origins as an intrusive annual
festival invasion taking over the “streets make to walk on carnival day.”

NOTES

1 Portions of this introduction, particularly the opening pages, were adapted from Riggio,
“Resistance and Identity,” first published in Riggio (1998a), now out of print.
2 The history of the Dimanche Gras show is in itself an important chapter in the unfolding of
carnival. It was begun in 1946 as a showcase for the then new Carnival Queen contest, which
was held until it was canceled in 1971, following the Black Power movement of 1970, before
being renewed briefly in the later 1970s and again in the late 1990s. The issues of class and race
in this event, and the relationship between this beauty queen contest and the Queen of the Bands
costume competition (established 1958), help to chart the rise of carnival as the signifying
cultural event of the new republic (see Riggio 1999, n.p.). Dimanche Gras has been the host
venue for a variety of competitions, as well as varied carnival revues. The first effort to create a
sustained theatrical event as a cultural tribute to carnival came with Callaloo 1952, directed by
Jeffrey Holder. Hill’s Independence Carnival productions followed in this vein but with more
formal drama (see Hill 1972: 105–13). Currently, the Dimanche Gras show, during which the
Calypso Monarch and the King and Queen of the carnival bands are customarily crowned, sells
out each year; it attracts a posh, mature audience, but it lacks the dynamic youthful intensity of
such events as, for example, the Soca Monarch competition.
3 Though French Mardi Gras is a two- or three-day festival (as it appears also to have been in
some French colonial areas as, for instance, in Martinique), in other French-influenced areas,

46
• THE CARNIVAL STORY

such as Louisiana, the carnival season stretched from Twelfth Night (January 6) to Ash
Wednesday, as it does in Trinidad. As early as 1833, according to one commentator, “bacchanal
diversions” were extended “for the space of a month or two” (Port of Spain Gazette, January
22; quoted in Cowley 1996: 25). The festival would recurrently be limited to two days through-
out the nineteenth century. But the natural season – apparently accepted by the British as well
as the French – runs from Christmas to Ash Wednesday.
4 From 2002 the preliminary competition has, through at least 2004, been held in pan yard,
rather than the Queen’s Park Savannah.

47
2
CANNES BRÛLÉES
J.D. Elder

INTRODUCTION

Cannes brûlées (canboulay) as a Black artistic institution in Trinidad and Tobago

should be defined as a multimedia symbolic ceremony in which its psychological
messages take various forms and are manifested in a variety of artistic behaviors –
music-making, poetics, vernacular languages, dramatics, dance, and other acrobatic
gestures. Each of these media is anchored in the matrix of the African cultural
traditions brought into the Caribbean by migrants mostly from West Africa and
can be traced back to specific tribal origins whose cultural traces are still evident in
contemporary Black Caribbean society, as in zoomorphic masks like the Cow/Bull
dancers, Dragons, Serpents, butterflies, giant spiders, Burrokeet.
Music, theatre, handicraft, poetry, mythology, superstitions, religion, dance:
each and every one of these features carries a dramatic “message” about the per-
formers themselves, their worldview, belief system, philosophy of life. But above
all, what the Africans are projecting is their aspiration for true liberty, freedom to
pursue their own goals as human beings and not to be hampered in this effort by
the White planter class or the European colonial rulership which regarded them as
inferior or even savage and without civilization. This is the burden of the message
of cannes brûlées. Whether we examine the songs or the dance, the theatre or the
costumes worn by the actors, this eloquent declaration is symbolized – in satire,
burlesque, in pornographic expletives and double entendre, in half-hidden verbal
dualisms – and only the Africans are enabled to understand the “message” because
the very medium is the message.
The Europeans who definitely did not know the medium missed the message over
and over. They traditionally felt that something was wrong. The communication
lines seemed fouled but, as in Greek tragedy, though they felt something awful was
about to overcome them, they could do nothing to escape. Riots and rebellions
followed and, finally, the abolition of colonial rule in 1962, more than a hundred
years after the abolition of slavery in 1838 – one century of Black strategy and
struggle.

48
• CANNES BRÛLÉES

Canboulay is basically a ceremony symbolizing cane burning that Africans of

Trinidad devised to celebrate their “freedom from slavery” in 1838. The exact date
of its original enactment and the prime movers are completely forgotten. We can,
however, historically pinpoint this Black artistic pageant only from 1881, when the
British administration in Trinidad decided to stamp it out, to suppress its annual
celebration in the streets of Port of Spain using the police force to restrict its
performance. Canboulay can be examined as: first, a Black resistance ceremony;
second, a recreational pageantry of Africans; third, an anti-Catholic celebration of
freedom from slavery and the origin of the present carnival; and fourth, a popular
street theatre exhibiting African-style dance, theatre, and music. It can also be
regarded as a boast – nonmoralistic exhibitionism – a duel between the European
moral codes and the African canons of freedom, which in essence it was.

ELEMENTAL FEATURES OF CANNES BRÛLÉES

The elemental features of cannes brûlées are highly expressive of the symbolical
functions of this ceremonial protest and resistance of European domination. These
features include:
• enacting the African pageant inside the White-dominated carnival (trespassing)
• processing through the streets at dead of night
• satirizing the ruling class in popular song
• beating African drums – a symbol of savagery
• performing African-type dancing condemned by the White moralists as profane
• carrying lighted torches in a wooden city
• blowing cow horns and conch shells at dead of night
• burlesquing the Europeans’ lifestyle, as in Dame Lorraine
• arming with bois for dueling (stickfighting) on the streets.
The White upper class, according to L.O. Inniss, condemned the Africans (as
pagans) for entering carnival, a Christian religious ceremony. On this basis, cannes
brûlées was deemed a savage pagan ceremony – in a Christian Catholic society. This
to them was heresy for which Africans were persecuted cruelly for years.
In an effort to extinguish this African saturnalia (as the Whites deemed can-
boulay), it was decided to outlaw carnival. In 1884, a royal commission, under Sir
Robert Hamilton, outlawed cannes brûlées in Trinidad. But kalinda (bois) con-
tinued, and the Africans promptly took over carnival. Caliso singing and kalinda
dueling continued. Finally, African-type carnival, highly organized in “tents” –
crude theatres erected in several points of the city of Port of Spain – sprang up,
and carnival became African in terms of art, craft, music, and theatre. The White
upper-class capitalists such as Sa Gomes invested heavily in carnival, but the
prime movers in carnival had become all Africans – singers, dancers, shantwells
(chantuelles), and organizers. By 1940 Trinidad calypsonians (such as Raphael
DeLeon (Roaring Lion), Neville Marcano (Growling Tiger), Phillip Garcia (Lord
Executor), and Raymond Quevado (Atilla the Hun)) were in the US recording their
music and making history, and cannes brûlées had become just one type of mask in
the Trinidad black carnival.

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• J.D. ELDER

STRUCTURE OF CANBOULAY

The structure of canboulay reflects its psycho-sociological function, i.e., resistance

and protest against White racism and social alienation in Trinidad. The major
features include:
• iconoclastic objects, e.g. the lighted torch, the bois, the African drums (ka), the
bull-mask
• the mass processional – the show of strength
• the simulation of Africans royally – kings, queens, princes
• the musical march – the blowing of cow horns and conch shells
• the satirical songs – the vitriolic Black poetics shouted in French Creole
• the performing of erotic pornographic dances and postures
• the physical defiance within the “encounter of resistance.”

CANBOULAY: BASIS OF CONTEMPORARY CARNIVAL

Canboulay included:
• shantwells – song leaders, composers, etc.
• organizers of “tents” – crude theatres
• mask-makers and craftsmen/women
• music makers and organizers of song groups
• entrepreneurs in the entertainment industry.
Out of this body of organizers and recruitment of talent grew the contemporary
carnival movement with “factories” that annually organized “bands” – people who
“play mask [mas]” each year. These are “mask [mas] camps,” which operate all
through the year, holding shows at which calypso singers appear in regular con-
certs to exhibit new songs – originally composed and entered at carnival time in
competitions for valuable prizes. Thus, out of the despised canboulay has risen the
national carnival of Trinidad and Tobago. The traditional features still exist:
• massive music bands
• street processing, i.e. jumping-up
• stage competitions in singing
• stickfighting (kalinda/bois)
• costume competitions and Queen shows
• masquerades (Devils, Dragons).
Canboulay has become socially approved by the European element and, though
once suppressed and despised, is now recognized as art by all classes. Trinidad
Carnival is celebrated each year in foreign countries wherever there are Trinidadian
Africans – Brooklyn, Toronto, London, Germany.

WOMEN’S ROLE IN CANBOULAY

In music and music-making, females formed a major part of the chorus led by
the shantwells, who were always male. Several instances exist where the drum
team included females. For example, Congo women played the marli doundoun
(Tobagonian drums made of olive oil containers) for their quelbe dance in Tobago.

50
• CANNES BRÛLÉES

Lennox Pierre: Canboulay Riots

an interview by Tony Hall

The structure of the canboulay bands has long been a matter of conjecture and
uncertainty. The following description and illustration were provided by musician and
cultural researcher Lennox Pierre (1990) in an interview by Tony Hall, partly from an
eyewitness account and from Edric Connor’s descriptions. The interview was produced by
Christopher Laird for “Late Night Lime” on Trinidad and Tobago Television.
Hall: Can you give us a quick view of the actual Canboulay Riots?
Pierre: J.D. Elder and I were fortunate to meet an old lady [Frances Edwards] in
1954 at 87 years of age, and she gave us this eyewitness account of the Canboulay
Riots. What had, in fact, happened was that Captain Baker, who was the
Superintendent of Police at the time, had attacked the canboulay revelers in 1880
and taken away their torches. And in 1881 the canboulay revelers prepared for
Baker. According to the eyewitness account Edwards gave, the canboulay revelers
from districts outside Port of Spain came into Port of Spain. And you had a Neg
Jardin stickband that took the length from Medical Corner at the corner of Park
Street and Tragarete Road, [i.e.,] Park Streets and St Vincent Streets, right down
St Vincent Street into Park Street. When twelve midnight struck that year, 1881, the
canboulay revelers moved out from the Medical Corner, and the band moved in
darkness and without drums. And the old lady told us how there was an old patois
woman at the front of the band. And she called out “Mssrs, Captain Baker et tout
l’homme” (and all his men), “au cour de la rue” (at the corner of the street), just
about where All Stars [steel orchestra] have their headquarters now. And at that
signal the fellows light their torches and start up the drums and went for Baker.
The story that she gave me and that Brierly said in Then and Now [1912] was that
the canboulay revelers swept the ground with the police.
Hall: But this wasn’t all men, was it? Wasn’t there a role for women as well?
Pierre: A canboulay band, canboulay revelers moved with their women and children,
too, but as I understand from [Edric] Connor’s account, the Neg Jardin band was
surrounded by stickfighters [see figure 2.1]. Each stickman had a flambeau in his
left hand, and that left hand was interlaced with the right hand of the man next to
him. The women and children were at the back with [some spare sticks and] some
other kinds of weapons, stones and all.

During breaks in kalinda tournaments the females, according to Frances Edwards

(1954), sang early original caiso (cariso, kaliso) in the ring. These songs were based
on kalinda in structure, rhythm, language (French Creole). The original calypsos
were sung in the minor mode, i.e. pentatonic.
As regards organization, females were members of the cannes brûlées. Several
of them were stickfighting in their own right or wives of batonniers. Notorious
stickfighting kalinda women existed. In Trinidadians’ popular canboulay history,
noted in the early nineteenth century, Sarah Jamaica, Boobull Tiger, Techselia, and
B-Bar the Devil are called matador women.
On parade the canboulay band comprised several categories or ranks of roles –
musicians (drummers), warriors, shantwells, and ammunition-bearers. These
were mostly females bearing spare weapons (sticks), food (rum, pelau, etc.), and,
according to L.M. Fraser (1881), Chief of Police, stones and bottles for war with

51
• J.D. ELDER

Fig. 2.1 Diagram of Stickmen with flambeaux. Excerpt from unpublished letter to Lennox Pierre from
Edric Connor (1953); courtesy of J.D. Elder.

the police. Women’s roles included performing first-aid services for wounded fight-
ers and mourning for those killed in action or arrested by police. Females’ roles
included, as today, the bearing of the banner (flag) of the band. Females were the
“out-riders” of the canboulay band. They were the spies who gave the signals
of safety from police interferences and harassment of wanted badjohns (e.g. Joe
Talmana) and jailbreaks.
On Carriacou island in the Grenadines there is in the Big Drum Dance an “Old
People” (ancestors) kalinda played by two women armed with large white towels.
They enact a “battle” of Right against Wrong, the steps corresponding to the bois
kalinda of Trinidad. The music and drumming are by females (Elder 1966).

This essay is reprinted from Milla Cozart Riggio (ed.), The Drama Review, 42 (3): 38–43 (1998),
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

52
3
THE TRINIDAD CARNIVAL IN THE LATE
NINETEENTH CENTURY1
Bridget Brereton

The late nineteenth century was crucial for the development of the Trinidad
Carnival. The period opened with carnival taken over almost entirely by the
jamettes, the underclass of Port of Spain. The attitude of the upper and middle
classes was one of disgust, fear, and hostility, with some exceptions. Between 1879
and 1884 a determined effort was made by the authorities to purge all the features
which they considered objectionable, by force if necessary. The climax was reached
with the riots at the carnivals of 1881 and 1884. The government succeeded in
eliminating the organized band warfare and in suppressing some, though not all,
of the obviously obscene masks. Canboulay became illegal. The decade or so
after 1884 was a time when many people confidently predicted that carnival would
die a natural death, and good riddance too. Finally in the 1890s there appeared
signs, small though they were, that carnival was on its way to becoming a festival
acceptable to most sectors of the society, including the upper and middle classes.
A study of carnival in this period is of interest for two reasons. First, it was an
important means of expression for the mainly Afro-Creole lower classes who
participated in it; it provides a window to their values and aspirations. Second, in
this period carnival was an arena in which class antagonisms and cultural contesta-
tions were worked out. Hardly anything else illustrates so clearly the profound gulf
between the “respectable” classes and the jamettes, whose carnival was a reversal
of all the values and judgments of society. Reading the interminable editorials,
articles, and letters denouncing the festival, one might conclude that there was an
almost total lack of understanding and communication between the two groups,
though the events of 1881–4 showed otherwise.
Before emancipation carnival had been an elegant social affair of the white
Creole upper class. It had involved masked balls, house-to-house visiting, street
promenading, small musical bands, and practical jokes. The leaders of society
would appear masked in the streets; the masques were mainly European. Emanci-
pation led to a complete change. The ex-slaves and the lower classes in general
participated increasingly, and, correspondingly, the upper classes withdrew, and
“the comments of their journalistic representatives became increasingly hostile

53
• BRIDGET BRERETON

right through till the 1890s” (Pearse 1956a: 184; Hill 1972: 16–21; Cowley 1996:
chapter 2; Liverpool 2001: chapters 5 and 7). Masques continued to be mainly
European – in 1848 they included Punch, Pirates, Highlanders, Turks, Death,
Cavalry and Infantry – but the players were now mostly lower-class persons. Con-
temporary events were often represented, and the Red Indian band became popular
around this time, usually played by “peons” of Spanish-Amerindian descent with a
high degree of realism.
In the 1840s there is no mention of organized band fights or of obscenity. But in
the 1850s carnival was regarded as increasingly disreputable. In 1858 Governor
Keate attempted to forbid public masking; he met with organized resistance which
was put down only by troops. No further attempt was made at the time. By the
1850s, too, canboulay had become an established part of the festival, starting at
midnight on the Sunday. The withdrawal of the respectable classes was almost
complete by the late 1860s. Generally speaking, as L.O. Inniss remembered, “no
decent persons” could go about on carnival days in the 1860s and 1870s (Inniss
1932: 9).
Around the 1860s carnival came to have a distinct character: the “jamette”
carnival. The festival was almost entirely taken over by the jamettes, who had
created in the backyards of Port of Spain their own subculture. Here the urban
lower class lived in long barrack ranges situated behind the city blocks, centering on
a yard which formed a common living space. At about this time, yard “bands” were
formed: groups of men and women, boys and girls, who went around together for
singing, fighting, and dancing. Such bands existed all the year round, but were
especially active in the weeks before carnival, when they rehearsed their songs,
dances, and stickfighting. The yard “chantwelle,” or singer, insulted rival yards, and
yard stickmen sought out rivals for single combats. The big carnival bands were a
combination of several yard bands. The jamettes, who were the band members,
were the singers, drummers, dancers, stickmen, prostitutes, pimps, and “bad johns”
in general. They boasted their skill and bravery, verbal wit, talent in song, dance,
and drumming, their indifference to the law, their sexual prowess, their familiarity
with jail, and sometimes their contempt for the church. In short they reversed the
canons of respectability, the norms of the superstructure. As one newspaper put it,
“the immoral bands of men and women . . . base their right of existence on their
power to outrage all that society holds most dear, and all that religion imposes”
(Pearse 1956a: 191–3; New Era, March 19, 1877).2
One need hardly say that the lifestyle of the jamettes outraged respectable
Trinidad (Pearse 1956b: 250–62; Brereton 1979: 166–9; Liverpool 2001: 253–92;
Franco 2000: 60–76). As the San Fernando Gazette reported in 1875:
There is no gainsaying that year after year adds, in an alarming degree, to the number
of these depraved wretches, who . . . band themselves together to the detriment of law
and order, and society . . . Hardly anything else is so dangerous to our society . . .
Hordes of men and women, youthful in years but matured in every vice that perverts
and degrades humanity, dwell together in all the rude licentiousness of barbarian life:
men without aim, without occupation and without any recognized mode of existence
– women, wanton, perverse, and depraved beyond expression.
(September 18, 1875)

It was these jamette bands which took over carnival in the 1860s and 1870s.

54
• THE TRINIDAD CARNIVAL IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

During the 1870s, “pretty” costumes and topical masques became rarer, as the
carnival focused more and more on band fighting and on masques involving a
sexual theme. The Port of Spain Gazette summed up the respectable view when it
stated:
The performances were poorer and more foolish than ever. It is evident that mas-
querading is dying a natural death . . . In former years there was some amusement to
be derived from the exhibitions of the carnival, but each return of the season seems
only to render them more thoroughly contemptible.
(February 25, 1871)

In the 1875 carnival there were said to be very few maskers with gorgeous or
grotesque costumes, and two years later hardly any fancy masques; Pierrots were
almost extinct and the only spectacle was a few masked men in women’s clothes. On
the other hand, the carnivals of 1878 and 1879 were reported to have featured some
attractive representations, including a float showing the capture of Constantinople
by Turkish soldiers, with the fort represented by a large box on wheels defended
by wooden cannons. In 1879, though there were said to be fewer character groups
than usual, among those listed were a Hosay (Muharram) procession, a party of
Venezuelan maypole dancers, schoolgirls, a Venezuelan army, a Chinese couple, a
squad of Redcoats, Pierrots, and South American Indians (Fair Play, February 18,
1875 and March 5, 1878; Chronicle, February 13, 1877 and February 26, 1879).
Indeed, the frequently mentioned decline in attractive or witty masques may have
been chiefly imaginary: commentators may have been so concerned about the
fighting and the obscenity that they overlooked, or minimized, the existence of the
older kinds of bands.
Probably the most objectionable feature of the jamette carnival was the explicitly
sexual dimension, in other words, its “obscenity.” Bands of jamettes roamed the
streets making indecent gestures and singing “lewd” songs. There were also
traditional masques with explicit sexual themes. The most notorious was the
Pissenlit – “wet the bed,” usually translated as “stinker.” It was played by masked
men dressed as women in long transparent nightgowns; some carried “menstrual
cloths” stained with “blood.” Their dance was a rapid shifting of the pelvis from
side to side and back and forward, and they sang obscene songs. There was a lot of
sexual horseplay, including a poui stick held between the legs. The jamette bands
featured both men and women: the women, many of whom might be prostitutes
or were ex-prostitutes, in the traditional Martinique dress, often masked. At some
times and in some places they exposed their breasts. The men wore trousers, silk
shirts, jewelry and chains, panama hats, and fancy waistcoats. They danced and
strutted through the streets speaking to bystanders in sexy tones and proposition-
ing women. Newspaper comment was hostile: “the respectable inhabitants are
scandalized and outraged by exhibitions which are not only neither amusing
nor entertaining, but are decidedly unchaste in character and demoralizing in
tendency.” And “it were better to deny recreation to outlawed ruffians, than to
have pollution and obscenity exhibited naked before the eyes of our wives and
daughters” (Crowley 1956: passim; Port of Spain Gazette, February 21, 1874 and
February 17, 1877).
Transvestism and accompanying horseplay were very common, whether in the
Pissenlit or individually: “as for the number of girls masked and in men’s clothing,

55
• BRIDGET BRERETON

we cannot say how many hundred are flaunting their want of shame. As many men,
also generally of the lowest order, are in like manner strutting about in female dress,
dashing out their gowns as they go.” A few years later: “the saturnalia of this year
differed from preceding ones in the enormous proportion of masked men who
unsexed themselves to enjoy the strange and silly novelty of wrapping their big
frames in a shapeless bundle of female apparel” (Chronicle, February 17, 1874 and
February 26, 1879).
It seems clear from the reams of press comment that nothing else about the
carnival scandalized respectable people as much as the obscenity, real or imagined.
Victorian Trinidad was certainly a more prudish and less tolerant society than that
of the early nineteenth century, despite the continuation of the traditional “out-
side” liaisons by upper-class Creole men (“jacketmen”). And of course it was a
time when decent women knew, or were supposed to know, nothing about sex,
and even married women would have been shocked by any public manifestation.
The press made much of the corruption of lower-class youth which was alleged
to take place before, during, and after the carnival. Perhaps it did, though in the
teeming and squalid backyards where most of the jamettes lived it would have
been difficult to remain uncorrupted, carnival or no carnival. The whole business
shows very clearly that the ideas of the jamette class about sex and women
were poles apart from the notions of respectable people, and that the Afro-Creole
urban underclass held very different gender ideologies from those of mainstream
society.3
Only a degree less objectionable than the obscenity was the organized conflict
between bands. The weapons were stones, bits of macadam, bottles, and staves.
Serious injury was rare, but there were always broken heads or slashed faces. In the
early 1870s the number of bands greatly increased. Bands from Belmont, the Dry
River, and the tenements in the center of the city used the days of carnival to pay
off old grudges or to increase their prestige at the expense of other bands. In 1871
the names of some of the rival bands were: True Blues, Danois, Maribones, Black
Ball, Golden City, Alice, D’jamettres. The Maribones (wasps) were still going
strong in 1877, when their carnival outfit consisted of a black hat, obtained from
gentlemen friends, red shirts, white trousers with a blue waistband – their colors
were red, white, and blue – with a silk foulah band round each knee, in the Neg
Jardin style. The women were in trousers reaching the knee, a short red jacket over
a blouse, an apron in front, and a sailor hat of white with a blue ribbon. The band
leader, the Roi, was on horseback. Each woman carried a wooden hatchet, painted
to resemble iron. The Maribones had their own musical ensemble, consisting of a
clarinet, two drums, a fiddle, a beke-nègre (a fair-skinned black man) with a small
drum, a line of tomtoms (keg drums with a goatskin top), and a triangle. The
players kept to the center of the band, for protection (Chronicle, February 21, 1871
and February 9, 1877; see figure 2.1).
According to an obviously well-informed editorial, in 1877 there were perhaps
twelve large bands in the city, formed on a neighborhood basis. Among those
named were the Bois d’Inde (allspice tree) from Upper Prince Street; Bakers
from east of the market; Danois (Danes) from the Dry River; Peau de Canelle
(cinnamon bark) from west of the Royal Jail; Corail (coral) from Newtown;
S’Amandes (almonds) from the wharves; Maribones from Belmont Road; and
Cerf-Volants (kites) from Duncan Street. The editor concluded:

56
• THE TRINIDAD CARNIVAL IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The band itself seems to be merely the loose, idler, younger members of the floating
portion of the populace (it would not be always correct to call them the working
class) in a district or neighborhood. In many cases the lads, as men, grow out of this
brawling, idle vagabondage but there cannot be a doubt it demoralizes them.

In 1882 Port of Spain was said to be divided into two zones, one belonging to the
“English Band,” the other to the French Band, alias the Bakers. In one incident
three Bakers drove in a cab over the boundary into hostile territory and were stoned
by members of the “English Band” (Chronicle, February 9, 1877 and Palladium,
July 1, 1882).
These bands existed the whole year round, but were most active during the
carnival, the great opportunity to challenge rivals and show off prowess in song,
dance, and stickfighting. Their aggressiveness during the carnival was heightened
by liquor, and the result was street fights, often of considerable proportions. Bands
would roam about seeking a rival to fight. It seems that firearms or knives were
virtually never used; the intention was not to wound seriously, but to establish
prestige by skilful use of the stick, though bottles and stones were also used as
weapons. Such affrays were, of course, illegal, and numerous arrests were made each
carnival. Yet the street fights continued until the early 1880s (Palladium, February
3, 1877; Brereton 1979: 166–9; Cowley 1996: 67–84; Liverpool 2001: 253–92).
One notable feature of the jamette carnival was the canboulay. This was a pro-
cession of men, usually masked, carrying lighted torches and staves, which started
at midnight on Sunday and continued until the Monday morning. It was accom-
panied by a great deal of drumming, hooting, singing, and shouting, which kept
everyone awake. “Canboulay” is said to be a contraction of cannes brûlées, or burnt
canes. Its origin was probably this: after emancipation (August 1, 1838) the ex-
slaves commemorated the First of August each year by a torchlight procession,
which looked back to the days of slavery when the slaves had to turn out to fight
cane fires on the estates. Carnival was originally held on the Sunday too; this was
prohibited in 1841 and so it began at midnight on Sunday. For some reason the
torchlight procession formerly held on the First of August, perhaps only for a few
years after 1838, was revived as the opening event of the carnival (Chronicle, March
26, 1881; Espinet and Pitts 1944: 58; Cowley 1996: 19–21; Liverpool 2001: 220–2).
Canboulay was felt to be objectionable on two main grounds, the noise which was
kept up all night, and the danger of fire from the torches. A further fear was that
the presence of so many men armed with sticks, and in an aggressive mood, was
a potential source of riot and disorder. Canboulay was also seen – correctly – as a
powerful symbol of Afro-Creole resistance to European cultural norms.
Through most of the 1870s the government’s attitude towards the carnival was
vacillating. But in 1877 Captain Baker became Inspector-Commandant (Chief of
Police). He was altogether a more militant character than his predecessor, and he
made it one of his chief objects to control, and if possible to destroy, the organized
bands. The carnivals of 1878 and 1879 were strictly controlled, and stickfighting
was made almost impossible, by guarding four or five of the chief meeting places of
the bands. Instead of waiting until after carnival to make arrests (and since the
offenders were masked, they often could not be recognized and found), the police
arrested troublemakers on the spot (Port-of-Spain Gazette, March 9, 1878 and
March 1, 1879).

57
• BRIDGET BRERETON

Two ordinances passed in the 1870s strengthened the hands of the police. In 1875
members of bands convicted of an offense came under the Habitual Criminals
Ordinance, which allowed police surveillance of such persons. Usually, a person
had to be convicted of three offenses to come under this law, so that band members
were being subjected to discriminatory treatment. In 1879 an ordinance amended
the law as to the punishment of riot and affray. An ordinance of 1868 allowed the
police to stop torch-bearing if it became a public nuisance. In the carnival of 1880
Baker, using this last ordinance, decided to suppress the canboulay. He called on
the participants to surrender their torches, sticks, and drums; probably taken by
surprise, for Baker’s intention had not been announced, they did so without any
resistance (New Era, February 16, 1880). The carnival passed off quietly, and Baker
must have thought that his problems with the festival had been satisfactorily solved.
But the carnival of 1881 was in fact the climax of hostilities between the govern-
ment and the maskers. Baker’s successful suppression of canboulay in 1880 was
widely regarded as a step to the total suppression of carnival, and the bands
organized to resist police interference in 1881: this time they were prepared. Again
without prior notice, Baker tried to seize the torches on Sunday night. He had
previously armed the force with special balata clubs. When he struck against the
marchers, he met with united opposition from several hundred men armed with
sticks, stones, and bottles. A fight ensued in which thirty-eight out of the 150
policemen present were injured; it ended inconclusively. Many street lights were
smashed by the mob. Their attitude seemed highly threatening by the Monday
morning, and a meeting of the Executive Council decided on drastic preparations
to resist a serious riot.
On the Monday afternoon members of the Port of Spain Borough Council,
fearing civil disorder, went to the Governor, Sir Samford Freeling, and pleaded with
him to make some conciliatory gesture to the people; they argued that the maskers
were excited but not riotous and would easily be satisfied by such a move. Freeling,
late in the afternoon, went to the Eastern Market and addressed the maskers. He
said that the government had no desire to stop carnival; the interference with the
torches had only been to prevent fires. They should be peaceful for the rest of
Monday and on Tuesday; the police would not be allowed to “molest” them, and
would be confined to barracks until the Wednesday morning. After his address,
there were one or two incidents; an effigy of Baker was burnt outside the police
barracks. But on the whole the Tuesday passed peacefully (New Era, March 7,
1881; Brierly 1912: chapter 21; Pearse 1956a: 188; Cowley 1996: 84–90; Liverpool
2001: 306–11).
The reaction of the press to the events of the 1881 carnival is interesting. With-
out exception, the editors condemned Baker’s actions and commended Freeling’s.
Baker had acted high-handedly and had provoked the maskers into resistance
(New Era, March 7 and 28, 1881; Palladium, March 25, and April 23, 1881; Port-of-
Spain Gazette, March 26, 1881; Chronicle, March 26, 1881; Cowley 1996: 89–90).
This unanimous reaction shows one thing clearly. Though the editors, and the
people they spoke for, were disgusted by many features of the jamette carnival, and
though they looked forward to its natural death, at least in its then form, they
strongly resented any attempt by the government to interfere with it by force. In
some way carnival was thought of as the “people’s” festival, and the government
was thought of as alien. If it was a conflict between expatriate officials and the

58
• THE TRINIDAD CARNIVAL IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

people, the press came down on the side of the latter, even if they disliked the way
in which the people chose to amuse themselves. This was especially the view of
spokesmen for the French Creole elite and the mixed-race (“coloured”) Creoles, who
recognized that carnival – for all its objectionable elements as they saw it – was
nevertheless a core expression of Trinidad’s “creoleness.”
The Colonial Office sent a commissioner, Robert Hamilton, to investigate the
riots, and he reported in June 1881, having spent exactly one week in Trinidad.
Hamilton found that the riots were caused by the people’s belief that the police
were going to stop the whole carnival, based on their action in 1880, and fomented
by certain people who excited the maskers against them. He thought that the
carnival should not be abolished, but instead that it should be very strictly regulated.
Torch processions should be allowed only in places like the Savannah. Leading
citizens should be sworn in as Special Constables in future carnivals and they
should impress on the people the need for order and decency. A British warship
should be in the harbor during the next carnival. The police should be supported in
the execution of their duty, but their very bad relations with the public would need
to be improved. Some subordinate officers who were very unpopular should be
removed, but Baker, whom the report cleared of charges of provocative conduct,
should be retained in his post (The Hamilton Report into the Disturbances in
Connection with the Carnival, in Port of Spain Gazette, October 22, 1881; Cowley
1996: 90).
After the events of 1881, the carnival of 1882 was the cause of much anxiety. A
proclamation issued in November 1881 authorized the canboulay for the next year
by allowing the carrying of lighted torches in any street between midnight Sunday
and 5:00 a.m. Monday. This was clearly a defeat for Baker. On the other hand,
the government took elaborate precautions for the carnival. Two men-of-war were
stationed in the harbor; troops and volunteers were on full alert; the fire brigade
was ready; the government steam launch was kept under steam and plans for
the evacuation of the governor had been concerted; special magistrates were for-
bidden to leave their posts; government officials armed themselves; and surgeons
were ready at the police station to cope with the wounded (Port-of-Spain Gazette,
February 25, 1882).
It was all quite unnecessary. For the maskers had determined among themselves
that there would be no disorder. A deputation of maskers called at the Port of
Spain Gazette office asking the paper to use its influence for order and peace at
the carnival. And a broadsheet entitled “Advice for the Coming Carnival” was
circulated, obviously the work of bandleaders, calling on maskers to play peace-
fully and not to betray the governor’s confidence. Canboulay passed off quietly,
though celebrated on a larger scale than usual. No fights took place, there were no
clashes with the police, and no fires. One band, seeing the approach of a rival,
agreed to drop their sticks and refused to “take on” the rival’s insults. The other
band did the same, and they shook hands fraternally. The bigger bands were led by
prominent citizens who had influence with the maskers and who used their prestige
to see that order prevailed (Port-of-Spain Gazette, February 11 and 25, 1882; Fair
Play, February 9 and 23, 1882; Chronicle, March 4, 1882).
The government still had not made up its mind about the canboulay by the
carnival of 1883. No special proclamation was issued and the procession was held
as usual. But this carnival was quite as disorderly as before the riots. One band in

59
• BRIDGET BRERETON

particular, the Newgates, provoked and attacked other bands with sticks, stones,
and bottles. They were apparently mainly from the eastern Caribbean; it was their
maxim to beat all French-speaking (Creole) maskers they met. They themselves
were not masked, and their only object appeared to be to attack other bands.
Private houses were forced open and stoned. One theory was that the police incited
and encouraged the Newgates with the object of avenging the reversal of 1881 and
discrediting the carnival. Baker was said to have openly promoted disorder by
calling on the other bands to beat and arrest Newgates whenever they found them.
There were also many individual encounters among maskers (Fair Play, February
8, 1883; New Era, February 12, 1883; Cowley 1996: 94–5).
Probably the disorder in 1883 strengthened the hand of the anti-carnival faction
within the government, and finally brought the governor round to the view that
canboulay had to be stopped and carnival rigidly controlled. In 1883 the Peace
Preservation Ordinance was passed to give the police wide powers over “riotous
bands.” Just before the 1884 carnival an amendment was rushed through the
Legislative Council. It gave the governor power to prohibit by proclamation public
torch processions, drum beating, any dance or procession, and any assembly of ten
or more persons armed with sticks or any other weapons; the maximum penalty on
summary conviction was a fine of £20 or six months in jail. This, of course, gave the
governor authority to abolish canboulay and the large stick bands. Accordingly a
proclamation was issued for the coming carnival. It prohibited torch processions,
assemblies of more than ten persons carrying sticks, and drumming or the playing
of any other instruments except between 6:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. Masking was
prohibited save between Monday 6:00 a.m. and Tuesday midnight. The provisions
of the 1868 police ordinance against assault, drunken and disorderly behavior, riot
and affray, and obscene language or songs, would all be rigidly enforced (Port-
of-Spain Gazette, January 26, 1884: Legislative Council, January 25, 1884; Review,
January 31, 1884: Proclamation, January 28, 1884; Cowley 1996: 99–102).
All sorts of rumors circulated. It was believed that the government intended to
forbid all masking at the eleventh hour. The maskers were said to be rebellious.
Someone claimed to have overheard a conversation to the effect that they were
planning to retaliate for the prohibition of canboulay by poisoning the Port of
Spain reservoir, pulling down the telephone wires, destroying street lamps, and
burning down the powder magazine. There was so much resentment at the inter-
ference with canboulay and the bands that another proclamation was issued which
assured the people that the new ordinance was aimed only at rogues, vagabonds,
and prostitutes. This only caused confusion: were people not so classified allowed
to do things which would be an offense for people of that description (Review,
January 23 and 30, and February 14, 1884)? Volunteers were called up, and middle-
class persons were sworn in as Special Constables. Everyone waited apprehensively
the result of the government’s new policy.
In Port of Spain, all was quiet. No attempt was made to stage the canboulay.
There were no disturbances and no confrontation with the police. It was, in fact,
the quietest carnival in years, though outside the city there was trouble. In San
Fernando there was a riot on the Monday morning. A mob armed with bottles and
stones and carrying torches was confronted by the police. There was fighting for
about fifteen minutes before the mob was dispersed, and several arrests were made.
A similar affray took place at Couva. In Princes Town, an attempt by over five

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• THE TRINIDAD CARNIVAL IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

hundred persons to hold canboulay ended with firing by the police and two deaths.
One newspaper speculated that “ringleaders of some of the most desperate bands”
in the capital city tried to stage “in the Naparimas [i.e. south Trinidad] those orgies
which were forbidden them in Port of Spain” (Recorder, February 27, 1884; Port-of-
Spain Gazette, March 1 and April 12, 1884; Review, February 28, 1884; Cowley
1996: 102–3).
The purging of carnival proceeded slowly in the years after 1884. The general
consensus about the government’s new policy was that it had succeeded, despite
the bloodshed in the south. Canboulay was for ever abolished, and so were the large
stick bands and the band fighting. In 1890–1 the control over the festival was
extended by a proclamation prohibiting the throwing of missiles, including flour, at
onlookers. Another new regulation in 1893 was that persons intending to mask as
Pierrots had to register with the police in advance.4 But in 1890 and 1891 the police
were still being accused of doing nothing to stop public indecency. The Daily News
quoted approvingly the words of the Chief Justice, that the carnival was a disgrace,
and that “in two days the whole year’s work of the clergy and the schoolmasters
was destroyed” (Port-of-Spain Gazette, February 6, 1891; New Era, February 21,
1890; Daily News, January 21, 1893).
In response to this pressure, the carnival regulations for 1895 added a new clause:
it was illegal for persons to appear masked “in the dress or costume commonly
called and known as Pisse en Lit.” As a result there was none of the grosser
obscenity in the 1895 carnival, very little transvestism, and only a handful of
obscenity arrests (Port-of-Spain Gazette, January 22, February 7 and 27, 1895).5
The way was clear for the respectable classes to re-enter carnival, and for the
festival to develop slowly into a “national” event. Clear signs of this movement
can be seen between 1885 and 1900. In the former year a “relatively large number”
of respectable persons felt safe enough to mask and play in the streets. Citizens of
worth were seeing people they knew playing masked. Three years later there was a
small band of courtiers whose “propriety and reserve stamped them gentlemen in
the midst of the surging mass of coarser masqueraders. There was a lady among
them” (New Era, February 23, 1885; Chronicle, February 18, 1888).
Upper-class maskers in 1893 revived the pre–1838 tradition of house-to-house
visiting, with practical jokes, and music. Another older practice which was revived
after 1885 was the holding of fancy dress balls in the weeks before carnival.
Governor Sir William Robinson gave one before the 1888 carnival; he was the Earl
of Leicester and his wife the Queen of Scots. Two years later a juvenile fancy
dress ball was held to aid the All Saints Anglican Church. In 1895 the elite of San
Fernando attended a similar affair on carnival Tuesday night. And a paper
observed that year that, if masking was to be abolished, then costume balls, much
in vogue “of late,” would also have to go, for to prohibit street masking for the
lower orders, and to allow it in the homes of the wealthy, might cause trouble (New
Era, February 17, 1888 and February 14, 1890; Daily News, February 15, 1893;
Port-of-Spain Gazette, January 12 and February 27, 1895; Cowley 1996: 104–6,
120–1, 124–33).
By about 1890 businessmen were beginning to realize the commercial benefits of
carnival, especially for the dry goods stores. College boys and store clerks began to
organize bands. In the late 1890s Ignacio Bodu, a borough councillor and a patron
of carnival and calypso, organized competitions for “pretty” bands in Port of

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• BRIDGET BRERETON

Spain to improve the festival’s moral tone (Daily News, February 15, 1893; Pearse
1956a: 189–90; Cowley 1996: 132–3; Liverpool 2001: 335–9).
The changing character of carnival was also seen in the development of the
calypso. The late nineteenth century was a time when the calypso was emerging in
its modern form. Up to about 1898, most calypsos were in Creole, or in a mixture
of Creole and English, and they were accompanied by “tamboo-bamboo” bands.
By the late 1890s singers were accompanied by the cuatro, guitar, and chac-chac,
and Venezuelan or Latin melodies were being used. According to Lord Executor, in
1898 Norman le Blanc sang the first calypso wholly in English, on the abolition of
the Borough Council. One verse ran:
Jerningham the Governor
Jerningham the Governor,
I say is fastness in you
To break the laws of Borough Council.

At about the turn of the century upper-class persons began to attend the “tents,”
which were made of bamboo, covered with palm branches and with bamboo
seats. They soon became better organized and were moved into better districts. The
upper- and middle-class patrons were the “jacketmen,” the coat being the great
symbol of respectability:
Point for point,
I prefer a jacketman,
Jacketman don’t beat me with a stick in the street.

Extempore singing was common, and there was often “picong,” an exchange
of witty insults between rival calypsonians. The last three decades of the century
were, in fact, the time when calypso achieved partial acceptance, as a result of
the changeover to English, the use of European instruments and melodies for
accompaniment, and the organization of better tents (Quevedo 1962: 90; Liverpool
2001: 330–9).
The study of carnival in the late nineteenth century illustrates several aspects of
Trinidad society in the period. In the 1870s carnival was essentially confined to the
Creole masses, especially those who lived in Port of Spain. In fact the really active
participants were a group within a group, for they were members of the jamette
society of the city’s backyards. It should be emphasized that the majority of the
working class were not jamettes themselves, and would not have approved of much
of their way of life. But each carnival they came out in their glory and the whole
Creole working class probably felt a vicarious pride in their exploits. There was
nothing really vicious about the jamette carnival. The fighting rarely resulted in
serious injuries, though certainly people got their heads broken and there was a lot
of disorder. As for the obscenity, it probably reflects the far more casual approach
to sex which characterized the masses as compared to the “respectable” classes.
Privacy and delicacy were impossible in the physical conditions under which they
lived, and masques such as Pissenlit were probably harmless foolery to them.
They also exemplified widely differing gender ideologies held by the jamettes and
the strata striving for, or enjoying, acceptance by mainstream society. Carnival as a
whole served the function of an escape valve for the masses, whose lives were
ordinarily harshly limited, and desperately hard.

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• THE TRINIDAD CARNIVAL IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The decision to end the two features of the carnival which were most enjoyed
by the jamettes, band fighting and canboulay, was taken by the government in
response to pressure from the middle class, and their own reaction to the carnival.
The decision was carried out by force in 1881 and in 1884, and both times the
maskers resisted, in 1884 with fatal results. Once the fighting and the canboulay had
been forcibly put down, the middle class turned its attention to public indecency,
and this was largely suppressed by 1895, again by police action rather than by a
campaign of popular education. It was only then, after carnival had been licked
into the shape they wanted, that “respectable” persons began to participate.
At several points in the late nineteenth century, the total suppression of carnival
seemed possible. But when it came to a crisis, as in 1881, important sections of the
French Creole elite and the mixed-race middle stratum resented what they con-
sidered high-handed attempts by British officials to put down a festival which –
disgusting though it might be in many ways – was undeniably “Creole.” Since
carnival could not be persuaded to die a “natural death,” forcible suppression of
the festival itself was unacceptable to most Trinidadians, with some exceptions such
as E.F. Chalamelle who argued in 1897 for outright abolition. Instead, the jamette
carnival was purged, controlled, remade, and “social incorporation” of the middle
and even upper strata into the festival began (or resumed). The dialectical relation-
ship between carnival’s anarchic elements (including violence and obscenity) and
the push to control and sanitize it would continue and develop in the twentieth
century.

NOTES

1 This is a revised version of my essay, “The Trinidad Carnival 1870–1900” in Savacou, 11/12
(September 1975), pp. 46–57. All the newspapers cited were published in Trinidad.
2 “Jamette”, a feminine Creole word, means an underclass type, a woman or man whose life
centered on fighting, dancing, drinking, promiscuous sex often including prostitution and
pimping.
3 For a strongly expressed contemporary argument that carnival corrupted young girls see
Chalamelle 1901 (written in 1897).
4 The Pierrot was a champion stickfighter who challenged rivals to combat: see Hill 1972:
28–30.
5 Nevertheless, in 1897 E.F. Chalamelle was still complaining about obscenity in carnival and its
role in corrupting youth: see note 3.

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4
THE MARTINICAN
Dress and politics in nineteenth-century
Trinidad Carnival

Pamela R. Franco

INTRODUCTION

Mary Ellen Roach and Joanne Eicher note that “dress . . . signifies the apparel
worn by men and women [and it] also refers to the act of covering the body with
clothes and accessories” (1965: 1). John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, suggests that
women’s dress and dressing up allow them to become both object and subject,
or what he terms “the surveyed” and “the surveyor” (1972: 46). As objects of
the male gaze, women are the surveyed. However, in the act of “watching” them-
selves, a ritual that is learned at a young age, women become surveyors. Berger,
here, introduces the idea of women as subjects or agents (surveyors) capable of
constructing and manipulating their self-image. Revisionist scholars, expand-
ing on the concept of women as subjects, emphasize the ways in which women
manipulate dress and dressing up – particularly as a strategy to attain visibility
and to articulate particular concerns, be they cultural, economical, personal, or
political (Hollander 1993 [1975]; Weiner and Schneider 1989; Barnes and Eicher
1993). This body of literature positions women as agents with clearly defined inten-
tions, which they express or communicate through dress and dressing up. Agency,
here, is neither fixed nor permanent; it is negotiated at particular historical
moments or on specific occasions. Carnival is one such occasion when women use
dress and dressing up to create a self-image through which they can “articulate”
their opinions.
The effectiveness of dress in such a public space as carnival is dependent on two
factors: first, dress as cultural product and, second, dress as sign. As a cultural
product, the use-value of dress is dictated by society, what Erving Goffman defines
as the “orientational” aspect of dress (1965: 52). In other words, society fashions a
system that assigns garments to either a public or a private sphere on the basis of
their function.1 For example, a petticoat worn in a public place would be
inappropriate. Even though the apparel covers the wearer’s body, its social “orien-
tation” is under an outer garment. Its “dislocation” from the private (invisible)
to the public (visible) sphere undermines the extant system thus making the act

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revolutionary. Or as Stuart Hall posits, “what unsettles culture is matter out of

place” (1997, rpt 2001: 236).
Therefore, as a cultural product carnival dress is susceptible to interpretation
based on the (dis)“orientational” role of specific garments. As a sign, however,
dress achieves some elasticity. Malcolm Barnard, in Fashion as Communication
(1996), explains that, as a sign, dress can be either denotative or connotative. The
former refers to the “literal meaning of a word or image” (Barnard 1996: 80–1),
and the latter is “the word or image [that] makes a person think or feel” (ibid.). In
other words, the meaning of a denotative sign is fixed; it is literally what one sees or
what is conventional. Conversely, the meaning of the connotative sign is dynamic
because it is context-driven. Therefore, the connotative aspect of the sign permits
multiple, sometimes conflicting, readings. In actuality, both aspects are present in
dress; however, it is the connotative that better facilitates analysis of carnival dress.
In the context of carnival, new meaning(s) is (are) further negotiated within a
performance frame. Barnard’s connotative factor permits the constitution of the
author and meaning within performance.
In this chapter, I will discuss how nineteenth-century black women constructed a
new self-image through the creation of the Martinican dress. As the authors of this
sartorial ensemble, they controlled much of its meaning. However, in carnival the
Martinican dress took on several meanings that were based on social, cultural, and
legal issues framed within the contemporary politics.

MARTINICAN DRESS: ANALYSIS OF A CREOLE STYLE

In nineteenth-century Trinidad, the term “Martinican” was a popular designation

for black women’s fancy dress: specifically the à la jupe and la grande robe. The à la
jupe, or chemisette et jupe (figure 4.1), was a bodice and skirt ensemble. Draped
to the side and tucked into the waist, the skirt revealed a jupon, an underskirt. The
more formal la grande robe (figures 4.2 & 4.3), an all-in-one gown or douillette,
was secured at the waist. Like the à la jupe, the skirt was often draped, rolled, and
tucked into the waist, revealing an elaborately decorated underskirt. Both styles
incorporated a foulard, which was draped around the shoulders, and a calendered,
or painted, headtie, adorned with brooches. Gold chains, rings, and bracelets
completed both costumes.
In the late eighteenth century, immigrants from the francophone islands –
Grenada, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and St Vincent – brought the Martinican dress
to then Spanish Trinidad. Many were fleeing the French Revolution and its effects on
France’s Caribbean colonies. The Spanish government, through the Royal Cedula
of Population (1783), offered refuge to the region’s French Creoles whom they
expected to develop the island. Therefore, they offered them plots of arable land, and
additional acreage was given to those planters who brought their slaves with them
(Borde 1982 [1876]: 185–93). The immigrant population included white, free col-
oured and black families, and slaves. It is during this period that black French-Creole
women introduced their unique style of dress to Trinidad. Since Martiniquians
constituted the numerical majority of the immigrant population, the dress became
identified almost exclusively with them, hence the appellation, Martinican dress.
The Martinican ensemble was a veritable Creole invention. Using an assemblage
technique, black women combined European-manufactured cloth with a West

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• PAMELA R. FRANCO

Fig. 4.1 Mulatresse de la Martinique. Late nineteenth century. Published by

permission of Musée Regional d’Histoire et Ethnographie, Maison de la
Canne du Conseil Regional de la Martinique, Fort-de-France, Martinique.
no. 88–56–14.

African dress aesthetic. They chose colorful cloth – scotch plaid, madras and
printed cotton – and/or sumptuous materials such as silk, damask, muslin, and
lace, which they draped, rolled, and tied in a West African style. Forgoing the
European-styled dress handed down by the planter’s wife, black Caribbean women
created their own version of fancy dress. They fused bits and pieces from the
region’s major ethnic and cultural groups and created a novel and distinct dress
style and aesthetic. This process can be interpreted as an “act of cultural bricolage”
(White and White 1998: 19).

66
• THE MARTINICAN

Fig. 4.2 Jean Michel Cazabon, Old Negress, French, in Gala Dress. Published by
permission of the Trustees of the Harris Belmont Charity.

The colorful and sumptuous materials were further enhanced by a brilliance that
emanated from the women’s jewelry. In Martinique M. Granier de Cassagnac was
amazed at the profusion of jewelry that the members of “Les Roses” association
wore at an 1840 carnival ball.2 He remarked “du reste jamais de ma vie je n’ai vu
autant de bijoux, de turquoises, d’emeraudes et de perles” (quoted in Rosemain
1986: 100–1) (“never in all my life have I seen so many jewels, turquoises, emeralds
and pearls,” my translation). In nineteenth-century Jamaica, an observer of the
Set Girls (similarly dressed women who paraded during the Christmas/Jonkonnu
festivities) also remarked on the quantity and diversity of jewels worn by black

67
• PAMELA R. FRANCO

Fig. 4.3 Fashionable young lady, 1880s. Published by permission of

Paria Publishing.

women. “I was astonished to see such a display of valuable trinkets – coral and
cornelian Necklaces, Bracelets, etc.” (quoted in Bettelheim 1979: 23). Sometimes
the planter or his wife provided pieces of jewelry, but black women purchased most
items.3 The overall brilliant and dazzling effect of colorful dress and jewelry “trans-
literated” the women from a life of hardship and drudgery to one of implied
affluence, which they successfully displayed using the conventional signs of wealth
– jewelry and sumptuous dress.4
Although jewelry helped to create a dazzling image of the black woman, the
headtie was her crowning glory. “The making-up of . . . a turban [was] called ‘tying

68
• THE MARTINICAN

a head’ (marre yon tête), and a pretty folded turban was spoken of as ‘a head well
tied’ (yon tête bien marre)” (Hearn 1923 [1890]: 226). Mary Jo Arnoldi explains: “in
the thought and moral imagination of many African and African diaspora soci-
eties, the head, itself, is a potent image that plays a central role in how the person
is conceptualized” (Arnoldi and Kreamer 1995: 11). For example, in Yoruba
philosophical thought each person possesses two heads, the outer and the inner
head. The more important is the inner head or the ori-inu. Art historian Rowland
Abiodun defines the ori-inu as one’s “essential nature and personal destiny” (1994:
74). Wande Abimbola states that “Ori is the essence of luck and the most import-
ant force responsible for human success or failure” (1975: 390). Piggybacking on
Abiodun and Abimbola’s explication of ori, it is feasible to suggest that many black
women would have been familiar with this concept of the head, as a critical com-
ponent in the process of self-identification and in determining one’s destiny. Thus,
the elaborate tying of the head may have been a way of acknowledging the head’s
significance and its sacredness.
The headtie served many functions. In the nineteenth-century American South,
African-American women “completely covered the hair and held [it] in place
either by tucking the ends of fabric into the wrap or by tying the ends into knots
close to the skull” (Foster 1997: 272). Basically, it was used to protect the head
from the sun and to keep one’s hair in a neat fashion. In nineteenth-century
Trinidad, Mrs Carmichael observed that black women were not well dressed with-
out their headties. Prior to a dance or special event her female slaves “came up
not an hour before the dance commenced to have their ‘hats drest’ ” (Carmichael
1961 [1833]: 292). In late eighteenth-century Louisiana, sumptuary laws were
enacted as a strategy to publicly demoralize and humiliate women of color.
Both free and enslaved women were forced to wear headties which, according
to Helen Foster, “became a badge of servitude and inferior status for Black
women” (1997: 272). In an ironic twist, the women wore the headtie, as the law
dictated, but they fashioned it in elaborate sculptural designs, thus remodeling
the garment from a sign of their servitude to one of personal agency. In essence,
they “played with the white ‘code’ by convert[ing] it [headwrap] from something
which might be construed as shameful into something uniquely their own” (ibid.:
292).
The headtie functioned also as a marker of the wearer’s occupation, age, marital
status, and ethnicity. In the American South, for example, headwraps were used “as
a signifier denoting religious beliefs and age, sex, marital, gender and class status”
(Foster 1997: 284). In many parts of West Africa, hairstyles and special cloths have
been integral aspects of young girls’ coming-of-age ceremonies. Similarly, in
nineteenth-century Nigeria the Ejagham women wore elaborate hairstyles in “com-
ing out” ceremonies (Arnoldi and Kreamer 1995: 55). Lisa Aronson, in her work on
the Kalabari region, observed the significance of cloth in a young girl’s coming-of-
age ceremony or bitite. In the “cloth-tying ceremony,” which follows her seclusion
in the “fatting house,” the young woman ties several types of cloth around her
body, transforming herself into a site/sight of abundance. “The most highly
regarded cloth throughout the eastern delta is now the Indian madras, the tying
of which constitutes the last phase of the ceremony, the bitite” (Aronson 1980: 63).5
In Kalabari, the madras marks the crossing of the threshold from childhood to
adulthood.

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• PAMELA R. FRANCO

In nineteenth-century Martinique the madras also signified female adulthood

and a young woman’s marriageability. According to Louis Garaud, in Trois Ans à
La Martinique (1895: 200), “Vers dix huit ans, la jeune fille prend tête, c’est-à-dire,
en langue du pays, echange le foulard contre le madras” (“At about eighteen years
of age, a young girl takes/gets a [new] head, in other words, in the local parlance,
she exchanges the [regular] scarf for the madras”, my translation). The “taking
of a new head” appears to have been a coming-of-age ceremony, with the
madras signifying the transition from childhood to adulthood. On “taking a new
head,” the young Martiniquaise also had a choice of several headtie designs,
which were centered on the points (pwen) or bouts (boo). For example, the headtie
design with one point or bout signifies “My heart is free – not taken by anyone”; the
head with two points, “My heart is taken, but you can take a chance”; a head with
three points, “I am taken – nothing doing”; and a head with four points, which was
extremely rare, “There is place for those who want it” (Aumis et al. 1992: 60). Thus,
the design of the headtie “communicated” the young wearer’s betrothal status.
The elaborate and complex headtie designs were enhanced with jewelry (figure
4.4) – gold pins and brooches – that enhanced an already radiant image. Frequently,
they were given such names as Dahlia, Chenille (Caterpillar), Les Hisbiscus, and
Le Nid abeille (Wasp’s Nest). The significance of these names is not clear; some
(Dahlia and Hisbiscus) appear to be descriptions of specific floral designs. Other
jewelry pieces with such names as Louis XVI and Fleurs de Champs seem to have
had some political ramifications. Louis XVI was dethroned during the French
Revolution. His ouster ushered in a republican government whose ideology
was based on liberté, égalité et fraternité or freedom, equality, and brotherhood.
Without a description of this piece of jewelry, it is difficult to ascertain the
full meaning of the object. Hypothetically, for royalists the Louis XVI brooch
would have been a commemorative emblem. For republicans, most likely, it would
have been a satirical or parodic commemoration of a once-royalist France. Placed
on black women’s headties as a decorative element, Louis XVI is reduced to a
trinket6 that the women controlled. There is ambiguity and uncertainty in my
rudimentary attempt to determine the true meaning of the brooch designs, and
further research is needed. Despite this shortcoming, this example suggests that the
headtie and jewelry may have been part of a complex sign system for which black
women inscribed the referential meanings. Colorful dress, dazzling jewelry, and
sculptural headtie designs enabled black women to create a new self-image that
veered significantly from the racialized picture painted by members of the planter
class.

THE MARTINICAN DRESS: POLITICS AND CARNIVAL

Traditionally, the Martinican dress was worn throughout the year to celebrate such
events as baptisms and weddings. However, it was at the drum dance, specifically
the belair, that black women showcased their sartorial creativity. The term “belair”
describes a Creole dance and song style from the French-speaking Caribbean. It
was black women’s premier performative domain. They constituted the major and
majority participants; they were the dancers and singers, and men were often the
drummers. Women choreographed belair dances, and frequently composed songs
in French Creole or patois. Some made reference to the island’s contemporary

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• THE MARTINICAN

Fig. 4.4 Camille Dedierre, a Martiniquian mulatto, photograph c. 1900.

Published by permission of Paria Publishing.

politics. For example, an 1805 belair song conjures up images of the Haitian
revolution, an event that the British hoped to arrest in Trinidad.
The bread we eat
Is the white man’s flesh
The wine we drink
Is the white man’s blood
He St. Domingo,
remember St. Domingo
(quoted in Cowley 1996: 14)

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• PAMELA R. FRANCO

Songs and dance were enhanced by the women’s elaborate toilette. Dressed in the
most beautiful chemisette et jupe or la grande robe, black women appropriated
the dominant culture’s material icons of wealth, social status and power – fancy
dress, jewelry, shoes and silk stockings – and reinterpreted them. They reworked the
“borrowed” European elements to reconstitute a social order that they controlled,
a practice that resonates of James Scott’s “hidden transcript,” a private, often
subversive, response to societal norms (Scott 1990: 25). The belair performance was
structured around a hierarchical “society” that included “ ‘royal’ leadership by
Kings and Queens, and a Dauphin (or Prince), ‘royal’ households, and political,
legal, and military personnel – for example Ambassadors, a Prime Minister, Grand
Judges, an Admiral, Colonels” (Cowley 1996: 13). These events were held in “neatly
built edifices . . . [with] an elevated platform . . . where the King with his gorgeously
apparelled [sic] Queen sat surrounded by her almost equally dressed attendants . . .
the Chorus and Dancers [were] all gaily dressed females, with bright colored head
dresses and sparkling with jewelry” (ibid.: 45). Thus it is reasonable to say that at
the belair blacks constructed a world in which they held all hegemonic roles and
they dressed up for their parts.
Belairs were performed also throughout the Christmas-carnival season when
slaves were “given considerable freedom for dancing, pageantry, parades and
traditional good strife between plantation bands” (Pearse 1956a: 13). The high-
lights of the season’s performances were private masquerade balls and street-
processioning either on foot or in carriages. The coloured middle class generally
adhered to this tradition; they hosted balls and paraded, probably in a limited
capacity, in the street. Slaves rarely participated in the public festival. But Friedrich
Urich, a German store clerk, recorded the extent of black festive activities in the
pre-emancipation era. For example, on carnival Sunday, 1831, “After dinner we
went to see the negroes dance” (quoted in De Verteuil 1984: 12).7 The “negroes
dance” most likely was a drum dance, probably the belair. Since the slaves did not
host European-styled masquerade balls, the belair, being their most extravagant
performance, would have functioned as a comparable alternative to the upper
classes’ elaborate dressing up and disguises.
On carnival Monday Urich “follow[ed] various masked bands. The dances [were]
usually African dances, and the enthusiasm of the negroes and negresses amuse us
very much, for these dances [were] stupendous” (ibid.).8 Similarly, in 1832, he wrote
of “coloureds and negroes” being very active in the street parade. So blacks, free
and enslaved, were part of the pre-emancipation street carnival. Since there is no
description of the costumes, it is difficult to ascertain whether or not the women
wore the Martinican dress. However, at the “negroes dance” on carnival Sunday,
black women would have worn the Martinican dress creating a spectacle of dancing
black female bodies radiant in jewels that shone brighter in the glow of the candle-
light or flambeaux. From Urich’s account it is reasonable to suggest that the
“negroes dance,” or belair, was an integral part of the early nineteenth-century
carnival, and consequently black women, as its premier performers, were active
participants in the festival.
The Martinican dress connoted many things. For black women, it allowed them a
certain visibility and an opportunity for self-identification. They may have also
used the dress as “an ideological weapon” in the constant power struggle with the
local white authorities. Inter-island travel and migration not only facilitated the

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movement of dress from one island to another; it also permitted the movement of
political ideology. Fallout from the 1789 French Revolution impacted the politics
of the Caribbean region. Supporters of the Revolution, who called for liberté,
égalité et fraternité, were labeled republicans, and the supporters of the monarchy
and a court tradition were royalists. This ideological division became part of
the political landscape of the francophone Caribbean with the elites generally
favoring the royalists, and the lower classes the republicans. Trinidad’s French elite
community was also “royalist in politics, [and] bitterly hostile to the revolutionary
and republican movements” (Brereton 1979: 37). Blacks generally were more sym-
pathetic to the republicans because, theoretically, they were fighting for freedom
and equality, social and moral conditions that had great resonance for them. As
part of the middle class, free blacks had lost the privileges that were gained under
Spanish rule. Many blacks also had enslaved kin whose freedom they were trying to
secure. Republicanism, with its emphasis on freedom and equality, seemingly
echoed the plight of this community. Thus it was adopted as a rallying cry for the
freedom of enslaved blacks and for the colored middle class, the recovery of lost
privileges.
In the 1790s, prior to the capitulation of Spanish Trinidad to the British in 1797,
French republican supporters, many from a rapidly declining francophone Carib-
bean,9 traveled throughout the region enlisting the help of the free coloured and
black middle class, in an attempt to gain support for a republican France, the
overturn of Britain’s fortunes in the region, and “the abolition of slavery every-
where” (Brereton 1981: 29–30). In Trinidad, reportedly, they organized meetings
and distributed anti-English and anti-royalist literature. The propagandistic
rhetoric so unnerved then Governor Chacon that he remarked, “the contact which
our coloured people and our Negro slaves have had with the French Republicans,
has made them dream of liberty and equality” (ibid.). They did not only dream
of freedom; they also acted upon it. “The slaves . . . adopt[ed] the revolutionary
tri-colored cockade introduced by the French republicans” (ibid.).
The cockade was a recognizable sign of French republicanism. To wear it in a
Spanish colony, with strong royalist support, was a bold and daring act. Moreover,
the slaves’ public display of the cockade suggests a growing militancy among this
group. In 1797, General Abercromby attempted to arrest the island’s revolutionary
climate. He quickly issued a proclamation with instructions for evacuation: “all
such Frenchmen as consider themselves to be citizens of the French Republic were
to be allowed to leave and were to be given safe conduct to some French, Dutch or
Spanish Colony” (ibid.: 33). Some left voluntarily and others were deported. The
events of the recent Haitian war of independence coupled with a growing militancy
among the slaves increased the British fear of insurrection on the island. Sub-
sequent governors undertook steps, sometimes brutal and violent, to suppress
black militancy and to curtail revolution on the island (Campbell 1992: 129–39,
145–8).
In this highly charged political climate, black women, many of whom would have
been Martiniquaises, may have sought ways to distance themselves from the British
and their racist attitude toward slavery and social inequality. They accomplished
this goal by constructing a distinct Creole cultural identity through their manipula-
tion of dress. As cultural historian Elizabeth Wilson notes, “in a fragmenting world
people . . . rework their identities, and [they] use dress and style as a substitute for

73
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identity” (quoted in Tulloch 1997–8: 48). Using the seemingly benign Martinican
dress the women constructed visually a cohesive communal identity, an act that
resonates of Frantz Fanon’s writing on the role of the veil in the creation of
Algerian women’s identity. As he explains it, “the fact of belonging to a given
cultural group is usually revealed by clothing traditions” (1967: 35). In other
words, the cultural or ethnic orientation of clothes allows for easy recognition of a
group or community. Similarly, the idiosyncratic Creole dress stressed the women’s
cultural identity while simultaneously distinguishing them from their white
counterparts.
The Martinican dress remained part of the nineteenth-century carnival land-
scape, but the colorful and radiant image would be greatly diminished. By the 1820s
the “mulatresse”10 was a popular street disguise among white women. Donning a
simplified version of the chemisette et jupe, they paraded with their male counter-
parts, who were disguised as the Nègre Jardin or field laborer. Their performance
was a parody of the quelling of estate fires. Later, blacks would appropriate and
reinterpret this carnivalesque performance, which would be called the canboulay.
By the 1840s white women would also use the mulatresse costume while parading
in all-women’s bands, as Charles Day observed in the 1848 carnival when he
encountered a group of young girls dressed in the “à la jupe, the vrai creole negro
costume” (1852: 316). In a typical carnivalesque manner, upper-class white women,
by appropriating lower-class black women’s dress, symbolically inverted both race
and social status. Black women would continue to wear the dress in carnival but
its sartorial splendor would be greatly compromised. In 1841, they choreographed
a Coq d’Inde ponde dance, still projecting a republican ideology, but there’s little
reference to the colorful Martinican dress. While contemporary accounts identify
black women as maskers in the street carnival, their dress style may have changed
(see Day 1852: 313–14). By the 1860s, jamette11 women would remodel the garment
to allow them ease in unstringing the bodice to reveal their breasts. Recalling
Goffman’s “orientational” aspect of dress, this public behavior undermined the
Victorian code of moral ethics. Allegedly, the bared breasts were so shocking that
the sight did not “permit our [white] mothers, wives and sisters to walk the streets
and promenades without having their senses shocked” (quoted in Pearse 1956a: 31)
by such disgusting behavior.
The carnival climate had changed. According to the newspapers, there was a
marked increase in violence and sexual obscenity, only among black maskers. The
authorities would issue proclamations and activate the police force in an attempt to
suppress the festival’s reputed degenerate elements. Reportedly, the once-elegant
belair had become “one of the most fruitful and common sources of Trinidad
demoralization” (quoted in Cowley 1996: 72). And by the 1880s the performers
were “a few dirtily dressed women who serve[d] as Chorus, a mixed crowd of dirtily
dressed men and women who dance to the sound of the drum independently of
each other” (ibid.: 96). Gone was the splendor of a court with its royalty in attend-
ance. Supplanting this style of performance was a seemingly unstructured and
slightly chaotic event. The sumptuous Martinican dress would be seen less and less
in carnival. Finally, in the late 1880s, batonniers or stickfighters appropriated this
special dress. After the banning of sticks on the streets on carnival days, black male
maskers sought ingenious ways to carry their sticks unnoticed into the street. To
circumvent the prohibition they donned the Martinican-styled dress as a disguise.

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• THE MARTINICAN

The voluminous skirt allowed them to hide their sticks. It is evident that the Mar-
tinican dress was a staple in nineteenth-century carnival; however, it underwent
several changes, and its meaning was derived from the particular performers and
the historical period and situation in which the garment was used.
In sum, I am suggesting that the Martinican dress, with its dazzling and spectacu-
lar aura, may not have been simply a sartorial strategy for black women to become
visible or temporarily invert the extant social order. From very early, it appears that
the women may have transformed the garment into a discursive site of resistance.
With limited economic resources and little political power, they used their brightly
colored and dazzling Creole dress and the tricolor cockade to “transliterate” them-
selves from the realm of the exotic (the surveyed) into the political arena (the
surveyor). This seemingly “innocent” dress connoted black women’s construction
of a cultural or communal identity and a unique protest strategy. The sartorial
display of self-affirmation and anti-slavery protest was probably one of many
elements that threatened the British sense of political stability and the continued
success of slavery. Despite its varied and “deteriorated” representation in the later
decades of the nineteenth century, the dazzling and sumptuous Martinican dress
provided a “voice” to black women at a time when they were expected to be silent.

NOTES

1 Since diverse communities constitute a complex society, the garment’s meaning can differ from
one community to another.
2 According to de Cassagnac, this was an association of domestic workers.
3 Black women earned money through a variety of endeavors. Many used the profits earned from
selling the produce from their plots of land. Some ran huckster shops, organized dances for
which they charged an entrance fee, or managed boarding houses.
4 Cloth, fancy dress, and jewelry were signs of wealth and social status in Africa and Europe.
5 I am not suggesting that the Martiniquian and Kalabari women were aware of each other’s
usage of the madras. The madras probably entered Martinique in the early nineteenth century.
In the Kalabari, the madras was introduced into the area in the early twentieth century.
6 This style of decoration seems to replicate the Bini’s Queen Idia’s ivory pendant, with its stylized
images of the Portuguese men arranged in a semicircular design at the top of the head.
7 In Urich’s diary, the term negroes is a synonym for slaves.
8 Urich obviously believed that the Negro dances would have been African. Some were probably
creolized dances.
9 In the late eighteenth century, Britain captured several French colonies including Grenada,
Tobago, and St Lucia. They also occupied Martinique in the late eighteenth century. Victor
Hugues, a professional soldier and a republican, fought off the British to regain control of
Guadeloupe.
10 “Mulatresse” is a synonym for the Martinican dress.
11 “Jamette” is a creolization of the French diametre. Translated it describes those at the
periphery of society, who sometimes engage in petty criminal behavior.

75
5
INDIAN PRESENCE IN CARNIVAL
Burton Sankeralli

Trinidad’s carnival is alive. It grows organically out of a rich culture, a tortuous

history. The event is a space where the entire range of our cultural expression and
ethnic diversity emerges. It is in terms of this, the fundamental nature of carnival,
that we are to understand the Indian presence in it.
Indian indentured immigrants arrived in Trinidad from 1845 to 1917. The con-
ditions on the sugar plantations, where they labored during their contract period
of at least five years, were like the slavery which indentureship replaced. The condi-
tions were oppressive in the extreme: a number of families shared a single barracks;
the Indians were strangers to each other, often speaking different languages. They
came from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Tamil Nadu. Men outnumbered women by
up to three to one – making the women targets of male violence despite the poten-
tially strong position that imbalance gave women. Despite all these troubles, a
communal dynamic emerged. The dominant language was a Trinidadian version of
Bhojpuri-Hindi, common in Uttar Pradesh. And as the Indians moved off the
plantations, a basic pattern of Indo-Trinidadian community – the rural village –
came into being. Life in the villages centered on the extended family and a reformu-
lated sense of caste.1 Village life was regulated by the rhythm of cane and rice
farming. It is not coincidental that the major Indian settlements were around the
Caroni and Nariva swamps where rice flourished. Beyond farming, some Indians
became involved in family-based businesses. Hinduism and Islam were practiced
in the villages by most people, though some converted to Christianity, especially
Presbyterianism, which is viewed in Trinidad as an “Indian church.” For all this
diversity, the core of East Indian spirituality is Hinduism, especially as disclosed in
the notion of leela (also spelled lila), or play.2
The entire cosmos is a leela, a dance of energy, a drama staged by Brahman, the
Absolute. Leelas are also specific celebrations, the most important in Trinidad
being Ramlila, the story of Ram (Rama), the god-warrior-king as told in Valmiki’s
Sanskrit Ramayana and retold in Hindi by the seventeenth-century poet Tulsidas.
The celebratory feeling of Ramlila and other Indian festivals was countered
by more than a century of severe oppression. During this period, the Indian

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community was ghettoized, and responded by adopting a siege mentality. The

Indian engagement with the Trinidad landscape is awkward: a kelapani, the “black
water,” from India to Trinidad was a one-way trip. Within the Trinidad landscape,
Indianness had to be redefined.
The Indian celebration most like carnival is Hosay, derived from Shiite Islam.3
Celebrated during the first ten days of the Islamic month of Muharram, with
processions on the seventh, eighth, and ninth nights and the tenth day, Hosay
commemorates the martyrdom of the grandsons of the Prophet Muhammad, the
brothers Hassan and Hussein. The former was poisoned and the latter was killed in
the seventh-century battle of Kerbala (in modern-day Iraq). In its Trinidad form
Hosay is rooted in leela. The martyrdom and particularly the funeral of the
brothers are re-enacted. The ritual drama culminates on Ashura, the tenth of
Muharram, the day when Hussein was killed. The centerpieces of the performances
are the parades through the streets, on three successive nights, of, first, flags, then
small tadjahs, then the tadjahs (or Hosays) – massive, beautifully constructed
tombs of Hussein which, these days, reach a height now limited to 15 feet (it used to
be 25 feet). The tadjahs are carried in the streets the night before Ashura and again
on Ashura Day. In years gone by the tadjahs were illuminated by blazing torches,
accompanied by armed men engaged in dramatized stickfights, weeping women
singing funeral songs, and (as is still current today) the music of tassa drums, huge
bass drums, and jahlls (cymbals).
This Muharram festival, as Hosay was also called, was the major Indian cele-
bration in nineteenth-century Trinidad. The procession took place throughout the
center and south of the island in the “sugar belt” and even in St James, from where
it entered Port of Spain. Every plantation where the “coolies”4 worked produced its
tadjah, but the center was San Fernando, where over a hundred tadjahs extended
for more than a mile. Hosay included Indians who were Hindus as well as Muslims:
it was the island’s major source of Indian cultural affirmation and pride. It took
on proportions of an “Indian Carnival,” in which many thousands participated
and watched. Today those building tadjahs commit themselves to a period of
“clean” living – abstaining from sex and alcohol, following a prescribed diet. On
the streets in the nineteenth century people danced, drank, smoked opium and
ganja (marijuana), and ingested bhang (marijuana boiled in cow’s milk) – as in
India itself.
Hosay also broke the ethnic barrier separating the Indian and African com-
munities. There still is significant African involvement in Hosay. Africans have
always been able to connect with the vital rhythm of the drums of Hosay. Indeed,
there are accounts of tadjahs appearing in carnival itself (see Cowley 1996: 83).
The late nineteenth century was a turbulent time, as the colonial masters tried
to suppress local cultural expressions (see Singh 1988). This oppression was at the
root of the 1881 Canboulay riots (see Elder and Brereton in this volume). The
authorities were particularly concerned about Hosay because it was a source of
Indocentric self-affirmation at a time when the “coolies” were resisting plantation
conditions and because Hosay was a bridge connecting Indians to Africans
which undermined the key colonial policy of isolating the Indians. Additionally,
Afro-Creoles resented Indian economic competition which broke the hold of
Africans on the labor market. Hence, the question was raised: If canboulay was
restricted, why not Hosay?

77
• BURTON SANKERALLI

Thus on 30 October 1884 the police and the military opened fire at close range on
the Hosay procession. At least twenty-two people (of whom eighteen had recogniz-
able Hindu names) – and probably many more – died. Well over a hundred were
wounded. The “Hosay riots” represent the bloodiest confrontation of its kind in
the history of Trinidad. But though initially suppressed, Hosay was accepted by the
Victorian British government, which, for the first time, authorized a public gather-
ing place for such a religious observance on the grounds of the Queen’s Royal
College in Port of Spain. Hosay has today survived in some parts of the south such
as Cedros and in St James, a Port of Spain suburb, which became the new centers
of the festival.
In Hosay one may see the cultural confluences of Persia, Arabia, India, Africa,
and Europe: the fusion of sacred and secular, of funeral and fete.5 St James itself
was to become a major center for a cultural sharing and crossing-over between
Indian and African. Both communities struggled against the same Eurocentric
hegemony, though in different ways. The Africans were oppressed within the Creole
mainstream, while the Indians were alienated from the mainstream. The dominant
Creole structure established a relation of contestation between the African and
Indian communities even as they both shared the same foundation of “folk
culture” which vitally defined the Trinidad landscape. This sharing took place
despite the fact that the African community was largely urban and the Indian
largely rural.
How is one to articulate the structure of the encounter? The engagement is
defined by three simultaneously occurring aspects: assimilation, contestation,
and communion. There is assimilation as each community appropriates cultural
elements of the other, defining them in terms of its own center; there is contestation
as each community establishes itself in defined spaces which the other community
also wants to occupy; there is communion as each community participates with the
other in a shared cultural space. The best way to get at this sense of shared space is
to examine the distinct Indian presence in carnival.
Solo Girdharrie (interview, 1997) has described carnival in San Fernando and
central Trinidad in the 1950s:
In the 1950s, it was a rare thing for anyone from outside San Fernando to go to the
city. You had to go by cart and that took a long time. People from central and south
Trinidad would go to San Fernando maybe twice a year. At carnival, they came to
have a meal in a “cook shop,” then go to the cinema to see an Indian movie, and
finally to watch some mas. Performers gathered behind the library near the big salmon
tree. From there minstrels emerged, musicians sat on the steps of the library and
played the harmonium and dholak, and there was singing and dancing by a male
dancer in a very dressy gown. One was to dress up like colonial officers – khaki pants,
cork hat, and white shirt – and pretend to be measuring or surveying land. This came
from the time when indentured servants, having decided to stay in the country after
their contracts ended, were allocated plots of land by the colonial authorities.

Costumes in the primarily Indian villages were very basic: Ravi Ji describes them
as being of the old mas type: “Indians played in steelbands and, before steelbands,
Indians beat biscuit tins with two sticks as if they were tassa drums” (Interview,
1997). The Jab Jabs, with their fancy clothes, whips, and bells, had a particular
Indian involvement – the Indians would have understood the bells as gunghroos

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• INDIAN PRESENCE IN CARNIVAL

(shunghroos), bells Indian dancers attach to their ankles. Jab Jabs were indeed
referred to as “coolie devils” (Crowley 1956: 74). Indians were attracted to the
Devils because they evoke images from Indian mythology. Indians also played Red
or Wild Indian (Amerindian), with a creative “confusion” both by Indians and
Afro-Creoles of the very word “Indian.”6
Carnival in the villages involved music, dancing, and the little skits, leelas. This
kind of celebration forms the basis for today’s carnivals in central Trinidad in
towns such as Chaguanas, Couva, and Carapichaima where traditional characters
– Jab Jab, Jab Molassie, Blue Devils, Midnight Robbers, Sailors, Wild/Red Indians,
“Arabian” dancers, Moko Jumbies, Bats, and Burroquites – come out on carnival
Monday. There is a distinct Indian version of Burroquite taken from the leela of
the Hindu goddess Durga and played in the villages, referred to as the harichand
dance. The mas is called Sumari:
The costume consists of an ornately decorated bamboo frame in the shape of a horse
with a hole in the “horse’s” back. The masquerader enters this hole and is attached to
the frame by a series of straps. He holds the reins of the “horse” and dances. He moves
the “horse” forward and backward to give the illusion of riding on horseback. Drums
and singing in Hindi usually accompany the dancing.
(J. Singh 1997: 18)

We are at this point in a position to make some preliminary reflections on the

Indian presence and influence on the three key components of carnival: steelband,
mas, and calypso. In steelband there has been, and continues to be, a very strong
Indian presence, particularly around San Fernando. The most famous name here
is Bobby Mohammed, who played the cowbell,7 his name immortalized in David
Rudder’s calypso “The Engine Room.” However, by far the most celebrated
Indo-Trinidadian is the legendary Jit Samaroo, arranger of the Renegades, one of
the oldest steelbands. Jit, the most successful Panorama arranger in the history of
the competition, is closely associated with the music of Kitchener, the calypsonian.
Jit also leads his own very successful family pan ensemble, the Samaroo Jets. Per-
haps even more fundamental than the outstanding Indian arrangers and perform-
ers is the influence of tassa drums on the very creation of pan. Solo Girdharrie
intimates this connection in his account of San Fernando (Interview, 1997). A case
has been made that tassa also influenced the development of pan in Port of Spain.
In mas the Jab Jab with its bright colors and mirrors and glitter is significantly
rooted in an Indian aesthetic. Mirrors and glitter are also prominent in such char-
acters as the Fancy Sailor, Midnight Robber, and Neg Jardin. The Indian aesthetic
is very strong in mas, as, for instance, in the color schemes of Peter Minshall’s River
(1983), Carnival Is Colour (1987), and Tantana (1991). Following the lead of Car-
lisle Chang, designer for Lee Huang in the late 1960s, Minshall introduced the
tassa into Port of Spain mas in the 1980s. In his works, Minshall weaves together
the African, Indian, and European. From 1995 to 1997, Minshall’s music was
mixed by Indo-Trinidadian Anil Harditsingh. Indians have also been band
leaders. Ivan Kallicharan was for years the leading mas man in San Fernando, and
Raul Garib was prominent in Port of Spain. Garib brought his band to Tobago
in 1997.
Formal Indian involvement in calypso can be traced back at least to the 1920s
(Constance, interview, 1997). In the 1970s and 1980s, Indian calypsonians included

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Shah (who raised issues of ethnic identity), Raja, and Hindu Prince. While the
point of departure for calypso is African, it engages the entire society, including
Indians. There are community calypso competitions in Indian areas. But of more
fundamental significance is the Indian influence since the 1970s on the form
of calypso itself. Lord Shorty (now Ras Shorty I, one of the key architects of
soca) lived many of his formative years in an Indian community. Shorty infused
Indian musical patterns into such soca songs as “Indrani” and “Om Shanti.”
Another key moment surrounded the controversial calypso by the Mighty Sparrow,
“Maharajin” (1982). The word refers to a Brahmin’s wife, though this meaning
does not carry into the song, where it refers to any Indian woman. The song is
constructed from Indian melodic patterns. In the song, Sparrow confesses his
love for an Indian woman, the Maharajin. This calypso represents a desire by the
Afro-Creole to appropriate the Indian musicality. But it can allow itself to do so
only through the Trinidadian tradition of humor known as “fatigue” and “stereo-
typing.” Hence, “Maharajin” simultaneously pokes fun at and expresses appreci-
ation for Indian music. This process must not be understood only as the use of
Indian music by Africans, which of course is taking place, but also as further
establishment of the Indian presence in carnival. This process reached a climax
with Indo-Trinidadians such as the female Drupatee Ramgoonai in the late
1980s and Rikki Jai in the 1990s and 2000s competing as calypsonians in carnival.
Carnival is an arena of cultural affirmation – different for Indians and Africans.
Africans experienced oppression while Indians experienced alienation, experiences
which, within the Creole framework, created contestation between these two
groups. By putting each community in its “place,” the dominant colonial author-
ities suppressed this contestation. After independence, the oil boom of the mid-
1970s created an influx of wealth. The centrality of the folk-community structure
was undermined as Trinidad society came to be defined by a new Americanized
middle-class culture, representing a new stage of Eurocentric hegemony. The
various ethnic centers – Indian, African, European – are no longer held each in its
own place. These centers now contest the space which is the society’s mainstream.
Today three “tribes” (a term used in Trinidad) are now clearly demarcated. The
first is the Eurocentric elite, the core of whom are the “local whites” (often referred
to as the French Creoles but who are actually by now racially mixed, hence the
term “neo-Europeans”); the neo-Europeans are culturally middle-class. The second
tribe is the Indian community with its center moving away from alienation and into
the mainstream where the Indians are challenging Eurocentric hegemony. A critical
point in this emergence was the election in 1995 of an “Indian” government led by
Prime Minister Basdeo Panday. This radical shift has implications for the carnival.
The third tribe remains the Afro-descended Trinidadians.
The older community structures must now be understood in terms of a radical
new frame of reference. Previously, Indian participation in carnival took place
within the Creole framework. Indians participated but were alienated from the
carnival mainstream itself. Currently, Indian participation expresses the very
center of this community, claiming its space in the post-Creole mainstream. In
this context, the town of Carapichaima celebrated fifty years of formally staging
carnival in 1997 with a large celebration attended by Prime Minster Panday. A
crowd of about twenty thousand gathered to listen to speeches and enjoy the
trademark traditional characters, calypso and steelband contests, and a mas of

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thirty bands who reached Carapichaima on carnival Monday from around the
island. (Carapichaima Carnival is on Monday only, leaving the bands free to go to
the “big show” in Port of Spain on Tuesday.) In Carapichaima, in the midst of the
traditions one associates with Creole carnival, there is a distinct Indian aesthetic
in the dancers, the Sumaris, and other performers, some of whom reappeared for
the Energy and Sugar Festival in Couva in June 1997. Also, recently, there has been
a major Indian participation “on the road” at carnival time. A number of young
Indo-Trinidadians play mas in one of the neo-European bands, Poison. Indians are
claiming carnival space as Indians.
The flagship of this Indocentric presence and contestation for space is chutney,
which originated as a distinct form in the 1970s and bloomed in the 1980s. Chutney
is the confluence of the folk-songs of women (particularly those associated with the
matikhor and cooking nights of the Hindu wedding), the raw celebratory
music of the menfolk, Hindu religious music, and Indian film songs. The pivotal
erotic energy is that of the female matikhor, where, for women, dancing onstage,
both planned and spontaneous, is essential. In chutney, “grassroots women” (a
term which in local parlance refers to the poorer classes) claim their space, even as
men and women spectators dance and wine. Traditional instruments have given
way to electronic keyboards and guitars. Chutney shows occur throughout the year.
It is in this context that Drupatee Ramgoonai’s successful break into the calypso
arena in the 1988 season must be understood. She was followed by Rikki Jai –
calypso and chutney intersecting. Chutney now struggles with calypso for domin-
ance. Drupatee symbolizes this contest for control of the carnival mainstream by
Indians.
The move of chutney into calypso space climaxed in 1996 when Indo-
Trinidadian Sonny Mann’s chutney “Lotay La” was a major hit during the carnival
season. However, while “Lotay La” was a hit with non-Indians, ethnic tension
was not far beneath the surface. In this context, and in retrospect, there was an
unsurprising backlash in the pelting of Sonny Mann at the Soca Monarch final in
1996.8
This incident, which arose over a controversy surrounding Mann’s qualifications
to be in the Calypso Monarch finals, may be understood as an Afro-Trinidadian
reaction to the emergence of Indians. Mann’s near-disqualification rested not on
his abilities as a singer but on the fact that his calypso had been written and
recorded before the previous Ash Wednesday. Nevertheless, the Indo-Trinidad
community reacted fiercely to his initial disqualification, which was rescinded
before the final competition on the technicality that a new version of his calypso
had been recorded within the permitted time frame, i.e. after the previous Ash
Wednesday. This pattern of racial divisiveness in calypsos was first evidenced in the
calypsos of the late 1980s, grew more intense after the elections of 1995, and
reached highly controversial and possibly explosive proportions after the 1997 car-
nival, with the Prime Minister threatening to censor calypsos if they are deemed to
be racially offensive. While many calypsonians have been involved in this process,
the major ones are Cro Cro, Sugar Aloes, and, in 1997, Watchman, who sang a
calypso that was a blatant attack on Prime Minister Panday. In this light, the
“Indian” Prime Minister threatened to take measures against the “African” calyp-
sonians. The proposed measures involve the withdrawing of state funding for
calypso shows.

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• BURTON SANKERALLI

Secondly, there is the “Jahaaji Bhai” controversy. In 1996, Afro-Trinidadian

Brother Marvin sang the calypso “Jahaaji Bhai” on the 150th anniversary of the
Indian arrival, which was celebrated the previous year. “Jahaaji Bhai” is about
the bond between African and Indian. The phrase itself, as the calypso says, origin-
ally refers to the “brotherhood of the boat” established between indentured immi-
grants who traveled together; “Jahaaji Bhai,” rich with Indian musical patterns,
was the outstanding calypso of 1996. It was strongly endorsed, indeed taken over,
by the Indian community. Nevertheless, there was an objection raised in some Afro-
Trinidadian quarters. In the 1997 season several calypsonians (Marvin himself
counted nine) attacked the song. The reason given for the reaction was an objection
to one line in the calypso which was considered offensive. While there may well be
some legitimacy to the charge, it would appear that the real concern runs deeper.
There is a perception that the Indian presence is being glorified at the expense of
the African. By 1997 the soca-chutney space had “parallel mainstreams” – the
African and the Indian, each having its own artists, its own shows, and its own
radio stations.
The designations “chutney soca” and “soca chutney” are employed to denote a
fusion of the artforms, though such fusion has not essentially taken place. It may
be said that “chutney soca” refers to soca which has assimilated patterns from
chutney. “Soca chutney” refers to chutney which has done likewise in regard to
soca. Judging from the 1997 season and the general trend in the society, the
Afrocentric soca space is not particularly open to such experimentation – while in
the chutney space, it is the “Indian” soca chutney that will predominate; it is this
which has more of a future, at least in the short run.
In Afrocentric soca there was no chutney or Indian-oriented song in 1997. Con-
trast this with “Lotay La,” “Jahaaji Bhai,” and even Chris Garcia’s very popular
“Chutney Bacchanal” of the previous season. Some artists effectively function
in both mainstreams, but to a large extent they allocate different songs to each. In
this regard, the most significant was the very successful soca singer Crazy (of
part-Chinese ancestry), who fully embraced the challenge and sang two songs
which may fairly be described as “raw” chutney. In terms of participation, soca,
being more directly descended from the old Creole culture, is ethnically more
diverse, though often overwhelmingly Afro-Trinidadian. However, there are as well
neo-European and even Indian-dominated soca fetes. On the other hand, chutney
shows are musically more assimilative – an indication of the Indian community’s
vitality in this period of its expansion. It is also manifest in the proliferation of
Indian radio stations, which have further sustained the chutney space.
Since the 1980s there has been a Hindu renaissance, a resurgence of Hinduism,
marked also by some Hindu fundamentalism. Take, for example, the Divali celebra-
tion in the Hindu month of Kartik (October or November, according to a seasonal
lunar calendar) which has taken on truly national proportions. “Divali Nagar”
is an open “village,” running for a week before Divali, full of religious and com-
mercial booths and cultural presentations – storytelling, skits, bhajans (Hindu
hymns), devotions. From the large stage come musical shows that are broadcast
over the radio. Food and drink are in abundance, but no alcohol or meat. Estimates
have put annual attendance in the hundreds of thousands.
The Hindu renaissance has also provided the basis for the successful 150th
Indian Arrival Day celebrations and its declaration as a public holiday. Much of

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Arrival Day took place “on the road.” The renaissance has also led to the Phagwa
festival, which includes the pichakaaree competition. The pichakaaree is an Indian
song sung mostly in English. It utilizes traditional instruments and music as well as
some film and Indian pop tunes. What is most significant about the Phagwa
pichakaaree is that it deals with social issues confronting the Indo-Trinidadian
community. Pichakaaree parallels Afro-Trinidadian “social commentary” calypso.
Mukesh Baburam is an exponent of a strand of pichakaaree which may be called
“Indocentric calypso.” Baburam challenges Cro Cro and Sugar Aloes.
Pichakaaree is broadcast on radio and television. Though funding the
pichakaaree competition is always an uphill struggle, the finals have in recent years
drawn large and enthusiastic crowds. I predict that in time this or its equivalent will
become more central. What is evident is that the very definition of what constitutes
“carnival space” is being radically redefined by the Indian entry into the Trinidad
mainstream. The question is whether such contestation will lead to increasing
fragmentation and the disintegration of Trinidadian society or whether there is a
possibility of unity.9
Carnival is not only a reflection of Trinidadian society, it is the essence of the
society. The “road” is the gathering, the concentration, the intense focus of
the earth. It is a place of dwelling and journeying, a space of play and struggle. It
is here that the energies of our people are focused. However, carnival does not
disclose abstract “cultural expressions” or “artifacts.” The space is engaged by
living communities, who assimilate, contest, and participate. It is out of this that
real communion emerges.
When we speak of Indian, African, and European groups, we do not mean that
they are any less Trinidadian. What are disclosed are phenomenologically dis-
tinct ethnic centers, living communities constituted by ancestral patterns which in
terms of the present global frame of reference are recognized as being “Indian,”
African,” and “European.” However, these centers are all “Trinidadian.” The
communities are grounded in the same earth, they play on the same road where
they engage each other. What is often overlooked is that the Indian community has
long been a key “audience” for carnival (Ravi Ji, interview, 1997). At present,
Indians are claiming their rightful place in the “center.” This raises the question
of ethnic fragmentation. The Afro-Creole celebration of life bore witness to the
possibility of unity. But the “Creole structure” carried with it the inherent violence
of oppression for the African and alienation for the Indian. With the collapse of
the hegemony, ethnic contest began in earnest. Contestation need not lead to dis-
integration; such chaos may be both violent and creative, yielding new possibility.
To Hindus, chaos really means transformation and regeneration. Such is the nature
of leela. Is this not the essence of carnival?

NOTES

This chapter is reprinted from Milla Cozart Riggio (ed.), The Drama Review, 42 (3): 203–12
(1998), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
1 The system was not as complex as in India. The most significant caste designation was Brahmin
(Brahman). But in Trinidad this was often acquired during or after the boat trip.
2 [Editor’s note]. There is also in Trinidad a vibrant Indian-Trinidad muslim community.
3 Also known as Hosein, the festival is named after the brother martyred on the plain of Karbala

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• BURTON SANKERALLI

on Ashura. The account given here of the festival is based on my own experience and written
sources. It should be noted that there must have been variations over time and location. This
account is not presented as definitive; it is suggestive only of certain traditions and trends in
Hosay.
4 At the time “coolie” was a term for an Asiatic laborer, including the Indian. It is today a
derogatory ethnic term, roughly equivalent to “nigger.”
5 Those who create Hosay as a sacred religious, funereal re-enactment themselves resist the idea
of this event as having any link to the “fete,” though they of course acknowledge the ribaldry
among the gathered crowds on the street. This is especially true in St James, where the Hosay
camps are controlled primarily by Muslims. In the southern fishing village of Cedros, however,
where Hosay is the biggest celebration of the year, celebrants themselves on Ashura day – after
they have broken their strict fasting the night before – tend to be more carnivalesque in their
own exuberance, sometimes drinking beer as they process, with a tendency to jump up and wave
to the beating of the tassa drums. This adds a note of gaiety and some might claim profanity
to Ashura day in the south. Moreover, orthodox Muslims throughout the island have at best an
ambivalent relationship to Hosay. Many reject it, though not all. The prayers in both St James
and Cedros (where it is celebrated primarily by Hindus and some Christians) are fervent, and
the fasting strict. [Editor’s note.]
6 An Indian form of stickfighting was called gadka (or gatka), with shield and drumming. Accord-
ing to Ravi Ji, the Indian attraction to Native American (AmeriIndian) rituals and customs
extends beyond carnival masquerading and even beyond Trinidad, back to India. There is much
to be studied here. [Editor’s note: Interview, 2004].
7 A cowbell is a percussion instrument in the rhythm section, or engine room, of a steelband. The
song is found on David Rudder’s album Haiti (1988).
8 The pelting of calypsonians with toilet paper and bottles is by no means unknown. The reasons
behind this particular incident were complex, but ethnic considerations were a factor.
9 Since this chapter was first published in 1998, the Hindu festivals have increased both in
number and in intensity under the direction of Pundit Ravi Ji, with a commemoration of Holika
Dahan being added to Phagwa in the Spring and Ganga Dhaara (or the River festival)
celebrated in June. Plans exist to further develop Ramlila, already arguably the most extensive
celebration of this Fall festival outside India itself. [Editor’s note.]

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6
CHINESE IN TRINIDAD CARNIVAL
Carlisle Chang

Ten years after the British took over the island of Trinidad, the first British census
of 1808 records the presence of twenty-two Chinese among a mixed population of
English, Spanish, French, German, and Corsican whites, Amerindians, mainly
French-speaking free coloureds, and enslaved Africans. The Chinese were probably
part of a British experiment to find a source of free labor that could replace the
uneconomical slave system. The Chinese experiment was unsuccessful; beginning in
1845, it was replaced with indentured labor from India.
Chinese immigrants came to the island after an often hazardous six-month
voyage from the province of Canton. The men were not usually accompanied by
their womenfolk; interracial marriages required registration and religious conver-
sions for the Chinese. Over the years, ignorance of the Chinese custom of stating
the clan or family name first has produced a number of pseudo-Chinese (or newly
created Chinese) family names. Thus, a Mr Chin Lo-sin could become Mr Chin,
Mr Chin-sing, Assing, or Alowsing. Moreover, the converted Chinese spouse often
assumed the name of the parish priest or the sponsor at his baptism, a practice
resulting in Chinese families named Johnson, Richards, Isaac, and Scott. With
counterparts throughout the southern Caribbean, these anomalies must be noted in
any study of Chinese involvement in the social development of Trinidad, in which
carnival forms a unique cultural expression.
The Chinese soon became known not only as good providers in a marriage
partnership but also as possessors of acute business acumen. Before long they
controlled a network of variety shops throughout the island. Their entrepreneurial
skills made them one of the most upwardly mobile social groups in the country.
The earliest evidence of Chinese participation in the street carnival – from 1927 –
appears to point to the brothers Christopher: Choy-yin, Chin-yu, and Con-chin
(the youngest), also known as “Bolo.” These were the children of a very successful
merchant from Canton and a Venezuelan mother. The family lived at 7 Nelson
Street, less than a hundred yards from the Roman Catholic Cathedral and the
splendid twelve-block esplanade then known as Marine Square. Their home was a
large two-storeyed building with a Spanish-style courtyard. The living quarters

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• CARLISLE CHANG

Fig. 6.1 Carlisle Chang at work in his living room in Woodbrook, a suburb of Port of Spain, Trinidad.
Photograph by Jeffrey Chock.

were above with a wide veranda overhanging the sidewalk; on the ground floor the
family had a musical-instruments business. Later they would import gramophone
records and eventually make their own.
All the children were taught music, as befitted a well-established middle-class
family, studying the four-stringed cuatro from Venezuela, the Spanish guitar, and
all the instruments of the ’pagnol parandero orchestras. But they were becoming
increasingly interested in the latest jazz instruments from America – clarinet,
saxophone, banjo, and trombone.
The Christophers lived on the east side of Port of Spain’s business district;
farther east, beyond the dry river, in the hills of John-John, Laventille, and
Belmont, were the shanties and cottages of the working class whence nightly
sounded the drums of Orisha and the Rada people. From these hills at carnival
time the traditional mummers descended into the city – Moko Jumbies on stilts,
Warrahouns speaking Amerindian tongues, Pierrot Grenade in rags, Jab Jabs
with whips, Jab-Molassi painted blue – moving to the beat of African drums or
tambour-bamboo.
The Christophers were a different breed. Theirs was the world of resurgence
following World War I. Oil had been discovered as early as 1857, but, following
the Great War, a major influx of investment in petroleum drilling came from the
United States, Britain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The country could boast
of water piped to every district, free health care and education, a network of
asphalted or graveled roads, and a grand new railway terminus as fine as the
governor’s mansion. In roared the 1920s with the latest products and influences
from Europe and America. It was the era of the Charleston, one-piece bathing

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• CHINESE IN TRINIDAD CARNIVAL

costumes, flappers, movie theatres, visits by Lindberg and the Graf Zeppelin, and
new air connections to Miami to begin by the 1940s.
The Christophers’ trading emporium and their interest in music brought the
family directly into the world of the street carnival. In those days bands of
musicians roamed the streets of the city nightly, dancing and visiting friends in the
Italian tradition (which arrived in Trinidad via Corsican immigrants). Accom-
panied by costumed revelers, everyone wore masks of papier-mâché or molded wire,
well-covered to ensure anonymity. This enabled the women to join in the revelry
without being recognized and branded as “immoral.” The season extended from
January 1 to jour ouvert (jouvay), the dawn of the last Monday before Lent when
all forms of satirical costumes or old clothing are worn. This was followed later by
more sumptuous costumes culminating at midnight on Tuesday.
Like many other established families that subscribed to this Creole custom,
the Christophers and their musical friends inevitably were drawn into the main
costume parade. They began organizing bands, as they were called, in 1927 and
continued annually until 1939 when another world war began to loom. As Bolo
tells it, the brothers played “every type of costume imaginable” reflecting the
expanding world of the 1920s and 1930s – Arabs of the desert, Mexicans of
the haciendas, Gauchos of the pampas, French Pierrots, Spanish Toreadors and
Caribbean Pirates – all lavishly decorated with the latest haberdashery from
Paris, the newest rayon satins and cotton velvets from London, wire masks from
Germany, and ostrich and swans’ down, spangles, and braid from everywhere else
(Christopher, interview, 1997).
The brothers decided to retire after twelve years, but another Chinese stepped
into the breech, a young salesman named Manzie Lai, the son of a Cantonese artist
and his Venezuelan wife. Drawing his main support from members of the Chinese
community, Manzie first appeared on the scene with the masquerade band entitled
The Moors in 1939 and followed with the Knights of the Round Table the next year.
But the war in Europe was now a reality and would be followed shortly by the
Pacific war. Carnival was halted for the duration, and the wearing of face masks or
any garment too closely resembling military uniform was forbidden.
Manzie reappeared in 1946 with Apaches, and the following year he produced
Daniel Boone, evidence of the increased influence on carnival of American films
and the large US naval and army bases set up under the US Lend-Lease Agreement
with Britain. Manzie’s final carnival appearance was with Leopard Men – one of
the largest groups of the day, its costumes simple, inexpensive, and lighter, suited to
the interests of a comic-book generation. Since VE Day, the wearing of masks had
been abandoned and the bands showed an increasing female participation which
would continue annually up to the present.
Manzie Lai was replaced by Lyle Ackrill, a manufacturer’s representative who
created bands from 1951 to 1954. His major bands were Ghenghis Khan and The
Greatest Show on Earth. About this time Dr Robert Ammon, a dentist, entered the
competition arena. He developed several presentations reflecting his wide-ranging
interests and an intellectual turn of mind, but also the growing affluence of Port of
Spain. Gods of Olympus appeared in 1954, the first time that hand-tooled metal
breastplates were worn. These were done in aluminum, copper repoussé, and gold
plate, and were executed by the celebrated silversmith Ken Morris. Ammon created
several notable bands – Richard II (1955); La Fiesta Brava (1956), a tribute to

87
• CARLISLE CHANG

the famous Spanish bullfighter Manolete, in which each costume was individually
decorated; Atlantis (1958); Conquistadors (1959); and China in Peace and War
(1960). His triumph was the Flagwavers of Sienna (1962), introducing flags as an
effective hand prop.
Up to the mid-1950s the street carnival parade still reflected the ideas and
aspirations of the predominant Afro-Trinidadian groups. Costumes tended to be
“traditional” or folkloric, such as Wild Indians, Jab Jabs (devils), Fancy Clowns
with wired collars, etc.; sailors of various types and uniformed groups depicting
World War II Pacific theatre operations copied from American movies and pro-
duced by the burgeoning steelbands; African tribal themes, commonly referred to
as Ju Ju Warriors; and Old Testament biblical stories of Assyrians, Egyptians,
and Philistines, reflecting the extensive missionary work of the African Methodist
church among the African-derived working class.
Ammon’s organization represented the broader interracial mix of the younger
professional, business-oriented, or gainfully employed and educated middle
class. By the time he withdrew from active production, several spinoff groups were
emerging under non-Chinese leadership: Harold Saldenah out of Lai, who made
excellent use of Ken Morris’s metal skills in a series based on Roman history; and
Edmond Hart, a customs broker, out of Ammon. Hart developed his band into
a family business which continues today as Hart’s New Generation, now several
thousand strong and already parlayed into two separate groups for more effective
control.
By the 1960s the entire carnival celebration began to come under greater govern-
mental regulation. A new Carnival Development Committee was established to
manage the undertaking – to advise on policy, to codify rules and regulations, and
to generally promote carnival as both a national event and a tourism investment.
The organization of individual bands became more complicated and expensive,
and keen rivalries grew for the prestigious awards and money prizes.
In 1963, Archie Yee-Foon, a young commercial artist, won the first Band of
the Year award for his production The Field of the Cloth of Gold. It recreated the
meeting between Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France, which was
celebrated for its opulent display. That was Archie’s only contribution to carnival
history. Participation in the now government-regulated competitions with the
main venue at the Queen’s Park Race Course (i.e. Queen’s Park Savannah) was
becoming more expensive to produce and more complicated to manage. Volunteer
helpers were being replaced by hired labor, orchestras grew larger and pricier
as band membership increased, and making costumes for fun was quickly
becoming obsolete. Carnival was now a critical business investment demanding
entrepreneurial skills.
Thus it was that Stephen and Elsie Lee Heung, after several years of organizing
old mas bands – a particular style of satirical performance presented at private
clubs – decided to enter the larger arena of the Monday and Tuesday parades. I was
invited to create their first presentation in 1964. Japan, Land of the Kabuki was
a small group but it earned the fourth prize and high praise for elaborately
embroidered costumes, traditional kabuki theatre characters, and an innovative
presentation in mime. Thereafter my association with the Lee Heungs lasted eleven
years until we parted company after carnival in 1975. In that time I was able to
introduce more esoteric concepts and new innovations into the street parade.

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• CHINESE IN TRINIDAD CARNIVAL

Themes ranged from Crete (1966), to Yucatan (1971), and East of Java (1973).
Les Fêtes Galantes de Versailles suggested a correlation between the entertainments
at the French court of Louis XIV and XV and the structure of bands in the
Trinidad Carnival. There was make-believe and childlike fantasy in the 1001 Nights
(1969) and Russian Fairy Tales (1972). Primeval (1968) postulated the notion of
the universality of tribal beliefs, while Terra Firma (1974) explored the molecular
structure of matter. Conquest of Space (1970) saluted the US space program and
We Kinda People expressed the vernacular paraphase of our national motto, “All
ah we is one!” The band won the Band of the Year title three times, produced four
Queens of Carnival and two Kings, and I won the Designer’s Prize several times.
We were always ranked among the first three prizes and were depicted on at least
three national postage stamps.
Annually, however, surprise elements were injected into our presentations. We
are regarded as having developed hand props into a fine art. We first introduced
Chinese drums in China: The Forbidden City (1967) and East Indian tassa
drummers every year thereafter, and that has become almost universal among
large bands. In Versailles I transposed the Burroquite hobbyhorse costume into
caparisoned horses for the Horse Ballet of Louis XIV, and traditional Bat costumes
became pterodactyls in Primeval. We tried everything and anything to gain a
competitive edge, from battery-powered gears in the Magic Horse (1001 Nights) to
pinwheels in Yucatan.
Stephen Lee Heung was the first president of the Carnival Bands Association,
formed to ensure representation for costume bands on the controlling Carnival
Development Committee. As bands were becoming larger and more expensive,
requiring upwards of a half-million dollars to underwrite, there were few new
organizers with the capital or the production capabilities required. Lee Heung was
among the top three producers whose works were annually showcased in Madison
Square Garden, New York, during the late 1960s and early 1970s in shows that
paved the way for the establishment of the present Labor Day Parade in Brooklyn.
In 1989, as the Lee Heung star faded, another Chinese producer, Richard Afong,
broke away from his apprenticeship in Edmond Hart’s band to form a partner-
ship under the name Savage. This was the first of the truly large bands, growing
larger each year with the inflow of new teenagers. Afong again separated and
formed Barbarossa in 1992. He was an immediate success and produced Cipango
(1993), Picasso (1994), East of Sumatra (1995), Comanchero (1996), Sarragossa
(1997), Botay (1998), Jewels of the Nile (1999), Xtassy (2000), Arena (2001),
and Untamed (2002). Another Chinese of mixed ancestry, Afong rehabilitated
the almost-defunct Carnival Bands Association, presiding as president from the
inception of Barbarossa to the present. Afong has shown astute managerial skills
and an unusual turn of mind. He produced the first international King and Queen
of Carnival show (in the Fall of 1994) and has developed the organization into
a powerful bargaining group, on a par with the much older calypsonian and
steelband organizations.
The third and fourth generations of Chinese, more fully integrated into the
festival, have found other ways to participate. Dr John D’Arcy Lee, for instance,
brought out a jouvay band of Blue Devils – with some interruption – for more than
a decade (resuming this band in 1995 after a hiatus and ending in 2000). There have
also been tentative attempts to enter the world of calypso, the chief exponents

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• CARLISLE CHANG

being Rex West (a medical doctor) and Chinese Laundry, already a DJ popular
with the young. In addition, there has been steelband sponsorship, such as the Lee
Chong Serenaders of San Fernando. A Chinese-Jamaican bandleader, Byron Lee,
who regularly plays for one of the biggest and best masquerade bands in Trinidad,
has been an instrumental factor in developing carnival in Jamaica. It is too early to
surmise the degree to which the Chinese will participate in the performance aspects
of carnival because of their characteristic reticence, but one will readily find them
wherever they can express their creative and organizational skills. The Chinese
have manifested their presence in unexpected places. They will continue to do so as
Trinidad and Tobago Carnival evolves.

This chapter is reprinted from Milla Cozart Riggio (ed.), The Drama Review, 42 (3): 213–19
(1998), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

90
Part II

PLAYIN’ YUHSELF – MASKING

THE OTHER
Tradition and change in carnival masquerades
7
“PLAY MAS” – PLAY ME, PLAY WE
Introduction to Part II

Milla Cozart Riggio

“You feel I should play a princess or a slave girl?”

He smiled. “You is a princess already,” he said, “Play a slave girl.”
Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can’t Dance

The apt description of the typical Caribbean person is that he/she is part-African,
part-European, part-Asian, part-Native-American but totally Caribbean. To perceive
this is to understand the creative diversity which is at once cause and occasion, result
and defining point of Caribbean cultural life.
Rex Nettleford, Texture and Diversity: The Cultural Life of the Caribbean

Contemporary Trinidad Carnival has three major divisions: pan, calypso, and
masquerading – collectively, the music and the masks of carnival. Separating
carnival masquerades from carnival music belies the reality of the event itself. But
in an island in which “playing mas”1 has for many come to define a way of life,
where to “play your mas” can mean to “do your thing,” carnival masking has a
mystique that both manifests and calls into question varying senses of identity and
processes of cultural memory. Ultimately, the assimilation that is the lifeblood of
the Caribbean – “part-African, part-European, part-Asian, part-Native-American
but totally Caribbean” – is interwoven into the process through which the carnival
masquerades of the “hoi polloi” have become the identifying signifier of a nation,
transforming carnival into something that is neither European nor African nor
Asian, but a unique Trinidadian spectacle newly created in this so-called “new
world.”2

IDENTITY AND DISGUISE

In Trinidad, as in any of the plantation cultures developed by enforced labor to

supply leisured foodstuffs – sugar, rum, coffee, cocoa – to the ironically designated
“mother” countries of Europe, identity and disguise often merge. Subjugated
peoples living under laws they do not make themselves tend to develop a Janus-like

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double face, looking outward with impassive expressions, often accompanied by a

deceptive “yes massa” cooperativeness, while their vital lives are turned inward,
to their own enclosed community. The face that points outward becomes a mask,
disguising and hiding the personality beneath. In their own space – their homes or
the yards or huts they inhabit – the people free up, manifesting independence of
spirit, pride, and a hard-won distrust of outsiders. Masking yourself and playing
the “other” that one is expected to be becomes a daily survival mechanism: be a
“princess”; play a “slave girl.”
The issue, of course, is not so simple. How does one sustain a sense of self when
all the public measures of beauty, intelligence, strength, and wisdom work against
you? How to keep the physical chains from becoming “mind forg’d manacles” that
cripple the spirit and destroy the soul (quotation from William Blake, “London”)?
How to be “enslaved” without becoming a “slave”? One solution is to disguise
forbidden customs or religions, hiding outlawed traditions behind allowed rituals.
Africans transplanted to the Americas, for instance, often subsumed their some-
times diverse African religious systems under the Yoruba Orisha banner, first by
identifying their own deities with the Yoruba Orishas and then masking the Orishas
(or gods) in the acceptable figures of Catholic saints, such as St Michael, John the
Baptist, St Barbara or others. Cultural and religious rituals thus transplanted do
not remain the same. They are inevitably altered by collisions with other traditions.
Thus, no matter how strongly he continues to wield his African ax, the Shango that
peers through the eyes of John the Baptist on a Caribbean plantation is not pre-
cisely the figure he would have been in a Nigerian tribal setting.3 Similarly, the
“princess” who in her daily life “plays” a “slave girl” cannot so easily separate the
self from the mask.
Such syncretism works both ways. If the African Orishas are altered by the
Catholic masks they are made to wear, they also leave their own imprint. This is
true throughout the Caribbean. The particular Trinidad story is even more com-
plex. Despite the horrors of genocide and enslavement that remain the foundation
stones of Trinidad cultural history, there was never a simple opposition between a
hegemonic authority and an oppressed people. Ruling elites (British and French
Creole, with a strong Spanish residue) conflicted over religion, language, and con-
cepts of power, each with its own Afro-Creole underclass or, in the case of English-
speaking Barbadians, sometimes middle class; a population of often well-educated,
sometimes wealthy “free persons of color” had its privileges restricted; African
Creoles owned slaves; Chinese indentured laborers, Germans and other Europeans,
and many more filled in a social picture further complicated by a continuous
process of interracial mating and creolized miscegenation.
In this situation, carnival – with its “inherent capacity to appropriate spaces and
transgress boundaries in order to manifest and celebrate aspects of human com-
munity” (see Riggio 2003) – emerged as the festive arena in which classes, races, and
finally genders and even religions would most naturally mix with, resist, and finally
accommodate each other. In a culture of multiple identities, to “play yuhself,”
as the carnival cliché suggests, may be best achieved in fantasies of the so-
called “other.” This reality complicates our understanding of carnival masking in a
situation in which “dressing up” and “dressing down” in the carnival season mean
more than temporary release or momentary social inversion.

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• “PLAY MAS” – PLAY ME, PLAY WE

MIXING AND MASKING

Often histories of carnival masking in Trinidad are reduced to questions of origins:

What is African? What is European? Which came first? Which is most basic?
Most dominant? This debate may be a necessary corollary to reclaiming cultural
space denied to a subjugated people. But it also tears at the fabric of a festival
in which the individual threads are indistinguishable parts of a whole cultural
tapestry. Certainly, Africans brought with them basic festive customs still evident in
today’s carnival – not the least of which is the habit of “playing royal,” of crowning
festive Kings and Queens for their beauty rather than their grotesque comedic
functions. African concepts of masking are abundantly reflected in carnival, just
as the history of resistance and rebellion is encoded in the evolution of canboulay,
the territorial street bands of stickfighters that collectively produced the pre-dawn
rituals of jouvay, and many of the traditional characters of carnival. But in each of
these cases – as in the influx of Chinese, Indo-Trinidadian, and many other cultural
influences – the product is finally a uniquely Caribbean hybrid.
Equally as important as the threads of origin are the parallels between different
masking traditions: between the European hobbyhorse, the Indian Soumarie,
and the Trinidadian Burroquite; the African martial game of stickfighting and
European fencing; African Moko Jumbies and European stilt walkers. Just as the
character of Catholic saints made it easy for Yoruba Orishas to take refuge behind
Catholic masks, so too these parallels facilitated the creation of carnival as a
Trinidadian phenomenon, merging and mixing many traditions.
When and how this merger first began is impossible to say. As early as 1827 – a
full decade before emancipation – the “high and the low, rich and poor, learned
and unlearned Catholics of Trinidad” are described by a visiting British officer as
“masking” for carnival in a display of gaiety and transformation on the streets of
Port of Spain compared to which “Ovid’s Metamorphoses were nothing” (Bayley
1833: 214). Do the “low,” the “poor,” and the “unlearned” include Africans? It is
not clear. But Mrs Carmichael, a British matron newly arrived from St Vincent
with her husband, describes a Christmas spent partly with slaves, first attending
a dance held in the slave quarters, characterized by its decorum as well as the
elegant sense of clothing styles, and then welcoming the enslaved Africans outside
the big house the following morning in a celebration of the season, to which the
slaves brought “good wishes for a good crop and good sugar” – in a show of
solidarity or hiding behind a festive mask (Carmichael 1833: 288–97, quoted in
Cowley 1996: 17). Who is to say? The significant point is the early evidence of
festive intermingling. Christmas was, of course, a time of gift-giving when the rules
of the plantation would be somewhat more lax. But one cannot help wondering
what better documentation might also reveal about interactive patterns of cele-
bration extending into the carnival season. Even in this case, the Africans were
invited to return on New Year’s Day (Carmichael 1833: 288–97, quoted in Cowley
1996: 17).4
We do not know when European and African masking traditions began to
impact each other directly. What we do know – and what continues to be true today
– is that costume styles were less codified than we often imagine. Today we think of
the stickfighters and the Neg Jardins (field Negroes) as separate carnival characters,
with the latter often described as a costume favored by French Creole planters,

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• MILLA COZART RIGGIO

in a display of carnival inversion. But the costume was also favored by Afro-
Trinidadians. Stickfighting bands were once known as “Neg Jardin stickband[s]”
(Lennox Pierre, interviewed by Hall, 1998b; see p. 51 in this volume; see also Port-
of-Spain Gazette, 1908, quoted in Cowley 1996: 164). Like the earlier stickfighting
costume, the Neg Jardin is a fancy dresser; he wears European-style knee-length
breeches and satin shirts, on which is sewn a heart-shaped “fol” (the name is
French) decorated with small mirrors. There are at least four characters in today’s
carnival who wear this fol: the Neg Jardin, the Pierrot, the Jab Jab, and the trad-
itional stickfighter (see figure 7.1). In their origins and early development, these
characters – the well-dressed field slave, the clown, the fancy devil, and the stick-
fighter – were neither as separate nor as ethnically specific as they now may seem.
Moreover, the fol, which resembles a similarly heart-shaped decoration on (East)
Indian clothing, also decorated with mirrors, may have helped to encourage gatka,
or Indo-Trinidadian stickfighting, to develop alongside the African form. As we

Fig. 7.1 Traditional Jab Jab carnival character, with fol breastplate covered with mirrors. Carapichaima,
carnival Monday, 2002. Photograph by Pablo Delano.

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review the history of masquerading and the development of traditional characters,

it is good to be reminded that the taxonomy of costuming is as fluid and changing
as language itself.

MAS AND CLASS

From at least the mid-nineteenth century on, there were multiple middle classes
in Trinidad: African Creole, French Creole, free colored, and British. Ordinarily,
the history of the festival in the latter half of the nineteenth century is described as
an African Creole middle-class takeover of carnival (see Brereton in this volume).
In essence, though carnival is now a festival that involves all the classes of the island
and throughout the Caribbean diaspora, the values of the middle class, created as a
function of the Industrial Revolution in capitalist economies, are intrinsically
opposed to the values of carnival. This has resulted in a dialectical tension that has
remained much more constant through the history of carnival than is ordinarily
recognized.
The British brought a stern sense of ethics and a code of acceptable behavior to
the event, which was from a very early period commercialized (costumes were
advertised as early as 1829; see Cowley 1996: 23), subjected to restrictions based
on notions of gentility and morality, feared for the possibilities of insurrection
that might be created by allowing a majority dark population to gather even for
festive purposes, and repeatedly thought to be dying out. At the heart of much of
the conflict was the basically middle-class notion of decency. In 1895, cross-
dressing was forbidden, with the result, it was said, of much less vibrance on the
streets. Pierrots were required to be licensed from 1891, and Neg Jardins were
frequently arrested for disturbing the peace, particularly in the decade before
and after the turn of the century. In 1919, the rules for the so-called “Victory
Carnival” sponsored by the Trinidad Guardian newspaper after World War I
stressed decorum, threatening to take away prizes from anyone for vulgar behavior
subsequent to the competition.
This Victory Carnival also featured a “Grand Illuminated Parade of Decorated
Motor Cars and Other Vehicles” that would on Tuesday night circle the Queen’s
Park Savannah three times. These decorated cars and, especially, the “other
vehicles” are important milestones in the history of carnival. They are the proto-
type of the lorries that in the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s would be the bastion
of the white middle class in carnival, allowing them to participate in the street
event without actually mingling on the streets. These lorries in their turn provided
the origin of the massive semi-trailer sound-trucks that now provide music for
masqueraders of all classes who mingle on the streets.
Even when middle-class, mainly white, masqueraders played on trucks, safely
above the street fray, the mas they played and their costumes were no more neces-
sarily distinctive from those of the working-class street festival than they had been
when nineteenth-century Creole planters and stickfighters both favored the Neg
Jardin. See, for instance, figure 7.2, which shows a truckload of white masqueraders
playing “prison mas” in 1935, compared to photographs of Afro-Trinidadian,
plebian traditional masqueraders playing prison mas on the streets of Port of
Spain in the 1940s and a middle-class steel band in 2003 (figures 7.3 and 7.4). The
similarity of costuming bridges the divide between the masqueraders, emphasizing

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Fig. 7.2 Prison mas played by middle-class masqueraders on a lorry or truck, 1935.
Photograph from the collection of Pablo Delano. Used with permission.

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• “PLAY MAS” – PLAY ME, PLAY WE

Fig. 7.3 Prison mas played on the street by traditional

masqueraders, 1940s. Photograph courtesy of
Narrie Approo.

the crossing of boundaries, which is one of the most basic characteristics of

carnival.

CATALOGING CARNIVAL

Although contemporary Trinidad Carnival defies all attempts to contain or restrain

it, it does now have a plethora of categories and rules that purport to govern its
many competitions, prizes, and levels of production (there are more than a hundred
different kinds of prizes given for traditional characters alone each year, with at
least two dozen of them for varieties of Amerindian masquerading). Thus, it can at
times appear to be a conglomerate of criss-crossing separate tracks and paths. Such
definition, of course, is a recent innovation, belied by the actuality of the festival
that grows from the streets and city squares as if by magic. Mas itself, though only

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Fig. 7.4 Prison mas played on the streets of Port of Spain. Christopher Laird (in center with flag) leads masqueraders with Phase II Steel Orchestra,
carnival Monday, 2003. Photograph by Pablo Delano.
• “PLAY MAS” – PLAY ME, PLAY WE

one part of carnival, is a many-headed hydra that resists definition: on the one
hand, it is topical; each year’s mas reflects local and international events of the
months preceding, often satirically but also with an edge of glorification – with, for
instance, many representations of Osama bin Laden in 2002; in 1907 the USS
Alabama arrived as part of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Great White Fleet” and was repre-
sented in carnival in 1908. On the other hand, mas can be entirely fantastic – given
to representing insects, animals, bugs, abstract symbolic ideas, historical recre-
ations, mythology, and much, much more.
The chapters that follow in this section do not aim at inclusivity. Therefore, it
may serve us to identify some of the basic types of masquerading. Please see the
glossary for specific definitions:

• Ole mas – now often called traditional mas, basically a satirical form, usually
involving skits with much wordplay and many puns.
• Jouvay, including the low-keyed jouvay king and queen competitions held at the
downtown Port of Spain venue in the early hours of carnival Monday, as well as
the mud bands that are now among the favored forms of mas for all classes.
• Traditional “culture-bearing” characters. These are the characters who play
singly or in bands whose evolution is enmeshed in the history of carnival as a
resistance festival. Daniel Crowley defined many of the traditional categories in
1956. They play throughout the carnival season.
• Military and sailor mas – special categories of mas, often associated with the
history of the steelband in the twentieth century. The earliest street mas recorded
was a military band in 1834, mimicking the artillery of Christmas militia forces.
Military and sailor mas illustrate the dialectic through which masqueraders
often satirize behavior they also wish to appropriate, and which they sometimes
more simply glorify. (See, for instance, figure 7.5, in which a living tableau
created by Wilfrid Strasser, a third-generation Trinidadian of Martiniquian
and German ancestry and one of the legendary innovators of mas, portrays
the newly elected President Eisenhower imbedded in a globe, in the process
advertising Esso Oil Company.5)
• Pretty mas or fancy mas. The legacy of carnival designers such as Strasser or
George Bailey, who helped to develop both European and African history mas
bands, and Carlisle Chang, an artist who designed the Trinidad flag and coat of
arms and who designed mas bands mainly in the 1960s and 1970s (see Chang
in this volume), has helped to create the mystique of masquerading, and to link
the sense of beauty and the idea of royalty to carnival costuming and cultural
history, to some extent in opposition to the ballgown Carnival Queen contest
once sponsored by the Trinidad Guardian, later by the Jaycees, and revived in the
1990s by Wayne Berkeley, another distinguished masman. Pretty mas dominates
the streets on carnival Tuesday; in Port of Spain on carnival Monday afternoon,
fancy mas bands will move through the city, with masqueraders wearing part of
their Tuesday costumes, or perhaps only band-issued tee shirts, in a preview
of what is to come on Tuesday. Carnival in San Fernando and other towns
throughout Trinidad may also include fancy mas costumes on both Monday
and Tuesday.
• Children’s carnival. In a typical carnival season, there are more occasions
for children to masquerade in fancy costumes in the street than for adults.

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Fig. 7.5 Living carnival tableau, US President Eisenhower behind a globe of the world, advertising Esso gasoline, Wilfrid Strasser mas, carnival Monday, 1952.
Photograph from the collection of Pablo Delano. Used with permission.
• “PLAY MAS” – PLAY ME, PLAY WE

Beginning several weeks before carnival Tuesday, children may appear in their
disguises in at least four recognized major competitions (along with other
events, such as school carnivals or private parties): PSA (Public Services Associ-
ation), children’s carnival organized by the St James street community, Red
Cross Carnival at the Queen’s Park Savannah, and the NCC children’s carnival.
The final and official “children’s carnival,” traditionally on the Saturday before
carnival, is a massive affair, rivaling carnival Tuesday in diversity and grandeur.
Watching the parents guide their children through the streets on their way to
or from the Queen’s Park Savannah, one quickly understands that these children
– ostensibly at play – are also in school, being trained and disciplined to partici-
pate in the ritual of masking that helps to define identity in Trinidad (see figures
7.6 and 7.7). To this end, children are increasingly participating in the trad-
itional character festivals, also organized by the NCC, particularly on the Friday
before carnival.
• Regional variations. Port of Spain is regarded as the Mecca of carnival, but
there are carnivals throughout the island, on both Monday and Tuesday. Some-
times the carnivals in places such as Arima, Arouca, or Carapichaima (which
hosts only Monday mas) may encompass aspects of cultural and religious life
in Trinidad not seen in Port of Spain, reflecting the eclectic inclusivity of
carnival throughout the island. See, for instance, the figure of Buddha carried
in Carapichaima in 2000, preceding a carnival dragon (figure 7.8).

CARNIVAL PEOPLE: PRESERVING AND TRANSMITTING CULTURE

One of the offshoots of defining carnival as a national festival is its increasing link

Fig. 7.6 Children’s carnival on the stage at the Queen’s Park Savannah. Photograph by Jeffrey Chock.

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Fig. 7.7 Sheynenne Hazell, Junior Calypso Monarch, Dimanche Gras show, carnival Sunday night,
February 29, 2004. On the stage at the Queen’s Park Savannah, 10-year-old Sheynenne, one of the
youngest Calypsonians to win the title, was co-winner also in 2003. With thanks to Gemma Jordan.
Photograph by Pablo Delano.

to education. Even among those who continue to believe that the carnival of the
streets is a vulgar and decadent affair, it is sometimes thought to be a good teacher
of cultural history.6 Many schools have their own in-school carnival jump-ups,
sometimes with their own steelbands, often with their own calypso contests.
Children study carnival as an essential component of the history of resistance,
rebellion, and cultural self-determination in Trinidad whether they design and
wear their own costumes or not. And in the Lady Hochoy School for physically
challenged students, steel pan is used as a teaching tool, while young men with
severe physical disabilities produce carnival staffs for major mas bands, such as
Stephen Derek’s D’Midas. In addition to the emphasis given to carnival in the
formal school system, the National Carnival Commission, in an impetus guided by
John Cupid, has established camps across the island that teach children traditional
character dances and chants (see Hall in this section).
Though Trinidad Carnival mas is known internationally mainly for its grand
costumes and massive celebrations in Port of Spain, there are also those that still
produce the traditional masquerades in a more conventional way, often outside the
capital city. In Carapichaima, a traditionally (East) Indian area in the center of the
island, B.M. Singh and his daughters Jill and Sue have, with the assistance of an out-
standing carnival committee, presented a Monday carnival every year since 1947
that is now the largest carnival Monday festival on the island (see Sankeralli in this
volume; see also figures 7.1 and 7.8). In this section of the book, Puerto Rican
photographer Pablo Delano captures the essence of some “carnival people” from

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Fig. 7.8 Buddha carnival float preceding dragon in parade of bands. Note kitchen sponges on sticks as
props. Carapichaima, carnival Monday, 2000. Photograph by Pablo Delano.

Caripichaima to Port of Spain. Other chapters further highlight two specific tradi-
tions associated with regions outside Port of Spain. Hélène Bellour and Samuel
Kinser focus on Amerindian masquerading in the House of Black Elk in San
Fernando, Trinidad’s second city. Theater director and scholar Martin Walsh
describes and Trinidadian photographer Jeffrey Chock sensitively illustrates the
continuing legacy of Blue Devils in the nine-village area atop Paramin Mountain,
abutting Maraval in the environs of Port of Spain. Like the children’s camps, those
who preserve these cultural traditions do so partly by passing them on to their
children.
The other route to preservation and transmission highlighted in this section
is that of assimilating traditional styles into contemporary masquerades. Many of
the large mas bands, as for instance NCBA President Richard Afong’s 1998
Barbarossa Band Botay, have begun to pay homage to jouvay and to incorporate
representative symbols from traditional masquerades into their “fancy mas”

105
Fig. 7.9 The late Theresa Morilla Montano. Morilla, then 84 years old, prepares for her role as leader of the The Minstrel Boys, a white-faced traditional
masquerade group, carnival 2001. Photograph by Pablo Delano.
• “PLAY MAS” – PLAY ME, PLAY WE

Tuesday bands. Carnival designer and artist Peter Minshall – as illustrated in an

interview edited for this volume – has enshrined the idea of “playing mas” as a
marker of uniquely Trinidadian identity, evolving new artistic forms from
traditional carnival characters, particularly the Bat, always with an eye to a vitally
evolving carnival dynamic.
And then the carnival plays: beginning with references as early as 1827 to
plays such as The Tragedy of the Orphan or The French Farce of “George Daudin”
(Cowley 1996: 22), formal and informal plays have been part of the carnival scene.
Concluding this section, award-winning filmmaker, director, and playwright Tony
Hall tracks carnival mas from the streets to the stage, ending with a description of
the process through which he uses traditional character archetypes, such as the
Sailor, Baby Doll, or Midnight Robber as dramatic vehicles.
Carnival masquerading in Trinidad is prolific, varied, historically resonant, and
contemporary. Traditional masqueraders – such as the elegant and talented Narrie
Approo of Arima, who plays many characters including Black Indian, Midnight
Robber, and more; the late Theresa Morilla Montano, crowned sixteen times as
Jouvay Queen and leader of the white-faced Minstrel Boys before her death in
2001 at age 84 (figure 7.9); Felix Edinborough, a Belmont principal who has
almost singlehandedly revived the Pierrot Grenade; Brian Honoré, who keeps the
Midnight Robber tradition alive in the spirit of his mentor Puggy Joseph – carry
the traditions of past decades into the present, supplemented by many others,
including the children in the NCC training camps. Among the older traditional
characters bands, men continue to outnumber women (though this is changing).
However, more than 80 percent of those playing mas on carnival Tuesday are now
women. Empowered by the beauty and sexuality made visible by the bikini cos-
tumes that are the bane of carnival purists and traditionalists, women who decades
ago might have taken refuge in a decorated lorry now mingle with others on the
street, proudly displaying bodies often honed for the occasion in the gymnasia of
Trinidad or their home cities in North America or Europe. On the surface, it might
seem that the carnival beast has been tamed by its own success. But beneath the
glitter, the glamor, and the increasingly banal surface of the large-scale annual
carnival shows, there is no doubt some rough beast even now slouching his – or
perhaps her – way to Port of Spain to be born.7

NOTES

1 Formerly, “playing mask,” literally, masquerading for carnival; see Glossary.

2 I am aware that the concentration on Trinidad appears to diminish the significance of Tobago.
The history of carnival in Tobago is a vital part of the overall Trinidad Carnival story. It began in
the 1920s with the early innovations of transplanted Trinidadians such as George Leacock
but was developed mainly after World War II. Please see Hall and Eddie Hernandez in Riggio
1998a for a fuller sense of that story. Tobago’s own cultural history is much more deeply
invested in the Tobago Heritage Festival, re-created each July. Nevertheless, the story of
carnival in Tobago is a rich one that needs to be explored in detail.
3 Shango was identified with John the Baptist in many areas including Trinidad, but with St
Barbara in the evolution of Santería in Latin American countries, particularly in Cuba. There
is a continuing debate over the extent and nature of syncretism in “New World” adaptations
of African religions (see, for instance, Houk 1995 or Lawson 1985). The point here is not to

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engage in that debate but more simply to link the notion of disguise that emerged from social
and religious customs with festive masquerading.
4 I am indebted to Cowley’s masterful study (1996) for the idea of using Christmas revels as one
key to understanding carnival celebrations. This is but one of many ways in which I, and all other
researchers following Cowley, owe much to his extraordinary archival work.
5 Strasser’s great-grandmother’s parents (née Capet) fled the French Revolution to Martinique.
His grandfather (Strasser) came from Germany to Panama to work on the Canal. He met great-
grandmother Capet in Martinique and they came to Trinidad about the middle of the nineteenth
century. This information, provided by Hadyn Strasser, nephew of Wilfred Strasser, illustrates
the complex pattern of ethnic intermixing that underlies the history of the entire Caribbean
region.
6 Of course, this is not uniformly true. There remain many who feel that the history of the island is
trivialized by the emphasis placed on carnival. This, too, is in a larger sense part of the carnival
story and must not be forgotten.
7 Cf. “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be
born?” William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming.”

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8
PETER MINSHALL
A voice to add to the song of the universe

An interview by Richard Schechner and Milla Cozart Riggio

February 14, 1997, Port of Spain, Trinidad

Minshall: The other day just outside the mas’ camp I was talking to someone
who had come down from Jamaica, and in the middle of a very relaxed
conversation she said, “But your accent doesn’t sound Trinidadian.” And I
said, “I have two languages. The one in which I am expressing myself now –
and my native language.” I think in both these languages. Though, when I am
most excited, I revert to my native tongue both in thought and in speech.
In 1974, a year of revelation and change for me, with a colleague of mine
[Arnold Rampersad] up near Maracas [Beach], we met by chance a 92-year-
old woman, Elise Rondon, who sold sugar cakes and pickled pomseetay [a
tropical fruit]. There in a little rum shop, sheltering from the rain, drinking a
beer – this lady, brightly garbed, golden earrings, with her tray of fruit. I
became fascinated with her. In the meantime, TTT [Trinidad & Tobago Tele-
vision] asked me to do a half-an-hour program on a subject of my choice, and
my mind went, Ping! Idea! I visited Elise Rondon about four or five times –
and she started to tell me stories. She had an extraordinary presence and sense
of theatre. The reason why? She had been a bélé queen all her life. The dance
called bélé is like a minuet to African drums, mainly a women’s dance, utterly
Caribbean. Here is a young man who had gone away in 1963, believing his life
lay abroad, coming back in ’74, understanding that this woman knew “atti-
tude” in her way as much as Olivier did in his.
Schechner: Did you play mas’ when you were a kid, and if so, who did you play
with? I ask because clearly you’ve lived several lives. Your early life, then your
life abroad, then your life as a person who chose to return to Trinidad – but
who lives also an international/intercultural life.
Minshall: It starts when you’re a child, mindless, you don’t know why you’re
doing what you do. But at the age of 13, with cardboard box and Christmas
tree bells turned inside out as eyes, and some silver and some green paint that
I begged from the Chinese man who ran the grocery at the bottom of the hill,

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and some grasses from San-San, which was the name of that very hill behind
the house, and bits of wire, and bones the dogs had left around the yard dried
in the sun and bleached, I prepared all by my precocious little self a costume
for the Saturday afternoon children’s competition.
I called my mother to the balcony. “Mummy, mummy, mummy! Come see
my costume!” “Oh, very nice, darling! Tell me, what is it?” “But, mummy, I’m
an African witch doctor.” “Oh, but darling, you’re the wrong color. Here,
come.” And she gives me a dollar, sends me down to Ross’s drugstore on
Frederick Street for eight ounces of “animal’s charcoal.” That’s all I remem-
ber. To this day I don’t know what “animal’s charcoal” is. So I get the stuff,
and I am transformed into a black that is as deep as velvet. Then I go down to
the Savannah and dance my mas’ and I am awarded the prize in my age group
for “the most original.” So I suppose the die was cast there and then.
Now, three years later, at age 16, still a schoolboy, I do something which
was then commonplace. In those days, prominent figures in society – lawyers,
doctors – would be seen in the jouvay in their wives’ nighties or in corsets.
Jouvay was about the ridiculous. It was also about Jab Molassie – Blue Devil
as I knew him – in all my experience of theatre, one of the most powerful
pieces of theatre ever!
And another thing about the jouvay then was the mud. Sometimes when I
think of people putting mud on their bodies in the predawn, when I try on my
own to figure out what the carnival’s about, I say: The ritual of putting mud
onto the body for jouvay is about the myth of man being made from that
mud. It is returning to the source, it is being one with the universe. That mud
is of the earth, but it is also of the Milky Way. That river of people is a river of
stars, it is not your everyday.
OK. Into that jouvay this schoolboy, having tied a pillow to his backside,
and having stockinged every inch of his body, including his head with the
tee shirt, over which there is a mask, over which there is a hat, in one of his
sister’s discarded dresses and a pair of old slippers, goes into town quite
unconsciously as a Dame Lorraine – but totally disguised. To be disguised is
not to be hidden or submerged. On that jouvay morning that schoolboy was
liberated from race, from age, from gender. It was total liberation.
And then a Mrs Burnett, a good friend of my mother, a black Trinidadian,
while visiting said, “Jean [Minshall’s mother], why doesn’t Peter design a
costume for my daughter?” Now this is the unconsciousness of a young
growing-up-person; you don’t know what you are doing or why. But as I look
back I find it plain to see. His first costume as an African witch doctor is for
his white self, and then I take this black girl and send her up as a Gothic
stained-glass window. So I think the business of playing mas’ is about being
other than yourself.
Schechner: What made you want to go to the UK – what drew you away, and
what then drew you back?
Minshall: My parents were divorced, I was living with my mother, but my
father made sure I had at my disposal an easel, oils, and canvases at age 12.
I was painting, I was making costumes for carnival, I got involved with the
Light Operatic Company’s yearly Gilbert and Sullivan. This flair for set
design emerged. Having left Queen’s Royal College, I went straight into a job

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at Radio Trinidad – and so here am I, a household name on radio on an

island. Television ain’t come yet. And in the meantime, some of my schoolmates
are going away and coming back saying, “Minsh, boy, you really have to come
up there, you know.” And not only that, this artist thing is niggling at me.
So it enters into my head that I am going to go away and be a painter. But my
father takes me aside and advises, “It would be saner to go away and be a
designer for theatre.” Well, I was admitted to the Central in London [The
Central School of Art and Design, now associated with St Martin’s]. At
Central I was taught by the likes of Ralph Koltai. To see London fresh and
new at the age of 21! I arrived at a most extraordinary time, the beginning of
the ’60s, the year of the Beatles, I saw Olivier’s Othello, went to the National
Gallery and saw that sepia-tinted cartoon of the Virgin of the Rocks done by
Leonardo himself. Any art I had seen before had only been in books.
And the World Theatre season! A Zulu Macbeth, Umabatha, with this
army, this wall of warriors, coming from the furthest back wall of the theatre
down to the edge of the audience. That awesome production of A Midsum-
mer’s Night’s Dream by [Peter] Brook. And then his Marat/Sade. In London
I saw my first opera, a baptism of fire, Götterdämmerung.
Bit by bit I learned – without sounding too grand – what art is. And amidst
all of this, for reasons that should need no explanation, my thesis at the end of
three years is on the Trinidad Carnival. The more my eyes were being opened
the more I was able to see. My thesis deals with the Bat, and with the Fancy
Sailor – which, in its time, in my knowledge of world costume, was the most
surreal statement I have experienced. Imagine a man coming down the street
in Port of Spain, and where his head should be is a giant slice of paw-paw
[papaya], or a cash register with a drawer that actually works, or a headpiece
with three barking dogs on it, or made out of cottonwool and swan’s down
and little bits of silver paper, a great delta-winged warplane – utterly surreal.
But surreal with that kind of basenote truth of Magritte. So honest yet so
fantastic. And then, I can’t remember how it happens, somebody says, “Get
off your ass, child,” and I take my portfolio to a producer who says, “I know
who you ought to see, Peter Darrell.” It just so happens that Peter Darrell and
Colin Graham are collaborating on Beauty and the Beast for the inauguration
of the Scottish Theatre Ballet. As I am showing them my work from Central, I
turn the page and there is a costume for the now-defunct J.C.’s Carnival
Queen Show called Once Upon a Time – and Darrell looks at this thing and
says, “You’re the person we’re looking for.” That was 1969. So I designed the
set and costumes. Beauty and the Beast premiered at Sadler’s Wells.
Four years later my mother is in London and says, “Now Mr Designer, I
want you to design a costume for your little adopted sister.” The heart skips a
beat. “Furthermore, I want it to be a hummingbird.” Oh dear. The happening
young London designer returns to the island to design for the children’s
carnival. And of course there is no way out. So I must make the best of it. I
must’ve spent off and on about five months just fiddling – in between what-
ever jobs I was doing – putting into this diminutive little work all my theories
about playing the mas’ and its energy: it’s about performance, it’s about
mobility. It was Christmas Eve night I came [home to Trinidad] with £100
worth of fabric, which was a lot of money back then. On New Year’s Day we

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start to construct the costume. It took five weeks, twelve people. It was totally
meticulous, 104 feathers, each one made of 150 different pieces of fabric, the
blue to the purple to the green, stuck with transparent nail varnish over bits of
plastic over a pattern. All pinned up, then finally assembled. It has to be
finished. We haven’t slept for three nights. One person is holding the thing
onto Sherry standing there like a little girl crucifix – there’s not time for zips
[zippers] – while we sew her into it.
We lift her up onto the jitney, drive to the Savannah in a dream, in a daze,
mindless. This little 12-year-old girl is going up the path. I’ve rehearsed with
her with canes and an old sheet and told her, “Forget you’re a bird. You’re a
flag woman. Wave your flag, dance, you’re not flying, these are not wings,
you’re a little girl enjoying yourself.” This little thing exploded like a joyful
sapphire on that stage, and ten thousand people exploded with her. On that
afternoon, a moment of revelation. “Christ, so this too is art!” I did not
choose the mas’ – it held me by the foot and pulled me in. Three weeks after
that experience I met Elise Rondon. Put those two things together. I was
finding myself. I was so proud to be from where I was. There was an art that
we knew how to make. We have a voice to add to the song of the universe.

Fig. 8.1 Peter Minshall drawing for the Hummingbird costume, whose movable wings Minshall
combined with the fixed wings to create later costumes (see figure 8.3), costume 1974. Courtesy
of Peter Minshall and Callaloo Company.

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So back to London, I started doing things in the Notting Hill Carnival. In

’75, because of the Hummingbird and because he has fallen out with one of
my first gurus of the mas’, a great artist, Carlisle Chang, Lee Heung rings me
up in London and says, “How would you like to design my next band?” At the
time in Notting Hill I am doing a band of devils called To Hell with You. It
just comes to me. While Braf [Hope Braithwaite, one of Minshall’s teachers at
Queen’s Royal College, Port of Spain] was teaching me all about The Tempest
and Othello, my other English teacher, Mr Laltoo, was teaching me about Mr
Milton and his Paradise Lost. So these many years later, I think, “Mr Lee
Heung wants me to do his band . . . what do I do? PARADISE LOST!!! I’m
already makin’ devils, all those fallen angels!”
Paradise Lost was a watershed in the context of carnival; it was epic. It was
a visual thesis of many of the things I would do in years to come. A band?
How do I do a band? What is a band? A band is the closest I know to live
visual art, a band is symphonic, you can’t see the whole of it all at once. I
approached Paradise Lost as a symphony in four parts.
Schechner: What year was it?
Minshall: Paradise Lost? 1976. Hummingbird, ’74.
And then there is another family falling-out, and as a result a group
assembles itself and says, “OK, Minshall, come. You’re not going to be
working for any other bandleader. You’re going to bring your own band.” So
1978, I return to Port of Spain to do Zodiac.
Discipline, not a damn sequin, not a piece of braid! Primary colors – red,
blue, yellow, black, and white – spinnaker nylon. It’s incredible how things
happen. Sitting in the Tube in London, trundling through the Underground,
all these Americans on tour with their great backpacks. I’m sitting there:
“Mas’, mas’ ” – it’s never far away – I go into the sporting goods shops,
lookin’ at all the backpacks. Zodiac was aluminum backpacks, extensions
here, spring-steel wires there, and great shapes attached to the ankles. As
[George] Balanchine said, “I want you to ‘see’ the music and ‘hear’ the
dance.” So the whole band is coming down, and every step to the music moves
the fabric ten feet in the air and you get this kinetic madness. And Zodiac
amazingly came second, unheard of for first timers. You’re challenging
people. You’re saying, “Come on, let’s stop being so quaint.”
Riggio: How many people in the band?
Minshall: About fifteen hundred.
Schechner: What finally got you to move back to Trinidad?
Minshall: You begin to feel homeless. Around this time, [the late] Errol Hill, a
professor [of theatre] at Dartmouth [and a Trinidadian], who I knew since I
was a little boy, gets in touch with me in London to design his [play] Man
Better Man. A bright Caribbean island is going to be set down in the middle
of White Winter, in Hanover, New Hampshire, and this island is going to be
populated mainly by whites. This is a problem I am trying to solve.
White linoleum on the floor, mirrors on either side, I create a Barbados
beach, a white gingerbready cottagey thing, and white fucking costumes on
everybody. All of these ladies with great white cotton skirts, and it’s as though
bits of the scenery, and the gingerbread, and hibiscus had bits of color printed
on them as differentiation. And one character, Minnie, had a black silk

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• RICHARD SCHECHNER AND MILLA COZART RIGGIO

Fig. 8.2 Peter Minshall drawing of figure with fixed wings, the Imp of Paradise Lost
(1976 mas band). Courtesy of Peter Minshall and Callaloo Company.

headtie . . . a contemporary Broadway set, not condescending West Indian

charm. Errol, his heart in hand, unwillingly says, “OK, do it.” I shall never
forget at the dress rehearsal, Errol Hill dancing like a child, bubbling over with
joy. It worked! Errol asked me to give the first lecture I ever have on the mas’.
The success of Man Better Man led to an invitation to return to Dartmouth to
design Blood Wedding – the nearest thing to Greek ritual that I know.
Schechner: After that you came back to Trinidad for good?
Minshall: I don’t remember the exact date. At a certain point, I thought,
“Enough is enough.” I rented out my London apartment and decided
Trinidad is where I am going to be.

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• PETER MINSHALL

Fig. 8.3 Drawing of Sweet Oil Butterflies of Paradise Lost (1976 mas band), showing fixed wings
attached to a back-pack and movable wings on the arms. A mobile Minshall signature style allowing
for a maximum of graceful movement. Courtesy of Peter Minshall and Callaloo Company.

I start doing the mas’, even as the mas’ is undergoing certain social changes.
It used to be very much a male thing, but at the point of my return it was
becoming what you now see, very much a female thing. It was also going
through all kinds of visual changes. At this point, I really come into it saying,
“This is a theatre of the streets.” Which is obvious to me, but no one here
understands the terminology. “Oh, you’re trying to turn it into theatre.” “Oh
my God, don’t you realize it’s always been that?” When the Midnight Robber
makes a speech, when I run away from a Blue Devil, when George Bailey
brings a black Queen Elizabeth in a golden coach drawn by white horses. All
of this happened when I was small.

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It’s not easy. I suppose that not-easiness came to a mighty crescendo with
the experience of Hallelujah [1995], where nothing I had done in my life had
prepared me for two and a half months of daily diatribe in the newspapers,
every single day, the most extreme Pentecostals saying it is sacrilege to use the
word “hallelujah” in carnival – “the mother of all rot,” they called it – and
columnists, editorials, politicians, bandleaders, priests debating the pros and
cons. But of course you can call a band “Hallelujah” – Ella Fitzgerald sings,
“Hallelujah, come on, get happy!” What are you talking about? But not just
the Pentecostal point of view, but others too. “Why don’t you change the
name of the band?”
I went through my own spiritual transformation. I am sitting right here
one day, I hear a rustle over there in the heliconias, and I look: there is
the cat, Missy, having just missed the hummingbird that was about to
touch the heliconia flower. In a flash, I understand that the cat, the humming-
bird, the heliconia, and myself are one. I can explain it no other way. And
I was paralyzed. This is my life’s work, I want to bring celebration into
the mas’. This is the only way I know. Hallelujah! Curses were heaped on
people. “If you play in this band, the island will be cursed.” And so people
began to pull away, and the band became smaller. Then carnival came. The
people had a joyful, transcendent experience. The people who played in
the band and the people who watched it. Hallelujah was the Band of the
Year. It is a week after the Hallelujah, and I am on the north coast, by
the sea, alone. The rocks, the crashing waves, the horizon. Everybody
has their version of communication with the higher self. Mr God says to me,
“It was a beautiful Hallelujah. But what ever made you think it would be
easy?”
It is not easy. In dealing with the mas’, I and other people have had to deal
with my whiteness. It is not easy. [Silence] It has not been easy.
It is not easy when the fear of AIDS seizes the place, and you read in one of
the weeklies, “Don’t join the Minshall band, you’ll get AIDS.” It is not easy.
[Long silence]
The first trilogy [River (1983), Callaloo (1984), and The Golden Calabash:
Princes of Darkness and Lords of Light (1985)]. Derek Walcott has always
been a champion of my work. Himself having received a Guggenheim
Fellowship, he recommended me. There was this great battle. Derek saying,
“They’ll only give it to you if you apply for theatre.” And I said, “No, it has to
be for the mas’.” The difficulty being in making the application, you have to
say both what you want to do and explain what the mas’ is. Miracle of
miracles, I am awarded a Guggenheim on the basis of the mas’. My work is
not to make pretty pictures but to make you shed your self-contempt. The
Guggenheim people are treating me seriously, well let me treat the mas’
seriously now I have a little money. River flowed out of that, and Mancrab
came into being.
Now all of these connections – Paradise Lost, Zodiac – the thing coming
from the feet, [and most of all finding the phrase] “to make the cloth dance.”
The other thing, too: Yes, I adore the Robber, the Bat. But the Bat was right
for the ’50s, he’s quaint now because his competition really is Darth Vader.
Today it’s movies, television. So we have to learn what the Bat or Robber

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teach us – about dancing the mas’, about mobility – and not just re-create
them, but find their contemporary equivalents.
Mancrab [the principal male character, the king, of the mas’ River, 1983;
see Figure 8.4]. I actually constructed the model, then realized that a man
normally stands like this [demonstrates feet together], but you play mas’ like
this [demonstrates feet apart] – considering the distance between the ankles.
Therefore, extending a man’s shoulders into a kind of rectangular armature
with arms going out at each corner perfectly angled and fiberglass fishing rods
coming into the angles so that one is going there, one there, one there – as he
rocks his shoulders all of those rods move. At the tip of each rod the corner of
a 25-square-foot piece of silk, so that the dancing steps of the feet move
the rods which give life to the canopy of silk, a turbulent, billowing cloud.
Yes, “to make the cloth dance.” This is contemporary. This is our equivalent
of what you see now at the Museum of Modern Art. I feel comfortable with
this.
Then a story begins to build. And you don’t get the final line in the story
until a week before the carnival, because that’s how it happens. You put parts
into place, you don’t know – then suddenly, “Oh, that’s the story, ‘Mancrab
and Washerwoman.’ ” He, a master of technology, all of man’s genius, all the
more powerful now because he has technology. She, simple love and beauty.
She representing Blanchisseuse, the pureness of the clear river water, also the
pureness of true love. She, dressed in white cotton organza, the simplest little
costume, carrying two poles, and lines of silk washing just hanging down, and
a laundry basket in her hand, so simple. He, Mancrab, the claws of the crab
turned this way [gestures upward] like so many arms, and the two gundees
[main claws, pincers] like something coming out of a military tank. He’s metal
with a great crab’s head with little lights and things flashing, a compressed-air
canister on his back. He comes onstage moving to the sound of East Indian
tassa drums. I had seen kathakali in London – so I go up to an Indian village
with Peter Samuel [Minshall spreads his legs into the wide, bent-knee stance
of kathakali and stamps the ground with high, violent steps to an imagined
drumbeat].
Schechner: They do kathakali here?
Minshall: No. And there’s a bicycle chain and gear thing, and you know it has
to be exposed, because you don’t hide de innards and de workings. And there
are levers and cantilevers, the claws are going up and down. There’s a moment
he just settles center stage and breathes. And at that moment, the cloth begins
to bleed in front of your eyes. This is the beauty of mas’.
The thing about the mas’ in a push-button television age, it’s about human
energy. There are no electric wires, it’s me doing this, it’s me making it work. It
really is a chilling thing, in a carnival, full of all its many parts, its sequins,
its feathers, to see this piece of white silk undulating, and suddenly rivers of
red starting to run. At that point, with due respect, because it was so good,
stolen from kathakali, a performance that left me limp, he exits pulling from
his gut –
Schechner: Yes, yes, the revenge Bhima takes on Dusassana at the end of The
Mahabharata –
Minshall: – he just leaves this 30-yard trail of red silk as he exits.

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On his first appearance, half the audience, I tell you, as an artist, it was as
though there were two prize fighters onstage. Half the audience was booing,
half the audience was clapping. It was a moment of terror.
Another designer comes up to me after and says, “How could you do
that! That is my daughter being raped!” I thought – once more this is the
Hummingbird – yes! Mas’ when it works is as grand and as great as opera
when it works. When it jumps you have no defense!
River. [Each section was called by the name of a river of Trinidad.] I used
the clothes of our island ancestors – African, Indian, some European; turbans
with pearls, two thousand people, men and women – all in white cotton. Of
course, controversies rip. How I could bring a band all in white, carnival is
colour! This is madness. In fact, the colour scheme of the band was this skin
tone and that skin tone and all the many others. And the white just framed it.
The people looked beautiful. So on Monday, as the band hits the stage, there
is Mancrab, crowned King the Sunday night before, challenging Washer-
woman. And with a symbolic square of white cloth, she dismisses him. But
the story goes that that carnival Monday night, Mancrab, using all his techno-
logical magic, fashioned an illusory rainbow. All those little gadgets of the
twentieth century, that are so dear to us, that make our lives so comfortable,
offering all these pretty colours to the people, a rainbow of colours.
Tuesday morning. Every single person in the band has been supplied with a
white cotton pouch and in it is a white squeezy bottle [plastic squeeze bottle,
such as is used for dishwashing liquid] loaded with colored dye. Ha! Red,
orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. Now this is where the people take the art
over from the mas’ man. You have to understand the thing.
Carnival Monday. A river of people. A river of cloth. A single piece of
white cloth as wide as the road, one mile long, held aloft on poles. One cloth.
One river. One people.
Carnival Tuesday. We have folded up the white cloth, put it away. We have
made exactly the same size, exactly the same length a cloth that is a rainbow.
Suddenly on Tuesday the people are under Mancrab’s rainbow. The ritual
begins. Charlie’s Roots is playing the most painful funeral version of “River
of Babylon,” a reggae. Thirty priestesses, women in white, with white
headties, holding calabashes. Fifteen faced the grand stand, fifteen faced the
north stands. They go through the ritual. Then all of a sudden they tip the
calabashes down the fronts of their white dresses. The poor announcer, “And
it looks like – blood!” Red, and they go into a Shango frenzy.
Mancrab comes on under his canopy, but it’s not attached to his feet; four
men are holding it, thank goodness, because the wind is raging. Washer-
woman’s washing has been slashed overnight and splattered with red, the red
of his silk. Washerwoman, the queen of the band, in the middle of carnival is
brought over the stage lifeless, on the shoulders of three bearers. And then,
the best laid plans. [. . .] The band is waiting at Frederick Street by the jail and
down at the tail end, Patrick Raymond, who heads the last section, puts his
bag of squeezy bottles [of colored vegetable dye] which he is about to give to
his group onto the ground and a car wheel mashes the bag, a bottle bust, color
splashes onto a lady’s nice white costume. Well, is to know, color spread like
fire through the band. My friends, do you know about theatre? Do you think I

118
Fig. 8.4 Mancrab (on left of photo) from River (1983 carnival mas created by Peter Minshall). Photograph by Jeffrey Chock.
• RICHARD SCHECHNER AND MILLA COZART RIGGIO

know about theatre? Those people start to paint each other. Talk about action
painting! Two thousand people on the day of the carnival going through this
ritual of ablution, see their shining faces – but it happened before its time.
[. . .] This rainbow thing starts to stretch and haul itself over the stage and the
calypso music breaks out. All those people who said, “Oh God, it’s white!” on
Monday, but then realized it looked so beautiful! On Tuesday, Jesus, the
country is in disbelief. How we could spoil it so! Because the river now – the
story is coming to completion – is polluted.
We had parked up by the side of de stage six 500-gallon barrels of
these same colors, hooked up to power hoses. Yellow went 30 feet up into the
air like an arc of pee, and look at the people: “Oh, God, wet me down!” And
they came with the blue, and as it came up the people are shouting, “Wet me
dowwnn!” This baptism, this ritual, this total madness onstage! This was
pure, living theatre, pure ritual! I’ve never experienced anything like it.
So much for my artistic ideas of neatly coloring each section. This was a
chaos of color, a madness, all the colors running together till they got to a
deep purplish muddiness. But it was so much better than what I had planned –
the people played the art profoundly. They played pollution better than any
artist could have painted. They played the mas.
Two days later, the results are announced. And in those days it was grandly
and publicly done, there was an audience, and the envelope was opened. And
as you know, when they make these announcements they start at the bottom
and work their way up. “Ladies and Gentlemen, we will now announce the
Band of the Year results. Tenth, River.” The audience is of the mas’ fraternity,
and my brothers went up in a roar of approval. Yes! Tenth and last! I in my
heart knew that I had been part of an extraordinary experience, a statement
that could only have been made in the mas’. The simplicity of it, the power of
it. And – dare I say it? – my own humility, in learning once more from those
people, that this River was truly a river polluted. Two days afterwards, they
count up the votes for the “People’s Choice” [determined by the audience
marking their ticket stubs and putting them into a ballot box on their way
out]. And by a vast majority, and I’m speaking about thousands, River was
the People’s Choice.
Schechner: Do they do that any more?
Minshall: They don’t, and the reason that’s generally believed is that one
person, one band, was winning the People’s Choice too often. The band-
leaders recommended to the officials to stop the People’s Choice. The
People’s Choice was introduced for the very reason that the judges’ decisions
were often very unpopular. And so the first Prime Minister of independent
Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams, instituted the People’s Choice. And the
bandleaders de-instituted it.
I’ve taken the time to tell this story not without reason. Often I am asked,
“Which was your favorite, or most important?” In fact, in its entirety, the
Mancrab, the Washerwoman, the River People, the mas’ played in two acts,
Monday and Tuesday, the mile long ribbon of cloth. Words, paintings, a
movie can’t convey this. On New Year’s Day [1997] when I was asked to say a
few words. “Ladies and Gentlemen, our carnival is going to grow when you
start awarding prizes to those works that can truly be called ‘works of art.’ ”

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And River was one such powerful work. Having done River, we knew there
was more. The next step was the band Callaloo in 1984, and the climax was
The Golden Calabash: Princes of Darkness and Lords of Light in ’85. We
didn’t know that Hallelujah [1995] was leading to a trilogy – it just naturally
led into The Song of the Earth [1996], which carried the theme on, and
Tapestry [1997] which just finished it.
Schechner: One of the most impressive things about carnival is that it’s both
very local and enormous. Members of bands know each other, people on the
island know each other, but the scale of carnival is vast. Between the people
watching and the people doing, who’s left inside?
It is ritual, definitely. How else can people go hour after hour repeating
the same movements to the same music? It’s a kind of religious service. A
celebration, certainly, but a playing out of belief also. They also immensely
enjoy seeing themselves enact themselves. To put it in Clifford Geertz’s words,
the carnival is a story Trinidadians tell themselves.
Minshall: I have this observation. Here’s a little island that needs catharsis
like anybody anywhere else. We don’t have either the resources or the audi-
ences for a Broadway season or a West End. But we have the same needs. So
what do we do? Carnival. That it goes back to the most ancient times, that it
really is a celebration of life – is almost neither here nor there. What matters is
that we are here now, and we have this festival of the arts. We sing songs, we
compose tunes, we dance. And it involves the whole society. It is not just the
few days. The band is launched the year before, there is a build, a build, a
build. There are calypso tents, steelband yards, mas’ camps.
Schechner: And there are people designing, people sewing, people preparing all
over the island – and in New York, Toronto, London, too.
Minshall: There is much creative activity, it’s our Broadway.
Schechner: It’s both more and different than Broadway. Broadway is a very
expensive veneer entertaining relatively few people. Carnival is more like the
Elizabethan or Greek theatre – such a large proportion of the whole popula-
tion participates. At Broadway there is an absolute separation segregating
the audience from the stage. In carnival, at many decisive points and times, all
separation dissolves into a scene of total participation. Even if you’re not in
the band now in front of you, you have been in some band, you have danced
across the Savannah stage, in the streets, at any number of venues. Or you’ve
sung calypso, beaten pan. The people who watch are experts through their
own experiences, that’s why the People’s Choice was so important: it was the
collective opinion of experts. Brecht would have loved the carnival audience –
active, involved, knowledgeable, and critical. The Broadway audience is an
extension of the TV audience – passive and receptive.
Minshall: Boss, you make me want to cry. Because I know the absolute truth of
what you saying. But I do not think that there are many people on this island
who would understand your language. Perhaps the reason I choose to explain
as I do, if I say “Broadway” they understand.
I squirm when the announcer or commentator says, “This ‘costume’. [. . .]”
Please learn to say “mas’,” or “this dancing mobile,” or “this walking sculp-
ture.” This is not a costume. I like the word “mas’,” it is our word: m-a-s
apostrophe.

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• RICHARD SCHECHNER AND MILLA COZART RIGGIO

I have the knowledge through the mas’, having watched it ever since I was
a little boy, that if you give a person a cloth, a robe, that extends from wrist to
wrist, and you play the music, look at me [Minshall extends his arms as if
to show off his “robes”], this is going to happen. If you give a person another
piece of cloth with two sticks on it, then this is going to happen. [Minshall
waves his arms as though they are wings]. We have our own body language
here, our own rhythm. One of the fears in Barcelona [1992 Olympics],
expressed fairly early on, was, “We are not Caribbean people here.” And I
hastened to assure my hosts, “No, there is something else my work tries to be
at its best – to inspire the ordinary man to say, ‘Look at me, look how much
bigger I am than I was before I went into this thing!’ ” And though the
Olympic stadium is a vast arena, a huge space, I remember when I first got to
Barcelona they thought it was going to take seven thousand people to make
the Mediterranean Sea, but with the things I knew from mas’, it took one
thousand.
Schechner: What was the development from Barcelona to Atlanta?
Minshall: I had no expectation that there would be an Atlanta after Barcelona.
I am the servant of my master. I went to Barcelona to serve Barcelona. Like-
wise Atlanta. What is “the South”? I was able to draw on many experiences
from Trinidad to decipher the riddle of the [American] “South,” and I am
happy to say that every Southerner I have met so far has been very pleased
with our representation of the South.
Even as the Hallelujah controversy was raging, I knew that three weeks
after carnival I was due to present first sketches, notes, and ideas for The
South. So all through the working of Hallelujah I am supposed to be doing
The South, all these other wheels are turning. But up till that time, The South
had not resolved itself, no one knew what it was. I didn’t know where I was
going, left, right, or what. I remember one afternoon seeking the counsel
of a man of the cloth. And he said, “You’re an artist. Go into the studio and
work. Your work is your prayer.”
After that, at the eleventh hour, I got the silk, I knew I was going to do
a costume because I had promised somebody, a girl from London, who
had come to dye silk, that “It’s all right, I will design a costume for you to
dye.” That’s all I knew. And out of this came a work called Joy to the World
that appeared at the preliminaries all in white because we didn’t have time
to dye it. And after the semifinals, all day Saturday into Sunday morning,
under a light specially set up in the abandoned warehouse next door, the
girl with the dyes puts water colors onto the white silk wings. And Alyson
Brown floats onto the stage like some Southern angel. [After having come
second in the prelims and semifinals, Alyson Brown as Joy to the World ] is
the Queen of the Carnival, the most graceful, most feminine Queen ever to
earn that title.
The carnival was over, I come back to town. We laid [Gershwin’s] “Summer-
time” music over the soundtrack of a videotape of Joy in performance. And
so, from a real-life experience of preliminaries to the Dimanche Gras, I was
given the tale of The South. It was called “Summertime.” And the Spirit of
the South is actually created as part of the drama. The Sun and the Moon
come with their attendants and in a sort of ritual they put her wings in place,

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and the Southern Spirit is born. She is dressed all in white, and she brings
alive the Garden of the South as she leads the River of History through it.
And a great storm, a Thunderbird, comes to attack her. The storm sweeps
everything in its path, but out of the storm there is rebirth. She hangs by that

Fig. 8.5 Gilded Pieta living tableau, following the style of Wilfrid Strasser, from Tapestry, carnival mas
created by Peter Minshall, 1999, which included tableaux representations of figures from many different
religions. Photograph by Jeffrey Chock.

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• RICHARD SCHECHNER AND MILLA COZART RIGGIO

Fig. 8.6 Peter Minshall follows in the tradition of masman George Bailey. Tears
of the Indies was Bailey’s last mas band before his death in 1970. The woman
on the right won Best Female Individual of the Year in this mas. Photo courtesy
of Norton Studios Ltd, Trinidad.

one thread of hope. There is a note in the music – such a beautiful blues
sound! – and her Southern Spirits come to give her good cheer – and they, all
forty of them, have the colors of the Dimanche “Joy to the World” on their
wings.
The folks in Atlanta wanted a feeling of church, so it seemed correct to end
the piece with a great Southern-gospel Hallelujah Chorus. And “Summer-
time” had many makers: composers, choreographers, and people making
huge puppets – each one bringing their own love and skill and inventiveness.
Sometimes I wonder, “Did I have anything to do with any of this, or did it just
happen to me?” Do you know what I mean?

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Schechner: Of course. When you do your best work, you are animated, energy
passes through and literally takes you with it. You sign your name to it, but
when you are doing your best work, it’s objective, like a piece of rock on the
ground, not really yours. You can never own it, you can only receive it and
give it.
Minshall: Absolutely. And share it.
Riggio: Of your two trilogies, the most recent comes when you feel danger,
threat, and rage among your people. Yet you celebrate beauty and union and
wholeness, a swirling kind of coming together – out of the Tapestry of the
world and out of the Song of the Earth and Hallelujah, with its Joy to the
World. The earlier trilogy – Mancrab was allied to – ?
Minshall: River followed by Callaloo. Throughout my work is this duality.
The very structure of Mancrab, the four poles, the structure of evil became
the structure of goodness for the king of the following year [with two
enormous diaphanous splashes one from each ankle], called “Callaloo
Dancing Tic-Tac-Toe Down the River.” Callaloo is the son of the Washer-
woman from River and Papa Bois – who is the father of the forest. Because he
was son of the water, the water taught him how to dance tic-tac-toe, like a
stone skipping down the river. The king of the first band, the same structure,
is the king of the second band. And it says in the story that “Callaloo, besides
being good was also very wise. He had brains as tall as any skyscraper.” So his
headpiece made of balsa wood, 16 foot, a shaft, very African – a vertical line
like the stamen of a flower rising up between these two huge dancing splashes.
So every time he stamps his foot, the water splashes. And in Papillon [1982],
which was as much about social structure as about butterflies – here today,
gone tomorrow – the king of that was called The Sacred and The Profane.
Riggio: And the third year?
Minshall: There’s an old calypso, “And when de two bands clash, partner / If
you see cutlass / Never me again / Jump up in a steel band in Port of Spain.”
There used to be steelband clashes. Taking this theme, I wanted to bring a
mas’ that was actually two bands. So, the third in the River trilogy was called
The Golden Calabash. Whoever owns the Golden Calabash is given great
power. Two bands fought for this Golden Calabash – one called Princes of
Darkness, the other, Lords of Light. I would simply leave it up to the judges to
decide who should win. But, ironically, neither of them won.
Schechner: Any final words?
Minshall: I’m visiting San Francisco doing the tourist thing, and I pass a
corner shop just bright with kites. I’ve always loved kites, so I go in to look
and touch and I discover – I forget the year, I always forget the year [1981] –
the fiberglass rod. In carnival we have used wire, cane. Immediately I think,
mas’! mas’! The first time I use it to simply make long, long feathers for the
band Jungle Fever, like grasses, forests of feathers quivering across the stage.
Then one day, this is how it happens, we’ve done the Mancrab thing, I’m
working on the band Callaloo, and I am thinking, how does this band work?
Instinct takes over. I’m wearing an ordinary tee shirt, the fiberglass rod is
there. The mind doesn’t think it, the hand does it. The hand picks up a
scissors, cuts into the hem of the tee shirt and pushes the fiberglass through.
And suddenly this [Minshall describes a circular shape around his waist]

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happens all around me. “Todd, please, run into town, get me a bolt of cotton
jersey, and buy a sewing machine.” I start to make shapes and cones. Talk
about making a person’s energy bigger! That price of fiberglass has gone right
through the hem and into the carnival. It went straight into the Atlanta
Olympics. The opening number, the tribal “Call to the Nations,” all of those
jumping and dancing hoops, it started off one day with a fellow in a studio
with a tee shirt and a piece of fiberglass. Two years later, it’s fashion. Well I’m
not Cecil Beaton, and this isn’t My Fair Lady. Nobody knows it, but Trinidad
put a little thumbprint out there, our little mark on the universe.

A longer version of this chapter is printed in Milla Cozart Riggio (ed.), The Drama Review, 42 (3):
170–93 (1998), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. This version was orally edited by Minshall, June 2004.

A TIMELINE OF SOME OF PETER MINSHALL’S MAS’ AND OTHER WORKS

Mas’ for Trinidad Carnival

1972 Josephine Baker, individual mas’

1974 From the Land of the Hummingbird and The Little Carib, individual mas’
1976 Paradise Lost
1978 Zodiac
1979 Carnival of the Sea
1980 Danse Macabre
1981 Jungle Fever
1982 Papillon
1983 River
1984 Callaloo
1985 The Golden Calabash
1986 Ratrace
1987 Carnival Is Colour
1988 Jumbie
1989 Santimanitay
1991 Tantana
1993 Donkey Derby
1994 The Odyssey
1995 Hallelujah
1996 Song of the Earth
1997 Tapestry
1998 RED
1999 The Lost Tribe
2000 M2K
2001 This is Hell
2002 Picoplat
2003 Ship of Fools

Mas’ for other carnivals

1973 Mas’ in the Ghetto, Notting Hill, London

1974 Play Mas’, Pierrot, Notting Hill, London
1975 To Hell with You, Notting Hill, London
1976 Skytribe, Notting Hill, London

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• PETER MINSHALL

1986 Drums & Colours, St Paul’s Carnival, Bristol

1989 Caribbean Baroque, Brooklyn Labor Day Carnival
1990 Tan Tan and Saga Boy, individual mas’ guest performances, Miami, Toronto,
Jamaica
1991 Tan Tan, Saga Boy, and Mr and Mrs Merry Monarch, individual mas’ guest
performances, Jamaica
1998 RED NY, Brooklyn Labor Day Carnival
2001 Tan Tan and Saga Boy, guest performance, Brooklyn Labor Day Carnival

Stadium events, concert-spectacles, and festival performances

1987 Segment of the Opening Ceremonies, Xth Pan American Games, Indianapolis
1990 Part of Paris in Concert, a Bastille Day Spectacle, Paris
1992 L’Homme et Le Toro, a group mas’ work for the opening procession of the Feria de
Musique de Rue, Nîmes, France
1992 The Hola segment of the Opening Ceremony of the 1992 Barcelona Olympic
Games; the massed-group elements of the Mer Mediterrani segment
1994 The Dance of the Nations segment of the Opening Ceremony of the World Cup
Finals (soccer), Chicago
1995 Theatrical characters for Concert for Tolerance, a citywide event for UNESCO, Paris
1996 Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the 1996 Olympic Games, Atlanta, including
Summertime: A Song of the South
1997 Oxygen in Moscow, produced by Jean-Michel Jarre, Moscow; dancing mobile char-
acters for citywide concert-spectacle
1999 The Miss Universe Pageant, broadcast on CBS from Port of Spain, Trinidad. The
opening segment and other performance elements were conceived and designed by
Minshall
2002 Mas’ costume designs for The Fire Within segment, and member of overall creative
team, for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Salt Lake City Winter
Olympics

Theatre and visual art

1969 Sets and costumes for Beauty and the Beast, full-length ballet, world premiere by the
Scottish Ballet, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London
1970 Sets and costumes for Molière’s Sganarelle, Theatre of the Deaf, Toynbee Theatre,
London
1971 Set and costumes for Cannes Brûlées by Trinidadian director/choreographer Beryl
McBurnie, Commonwealth Institute, London
1972 Sets and costumes for Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Crewe
Theatre, England
1973 Sets and costumes for The Adventures of Robin Hood, Birmingham Repertory
Theatre, England
1974 Costumes for Play Mas’ by Mustapha Matura, Brighton Festival, Royal Court and
Phoenix Theatres, London
1974/5 Set and costumes for Man Better Man, written and directed by Errol Hill,
Dartmouth College
1976 Sets and costumes for Lorca’s Blood Wedding, costumes for Aristophanes’ The
Birds, Dartmouth College
1979 Sets and costumes for Lorca’s The House of Bernardo Alba, the Ballet Metropolitan,
Ohio Theatre, Columbus

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• RICHARD SCHECHNER AND MILLA COZART RIGGIO

1985 The Adoration of Hiroshima, Washington, DC, mas’-style street theatre anti-
nuclear presentation, performed on the fortieth anniversary of the bombing of
Hiroshima
1987 Peter Minshall: Callaloo, an Exhibition of Works from the Carnival of Trinidad, 19th
International Biennial of Sâo Paulo
1989 The Coloured Man, painting, drawings, and renderings, Gallery 1 2 3 4, Port of
Spain
1990 Minshall: The Early Years, an exhibition of theatre designs from productions in
England and the US, 1996–80, On Location Art Gallery, Port of Spain
1990 Part of Zeitgenössische Künste aus Trinidad und Tobago (Seven Artists from Trinidad
and Tobago), IFA Gallery, Bonn, Germany
1991 The Spirit of the Savannah: J’ouvert – The Rising Sun, mural, 18 feet by 15 feet, for
The Mutual Centre, Port of Spain
1993 Section in show, The Power of the Mask, National Museums of Scotland,
Edinburgh
1995 Part of Caribbean Visions: Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, traveling
exhibition
1998 Caribe Insular: Exclusion, Fragmentacion, Paraiso – an exhibition of Caribbean
Art presented by MEIAC (Museo Extremeno e Iberamericano de Arte Contem-
poraneo) and Casa de America (Madrid). Works from Minshall’s mas’ RED were
featured in the exhibition
1999 Minshall and the Mas (Brooklyn Museum of Art) – mas’ performance works
MonkeyBird and The Dance of the Cloth, accompanying a lecture-performance by
Minshall on his life and work in the mas’
2000 7th Biennial of Havana – RED by Minshall, an exhibition of works from the mas’
RED presented by Minshall in the 1998 Trinidad Carnival, and the presentation of
the mas’ performance work The Dance of the Cloth
2001 Leonardo’s Man, Prince Claus Awards Ceremony, Amsterdam; a multimedia
performance work combining costumed mas’ performers, live drums and violin, and
computer-projected images
2004 Play mas’ festival collaboration, Hamburg, Germany

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9
AMERINDIAN MASKING IN
TRINIDAD’S CARNIVAL
The House of Black Elk1 in San Fernando

Hélène Bellour and Samuel Kinser

In 1498 Columbus, coming upon this island about the size of the US state of
Delaware, observed what to him and a long series of reporters after him seemed
to be “wildmen,” naked beings living in the “wilderness” with no fixed abode.
Such beings had been emblematized in European festive performances for several
centuries prior to their discovery in the West Indies. They had existed in Greco-
Roman and Christian imaginations for a much longer period – consider the
Scythians or hairy, disheveled John the Baptist. Since the voyages of Columbus,
most Europeans and Euro-Americans have reduced Amerindians to their pre-
conceptions of wild people and wilderness, finding in the stereotype a convenient
cipher for one of those dualisms which seem almost intrinsic to human reasoning:
us and the others; we who are civilized and you who are not. Since carnival is,
among other things, a festival of inversion, we who are civilized can play at being
you who are not. But what if the “we” in question is also not considered civilized
by the dominant culture into which “we” are born? Then “we” may play back
and forth, ambivalently, across this line of division, momentarily placed in
question. How this option has been drawn upon in Trinidad, how the tradition
of Amerindian masking is today pursued by a small neighborhood band in San
Fernando, is our subject here.
Unlike the case in most Caribbean islands, Trinidad’s aboriginal population was
not quickly eradicated by war, enslavement and disease after the Spanish arrived.
Aborigines maintained their diminishing tribal independence in the southerly areas
of Trinidad until the mid eighteenth century. By 1797, when the British conquered
the island, Amerindians no longer existed in any significant way as self-sustaining
communities. But they had waned slowly, leaving behind groups of mixed Spanish-
Amerindian-African descent in several parts of the island.
San Fernando has a particular connection to the Amerindian world. The hill
around which the town is built plays its part in the cosmology of a large tribe
(twenty thousand in 1980) who still inhabit the swampy Orinoco delta opposite to
the southern shore of Trinidad. The distance is small across the intervening gulf
and the Warao are skilled in canoeing. For untold centuries they came to “the

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• HÉLÈNE BELLOUR AND SAMUEL KINSER

abode of the northern earth-god known as Nabarima or ‘Father of the

Waves,’ ”that is, to San Fernando Hill. After the town was established, they
continued to come for trading purposes (Wilbert 1993: 11, 58–61).
On February 23, 1879, the Sunday before carnival, Father Armand Massé,
a Catholic priest, observed thirty “Guaraoon” Indians – men and women with
babies at the breast, naked except for “belts” – who had come to trade for fish
hooks, tobacco, mirrors, and salt (De Verteuil 1984: 1). Those who grew up in San
Fernando in the 1930s can still recall these traders, male and female, bartering
hammocks, parrots, dogs, and basketry in the large marketplace. By the 1950s
these trading expeditions had become a thing of the past (Wilbert 1993: 58n).
Another kind of Indian, however, had at an undeterminable epoch emerged to
become a familiar sight during carnival. The following account, paraphrased from
a local newspaper, describes a Warahoon performance in San Fernando in 1923
(Anthony 1989: 34):
Then there were the groups of fierce-looking Wild Indians, with their roucou-red
faces, their costumes of bodice-and-skirt stained in red, with rings in their noses and
ears, and shrieking with the crowds surging round them, “killing” with their staves the
pennies thrown at their feet by people, and hopping and dancing down High Street,
with the chant:

Gran failya, Katuama,

Kat, Kat, Katai Kobie,
Gran failya, Katuama . . .

What would the naked Warao think of all this, so little consonant with their
appearance and customs? “Red Indians” in carnival in the 1950s, according to
a contemporary report and sketch, wore long underwear dyed red and a wig
of tangled hemp rope. In keeping with the report of 1923 just cited, a red skirt
reaching to the knees was usually added (Crowley 1956: 205).
An elderly masquerader interviewed at San Fernando in 1996 remembered bands
of Red Indians whom he also called “Warahoons.” We showed him and one of his
friends a sketch of a Red Indian accompanying Daniel Crowley’s 1956 article. The
sketch shows something similar to a peacock on the warrior’s head (Crowley 1956:
208). “Yes,” the two agreed, Red Indians “made funny things.” They wore headgear
of “airplanes” and “ducks.” They came “from the country” south of San Fernando
at Fyzabad and at Moruga on the southern coast. People living along the rivers
down there also wore “boatheads,” that is, little models of canoes. Different bands
had different headgear. Some people in San Fernando also wore such costumes,
they added (interview, December, 1996).
These two informants, Afro-Trinidadians, focused on the features of Red Indian
costumes which were least probably Amerindian and most probably African in
derivation. Headdresses modeling elements of everyday life are common festive
paraphernalia in large areas of West Africa, particularly in the Yoruba area of
Nigeria from which many Trinidadian slaves seem to have been taken (Drewal
1977).
Did Spanish colonial dress, on the other hand, inspire the graceful short red skirt
and petticoat with lacy leggings reaching just below the knees also shown in the
sketch? (In today’s northern Spanish carnivals similar costuming is traditional

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(Regalado and Regalado 2004).) Crowley reported that Red Indians shouted
“Mate” when encountering another Red Indian band, an exclamation plausibly
derived from Spanish matar, to kill (Crowley 1956: 205), and in 1905 and 1913 the
newspaper noted “wild Indians” incongruously carrying “swords” (Cowley 1996:
166, 188) (see figure 9.1).
The connotations just mentioned point toward Spanish and African inspiration.
But the name “Warahoon” and the roucou on the clothes and body also connect

Fig. 9.1 Red Indian in old time masquerade (Viey le Cou), Port of Spain, 1996.
Photograph by Gordon Means.

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• HÉLÈNE BELLOUR AND SAMUEL KINSER

this character to the Waraos of the Orinoco. Whatever the sources and precise
iconography of this costume, it suggests the mingling minds as well as bodies,
during three long centuries, of Spanish colonials and native Americans – and the
similarly mingling body-minds of the Africans who observed them and eventually
played with these observations by means of carnival.
Sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century another kind of
Indian masquerade made its appearance. The masqueraders in the group which
calls itself the House of Black Elk (figure 9.2) follow that other tradition. Pre-
dominantly Afro-Trinidadian in ethnicity, they exhibit North American Plains
Indian costuming in their merry-making. In 1978 the band won a prize in San
Fernando’s carnival competition for the best masking group or “mas band” in
the category “Authentic Indian.” The band celebrated its victory by posing with
panache in the one place in the middle of the city which is not urban: the naked
rocks of San Fernando Hill.
Why did the Black Elk group choose to portray North American Plains Indians?
Why didn’t they choose to depict Amerindians of their own past, in their own
geographical area at the foot of the sacred hill? Why did they choose to mask
themselves as Indians at all? And why in any case did the Plains Indian costuming
become so popular in Trinidad in the decades just before and after World War II?
Questions such as these demand pursuit of several analytical avenues – his-
torical, sociological, cultural, and political. They cannot all be delineated properly
within the framework of a chapter. But some initial results can be reported.

Fig. 9.2 Black Elk crosses the Grandstand stage on carnival Tuesday, Port of Spain, 1998. Lately the
band has begun to compete on Tuesday in the capital and on Monday in San Fernando. Photograph by
Jeffrey Chock.

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• AMERINDIAN MASKING IN TRINIDAD’S CARNIVAL

HISTORICAL AVENUES

The first description of Amerindian masqueraders in carnival is by Charles Day, an

English visitor to the West Indies between 1846 and 1851. He witnessed a carnival
parade in Port of Spain in 1848 which included masqueraders portraying “Indians
from South America.” These masqueraders were “Spanish peons from the Main,
themselves half Indian.” “Daubed with red ochre” and proceeding in parade, they
carried “real Indian quivers and bows, as well as baskets; and, doubtless, were
very fair representatives of the characters they assumed. In this costume children
were very pretty” (Day 1852: I, 315). That Venezuelan peons would have played a
role in the development of Amerindian masking is consonant with the Spanish/
Amerindian references found in the twentieth-century Warahoon costume and with
the regular flow of immigrants from Venezuela during the nineteenth century.
Day’s description is not very detailed but his account, coupled with a few other
references relating to the same period (Cowley 1996: 36, 42), indicates in any case
that by the 1840s Amerindian masking was an established part of carnival.
At the time of Day’s visit to Trinidad in 1848, fourteen years after the abolition of
slavery, carnival revelers were mostly Afro-Trinidadians. This was also the case at
the time of a second representation of Amerindian masking, found in the engraving
of a Port of Spain parade published by the Illustrated London News in 1888 (figure
9.3). The scene is structured by the contrast between excited masqueraders front
and center, and the spectators looking on from above or at the sides of the street. To
the right a white clergyman observes the festive crowd superciliously. Although
many are disguised in white-face, all the leaders of the carnival throng show some
dark-colored flesh. The head of an Indian masquerader bobs up behind the proces-
sion’s leader who is masking as a giant devil figure. The headdress, round in shape,
can be linked to so many different contexts, North and South American alike, that it
provides few indications. But what is the significance of the three points appearing
at the top of the masquerader’s weapon? Could they represent a decorated lance like
those carried by North American Plains Indians? One can also not rule out the
possibility that the masquerader’s headdress is not simply round but has feathers
trailing down the back in Plains Indian style, similar to those of a masquerader
shown in an illustration of New Orleans’s carnival in 1873 (Kinser 1990: 139).
From the beginning of the nineteenth century more precise ethnographic repre-
sentations displaced generic allegorical models for Amerindian illustrations. After
the 1860s popular monthlies such as the Illustrated London News, Scribner’s
Monthly, and The Century Magazine began to include engravings of subjects such
as Custer’s Last Stand, Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull, and the Wild West shows which
became a vogue in the 1880s. Were these media sufficiently disseminated in Trinidad
to influence the popular imagination by 1888, or did images of North American
Indians become familiar only later? By the 1920s in any case, when more detailed
reports of Trinidad Carnival began to be published in newspapers, such influences
were clearly at work. Michael Anthony, paraphrasing newspaper reports, mentions
Indian masqueraders around their “wigwams” in 1919 and portrayals of “Indian
Braves and Squaws” in 1920 (Anthony 1989: 20, 26).
The taste for novelty and exoticism has always played a major role in carnival. At
the same time, in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century context of colo-
nial inferiority imposed upon non-white Trinidadians, to imitate one of these grand

133
Fig. 9.3 M. Prior engraving, carnival parade, Port of Spain, 1888. From Illustrated London News, photograph by Gordon Means.
• AMERINDIAN MASKING IN TRINIDAD’S CARNIVAL

warriors of the north was to adopt a deliciously ambivalent position: “Yes, we are
‘wild men,’ just as everybody thinks we are, just as Africans and Indians have
always been known to be; but no, we are just fooling around – and fooling you, who
confess by your reticent yet fascinated staring that this heroic persona adds to our
stature.” At the same time the superbly decorative style of the Plains Indians was a
new source of inspiration for those whose energy was increasingly focused on creat-
ing spectacular costumes and winning public approval at carnival competitions.
This dual theatrical leverage was the more effective because it involved another
ingredient in Plains Indian attractiveness, an ingredient formed at a deeper chrono-
logical level and attracting all ethnicities and classes, privileged and exploited. All
of us, wherever Western popular culture has penetrated, feel the pull by such wildly
free warriors on the strings of our fantasy life. The pull comes from the slow
European construction, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, of aboriginal
people as noble as well as barbarous savages. This construction generated some-
times competing, sometimes complementary images. On the one hand, each Euro-
pean nation as well as each region in the United States created a special version of
the white man’s burden. On the other hand, the opposition shifted its vectors to
look less like the uncivilized versus the civilized and more like the natural versus the
superfluous, or like honesty and forthrightness versus corruption. Chateaubriand,
James Fennimore Cooper, and a hundred authors of lesser fame infused such
Enlightenment revisionism with the enthusiasms of Romantic humanism. New
World aborigines became nature’s noblemen, wildly free and, however cruel, also
grandly brave.
The American West was the main stage where this refiguration was acted out, at
least in the popular media. The Plains Indian warrior, with his freedom and his
courage to resist, became the ultimate empowering figure because he embodied,
and still embodies, a dream recognized by everyone: the dream of a heroic and
natural life, untainted by the constraints of society. For Afro-Trinidadians or
African-Americans, masking as an Indian had an added appeal: it expressed
independence from European-initiated dominance at the very least and outright
resistance and defiance at another extreme; yet all this was represented in a context,
carnival, understood not to be serious.
Such ideological and social contexts help explain the growing popularity of
Plains Indian masking. The role of the media in that process should not be under-
estimated. The influence of American popular culture began to be felt in Trinidad
as early as the 1840s. In the 1940s and 1950s, the decades of North American
Indian bands’ greatest popularity, this influence was massively disseminated not
only by the growing saturation of the island with American newspapers, radio
broadcasts, and movies but also through interaction with the large number of US
sailors stationed in Trinidad during World War II. Movies in particular generated
tremendous excitement. Not only did they shape Indian masking generally during
this period; they also regularly restimulated the desire to diversify Indian costumes
in colors and accoutrements.

“THE HOUSE OF BLACK ELK PRESENTS: THEN AND NOW”

It is time now to turn out of the historical avenue into the busy main street
of today’s performances. The mas camps of San Fernando are smaller versions of

135
• HÉLÈNE BELLOUR AND SAMUEL KINSER

those found in Port of Spain. For the past five years the Black Elk group has rented
a wood and half-corrugated tin structure with earthen floor, located in a working-
class residential area in the central part of the city. One evening shortly before
carnival’s climax on February 20, 1996, the place hummed with music from a radio
cassette deck, playing soca and also something resembling a North American
Indian idiom, which somebody in the shop accompanied by beating on a can with a
spoon. Eight or ten people, gathered around a long table, were cutting, pasting, and
measuring costumes, and others came in and out for short conversations, bringing
food and beer and pop and taking care of assorted children’s needs (five of them,
aged 4 to 10, ran about). The atmosphere was easy and pleasant and yet busy and
purposeful. We outsiders were quickly accepted and absorbed into the rhythm of
the evening without much disruption for the following two hours. Several Black Elk
mentioned that they would in any case be working all night. Five or six nearly
finished costumes hung on the walls.
Thirteen people living nearby were pointed out to us as the organizing committee
of the group. These organizers range in age from 31 to 51 and four are related by
marriage or kinship; all are close friends of long standing. After a half-hour of
desultory talk one of them produced an album of the group’s past parades with
forty to fifty photographs dating between 1968 and the present. It was a folklorist’s
dream – a neighborly group that had been around for more than a generation,
and with documents to prove it; a group fabricating costumes of esthetic and
historically intriguing quality, while having a good time, going at it in that relaxed
and open-to-outsiders way of Trinidad.
Success! On carnival Tuesday the group carried off a flock of first prizes with
their band, Then and Now. In San Fernando as in Port of Spain it is customary for
performances to take place on both Monday and Tuesday. We did not see carnival
Tuesday, but we were there for their performance the day before. Between 12:30
and 3:45 p.m. people slowly assembled. At the head of the group two children in
Indian costume carried the group’s banner. Because of the number of years that
the organizers had been working together, there was no need for a hierarchy or a
boss to indicate what had to be done. The same agreeable, convivial busyness
noticed during our first visit took place, and as if by magic the masqueraders
grouped themselves near the sound-truck blaring socas at a quarter to four.
Matotope, White Bear, Medicine Man, Chief Pigeon Head, Indian Policeman,
characters from the 1870s and 1880s indicated to us the week before, appeared
in full regalia and generally accurate dress. The Black Elks’ sources included
sumptuous and well-illustrated books such as Thomas Mails’s 1972 volume Mystic
Warriors of the Plains, and others which reproduced George Catlin’s famous early
nineteenth-century sketches of Plains Indians. Adaptations from the sources had
been made in the colors and in the way feathers extended out from the body. The
colors tended toward pastel brightness and vivacity. These preferences accorded
with those observed generally among mas bands in Trinidad. Mas players seek an
exoticism that is gaily bright. “Pretty mas” is an accurate phrase for the coloristic
effect of the costumes.
Masquerades get prettier and prettier, not least because middle-class women
have come to dominate them. Eighty to ninety percent of the masqueraders in
Port of Spain’s large carnival bands today are women. But only three or four
women over the age of 15 were with the Black Elk on February 19, and their

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• AMERINDIAN MASKING IN TRINIDAD’S CARNIVAL

costumes were not elaborate. The extravagant headdresses and bustles, the densely
figured pastel costumes, and the soca dancing around the huge sound-truck were
largely male preserves. We had been told that the group had a “queen.” She did not
participate, and there was no picture of her or of any other women in the group’s
album. It is possible that the amount of gendering in the costumes and perform-
ance differs from year to year. In a videotape we saw of the 1995 Black Elks’
carnival Tuesday performance at the Skinner Park Grandstand, half a dozen
women wore quite individualized costumes. But male-oriented display is probably
an enduring characteristic of this group.
On the other hand, it is a woman who maintains the books and archives for the
group; she and another female member of the committee occasionally join the
masquerades, and their children take part. At all levels the activities of the band are
embedded in the family life of the neighborhood. Children of both sexes and all
ages play with the group and are present in all its activities. On that Monday three
or four families living close to the mas camp had participating children and in-laws
as well as parents. Two café-restaurants a few houses away were involved and eager
for patronage. It was a neighborly affair in the historically oldest section of San
Fernando, a working-class residential area near San Fernando Hill, only three
blocks from the store-lined High Street and about a kilometer from San Fernando’s
center.
We were told that the Black Elk on carnival Tuesday moved in a certain order
across Skinner Park stage, so that the grandstand announcer could indicate who
was who in their group. But on Monday they moved down the street in a random
way, changing places and moving to the sides with freewheeling looseness.
Some, like a masquerader swirling in front of the sound-truck, used the long tail
extensions of their costumes to create colorful effects as they moved. But few made
attempts to create dance steps characteristic of Plains tribes. For the competition at
Skinner Park a few masqueraders probably imitated Plains-tribe dancing very
well, to judge from the videotape of their grandstand performance in 1995. But the
music accompanying them was and is always soca, and the vast majority of the
dancers “jump-up” and “wine” if their elaborate costumes allow for it. The larger
and more thickly elaborated costumes are presumably designed less for dancing
than for slow-moving, straight forward or circular movement with outstretched
arms, which in the culture is called “dancing the costume” (figure 9.4).
Black Elk masqueraders occasionally whoop and chant in call-and-response
style, using French patois and words designated as “Indian language,” and they
may imitate Indian dancing for a moment in the street or on stage. They
even sometimes use a peace pipe. But their focus is not on achieving a tightly
woven ritual ensemble of visual, verbal, melodic, percussive, dramatic elements.
Participation in the band is not based, as in the case of the Mardi Gras Indians
in New Orleans, on acquiring a repertory of some dozen songs which are known
by all masking groups, with each group, or rather the lead singer in each group,
creating competitive variations. It is not based on working out extended
dance competitions and verbal boasting routines, learned collectively, in repetitive
tavern-located Sunday-night practices. New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian parades
are ritualized versions of intertribal war. In the old days the rituals nearly always
led to knife- and hatchet-wielding mayhem. Now they nearly always issue in battles
of gestural and verbal-musical virtuosity. But today as yesterday carnival unfolds

137
• HÉLÈNE BELLOUR AND SAMUEL KINSER

Fig. 9.4 Black Elk warrior, San Fernando, carnival Monday, 1996. Photograph by Gordon Means.

in New Orleans as a long series of ritual actions, each one repeated in different
circumstances, each one carrying the possibility of a confrontation. These confron-
tations are numerous and cumulative. There are no judges, no grandstand, and no
particular prize to be gained at any one moment. The prize is reputation, collect-
ively engendered among onlookers and collectively maintained by the ritualized
cohesion of the Indian troupe (Smith 1994; Kinser 1990: 165–93).

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• AMERINDIAN MASKING IN TRINIDAD’S CARNIVAL

Sixty or eighty years ago Indian bands in Trinidad acted very much like their
New Orleans counterparts. Routines were learned through weeks of practice and
ritual confrontations easily led to physical battles. “If you was a Red Indian, and
you don’t know the [other group’s special language], then they gonna hit you.
They gonna be a fight” (interview, San Fernando, December, 1996). In Trinidad as
in New Orleans Amerindian figures were crafted to inspire fear. During the weeks
preceding the 1919 carnival in Port of Spain, “in Bedford Lane, home of the Wild
Indians, ghastly shrieks pierced the night, in the area of the wigwams” (Anthony
1989: 20); three years later a fierce fight between two Wild Indian bands in carnival
led to a fatal stabbing (Anthony 1989: 20, 38). By that time, however, social per-
ception of ethnicity in Trinidad was moving not towards caste-like black and white
bifurcation but towards the shading-in of many small distinctions of social,
cultural, and economic prejudice. Indian masqueraders did not raise the same fears
in Port of Spain as in New Orleans. When a local business offered a prize in May
1909 for the “best-dressed Wild Indian band,” it was won by a group from the same
Belmont which produced shrieks and stabbings some years later (Anthony 1989:
17). In New Orleans no civic or business prize has ever been offered to Mardi Gras
Indians for their carnival performances.
In the first part of the twentieth century Trinidad Carnival was progressively
made safe and even attractive to the middle classes through a combination of police
action, business sponsorship of prize competitions and direct advertisement of
consumer goods. Simultaneously the role of the festival as a vehicle for social
protest diminished. The evolution was slow and non-linear. Ritualized aggression
remained a defining feature for many lower-class groups, including Indian bands,
as late as the 1940s and 1950s, and it manifested itself with renewed force in the
battles that steelbands fought against each other. But over the long term violent
incidents decreased. Costumes became more elaborate, in keeping with the pro-
gressive investment of the middle classes in the holiday. In the 1950s a new form of
Amerindian masking appeared, devoted to spectacular effects that increasingly
immobilized the costume-bearer; these costumes were called “Fancy Indian,” and
were better adapted to grandstand competition than to street-parading, let alone
fighting. As the country moved toward independence and non-whites expanded
their role in the public arena, Trinidad’s ethnic and cultural diversity could begin
to be celebrated as something positive. Carnival acquired generalized political
meaning as a festival of the whole, a celebration of the nation’s pluralism, a
gigantic advertisement directed first to the country’s own citizens and increasingly
to the world.
Today at the House of Black Elk a core group of ten to fifteen people imagines
next year’s performance and then advertises it to the public, so that anyone, young
or old, Trinidadian or foreigner, can come to buy a costume, whether they know
or don’t know the steps. The focus is not on ritual but on pleasure, on creating
historically precise, but above all spectacularly accented visual effects. “First we
think about the colors, then we choose a theme, then we get the artist,” the person
serving as the Black Elks’ secretary informed us. “Do you like the way this costume
looks? This one here, the third from the left on the placard at the mas camp door.
Buy it, get inside it, and have fun with it, whooping and jumping, passing the bottle,
maybe smoking a little, ‘playin’ mas’ and enjoying yourself.”
The Black Elk are proud of the historicist purity of their costume themes (“we

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do research . . . we choose our costumes from books . . . we have a lot of books,

all the books about Indians”). But they combine exactitude with eclecticism in
colors (using modern pastel colors) and in performance (swirling in time with the
costumes and soca). And they offer social openness, distributing membership in
the band to anyone who wishes to costume themselves in the same thematic way,
without sacrificing thereby a highly developed sense of individuality. Asked some
months after the 1996 performance about what costume he was planning for 1997,
one member of the organizing group said: “I’ll be a Cheyenne warrior returned
from the dead. I always try to do something original.” Thinking of the costume he
had made in 1996, we asked: “You mean, something different from last year?” “No,
not just that,” he replied, “I want to stand out, apart from the others.”
Historicity and eclecticism, openness and individuality: the combination is well
suited to the ordering of carnival in San Fernando, which carries you out of the
mas camps, into the High Street, up through the center of town and out to the
climactic moment at Skinner Park. You move together, interacting with your
friends in the group, acknowledging acquaintances among the spectators along
the route. But during those final decisive few moments on stage when your small
subsection of the mas band moves forward to impress the top judges in the city,
you’re on your own, “apart from the others.”

CONTEXTS

New Orleans’s million and more people are all urban, and New Orleans’s central-
city blacks are hyper-urban, pressed together in broken-down housing and given
few of the public services to which all citizens have supposedly equal rights
and access. Black Elk masqueraders are not necessarily better off economically
than most New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians. Most of them engage in manual and
semi-skilled labor as carpenters, masons, mechanics, offshore-oil workers, and
security guards. They too are often unemployed. In that small island which
most economists would qualify as a “Third World” or “developing” country, the
standard of living is lower overall than in the United States. As limited as income
and opportunities may be, however, Black Elk masqueraders are not surrounded by
mostly hostile white economic and mass-media structures. And Trinidadians today
possess almost as a birthright what New Orleans black people enjoy only in limited,
neighborhood terms: sociocultural receptiveness to the way they play mas.
Another significant contextual dimension is geographic and environmental.
Trinidadians live in a small island, far from the centers of wealth and power. The
relatively limited level of economic development seems to pull every settlement,
and until recently even most neighborhoods in the Port of Spain urban strip, back
toward isolated provincial particularity. San Fernando is not exempt from this
atmosphere of isolation.
Isolation and yet openness: Trinidad’s population was very small in the eight-
eenth century and it grew slowly, leaving large parts of the island unoccupied. This
excess space, left untamed for so long and so late, through the early twentieth
century when the canoes came from Venezuela, and still wild today along the flank
of many unexpected hills and valleys throughout the island: this presence of
physically available opportunity for runaway slaves and then former slaves, for
indentured servants, illegal immigrants, half-breed Indians and Grenadians and

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Haitians and Venezuelans – and those other more mysterious beings of the forests,
Lougawou, Papa-Bois, Ladjabless, Soukouyan – played a never exhausted role in
creating a horizon of possibilities, a horizon of otherness.
The scenes that this former Wild Indian masquerader from San Fernando
described to us as his boyhood joy in the 1940s do not even today seem out of tune
with the small-town flavor of the place:
All through the week, we’d go to the stores up n’down the Coffee [Street], an’ in each
one say gimme a l’il flour, jes’ a l’il, an’ another day jes’ a little sausage, an’ another
day a l’il sugar . . . like that, you know. We all would do that, me an’ my friends, we’d
put it all together in cans. Them store-keeper was nice, we was l’il kids an’ it all wasn’t
worth nothin’, we jus’ ask a l’il each time. Then we take all that stuff Friday an’ go up
on the Hill, an’ we camp there an’ cook with that stuff all the weekend, jes’ like
Indians. That’s what we always used to do.
(interview, San Fernando, December, 1996)

What did this man know about the Warao and the sacredness of the hill where he
and his friends used to play? He vaguely knew about them, relating them to the Red
Indian costume. But the hill for him was a wild space, not a Warao place. It was a
place for freedom and a place of separateness where boys could play “just like
Indians,” and educate themselves subconsciously for the carnival masking that
would come.
The mind works both with and against people’s immediate experience. It does
seem paradoxical that the Warao, once the actual inhabitants and still until the
1930s and 1940s actual practitioners of nobly envisioned natural freedom, could
not in the end directly embody these values. They were too actual, as silent traders
in San Fernando and other marketplaces. They had to be reinvented as Warahoons,
with red skirts, nose- and earrings and incomprehensible language. Then they
could become imaginatively wild, and in this guise they circulated in San Fernando
in 1923 and later. Similarly Trinidadians’ remoteness from the noble savages who
valiantly resisted white hegemony, far to the north, made them all the nearer in
spirit. Like other heroes and anti-heroes – cowboys and gangsters, English kings
and queens, African warriors, biblical figures – North American Indians were
emphasized in their appeal by the isolation of local contexts. The ever-present lush
nature just outside the door, down the street, just over the hill gave space to the
imagination to develop a distant generalized appeal.

MAS

Even at the time of its greatest popularity in the 1950s, the Plains Indian
model never entirely displaced other sources of inspiration. From the 1920s to the
1950s newspaper reports mention Black, Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, and White Wild
Indians (Anthony 1989: 85ff). The most popular forms during this period were
the Red and the Black Indians. It is a testimony to the popularity of the North
American paradigm (and the eclecticism of masking categories) that the term
“Red Indian” ended up being used, depending on the context, for Plains Indian
masqueraders as well as for the Warahoons. White Indians also portrayed
North American (Canadian) Indians. But Blue Indians were said to be “from the
Orinoco” (unfortunately we have no details about their costume), and in the 1950s

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bands based on Amerindian empires – Incas, Aztecs, and Mayans – became very
popular. Black Indians for their part, a few of whom still participate in carnival
today, have always been considered “African.”
If, as we have argued, the popularity of Amerindians has to do with their heroism
and marginality, the conflation of Amerindians with Africa is understandable.
“In this case,” writes Daniel Crowley, “Indian is synonymous with ‘wild man’ or
‘savage’ ” (Crowley 1956: 206). Like the Warahoons the Black Indians are a striking
example of eclecticism, with their black satin shirts decorated with silver and gold
beads, their Spanish pantaloons made of broad yellow and black stripes, their
earloops and noserings and feathery headdresses. Less visible in our figure 9.5 are
the faces blackened with lamp-black or other substances and high-lit with white at
cheekbones or around the eyes. Lunging at you with a spear, or with an artificial
snake wrapped around one arm, they are, at least for a startled moment, very
frightening. In the 1950s Black Indians carried lances, spears, tomahawks, bows
and arrows, and drums, and ate fire (Crowley 1956: 206).
In Trinidad as in New Orleans Indian bands created themselves by means of
ritual practices embedded in neighborly and other local ties, no less than by using
a certain kind of costume. Warahoons and Black Indians were known for their
special languages and elaborated performance routines. The masking forms that
became dominant during and after the 1950s relied on a spectacle-oriented
aesthetic and the combination of carnival artist-entrepreneurs with large pools
of individuals ready to buy rather than to make costumes. As bands grew larger,
band leaders and carnival artists took advantage of this more general participation
and of the increased availability of new material to present Hollywood-like repre-
sentations of famous characters and stories, including Amerindian themes –
Northwest Coast Indians carrying totem poles, Custer’s Last Stand, Hopis, Zunis,
Seminoles, Mayans, Aztecs, Toltecs, Incas, and so on.
Warahoons and Black Indians were locally generated characters, reflecting influ-
ences (Spanish, African, Amerindian) that had been part of the social and cultural
fabric of the island for a long time and that gave form and meaning to the rituals.
Plains Indian masking, on the other hand, originated in media-transmitted images
and was now widely disseminated by the movies which taught everyone how to
play this mas. In the short run this evolution produced a spectacular array of
Indian costumes and performance forms, since more ritualized and more spectacle-
oriented types coexisted and nourished each other. These years were the heyday
of the Fancy Indian costumes and of Plains Indian masking. In 1959 Harold
Saldenah electrified the Savannah Grandstand audience with hundreds of Cree
Indians shrieking and brandishing lances (Anthony 1989: 276). But over a longer
period the emphasis on artistic spectacle “civilized” the wild people. The Indians
are – and have been since the 1960s – in danger of diluting their distinctiveness
to the point of oblivion. A few fringes here and there and headdresses vaguely
Amerindian in aura have become what too often passes for Amerindian masking in
present-day carnival bands. Few and far between are the grand constructions
of yesterday when inspiration exalted the conventional. The Warahoons have dis-
appeared but for a few aging masqueraders (although in recent years groups of
children trained in camps organized by the National Carnival Commission
portrayed the character in the traditional carnival character festival held on the
Friday before carnival). The Black Indians are reduced to a brilliant but very

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• AMERINDIAN MASKING IN TRINIDAD’S CARNIVAL

Fig. 9.5 Warriors of the Black Continent Amerindian mas band on a Port of Spain street,
carnival 1996. Photograph by Martin Walsh.

small group. The Plains Indian style has proved more enduring, especially in San
Fernando, where, from the days of the Wild Indians, Indian mas has been very
much alive. Few costumes, however, are as elaborate, while at the same time being
successful in conveying a sense of authentic Plains Indian dress, as those produced
by the Black Elk.

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During our stay in Trinidad we also heard of no other group that was as deeply
rooted in the life of its neighborhood. Lionel and Rosemarie Jagessar, also in
San Fernando, have for many years created spectacular costumes (nowadays often
portraying Amerindians from South American past empires) lavishly decorated
with layers upon layers of colored feathers. The aesthetic of these beautifully
crafted productions, however, belongs entirely to the realm of the familiar. Their
creators’ energies, in the feverish months that precede carnival, are mostly focused
on the two to four huge costumes that will participate in the prestigious kings and
queens competition in the Queen’s Park Savannah in Port of Spain. The goal here
is primarily to please the eye, in the context of a more and more spectacle-oriented
carnival. Indians do survive as a masking motif today, but, with a few exceptions,
less as substance than as style.
In the beginning, say the Black Elk, they were led by Wilfred Henry Ramdin, a
man who they say “lives like an Indian,” dressing simply and eating natural foods,
in a small, unpainted dirt-floor place near the foot of San Fernando Hill. In the late
1980s Ramdin ceased to parade with the Black Elk. He now goes to Port of Spain
with his own group, although we were told that the two bands sometimes appear
together in celebrations before carnival Tuesday.
Ramdin’s costume designs and face-painting are exercises in sensuous simplicity.
He seems to aim at expressive intensity rather than at accumulating effects, using
bright primary colors rather than many mixes and contrasts in flattened costume
panels. He employs few feathers, which leave bodily contours and areas of skin
intact rather than covered by massy, undulating designs. The etched vividness of
his style strikes the spectator in a manner different from the Black Elks’ feathery
flows (figure 9.6). Black Elk costuming, since the departure of their former
leader, has become more exuberant at the risk of losing some intensity. But the
band continues to pursue an ideal of historical accuracy, which is akin to Ramdin’s
vision and sharply different from the Black Indians’ and Red Indians’ (i.e.
Warahoons’) eclectic style.
Simplicity versus accumulation of effects, historical authenticity versus rich,
bewildering eclecticism: such contrasting tendencies have for decades produced
superb inventions deservedly recognized with carnival prizes. But the question here
is less this public recognition than the inspiration behind it. If the wild is always,
perhaps even only, found by means of contrast with what is tame “here,” rather
than discovered by immersing the self in the otherness of wilderness “out there,”
then carnival masking, insofar as it is successful in communicating the wild, brings
to the surface qualities that are latent in our everyday existence, qualities that are
constantly present but scarcely acknowledged. That too is a function of carnival:
like inversion, like satire and parody, like the enlargement of our sense of what is
possible, carnival wildness may enlarge our sense of the actual.
Can the Black Elk, with its attendant neighborly practices, maintain the balance
it has struck between authenticity and coloristic effects, collective energy and
openness? Will the rich eclecticism of the Black Indians and the luminous intensity
apparent in Ramdin’s costumes be extended? These Amerindian modalities offer
attractive alternatives to the commonplace way of responding to ever larger, more
vaguely oriented crowds with correspondingly ever larger, more vaguely articulated
spectacles which address no challenges to consciousness. For the moment at least,
they represent the wild amid the tame.

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• AMERINDIAN MASKING IN TRINIDAD’S CARNIVAL

Fig. 9.6 Ramdin-Jackman group, carnival Tuesday, Port of Spain, 1996.

Photograph by Gordon Means.
NOTE

An earlier version of this chapter is printed in Milla Cozart Riggio (ed.), The Drama Review, 42 (3):
147–69 (1998), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
1 Black Elk was a revered Lakota Indian medicine man who survived the Wounded Knee
massacre and became an eloquent spokesman for Plains Indian spiritual profundity. We thank
the Black Elk band for their help and also others interviewed at San Fernando in 1996 (names
are listed in the fuller Drama Review version of this chapter).

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10
THE BLUE DEVILS OF PARAMIN
Tradition and improvisation in a village carnival
band

Martin W. Walsh

Some of the most dynamic players in the venues of Trinidad Carnival featuring
traditional masquerade are the Blue Devils. A relentless beating on biscuit tins,
punctuated by unearthly yelps, marks their passage through the downtown streets
of Port of Spain, as a palpable ripple of excitement runs through the spectators,
many of whom will be plundered of their snacks or TT dollars by these comic/
horrific images of the demon world. Blue Devils are found throughout Trinidad in
such towns as Arima and Point Fortin, but are especially popular in the mountain
district of Paramin above the suburb of Maraval to the north of the capital. Blue
Devils may be classified as a local variant of the historical character-type of the Jab
Molassi (Molasses Devil).1 It must be borne in mind, however, that many Blue
Devil players, past and present, consider the Jab Molassi “somethin’ different.”
With the perversity of true folk practitioners, they often label themselves Jab Jab (a
term which they shorten informally to “jab,” a practice that will be followed in this
chapter). The Jab Jab is, however, a totally different character-type according to the
literature.2
The present report is based on observations of the Paramin Blue Devils, in action
and behind the scenes, during the carnival seasons of 1997, 1998, and 2000, during
which I conducted some ten hours of interviews, formal and informal. I focused
particularly on the troupe from the mountain trackway of Fatima Trace headed by
Andrew Sanoir, better known as “Kootoo.”3 Kootoo’s startling “stage presence”
and improvisational skills indeed prompted this initial attempt at a performance
analysis of the Paramin devil mas’.

EARLIER BLUE DEVILS

Obtaining a “history” of the Blue Devils is by no means easy, the performance

tradition being completely oral in transmission and limited exclusively to the brief
carnival season. Until very recently the people of Paramin have not given the
subject much thought, proud though they are of their tradition. With no records to
speak of, one must fall back on anecdotal information and individual impressions.

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• THE BLUE DEVILS OF PARAMIN

Many current and retired performers have a general notion that the jab per-
formance has something to do with the end of “slavery days,” but none could
answer, for example, the practical historical question of when bluing itself began.
Andrew’s father, Patrick Joseph, at the time in his late seventies (now deceased),
had played Blue Devil in the early 1930s. It was a well-established tradition at that
time, and so we may with some confidence push the Paramin Blue Devils back to
before World War I. However, since there are no patois terms clinging to the per-
formance (other than the word “jab” itself), it is risky to assume that this particular
performance, in its current manifestation, goes all the way back to “slavery days.”
In Mr Joseph’s time the jab dance was performed to tamboo-bamboo
(bamboo sections thumped on the road and struck with other sticks), a different
sonic effect from the current rhythm section based on the beating of biscuit
tins. Though very popular, with “plenty, plenty” jabs, these early bands were
small, usually only two percussionists with one jab holding a chain or rope attached
to the principal dancer, who was called “King Devil” or sometimes the “Abyssinian
Jab.”4
The players would sequester themselves to blue-up on carnival Monday morning,
then surprise the village with their sudden appearance. They would proceed from
house to house, extorting from the “terrified” residents a piece of bread or bacon,
or a “big penny wit’ the King head on it.” The rope-man carried a receptacle for
the proffered swag that the King Devil usually snapped up in his mouth. Jabs
might brandish farm implements such as a pitchfork or cutlass (machete). Young
children were known to hide under their beds when they appeared. The group
played without masks, their bodies, faces and hair completely covered in bluing.
Their appearance was more or less uniform. They wore only a pair of cutoffs
furnished with a springy tail. Mr Joseph mentioned fashioning himself a headpiece
as King Devil, and I have a separate account of a “cowhead,” a skull section
painted blue and used for this purpose. But the accoutrements of today’s per-
formance – bat wings, forks (tridents), either store-bought or homemade monster
masks – were lacking. “Bat wing come after,” Mr Joseph recalls. Various cross-
fertilizations with Port of Spain Carnival no doubt took place over the years.5 Even
in Mr Joseph’s time, the Paramin Blue Devils sometimes ventured downtown
to play.
Older players indicated that tensions existed between the jabs and early motorists
on the steep and winding trackways of Paramin. Mr Joseph related how a car’s
fender had once snagged his rope and dragged him some distance down a slope. He
did not indicate, however, that this was anything other than an accident, though
holding up vehicles for “ransom” – still a common practice of the Blue Devils –
might well have been a factor earlier on.
James Sanoir is another son of Patrick Joseph and Andrew’s elder brother by
some dozen years. He played Blue Devil from the early 1960s to the early 1970s and
succeeded his father as Fatima King Devil. In James’s time a certain amount of
innovation was occurring in the jab performance. He himself played with a macajuel
(boa constrictor) that he had procured in the high hinterland and tamed. He would
not use the snake directly to terrorize the audience, but would dance with it draped
around him. Nowadays it is against the law to employ such partners, but more
recent performers occasionally dance with rubber imitations. (Editor’s note: In
2003 and 2004 one Blue Devil did carry a six-foot boa constrictor around his neck,

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using it to threaten the spectators. The mouth of the snake had been taped shut.)
Blue Devil fire blowing, on the other hand, is a relatively recent innovation that
James disapproves of, finding it “too risky.” The general consensus among players
of his generation is that present-day youth are going to greater extremes, taking far
more risks, and that even the tempo of the pan is more frenetic.

TRAINING (OR THE LACK THEREOF)

For generations, the ranks of the Blue Devils have been replenished from a pool
of young adolescents without any direct training of the young by the old, or so
my informants maintain. Imitation of the jab dance and vocalizations, as well as
practice beating the ubiquitous biscuit tins, however, begins at a fairly early age.
The better dancers get noticed by older players and are eventually taken into a band
by a kind of “natural selection.” James Sanoir was not directly coached by his
father but simply “followed along,” eventually taking his place as King Devil.
James’s younger brother Andrew, in turn, took over from him. Little boys seem to
spend a good deal of the carnival season in this mimetic process. They often create
parallel junior bands complete with homemade props. Some even experiment with
bluing. Older boys might help out by beating pan for them. They are likely to turn
out for an impromptu performance wherever an audience might gather, for
example, after the Patois Mass on the morning of Dimanche Gras. Early in the
afternoon of carnival Monday 1998 I followed Andrew around while he beat pan
for his two small sons and their friends as they performed a full perambulation of
the Fatima area. Andrew lets the boys “create der own t’ing,” but is free with advice
on road safety, which houses to hit, how to keep up the beat, etc. His involvement
as pan man is perhaps not so unusual. The training of the younger generation must
be going on all over Paramin in many such informal ways.6 Andrew’s boys fearlessly
halted jeeps on the steep traces and lunged at elders hanging around outside the
bar. Andrew was proud of them for nabbing 84 TT dollars in their afternoon’s
work.
As there is no formal training in devil play, so too is there no group rehearsal or
designated rehearsal time. While pan beaters need to get back their control over the
complicated rhythms every year, the jabs seem to require no such preparation. Joe
Felix, known as Pocket, claims to have “never rehearsed, never practiced” when he
was playing jab some fifteen to twenty years ago. Many others echo him – jab
dancing either comes “natural” or one does not engage in it.
There is, however, an implied code of behavior expected of the Blue Devils.
Despite their furious appearance, they are rather circumspect with regard to their
audiences, “ain’t touchin’ nobody,” as Mr Joseph phrases it. His son James
expresses identical sentiments and Andrew echoes them: “You don’t block no one.”
If a spectator clearly turns away from an approaching jab, he or she is not to be
pursued. Even soiling others with blue should be confined to one’s friends and
neighbors. If a yelping jab demands something, such as a beer or ice cream, and is
refused, he simply moves on. Local killjoys might be punished with some minor
looting – James once stole a bake out of the oven of a stingy neighbor, juggled with
it, and shared it with his rope man – but generally property was respected. Unlike
the Wild Indian or Jab Jab bands, Blue Devil groups never had a tradition of
challenging each other.

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THE PAN, THE BLUE, THE DANCIN’

Although Mr Joseph played jab to tamboo-bamboo back in the 1930s, the trad-
ition for the past fifty years has been driven by pan – biscuit tins slung around the
neck and beaten with crude sticks, usually with some other iron percussion (brake
drums, cow bells, etc.) and whistles.7 As in the large steelbands, this rhythm section
goes by the name of the “engine room.” It keeps up an unrelenting beat. Some tins,
given a higher pitch by firing them beforehand, take over during the crescendos of
the performance. Beating on the short ends of the tins also produces a different
sound from the usual beating on the long sides and is used for various signals to
the group. Incompetent and inconsistent drumming can ruin a Jab performance
and so the engine room (as the percussive section is called) is considered a vital part
of the performance. “Timin’,” the “tempo on de pan,” is of the essence, everyone
agrees. One usually “comes up” as a pan beater and graduates to dancing, but
there is no fixed rule. Some pan men never dance, some dancers never beat pan,
but a large percentage do both. Everyone knows that carnival is near when the
distinctive driving rhythms are heard being practiced up and down the slopes of
Paramin.
As far back as anyone can remember Paramin has had Blue Devils, the charac-
teristic color coming from ordinary laundry bluing. Tablets of the bleaching agent
are ground up on the performance site and mixed with water, usually by junior
members of the team.8 The dancers begin with a coating of petroleum jelly to fix
the color, which otherwise would be sweated off, on the skin. (Earlier performers
had used lard, which must have created another, olfactory dimension to the
masquerade.) The thick, bright blue liquid is smeared on by hand over every inch
of exposed skin and often a paintbrush is used to get a smooth and even finish.
A junior member of the band carries along a bucket of this bluing to “freshen up”
the dancers. Members of the engine room usually smear a bit on themselves in a
gesture of solidarity. Other Blue Devil groups sometimes wear blue boiler-suits for
protection in their antics, but Andrew’s troupe pride themselves on playing in the
old manner, “naked,” that is, in briefs and sneakers only, the bluest of the blue.
Blue Devil dancing is recognizably Trinidadian in style, a spread-kneed, angular
strut with pelvic grinding, arms extended outward. The most common actions
are leaping in the air, lunging at victims, or “rollin’ on de groun’ an’ winin’ wit
ya partner.” Devil winin’ indeed can create the impression of undifferentiated,
insatiable sexual mania – humping anything at any time. Late in the evening of
carnival Monday 1996 I witnessed a devil winin’ the front of a maxi-taxi as it
attempted to leave Fatima Junction, as well as heaps of jabs winin’ on each other
as they tumbled down a hillside. Winin’ with members of the audience is not
common, nor really expected by the dancers. It is strictly up to the initiative of the
individual spectator since it would involve considerable soiling.
Current performers deny any particular scenario in what they enact, and yet
there is the basic role differentiation of King Devil roped in by an assistant. The
“reading” must be that the King Devil is the most possessed, the most dangerous of
the jabs, and would tear into the crowd with dire consequences were he not so
restrained. Depending on the size of the band (Andrew’s can have as many as nine
or ten players) there might be two or more jabs also roped in. The larger the troupe
the more individual “lines of business” flourish. The King Devil usually is the most

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• MARTIN W. WALSH

active in procuring dollar bills from the spectators by a relentless, “in-your-face”

yelping, but the other members of the band also prey upon them. Snow-cones,
drinks, fruit and other snacks might be plundered in this way, both for actual
refreshment and to create disgusting effects of slobbering, foaming and spitting
out. Whole styrofoam cups might be masticated and spewed out again. Often the
jabs bite on hidden capsules of red or green food coloring to create quite startling
effects of cannibalistic gore. Fire blowing also became quite popular in the 1990s.
Ordinary kerosene is taken into the mouth and sprayed out over an open flame
creating huge bursts of fire. Players coat their mouths with milk or cream before-
hand, but this is the only precaution taken. Andrew has specialized in “eatin’ fire,”
which he claims no other devils want to try at the moment. Since there are many
other fire blowers at work in Paramin, it is probably only a matter of time before
fire swallowing also enters the general repertory.

PSEUDO-TRANCE AND THEATRICAL TRANSFORMATION

All devil players queried, whether current or retired, agree that a certain trans-
formation takes place when one blues-up and begins to hear the beating of the pan,
and that both the bluing and the rhythm are required for this particular energizing.
James Sanoir describes it thus in an interview:
You see, when you put de blue on you and you hear de pan, you get a vibes, you get
a vibes bring you . . . jumpy . . . get you jumpy . . . you feel you could do anyt’ing, yeh,
not violence t’ings, but you feel a kinda Happiness in you, Joy.

Another older performer remarked, “You a changed man when you put de blue on
you, you change.” A current dancer chaffs at the small, demarcated judging areas
in Paramin’s carnival Monday competition because “when that Jab in ya head, in ya
head, you can’ really perform in a box!”
When Kootoo’s group prepares (what they call dressin’), whether behind the
grandstand in Port of Spain or on the slope below their homes on carnival Monday,
the atmosphere is essentially that of a locker-room during a winning team’s suiting
up – lots of laughter, joking, one-upmanship, helping each other get ready. Rum or
beer might be passed around, but are only casually indulged in. Alcohol does not
really fuel the performance. When the pan beaters start warming up, however,
dancers in the final stages of their bluing begin to gyrate and let out the character-
istic yelps (what Andrew calls bawlin’) much like an orchestra tuning up. One might
even get a call-and-response effect with the jabs yelping on different tones. This
process may start and stop several times before the group is completely welded into
a performance unit, at which point they are ready to move on down the road. A
jab group unwinds in a similar fashion – intense moments are relived, injuries
compared, rum or beer contributed by supporters is passed around and, most
importantly, the crumpled TT dollars, stashed in one of the tins of the pan men, are
flattened out, counted, and shared among the band members.
Although James Sanoir might talk of a happiness and joy in getting into the Blue
Devil role (and all performers characterize their activity in typical Trini fashion as
“enjoyin’ ya’self wit’ ya friends”), the image presented to the carnival spectators is
one of elemental rage, insatiable hunger and bestial energy, a blast from hell itself.
This does not register as a paradox to the performers, who are, as a rule, friendly,

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easy-going individuals. The demonic impersonation is not viewed as dangerous in

any psychological or spiritual sense, either to the players themselves, or to others.
The majority of the Paramin villagers are at least nominally Catholic, but no older
people indicated that there was ever a religious objection to the portrayal, even
from the local priest.9 It goes without saying, however, that the jabs completely
disappear by Ash Wednesday and are not to be heard of until the next carnival
season. Disapproval did exist but it was more a matter of personal discomfort or
taste, especially with older women. It was related that Andrew’s grandmother
wanted nothing to do with the jabs one carnival Monday and consequently had
closed up all her windows. She neglected the one over the steep slope behind her
house and the devils managed to build a human pyramid and spook her anyway.
A contemporary older woman like the late Morilla Montano could still convey an
ambiguous relationship to the jabs. Admittedly uncomfortable in their presence, in
speaking of them before her death in 2001 she could not refrain from squirming
with delight at their “greasy” behavior.
The Blue Devil performance thus does not require any prophylactic activity
beforehand, and no player had ever heard of any jab having problems coming out
of his role. If the pan keeps beating, the jabs might continue to dance well beyond
the boundaries of a particular performance event, but this is strictly for their own
pleasure. In earlier decades spectators might have held up a crucifix or saint’s medal
to turn away an aggressive jab, but this was always in jest. In the Paramin Blue
Devils, then, we are not dealing with a spirit-possession performance, as in certain
African masked dances or the “riding” of worshippers by the loa in Haitian Vodou,
but rather with the skillful simulation thereof. What the Blue Devils do is acting,
clearly. They are “only playin’ de devil.” Yet a dancer must truly seem possessed.
A good jab player never breaks character, and especially not for the purposes of
incidental humor. The aural stimulation of the pan and the visual and tactile
stimulation of the body-painting evidently create a particularly intense, empathetic
brand of impersonation that has elements in common with, one might be tempted
to speculate, African modes of religious experience. Not a trace of cultic influence
has been noticed by this observer, however.10
Many performers, however, credit the jab role with something like special powers.
Andrew, for example, claims that he would never consider himself capable of his
spontaneous feats of climbing, fire-handling, or uprooting vegetation if he was not
so completely in character. “Pan have some kind a meanin’,” he claims, imparting
extra strength to the dancer. Blue Devils are susceptible to injuries but, like high-
performance athletes, they transcend the pain in the adrenalin rush of the game.
At the same time, however, the jabs require a certain performative “distance” for
their improvisational interactions with the audience and the environment, some-
thing like the controlled anarchy of ritual clowns such as the Hopi Koshare. As
mentioned earlier, there is an implied code of conduct operating in the per-
formance. In the 1997 Traditional Characters Parade, one of the younger King
Devils, riding the wave of his energetic performance, had successfully swept away
the crowd from the entrance to one of the upscale shopping malls on Frederick
Street, and seemed on the verge of plunging in. Kootoo gave him a quite clear
signal to pull back. Jab mayhem was not to be played with wristwatches, calculators
and CDs as possible props. Boundaries had been reached: the proper theatre of the
Blue Devils remained the street.

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IMPROVISATION AND INNOVATION

The Paramin Blue Devil tradition appears to be in a very healthy state of preserva-
tion. Unlike many of the traditional masquerades in Trinidad, there has not been a
break or a serious decline in the practice. It has deep, local roots and, largely
because of its continuous appeal to youth, has never needed to be revived or coaxed
back to health by initiatives from the National Carnival Commission. The present
Paramin jabs are intensely proud of their tradition and feel that Blue Devil bands
from other districts are but pale imitations of their genuine article. Playing jab is
“instinct,” it is “in de genes.”
Dramatic changes have been taking place in recent years, however, largely owing
to this very success. For one thing, the Blue Devils’ exposure to urban carnival
spectators and participants has increased dramatically from the days of Patrick
Joseph or even James Sanoir. Numerous, often remunerative venues have opened
up from Viey le Cou at Queen’s Hall a week before carnival, to NCC events at
Carapichaima or San Juan, to the Friday Traditional Characters Parade in down-
town Port of Spain, which has grown conspicuously in size and popularity in the
last few years. In the 1997 season, Andrew’s troupe seemed to be on the road every
other day in the two weeks prior to carnival. They were called upon to open the
glitzy Dimanche Gras show on the big Savannah stage. (They had also organized a
downtown jouvay band that year called Blue Devils and White Angels.) In 1998
Andrew was hired by the large mas’ band Barbarossa to play jab around their
magnificent Blue Devil King costume construction during the Kings and Queens
semifinals. The Paramin Blue Devils are indeed achieving something like celebrity
status in Trinidad Carnival. Andrew has even appeared, anonymously, on the cover
of Earl Lovelace’s novel The Dragon Can’t Dance.
Another development is the annual Jab Jab Competition sponsored by the
Paramin Carnival Commission, first held in 1997. The more or less impromptu
appearance of Blue Devil bands from dawn to dusk on carnival Monday has now,
to some extent, been organized along urban carnival lines to include adjudication
and prize-winning. It is hard to imagine how “judging” goes on in such a sweeping,
spontaneous display of comic chaos. The brief time slots and small playing areas
marked out at Fatima Junction and in front of the Arietas Bar seem ludicrously
inadequate. Still, judging proceeds and the idea of a competition with prizes has
definitely caught on, especially among the younger players. What the event has also
created is an incredible concentration of jab playing, with easily two hundred par-
ticipants streaming into the village from late afternoon to early evening. Feeding
off each other’s energy, the various bands collide with each other, hooting in
rivalry, as they pour down the various traces toward the judging areas, the living
definition of Pandemonium. Carnival Monday night in Paramin, on the other
hand, is dominated by the sound-truck and soca music like any other Trinidad fete,
although older jabs in their thirties and forties may continue to work the edges of
the youthful dance crowd.
There are other developments as well. Colors other than the traditional blue and
red have been experimented with, White Devils having appeared recently. Teenage
girls are beginning to play (Andrew’s sister for example), but so far are not seen
in the front ranks of the “shock troops.” Elements of the larger carnival world are
also creeping in – references to current soca hits, flagmen such as one sees with the

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big steelbands, and so on. In 1998 Andrew’s group was quite fond of Michel
Montano’s hit “Toro, Toro.” The engine room would occasionally change to a soca
beat as the jabs charged under their flag like enraged bulls.
With all the increased activity and the new attention from outsiders, an intense
form of improvisational performance has resulted, one that leaves the oldtimers
both amazed and somewhat disturbed. Rivalry between the proliferating bands
leads to mutual inspiration and a desire to go the other performer one better.
Specialties, particular “turns,” are regularly invented in the manner of commedia
dell’arte clowns. Andrew’s cousin, Damien Joseph, for example, wears a red card-
board mask that has two white plastic orbs dangling off it giving the impression of
enormous bulging eyeballs. He is also partial to wearing fangs and dripping lots
of red food coloring from his mouth. David Hosang makes devil necklaces
out of donkey-eye nuts as well as papier-mâché beast masks. Andrew’s young
nephew Jason Sanoir has a tolerance for the bitterness of aloes and specializes in
chewing up the inner pulp to create long slimy fillets that, stained bright red by food
coloring, look for all the world like raw flesh torn by a lion in a wildlife film. Jason
then smears these strips over his face and shaved head, and even blows bubbles
through the aloes’ slime. Andrew himself is always looking for new opportunities
to show off his climbing skills. 1998 was his year as “Spider Man.” He had even
scouted Fatima Junction the evening before the competition to locate likely
challenges.
We might well be in a “golden age” of jab playing in Paramin, but there is a
darker side as well. The winners of the 1997 Jab Jab Competition, a troupe from
further up the mountain, literally dismembered a live chicken in front of the judges
and played on with the blood and body parts. How far might this trend go before
there is a crackdown? Serious injuries are also more likely in today’s frenetic
playing. At the end of carnival Monday 1998, Damien Joseph had some serious
back pain, while Jason Sanoir had badly singed his eyes. Jason had outfitted him-
self with a pair of cow horns tipped with kerosene tapers. This innovation provided
a constant flame for other fire blowers, but Jason was not always ready for the balls
of fire erupting directly over his head. Conversely, Andrew surprised himself by
coming away with only three minor cuts after all his clambering up stone walls
clothed in nothing but a pair of swimming trunks. Older relatives are also very
concerned with the possible exposure to serious diseases when the jabs slobber
standing water or gutter runoff.
Despite these concerns, one cannot deny the power, excitement, hysteria and
hilarity of present-day jab performance. Let me conclude with some moments
culled from Andrew’s recent outings. They constitute some of the most startling,
vigorous, inventive and virtually seamless improvisational playing I have ever
witnessed.
For the 1998 Jab Jab Competition in Paramin, Kootoo sported a bright red and
yellow Indian headdress, part of his costume for a downtown band on Tuesday. In
the surge down Fatima Trace to the junction, he uprooted a fig tree and proceeded
to tie the branches around his waist. He was then able to swish the shredded trunk
of the tree around like an enormous tail, becoming a strange, multicolored and
enraged dinosaur for the competition judges. The band had also found a large,
discarded plastic sink by the side of the road. Andrew repeatedly slammed this
down in front of his audience to reinforce his yelping, behaving like an animal

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toying with its prey. At one point he even wore it as a kind of headpiece. Finally
casting it aside, he shucked everything but his skimpy swim trunks and took off as
Spider Man. First he scaled the walls of the Social Club and appeared suddenly
among the old folks on the balcony, snatching up beers and roaring in triumph.
He was soon scrambling up an earth embankment and into a tree, then up a sheer
retaining wall, then across the roofs of parked jeeps and onto the walls of the
Arietas Bar, then all the way up a tall lamppost, yelping at the crowd all the while,
finally descending rapidly, butt first, back to earth. Andrew loses touch with his
band in these amazing solo excursions, freelancing to the ubiquitous rhythm of the
pan. He is constantly “pushing the envelope,” taking his jab-playing ever deeper
into the mundane environment and away from the circumscribed areas of the pan
beaters and the blue-stained rope, beyond, indeed, the immediate festival context.
In the course of play he tends to shuck all devil props and accoutrements in favor
of a purity of effect – the wild, naked, elemental being in your space and “in your
face.”
The band’s performance in the Friday Traditional Characters festival of 1997 is
still recalled as a high point by the players themselves. The group was late in getting
down from Paramin and it seemed at first that they were not going to make it. The
column of traditional characters was already turning into Frederick Street when
the Paramin Blue Devils suddenly crashed into the line with their thunderous pan.
They had appropriated some sand sharks from the Fish Market on the way, and
these were now bandied about. Kootoo, in his great cow horn headdress, worried
his shark furiously, then stuck it in his pants, pulling it out through his fly and
wagging it at the crowd. He then skewered it on a tine of his crude wooden trident
and proceeded to grill it with a bit of fire blowing, all the while keeping up the jab
dance and yelp. He did some fire eating and then began to tear the shark with his
teeth into several long strips. He actually lost a front tooth in the process, sharkskin
being incredibly tough. It was one of Andrew’s few serious miscalculations as a jab.
Meanwhile the other members of the Fatima band were taking off on Andrew’s
energy. Ice creams plundered from spectators were being gobbled up and spewed
out again at a furious rate. As usual, teenage girls and the younger schoolboys
erupted in squeals of mock – or perhaps sometimes real – terror and helped
stampede the other spectators. Because of the railings at Woodford Square, the
crowd was not able to flee backward very far from the lunges of the jabs. And so a
kind of riptide set in, funneling everybody down into the canyon of lower Frederick
Street where the waves of playful panic continued to roll. Andrew was soon
strirring up a puddle of burning kerosene, eventually putting it out with his butt
and howling in pain until he had found the flowing water of the gutter where he
splashed about merrily. Nearby was a large, soggy cardboard box that Andrew
climbed into and began to ride like a Burrokeet (hobbyhorse), eventually reducing
it to pulp. Then he was off for some high pole climbing with that butt-first crashing
back to earth. The other jabs meanwhile were finding all sorts of treasures in the
deep gutters of lower Frederick Street and flinging them about. Andrew’s spectator
cousins, Edward and Edwin Joseph, were in a state of extreme hilarity, never having
seen the band at quite this pitch. They would literally hoot in surprise at the
improvisations.
The presence of such a tightly packed and “captive” audience also contributed
to the intense atmosphere of these fifteen or so minutes of insane jab playing.

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When the parade burst out into the wide open spaces of Independence Square,
much of this collective energy dissipated. One noticed immediately how fatigued
the Paramin band had become. Uncharacteristically, Andrew turned to me in the
crowd pleading for a Carib. Securing an armful of beer bottles I hurried back to
the band. Andrew meanwhile was dancing with a concrete block poised on his
head. After sloshing a beer, he was up another lamppost, but it was clear he was
beginning to wind down from this extraordinary performance.
What might all of this jab playing mean? Certainly for the performers themselves
it means a good time and a way of making a few dollars as it has always meant.11 In
recent years it has also opened up an arena for achievement that basketball or
hip-hop might afford in a North American context. But carnival comes but once a
year, and there is no promise (or danger) of “going professional.” The new com-
petitive edge to jab playing may have created some new problems and tensions, and
one detects a hint of jealousy in some oldtimers regarding the big stage and media
opportunities the younger jabs now enjoy; nevertheless, there is little danger that
devil mas’ will lose its mountain roots or its local appeal. The Paramin Blue Devils
are among the most vital traditional characters of Trinidad Carnival, and there are
probably more of them than in any previous decade. If the Midnight Robbers and
Pierrot Grenades are delicate hothouse plants needing the constant care and
nurture of the NCC, the Paramin Blue Devils are hardy, roadside perennials.12 For
the larger context of Trinidad Carnival they may well be supplying that element of
“wildness” that Sam Kinser sees as a necessary component of any vital carnival
tradition (1999). Celebrating their own blue-smeared, enraged and incontinent
bodies, they are the anarchic counterweight to the glitz and glamor of the
Savannah stage.

NOTES

1 Under Jab Molassi in his article “The Traditional Masques of Carnival,” Daniel Crowley
observes, “there are also bands of red, green, or blue devils dressed like the Imps of the Dragon
Band with short kandal, tails and pitchforks, but with their bodies covered in ruku or green or
blue powder” (1956: 74; see also Harris (1998)). Trinidadian terms used in this chapter can be
found in Allsopp (1996). See also the Glossary in this volume.
2 See Crowley (1956: 74–5). Paramin people occasionally use the term Bad Jab for their devil
type.
3 Andrew likes to call his group “Number One Paramin Blue Devils,” but he also works easily
with many other devil bands in the district. All jab bands are very loosely organized and often
share personnel. Thanks go to the twins Edwin and Edward Joseph who serve as informal
“managers” of the troupe. They helped me interpret the village scene and link up with earlier
devil players. They also recorded some interviews in 1997 and 1998.
4 The pun is on “abyss.” In one of Mr Joseph’s old Pierrot Grenade routines he spells out
“Mussolini,” which might place the Abyssinian Jab at the time of the conquest of Ethiopia.
5 A connection to the props of the elaborate but now defunct Dragon Band is probable. See
Crowley above. The horn headdress popular among present-day Blue Devils is perhaps traceable
to the urban “Cow Bands” originally organized by abattoir workers.
6 For the Carapichaima venue in 1997 the Fatima Blue Devils brought three “sides.” Andrew
played King Devil in the first side, and then directed from the sidelines as the apprentice jabs of
the second side came on. He would wave and hoot them on to make more of such opportunities

155
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as a burning puddle of kerosene. The third side was made up of very young performers for whom
Andrew gleefully beat pan.
7 One older player mentioned that heavier cooking oil drums preceded biscuit tins in Blue Devil
pan (not to be confused with the motor oil drums which give rise to the steelband).
8 The brand name is “Family Train” with an antique-looking palm tree trademark. A box of
several hundred square tablets costs about $30 TT (approx $5US). Earlier the bluing was
begged for.
9 The current parish priest, an elderly Tipperaryman, is only amused by the young people’s jab
playing. He finds they have little historical sense of the masquerade as a response to the trauma
of slavery. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to get more of his “bookish” opinions of
Paramin Carnival.
10 Damien Joseph compared playing jab to the experience of Shango, but no direct connection to
Afro-Caribbean religious practice or cult activity is evident in the masquerade. My son Tilman,
who in 2000 became the first white person to play Blue Devil in Paramin, can testify to the
ecstatic nature of the experience, something comparable to a really intense “mosh pit.”
11 Andrew’s group takes in an average of $200 TT per outing, about $35 US, not counting travel
expenses and other stipends for performing in sponsored “traditional” events.
12 Few of the traditional character bands come from an unbroken tradition, or have the “critical
mass” necessary for a convincing performance. Some exceptions I have noticed are: Rodney
Alfred’s East Indian Jab Jabs from Couva, now in its third generation, and the Bad Behaviour
Sailors from Saparia who, like the Blue Devils, rely on improvised mayhem – kicking each other
in the pants, piling up in great heaps on the ground, wining in a chain-dance, etc.

156
1 True to their adopted demonic code, Blue Devils recoil from water because it is associated with the
Christian sacrament of baptism. Trident in hand, Andrew Sanoir, Paramin’s top Blue Devil practitioner,
enacts this aspect of the mas’ during a presentation organized for visitors at the Chagaramas marina,
west of Port of Spain. Photograph 1997.

11
PARAMIN BLUE DEVILS
Photographs by Jeffrey Chock

157
2 Like all fine actors, Sanoir holds his poses so that the details of his performance are manifest. Paramin,
carnival Monday, 2002.

3 Apprenticeship begins at a young age. Paramin, carnival Monday, 2002.

158
4 Disdain and stoicism: another aspect of the Blue Devil’s performance. Paramin, carnival Monday,
1999.

159
5 A rubber-masked devil dares his audience to follow him down the road to perdition. Paramin, carnival
Monday, 1997.

6 Paramin’s Blue Devil mas’ is not the exclusive preserve of men. Carnival Monday, 1999.

160
7 The tin pan made of a discarded biscuit tin is the driving force of the mas’. Paramin, carnival Monday,
2002.

161
12
THE JOUVAY POPULAR
THEATRE PROCESS
From the street to the stage

Tony Hall

. . . in that self-defining dawn . . .

Derek Walcott, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory
(Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1992)

Trinidad Carnival has long been associated with theatre – with scripted drama,
short sketches and songs, which featured strong “internal dramatic action,” and
what is often called “theatre of the streets” – featuring acting, song, dance, mime,
speech traditions, and elaborate costumes.
One of the first post-emancipation manifestations of theatre connected to the
carnival season was the Carnival Tent or Backyard Theatre (Hill 1972: 32). In this
setting there were elaborate drum dances such as the belair. There were coronation
ceremonies by Borokit bands characterized by Hindu-derived as well as African-
derived entertainment, some subtle speechifying as well as elaborate spectacle and
dance. There were also Red Indian and Wild Indian playlets, with textured mime
and the most remarkable invention in language. There was the satire of Dame
Lorraine performances and, by the early twentieth century, the creation of the
calypso tent with its calypso war, duet and calypso drama.
The Dame Lorraine show began at midnight on Dimanche Gras, carnival Sunday
night. It was a continuation of the mockery of the slave master by the enslaved,
which had begun on the estates prior to the period of apprenticeship, 1834–8. This
performance in two acts was a burlesque satire of the manners of the eighteenth-
century French plantocracy. This Dame Lorraine performance (in Hill’s words)
“formalized this practice into public theatre for a paying audience” (Hill 1972: 40).
These performances lasted till dawn when the heavily costumed performers and
their audience would filter onto the street to begin the masquerade on Monday
morning: an early version of jouvay.
In 1943, Edric Connor, actor, singer and pioneer folk researcher, in a now famous
lecture on West Indian folk music in Port of Spain, demonstrated “the new creation
in musical sound” of the steelband and that it could be presented on the concert
stage (Hill 1972: 49; Hall 1990: Late Night Lime TV interview with Lennox Pierre).

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This lecture had a profound effect on a number of pioneer theatre researchers,

including Errol Hill and Beryl McBurnie.
In his 1963 and 1964 Dimanche Gras shows, Errol Hill transferred to the big
yard of the Queen’s Park Savannah stage many of the raw beginnings of the theatre
of the yard and the street in the form of the sophisticated political satire of the day.
Before that, in 1955 in Trinidad, he had produced The Ping Pong, his play about
the steelband, which explored both “the strong rhythmic foundation” of the music
and the social conditions under which these pioneers of the instrument were forced
to live.
Man Better Man, Hill’s full-length musical play, written in calypso verse,
appeared in 1957 and is still one of the only plays of its kind, which utilizes the
calypso idiom so completely for its structure and narrative thrust. In The Trinidad
Carnival: A Mandate for a National Theatre, Hill attempts to outline a version of a
national theatre, grounded in the rhythms of carnival and all the varied elements
of theatre found there, using the skills of costume making, the widespread talent
for designing and building costumes and properties, the audience participation,
choreography and performance, etc.
Others have worked to develop dramatic pieces and other forms of performance
out of the carnival and related folk forms. Derek Walcott produced his Drums and
Colours: An Epic Drama in 1958 as part of the inauguration of the now long-
defunct West Indies federation. In this play Walcott attempted to chronicle the
history of the islands, from a Caribbean perspective, drawing heavily on carnival
pageantry and poetry. Beryl McBurnie with her Little Carib Theatre and Molly
Ahye were among the first, in the 1950s, to produce dance dramas based on their
research into folk traditions and the struggles for freedom of the Amerindian,
African, and East Indian peoples of the islands. Later in the 1970s Astor Johnson
took over the mantle with his Repertory Dance Theatre, and in the 1980s Helen
Camps successfully produced spectacular plays in the Trinidad Tent Theatre,
using the performance traditions of the carnival. In the 1990s, we have the work of
playwright Rawle Gibbons, whose Calypso Trilogy has been influential, and
of musician/composer Geraldine Connor, whose spectacular Carnival Messiah
produced in England in 2001 and again in 2002 (with productions in Trinidad in
2003 and 2004) has taken carnival theatre to a new level.
As Hill points out, the theatre to be created is taken not just from the perform-
ances of the streets but from the basic essence of all the elements of the carnival –
from the essence of the mas itself on the road, as Peter Minshall has demonstrated;
from the swirling vortex of steel orchestras in the pan yards (as in the offerings
of Boogsie Sharpe and Clive Bradley); or from the essence of the extempore,
celebratory call and response and social commentary of calypso, soca and chutney,
as the late André Tanker and David Rudder have projected.
Working with Peter Minshall, I was able to observe him adapt and transform
traditional mas characters through his own meticulous designs – the basic Bat, the
Midnight Robber, the Borokit, Moko Jumbie. I witnessed how he incorporated
history (particularly the social and design history of the mas) into the present
reality of performance without the hampering clogs of nostalgia. From this I
learned that traditions are most meaningful when they transform and evolve
with the culture that produces them. Therefore, the value of traditional, culture-
bearing, mas characters, who embody the history of emancipation and the struggle

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both for independence and self-definition: characters like the Midnight Robber
with his rapid-fire grandiloquent speeches of revenge and imposing hat and gait;
the Baby Doll with her instant social action theatre which insists, right there on
the street of carnival day, in shaming renegade fathers into child support; the Badly
Behaved Sailors satirizing the gay abandon of the Yankee sailor in drunken
choreography along the street; all these and more I am now driven to look at more
closely.
Throughout Trinidad, at the present time, John Cupid and the National Carnival
Commission have established schools in which children learn to embody such
culture-bearing characters – so much so that the Traditional Carnival Character
festival that takes place on Friday of carnival week has in the last few years
virtually become an alternative children’s carnival, in which masses of children
outnumber the oldtimers performing traditional masquerades. Such an effort of
education empowers these children. It gives them a sense of purpose, teaches them
valuable lessons from their own history, and helps to preserve and transmit vital
cultural traditions, even at the risk of encasing these renegade traditions within the
marble vaults of pure mimesis – traditions memorized but not always experienced.
Here emancipation can be seen as the organizing principle around which we can
chart and triangulate all our daily efforts. Therefore, when any of these creative
impulses, embedded in emancipation cultural traditions, are invoked, a new
realization of self emerges, a new understanding of independence “in that self-
defining dawn” manifests a jouvay of the collective spirit. These manifestations I
call jouvay process. This is what we are involved in, a jouvay process. It is ongoing.
In this context the theatre wants to probe and bear “witness to the early morning of
a culture that is defining itself” (Walcott 1992).
But, as a dramatist, for this to have any concrete meaning, I need a “performance
model” based on this formulation. What I call the jouvay popular theatre process
(JPTP) is such a “performance model.” This model assumes the existence of the
traditional masquerade characters, not as specific historical figures but as arche-
types of human behavior defined within the evolving context of the survival sys-
tems of the emancipation tradition in Trinidad. These systems involve processes of
creolization, of hybridity, of betweenity, and of assimilation. Moreover, the history
of resistance in itself affirms a contrary, paradoxical sensibility sustained throughout
the colonial and postcolonial search for personhood and identity.
A JPTP workshop begins by assuming that the daily life of each participant
reflects the essential drives and energies of any one or any combination of the
hundreds of traditional mas characters, seen as archetypes rather than historical
figures. Thus, workshop participants begin their search for the right character
or characters, for which they may have an affinity, through an introduction to
the history and sociology of the original characters and mas makers of these
characters. Second, we go through a range of theatre exercises and games, based on
the street performances of the characters, to assist the participants (theatre artists,
students or community persons) in their discovery.
In the third stage of the workshop, JPTP participants are asked to create short,
improvised dramatic presentations using elements of the street performances of
their chosen characters. In these presentations they must play themselves, as the
characters, in their own normal everyday life situations. This can be related to
the process of spirit possession, which is an important part of the traditional

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religions of many of the peoples who settled in the West Indies. The traditional
mas characters, therefore, manifest in contemporary situations through the JPTP
workshop participants.
So you end up with, for instance, the bank manager as Midnight Robber. Only
it is not satire: the person playing the Midnight Robber is a real bank manager. It is
a way for actors and drama students to understand drama and create theatre,
and for community people to better understand themselves and their cultural
history. The JPTP, therefore, is a direct way to meditate on jouvay process through
a “performance model.”
In 1956 the Mighty Sparrow won the Calypso Monarch title in Trinidad when he
sang:
Jean and Dinah
Rosita and Clementina
Round the corner posing
Bet your life is something they selling
And if you catch them broken
You can get it all for nothing
Don’t make a row
Since the Yankees gone, Sparrow take over now.

This heralded a new voice in the calypso arena as well as the new nationalist
movement of Premier Dr Eric Williams that was to point the way for an inde-
pendent Trinidad and Tobago. By 1962 Trinidad and Tobago gained independence
from Britain after a West Indian federation of nations, mired in political ambi-
valence, had failed. Yet, after forty years, Sparrow’s voice remained the only one
on this issue of the women who were left behind by the Yankees who had occupied
the island on the Chaguaramas Naval Base during World War II. The presence of
the soldiers on the island with their “yankee dollars” and the resultant power had
thrown the local men into dire insecurity. But by 1956, the year of the calypso, most
of the soldiers had left for their home, leaving the women behind to fend for
themselves among their wounded menfolk. Sparrow’s song speaks of the masculine
revenge.
My play Jean and Dinah . . . Who Have Been Locked Away in a World Famous
Calypso, Since 1956, Speak Their Minds Publicly is about those women from whom
we have not heard officially. Sparrow’s keen observations of the gender politics
sparked our attention, and to my mind the women had to reply. To this end, through
the JPTP, I created a two-woman play which Earl Lovelace reviewed in the Trinidad
Sunday Express after attending the play’s premiere performance on November 29,
1994 in Port of Spain:
The two old friends tear at each other, stripping the other of the last little veil of
pretence until they stand naked and exposed before each other, evoking the ram-
bunctious poetry of a theatre that is self-confident, passionate and fearlessly their
own. We see the soft, delicate shift and shuffle of the fancy sailor dance, and the
absurd caricature of baby doll and behind it all the hard life of pimp and prostitute,
hard violent men and tough battered women of a pathetic and glamorous heroism, all
needing to be rescued for life.
(December 11, 1994)

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To build this play I called Susan Sandiford and Rhoma Spencer, two actresses
who had always called themselves modern-day jamettes, the defiant warrior-like
people of the street who found themselves below the line of respectability in the
post-emancipation era.1 This group comprised drummers, matadors, calinda
dancers, batoniers/stickfighters, shantwells/calypsonians, masqueraders/street
revelers, prostitutes, etc. Both Rhoma and Susan had already discovered, as
students of mine at the University of the West Indies, their full jamette conscious-
ness that allied them with the older women of the street.
By the time we started they were close friends with many of the women from
Sparrow’s calypso through research they had done on earlier projects. Some of
these women had migrated to the United States; others had died. However, Rhoma
and Susan were able to improvise monologues and scenes from interviews they had
with Jean Clarke (the famous Jean in Town) and other informants. I videotaped the
improvisations, which I then had to turn into a play.
The women – “carnival people” through and through – played sailor mas (in all
its forms), and they inhabited the pan yards of the “battered lovers” of the “macho
bad john” pan men. Yet these women were the stolid keepers of the truth of these
men’s and their own lives, from the nightclubs to the pan yards. Their drama
emerged from the jamette/calinda/warrior essence of the traditional Bad Behaviour
Sailor. From that base emerged a Baby Doll monologue by Jean and a mythical
Midnight Robber from the dead, Ruby Rab, by Dinah. Each of these forms of mas
speaks to a social consciousness: the sailor satirizes American imperialism, and the
Baby Doll evokes gender politics, whereas the Midnight Robber seeks to avenge
injustices done to his ancestors. The emergence of the Midnight Robber in our
workshops was strange, since this is traditionally a male character.
The idea of the play had begun with an interest in the women of the calypso and
with no real thoughts of carnival or mas. The women themselves through their
spirit had infused the drama with the energy of traditional carnival characters,
which emerged from an organic process rather than appearing as arbitrary carnival
devices inserted into something called “a carnival play.” In fact, even though at
times it utilizes the risqué, bawdy humor and viciousness of the jamettes, the relent-
less, raw and raucous rhythm of carnival, the confrontation and participation
peculiar to the carnival of the street, the play consistently uses such elements to
draw the audience in. To help viewers appreciate the tumbledown lives of Jean and
Dinah, the jamettes who survive partly by infusing their own lives with the spirit of
mas, we incorporated their story into a theatre totally derived from the carnival
streets that in their essence belonged to Jean and Dinah.
Make a ritual of the sunrise, jouvay!

NOTE

1 By the time the playmaking process ended, Susan Sandiford had been replaced by Rhoma’s
cousin Penelope Spencer. Rhoma and Penny have performed this drama together in the West
Indies, the United States, and Canada frequently, as Lordstreet Theatre Company, since 1994.

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1

13
CARNIVAL PEOPLE
Photographs by Pablo Delano

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 1 Individual carnival masquerade costume, Carapichaima, carnival Monday, 1997.
2 Nydia Byron, then reigning limbo champion, and Derek Cassanova with others from the Malick Folk
Performers, Barataria, 1997.
3 Alyson Brown, This is Hell, designed by Peter Minshall, Callaloo Company, Queen’s Park Savannah,
carnival Tuesday, Port of Spain, 2001.
4 Individual fish costume, Parade of Bands, Queen’s Park Savannah, carnival Tuesday, Port of Spain,
2002.
5 Egyptian costumes, Carapichaima, carnival Monday, 1997.
6 Albert Bailey, master wirebender, at home, Woodbrook, 2002.
7 Dragon costume, Carapichaima, carnival Monday, 2001.
8 Soumarie costumes, Port of Spain, Traditional Carnival Character Festival, 2000.
9 Individual costume, Carapichaima, carnival Monday, 2002.
10 Beating iron, Mud Mas, Carapichaima, carnival Monday, 2000.
11 Mud Mas, Carapichaima, carnival Monday, 2000.
12 Winin’, Mud Mas, Carapichaima, carnival Monday, 2000.
13 Amerindian costume, Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2002.
14 Paramin Blue Devil, Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2002.
15 Sailors Astray, Bad Behavior Sailor mas, Carapichaima, carnival Monday, 2002.
16 Sailors Astray, Bad Behavior Sailor mas, Carapichaima, carnival Monday, 2002.
17 Sailors Astray, Bad Behavior Sailor mas, Carapichaima, carnival Monday, 2002.
18 Blue Devils, Queen’s Park Savannah, Port of Spain, carnival Tuesday, 2002.

18

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Part III

PAN AND CALYPSO – CARNIVAL BEATS

14
WE JAMMING IT
Introduction to Part III

Milla Cozart Riggio

From the bongo drum to the roll of the tassa

Ever since Europe come and she make bassa, bassa,
We jamming it.
Calypso, calypso, oh calypso music, yeah! Yeah!
David Rudder

The music of carnival is no less assimilative than carnival masquerades. Whatever

their origins and whatever influences they encompass, calinda, kaiso, calypso,
soca, rapso, and steel pan are all musical forms (or in the case of pan, instru-
ments), whose structures – like their names – reflect a variety of real and imagined
influences that have merged into a new set of Caribbean musics. However – unlike
mas – pan and calypso are recognized aspects of the larger African presence
throughout the Americas. Often percussive, with a tendency to rely on drums, and
yet with melodic, sometimes ballad-like lyrics influenced by the European cultures
they partly assimilated, Trinidad Carnival musics are varied and eclectic, their
history embedded in what Gordon Rohlehr has called the “whole process of
cultural erosion, adaptation, change, and innovation, as well as the concern today
with national identity” (1990: 1).
Unlike Part II of this book, the chapters in Part III systematically track, as well
as comment on, the evolving history of Trinidad’s Carnival musics from the point
at which this story is known and can be documented – i.e. from the arrival of the
Europeans, the Africans, and ultimately the Asians. There are, of course, hundreds
and perhaps thousands of years of history – of music, dance, and the rhythms of
life of varying peoples who had passed through and claimed these lands, of voices
belonging to the island whose echoes haunt and intensify the assimilative patterns,
but which are remarkable mainly for their absence from the recorded histories.
Our story begins with the early nineteenth century, with the interaction of the
colonizers and the colonized.
Part III, however, begins and ends with the present, acknowledging the role of
today’s youth in the perennial search for national identity. In an initial lyrical

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• MILLA COZART RIGGIO

statement that at once mourns the passing of traditions and celebrates “the terror
and the truth” of “the jouvay youth massed on Frederick Street, dancing to
reggae,” award-winning novelist Earl Lovelace affirms that in the Caribbean “the
aesthetic is the political,” even as he points to the potentially destructive paradox
implicit in enshrining music bred of resistance and emancipation in the symbolic
citadel of nationhood. Dr Jocelyne Guilbault ends the part by analyzing the music
of contemporary, massed youth, the often maligned soca-based “party music” of
today, as a defining agent for a new sense of nation that – true to the ethos of the
time – confirms and transcends national boundaries, assimilating influences from
across the Americas.
In the middle chapters, Dr Dawn Batson, Assistant Professor and Chairman
of the Board of the Trinidad and Tobago National Steel Orchestra, tracks the
evolution of what she calls the “drum trilogy” from the skin drum to the steel
drum – beginning with a tradition that in the early nineteenth century linked fiddle
playing and calinda dancing to African drumming, through the incorporation of
tamboo bamboo and varieties of other metal instruments (biscuit tins, wheel hubs),
noting the cross-fertilization of the (East) Indian tassa ensembles and steel pan. Dr
Kim Johnson, who has recently completed his PhD with a carefully researched
dissertation that personalizes the history of steel orchestras in the narratives of
steelband pioneers, muses on the link between pan and the sense of the fleeting
moment, the ephemerality of a music that for him captures the ontology of the
modern condition.
In an essay written and massively abridged for this volume, Professor Gordon
Rohlehr tracks the “jarring, jamming, carnivalesque collision and clashing
counterpoint of rhythms” that constitute the emergence of contemporary soca
from “the calypso [that] is a living example of Afro-Caribbean oral tradition
adapting itself to a process of continuous change.” Pointing to the residual
presence of Spanish rhythms so strong that for a time calypso was regarded by
some in the 1930s “as an extension of Latin music in the Caribbean,” Rohlehr
ends his essay by describing the nearly disastrous consequences of assuming that
Machel Montano’s “‘Real Unity’ concert of Sunday 26 November 2000” could be
transformed into “the bourgeois notion of a ‘concert’ at which $600 patrons would
sit politely in their all-inclusive/exclusive compound.”
As part of the story he does not have time to tell, Rohlehr points to forms of
music analogous to but different from carnival music, as for instance the
pichakaaree competition begun by Ravi Ji as a way for Indo-Trinidadian youths
to give voice to their own cultural traditions during the Hindu spring festival
of Phagwa. Among the many assimilative influences – including that of English
ballads as well as Latin rhythms – that are bound up in the evolution of Trinidad
Carnival music, none is stronger or more continuous than the persistent cross-
referencing of Afro- and Indo-traditions. True to the character of the island and its
peoples, that which is identifiably (East) Indian – instruments such as the tassa
drums, rhythms, themes, and lyrics – persistently intermingles with the hybrid,
indigenous Afro-based percussive rhythms, even as each set of peoples with their
own religions and carefully preserved cultural traditions stalwartly maintains its
own independent identity. Visible everywhere, this combination of interaction and
separation was driven home to me during carnival season 2002 when Nestor
Sullivan of the community-based Pamberi Steel Orchestra in San Juan, Trinidad

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(also the Director of the Trinidad and Tobago National Steel Orchestra), sat on the
steps of the Hindu Temple in the Sea beside a musician who had been playing for
Hindu prayers, fingering what was for Nestor a new instrument, hoping to figure
out how to incorporate both the rhythms and the tone into his own pan calypso
music for the following year.
One of the most striking features of all the musics associated with Trinidad
Carnival is the spirit of affirmation that rings through sometimes heart-wrenching
lamentations (such as Singing Sandra’s 2000 prize-winning calypso monarch entry
“Voices from the Ghetto” or Gypsy’s earlier controversial “Little Black Boy”) and
that sustains otherwise banal adaptations such as Sanelle Dempster’s 2001 winning
Road March “River,” which incorporated both melody and adapted lyrics from
“When the Saints Go Marching in” in a song that used double entendres to
celebrate copulating sexuality. For all the attention given to the role of calypso as
political and social satire and to pan as the music evolving from the toughest
street environments, there is at the core of Trinidad Carnival music an indomitable
spirituality. The musicians of this tradition are, in essence, the high priests of a
culture that is – in despite of (rather than because of) the politicians and marketing
experts who would commodify their aesthetic traditions – affirmed through its arts.
In the lyrical language of David Rudder:
Cause we’re moving with a power and a glory, see how we step in style
One nation heading to salvation, the Ganges has met the Nile.

Locating the essence of life’s interactions in communal celebration rather than

the political arena and finding the healing pulse in the rhythms of the dance rather
than the posturing for positions of power that often constitutes the basis for
international relations removes the cynicism from much of the satire in Trinidad
music. Take, for instance, André Tanker’s 2002 brilliantly satirical soca com-
position “Ben Lion,” performed with Wendell Manwarren and Three Canal. What
is remarkable about this song, Tanker’s response to the tragedy of 9/11, is that it
contains an astute sense of the political realities of international power and conflict
without itself being in any sense political or self-righteous in its call for “one world,
a free world” and its welcome of all that world – the Americas and Afghanistan –
to one big human party. This song as well as Tanker’s equally potent 2003
“Food Fight,” points to the healing power of “de fete” as a counterweight to the
potentially killing power of international political warfare. There is a basic joy, a
sense of celebration, a common bond of humanity that links Tanker’s dance-
inspiring satire or Rudder’s more obviously priestly “High Mas” with Ravi Ji’s
Mantras of the Year or Pat Bishop’s Lydian Singers’ resounding “Hallelujah
Chorus,” sung to the accompaniment of both steel and tassa drums.
The Power and the Glory: In times of fiscal crisis in the United States, when
funding for the arts – considered one of the luxuries – is inevitably threatened, the
paradoxes of power are highlighted. While the US expansion into the Caribbean
has always been capital-driven – attempts to gain power economically through
markets – the power of an island such as Trinidad finally comes from the arts. Alas,
in their race to capitalize on their oil and natural gas reserves, to replace their street
vendors with air-conditioned malls, and to turn their most precious treasures –
as, for instance, their music and their carnival arts – into marketable commodities,
the politicians and capital developers of Trinidad ironically threaten to silence the

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music and eradicate the unique richness of their culture. If history can be our guide,
these efforts will finally fail. What Lovelace calls the “emancipation jouvay
tradition” will hopefully find a new medium of resistance and subversion. So long
as the “jamming” goes on, the songs will be sung, the mantras will rejoice, the
children of the culture will find and fight their way to some new, subversive, and
probably outrageous triumph.

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15
THE EMANCIPATION JOUVAY TRADITION
AND THE ALMOST LOSS OF PAN
Earl Lovelace

Looking back now to our obligatory carnival Sunday-night fetes that led into
jouvay, at whole families linked together, at the lime with friends, the strands of
green bush held aloft, old, young, everybody out to Jouvay, it all seems very clear.
Yet, for years, hardly any among us realized that, in celebrating jouvay, we were
commemorating the celebration of emancipation.
We knew that from 1838, 1 August was the official day of the emancipation
celebration. What we did not know was that sometime in the mid-1840s the colonial
administration had moved the celebration from that day and tacked it onto
carnival. From midnight carnival Sunday the emancipation celebrations began.
In effect, jouvay became emancipation. Somewhere along the way the name
emancipation was withdrawn; but the celebration continued with, poetically, a more
appropriate name, one confirming not only the dawn of carnival Monday morning,
but asserting the dawning of a new day for those previously enslaved in the island.
Jour ouvert, J’ouvert, Jouvay!
By the time we get to the 1950s there is no official celebration of emancipation.
August 1 has been given over to Discovery Day or, as some called it, Columbus
Day, commemorated in a carnival-style celebration, its central point Columbus
Square just off Nelson Street. The picture I have of it before it ceased is of ribbons
and maypole dancing and Juju Warriors, and Guarrahoons (Wild Indians) with
faces rouged with roocou and freshly cut staves peeled of their skin, chanting
in Guarrahoon language and doing their Guarrahoon dance. Here we were
carrying on two celebrations, both to do with the celebration of emancipation,
and emancipation not even mentioned.
So, instead of blotting the idea of emancipation from the calendar of the
country’s consciousness, the colonial administration, by tacking emancipation
onto carnival, provided emancipation the opportunity to penetrate the official
carnival and transform it into a stage for the affirmation of freedom and the
expression of the triumphing human spirit in a street theatre of song, dance,
speech, sound, and movement. We may reason as well that the colonial government
of the 1840s chose carnival as the celebration on which to append emancipation,

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not simply out of malice but out of their acknowledgment that jouvay, carnival of
the street, was itself created and supported by the lower classes of Africans.
It is in emancipation then that we find the genesis of the jouvay carnival
characters. Along with parody, ridicule, and the mocking derision of pappyshow,
what characterizes these presentations is a sense of threat and violence, ritualized
in masquerades: the Devil, Jabmalassie, Midnight Robber, Dragon. All of these
masquerades present themselves not only in costume but through their own
peculiar song, dance, and/or speech. Along with these we may add the violent art of
the stickfighters and their ceremonial kalinda dance and chants. It is into this
tradition that the steelband settled when it entered jouvay after World War II.
Steelband belonged here not only because of the spirit of resistance and rebellion
it expressed – it had itself grown out of tamboo bamboo and skin drums,
was inspired by Orisha chants and Shouters’ hymns, and fell easily into the
emancipation-jouvay mas playing tradition of Juju Warriors, themselves contri-
buting Flourbag Sailor and Dirty Sailor, Bad Behavior Sailor, Fancy Sailor, and
a wave of military-inspired mas.
Steelband was the emancipation jouvay movement’s new force. It had arrived
at the beginning of a new epoch. The colonialist movement was on its last legs.
Self-government and independence were around the corner. The jouvay characters
that had maintained their expressions of rebellion and resistance for 120 years were
now largely taken for granted, the social conditions out of which they had grown,
ignored. The steelband provided a new focus and challenge, not only because of its
music but also because of the violence that accompanied it.
Where the violence of the jouvay characters had become formalized into ritual,
the steelband presented a violence that was naked, that could not be ignored,
that recalled the first fierce jouvay revelers coming onto the streets just after
emancipation. And this naked violence was not limited to carnival. It was linked
to everyday living. In some ways the steelbands’ violence was greater outside of
carnival than within it. Bands kept up between themselves ongoing feuds.
But steelband had already become the rallying point especially for the dis-
possessed jouvay youth, its charisma established even before it hit the streets,
the sounds reproduced everywhere in classrooms, schoolboys beating the desks
and getting the rhythm, fellars coming back victorious from a football match play-
ing mouth band, imitating the different instruments of the steelband and repro-
ducing pan or drum sounds; fellars all about walking in steelband rhythm and
shadowing the wrist movements of a man beating pan. We had something. We, its
supporters, its followers, were not awed by the genius that had created it; we shared
in its creation. New people were developing new pans, sinking new notes in the
steel. Ordinary people were tuning steeldrums, ordinary men and women were
becoming arrangers of music. In a sense we had produced the rallying icon for our
generation that, if we were mindful, showed us self-confidently embarked upon the
mastery of technology, which we would need to compete in the modern world.
At that time steelband was not yet pan. There was no insinuation of its being a
single musical instrument; it was a band, with players and men beating iron and
men waving flags and various levels of supporters, the principal of which were
the bad johns. It was a whole movement that came out at carnival, a gathering of
jouvay people complete with flag-man and bad john and jamette woman and man
beating iron. There was pride and there was danger. Anything could touch off a

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fight. And we jumped up in the band with a kind of wariness, feeling ourselves at
that time in the heart of a time bomb, listening for the explosion in any discordant
sound, alert to run. It was this danger that made the band our own. This was the
danger that had to be crossed to lay claim to the bands.
The bad johns were the carriers of that danger, heroes, at least to schoolboys
who intuitively knew that they were warriors, heirs to stickfighters now meta-
morphosed here in the urban ghettos of Laventille, and John John and Gonzales
into fist fighters and head butters. Heroes, Warriors: these terms even in their most
limited application traditionally suggest a political consciousness. It is doubtful
that the bad johns exhibited any of that; but they were all we had to express the
breadth of violence that the poorest had been emancipated into. Just as steelband
was showing us the inventiveness, dedication, and genius by which we were to be
liberated, the bad johns were displaying the violence we needed to confront if we
were to lay claim to that liberation. If the music was to be claimed, you had either
to find a way past the bad johns and the violence or open your own band. To claim
the aesthetic you had to deal with the political.
Around Port of Spain in the 1950s many “decent” bands began sprouting.
Decent people ran to them. But the violence remained until there came the political
promise of Dr Eric Williams and his political party, the People’s National Move-
ment (PNM). Few have failed to observe that the much vaunted cultural creativity
expressed in Trinidad and Tobago has come principally from the ordinary African-
descended people at the bottom of the economic ladder. This is not surprising.
European colonialism was not motivated to create anything since its very rule and
mystique rested upon the enlightenment it was introducing to these islands. Its
laws, parliament, literature, music, even its brutality: all of it was brought in from
the centers of its civilization. Its civilizing mission established a minority that for
the purposes of its own advancement and privilege doomed itself to imitation.
The remainder, unexposed to the formal colonizing education, were forced to
draw upon their own resources of memory, myth, genius, and the consciousness
of their circumstances to construct, from the fragments of their broken culture, a
new culture by which to live. The very fact that these fragments, whether religious
or secular, were continuously under threat forced upon them the need to seek
creative means to keep them alive. And this they did in the face of banning, jail,
fines, and ostracism. Shango, Shouters, calypso, steelband, carnival – all have come
through the fire of colonial disapprobation. The aesthetic would also become
the political.
When we woke up to the realization that we were independent and that inde-
pendence meant having a culture that we could call our own, we discovered that all
we had that might be termed indigenous or native was what had been created or
reassembled and maintained here by those at the bottom of the economic ladder.
But we had not all been engaged in the struggle to protect what would eventually
become basic to our patrimony. Colonialism with its education, its system of
rewards, had produced a diversity that went far beyond what we might call race.
And while there were those that transcended these classifications, others benefited
from collusion with the colonizers, sharing their contempt for what was being
fought for; some were bystanders engaged in what they saw as their own battles.
Independence was to face us with the questions: How were the people of this
diverse society to access these native elements of what was now being seen as

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fueling a culture which all of us were to share? How was this society to authentic-
ally access cultural institutions that grew out of the struggles in particular circum-
stances by ordinary Black people for their self-affirmation and liberation without
the society embracing the philosophies that inform these institutions? How was it
possible to access the aesthetic without embracing the political?
The simplest solution was to define carnival away from anything political. This
had already begun by linking it to the Greek and the Roman celebration of the two
days of abandon before the Lenten retreat began.
This myth, since its purveyors were in power and since they too had need to
affirm themselves, was given carnival Tuesday in which to express itself; it was given
the Carnival Queen and the Savannah Carnival competitions and the columns of
the Trinidad Guardian newspaper which from 1919 to the 1950s ran the Savannah
Carnival, the myth supported by the pronouncements of Eurocentric anthro-
pologists who needed only to speak to be believed. And it was further supported by
a middle class that insisted on being led by colonial definitions that, despite what
was before its own eyes, could find neither the curiosity nor the courage nor the
self-confidence either to follow or to seriously build on the emancipation jouvay
tradition out of which carnival as we know it today was born.
It is against this background that Dr Williams and the PNM were welcomed
into the emancipation jouvay tradition, Williams elevated to the rank of jouvay
character. It was hard to imagine anyone more suited for caricature. He had a
distinctive height, look. He was masked with dark shades. Nobody in public saw his
real face. He was equipped with a hearing aid. In the early days he had a cigarette
dangling from his lips. His speaking voice was unique, his vocabulary and rhythms
a kind of baroque Trinidadian, his cadences echoing the Midnight Robber, his
repartee as swift and sharp as an extempore calypsonian’s, his attitude that of the
bad john. In addition he was griot, historian, obeah man, the third brightest man in
the world. This was The Man. The emancipation jouvay tradition claimed him as
its own. Dr Eric Williams for a long time became a fixture in old mas and jouvay-
morning bands, a number of his impersonators vying with each other for the Best
Individual prize.
What became of the political promise anticipated by the emancipation jouvay
movement is a matter that requires much reflection. Was the emancipation jouvay
movement sacrificed for the grander idea of making, of all our people, one nation?
What we know is that Williams stressed the large themes of the independence
epoch. He pointed us to the central concern of knitting together a quite disparate
population. He steered us to a concern for political education. Jouvay people were
invited out from their holes and gutters and shanty towns to the University of
Woodford Square to be lectured on international relations. We were lectured on
constitution reform in Trinidad and Tobago while Black people were not admitted
to work in banks and were finding it impossible to get loans from banks. People
were lectured on the end of colonialism – Massa Day Done – while no sensible
program of land reform was ventured into. Perhaps steelband was as much a bless-
ing as an embarrassment. If this venture of nationhood and independence required
that the country be good scholars, how to admit and champion the genius of
ordinary people as expressed by their origination of the steelband? How to elevate
and affirm the steelband movement if doing so would mean pinning oneself to a
certain social program? If it would mean giving stature to another institution that

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Fig. 15.1 Dr Eric Williams, first Prime Minister of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, 1962–81.
Photograph courtesy of the Ministry of Public Administration and Information, Port of Spain.

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• EARL LOVELACE

would not only compete with Williams himself but would elevate the indigenous
movement over the educated, elevate the creative over the imitative? Williams
couldn’t do that. The steelband as symbol and movement remained largely
unexplored with little to demonstrate its potential.
And so the opportunity of binding the steelband to indigenous effort, of fulfil-
ling the emancipation jouvay dream of liberating a society to self-confidence and
creativity was never undertaken. By the time Williams ended his political career,
he had left his emancipation jouvay constituency thoroughly mystified and as dis-
tressed as when he had met them. The violence of the steelbands had been removed;
and, if over those years we permitted a single bad john, his name was Eric Williams.
In that time, steelband had moved to the Savannah, followed briefly by the
emancipation jouvay movement. There it would be subjected to the sanitized rules
and regulations of a colonial middle class that continues to address battles that had
been long fought and won. Its musical offering remains frozen in the mode of the
European classics, the melodic line emphasized at the expense of the rhythmic, the
whole wide world of musical possibilities ignored. And is no one even a little bit
alarmed that calypso music now played at Panorama by steelbands is less capable
of moving people to dance than the deejayed rendition of the same calypso sung by
the calypsonian?
Is Panorama to become the final nail in the coffin of pan and the emancipation
jouvay movement? Will jouvay survive the loss of pan? Will pan make its way back
at the center of the emancipation jouvay movement?
In the first years of Panorama, the supporters of steelband followed the
steelbands – no, carried them into the Savannah, along the bull track and onto
the Savannah stage; and for a while it looked as if jouvay was going to take over
the Savannah; but the Savannah was too small for jouvay. The Savannah could
accommodate the music; it could not accommodate the Movement. The organizers
of Panorama began to construct more and more fences, to put up barricades, and
to employ security. Today, the presence in their numbers of diehard supporters
of big bands such as Desperadoes and Renegades helps to maintain the illusion
that the emancipation jouvay is in the Savannah. The fact is that, under the insist-
ent weight of security, the numbers of jouvay people in the Savannah have dwin-
dled. Unaccommodated and unwelcomed, they have drifted away. In any event,
they didn’t want to sit down to a concert, they wanted to get on. They wanted to
play.
In the Grandstand now, the Black middle class sit and listen to pan, their
baskets with food and drink at their sides. They look at programs and work out
which band is playing next and discuss who is likely to win the competition. Here
nobody gets up to dance. This is serious business. On the other side, over in the
North Stands, there is a mixed gathering of people, on their feet, most of them, the
majority in their own contained and rambunctious party. For them, the activities
on the stage are the background to their own celebrations, which they carry on
most wonderfully during the intervals when the bands are setting up onstage,
beating dudups and iron and wailing down the place.
Out on the Drag where steelbands assemble and make musical practice runs
before they go onstage, longtime supporters, jouvay people from twenty, thirty
years back, crowd around the pans, listening for the old sounds, for the emanci-
pation jouvay music. And the youth? Steelband used to be an organizing force for

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youth. How does the music played now speak to them? Or for them? What irony:
now that it has become a national symbol, pan has all but left the emancipation
jouvay movement.
Now, after the intense practicing for their single annual offering for the Savannah
stage, steelbands bring less and less to the streets. As a result of this fewer people
come out to push the pans. Steelbands got their own transportation; steelbands
which used to be pushed through Port of Spain now ride on trucks – some, like
floats, high up above the emancipation jouvay jam in which they used to be central.
Our failure to consolidate and build on the emancipation jouvay tradition has
left it in limbo. This has restored new attempts to define this tradition on the
periphery of carnival. This has spawned a debate on the origins of carnival. This is
not properly a debate about carnival at all. It is about how people who live here are
to lay claim to what valuable has been produced by others in the land. About what
price, if any, they are prepared to pay. It is also about the horror of the vision of a
carnival torn from its political and social roots, gutted of its power and presented
as a neutral aesthetic creation.
Today, the mas is ripe for the picking. It can go anywhere. We face again the same
question: How to access the aesthetic without addressing the political?
For a long time the tensions generated by this question have been expressed
creatively in carnival: in calypso, both Road March and social commentary; in
steelband, classic and calypso; in the mas itself, pretty mas and ole mas. Today,
jam and wine have overtaken commentary; classic has stamped itself on the steel-
bands’ presentation of calypso; and old mas has had to be rescued from extinction
by having a space on the Friday before carnival. Today the tensions in carnival
are expressed between the formal and the extempore; between the chant and the
ballad; between the rhythmic and the melodic lines in steelband. What is of par-
ticular interest is that, where the spontaneous, the zest, and the spirit belonged
to the old emancipation jouvay people, it is now used in the service of a newer
jouvay tribe.
The hordes of Bad Behaved Black Devils, Blue Devils, and mud mas in jouvay
are now largely of a middle class whose race is Trinidadian. The steelband whose
music was the solemn joyful rhythm of a people marching to selfhood is now in the
Savannah as the backdrop to the rambunctious revelry in the North Stands. The
masquerade figures that affirmed the emancipation jouvay presence in carnival,
rescued in part from oblivion by Minshall, have been all but gutted of their force
and terror in the translation.
Is there anything to reclaim here? Or are we right on target in producing a totally
inclusive and genuinely Trinbagonian celebration?
Carnival is still a monument to the endurance and triumph of the human spirit.
It remains the Trinbagonians’ existential challenge to that ironic “emancipation”
that sought to mock the idea of liberation by “emancipating” people to nothing.
Steelband cannot remain indifferent to its role in keeping the spirit of this move-
ment alive. It cannot allow itself to be sidelined to a single tune a year – a hundred
men and women in a band playing one tune a year while the youth disappear into
the Socarama arena to find a music to sing them and speak for them.
With the emancipation jouvay figures emptied of their force and threat, and
steelband tamed and almost put to bed, it is time for us to look elsewhere for the
challenge that has always been integral to the emancipation jouvay tradition.

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In recent years on carnival days, the jouvay youth massed on Frederick Street,
dancing to reggae. In 1998, they found in Machel Montano’s “Toro Toro” their
own music to place them more properly in carnival. The irony is that music is not
deepened by steel: it comes blaring in brass; and we shall need, as we always have
needed, to discover once again the courage and goodwill to face the terror and truth
of that charge.

RETAKING THE STREETS

Four years later the questions remain: Is Panorama to become the final nail in the
coffin of pan and the emancipation jouvay movement? Will jouvay survive the loss
of pan? Will pan make its way back to the center of the emancipation jouvay
movement?
Today, the dismantling of Panorama is well under way. At its height, it had been
one of the grandest festivals on the planet, and, up to 2001, it still brought together
all the bands from nearly the whole island for two days. The preliminaries (as they
now refer to what we knew as Panorama) are now being held in pan yards. Thirty
bands were selected in 2002 for a semifinal show. Even this number the president of
Pan Trinbago thinks is too high, so we can expect maybe twenty-five bands next
year and fewer the next, until the organizers arrive at an optimum number for their
idea of a steelband show. On the other hand, pan is returning to the streets for
carnival, more relaxed, more contained, not with quite the fervor as of old, not its
main show, more as its exhibition performance. Pan’s big show is still the Savannah,
still Panorama. At least one organization has had a steelband play at a big carnival
fete, as pan used to in what now seems so long ago. This welcome initiative will
most likely grow; some of the bigger steelbands have come together to organize
regular concerts, and, of course, there is the World Steelband Festival that brings
together bands from around the world. Today, pan stands looking in three direc-
tions, the streets, the Savannah and the pan yard. The world has changed, it seems
as if pan no longer needs to choose which avenue it will take to carry onward the
emancipation jouvay tradition.

An earlier version of this chapter is printed in Milla Cozart Riggio (ed.), The Drama Review, 42 (3):
54–60 (1998), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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16
VOICES OF STEEL
A historical perspective

Dawn K. Batson

ACROSS THE LAND, ACROSS THE SEA, THERE LIES AN ISLE CALLED LA TRINITY . . .1

To understand Trinidad’s gift to the world, the steelband, one must understand the
island and its people. Trinidad, the Trinity, is the home of a rhythmic force that
drives the people and the culture: a pitting of three against two, heard in the music,
seen in the life, found in the history. The concept of the Trinity confronts the
duality of a twin island republic, Trinidad and Tobago.

MOVED BY ANGER, MOVED BY GREED, MOVED BY LOVE AND MOVED BY NEED,

A PEOPLE, A PEOPLE INDEED . . .

The mix of cultures and ethnicities that congregated on these small islands played
an important role in the development of Trinidadian society. The cultural conflicts,
resolutions, and the resulting cultural meld added dynamic force to the creation
and evolution of the steelband. Steelbandsmen were mainly of African descent but
persons of other races were also deeply involved, the wider society influencing the
steelbandsmen.
Music, song, and dance were always important in Trinidad. The people needed
some form of release to stave off frustration especially in slave times; but these
gatherings also were an opportunity for the people to plan and incite riots. Thus, the
ruling class, whether French planters, British colonialists, or “respectable” persons of
African or French Creole descent, imposed laws in vain attempts to “tone down” the
music, song, and dance of the people. The drum trinity was the first voice heard.
Three in one: the bull or bass, the foulé filling in the middle parts, and the cutter, the
smallest and most insistent. They gave voice to the confusion, pain, and strength of a
people brought against their will from Africa to the New World. The drums wit-
nessed the French planters in their celebration of Mardi Gras. The drums were there
as the planters in masked balls combined finery with their imitations of the nègre-
jardins, as the field slaves were called. The drums laughed as the nègre-jardins
imitated in return the dances and dress of the planters and sighed as they heard the

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blowing of the slave driver’s horns and the cracking of their whips as the slaves
were driven to the cane fields. The drums slapped as the planters imitated scenes of
cannes brûlées (the burning of the cane) in their Mardi Gras balls and the drums
rejoiced as, after emancipation, the Africans mimicked not only the planters but
themselves as well in the canboulay (making the word their own) processions. When
August 1, 1838, brought full emancipation, we may imagine the canboulay proces-
sion celebrating the day as, linked arm in arm, those emancipated paraded through
the streets, stickfighters with sticks and flambeau torches, led by their chosen King,
Queen, and Prince, women and children bringing up the rear. In the heart of the
procession, as always, the drum trinity driving and unifying the people.
In the 1840s the emancipation celebrations and canboulay parades were moved
into carnival. Just after midnight on Dimanche Gras the processions began. Led by
the chantuelles singing songs of defiance and satire, musicians blowing conch
shells, cow horns, and beating drums, stickmen carrying flambeaux and bois (wood
for stickfighting), the voices of resistance proclaimed: “When Ah dead bury mih
clothes, mama doh cry for me.” Folk characters such as the Lagahoo, Soucouyant,
and La Diablesse haunted the streets calling out, “Jour Ouvert, jour p’oncore
ouvert” (the day is breaking: the day is not yet broken) (Carr 1965). In this way, the
jouvert celebrations were born. The music was traditional African call and response
with the chantuelle or lead singer singing the verse or lead lines, answered by the
crowd singing the chorus.

THEY PLAYED THE DRUM, THEY LAUGHED, THEY CRIED, THEY DANCED, THEY
SANG, THEY LIVED, THEY DIED . . . THEY FORMED A SONG AND SAW IT PROVED
THEM STRONG . . .

In the late 1800s, the canboulay procession and stickfighting were the mainstays of
the carnival. Stick bands divided the city, with each major band having its boundaries
which members of other bands were forbidden to cross. Increased urbanization and
unemployment created conflict that was enacted in stickfights driven by the drums.
Between 1881 and 1883 there were a number of riots connected with the canboulay
celebration. The colonial government, apprehensive about the power of the drums,
tried to silence them. In 1883, a Music Ordinance was passed effectively banning the
beating of any drum, the blowing of any horn, or the use of any other noisy instru-
ment. Banned were any dance, procession assemblage, or collection of persons armed
with sticks or weapons of offense numbering ten or more (Rohlehr 1990: 29–30). This
Ordinance incited rebellion. In many parts of the country policemen trying to
enforce the Ordinance were routed with sticks, stones, and bottles. In 1884 an order
fixing the commencement of carnival at 6 a.m. Monday suppressed the canboulay
processions and the calindas (Hill 1972: 23–31). These measures, however, did not
achieve the desired effect as the people devised different methods of expression,
which with each setback grew more and more elaborate.
Banishing the drum from the streets meant that the drum now needed a home. The
drum trinity without pause swept into the bamboo that grew all over the island.
Tamboo-bamboo bands grew up in “yards” in towns and villages around the coun-
try. These yards, as opposed to the huge domains of the stick bands, were based in
communities and were more part of neighborhoods than whole regions. “Tamboo”
came from the French for drum, tambour. Three in one transferred to the lengths of

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bamboo. The bull became the boom; 5 feet long and 5 inches wide, it was stamped
on the ground and became the bass. The foulé, middle mother, kept its name and
character, now broken into two pieces of bamboo each 12 inches long, 2 to 3 inches
thick and struck together end to end. The cutter still improvised, now made of thin
pieces of bamboo of different lengths, held on the shoulder and struck with a stick
(Gonzalez 1978). The bands also used the chandler, which was slightly longer than
the cutter, split bamboo hit together, bottles filled with varying amounts of water
and struck with spoons, chac-chacs (gourds of calabash or wood filled with stones
or beans), and scratchers (metal or wood graters scraped with a piece of metal).
Bands from all over the country, some of them over two hundred strong, paraded
through the streets. How exhilarating to belong and how frightening to be
excluded. The authorities made efforts to clamp down on the bands but they were
never banned outright. In the 1920s, the bamboo voice reigned. The (East) Indian
tassa ensembles which performed for the Hosay festivals may have affected the
rhythms of the later steelbands and vice versa. The tassa ensemble used one cutter
which did the soloing, two foulés, a large bass drum, and gynes, small finger
cymbals that were used to keep time. Many African-Trinidadians also played in the
tassa ensembles.
The 1930s were tumultuous. The voice of Uriah “Buzz” Butler, a trade unionist,
inspired labor riots that influenced the mood of the country. The voice of the
proletariat became louder and more strident. The bamboo voice, while strong, was
found to be easily stilled as the bamboo would burst after repeated pounding. In
the search for a louder and longer-lasting sound, young men added metal to the
bands. They found that pitches could be made and changed by constant beating.
All manner of sound makers were sought: brake drums from cars, dustbin tops
stolen from housewives, paint cans, cement drums, cow bells, chac-chacs, and
mouth bands (where all the sounds of a brass band were recreated using only the
mouth – sometimes real brass buglers played at the front of the bands). Against all
this the chantuelles and crowd sang.
In this way, a louder, more durable and more tuneful sound was created. The
bamboo was discarded. The rhythms of the drum ensemble were incorporated into
these steelbands vieing with each other throughout the island. Simultaneously,
persons found that notes could be created on these metal cans and old biscuit tins.
One-, two-, and three-note instruments were created. In 1939 and 1940 Alexander’s
Ragtime Band was the most popular of the new metal bands. Next, the voice of the
drums was forged into steel.
These early steelbands were mainly rhythm bands accompanying the crowds.
Gradually as the “steelband boys” experimented, more and more instruments were
added. The people had a voice that could be developed and improved upon. This
new voice of steel mirrored the heart and soul of the drum trinity. The bass, now
represented by the cuff boom or slap bass, was made of a biscuit drum “cuffed” or
struck with the hand or a ball. The bass was overlaid by the dudup or bass kittle,
a caustic-soda drum with two notes and hit with a stick. The lead was taken by the
kettle, also known as the tenor kittle or side kettle. Made out of a zinc or paint can,
the kettle had three notes and was hit with a stick. Accompanying these were the
iron, usually the brake drum of a car, bottle and spoon, chac-chacs, scrapers, and
other noise makers.
The people now had creative power and, like birds defending their territory with

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sound, the voices of the bands became louder, stronger and more melodic.
Encounters with the police did not cease, as seen in one incident that occurred in
San Fernando, according to the Evening News of February 1, 1940:
Lance-Corporal Sladen told the Court that over 200 pre-carnival revelers were
marching along Broadway and other streets beating bottles, spoons and bamboo
pipes, and when stopped by a Constable and himself threw bottles and sticks at them
and they were forced to seek refuge. They were only able to arrest John Cyrus – one of
the smallest men in the crowd.

In the early 1940s, bands continued to experiment with metal. Hamilton “Big
Head” Thomas of the Hell Yard band found that burning zinc cans to remove the
remaining zinc changed their pitch when struck and started to fashion notes on the
cans. At the same time in John John, Winston “Spree” Simon lent a pan to Wilson
“Thick Lip” Bartholemew who was noted for his strength. When returned, the pan
was badly dented. Restoring its original shape “Spree” found different pitches and
began tuning caustic-soda pans. The instrument at this time was in a convex form.
Ellie Mannette is credited with sinking the pan, thus allowing the creation of more
notes.
Mannette, the holder of an honorary doctorate from the University of the West
Indies and a National Endowment of the Arts award in the United States for his
contribution to the development of the steelband, remembers:
During the course of time between 1937 and 1939 there was a gentleman by the name
of Spree Simon who invented a four note . . . with the small can . . . created four notes
on top of it . . . convex and, I heard about it I did not see . . . sometime later I saw
another guy from St James I know, Sonny Roach, with another four note drum
playing a little melody on four notes. I was kinda taken back that I could only get two
rhythm notes on my drum and cannot get four and said why can’t I make four? So
I said OK I’m gonna change this whole concept and in 1941 I took the barrels down
and made it concave . . . The steelband was born from a very primitive form . . .
rhythm, rhythm, rhythm.
(Mannette 2002)

Neville Jules, one of the founders of Trinidad All Stars and a pioneer in the steel-
band movement, remembers:
Pan was coming from the river, a place call Hell Yard . . . I listened and then went
away. I was ten years old . . . Years later I was in the river playing with “Fisheye”
[Rudolph “Fisheye” Ollivierre, a steelbandsman celebrated for his playing skills] . . .
the older guys had stopped playing cause they couldn’t go on the street [during World
War II]. I used to watch Big Head Hamil, he tuned ping-pong, no song, rhythm. Later
I started tuning convex pans with dents – ping pong, dudup, biscuit drum, bass drum
. . . Big Head was said to be first to play a tune.
(Jules, Interview, 2002)

Norman Darway had this to say: “Victor ‘Totee’ Wilson was the first to put notes on
pan . . . ping pong, ping pong . . . like the QRC clock” (Darway 2002).
From 1942 to 1946 during World War II carnival was banned. Stella Abbott,
a Trinidadian music teacher for over sixty years (interviewed at 84 years old),
remembers: “at the beginning of the war carnival was still allowed but one year the

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Governor banned carnival. I remember the chantuelle singing, ‘the Governor say no
mas’ and the crowd would answer, ‘The Governor mother ass,’ I don’t know if it was
related but there was no carnival for the rest of the war[!]” (Abbott, interview, 2002).
In spite of the ban on carnival, there were still a number of steelband competitions
around the island. The ping-pong was developed and replaced the kittle as the lead
pan. On VE Day and VJ Day, the people and the steelbands took to the streets in
celebration. The Evening News of May 8, 1945, reported, “Dawn – Up earlier than
usual, joyous thousands dressed themselves appropriately and paraded in bands,
dancing in the street to the crazy rhythm of improvised instruments.” The Trinidad
Guardian on May 9, 1945, reported, “Carnival costumes, packed away since 1940,
were shaken out and men donned housecoats and dresses to join in the fun. Scrap
metal heaps were searched for brake drums which were mercilessly pounded all day
long under flags of all description.” The celebrations for VJ Day were even more
intense. A Trinidad Guardian report of August 1, 1945, stated:

Standing to lose by these preparations [victory celebrations] are residents of various

districts, who are already complaining of being fleeced of their dust bins as the steel-
band boys get on with the job of assembling instruments which they intend to accom-
pany proceedings. These dust bins which will be used as drums forming part of
improvised orchestras can already be heard and were sounded during the weekend as
members of the bands which will be seen on the streets prepare for the revelry.

The Trinidad Guardian of Saturday, August 18, 1945, reported in a piece headlined
“Trinidad Gives Peace A Noisy Welcome”: “On both days the steelband boys
kept up a deafening din with their improvised instruments which all but crushed
recognized orchestras off the streets as revelers showed preference for music
thumped out of old iron.”
The bands came out on the road with the larger instruments strung around their
necks or held in their hands. Stella Abbott (interview, 2002) says, “Coming from
Sunday school we were talking about the steel bands and one of the boys said
they play melodies now. ‘Really,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they play Mary Had a Little
Lamb.’ ”

OUT OF OIL THERE CAME THE DRUM . . .

In 1945 the voice, still muted, was in the small pans. Neville Jules:
Ellie and I were in a competition in Tunapuna, everybody had small pans . . . one guy
had a big pan with twelve or thirteen notes . . . the crowd laughed at [him] ’cause
everybody else would stand and hold the small pan in one hand and play with the
other hand . . . he had to sit and play with the pan on his knee . . . everybody laughed
but next competition everybody had big pans . . . I think his name was Cyril
“Snatcher” Guy from Tunapuna.
(Jules, interview, 2002)

Ellie Mannette (2002) remembers that “in 1945 we parade in the streets . . . my
drum the barracuda was stolen . . . in 1946 I came up with the first 55 gallon drum
into a musical instrument.”

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• DAWN K. BATSON

Some of the bands of the time were Grow More Food, later renamed Tripoli,
Hell’s Kitchen, Harlem Nightingales and Oval Boys. The advent of the oil drums
strengthened the voice of the steelbands and resulted in an improved tonal quality.
The steelbands grew up in the communities in meeting places now known as pan
yards and great rivalries were engendered between communities with the steelbands
being seen as the symbol of the community. As was done in the old canboulay
days, the bands paraded with players, women, children and bad johns (the fighters
of the communities). The bands took on the aspect of gangs each with their own
turf. Many names were taken from films of the time. Carib Tokyo, founded in the
1940s, took its name from the film Destination Tokyo, Boys Town, founded in 1951,
took its name from the film Men of Boys Town, and names such as Red Army,
Desperadoes, Renegades and Invaders were calculated to strike fear into the hearts
of other bands.
Bands became territorial again, with fights breaking out between the supporters
and members of different bands if they felt their territory and property (women,
instruments, or music) were threatened. Steelbandsmen were looked down upon by
polite society. Parents refused to let their children participate in steelbands. Stella
Abbott noted, “parents would beat their boys for playing in the steelbands, they
would go get their licks and go back . . . it charmed them” (Abbott, interview,
2002). Needless to say, the authorities were not happy. Famous clashes between
steelbands were memorialized by the voices of the calypsonians such as 1954’s
“Steelband Clash” by the Lord Blakie:
It was a bacchanal Nineteen fifty Carnival,
Fight fuh so with Invaders and Tokyo,
Mih friend run and left he hat
When dey hit him with ah baseball bat
Never me again to jump up in a steelband in Port-of-Spain.
Invaders beating sweet
Coming up Park Street
Tokyo coming down beating very slow
As soon as the two bands clash
Mamayo if you see cutlass
Never me again to jump up in a steelband in Port-of-Spain.

The Mighty Sparrow in his calypso “Outcast” also of 1954:

If your sister talk to a steelbandman
Your family want to break she hand
Put she out, lick out every teeth in she mouth
Pass!
You outcast!

A MONUMENT TO SOUND AND LIFE, A TRIBUTE TO CREATIVE STRIFE A PEOPLE’S

SONG, A PEOPLE’S PRANCE A PEOPLE’S GIFT, A PEOPLE’S CHANCE . . .

Innovations continued into the late 1940s and early 1950s. Tuners added notes as
needed for different songs. The ping-pong was first held with one hand and played
with one stick. Later on, two sticks were introduced and Ellie Mannette was said to

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have been one of the first to introduce the wrapping of ping-pong sticks with
rubber. As time went on, new pans such as the tune boom and a three-note bass
were introduced by Neville Jules. Jules, inspired by the cuatro of the Spanish
parang bands, also added the quatro. This instrument was later tuned by Philmore
“Boots” Davidson and called the guitar. The balay, chu-fat, grumbler and grundig
in the middle section were also added to the steelband.
Many of these instruments have since been discarded. Today the main instru-
ments of the steel orchestra are the tenor which replaced the ping-pong with a
range of slightly over three octaves and usually plays the melody, the double tenor
used for counter-melodies and harmonies and introduced by Bertie Marshall,
also known for his pioneering work on amplification of the instruments, the
double second introduced in 1954 by Anthony Williams and used for harmonies,
strumming of chords and at times the melody, the double and triple guitars, the
cello, the quadraphonic, covering the middle parts, and finally the tenor bass and
the six, seven, nine and twelve basses providing the foundation. The frontline or
higher pans, rather than being placed around the neck, are today placed on stands,
an idea introduced by Anthony Williams. The rhythm section or “engine room”
is also of extreme importance and includes the brake drums, the trap set, the
chac-chacs, the scratcher, the cow-bell and the congas.
The basic methods of tuning that for the most part are still used today were
developed in the 1940s and 1950s. The skirt of the drum was cut to size and the
drum sunk with a hammer, the notes grooved in their various sizes with a punch,
the steel tempered by heating it on an open fire and then pouring cold water over it,
and the notes tuned by hammering the sections. Tuning was often done by ear
or with the use of a melodica but today a strobe is used to make the tuning more
exact. Many instruments are chromed for longer wear and then re-tuned. In recent
times an American company, HydroSteel, has patented a hydroforming process
to mass-produce tenor pans. At the moment one hundred and fourteen tenor pans
can be produced at a time. The skirts must then be attached and the pans tuned.
The pans are made from stainless steel, thus eliminating the need for chroming.
Trinidad and Tobago Instruments Limited (TTIL), owned and directed by Michael
Cooper, uses a spin-forming process to create mini-pans but uses the traditional
method for full-size pans.

TO PLAN TO BUILD TO WORK TOGETHER. TO DREAM TO MAKE OUR WORLD A

BETTER PLACE, FOR EVERY CREED AND RACE . . .

Not all the voices of polite society were against the steelband movement. Leaders
of the Trinidad and Tobago Youth Council defended the pan men. Solicitor
Lennox Pierre, Albert Gomes, then a member of the Legislative Council, and
Canon Max Farquhar helped to educate the general public about the economic
plight of the steelbandsmen. Between 1949 and 1950, a Steelband Association was
formed that later came under the leadership of George Goddard, a stalwart
champion of the steelband cause. In 1951 the Youth Council sponsored a national
steelband of eleven members selected from the best pan men in the country to
perform at the Festival of Britain. Rehearsals were held for the first time under a
qualified musician, Sergeant Joseph Griffith, who was director of music in St Lucia
and a former member of the Trinidad Police Band. Working with tuners, the

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instruments were chromaticized, simple orchestral scores arranged, and the

panmen taught to read a score with the note names identified by Arabic numerals.
The band, the Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra (TASPO), debuted at an
open-air performance on the South Bank Exhibition Ground on July 26, 1951.
Reports from London indicated that, while the initial reaction was one of indul-
gence when the instruments were first seen, the response soon turned to amazement
once the first notes were heard.
The success of TASPO improved the image of the steelband movement in
Trinidad. Among the members of the original TASPO was Ellie Mannette, who in
his zeal to return to Trinidad to continue work on the instruments turned down
the offer of a music scholarship in England. Mannette now teaches and works on the
research and development of the instrument at the University of West Virginia in
the United States. Sterling Betancourt stayed in England and in 2002 received an
MBE for his sterling work in the development of the instrument. (An MBE is a
British honour – Member of the Order of the British Empire.) Anthony Williams
invented the spider web pan which is today used as the basis of the fourths and
fifths tenor. Other members were Dudley Smith, Patsy Haynes, and Granville
Sealey, who still plays pan at the Deliverance Temple in Port of Spain.
The official voice of the steelbands was the Steelband Association, which,
though formed at an earlier date, was officially registered in January of 1958. The
aims of the Association were to develop the steelband in all its aspects; to obtain
employment for steelbandsmen; to organize and hold music festivals for steelbands;
to encourage, aid, and promote the scientific development of instruments; to pro-
vide facilities for training in the art of playing and tuning steelband instruments;
and to do all things, matters, and acts for the welfare of steelbands and their
members. The Steelband Association was later renamed the National Association
of Trinidad and Tobago Steelbandsmen and finally in 1971 renamed Pan Trinbago,
today under the leadership of Tobagonian Patrick Arnold.
Many years were to pass before a majority of steelbands consented to join the
Association. From its inception, the Association – dealing with fights and rivalries
between bands often fueled by poor judging at poorly run competitions – set about
to oversee competitions and put competent judges in place. The Association acted
as a mediator in many disputes between steelbandsmen. In 1952 the Association
successfully lobbied for inclusion in the biennial Trinidad and Tobago Music
Festival. This festival, usually adjudicated by British musicians, had as its focus the
development of classical music in the country. The involvement of the steelbands
was of a high standard and resulted in improvements in the tuning, orchestration,
and technical approaches to the instrument. In 1952, Dr Sidney Northcote, the
adjudicator, remarked to the audience, “We have witnessed man’s ingenuity in
trying to get beauty out of something that is absolutely a waste product. That, I do
deeply respect” (Maxime 1990).
In 1964 the Association decided to hold its own Steelband Music Festival. Today
there is a World Steelband Festival which includes bands from Europe, North
America, the Caribbean, and, of course, Trinidad and Tobago. Music written for
the instrument has been promoted, and the repertoire of music written specifically
for the instrument has grown.
In 1963, the Association, with the help of the then Carnival Development Com-
mittee, organized the Panorama competition which became the major competition

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for steelbands. The Panorama steelbands usually ranged in size from fifty to one
hundred members or, at the height, one hundred and twenty. Panorama arrangers
with a proven track record became viable commodities, with many bands paying
large sums to obtain the services of arrangers such as Ray Holman, one of the first
to write and arrange his own music, Len “Boogsie” Sharpe, a phenomenal player,
arranger, and composer, Jit Samaroo, whose work with his family band Samaroo
Jets and the Renegades Steel Orchestra has won him international kudos, and Clive
Bradley, gifted teacher and brilliant arranger. Tuners such as Bertram Kelman,
Bertie Marshall, Tony Slater, the late Leo Coker, Roland Harrigan, Michael Ker-
nahan, and others have been and are in demand as bands struggle to achieve a good
sound.

MUSIC’S NOT THE ONLY VOICE THAT STRIVES TO GIVE OUR CHILDREN CHOICE.
ART AND SCIENCE HAND IN HAND TAKE ON A JOURNEY TO A LAND OF POSSIBLE
HOPE AND POSSIBLE PLAN . . .

The government of Trinidad and Tobago has over the years acted ambivalently
towards the steelband movement. The independence struggle leader, Dr Eric
Williams, leader of the PNM (People’s National Movement) political party, pro-
moted the steelband as a source of national pride using steelbands for many official
functions. Dr Williams also pushed for corporate sponsorship of the bands. Later
governments promoted the steelband in various ways – the steelband is the official
national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago – but there has been no major push
toward economic independence for the steelbandsmen. The Trinidad and Tobago
National Steel Orchestra was formed in August 1998 and the Board of Directors
put in place in November of 2000. Members of this orchestra are now pursuing an
Associate of Arts degree in Music Performance under the College of Science,
Technology, and Applied Arts of Trinidad and Tobago (COSTAATT). Despite
this, much more needs to be done for the instrument and its proponents in terms of
research and exposure.
What about the women of the steelbands? Women have always played an
important role in the steelband movement. The first all-girl steelband led by Hazel
Henley, Girl Pat, was formed in the 1950s, and Cynthia Davis of Tripoli was one of
the first women to play pan on the road. Women have been involved as arrangers,
conductors, judges, and performers. Women have also been the cause of many
steelband clashes. In addition, the work of pioneers such as Frederick “Mando”
Wilson and his cousin Victor “Totee” Wilson, Oscar Pile, Austin Simmonds,
George Beckles, Allan Gervais, Zigilee, “Patch Eye,” Rudy Wells, Rudolph Charles,
Denzil Hernandez, and many others deserves greater recognition. The steelband’s
future is now in the hands not only of Trinidadians, but in the hands of many
across the world. A new story has begun.

NOTE

1 All section headers are taken from Dawn K. Batson, “The Essence,” © 1996.

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17
NOTES ON PAN
Kim Johnson

Pan, which are called steel drums in the US, can be found throughout the world.
There are hundreds of collegiate steelbands in the US today, including at least one
in Alaska, as well as numerous community bands and many individual professional
pannists. Pan News, a Swiss steelband newsletter, lists over 125 full-time bands. The
Nigerian army has a steelband, as do the Dutch police service and as did, until
1999, the US Navy. There are bands all over Europe, in Japan, Venezuela, Kuwait.
And of course they are common in the Caribbean. To most people outside of
Trinidad a steelband is a small group of kids, or perhaps a five- or six-man
ensemble on a cruise ship or at a beachfront hotel, which plays pop tunes or
“Yellow Bird” on pans. That, to a Trinidadian, is as anemic as the worst muzak.
The real thing can be heard live only from the gigantic, pulsing orchestras known as
conventional steelbands. What these are, how they evolved, their relationship to the
society, are the subject of the following notes.
In his memoirs, John Slater (1995), founder of an early steelband, recalls that one
of his childhood pastimes in the 1930s at Easter Boys Government School was
drumming: “Roderick ‘Tench’ Waldron and I loved to beat our fingers on the desk
as if we were drumming, while at the same time singing calypsos (in our teacher’s
absence of course),” recalls Slater. “But whenever we got caught, we used to suffer
the consequences.” Over three decades later, I too, as a secondary schoolboy in the
late 1960s and early 1970s, drummed. It was nothing unusual, we all did it in my
class. I am not sure when we started but by third form a teacher could not leave the
class unsupervised for a moment without our striking up a racket, pounding away
on our desks. We sometimes drummed to annoy a teacher but mainly we drummed
for its own sake. The trancelike pleasure we got from the drumming was akin to the
sensuous pleasure we discovered later in dancing.
Sometimes our drumming was accompanied by oral imitation of instruments –
this boy the bass, that one the saxophone. One boy, a rather dull, otherwise
untalented youth, would at the slightest instigation launch into a marvelous electric
guitar whine. “Guitar Mouth,” he was nicknamed. Many years later, in researching
the history of the steelband movement, I discovered that “mouth bands” had been

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commonplace among working-class black youth as a means of transportation: if a

gang had to walk somewhere – say, they were returning from a party – they would
start up a mouth band which would “play” all the way home. Indeed, mouth bands
even became a didactic tool: when the members of Casablanca Steel Orchestra
wanted to learn a piece of music, they would listen outside a party to how the regular
dance bands played it. Each youth would take the part of a particular instrument,
and they would then tramp back to their pan yard, each one singing the lines of their
chosen instrument, until they could transfer what they had learnt onto their pans.
“Twelve o’clock, one o’clock sometimes we outside [a party] and them don’t
know, we outside because we didn’t like to dance, we like the music, so I always
outside listening,” Raymond “One Man” Mark, an early steelband captain, told
me in an interview (1995):
Sometimes I have a little side with me and we outside and we singing different parts we
go play on the pan and when the thing done we gone back up the road, we eh stopping
because if you stop you go forget. We sing until we go in the pan yard. Any hour and
we gone in and we get it and remember it.

It was through this method that the band learned “Ruby,” a calypso played by Sel
Duncan’s dance band on Henry Street, and surprised other pan men: “When we
come out on the road with that all them fellas want to know where we get that tune”
(Mark, interview, 1995).
I have asked many Trinidadians if they drummed on desks in school. Without
exception they replied as if the answer was so obvious that the question was silly:
“Of course.” Thus did it strike me how the compelling urge to drum and the
inchoate pleasure it gave were deeply rooted in Trinidadian hearts.

George Yeates, a captain of Desperadoes Steel Orchestra in the 1950s, recalled:

The young people [in the ghetto] had to travel some distance to fetch water from a
public stand-pipe. They used pitch-oil [kerosene] tins and zinc buckets, and on their
way down to the stand-pipes, they would keep a rhythm so that the distance was not
felt; and there we believe the thought of Steel Bands was originated.
(in Goddard 1991: 23)

Discussing this with Ernest Brown, an African-American researcher who has

studied black music in Africa and in the US, I asked the same question. He thought
for a while. “No,” he said. “We were more into sports” (interview, 1997).
Yet you do not hear it in calypso, which has not the overwhelming percussive
foundation one would have expected, and which you can hear, for instance, in
Cuban or Dominican music, even though the Hispanic countries have a far smaller
proportion of Africans. So how was this powerful compulsion to drum manifest in
Trinidad? Where was the energy channeled?
When I asked Jeffrey Beddoe – a priest in the Yoruba religion of Orisha, a
drummer, and the brother of the late Trinidadian master-drummer Andrew Beddoe
– where did our impulse to drum find an outlet, he replied, “It all went into pan”
(interview, n.d.).
The steelband that won the 1997 Panorama competition, Renegades Steel
Orchestra, did so for the third consecutive time. This victory not only gave

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Renegades the first Panorama hat-trick ever, it also gave the steelband their then
unprecedented ninth victory. It all has been accomplished on the basis of an
unusual partnership between the band and its arranger and musical director, Jit
Samaroo. The East Port of Spain band was of no musical significance throughout
the 1950s and 1960s but was notorious for its belligerence. Even today many people
still refer to Renegades by the name a small faction of the band called itself in the
1960s: Lawbreakers. And yet the arranger that this gang of black, urban youth
teamed up with in 1971, Jit Samaroo, was a shy, quiet Hindu teenager from a small
rural village in the Lipinot Valley, where the main musical tradition is Venezuelan-
derived “parang” music of string bands (for more information, see Bellour,
Johnson, and Riggio 2002). The Renegades–Samaroo combination seems unlikely,
but from a wider perspective it really is not. The steelband movement, despite its
Afro-Trinidadian origins and its fierce rivalries, has always been inclusive. Every
one of the top bands is wheeled onto the Panorama stage by throngs of partisans
who are quite clearly not slum dwellers.
“I wonder how many of them are from Laventille,” remarked a colleague when
Desperadoes took the stage with its enormous crowd of supporters. There were
many more than a handful of white people who were obviously foreign amongst the
crowd of men and women from Laventille, the ghetto home of the band. I knew
why they were there. I too can recall pushing pans as a child when steelbands
paraded on the streets for carnival. It was a mark of belonging, an honor even, to
be a part of one of the huge caravans that filled the streets with rivers of music. I
too must have stood out starkly as a middle-class child amongst the more plebeian
steelband supporters, but I never met the slightest hint of rejection.
If the original percussive impulse was African, it became highly creolized – that
is, is combined with other musical influences, including that of Europe and other
New World countries. So the early development of pan is largely a story of the
young men of Trinidad in the 1940s striving to create a melodic instrument out of a
drum, moving it away from being a purely percussive instrument of rhythm, and
laboring to acquire virtuosity of performance and composition with it. They began
with rhymes and progressed to nursery rhymes, choruses for simple songs, then
entire songs. By 1952 they were attempting European art music for the Music
Festival.
Technically, this progression represented a growing complexity of the instrument
and of the ensembles. Pans acquired more notes, which were in turn tuned more
accurately. Steelbands acquired more pans, which gave them a wider and ultimately
symphonic range. As important as this was the burgeoning social complexity of
the steelband movement as musical inclusiveness mirrored social inclusiveness. The
first barriers to be broken were those of age and sex. Daisy James, for instance,
unknown to her mother, played for Casablanca Steel Orchestra during the mid-
1940s when she was just a child. The men in the band, some of whom were the most
feared hooligans in Port of Spain, had to hold the pan that she played because it
was too heavy for a little girl. True, there was something of the mascot about her
presence there, but the more important reason she was allowed into what would
have otherwise been an exclusive club was her ability to play the instrument. Like-
wise, by 1950, when it was clear that pan was a melodic instrument, you got the
involvement of middle-class white and Chinese youths in the steelband movement
with bands such as Dixieland, Silver Stars, Stromboli, and Starlight. There was

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even in Tunapuna at the time an East Indian band, Saraswatee, which played
Indian music. So when Jit Samaroo teamed up with Renegades, it was nothing
unusual.
“It brings people together, both playing and listening, in a way that no other
kind of music seems to,” Lady Berkley, the wife of the twentieth Baron Berkley,
remarked enthusiastically on December 7, 1994, in the London Times. She played
piano, clarinet, accordion, and guitar. “But,” she explained, “the thing about those
instruments is that you play them by yourself, and I didn’t feel comfortable with the
idea of a proper orchestra.” So she joined the London Melodians, an English
branch of a Trinidadian steelband, Melodians. The London Melodians comprise
about twenty members, but the full extent to which pan brings people together is
manifest in the large “conventional” steelbands for which there is at present an
upper limit of 120 players in the Panorama competition. That is larger than a fully
constituted symphony orchestra. The gravitational force that attracts and musically
synchronizes so many players is rhythm. The dominating rhythm comes from the
continuous, bright, metronomic clanging of the brake-hub percussion that is the
most primitive instrument in the ensemble. It has undergone almost no change
since metal was introduced into the bamboo stamping tubes in the 1930s. And it is
still to many Trinidadians the heart of the steelband. That is why that section of the
band is popularly known as the “engine room.”
When a group of Trinidadians needs a single instrument to make noise on during
an outing, ultimately it is the iron they will carry. You can hear it on bus excursions
to the beach and at trade-union demonstrations, the sharp clanging that compels
Trinidadian hips to sway and their feet slowly to shuffle with a kind of sensuous
irresistibility. As David Rudder sang with brilliant double entendre in “The Engine
Room”: “If you iron good you is king” (1987).
That is nothing new. Drums have been used for centuries to coordinate people.
Soldiers marched steadfastly to their death to the beat of a drum corps. A rhythm
can be almost hypnotic, transcending individuality, merging the collective,
reducing fear. The early steelbands – aggressively masculine in their origins – were
martial organizations too, down to the bugles. They fought one another, and they
fought the police. The test was to continue playing throughout the melée, no matter
what.
All instruments in a steel orchestra are percussive, and every player fits into a
song’s unifying rhythm. That is what makes feasible the coordination of so many
players with neither scores nor conductor. But what makes it attractive for both
players and their audience is that pans are as much melodic instruments as they are
rhythmic. (Who would listen to 120 drummers banging away simultaneously on
timpani or congas?) The urge to drum was leavened by a desire to play melodies.
Were it not for this simultaneously melodic impulse, pan would never have evolved
beyond the initial five or six notes of a West African zana mbira, or thumb piano.
Ever so often the lament is heard that pan men cannot read music. It is an
opinion that is most often shaped by a formal training in classical music and by the
desire to provide a greater musical flexibility to the steel ensemble in a variety of
performance venues. But the point is not far-fetched. Indeed, at least one band
insists its players learn to read music. After all, steelband music, including the
Panorama arrangement that every steelband essays annually, is highly orchestrated,
and the method of rote learning requires weeks of practice. Then, even when a tune

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has been mastered, that lasts only as long as the players’ recall. A year later it is
gone. So what could be more practical than having the players able to read a score?
And yet nothing could be more irrelevant. Most pan men are amateurs with hardly
a continuous use for the skill. No steelband arrangers score music for their bands,
and indeed those who could do so number but one or two. If they did, who would
read the scores? That is not how steelband music is arranged or composed – by an
isolated musician creating in the solitude of his study. Instead, the pannist is there
in the pan yard with the band, and the tune grows as it is practiced, with players
making contributions, the arranger tailoring the piece to suit the skill of the band
and the taste of the players. From the preliminary to the semifinal to the final stages
of all steelband competitions, the tune changes according to the judges’ comments
and the way it feels when it is performed before the crowd.
Besides, who wants to hear last year’s Panorama tune? Until the late 1970s
steelbands played at parties. And they played on the road for carnival, on public
holidays, or whenever the mood took them, even when it was illegal. But for
every steelband the moment of glory, the apotheosis they hunger for, has always
been found in a competition. It is what they are remembered by. Mention, for
instance, the defunct Sun Valley steelband to any aficionado, and he will recall
how the band won the first island-wide competition in 1946. Nowadays the main
competition is Panorama, but in the first two decades of the steelband movement
many competitions were organized by private impresarios. Indeed, on the road,
steelbands even competed informally against one another.
Before the bands grew too large and were pushed off the streets by louder,
cheaper DJs, whenever two of them met on the road at carnival, if they did not
fight, they competed musically. Some emphasized their orchestration; others were
good in improvisation. “Revving” it was called, improvisation bringing to mind the
urgency of cars readying for a race. Bands sought one another to hold these
impromptu competitions on the road. None of this is surprising to a Trinidadian,
for rivalry, both martial and aesthetic, has for the past century been the motor in
our culture. Calypsonians compete, masqueraders compete. Robbers competed in
grandiloquent rhetoric, Jab Jabs competed with whips, Fancy Indians competed
with invented languages, Pierrot Grenades competed with nonsense rhyme – so it
was inevitable that steelbands would compete with music.
The great band of the 1940s and 1950s was Invaders. When in 1996 I interviewed
Neville Jules, the former captain of Trinidad All Stars, he recalled those days for
me:
When Invaders coming up from Woodbrook they coming up with a crowd and we
now, we now, we in Charlotte Street, we couldn’t even have half the crowd that
Invaders had so we just figured we want to get a name like Invaders. So any time we
hear Invaders in town we looking for them. It come like a guy is the world’s champion
in boxing, but you would be glad to get a chance to box with that man cause even if
you eh beat him, if you show good you build up yourself. So we used to look for
Invaders. And then it become a regular thing. So we started now to surprise them by
practising so that nobody would know what we doing and I think the first year we
really started that was with “Skokian”.

That was when orchestration, which was more suited to Jules’s temperament,
began to replace improvisation. Then in 1957 Trinidad All Stars met Crossfire from

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St James. Crossfire switched into their best tune, “Another Night Like This.” Trini-
dad All Stars geared up to follow them and do battle, but a police officer, thinking the
road already too congested with steelbands, shunted All Stars in another direction.
Jules (interview 1996) continues:

Crossfire was still playing “Another Night Like This” and, well of course that was
sounding better than what we were playing because they playing their best tune. We
were playing maybe our second or third best tune so everybody start to jump. “O
Gawd, Crossfire blah blah blah! Crossfire!” When we was coming up Henry Street the
following year somebody say, “Crossfire.” That was the only year we was never really
looking for Invaders cause we wanted to get Crossfire. And we swing into Duke Street,
and we wait for them right there, and as they come we hit them Beethoven’s Minuet in
G. That was the end of them.

Out of such competition was born the “bomb” steelband competition in which,
until the 1970s, bands played secretly rehearsed classical or pop tunes to calypso
tempo with an aim to surprise the listeners. That is, on jouvert morning they
dropped their “bombs.”
The music was the moment. I have heard Lennon and McCartney’s “Penny
Lane” countless times; it is a song I have loved. But it cannot be severed from that
early morning in the 1970s when, just as daylight was seeping into the carnival
Monday atmosphere, I heard Starlift steelband play it. The shock of recognition
and pleasure can never be repeated.
The moment was all, and despite their orchestration, bomb tunes were exercises
in immediacy. Consequently, to understand them we must explore the aesthetics
and the ontology of ephemera in relationship to modernity. There is a sense
in which all music only exists at the moment it sounds. Beethoven’s symphonies
only really exist, that is, are only realized, while they are being performed. In this
sense music cannot be written; scratchings on paper are not music, they are only
instructions on how to make a particular piece of music – a score is no more music
than a recipe is food. Nevertheless, the gulf separating “written” from “ephemeral”
music can be in some ways greater than the similarity between them. This has to do
with the ways in which music engages with time, and here is where the ephemeral
diverges from the written. The transcription of music constitutes an attempt to
deny time, or at best to transcend it, whereas the ephemeralization of music seeks to
outwit time. What does this mean?
Musical notation is usually thought to have been an outcome of the growing
complexity of European music: “As the separate voices gained greater freedom,
more accurate means had to be found to indicate the way these voices were expected
to blend,” argue Yehudi Menuhin and Curtis Davis in The Music of Man.
“Notation came partly from the need of many people to work together, and
music naturally reflected this social fact” (1980: 73). Maybe, maybe not. Notation
certainly allowed the creation of long, structurally complex works, which could
thereafter be performed far and wide. Its architectural permanence protected the
works from the attrition of human memory. But it also paved the way for the
domination of composers over performers. The latter became mere “interpreters”
of a composition. This is how the writing of music facilitated a suppression of
living composers by dead ones.

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• KIM JOHNSON

Facilitated, not caused. The root cause lay deeper, in the ontological value
accorded in Europe to permanence. “The dominant ideal of Western literate
culture calls for the creation of poetic and plastic forms that shall outlast bronze
and break the tooth of time,” declares George Steiner, who also notes in
passing that “there is in non-Western culture a long history of the production of
complex, highly inventive artifacts in materials intended for almost immediate
consumption or destruction” (1972: 175) – that is, the production of aesthetic
transience.
The quintessential African art form, music – which is often inseparable from
dance and, the most transient of art forms, masquerade – does not seek to break
the tooth of time. Its radically different ontology seeks rather to outwit it. This is
what Thelonious Monk meant when he said, “Writing about music is like dancing
about architecture” (in Gabbard 1995: 3). Ephemeral music derives its value from
its temporality; it is a celebration of the transient uniqueness of the present. This
moment is unique, and its music will never be repeated, it says. The musician taps
his foot as the metronome in his head says: now, now, now, now.
How does such ephemerality seek to outwit time? The answer is found in the
relationship between musician and audience. Whereas written music is realized
through the relationship between the composer and the musician who later inter-
prets the score, the moment of improvised music is created through the relationship
between musician and audience. The first case is a form of power; the second is a
kind of communion that transcends the solitude of the individual.
The momentary communion of musician and audience is intrinsic to the aesthetic
Africans brought to the New World, and not only through improvisation. A call–
response structure involves both parties in the creation of the music, removing
the barriers between them. So too does the dancing and hand-clapping associated
with the music. The emphasis on rhythm and repetition, and the centrality of
drums, also has the same effect. African-derived music in different countries
found different ways to manifest the aesthetic of transient immediacy. Emphatic
improvisation is the path jazz took, but there are other ways.
Although steelbands in Trinidad are often heard at shows and concerts, their
contemporary raison d’être has always been to compete regularly in the per-
formance of intricate music. From the 1970s on the music became highly
orchestrated, and improvisation was out of the question. And yet, the aesthetic of
immediacy is so deeply ingrained in the Trinidadian sensibility that these hugely
popular events are as completely ephemeralized as any improvisation. New tunes
are arranged for each band for each competition – you rarely hear last year’s tune.
And the competitions are conducted with all the fervor and partisanship and
excitement and here-and-now uniqueness of a sporting event.
Combining aesthetics and sport is not unusual for a Trinidadian. C.L.R. James
did so most profoundly in his magnum opus, Beyond a Boundary (1963), relating
them to the wider sociopolitical formation. He emphasized that the Greek origins
of democracy emerged from their annual competitions in both theatrical works and
athletics. On the cricket pitches of Eton and Harrow, James demonstrated, the
nineteenth-century ruling class of Britain learned their code of honor. In a similar
vein, I feel that the communal steelband of Trinidad, and the Afro-American music
of the New World in general, can be most fruitfully understood in the context of
the general existential condition of modernity.

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Fig. 17.1 San Fernando SeaBees on the road, carnival 1956. These masqueraders play steel “pan ’round de neck,” an early form
of steel pan before the instruments were mounted on stands and carried in racks. Pan around the neck still appears in Trinidad
Carnival as a traditional form of pan competition. Photograph courtesy of Nestor Sullivan of Pamberi Steel Orchestra and the
National Steel Orchestra of Trinidad and Tobago.
• KIM JOHNSON

What constitutes modernity? Usually its constituents are found in the Renais-
sance rise of humanism and individualism, or in the Reformation spread of
secularism, or in the growth of science and technology, or bureaucratic organiza-
tion (although, as James often pointed out, the earliest systems of industrialized
mass productions were the mines and plantations of the New World). For me,
modernity is first and foremost the condition of rootlessness or, to borrow a phrase
from Georg Lukács, “transcendental homelessness” (1971: 61). According to John
Berger in And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984), home in traditional
society was the center of the real, of everything which made sense; all the rest
was chaos. Home was the center of the world where the vertical line between the
underworld below and the heavens above crossed the horizontal line of geography.
Emigration breaks that crossing of lines. “To emigrate is always to dismantle the
center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments,” says
Berger, describing a condition that has come to be normal for most of mankind,
which has lost continuity with the dead and the gods alike (1984: 57). To Berger,
the irreversible loss of home has spawned, since the massive migrations of the
nineteenth century, the modern centrality of romantic sexual love, the longing for
the fusion of two displaced, rootless individuals.
But the vast and largely forced migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies were prefigured by the slave trading of Africans. Millions were uprooted
from one continent to another, from a traditional to an industrial environment.
Families were dispersed, nations dissolved, languages dissipated. For the African
slaves, the middle passage that uprooted them irrevocably shattered the crossing of
the vertical and horizontal lines that constituted home. Their background was
different from that of other people confronting the attrition of modernity, however,
and so too was their response. Descartes established a disembodied mind within the
solitary modern Europe, and Rousseau defined his freedom and solitude in terms
of an autonomous individual who formed a social contract with others. Whereas
New World Africans experienced modernity, both its racial oppression and its
eradication of tribal horizons, as an urge for collective liberation of the mind and
body. These diasporic Africans salvaged the shards of tradition and culture and
collected anything else they could find in that holocaust, and out of the debris they
created a culture that embraces all to collectively celebrate the unique beauty of the
present. That is the music of the Americans and, indeed, of the modern world.

An earlier version of this chapter is printed in Milla Cozart Riggio (ed.), The Drama Review, 42 (3)
(1998): 61–73, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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18
CALYPSO REINVENTS ITSELF1
Gordon Rohlehr

The calypso is a living example of Afro-Caribbean oral tradition adapting itself to

a process of continuous change. Its history reflects the immigration of Europeans,
Africans, Asians and Caribbean people into an island that had known 299 years
(1498–1797) of Spanish rule, and was, through ongoing contact with Venezuela, to
retain strong Hispanic cultural ties. The Trinidad experience involved a process of
continuous indigenization, enacted on ground stolen from reduced though not
erased Amerindian communities to create out of this teeming welter of ethnicities a
restless and, according to V.S. Naipaul, “half-formed” society, sufficiently flexible
to accommodate the paradox of homogeneity and difference: a jarring, jamming,
carnivalesque collision and clashing counterpoint of rhythms.
The Trinidad Carnival and the calypso are both theatres in and metaphors
through which the drama of Trinidad’s social history is encoded and enacted,
historically a celebratory mass/mas theatre of contested social space: the domain
of the stickfighter, the Wild Indian, the Pierrot Grenade, the Midnight Robber,
the chantwel and his descendant, the calypsonian, and the pan man of the
emerging steelband movement into the 1960s. The contestation of these carnival-
esque figures with rhetoric or blows – often rhetoric and blows – mirrored the
confrontation taking place within the social process itself.
The calypso had its roots in a complex of songs and dances which, in spite of
prohibitive legislation both during and after slavery, were kept alive at the regular
weekend “dance assemblies” of the African “nations” who had been brought
into the Archipelago. Prominent in this process was the transgression of sacred
and secular forms and the assimilation of different dances into each other. The
minuet was Africanized into the belair, which Errol Hill (1972) regards as the true
ancestor of the narrative calypso, drums replacing string bass and altering the
entire rhythmic foundation of the song. The stanzaic structure of the belair and
the litanic call-and-response structure of the calinda merged in the calypsos of the
first four decades of the twentieth century, which normally had an eight- or sixteen-
bar narrative stanza followed by a litanic refrain.
Because it has been so open to change, Trinidad society has always generated

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questions about the nature of tradition and periodic alarm at the erosion of
traditional forms. As early as 1883 the French Creole editor of Fair Play, Henry
Schuller Billouin, deplored the songs and drum dances of the black community of
Port of Spain, claiming that they had degenerated from African and French Creole
songs and dances of earlier decades. He called for the banning of “drum dances”
and the stickfighting and picong songs that were sung on those occasions (March 1,
1883). Other commentators from that period blamed migrants from the southern
Caribbean, while the editor of the Trinidad Review, Jacob Thomas, explained
that the scurrilous songs and lascivious dances were the bequest of belly-dancing
prostitutes from Curaçao (The Trinidad Review, August 9, 1883). One hundred
years later, in the 1980s, Jamaican “dub” and “dancehall” music, particularly the
sexually aggressive performance style of the “dancehall queens,” was being blamed
for the “degeneration” of Trinidad’s calypso and soca music into ultra-simplistic
lyrics and sexualized “wine-and-jam” performance. “Traditional” music was again
being defended against the evils inherent in “invasions” from rival Caribbean
musics.
Yet, between the 1880s and the 1980s Trinidad’s music had constantly been
reinventing itself. During the first decade of the twentieth century, old-time singers
of “single-tone” or four-line calypsos in Creole French resisted the efforts of
George “Jamesie” Adilla, the Duke of Marlborough and Phillip Garcia, the Lord
Executor, to improve the calypso by singing eight-line “double-tone” calypsos in
highly rhetorical English. The initial result of this confrontation between tradition
and innovation was that newcomers were forced to flee Port of Spain because
they could not endure the fierceness of the old-time picong in Creole French (Pitts
1962).
By the second decade of the twentieth century, it was clear that the reinvention
of what since 1901 had begun to be called “calypso” did not mean the death of
traditional structures but their incorporation into new ones. Thus, calinda litanies
coexisted beside rhymed couplets, quatrains and octaves; in time, combinations
of these would constitute the fundamental forms of most “ballad” or narrative
calypsos from the 1930s to the 1950s. The Sans Humanité or Oratorical mode,
which had been a contested innovation during the first decade of the twentieth
century, became a revered traditional structure during the next two decades.
Though it was superseded by narrative/ballad calypsos in the 1920s and 1930s,
it retained its place in what one might term “a calypso memory-bank,” and still
informs minor-key compositions.
Calypso melody, too, was under constant pressure from the variety of rival
musics that coexisted in Trinidad in the early twentieth century. The Roaring Lion’s
“Caroline” was a makeover of the English folk-song “Oh Where Have You Been,
Billy Boy.” Several folk-melodies from other Caribbean islands – for example,
“Sly Mongoose” from Jamaica, “Brown Skin Girl” from the Grenadines, “Stone
Cold Dead” from Barbados, “L’Année Pasée” from Martinique – were assimilated
into the emerging Trinidad calypso. Latin American song forms, promoted by the
prolific bandleader Lionel Belasco, were so popular in the Trinidad of the 1920s
and 1930s that Ralph Perez, the Decca agent who recorded most of the calypsos
between 1937 and 1939, viewed calypso as an extension of Latin music in the
Caribbean and a variation on the songs he had already included in Decca’s Latin
American collection.

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Performances of calypsos in the tents of the 1920s were rivaled by vaudeville

shows featuring variety acts, comedy, music of other Caribbean territories and of
North America. Between 1920 and 1927, the calypsonian Lord Beginner (Egbert
Moore) was a comedian in a vaudeville show even as he did his apprenticeship
“hiding in the back,” as he termed it, of a minor calypso tent in Belmont. What
he and other men, such as Bill Rogers (Augustus Hinds), popularizer of British
Guiana’s Bhagee/Bargee music, began in the 1930s would be replicated two decades
later in the 1950s by Barbadian composer and singer Irving Burgie (Lord Burgess)
and the American/Jamaican folk singer Harry Belafonte (Rohlehr 1990).
Recordings of calypso music from the 1930s (Harlequin HQ CD 1992) reflect
the influence of boogie-woogie piano, the rigidity of jazz-type bass lines, and
New-Orleans-style instrumentation. A jazz straitjacket was forcibly imposed on the
fluid prosody of calypso which, with its history of Latin-style syncopation and its
roots in calinda, belair and bamboula, had only recently sorted out the transition
from French Creole to English prosody. Yet the encounters of calypso with other
musics were never entirely one-sided. The presence in New Orleans music since the
1920s of compositions such as “Panama” or Jelly Roll Morton’s “Winin’ Boy Blues”
(White, sound recordings, 1991) suggests that some dialogue had been taking place
between the musics of the islands and those of the Mississippi delta. In Their Eyes
Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston describes the seepage of Caribbean work-
songs and folk-songs into America via immigrants working in what poet Kamau
Braithwaite later calls the “painfields” of Panama and Florida (1973).
In Trinidad, constant self-invention has resulted in the society’s preoccupation
with the contradictory forces of tradition and change, and in the generation of
hybrid forms. Single-tone calinda, calypso callendar, and creole carnival song
reflected the persistence of early African Creole litanic forms in transition between
their function as “folk” music and their reinvented status as the pulse of an
emerging popular, commercial music. The American presence, induced through
jazz music, radio, and cinema, was reflected in the many “calypso swing” songs and
the occasional calypso foxtrot. A “Calypso Shouter” suggests the early impact of
the Shouters (Spiritual Baptists) on the Trinidad public. For even as the Shouters
were mockingly identified by several calypsonians, their hymns were being recorded
and popularized by the same singers (Spottswood 1985). The same was true of
the prohibited Orisha religions, fragments of whose sacred chants entered into the
calypsos of Lion, Tiger, Caresser, Cobra and Beginner and resurfaced three
decades later in Sparrow and Duke, then twenty years after that as stylized
rhythmic figures in the compositions of André Tanker and David Rudder, and as
sacred chants in the music of Ella Andall (sound recordings, 2000).
Such evidence illustrates the contradictory pull of change and tradition in the
formation of the Trinidad calypso. Tradition was fiercely defended, particularly
when change seemed to threaten the erosion of old, established forms. Lord
Executor, who began his career between 1899 and 1901 and was a major voice in
the introduction of the eight-verse, oratorical calypso in English, rejected the
advent on the calypso scene of jazz-styled big bands. Executor’s “sad” lament in
“Calypso” that “outside fashions are idolized” has been repeated by calypsonian
after calypsonian throughout the five decades since he delivered it (Pitts 1962).
The 1950s were significant in the “reinvention” of calypso. Simultaneously, there
was the emergence in Trinidad of the “Little,” then the “Mighty” Sparrow (Slinger

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• GORDON ROHLEHR

Francisco) and of Harry Belafonte in America. Sparrow, who began as a roving

night club singer in 1954, won both the Calypso King and the Road March titles in
1956 with “Jean and Dinah.” Belafonte released his calypso album (1988) in late
1956, and by 1957 Belafonte’s style was successfully challenging rock ’n’ roll in the
international popular music market. Sparrow was the greater phenomenon, though
the world would never quite recognize this. A calypsonian’s lot was far from easy.
The Calypso King in 1956 received $25 and a silver cup. So the calypsonian had
to do more than compose and perform. He needed to create and access his market
and sell and promote his product at home and abroad, while retaining sufficient
creative energy to produce ten new songs every year. In the more than 120 he
recorded between 1956 and 1963, Sparrow logically collaborated with skilled song
writers, for which he was criticized as breaching the tradition that requires a true
calypsonian to compose his – or more recently her – own songs.
In contrast, Belafonte’s success – based on a relatively small output of Caribbean
folk-songs that included the occasional calypso, and of songs composed in the
folk-song mode – led to an acceleration of the process that since the 1930s had
propelled the calypso outwards from its parochial roots in Trinidad into the US,
UK, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Surinam, Panama, Guyana, Venezuela, Ghana and
Sierra Leone (among other places), where singers regularly began to call themselves
“calypsonians.”
Various factors determined this interface of diasporan Afro-Caribbean musics.
First, they were part of what diasporan Africans had refashioned out of the debris
of forced migrations, violent disrupture, plantation slavery and its grim aftermath,
which the Mighty Sparrow in “The Slave” (1963) describes as hunger, destitution,
illiteracy, loss of motivation and direction, and erasure of identity. Such musics
were, therefore, tough, flexible, stridently self-assertive and capable of fulfilling
some of the traditional functions of ancestral African musics: the call to work or
battle, celebration or lamentation, praise or censure, complaint or satire. Such
musics wore the emblem of Anansi, trickster, shape-shifter and survivor. They
adapted themselves to local circumstances, while pursuing the objectives of free-
dom and space. Chief among the challenges were recurrent legislative attempts to
regulate or censor both songs and singers. From the Music Ordinance of 1883 in
Trinidad, to the Theatres and Dance Halls Ordinance of 1934 on to the more recent
“Clause Seven” of the Equality of Opportunities Act of the late 1990s (Rohlehr
2002), grassroots Afro-Creole music in Trinidad has had to circumvent legislation
designed to control or even abolish social commentary critical of elites in positions
of power. Mask, disguise, verbal coding, and shape-shifting were strategies of both
self-defense and attack.
If musical forms such as mento, goombay, or beguine temporarily yielded space
in the late 1950s to “calypso,” it was because something called calypso had, through
Belafonte’s international success, become the vehicle that diasporan Africans, all
the children of Anansi, had perceived would take them into the freedom of “vacant
interstellar space” (Milton, “Samson Agonistes”; Coltrane, sound recordings,
1974). For a subaltern music to access the market at all, it needed to operate via a
US intermediary. In the 1950s and 1960s, Belafonte – clean, brown, smooth, tall,
handsome, and half-Jamaican – was the ideal player for that role; but there were
others: Robert Mitchum (who recorded Sparrow’s “Jean and Dinah” as early as
1957), Dorothy Dandridge, the Andrews Sisters, Maya Angelou, Sarah Vaughan,

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and Sonny Rollins. Crossing-over, then (and now), required the metropolitan
intermediary and a consequent loss of control by the original creators of the music,
over its style and content. After Belafonte, distinctly different folk singers from
throughout the Caribbean would, for as long as it was profitable, call themselves
“calypsonians” or “calypso singers.”
The commercial contact between market-seeking calypsonian and controlling,
withholding metropole inevitably necessitated a change in the form and content
of the calypso away from its sociopolitical relevance within its own community
towards its simplification and commodification for the market, as illustrated in the
contrast between Lord Invader’s bitterly protesting lament about prostitution and
social distress, “Rum and Coca Cola” (1946), and the Andrews Sisters’ successful
Shangri-La version of the same song. There was, however, almost as much resent-
ment as there was complaisance behind these calypso masks which, significantly,
were being worn at the same time as ten of the cricket-playing islands came briefly
together to form the West Indian Federation (1958–61). The new nationalism
of independence, which followed the break-up of the Federation, led to a hasty
quest for iconic national cultural forms – calypso, steelband, carnival in Trinidad;
mento, ska, pantomime, jonkunnu in Jamaica; goombay and jonkunnu in the
Bahamas. Island nationalisms, then, virtually put paid to that period when
“calypso” became the vehicle that had propelled the musics of the African
Caribbean diaspora into world prominence. Trinidad itself became more defensive
and jealous of its claim to being the homeland of calypso.
The first two decades of the Sparrow era (1956–76) were marked by contesta-
tions, with first Melody (1958–63) – who had composed songs for Belafonte in a
relationship for which Melody later felt he had not received sufficient recognition –
and then Kitchener (1963–70). While such contestations revitalized the tradition of
man-to-man confrontation characteristic of carnival culture, many innovatory
calypsos grew out of them. The Sparrow/Melody exchange resulted in over a score
of songs in which these two antagonists threw jibes at each other that varied from
good-natured to abrasive, from harshly coarse to smoothly sophisticated (Sparrow/
Melody 1957–62). Melody interrogated Sparrow’s kingship and the machismo on
which it was constructed. Sparrow mocked Melody’s supposed ugliness, personal
hygiene and inability to attract women. The tradition of picong was both main-
tained and reinvented, not as an exchange of spontaneous extemporized insults
but in carefully crafted full-length calypsos. Throughout this period the two men
remained the best of friends and were frequently on tour together.
A remarkably creative era, these five pre-independence years saw Sparrow’s
investiture as monarch of a new age. If Kitchener, Spoiler, and Melody defined the
spirit of the post-World-War-II decade (1945–55), Sparrow’s calypsos sparkled
with the self-confidence and machismo of a decade (1956–66) marked by a new
nationalism that was initially regional (i.e. the West Indian Federation) then
parochial (i.e. the separate achievement of independence by Jamaica and Trinidad
(1962), then Barbados and Guyana (1966)). Sparrow’s calypsos (1959, 1963) were
a channel for the bravado, self-assertiveness, and strident, yet paradoxically
fragile, masculine self-confidence that seemed inseparable from the politics of this
new nationalism. Indeed, Sparrow compared his own battles against his many
critics with those that the country’s premier, Dr Eric Williams, was fighting against
his rivals in politics and the press. Williams, the political hero, and Sparrow, the

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culture hero, were equal warriors in the same national cause, accepted and
rejected by Trinidad’s capricious publics, fragmented by class, ethnicity, gender,
and generationally determined tastes.
If “society in Trinidad” was constantly passing judgment on Sparrow, Sparrow
was equally forthright in his condemnation of society as hypocritical and guilty
of “false pride” (“Popularity Contest,” 1963). When Lord Kitchener returned to
Trinidad in January 1963, after fifteen years in the UK, the contradictions were
further emphasized. Kitchener was, quite inaccurately, remembered as a rooted
traditionalist, in spite of his having led the newly arrived group of calypsonians
who called themselves the Young Brigade in rebellion against the Old Guard
(sometimes known as the Old Brigade) in 1946. Sparrow, in contrast, was seen as
an innovator who had not only changed the structure of calypso but had also
committed the unforgivable sin of singing other people’s compositions. A kind of
nostalgic mythology had begun to be invented around the figure of Kitchener.
For all its awkwardness and sourness, the Sparrow–Kitchener rivalry revitalized
calypso, leading to innovation by both bards and awakening in other calypsonians
the desire to defeat both champions. Since steelbands were an important com-
ponent in determining the Road March winner, Kitchener undertook the task of
composing calypsos that could highlight the percussive strengths of pan in both
Road March and Panorama competitions – finding the medium between long
melody lines that would afford the pan men room for variation and short rhythmic
lines that would inspire the revelers to dance. With others joining in, a substantial
and still growing body of “pan calypsos” has been the result: the late 1990s saw a
competition for pan calypsos; over the last five years more than twenty of these
calypsos have been composed annually, some years over forty!
By the mid-1980s, Kitchener had arrived at a series of templates for structuring
different types of calypso. While accepting the sixteen-bar stanza and eight-bar
chorus as a basic calypso structure, Kitchener held that a calypso composed for the
steelband needed to carry either twenty-four or thirty-two bars in both stanza and
chorus. A “message” calypso, that is, a slow didactic ballad of the Chalkdust,
Stalin, or Pretender type, needed an expanded structure of thirty-two bars in both
stanza and chorus. Such expansiveness gave the singer “time to relate what you
want to relate.” A party calypso, on the other hand, required no more than eight
bars each for stanza and chorus. Verbally, such a calypso had much less to say
(Kitchener 1986).
In none of these categories – pan, message, or party calypso – was the calypso
stagnant. In the case of the Road March, the Kitchener/Sparrow monopoly drove
younger singers either to despair or to greater efforts to break the stranglehold.
Notions of how to do this varied from Maestro’s call for more tempo (“Tempo,”
1975, and “Fiery,” 1976) to Shadow’s demon-driven quest in “Bass Man” (1974)
and “Constant Jamming” (1976) for a deeper, more resonant and hypnotically
monotonal bass line. Maestro’s call for more tempo, echoed in Calypso Rose’s
“Gimme More Tempo,” the 1977 Road March, would, apart from Squibby in the
mid-1970s, fall on deaf ears until Christopher “Tambu” Herbert burst on the scene
in the late 1980s. Shadow’s threat to defeat both Kitchener and Sparrow, made in
1971 in his own name, but containing the desire of a younger generation, since
Composer’s “Cacadah” (1964), for a place on the calypso stage, would take a mere
three years to be fulfilled.

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By the mid-1970s, whatever generation gap had originally existed between

Sparrow and Kitchener had virtually closed. Another “generation” of singers had
moved to center stage. Sparrow and Kitchener were a settled issue: homage, public
recognition, honor needed to be paid to both in equal measure. The two singers
had become a sort of dyad in the public mind, voices of a generation whose cycle
had closed.
A new debate had opened up within Trinidad’s calypso universe. This time the
issue was not one of tradition (Kitchener) versus change (Sparrow) but one of
serious calypsos (i.e. moral, didactic or political calypsos) versus party or cele-
bration songs with their emphasis on melodic sweetness and rhythm. Chalkdust’s
“Kaiso versus Soca” (1978) defined the terms of this debate in which singers such
as Valentino, Chalkdust, and Stalin found themselves in one camp and singers
such as Kitchener and Shorty in the other. Matters had come to a head in 1977
when the Carnival Development Committee proposed a special prize for the best
political calypso, and Kitchener was loud in his disapproval of serious, solemn, and
heavy songs at Dimanche Gras when most people were seeking joyful release from
the burden of their everyday lives. However, Calypso Rose, a woman, had twice
beaten Kitchener at his own game of mindless celebration; his own masquerade
was now dominating the calypso stage and yet he could no longer find a place
on it.
Rose’s prolonged wailing mode of delivery, a possible inheritance from her
Spiritual Baptist/Shouter roots, has now become the signature style of a significant
number of current female soca singers. Denyse Plummer, Sanelle Dempster, and
Allison Hinds have all imitated it, while the United Sisters in their chanterelle mode
(for example in “Whoa Donkey” (1994) and “Four Women to One Man” (1995))
have also benefited from Rose’s signature style. Maestro’s call for “more tempo,”
echoed by Rose in 1977, had relocated raw energy at the center of carnival music,
which was augmented when Penguin (Sedley Joseph), a secondary school teacher,
revitalized the Jab Jab rhythm in 1980’s “The Devil.”
Among the many reasons why calypso has constantly reinvented itself is the fact
that calypsonians reinvent themselves by stepping out of their time and generation
forward into each new age and trend. Thus, Kitchener, who had many times before
expressed dissatisfaction with the emerging soca of the 1970s, contributed sub-
stantially to this emergence with his immensely popular “Sugar Bum” (1978). Since
“Sugar Bum” sounded rather like an uptempo reggae, it made quite an impact –
so says Byron Lee – on Jamaicans. It also brought to a head the issue of defining
what was a true calypso; for here was Kitchener, who had always been touted as a
preserver of tradition, sanctioning the intermarriage of calypso and reggae.
The issue, a hardy perennial, had arisen in 1960 with Sparrow’s “Rose” and
would recur three decades later with Shadow’s “Poverty Is Hell” (1993/4). In
1978, Kitchener insisted in one of his many interviews: “soca is nothing else but a
variation, an offshoot of calypso” (The Sun, 1978). He considered his colleagues as
being “very stupid . . . to think that anything can remain stagnant” (Harper 1978),
and pointed to the changes that had occurred in calypso since Lion’s time:

The Calypso was once sung in patois; Lion was in those times. The Mighty Growler
then added a swing in Calypso . . . Growler’s styling continued until Sparrow took
over with a ballad type of Calypso in 1956 and the people loved it. Now Lord Shorty,

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who has been experimenting for years, has come up with the soca beat . . . God bless
Lord Shorty . . . I am warning those calypsonians who feel the “soca” is not Calypso
to watch the waves. Those who cannot ride on the crest of the waves will have to fall by
the wayside. For years they have been clamouring for a change in Calypso and now it
is here they have failed to recognize it.
The “soca” beat is the only beat to fight against The American “soul” and Jamaican
Reggae. We should be proud of the “soca” instead of trying to cry it down. I
Kitchener say “soca” is Calypso and I should know because throughout my life
I have identified myself as a calypsonian and nothing else. No one can tell me what is
Calypso or not.
(Harper 1978)

Here was a peculiar state of affairs: soca music was being rejected by traditionalists
because it seemed to have incorporated elements from reggae and American soul;
yet the same soca music was being promoted by Kitchener as Trinidad’s only
weapon against the total incursion of foreign musics.
Sparrow, a notable innovator over the first fifteen years of his calypso life, had
in “Robbery with V” (1961) identified originality, stage personality, and melodic
variety as the criteria by which he measured excellence. In a 1969 interview (Jacobs
1969), he placed emphasis on entertainment value, sweetness of melody, and
heightened rhythm. He noted that the age favored celebratory calypso at the
expense of humor and satire, a shift in emphasis that paralleled the movement in
carnival away from historical or realistic portrayals towards imagination and
fantasy. Sixteen years later, in 1985, Sparrow reminisced that many of his inno-
vations – which had been misunderstood in their time – had become standard
features of what was now being called “soca.” Indeed, twenty-five years before,
explaining to Chubby Checker why a young Trinidadian girl from Boissiere village
had been able to out-twist him at his Astor Theatre show in Trinidad, Sparrow
asserted that the musically all-inclusive calypso already contained the means of
absorbing and transcending the twist or any other new thing on the stage. The folk
heritage of limbo, Shango, and bongo had inculcated skill, flexibility and panache
that were equal to any challenge or test, regardless of its source (Boyke 1985).
One of the explanations usually offered for the emergence of soca music in the
1970s is that in the 1960s both singers and musicians believed that calypso had
become a dying art-form, badly in need of vitalization. The fact that such a senti-
ment is even more pervasive in the first decade of the twenty-first century after
“soca” music has itself gone through several permutations suggests that the notion
of a dying calypso signifies something larger and deeper: the intuition of new and
insecure identities constructed not on the solid achievements of the past but on
the ruins of ancestral lifestyles. However, a close examination of the music of the
1960s and 1970s does not support in any way the myth of a dying art-form, of
a calypso that was melodically or rhythmically deficient. There was no lack
of either rhythm or rhyme in the 1960s, an era, as we have seen, in which the
combined talents of Kitchener, Terror, Sparrow, and Melody were in the process
of engendering calypsos with expanded structures designed specifically for pan on
the road.
There were, clearly, several tributaries of rhythm and sound that contributed to
that torrent of song that in the 1970s came to be called “soca.” Several persons

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are considered to have contributed to its genesis and development: Ras Shorty I,
Maestro, Arrow, Merchant, Kitchener, Superblue, Sparrow, Calypso Rose, and
Eddy Grant in the 1970s and 1980s, and Preacher, Ronnie McIntosh, Machel
Montano, Allison Hinds and Square One, Krosfyah, Sound Revolution, Sanelle
Dempster, Bunji Garlin, and a host of other voices and bands in the 1990s. Two
voices that have claimed authorship of the soca genre stand out: Eddy Grant and
Lord Shorty (or Ras Shorty I as he came to be called in the late 1970s).
Guyana-born and domiciled in England for twenty-three years, Grant relocated
to Barbados in the 1980s after achieving phenomenal success as a composer,
performer, and producer of his own wide repertoire of songs. Grant brought back
to the Caribbean his notion of a global market and his sense of the necessity for
Caribbean musicians to conceive of themselves as making music for the world.
Grant “conceived” of something he called “kaisoul”: “an amalgam of pop music,
soul music and calypso music which was ‘Black-skinned Blue-eyed Boys’ [1970],
which, I believe, was the first Soca recording” (interview, 1994). Grant’s experi-
ments with crossover rhythms were part of the phenomenon of countering a sense
of decay with new forms that in themselves feed the illusion of loss that is as
ancient as the calypso itself.
Ras Shorty I (Garfield Blackman) was born in 1941 in Lengua, a village of cane
and peasant farming whose population is so overwhelmingly Indo-Trinidadian
that even the small percentage of Afro-Trinidadians who live in that community
resemble their Indian neighbors in carriage, in gesture, and in understanding of
Bhojpuri that is still spoken there. Nurtured on both calypso and Indian folk and
popular musics, Shorty learned to play the dholak and the dhantal and was experi-
menting with integrating these musics, it is said, since his first calypso composition,
“Mango Long” (1958). After that adventure, his songs became a mixture of comic
narrative and here he demonstrated not only a familiarity with several of the popu-
lar Indian songs but considerable skill in rendering them in illustration of his
initial assertion that Indian singers had been improving (“going for higher”) over
the years. The narrative sections of “Indian Singers” were undoubtedly calypso,
while its choruses were quotations from current Indian songs.
It would take Shorty a few more “years of toil, burning the midnight oil”
(“Wh(om) God Bless,” 1979) before he would with “Indrani” (1973), “Kalo Gee
Bull” (1974) and the massively popular “Endless Vibrations” (1975) effect the per-
fect blend of calypso and East Indian rhythms while, paradoxically, calling for a
change in “the accent of Carnival/To a groovy, groovy bacchanal.” Shorty, at this
critical period in the mid-1970s – the period of Shadow’s “Bass Man,” Maestro’s
“Tempo,” Squibby’s “Iron Man,” and Kitchener’s “Rainorama” – seemed to half-
believe the myth that calypso was dying and in need of renewal in order to compete
with both reggae and soul, the musics preferred by a growing cohort of the nation’s
youth. Standing at a crossroads of infinite possibility, he began to point in two
directions at the same time. On the one hand, he was calling for change in the
direction of American “soul” culture – (“groovy, groovy,” “ride on, ride on/right
on, right on,” “rock your boat”) – and on the other hand he was pontificating about
Trinidadians’ need for cultural anchorage in the country’s indigenous sounds.
Shorty’s advice as “pointer-man,” man-at-the-crossroads-of-possibility, was
that the nation should be free to appreciate whatever it pleased, but should never
forget its roots. In envisaging a new sound, Shorty dreamed of a rhythm that would

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incorporate the different, yet subtly interconnected universes of Afro-Creole, Indo-

Creole and African-American popular musics and thus reach out simultaneously to
several of the accessible publics in Trinidad and Tobago.
The paradox of Shorty, however, did not end with this Janus-faced focus on local
and foreign traditional and new. “I Make Music” (1976) and “Soul Calypso Music”
(1975) both suggest that Shorty was moving into a musical space that contained
neither the traditional Trinidad mélange nor the new foreign sound. This was
totally new space and sound. Similarly, “Om Shanti” (1979), composed by Shorty
and Steve Rabathally, was a radically new achievement: the marriage of calypso
and Hindu mantra. Another experiment in fusion was conducted from his home
in the Piparo forest where he had retreated after the collapse of his life as calypso
superstar, phallic hero, and macho man. Shorty began composing devotional
music that he called “Jamoo.” Given the many dimensions of Shorty’s secular and
sacred existences and the many directions towards which his creative spirit simul-
taneously moved, one would imagine that he would understand and accept the
many radical changes that the music that he in 1977 named “SOKAH: the Soul of
Calypso” underwent throughout the 1990s. Shorty, however, considered most
of these changes to be for the worse, and with “That Ain’t Good Enough” (1993)
and “Latrine Singers” (1996) he magisterially condemned all his “disciples” in soca
for singing “tata” (feces), before his death in 2000.
Soca was and has continued to be the fruit of a series of contradictions, con-
testations, crossings-over, comfortable and uncomfortable compromises. Like the
calypso of which it was in the 1970s a still indistinguishable offshoot, soca was
diverse, multilayered and many-ancestored. The 1980s, age of Blue Boy at one end
and David Rudder, Chris Tambu Herbert and Charlie’s Roots at the other, with
Arrow and Shadow deeply entrenched in the middle, simply added to calypso’s
and soca’s diversity. Social and political calypsos, only peripherally treated in this
chapter, went through as many stages, phases and dimensions of change as did soca
or “party” music. David Rudder rather sardonically suggests in “Panama” (1988)
that one of those changes has been the extension of the narrative stanza to accom-
modate the incremental growth of political corruption.
Another change is the growth in metaphorical density in a significant number of
political calypsos. This development, however, contrasts with the even more sig-
nificant trend of plain, harsh, unadorned invective that has characterized many of
the political calypsos of the 1990s. These two trends require special and detailed
analysis and can be only mentioned here (see Rohlehr 1985, 1992: and also Hall, K.
and Benn, D. 2000). Special study, too, needs to be made of the extraordinary
manipulation of political calypsos in Trinidad’s trilogy of general elections, 2000,
2001, and 2002. Political calypsos are neither dead nor dormant. As with other
categories of calypso, there are more political songs available and wider coverage of
issues each year. There is, unfortunately, no corresponding increase in the coverage
that is given to political calypsos in the electronic media.
Middle-of-the-road genteel soca achieved its apex in the early 1990s with the
band Taxi and the “action song” “Dollar Wine,” along with the mischievous and
smoothly subtle “Frenchman,” whose rhythm was mildly reggae- and dancehall-
flavored. This was well-bred, bourgeois soca, doing what the bourgeoisie did best:
malingering on the edges of real energy while defending the ambience of the gated
community of privilege. Quite different from genteel soca but intersecting it at its

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edges is what one may term “ritual” soca. This may have started with the Tobago-
nian duo of Shadow and Calypso Rose, though one fully recognizes calypso’s
age-old linkages with Orisha worship and the Baptist faith (Sparrow 1984).
In this vein, Superblue shot into prominence with “Soca Baptist” (1980), whose
irreverent intermarrying of the sacred and the secular prompted the Spiritual
Baptist community to call for its prohibition. Later in the 1980s in a calypso
entitled “Zingay,” Blue’s preacher, clad in blue robes like Superblue himself, is a
prophet armed against demonic forces: unemployment, recession, retrenchment,
unhappiness, hunger. Clearly, Superblue viewed his music as an agency of national
and personal healing and as a protection against the terrible tribulations facing
almost everyone in the trammels of “pressure,” “fire,” “obeah” and “thunder.”
David Rudder has often assumed the role of “high priest” in what he calls “the
holy temple of soca” and has been consciously engaged in enhancing the ritual
elements of Trinidad’s carnival music. His efforts have won him deeply devoted
fans from every stratum of society, but particularly from among the genteel
bourgeoisie in quest of a soca that still combines rhythmic vitality with lyrical
intelligence, as had always been the case with the best of traditional calypso. It is
this bourgeoisie too that has been largely responsible for the reinvention of jouvay
into a more elaborate ritual of rebirth. Such ritual has demanded its own music,
and over the last decade there have been several songs composed about jouvay.
These songs carry a slow beat that is meant to resuscitate the old-time “chip” and
shuffle of the traditional steelbands. The best example of ritual jouvay music is the
Laventille Rhythm Section’s 1998 mud mas chant, “Jouvay,” a joyous parody of the
church’s rituals of anointment and baptism in which dwellers of the late twentieth
century reach backwards and downwards towards their origin: earth.
There has also been “dancehall soca” and its earthier relative, “ragga soca.” Here
the story turns to Byron Lee, the opportunistic popularizer of Jamaica’s ska in the
early 1960s, who has also been a vital link between the musics of Trinidad and
Jamaica (Lee 1992). Grasping the fact that Trinidad’s Carnival had historically
provided the most vital context for the flowering of that island’s music, Lee – who
made his first contact with Trinidad music when he visited in 1963 and was
intrigued by the percussion (the iron, brake drum, and jamming syncopation) –
promoted, first, street dancing in the Halfway Tree area of Kingston and then
carnival and a calypso tent.
The 1980s, too, was the time when Jamaican dancehall music spread throughout
the southern Caribbean with one of the main agencies of its dissemination being
the minibus or maxi-taxi, as it is called in Trinidad and Tobago. The themes of
sex and violence that had evoked harsh and continuous condemnation when they
surfaced in the calypsos of Sparrow and others in the 1950s and 1960s resurfaced
in maxi-taxi dancehall, without mask or metaphor. Public outcry resulted in a ban
being placed on the loud playing of music on public transport. Sound systems
of above a certain size were forbidden. This did not, of course, diminish the
popularity of the Jamaican sound; and the current generation of Trinidadian and
Tobagonian singers in their late teens or early twenties, both male and female,
are as much products of dancehall as they are of soca. It is normal now at carnival
shows for the season’s soca fare to be presented in the form of a drama of compet-
ing male and female sexualities, reminiscent of the much more intense gender
contestation that has for some time dominated Jamaican dancehall.

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Related to ragga soca is rapso, a hybrid with its own history of constant
metamorphosis. Rapso, like rap, hip-hop and dancehall, involves talking or at
best chanting to a beat. Lancelot Layne is usually credited with having invented
this form of “talk-song” (my name for it) in the late 1960s, time too of the
emergence of Eddy Grant’s “Kaisoul.” Rapso has served both political and enter-
tainment agendas and has, like soca, attracted both bourgeois and proletarian
practitioners.
Finally, there is chutney soca, the latter-day fusion of Indo-Trinidadian music
and calypso. The interface of these two bodies of music has seen various phases
from the 1920s and 1930s of “Bhagi Pholourie,” “Gi Sita Ram Gi,” and
“Dookani” where, seen through the eye of the Creole – Afro, Hispanic, or
Portuguese – the entire Indian presence was represented as a curious, at times
laughable, at times exotic Other (Rohlehr 1990). This mode of representation
did not readily change; it was simply augmented by other images of the Indo-
Trinidadian as rival, threat, an antagonist more dangerous than exotic. These
new images were, in their turn, qualified by highly flattering ones that commended
the diligence, intelligence and acumen of the race (e.g. Chalkdust’s “Ram the
Magician,” 1984) and recommended Hinduism as a source of spiritual strength,
wisdom and solace (e.g. Ras Shorty I’s “Om Shanti Om,” 1979).
Sparrow’s “Maharajin” (1982), “Maharajin Sister” (1983) and “Maharajin’s
Cousin” (1984) were updates of Atilla’s and Executor’s “Dookani” or King
Fighter’s “Sookie” (1964) in that the women in these calypsos were rustic, exotic,
sexually alluring and unattainable. Such calypsos presented favorable stereotypes
of ethnic Indian communities, probably in the hope that this would make possible
the penetration by calypso of the growing but as yet untapped Indo-Trinidadian
market. Musically, these calypsos required cooperation between calypso arrangers
and Indian musicians. The incorporation of Bhojpuri sentences in their choruses
also required interethnic collaboration. The reverse became true soon after, as
Indian singers sought the help of calypsonians and Black song-writers as they
crossed over into the domain of calypso.
The transition in 1987 of Drupatee Ramgoonai from singer of Hindu devotional
songs to calypso was a major leap forward for the hybrid soca chutney form.
Drupatee’s emergence, however, was greeted with consternation by ethnic Hindu
purists who deplored the intermixing of races and cultural forms. These ethnic
purists were little different from the aesthetic purists who had deplored even the
slightest deviation from what they considered the true, pure form of calypso.
The story of chutney’s (chatnee according to some experts) journey towards
calypso/soca has been one of the commercialization of a folk music. It has also
been a story of male expropriation of a female mode; the original chutney music
was exclusively female, involving mainly the performance of mature women at
Hindu weddings, behind closed doors where neither males nor children were
allowed. Over the years, chutney had made the journey from the matikor’s closed
space to the public stage where it was promoted, some complained, by non-Hindu
producers with only commercial profit in mind. Indrani Rampersad felt that
the issue now involved “the fight for the mighty dollar versus that for morality”
(1990). Between the 1980s and the 1990s, debate raged within the Hindu com-
munity over what should be done about the now public performance of Hindu
sexuality. Chutney, some said, was even worse than carnival in that its “lewd and

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vulgar dancing” was being performed nearly every weekend, while carnival was
only once a year. Some commentators even called for police censorship of chutney
shows.
Ravi Ji, a Hindu thinker and activist of Central Trinidad, noted that “chatnee,”
starting from humble beginnings in folk-songs sung at excursions, had now grown
“to register a dynamic presence in the cultural landscape of Trinidad and Tobago”
(1990). The song form had also moved beyond Trinidad and was now popular in
the Caribbean, Fiji, the United States, Canada and India, making a similar journey
to the one calypso had made since the 1950s. The movement from the matikor to
the open public stage then involved the transgression of women into an arena
already controlled by men. Female performance in this arena of rhythm, alcoholic
intoxication and license was directly related to Indian women’s desire for visibility
within their own and the wider national community.
Virtually all of this controversy sounded like cyclic repetition of debates that had
been taking place since the French Creole and British elites became confronted in
the mid nineteenth century with the phenomenon of “jamette carnival.” The desire
to control the behavior of an underclass and especially to monitor women’s public
performance; the call for censorship by means of police intervention; the moral
self-righteousness of an emergent bourgeoisie – all these things had happened
before.
Chutney, then, was an arena of contestation within its ethnic community, long
before the question arose of its encountering calypso and soca in their own arena
of tooth and fang. Political and cultural activists of the Hindu community such
as Ravi Ji and Kamal Persad sensed the potential of chutney as a politically
adversarial music to become the Indo-Trinidadian alternative to the predominantly
Afro-Creole form of the political calypso or to carnival. Another alternative to
political calypsos would be provided in the spring Hindu festival of Phagwa by an
innovative song form called pichakaaree, the name taken from the gun that shoots
the colored liquid called abeer during Phagwa.
Trinidad had always been a country of multiple cultural identities in covert or
open competition with each other for iconic representation and visibility. The Afro-
Creole versus Indo-Trinidadian (or Trinidad-Indian as some ethnic nationalists
prefer) phase of such contestation has been the most recent and crucial manifesta-
tion of this phenomenon. Chutney, calypso, soca, pichakaaree, carnival, Divali,
emancipation, Indian Arrival Day have, in this context of competing ethnicities, all
assumed iconic status, serving as metaphors of the larger contestation perpetually
alive beneath the face of the ongoing masquerade.
The uniting of cultures would insulate the society against the fissures that had
again become painfully evident when the Creole-Indian coalition party, the NAR,
split into its constituent fragments in 1988. Foreshadowing David Rudder’s
magnificent dream “The Ganges and the Nile” (2000) by more than a decade,
Delamo proclaimed:

Now who come out to divide and rule

Eh go use we as no tool
Anytime they coming racial
I dougla, I staying neutral.
(Constance 1991: 43)

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When for the carnival season of 1996 two businessmen, George Singh and Colin
Talma, promoted the first National Chutney Soca competition, it was immediately
recognized by many to be the musical inscription of the new UNC regime that had
first come to power in 1995 with its slogan of “national unity.” Speaking on the
night of the finals to a Skinner Park crowd of 18,000, Basdeo Panday, the new
Prime Minister, commended the cross-cultural nature of the competition as “a step
in the direction of national unity” (Danny 1996: 3).
Chutney soca, a newcomer to the carnival’s broad “national” and multiethnic
stage, was clearly only one part of what was happening in carnival in 1996.
Calypsonians Cro Cro, Sugar Aloes, Chalkdust, Watchman, and David Rudder,
among others, were interrogating Panday’s “national unity.” By far the greatest
attempt to illustrate Trinidad’s national unity via iconic performance was Machel
Montano’s potentially healing “Real Unity” concert of Sunday, November 26,
2000. “Real Unity” had arisen from the heart of soca, chutney and dancehall, out
of the symbolic meeting of Rudder’s “Ganges and Nile” (the UNC used this as a
political campaign song and as Panday’s signature tune in the trilogy of elections,
2000, 2001, and 2002). But just as Rudder’s song had been appropriated by the very
“mind-benders” it had sought to dismiss and leave behind, Machel’s “Real Unity”
was silently and swiftly embraced as the perfect apotheosis of the chutney soca
concept: equal visibility on the national cultural stage. It was breathtaking in scope,
this occasion that was meant to unite the calypso superstars of the 1950s and 1960s
with their soca, ragga, dancehall and chutney counterparts of the 1980s and 1990s.
Machel was touted as “one of the major assets this country has produced in culture
in the last two decades” (Blood 2000: 8). The song “Real Unity,” after which the
concert had been named, celebrated the myth of racial harmony and interracial
love, in terms not substantially different from Sparrow’s “Maharajin” (1982) and
Iwer George’s controversial “Bottom in the Road” (1998). “Real Unity” declared
that one was free to “jam” on any member of any race that one pleased in
Trinidad’s “united nation.” The idea attracted all sorts and conditions of people,
from the hedonistic, apolitical youth to the vote-seeking politicians for whom every
occasion, fete or funeral, had become susceptible to manipulation.
Everything was perfect except the ill-assembled scaffolding upon which the
ramps containing the VIP seats had been erected. These ramps could not bear the
collective weight of so many big shots, among whom “stormers” soon mingled in
classless unity. As soon as Machel took the stage and said “jump,” patrons started
to jump. The ramps began to sway, then to wine, then to dingolay, then to buckle
and finally to collapse into a wilderness of twisted steel, broken plywood and
scattered chairs, and a soca chorus of screams and groans (account reconstructed
from television replays of the catastrophe, as well as eyewitness accounts in the
press of late November 2000). The bourgeois notion of a “concert” at which $600
patrons would sit politely in their all-inclusive/exclusive compound was instantly
superseded by the reality of a typical Machel “bram,” at which patrons had for a
decade been invited to “get on bad,” “free up,” “misbehave,” and “mash up the
place.” After the $600 patrons departed and the injured were taken to hospital,
some by the very pirogues on which a few of the stormers had come, Machel and
company resumed the concert at 11:30 p.m. and performed until 3:00 a.m., giving
the $80 and $70 patrons, who stood on solid unshakable ground, what they had
come for.

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From all that has been said above, it should be clear that calypso reinvents
itself, not only in hope of finding formulae to penetrate external markets but also
and primarily in response to complex pressures within Trinidad’s parochial and
infinitely complicated society. Hybrid song forms reflect alliances, transgressions
and contestations that are constantly taking place in a society that is restless,
hyperactive, driven, as David Rudder suggested in 1997 or 1998, by an excess of
adrenaline, and imperfectly contained and defined by a multitude of shifting and
intersecting boundaries. The reinvention of calypso is a function of the society’s
constant self-renewal; but self-renewal suggests either the constant death or waning
of identities, and the discontinuity that ensues as younger and younger generations
try to supplant the entrenched hierarchies of the old and fossilized.

NOTE

1 This chapter has been condensed from Professor Rohlehr’s much longer, forthcoming study of
the evolution of calypso by Milla Cozart Riggio, who takes the responsibility for disjunctures
created in the editorial process.

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19
ON REDEFINING THE NATION THROUGH
PARTY MUSIC
Jocelyne Guilbault

This chapter examines identity politics by focusing on a popular music usually

found in the bins of record stores under the label “international music” or “world
music.” While this project falls into an important new trend in academic studies,
popular musics that are deemed profit-oriented, known not for their focus on text
but rather for their focus on pleasure, dance, and sexualized bodies, have rarely
been studied in relation to the notion of nation. My hope is to fill part of this gap
by exploring soca from Trinidad, a popular music also often called “party music,”
that emerged in the mid-1970s and has been a dominating force in the carnival
music industry since the late 1980s.
My aim is in part to challenge the commonly held view that soca is merely the
product of commercial interests, the result of the homogenizing effect of globaliza-
tion, and the embodiment of the threat to local culture’s integrity. As Line Grenier
writes about global pop, “in keeping with the high/low cultural hierarchy that
it reproduces, [such a view] involves, albeit implicitly, the uncritical privileging
of some musical genres deemed autonomous, ‘authentic,’ and empowering, over
pop and other mainstream genres deemed strictly profit-driven, alienating, and
‘false’ ” (in press: 3). Positing party songs as trivial and interchangeable com-
modities not only ignores the artistic investment of its makers but also neglects the
aesthetic discrimination and value-judgments of its consumers. It also overlooks
the ways in which soca’s success – its ability to communicate, to sell, and to endure
as a genre – is based not simply on reproducing familiarity but also on cultivating
difference.
Party music, like any other music, can be understood only by grasping the con-
juncture that has permitted it to arise. Thus, it is important to position soca in
relation to calypso, of which it is a musical offshoot and with which it shares the
same space, namely, carnival. Since 1993, soca has used the conceptual framework
and infrastructure of competitions that informs the calypso music industry to gain
legitimacy and recognition. Because carnival and its competitions have historically
served, in Gayle Wald’s expression, as the “authenticating” spaces of national
culture in Trinidad, soca, I contend, has helped to change definitions of the

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national (2002). This study examines how soca functions to critique prescriptive
ideologies of national identity.
I focus on three discursive spaces through which soca has been articulated:
first, soca’s sounds, which perform their own version of nation in carnival by
functioning as sites of encounters between styles, genres, musical strategies, and
technologies, and as sites of ethnic, racial, and gendered social relations; second,
soca’s producers or consumers linked to the nationalist discourses in which, or
against which, soca is figured; and third, the diasporic circuits in which soca travels.
My goal in looking at these spaces is to offer different takes on soca’s articulations
of nation.

TAKE 1: SOCA’S ARTICULATIONS OF NATION THROUGH SOUNDS

I begin by focusing on soca’s sounds, not only because they constitute a privileged
point of entry for me as a musician, but also because soca’s sounds first spurred
controversy. Here, I draw on Josh Kun’s notion of “audiotopia” (inspired by Michel
Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia”) to explore soca’s unique configuration of
spaces through sounds or, to use Kun’s words:
music’s ability to act effectively as an agent of intense utopian longing and its uncanny
ability to bring together several sites normally deemed incompatible, not only in the
space of a particular piece of music itself, but in the production of social space and
mapping of geographical space that music makes possible.
(Kun 1997: 289)

Soca arose in the early 1970s out of an attempt to bring together the two largest
communities of the island of Trinidad. According to one of soca’s most respected
founders, the late Garfield Blackman, known as Ras Shorty I (formerly as Lord
Shorty), soca music aimed “to unite the East Indian and African peoples” and “to
fight ‘racialism’ among them.” From its beginning, soca illustrates how global
movements can give force to local desires. Drawing on the civil rights movement in
the United States and its major impact in many other countries (Zuberi 2001; Dunn
2001), Ras Shorty I seized this particular moment to fight the colonial legacy of
ethnic or racial divisions in the newly independent nation-state of Trinidad and
Tobago through music. He fused calypso – the unofficial emblem of the nation-
state, which until then had featured Afro-Creole performers almost exclusively –
with Indian musical elements to bond and represent musically the two historically
divided Trinidadian communities.
Initially, arrangements of soca songs that featured Indian instruments1 had to be
revised – retaining the Indian rhythms but playing them on instruments typically
heard in the calypso rhythm section because, in the words of Ras Shorty I, “many
Afro-Trinidadians felt that these new additions were spoiling their music.” Eventu-
ally, however, soca’s new sounds succeeded in gaining acceptance and became the
dominant music during carnival by the late 1980s. Although Indian sounds have
nearly disappeared in soca today, it would be hasty to conclude that the initial
efforts made through soca to bring together the Indian and Afro-Trinidadian
communities were in vain. Soca, in fact, provided the possibility for the Indian
community to gain visibility in the local carnival scene. By the mid-1980s, soca
(then predominantly heard as an Afro-Trinidadian music) was (re)appropriated

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by the Indian community to produce chutney soca, a fusion that unmistakably

merges the sounds of the two musical traditions.2 In 1993 with the creation of
Indian-owned radio stations, and in 1995 with the additional support of an elected
government headed for the first time by an Indian Prime Minister, chutney soca
became more audible. With the launching of yearly competitions during carnival
in 1996, chutney soca acquired legitimacy. Through this process, the new sounds
of both soca and chutney soca have arguably redrawn the map of carnival space,
bringing to the fore the question of who and what, in ethnic terms, constitutes the
national.
In line with its initial mission, soca has continued to draw the voices of new
subjects into the carnival scene. In contrast with traditionally male-dominated
calypso, soca has featured a significant number of solo female artists or frontliners
since the 1990s. In recognition of women’s contributions to the carnival scene,
Rituals, one of the most important Trinidadian record labels, issued a ground-
breaking compilation entitled Soca Divas in the year 2000. Just as Ras Shorty I’s
motivation for bringing the Indian and Afro-Creole communities together was
partly related to social movements that transcended Trinidad’s sociopolitical
boundaries, so too the significant role women have come to play in soca is related to
issues on a far larger scale than the local (see Grenier in press: 10), influenced, for
example, by the growing prominence of women in other Caribbean popular musics,
such as dancehall and zouk, and transnational practices such as rap. Along with
these relatively new musics and their new gender politics, soca has provided a space
for Trinidadian female artists not only to join regional and international move-
ments but also to participate as song or mass leaders in the prominent public sphere
where the national is articulated.
In addition to featuring the voices of new subjects, soca has articulated other
types of relationships through its sounds. In songs such as “Jab Molassie” by
Superblue, “Jab Jab” by Machel Montano, and “Vampire” by Maximus Dan,
new relationships with tradition have been forged. As Kun describes it in reference
to other musics from the southern hemisphere, “the sounds of tradition . . . meet
the sounds of the post-industrial, the sounds of the machine, and the sounds
of (post)modern technology” (Kun 1997: 304). Old musical techniques (such as
repetition, call-and-response, and rhythmic patterns typical of traditional carnival
characters such as Jab Molassie or Jab Jab) and old calypso songs have not been
abandoned but have been reconfigured – for example, Maximus Dan’s 2002 song
“Vampire” featured excerpts of Black Stalin’s song “Vampire Year” recorded in
1982. The rearticulation of traditional material with contemporary sounds from
multiple cultural and national locations is not a new strategy in Caribbean Creole
cultures, where mixes and remixes have always been common. But in the post-
colonial context, in which modalities of cultural hybridity – such as forced assimi-
lation, internalized self-rejection, or commercial cooption – have caused much
resentment, soca’s open celebration of the creolization process makes any claim
that the national can be defined exclusively in terms of a fixed tradition harder to
sustain.
Importing new music technologies into soca has been part of what Nestor Garcia
Canclini has termed “cultural reconversion” – a process that reflects Leopold
Senghor’s motto “not to be assimilated, but to assimilate” – by using whatever is
available to reinforce the local cultural capital (cited in Kun 1997: 304–5, and in

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conversation). Such cultural reconversion takes place, for example, when the drum
machine is used to make soca sounds palatable to contemporary audiences. It also
takes place when Machel Montano appropriates a Jamaican dancehall rhythm to
create a break in his 1997 fast-paced soca song “Big Truck” to provide a breathing
space before returning to his fast soca section with a renewed intensity. Similarly,
when soca artists rely on “riddims” (derived from a well-known Jamaican practice,
fixed, pre-recorded instrumental rhythm section tracks created by producers or
arrangers that are used by different artists) to create their own soca songs, the
local cultural capital is not lost.3 Rather, following Canclini’s argument, it is re-
articulated through a multiplicity of subjectivities and senses of belonging that
inextricably interrelate the local and the global, the national and the transnational
(Canclini cited in Kun 1997: 305). Because soca bands and singers perform
mainly in the authenticating space of carnival where Trinidadianness is publicly
enunciated, soca sounds become an effective site for witnessing how the bonds and
boundaries of national culture are negotiated.
The question is, how do these forms of connections enacted through soca sounds
come to matter, for whom, and why? In an attempt to explore these questions
further, I turn next to soca’s “culture of production” and “production of culture,”
as articulated by soca artists in creative tension with the traditional discourses
of nationhood (for elaboration of the symbiotic relationship between “culture of
production” and “production of culture,” see Negus 1999).

TAKE 2: SOCA’S PRODUCERS AND CONSUMERS IN RELATIONSHIP TO

NATIONALIST DISCOURSES

It is well known that music has often entered nationalist discourses. But how has a
music deemed profit-driven, associated with parties – but not with political parties
of any sort – been relevant to nationalist projects? In our case, what conventions
does soca reinforce or challenge in the nationalist discourses? Before attempting to
answer these questions, I want first to clarify how music – and which music – has
been historically connected to nationalist discourses in Trinidad.
Drawing on the work of Thomas Turino, I use “nationalist discourse” to refer
explicitly to “a political movement or ideology that bases the idea of legitimate
sovereignty on a coterminous relationship between a ‘nation’ and a state” and the
expression “musical nationalism” to refer specifically “to musical styles, activities,
and discourses that are explicitly part of nationalist political movements and pro-
grams” (Turino 2000: 13–14). On the basis of these definitions, the music, space,
and format most associated with the nationalist project in Trinidad have been
calypso, carnival, and competitions. State-sponsored organization of calypso
competitions has linked this music to nation-building, independence and post-
independence themes (see Rohlehr 1990; Liverpool 1993, 2001; Trotman 1993;
Regis 1999).
To summarize briefly: in the 1960s and 1970s the nationalist construction of
calypso in Trinidad developed under the leadership of the first Prime Minister,
Oxford-trained black scholar Dr Eric Williams, and then was renewed during the
Black Power movement. Seen as central in the promotion of national culture,
calypso was thought of as bringing the kind of new consciousness needed to
eliminate the false sense of self that people experienced under the colonial regime.

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Because of calypso’s emphasis on the word, on speaking the reality as it is

expressed in everyday language, social activists and intellectuals, including C.L.R.
James, saw calypso as synonymous with “being authentic” by providing “a one-
ness of mind and physical reality” (Trotman 1993: 24–5). Calypso’s emphasis on
language had the power to bring change. Whereas during the colonial period
calypso became the focus of attention because of its perceived role in the struggle
for survival, during the 1960s and the 1970s calypso increased its prominence by
being associated with the processes of cultural identification and political
emancipation.
Thus, any music challenging the prominence of calypso in the carnival space
and using competitions similar to those associated with calypso to establish
its legitimacy would be confronted by nationalist discourses and set in com-
parison to calypso. In the 1990s, programs on the state-owned television channel
(TT&T), talk shows on local radio stations, columns and open letters in daily
newspapers, cultural critiques in monthly reviews, and academic articles expressed
concerns about soca’s commercialization, reliance on technology, and impact
on morality.
Over the past fifteen years, nationalists, cultural activists, and populist artists
have regarded with suspicion, if not antagonism, the commercialization of soca
which they attribute to Anglo-American influence. Debates about soca have been
part of a much larger nationalist discussion that opposes political-cultural values
to market values and procedures, Trinidadian nationalism to foreign influence
and domination. On the basis of such views, the problems raised by soca center on
cultural importation and export quality.
For many observers, when soca songs entered international markets, they began
to exhibit the typical symptoms of commodification – resembling many and any
other popular musics. According to Rohlehr, “Soca has in two decades moved from
being a trade name for a variety of calypso-crossover rhythms to a fairly rigid
song form with standard chord structure, melodic lines, and lyrics” (1998: 91).
Its songs have become simplified and homogenized. They all resort to similar gim-
micks involving both self-promotion and the adoption of the basic methodology
of all advertising: repetition (Rohlehr 1998; Alleyne 1995). On the whole, the com-
mercialization of soca is thus equated with loss: a narrative quality diminished
through the loss of humor and rhetorical or storytelling skills; and a musical
sensibility diminished through a reliance on repetition instead of creativity.
At issue is how local artists, in their attempts to penetrate the international
market, have allegedly fallen prey to the “rules” of the global market: turning
original musical compositions (here meaning traditional calypso) into cultural
commodities and adopting foreign aesthetics at the expense of local musical values.
Interestingly, even though calypso – like other musics linked to nationalist projects
– is widely acknowledged to have been mediated by foreign music, in nationalist
discourses it retains an aura of rootedness and authenticity as a cultural practice
associated with the masses, especially the Trinidadian black working class.4
Linked to the anguish over foreign influence and its homogenizing impact, the
widespread use of sound technologies in soca, particularly drum machines and
samplers, has been met with great concern because of the allegedly detrimental
effects of technology on both craftsmanship and creativity. In the words of a
journalist commenting on soca:

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Incorporating digital samples of other songs became easier with desktop audio
systems. With the coming of affordable CD recordable systems, anyone who wished to
become a soca artist could put something together on the desktop and burn ten or
so CDs for the radio stations . . . Faster and faster. Leaving less and less time to think,
to reflect, to contemplate this festival we are creating . . . There was a time when the
calypsonian thought long and hard about the events of the day and fashioned songs
which used irony and parable to tell stories richly flavoured with their opinions.
(Mark Lyndersay, “Bring the Rhythm Down,” Trinidad Express, February 18, 1998)

As Nabeel Zuberi notes, musical developments such as soca’s use of technology

are often framed in oppositional terms: “either an older organic and authentic form
of musical expression representing a community has been destroyed by the new
technologies, or ethnicity melts away in this synthesized global melange” (2001:
132). Indeed, the fact that some of soca’s major hits, such as Machel Montano’s
“Come Dig It” or Edwin Yearwood’s “Redemption,” have been associated, and
even confused at times, with American-style house music and R&B raises questions
about whether such crossovers embody a local or even regional Caribbean identity.
Either way, technology is conceived as a threat to the survival and expression of
difference. As Zuberi notes in relation to musics using digital technologies,
soca makes it “more problematic to claim that sounds are readable as arising
directly from specific identities and localities” (2001: 132). Soca thus troubles the
traditional expression and definition of nation in Trinidad by transgressing
not only the normative aesthetics of calypso but also the definitions of identity
circumscribed by place.
At another level, soca’s focus on pleasure, dance, and sexualized bodies has
constituted another main area of contention. Even though lyrically some soca
songs include social commentaries (for example, in 2002 André Tanker’s critique
of Osama bin Laden in “Ben Lion”), most party songs either vigorously invite
participants to jam and wine or focus on relations with the opposite sex. As a
whole, soca songs are thus seen at best as lacking any political value or as culti-
vating an escapist attitude. At worst, their focus on jamming and wining is thought
to encourage sexual looseness, and also to undermine consensual standards of
decency. Interestingly, the wining dance movements prevalent in soca are found in
many of the Afro-Creole traditions in Trinidad and in the Caribbean and are hence
not new. But the central importance they have acquired in soca both on stage and
among fans has been criticized, not because they foreground a new cultural politics
that links identity and culture irrevocably with the expression of sexuality, but
rather because this new politics challenges the norms of who can express sexuality
and to what extent.
As Simon Frith (1996) has argued in his work on popular discrimination, such
critiques are more than musical judgments. They imply not only ethical but also
moral evaluations and assessments. Just as Jamaica’s DJs have been said to “steer
the dancehall side of roots culture away from political and historical themes and
towards ‘slackness’ ” – which Paul Gilroy translates as “crude and often insulting
wordplay pronouncing on sexuality and sexual antagonism” (Gilroy quoted by
Cooper 1993: 141) – soca artists have been seen as steering carnival music away
from its language of sociopolitical resistance and critiques of a regressive form
of identity politics: the lyrics are deemed shallow, and their yearnings are judged to

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be limited to the immediate needs of the body. It is noteworthy that expressions of

emancipation or resistance to hegemonic tendencies – like those articulated by
some female performances – have not been read in nationalist discourses as such,
it could be surmised, less because these expressions are politically irrelevant than
because they may undermine some of the tenets of the nationalist project, as it has
traditionally been defined.
A contrasting perspective on soca emerges, however, when considered in relation
to the new nation-building discourse of soca producers or consumers. Over the past
eight years in Trinidad, Barbados, and Antigua, most soca singers and arrangers
I interviewed who have been active since the late 1980s explained their approaches
to soca as reactions to implicit rules and traditions in calypso. In musical terms,
calypso not only sounded old (as it did for Ras Shorty I in the 1970s or
more recently for Edwin Yearwood and Nicholas Brancker, the leader and main
arranger of Krosfyah, a famous Barbadian soca band) but its structure – three
verses alternating with a refrain – also seemed too confining, with the focus nearly
exclusively on the lyrics at the expense of the melodies: “the lyrical content of 90
percent of the songs don’t cater for the younger people and only talk about politics,
guns . . . and everything negative in society” (Yearwood, interview, Barbados,
August 6, 1997).
Yearwood and Brancker illustrate the generation gap, difference in musical
tastes, and relationship to the process of nation-building that separate most soca
artists from traditional calypsonians. Most new-wave soca artists were born after
their countries gained independence and thus take as a given their countries’
nationhood. As Robin Balliger indicates, soca artists “enact a form of politics
exemplary of the ‘post-national’ period: instead of an enfranchised public partici-
pating in a critical, modernist, national dialogue, alienation shifts power away from
state authority, political promises and ‘representation,’ to what is immediately
known and experienced” (Balliger 2000: 118). In this sense, the work of soca artists
has less to do with dismissing the idea of nation than with attempting to renew
its formulation in contemporary terms – in line with the new cultural politics of
neoliberalism and globalization. Concretely, they aim to redraw the carnival space
where the national culture is authenticated in at least two ways: by turning their
attention to youth and by reimagining soca sounds in ways that extend the carnival
music industry beyond the local scene, connecting it with today’s regional and
international markets.
What does bring we together
If yuh come from near or far
Jump and wave and get on bad
Soca make yuh catch ah glad
(“Soca” by Machel Montano and Xtatic, 2000)

As stated in “Soca,” a song by the reputed Trinidadian soca artist Machel

Montano and his band Xtatic,5 soca is designed to encourage the formation of
what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has called “a community of sentiment,” that
is, a community of people who begin to imagine and feel things together (1996: 8).
To achieve a sing-along feel and sense of togetherness, the soca artists I interviewed
were clear about the strategies they use: they give greater importance to the back-
ground vocalists than used to be true of calypso. To boost the energy level and to

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“vent frustration or express emotions that may not be possible to channel in any
other way,” they speed up the rhythm from the typical 100 beats per minute
in calypso to 120 and up to 140 beats per minute, and place the rhythm section
forefront in the final mix (quotation from Nicholas Brancker, interview, Barbados,
March 12, 1997). They also infuse the song texts with a series of hook lines based
on call-and-response exchanges.
To a much greater extent than calypso, soca performances are designed, in the
words of Krosfyah’s leader, “to cater equally for the feel, the audio, and the visual”
(Yearwood, interview, Barbados, August 6, 1997). In this spirit, most soca artists
have devoted a great deal of attention to lighting and theatrics, to producing
catchy tunes that involve constant interaction with the crowd, and to performing
choreographed or freestyle moves to make the whole stage come alive. For the soca
audience, this calls for dancing. In fact, leading people not only to sing but also
to dance has become the criterion in the Caribbean for evaluating soca songs and
artists. The repeated calls in soca songs to “jump and wave,” “move to the right,
move to the left,” “get yourself a partner,” “follow me,” “start to wine,” and “go
down low” make physical participation and acting together central to creating a
sense of community. As Balliger reported in her study on soca audiences, soca
music is not so much about a politics of representation, as about a politics of
presence: a face-to-face encounter and solidarity among peers. It is also about a
politics of pleasure, of emotional joy and release in the temporary community of
the “fete” through dancing – “not in the deferral of satisfaction through hard
work” (Balliger 2000: 118–19).

TAKE 3: SOCA’S ARTICULATION THROUGH DIASPORA

Numerous publications have richly documented the importance of overseas carni-

vals for Trinidadians and other Caribbean population groups in diaspora and
the crucial role that popular culture, most particularly music, has played in such
contexts. But few, if any, have addressed the particular role that soca has played in
diasporic spaces. What kinds of identities does it perform and for whom? In soca’s
transnational circuits, is the notion of nation reinforced or abandoned?
By entering the long tradition of overseas carnivals (the first overseas Caribbean
carnival began in the late 1920s in Harlem: Nurse 2000: 96; Hintzen 2001: 42),
soca has taken on the overseas carnivals’ original mandates: namely, to assert a
pan-West-Indian cultural identity and to provide a means of resistance in an
otherwise alienating environment (Nurse 2000: 103; Ho 2001; also see Nurse, Con-
nor and Farrar, and Kasinitz in this volume). Yet soca performers reach Caribbean
diasporic population groups markedly different from those of the early twentieth
century. The frequency with which migrants can now travel back and forth between
their new homes and their mother countries and the ease with which they can
exchange daily news with their friends and relatives still living in the Caribbean
have given a new twist to the meaning of migration. With today’s access to mass
communication and modern technology, the traditional meaning of “home”
defined by referring to a specific place or locality has become ever more blurred and
indeterminate.
Paradoxically, despite these changes, immigrant population groups’ need to
maintain ideas of cultural and ethnic distinction has become more salient than

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ever (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 10). In the face of adversities such as racial dis-
crimination and ethnic ghettoization, visible diasporic minorities have felt pressed
to reinforce their collective identities so that they can fight for political spaces. For
Caribbean population groups abroad, and for Trinidadians especially, the means of
reinforcing this sense of collective identity has been through carnival, through
calypso and, over the past fifteen years, through soca.
Interestingly, as Percy Hintzen (2001: 43) has noted in relation to New York’s
West Indian diaspora,
country-specific identities do not disappear on Labor Day [time when West Indian
Carnival is celebrated in New York] but are reflected in patterns of participation at
the carnival festivities that publicize national rather than regional identity. On the day
of the parade, a profusion of flags represents the various countries, and designated
sections of the parade route have become country-specific gathering places.

Since these remarks apply equally well to most other West Indian diasporic com-
munities, the question then is how soca has catered simultaneously for both a pan-
West-Indian and a Trinidadian identity: by being hybrid in form and influence –
like overseas carnivals themselves – and simultaneously embodying a culture of
resistance and one of cooptation – thereby defying the simplistic generalization
that the two cultures are by definition opposed to each other (see Nurse 2000: 103).
Its trademark of sounding multiple cultural and national locations and embodying
various musical sensibilities undoubtedly stems from appreciating, to use Stuart
Hall’s words, “the dialogic strategies . . . essential to the diaspora aesthetic”
(quoted by Nurse 2000: 105).
As Gayatri Gopinath suggested in relation to bhangra, reading soca as embody-
ing West Indian diasporic aesthetics “allows for a far more complicated under-
standing of diaspora, in that it demands a radical reworking of the hierarchical
relation between diaspora and the nation” (Gopinath 1995: 204; italics in the
original). On the one hand, soca’s incorporation of diasporic sensibilities from
different Caribbean cultures and communities creates a network of alliances that
“displaces the ‘home’ country from its privileged position as originary site”
(ibid.). On the other hand, the performance of soca’s diasporic aesthetics in the
nation reconfigures the very terms by which the nation is constituted – making the
diaspora part of its economy, both culturally and financially. Reading soca as
embodying diasporic aesthetics also highlights the ways in which soca constructs
its audience: formed by both national and diasporic subjects whose identities
are “not singular or monolithic and are instead multiple, shifting, and often self-
contradictory . . . made up of heterogeneous and heteronomous representations of
gender, race, and class” (Marcia Tucker quoted by Nurse 2000: 105).
The problem is that, even though soca may aim to reach an audience that is
“heterogeneous,” in reality soca’s constituency in the carnival sphere is mostly
black.6 This raises the question whether the carnival that soca helps to articulate
should be simply portrayed as a “black” or Afro-Caribbean thing instead of a
“Caribbean” festival (Nurse 2000: 103). In other words, the issue of racial and
ethnic representation in the diasporic celebration of the nation and the region
continues to be raised particularly by the Indo-Caribbean community in relation to
what music and whom the overseas carnivals continue to privilege.
Just as soca (re)produces in diaspora some of the tensions from “home” when

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performing the nation, soca also experiences in diaspora the same marginal posi-
tioning that “home” – and the nation it represents – has historically held vis-à-vis
First World societies. It faces the legacies of postcolonial conditions: lack of access
to political and economic leverage and insufficient organizational capability to
control its circulation and to maximize its commercial returns (for instance, those
made possible by legal copyright protections). Soca is racially marked, and thus
heavily confined to predefined markets and possibilities. In the same ways Keith
Nurse has remarked about overseas carnivals, the limitations faced by soca “are
systemic in nature in that they relate to large-scale, long-term processes such as
colonialist discourse (Bhabha 1994) . . . and imperialism (Ado 1986)” (quoted by
Nurse 2000: 109). And yet, along with the expansion of overseas carnivals beyond
the confines of the immigration populations they represent, soca has reinforced
some old alliances and created new ones – racially, ethnically, culturally, economic-
ally, and politically. In “this act of transnational, transcultural, and transgressive
politics,” to borrow Nurse’s wording (2000: 107), soca could be said to have
strengthened both national and pan-West-Indian identities at home and abroad.

SOCA AS A NEW CULTURAL FORMATION

Soca has radically altered the carnival music scene since the late 1980s. In con-
clusion, inspired by Herman Gray’s use of the term, I want to suggest that soca’s
deployment might point to a new “cultural formation,” one that has not only
remapped collective identities but also reformulated in fundamental ways what is
taken to be authentic in national culture. Through soca, a constellation of new
social relations, shifts in sensibility and desire, strategic use of new technologies,
and involvement of dominant institutions and infrastructures have come together
in revolutionary ways.
As we have seen, some of the social, political, and cultural moves that this new
formation has encouraged stand in contrast with traditional dominant ideologies
locally, and have been met with resistance. In addition to rethinking the bounds and
boundaries of the nation – whom it includes and excludes and what geographical
spaces partake in its embodiment – this new cultural formation enacted through
soca has embraced a diasporic aesthetics and identity politics that have posed
vexing questions about the ethics and politics of representation, not just for
Trinidadians. Indeed, I am struck by the ways in which the worries about the
images and representations circulated through soca echo those concerning other
black diasporic musics such as dancehall and rap and are profoundly related
to broader issues raised by and through the African diaspora. Scholars such as
Gordon Rohlehr from Trinidad and Paul Gilroy from Britain use strikingly similar
terms when addressing their preoccupations about the ethical, cultural, and
political future of the national and black self-representation through popular
musics that in their views lack political vision. They see these musics as underwrit-
ten by cultural and market values steeped in hedonism, short-term pleasure, and
social irresponsibility, and as withdrawing dangerously from collective black strug-
gle. But, as Gray remarks, “These images are made under very specific discursive
conditions and social relations. Such circumstances set the limits of possibility for
imagining, producing, and circulating different kinds of representations.” He adds,
“What may be a cause for worry are not so much the images alone as the cultural

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frameworks and social conditions out of which they are generated and the cultural
desires to which they respond” (Gray 2001: 88).
Following Gray’s recommendation, the work of cultural critics should not be
simply about documenting the rise of a new cultural formation, but also “critically
interrogating the conditions of cultural production and evaluating the politics
that it proposes and enacts” (ibid.). In that sense, tracing how soca has worked
effectively to change the notion of nation in Trinidad and Tobago as I have tried to
do here marks only the first step of a large critical enterprise.

NOTES

1 Ras Shorty I’s musical arrangement of “Indrani” recorded in 1973, for example, featured, in
addition to the mandolin, two Indian musical instruments: the dholak (double-head barrel drum
played with bare hands) and the dantal (also spelled dandtal, a metal rod struck by a U-shaped
clapper).
2 Chutney soca combines two already hybrid forms: the Indo-Trinidadian music called “chutney”
developed from Bhojpuri folk-songs and Hindu wedding music, and soca, as described above,
derived from calypso and Indian rhythmic patterns.
3 For example, in carnival 2002, a soca riddim called “Best Riddim” (riddims are often named)
created by producer Sheldon “Shel Shok” Benjamin was used by Trinidadian artists Bunji
Garlin (“We Doh Watch Face”), by Denise Belfon (“De Jammet”), and by Benjai (“Over &
Over”). I thank Christopher Edmonds for this information.
4 This comment is inspired by Christopher Dunn’s own assessment of a similar situation in Brazil
(2002: 72).
5 In contrast with the calypso tradition where artists are expected to be the authors of their own
songs – even though this, in practice, is not always the case – many soca songs are often written
in collaboration with other people. Over the years, Machel Montano has regularly credited
various members of his group as co-writers of his songs, as is the case for “Soca,” which was co-
written with Daryl Henry and Vincent Rivers, and performed by Daryl Henry a.k.a. Farmer
Nappy.
6 In festivals throughout Europe where soca is also performed, large crowds of white people
attend.

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Part IV

CARNIVAL DIASPORA
20
THE FESTIVAL HEARD ROUND THE WORLD
Introduction to Part IV

Milla Cozart Riggio

Of the three largest and most inclusive carnivals in the Americas – in Rio de
Janeiro, New Orleans, and Trinidad – Trinidad Carnival alone has established its
own diaspora. Indeed, despite its having been imitated in more than sixty North
American and European cities as well as other Caribbean islands, and its having
influenced celebrations in other places such as Japan and Australia, Trinidad
Carnival remains one of the most copied but least known major festivals. Still not
listed in the Encyclopedia Britannica under carnival, the festival that is arguably the
only truly national carnival in the world1 has created a centrifugal pattern of dis-
persion that radiates outwardly and inwardly. Many thousands of West Indians –
often from islands other than Trinidad – not only come “home” to Port of Spain
for carnival each year, they also take carnival home with them. Those who live in
the United States and Canada often follow diasporic carnivals from Toronto to
Brooklyn to Miami and places between and beyond throughout the summer,
traveling with their families and friends, usually in cars or buses, from city to city in
a series of weekend carnival pilgrimages.
One of the keys to understanding the phenomenon of the Trinidad Carnival
diaspora lies in the conscious decision of the scholars and statesmen leading the
path to independence from Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s to use carnival as
the identifying signifier of the newly independent nation. The Trinidad economy
has a strong multinational element to it, established primarily by its history
of oil and natural gas production. Moreover, the leaders of Trinidad, as in other
newly emerging West Indian nations, were more than politicians; men such as Eric
Williams, J.D. Elder, C.L.R. James, and Lloyd Best were statesmen and often
trained scholars (some with PhDs from English or American universities), authors
of significant books as well as shapers of political independence.
However, neither the economy nor the educational system of Trinidad was truly
autonomous. Both were derived from and interlocked with the nations from which
the emerging democracy wished to separate itself. What were truly indigenous
were the varied folk art forms – music, dance, masquerade – that had emerged
over a century and a half of resistance and assimilation, resulting finally in the

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extraordinary panoply of carnival. Faced with the dilemma of how to preserve

culture while also developing nationhood, the shapers of the new nation elected to
turn to the festival that since World War II had come to symbolize Trinidadian
identity. Taking the pannists off the streets and into the national performance
venues, giving calypsonians the privilege not only of critiquing the government but
also of helping to authenticate it, establishing a costumed queen of masquerade
bands to counter the ballgown Carnival Queen competition that had remained
the bastion primarily of Whiteness on the island, Prime Minister Williams and his
fellows converted folk aesthetics into national symbols. The romance between the
Prime Minister and the culture that had to a large extent developed in and from
the streets would not last. But by the time the Black Power movement of 1970
crystallized the rupture, carnival had already been enthroned as the festival of
the nation.
Meanwhile, the establishment of the new nation coincided with a large-scale
emigration of West Indians from their home islands in the 1960s, to fill the labor
forces of Canada, Britain, and the United States. As carnival became the signifier
of national identity, so too it became a gauge of nostalgic identification for those
émigrés, who would remember not only the masquerades and music but also the
food (peas and rice, for instance) and the varied senses of community of their
homeland. The process was simple.
What is not so easy to understand is why Trinidad Carnival should have provided
the blueprint for the nostalgic performances of identity for West Indian com-
munities, such as those of Notting Hill or Toronto, in which Trinidadians were
themselves in the minority of West Indian immigrants. In the chapters to follow,
Keith Nurse attempts to explain that phenomenon in terms (among others) of the
kinetic power of the Trinidad masquerade costumes, even as he defines ways in
which the Trinidad Carnival in its many new locations has become a more assimila-
tive, pan-Caribbean festival, incorporating Jamaican reggae, jerk pork, and other
culinary and aesthetic influences from other islands. It is true that the form of
masquerade known as “fancy mas” or “pretty mas,” with its sense of playing royal
and its spectacular individual king and queen costumes, along with decorated
bikini costumes for women, often dominates the diasporic carnivals, along with
steelbands and calypso or soca music. It is also true that carnival in Britain has
from its beginnings in the 1960s incorporated elements of satire and traditional
characters, as well as grotesquely comic, often cross-dressing costumes. Moreover,
stilt walkers of the Moko Jumbie variety are increasingly common in many
diasporic carnivals. Nevertheless, the satirical and/or threatening traditional
culture-bearing characters, such as the Midnight Robber, the Pierrot Grenade, or
the Moko Jumbie – traditions that have been revived within the last decade in
Trinidad – have followed into the diaspora very slowly, usually as a result of a
self-conscious effort at education by cultural researchers such as John Cupid of the
National Carnival Commission.2
One of the features that characterizes diasporic carnivals is that of reiterative
recall. Sometimes the designs for mas bands, and even some larger individual
costumes themselves, will be taken from Trinidad to Toronto, Brooklyn, Notting
Hill, or other places, where the designs may be given new thematic names and larger
costumes – once automatically discarded at the end of carnival – recycled. Thus, the
diasporic carnivals (some of which, because they are held in densely populated

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areas, at times draw more massive crowds than in Trinidad) become literal
reminders not only of the homeland or the festival in general but of the carnival of
any given year.
One interesting phenomenon of this kind is provided by the annual Road March
competition. Many non-West-Indian visitors to Trinidad complain about the end-
less repetition of music in the annual carnival: not only is the music sometimes
intolerably loud but the same songs are played over and over, until at last one is
played enough times to win the road title. In the years I have been attending
carnival (annually since 1995), it is customary each year to complain about that
year’s Road March offerings: the songs are said to be terrible, degenerating, worse
than one could remember. Then the festival ends; those who have come “home” for
the festival return to their varied cities, armed with tapes or CDs of this year’s music
purchased at the airport. Suddenly, the Road March compositions that seemed
banal during the festival are in themselves vital mnemonic devices. Play the song,
and you are back in the festival. The very repetition that drove one crazy becomes
the mechanism of cultural memory, propelling backwards in time and place.
Obviously, carnival in Trinidad – where the majority of citizens are either African
or (East) Indian in ethnic origin – is a different kind of festival (celebrating the
nation) than the event in which a minority population nostalgically celebrates its
homeland elsewhere. In this sense, the diasporic Trinidad carnivals have something
in common with the Shi’ite festival of Hosay in Trinidad, which throughout the
late nineteenth century was celebrated by Indian indentured workers throughout
the south of the island, by Hindus as well as (probably more than) by Muslims. A
spectacular religious procession that was contested in the actual homeland became
for a time a cultural unifier for the laborers known perjoratively as “coolies” (a
word roughly equivalent to “nigger” for Africans), perhaps in part because of the
spectacle that may have linked this professional commemoration with carnival,
or perhaps because those celebrating Hosay claimed always to be worshipping
at a shrine that contained a small clod of Indian earth, brought over in the ships
of 1845.
The difference between being a majority and a minority population is significant,
even to a people that does not make its own laws or feel that it has full control of its
own economy or its own future. Always to see some variety of one’s own face –
rather than faces of other races or cultures – mirrored in those around you provides
a kind of implicit confidence that does not exist when one is in a minority.
Correspondingly, carnival in Trinidad – which celebrates an entire nation – is very
different from the contained and regulated parades in the diaspora. The latent
violence in Trinidad emerges from the mythos of resistance, the danger implicit in
the clashing of territorial bands, or the basic dialectic of carnival itself. In other
places, such as Notting Hill, violence erupts mainly between those celebrating the
festival and the enforcement officers or threatened local citizens in the culture or
city that hosts it. The festival exists not only as a nostalgic reminder of home but
also as a way of taking and claiming space in the new society. As a result, diasporic
carnivals are often as much food festivals as they are parades or masquerades. All
those things that both remind of home and allow one to stake out aesthetic and
communal space in a new society become important.
In the three chapters that follow in this section, Keith Nurse first analyzes
the diasporic spread of carnival within the economic and cultural parameters of

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globalization itself. The final two essays examine two (or really three) of the major
diasporic carnivals: Geraldine Connor and Max Farrar compare Notting Hill in
London to the festival in Leeds. Philip Kasinitz focuses on Labor Day in Brooklyn.
Other festivals might as well have been chosen – Toronto, Miami, Boston, Atlanta,
Chicago, Montreal – with equal interest. Moreover, we have not considered the
spread of Trinidad-style carnival throughout the Caribbean itself – notably in
Jamaica where it was introduced only a few decades ago, partly by Chinese-
Jamaican musician Byron Lee, who plays regularly in Trinidad at carnival season,
or in Martinique or other islands. Typically, these other Caribbean festivals occur
at times other than carnival Monday and Tuesday, so as not to compete with
carnival in Trinidad. In the chapters that follow, we do not intend to privilege the
carnivals in any specific location. But we do hope that, by analyzing the dynamics
of relocating the festival in particular places, we will be able to get at some of the
major recurrent issues involved in the diasporic spread of carnival.

NOTES

1 Carnival in other places may exist throughout the nation, as, for instance, in Brazil or Italy.
However, in those countries carnival – for the most part an urban festive form – tends to remain
local and separate, so that one thinks of carnival in Rio as separate and different from carnival
in Bahia, or Venetian carnival as different from that of Rome. Though there are regional
carnivals in Trinidad, however, those participating in the festival tend to cross the island, often
moving from town to town, with many flocking to Port of Spain, known as the Mecca of carnival.
Since the 1920s (and more especially the 1940s), Tobagonians have also developed carnival,
sometimes celebrating in Trinidad and sometimes staying home, but for the most part following
the carnival forms developed historically in Trinidad.
2 Under the leadership of Cecil Alfred, mentored by Trinidadian cultural researcher John Cupid,
carnival in Montreal – scheduled the weekend before Caribana in Toronto – has self-consciously
incorporated the traditional carnival characters in its development. This is an exceptional case,
at least in North America.

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21
GLOBALIZATION IN REVERSE
Diaspora and the export of Trinidad Carnival

Keith Nurse

People carnivalling and playing marse in Brooklyn; they playing marse in Montreal,
in Toronto and Miami, they playing marse in Calgary, and in Antigua, in St. Lucia,
and Jamaica; they playing marse in New York and Notting Hill, moving and moving
and in the moving they throwing out the seeds that defy the holding in the ships
crawling across the Atlantic . . .
(Phillip 1998)

Trinidad Carnival has come under greater scrutiny from local and international
scholars in recent years (Burton 1997; Cowley 1996; Hill 1993; Riggio 1998b;
Rohlehr 1990). However, most of the research takes a historical, ethnographic,
anthropological and/or sociological perspective. In addition, by and large, the
unit of analysis has been that of the nation-state of Trinidad and Tobago. Con-
sequently, few analysts have looked at Trinidad Carnival within the framework of
the globalization of culture. This is symptomatic of a lacuna in the field of popular
culture, as Manning observes: “While Third World countries are well known as
importers of metropolitan popular culture, the reverse process – the export of
cultural products and performances from the Third World – has evoked less dis-
cussion” (1990: 20). This chapter attempts to redress this lacuna in the literature.
The approach used here is built on two planks. The first argument is that the case
study of the export of Trinidad Carnival illustrates the intersection of globalization
and diasporization. The Caribbean enjoys a peculiar circumstance in that it is both
a recipient and a sender of diasporas (Cohen 1997). The Caribbean has been a
destination for several migrations (forced and voluntary) that relate to the region’s
history of incorporation into the modern capitalist world-system over the last five
hundred years (James 1980; Mintz 1974). The Caribbean has also exported a large
share of its population to countries in the North Atlantic, especially since the
1960s. The contemporary diasporization of Caribbean people fits into Stuart Hall’s
notion of double or “twice diasporised” (1989).
The second argument critiques the literature on globalization (Kofman and
Youngs 1996; Waters 1995) and global culture (Featherstone 1994; King 1991),

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which tends to focus on the recent acceleration in the flow of technology, goods,
and resources and sees the flows principally as a north-to-south or center-to-
periphery direction. Much of the literature on globalization does not capture the
long history of global capitalism or the impact of contemporary diasporas on the
north. However, “culturally, the periphery is greatly influenced by the society of
the center, but the reverse is also the case” (Patterson 1994: 109). Therefore, the
aim of the chapter is to examine the counter flow, the periphery-to-center cultural
flows, or what Patterson calls the “extraordinary process of periphery-induced
creolization in the cosmopolis” (1994: 109). In this respect the chapter is a case
study of “globalization in reverse,” a take on what Jamaican poet Louise Bennett
calls “colonization in reverse.”1

THE DIASPORIC CARIBBEAN CARNIVALS

Trinidad’s carnival, which has long been a source of inspiration for carnivals in the
Caribbean region, has been exported outside the region and is now considered truly
global. The globalization of Trinidad Carnival is directly related to the spread and
expansion of a Caribbean diaspora in the North Atlantic, especially after World
War II, in response to the demand for cheap immigrant labor. Almost every major
city in North America and England has a Caribbean-style carnival that is, in large
part, modeled after the one found in Trinidad. In each respective site it is the largest
festival or event in terms of attendance and the generation of economic activity.
For instance, Notting Hill Carnival in London, the largest festival of popular
culture in Europe, attracts over two million people over two days of activities and
generates estimated economic impact of £93 million. Labor Day in New York and
Caribana in Toronto are similarly the largest events in the USA and Canada (see
Table 21.1 below for further details). As such, the diasporic Caribbean carnivals are
arguably “the world’s most popular transnational celebration” (Manning 1990:
36).
It is estimated that there are over sixty diasporic Caribbean carnivals in North
America and Europe (see Table 21.2 below). No other carnival can claim to have
spawned so many offspring. These festivals are modeled on the Trinidad Carnival
or borrow heavily from it in that they incorporate the three main art forms (pan,
mas, and calypso) and the Afro-Creole celebratory traditions (street parade or
theater). Organized by the diasporic Caribbean communities, the diasporic carni-
vals have come to symbolize the quest for “psychic, if not physical return” to an
imagined ancestral past (Nettleford 1988: 197) and the search for a “pan-Caribbean

Table 21.1 The economic impact of diasporic Caribbean carnivals

Diasporic carnivals Attendance Estimated expenditures

Caribana, Toronto 1 million Cnd $200 million

Labor Day, New York 3.5 million US $30 million
Notting Hill, London 2 million Stg. £93 million

Source: Nurse 1997; LDA 2003.

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• GLOBALIZATION IN REVERSE

Table 21.2 Diasporic Caribbean carnivals: regions and cities

(audience figures are given where known)

In the UK (30): In Europe (4):

Barrow-in-Furness Nice – France
Bedford (20,000) Nyon – Switzerland
Birmingham (600,000) Rotterdam – Netherlands
Bradford Stockholm – Sweden
Bristol (40,000)
Coventry In Canada (7):
Derby Calgary
Dover Edmonton
Hereford Montreal
High Wycombe (30,000) Ottawa
Huddersfield Toronto (1 million)
Leeds (300,000) Vancouver
Leicester (100,000) Winnipeg
Liverpool
Luton (100,000) In the USA (20):
Manchester (30,000) Atlanta
Norwich Baltimore
Nottingham Boston
Notting Hill – London (2 million) Cambridge – Massachusetts
Oxford (20,000) Chicago
Plymouth Dallas
Preston Detroit
Reading Hartford
Sheffield Houston
Southampton Jacksonville
Stafford Miami
Swindon New York (2 million)
Waltham Forest – London Oakland
Woking Orlando
Wolverhampton Philadelphia
Rochester
San Francisco
Tallahassee
Washington DC
Westchester

Source: Nurse 1999.

unity, a demonstration of the fragile but persistent belief that “All o’ we is one”
(Manning 1990: 22). In the UK alone, there are as many as thirty carnivals that
fall into this category. They are held during the summer months rather than in the
pre-Lenten or Shrovetide period associated with the Christian calendar. The main

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parade routes are generally through the city center or within the confines of the
immigrant community – the former is predominant, especially with the larger
carnivals.
Like their parent, the diasporic carnivals are hybrid in form and influence.
The Jonkonnu masks of Jamaica and the Bahamas, which are not reflected in the
Trinidad Carnival, are clearly evident in many of these carnivals, thereby making
them pan-Caribbean in scope. The carnivals have over time incorporated car-
nivalesque traditions from other immigrant communities: South Americans
(e.g. Brazilians and Colombians), Africans and Asians. For instance, it is not
uncharacteristic to see Brazilian samba drummers and dancers parading through
the streets of London, Toronto or New York during Notting Hill, Caribana
or Labor Day. The white populations have also become participants, largely as
spectators, but increasingly as festival managers, masqueraders, and pan players.
Another development is that the art forms and the celebratory traditions of the
diasporic Caribbean carnivals have been borrowed, appropriated or integrated into
European carnivals. Indeed, in some instances, the European carnivals have been
totally transformed or “colonized.” Examples of this are the Barrow-in-Furness
and Luton carnivals where there is a long tradition of British carnival. One also
finds a similar trend taking place in carnivals in France, Germany, the Netherlands,
Switzerland, and Sweden, as they draw inspiration from the success of the Notting
Hill Carnival. It is observed that many European carnivals, especially in the UK,
have become less rebellious and more commercial with the rise of modern
industrial culture. In fact, Shohat and Stam argue that “European real-life
carnivals have generally degenerated into the ossified repetition of perennial
rituals” (1994: 302).
The first diasporic Caribbean carnival began in the 1920s in Harlem, New York.
This festival was later to become the Labor Day celebrations in 1947, the name
that it goes by today (Nunley and Bettelheim 1988: 166). The major diasporic
Caribbean carnivals, for example, Notting Hill and Caribana, became institutional-
ized during the mid- to late 1960s at the peak of Caribbean migration. Nunley and
Bettelheim (1988) relate the growth of the carnivals to the rise in nationalism in
the Caribbean with the independence movement of the 1960s. The emergence of the
carnivals can also be related to the rise of “Black Power” consciousness. The growth
in the number and size of the diasporic Caribbean carnivals came in two waves. The
first wave involved the consolidation of the early carnivals during the 1960s until the
mid-1970s. From the mid-1970s two parallel developments took place: the early
carnivals expanded in size by broadening the appeal of the festival, for example
through the introduction of sound systems playing reggae or house music; and a
number of smaller carnivals emerged as satellites to the larger, older ones.

CARNIVAL AND DIASPORIC IDENTITY

The diasporic Caribbean carnivals have developed into a means to affirm cultural
identity and promote sociopolitical integration within the Caribbean diasporic
community as well as with the host society. The diversity in participation suggests
that the diasporic Caribbean carnivals have become multicultural or polyethnic
festivals (Cohen 1982; 1993). For instance, Manning (1990: 35) argues that the
diasporic Caribbean carnivals provide

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a kind of social therapy that overcomes the separation and isolation imposed by
the diaspora and restores to West Indian immigrants both a sense of community
with each other and sense of connection to the culture that they claim as a birthright.
Politically, however, there is more to these carnivals than cultural nostalgia. They
are also a means through which West Indians seek and symbolize integration into
the metropolitan society, by coming to terms with the opportunities, as well as the
constraints, that surround them.

Manning’s explanation of the significance of carnivals to the Caribbean diaspora

is supported by the observations of Dabydeen (1988: 40):
For those of us resident in Britain, the Notting Hill Carnival is our living link with this
ancestral history, our chief means of keeping in touch with the ghosts of “back
home.” In a society which constantly threatens or diminishes black efforts, carnival
has become an occasion for self-assertion, for striking back – not with bricks and
bottles but by beating pan, by conjuring music from steel, itself a symbol of the way
we can convert steely oppression into celebration. We take over the drab streets and
infuse them with our colours. The memory of the hardship of the cold winter gone,
and that to come, is eclipsed in the heat of music. We regroup our scattered black
communities from Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and all over the kingdom to
one spot in London: a coming together of proud celebration.

Dabydeen (1988: 40) goes on to to illustrate that the carnivals are an integrative
force in an otherwise segregated social milieu:
We also pull in crowds of native whites, Europeans, Japanese, Arabs, to witness and
participate in our entertainment, bringing alien peoples together in a swamp or com-
munity of festivity. Carnival breaks down barriers of colour, race, nationality, age,
gender. And the police who would normally arrest us for doing those things (making
noise, exhibitionism, drinking, or simply being black) are made to smile and be ever so
courteous, giving direction, telling you the time, crossing old people over to the other
side, undertaking all manner of unusual tasks. They fear that bricks and bottles would
fly if they behaved as normal. Thus the sight of smiling policemen is absorbed into the
general masquerade.

From another perspective, it is argued that the diasporic carnivals reflect rather
than contest institutionalized social hierarchies. In each of the major diasporic
carnivals the festival has been represented in a way that fits into the colonialist
discourse of race, gender, nation, and empire (Bhabha 1994). The festival has
suffered from racial and sexual stigmas and stereotypes in the media, which are
based on constructions of “otherness” and “blackness.” This situation became
heightened as the carnivals became larger and therefore more threatening to
the prevailing order. In the early phase, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the
carnivals were viewed as exotic, received little if any press, and were essentially
tolerated by the state authorities. From the mid-1970s, as attendance at the festivals
grew, the carnivals became more menacing, and policing escalated, resulting in a
backlash from the immigrant Caribbean community. Violent clashes between
the British police and the Notting Hill Carnival came to the fore in the mid- to
late 1970s (Gutzmore 1993). Similar confrontations occurred in the other major
diasporic carnivals in New York and Toronto (Buff 1997; Manning 1983, 1990).

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Through a gendered lens “black” male participants in the festivals have been
portrayed as “dangerous” and “criminal.” Female participants, on the other hand,
are viewed as “erotic” and “promiscuous” (Hernandez-Ramdwar 1996).
These modes of representation have come in tandem with heightened surveil-
lance mechanisms from the state and the police. In the case of London, the annual
expenditure by the state on the policing of the festival in the late 1990s was in excess
of £3 million, ten times more than public investment for the staging of the festival.
It can thus be argued that the politics of cultural representation has negatively
affected the viability of the diasporic carnivals. The adverse publicity and racialized
stigmas of violence, crime, and disorder have allowed for the blockage of invest-
ments from the public and private sectors in spite of the fact that the carnivals have
proven to be violence-free relative to other large public events or festivals. In the
case of the UK, for instance, official figures show that Notting Hill, which attracts
two million people, has fewer reported incidents of crime than the Glastonbury
rock festival which attracts 60,000 people.2 Yet the general perception is that
Notting Hill is more violence-prone.
Under increased surveillance the carnivals became more contained and con-
trolled during the 1980s. The perspective of governments, business leaders, and
the media began changing when it was recognized that the carnivals were major
tourist attractions and generated significant earnings in visitor expenditures. For
example, the publication of a 1990 visitor survey of Caribana, which showed that
the festival generated Cnd $96 million from 500,000 attendees (Decima 1991),
eventually resulted in the Provincial Minister of Tourism and Recreation visiting
Trinidad in 1995 to see how the parent festival operated. Provincial funding for
the festival increased, accordingly. In 1995, for the first time, London’s Notting
Hill Carnival was sponsored by a large multinational corporation. The Coca-
Cola company, under its product Lilt, a “tropical” beverage, paid the organizers
£150,000 for the festival to be called the “Lilt Notting Hill Carnival” and
for exclusive rights to advertise along the masquerade route and to sell its soft
drinks. That same year the BBC produced and televised a program on the thirty-
year history of Notting Hill Carnival. By the mid-1990s, as one Canadian analyst
puts it, the carnivals were reduced to a few journalistic essentials: “the policing
and control of the crowd, the potential for violence, the weather, island images,
the size of the crowd, the city economy and, most recently, the great potential
benefit for the provincial tourist industry” (Gallaugher 1995). These develop-
ments created concern among some analysts. For example, Awam Amkpa (1993: 6)
argues that
strategies for incorporating and neutralizing the political efficacies of carnivals by
black communities are already at work. Transnational corporations are beginning to
sponsor some of the festivals and are contributing to creating a mass commercialized
audience under the guise of bogus multiculturalisms.

Another analyst saw the increasing role of the state in these terms:
The funding bodies appear to treat it as a social policy as part of the race relations
syndrome: a neutralised form of exotica to entertain the tourists, providing images
of Black women dancing with policemen, or failing this, footage for the media to
construct distortions and mis(sed)representations. Moreover, this view also sees that,

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if not for the problems it causes the police, courts, local authorities, and auditors,
Carnival could be another enterprising venture.
(McMillan 1990: 13–14)

In this respect one can argue that the sociopolitical and cultural conflicts, based
on race, class, gender, ethnicity, nation, and empire, that are evident in the Trinidad
Carnival were transplanted to the metropolitan context. In many ways the
diasporic Caribbean carnivals, like the Trinidad parent, have become trapped
between the negative imagery of stigmas and stereotypes, the cooptive strategies of
capitalist and state organizations and the desires of the carnivalists for official
funding and validation.
For the host societies, in North America and Europe, the diasporic Caribbean
carnivals also allowed for an open and public display of the socioeconomic and
politicocultural tensions that exist between the organs of oppression (i.e. the state,
police, media, church, school) and the Caribbean population. The carnivalesque
aesthetic and politics confronted the hegemonic discourse and modes of repre-
sentation as they relate to stereotypes of race, sexual behavior, and criminal activity.
At one level it has forced a multiculturalism onto the agenda. In other ways, it
illustrates how little things have changed in terms of the hegemonic colonialist
discourse and imperialist structures.

CARNIVAL AND THE CULTURAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

There is some debate as to whether the diasporic carnivals have lost their revo-
lutionary potential, whether they have been coopted and incorporated into the
capitalist production system. The issue, however, is that the host societies have not
remained untouched by the carnivals. They have forced a Caribbean consciousness
on their host societies. The Caribbean carnivals have not only grown in size, they
have also “colonized” other carnivals, especially in Europe. This has occurred
largely because the Trinidad-inspired carnivals have a competitive advantage in the
kinetic movement of the costumes and the vibrancy of the music and dancing.
Thus, “once the liberating forces of mas are felt by citizens of these cities, they
may learn to play mas as well” (Nunley and Bettelheim 1988: 181). They have
reintroduced magic, fantasy, and wonderment into the long-ossified carnivals of
Europe and its diaspora (North America). From this perspective one can argue that
the diasporic Caribbean carnivals are a powerful transcultural force which has
expanded the geo-economic and geo-political space for Caribbean people, at home
and abroad. Amkpa (1993: 6), in commenting on the Caribbean carnivals in the
UK, for instance, notes that:
As victims of enforced hybridity due to displacements and marginalizations
experienced in the histories of the islands, the carnival performances recall the African
and the Asian origins of communities, and these do not only hybridize the identities
of people they share spaces with, but also the dominant culture to whose centre they
have migrated.

It is also that the Caribbean carnivals, because they are forged from the struggles
against slavery, abhor closure and are inherently democratic and participatory. One
of the negative consequences of this is that the carnivals have the characteristics of

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free or collective goods and thus allow for free riding. At most of the carnivals
the people who make money contribute little if any financial resource in terms of
grants or business sponsorship (e.g. the hotels, restaurants, bars, airlines, ground
transportation, state authorities) while the organizers of the festival generally run
on meagre financial resources. As a result, the Caribbean carnivals exhibit some-
thing of a contradiction: the carnivals generate large earnings (e.g. visitor and
audience expenditures) but the organizing units retain very little of the profits.
The diasporic Caribbean carnivals are faced with the challenge of producing
what can be defined as a public good – a street festival which is subject to high
levels of free riding from key stakeholders such as hoteliers, travel and transport
agencies, restaurateurs, broadcasters, and unlicensed concessionaires. In this
sense the carnivals are not easily comparable to closed festivals which have greater
control over the appropriation of economic value by non-contributing entities.
Moreover, the growth of the festival has outpaced the management capabilities
of the early developers, and updating managerial skills has been slower than
required. For this reason most of the carnivals find themselves in a position of
resource-dependency upon state and city authorities or corporate entities. The con-
tributions are then generally viewed as subsidies rather than investments in the
public art process or festival tourism. When the carnivals are funded, the amounts
granted generally are small relative to the mainstream arts and to the economic
impact that the festival makes.
The carnivals have suffered from negative press and publicity in terms of crime,
racial tension, and mismanagement, which have devalued the corporate leverage
and media value of the festival and blocked investment from the public and private
sectors. In part this scenario can be explained by the tendency of the diasporic
Caribbean carnivals to draw on carnivalesque, popular culture, and anti-
establishment themes that are resistant to and critical of official and hegemonic
culture. However, because of the parallels with the large carnivals in the Americas
(e.g. Rio Carnival, Trinidad Carnival, and New Orleans Mardi Gras) it can be
argued that the challenge of attracting resources is linked to the larger multicultural
question of race, ethnicity, and class.
The diasporic Caribbean carnivals are at a historical turning point. In the
last decade they have grown in size and popularity beyond anyone’s wildest
dreams. The diasporic Caribbean carnivals have grown from being the bane of their
respective cities to becoming an indispensable feature of popular culture, multi-
culturalism, and cultural tourism. They have also outgrown the managerial and
entrepreneurial capabilities of the festival organizers as exemplified by the
problems of indebtedness in Caribana and the charges of mismanagement that
have affected carnivals such as Notting Hill. These problems are further com-
pounded by the factionalism and fragmentation found in many of the carnivals,
the most notable example being Miami Carnival. Faced with a less than co-
operative governmental and corporate sector, the carnival organizers have thrived
by leveraging political capital, largely under the banner of multiculturalism. How-
ever, the increased recognition of the importance of the economic benefits of the
carnivals is bringing new political concerns. The carnivals are now considered too
vital to the respective cities to be left up to the vagaries of diasporic politics. This
is evident in the recently commissioned economic impact study of the Notting Hill
Carnival by the London Development Agency.

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This scenario establishes an interesting context for the future of the diasporic
carnivals. In the current recession-plagued period where most developed country
state agencies find themselves under severe financial constraints there is a strong
temptation to cut funds to the Arts, especially so-called multicultural or ethnic
art. The shift in the political spectrum to the right-of-center has also made for a
less supportive environment. These trends signal that the stakeholders involved in
putting on the carnivals must begin to develop a strategy to enhance their income-
earning prospects independent of philanthropic public support; in the form
of corporate investments based on crass commercialism. Failure in this regard is
likely to result in the carnivals being disbanded or taken over by state agencies or
corporate entities.
These concerns raise the issue of political consciousness and praxis within the
Caribbean community. In terms of the transnational cultural politics of carnival,
the Caribbean diaspora is not a homogeneous group. There are a number of
schisms that impact the politics of the diasporic carnivals. Jamaicans outnumber
other islanders (e.g. Trinidadians) by a significant ratio, notably in the UK, and
consequently there has been a strong contest between both groups over what
should be in the carnival: reggae versus calypso; static sound systems versus mobile
sound-trucks. In part, the position of Jamaicans can be explained by the strength
of their popular culture in the metropolitan context. Another major conflict has
been between Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean groups, especially in Toronto,
where there is a sizable Indian population from Guyana and Trinidad. Much
heated debate has emerged as to whether the festival should be portrayed as a
“Caribbean” festival rather than a “black” or “Afro-Caribbean” thing. The former,
being viewed as more inclusive, was favored by the Indo-Caribbean community.
This contrasts with the situation in the UK where the carnival has shifted from a
“Caribbean thing” to being a “black British” and even a national festival. The
success of the carnivals has encouraged the jockeying for positions of power and
ownership within the festival. In many respects these contestations mirror the
inherent fragmentation of a multiethnic community and the process of continuous
negotiation of identity that follows.

CONCLUSION

For the Caribbean diaspora, carnival has emerged as a basis for asserting a pan-
Caribbean cultural identity and as a mode of resistance in an otherwise alienating
environment. The carnivals have also allowed for integration as well as contestation
with the dominant white population in addition to the other immigrant com-
munities within the host societies. In tandem, the carnivals have had to confront
colonialist and imperialist discourses and practices reminiscent of the threats that
the parent carnival faced in the nineteenth century. Financial challenges along
with schisms based on race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality have factored in the
Caribbean community’s ability to capitalize on the geopolitical, economic, and
cultural space that the festival has created. These conclusions reinforce the view
that carnivals, like other popular culture forms, involve the aestheticization of
politics and are keenly contested by different interest groups and social forces
(Cohen 1993) and thus defy simplistic generalizations which view transgression and
cooptation in oppositional terms.

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The chapter argues that the diasporic Caribbean carnivals are products of and
responses to the processes of globalization as well as transcultural social for-
mations. This illustrates that carnival as a cultural activity is not just about merri-
ment, colorful pageantry, revelry and street theatre, although there is a lot of that
taking place. Carnival is born out of the struggle of marginalized peoples to shape
a cultural identity through resistance, liberation, and catharsis. These values have
facilitated its replication wherever the Caribbean diaspora is found. The diasporic
carnivals have acted as a bond between the diasporic community and those at
home, promoting much travel and contributing to the growth of a cultural industry
in Trinidad and Tobago with strong export capabilities (Nurse 1997). It is also
observed that the sheer size and economic impact of the diasporic Caribbean
carnivals have made them an important basis for transnational diasporic politics.

NOTES

1 Louise Bennett’s poem entitled “Colonisation in Reverse” chronicles the wave of Jamaican
and Caribbean migration and its sociocultural impact on England in the 1960s (see Markham
1989: 62–3).
2 In 1992 the Glastonbury rock festival had 636 reported crimes compared to the 80 reported
for Notting Hill (So Yu Going to Carnival, 9 (January, 1995): 88–9).

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22
CARNIVAL IN LEEDS AND LONDON
Making new black British subjectivities

Geraldine Connor and Max Farrar

Participating in carnival undermines the possibility of writing an objective

account. This extraordinary experience, at once creative, transgressive, and
intensely pleasurable, melts the cool detachment of the traditional academic. Both
the authors of this chapter, one formed at the center, as the British defined it, of an
empire, the other at its margin, made their way to carnival from quite different
positions, but we find ourselves united in our love of the whirlwind of art, passion,
and struggle that carnival unleashes every year. We recognize that there are almost
as many ways of analyzing carnival as there are cities that host this marvelous
spectacle, but in this chapter we articulate a common perspective, which, though
infused with our own subjectivity, nevertheless makes a serious effort to interpret
the two largest Caribbean carnivals in the UK.1
The carnivals in Leeds and London, celebrated over the Bank Holiday weekends
at the end of August every year since 1967, symbolize the creative, surreptitiously
political, energies of men and women formed in the English-speaking Caribbean in
the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Seeking a new life either in London, the cosmopolitan
capital city of a recently abandoned empire, or in Leeds, a northern city at the
end of its life as an industrial machine for that empire, these men and women
were inspired by their recent memories of the massive Trinidad Carnival, or the
smaller, but equally vibrant carnival in St Kitts-Nevis. For many, carnival had
a special place as an embodied, artistic representation of the pleasures, pains,
and protests of their lives in their islands of origin. As they found their place
in the frequently unloving Mother Country, reuniting with their children or
making new families in Britain, many of their children grew up within households
in which the politics and art of carnival were central. Others, perhaps not deeply
involved in the preparations, learned that the carnival summer Bank Holiday
was a specially joyous, and specifically Caribbean, highlight of their year. These
younger people today join with their parents and grandparents in the making
of carnival.
But the analysis of carnival cannot be limited to mere description of its pleasures.
This chapter offers an understanding of the carnivals in Leeds and London

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structured by the following themes: first, the long history of the Trinidad Carnival
being used as a vehicle for protest against the injustices of colonial subjugation
has been transported into the UK carnival tradition; the latter must be under-
stood in the context of opposition to white British racism; second, the occupation
by carnival revelers of specific neighborhoods of the major cities, and the struggle,
particularly in London, to maintain that public, mobile presence on the streets, is
an essential component of the British carnival tradition; the demand to occupy the
streets takes particular force because carnival is an essentially embodied, per-
formative art form; third, because of these two phenomena, carnival has been one
of the anvils on which new black British identifications have been forged. Over
nearly forty years in the UK, new concepts of black British identity, in which the
creative and expressive arts are a central feature, have emerged. New subjects,
formerly colonized, sometimes anticolonial, and now postcolonial, have formed
themselves throughout the postwar period of black settlement in the UK, and
carnival has been an important instrument in this transformation.

THE UK CARNIVAL: THE CONTEXT OF RACISM

Trinidadian/British poet, publisher, and political activist John La Rose has pointed
out that Caribbean migrants had already formed their artistic, political, and social
lives before they arrived in the UK: “We did not come alive in Britain” (Harris
1996: 240). One aspect of that history is the anticolonial struggles for inde-
pendence in the islands of the English-speaking Caribbean (James 1985; Parry
and Sherlock 1971; Richards 1989). Another is the experience of carnival. The
earliest recollection of carnival for one of the authors of this chapter was as a child
growing up in Trinidad, sitting on the bleachers of the Queen’s Park Savannah
(Port of Spain) in scorching hot sun and seeing her fantasy come alive: the steel
orchestra Silver Stars’ portrayal of Gulliver’s Travels. It was 1963. Right in front of
her were all the children of Lilliput in glorious costumed splendor, exactly as she
had imagined it from reading the book, surrounding the amazing, tied up and
nailed down, giant-sized Gulliver. The band was designed by Pat Chu Foon. To add
to the delight, this was her first encounter with steelband in all its glory. The band
that impressed her the most was Guinness Cavaliers. Lord Kitchener’s kaiso of
that year was “De road make to walk on carnival day,” but the Mighty Sparrow was
also a serious contender with “Dan is de man in de van.” The sailor bands, all
in white, with masqueraders numbering in the thousands – you had to duck the
talcum powder! (Hill (1972: 106–10) provides a detailed description of the stage
show at Trinidad’s first independence carnival of 1963.) Not only did this leave a
lifelong impression on her, it shaped her work as a creative artist in both Britain
and the UK. In the mid-1970s she played a tee shirt mas of which her memories are
just as vivid. She jumped up all over Notting Hill behind Miguel Barabas and his
percussion crew, playing on the back of a pick-up truck.
Peter Minshall was designing for Notting Hill Carnival in those days, his famous
“Hummingbird” costume taking shape at that time. On the road Ebony steelband
played a Peters and Lee hit, “Don’t Make Me Wait Too Long.” Ebony’s mas
band that year was called Colour My Soul and depicted all the national colors of
the different Caribbean islands: Grenada, Trinidad, Jamaica. London Carnival
would not have been the same if we did not all dance the night away in one of the

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now late Charles Applewhite’s legendary carnival fetes. The latest calypso import
from Trinidad that year was Shadow’s “Bassman” – bom bom pudi bom bom!
In a similar vein, the founders of the Leeds Carnival drew their inspiration from
the childhood memories. Ian Charles joined his first mas camp – a Sailor band –
when he left his home in Arima to go to college in Port of Spain. Arthur France was
“always fascinated by carnival” in his home island of St Kitts, despite the fact that
his parents would not let him attend, because of the sometimes physical rivalry
between the steelbands. “When I was a child I remember seeing Levi Jeffers and
other men who are now in Leeds in a play called David and Goliath which they put
on the road,” he recalls. Ian Charles always wanted to be in a troupe of robbers:
“They would catch you on the corner and pull out their guns – you couldn’t get
away until you paid them something!” (LWICC 1988)
This chapter’s other author first encountered carnival in Leeds in the early 1970s.
With none of the rich history of the Trinidad Carnival to inform him, shaped
instead in England by a commitment to anti-racist politics, attending a Carnival
Queen show at the Mecca Ballroom came as a cultural shock. These were early
examples of carnival art in Leeds, produced by people from the small islands of St
Kitts-Nevis, with help from West Indian students studying at Leeds University, but
the costumes and the performance were so clearly superior to anything he had seen
at an English fete that he immediately recognized them as magnificent examples
of popular art. The program for that year lists seven Queen contestants, music of a
type he had never dreamed he would hear (the Wilberforce steelband), and songs by
Lord Silkie, who had heard calypso in St Kitts, and was determined to continue the
tradition in the somewhat colder climate of Leeds (Farrar 2001).
His abiding memory of that night is symptomatic of the troubled relationship
between black and white in the UK: his rising desire to join the joyous, expressive
spectacle of black culture, and his deep embarrassment as he and the other white
people demonstrated how far they needed to travel to catch the spirit. A few days
later, as the carnival procession gathered in the park opposite his house, he photo-
graphed the event for Chapeltown News, the local community newspaper. These are
long shots – having few connections with the revelers, fearing rejection as an
unwelcome, possibly racist, outsider, he pointed his camera and hoped for the best.
His caution was well-founded. Racism by whites against black citizens, and the
increasingly militant response, was the context in which black–white relationships
were inevitably placed. By the 1970s, most of Britain’s black population had ten to
twenty years’ experience of that hostility. Although social scientists disagreed on
exact proportions of the white population who revealed “extremely prejudiced”
attitudes in surveys in the 1950s, Anthony Richmond concluded that it was around
one-third of the population (Richmond 1961: 247). Searching for a place to rent,
black British citizens found notices in the window reading “No coloureds” (see
photo in Hiro 1992). It could get much worse. Wallace Collins described, on his first
night in London in 1954, meeting “a big fellow with side-burns” lunging at him
with a knife and shouting “You blacks, you niggers, why don’t you go back to the
jungle” (Collins (1961) cited in Fryer 1984: 375). These big fellows, so-called Teddy
Boys, aided and abetted by fascists, set off violent riots against black residents
in Notting Hill in 1958 (Pilkington 1988; Fryer 1984: 378–80; Hiro 1992: 39–40). It
is important to note that Sir Oswald Mosley, standing as the British Union of
Fascists’ candidate for the Notting Hill area in the 1959 general election, was not

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able to stir up any further disorder, and received a derisory number of votes
(Benewick 1972: 16).
Nevertheless, carnival was created in Britain as one of the responses by black
settlers to the disenfranchisement, blatant racism, and victimization they experi-
enced in the 1950s and 1960s. It should be understood as a very specific response –
one which asserted the positive contribution that black people would make to the
cultural life of Britain. Shortly after the Notting Hill “race” riots, Claudia Jones
initiated the carnival tradition in the UK. Scholars differ in their accounts of the
first carnival event,2 but the authoritative account is Marika Sherwood’s. Repro-
ducing the souvenir brochure for the night, Sherwood explains that it took place at
St Pancras Town Hall in central London on January 30, 1959, with a cabaret
program directed by Edric Connor, choreography by Stanley Jack, with stage decor
by Rhoda Mills and Charles Grant. Artists included Cleo Laine, The Southlanders,
Boscoe Holder Troupe, Mike McKenzie Trio, the Mighty Terror, Pearl Prescod,
Sepia Serendares, Fitroy Coleman, Corinne Skinner-Carter, Trinidad All Stars and
Hi-Fi steelbands, West Indian Students Dance Band, and Rupert Nurse and his
Orchestra (Sherwood 1999: 54–6). Jones, whose family had emigrated to the US
from Trinidad when she was 9, had been arrested and served with a deportation
order in 1951 because of her Communist Party activity. Trinidad was extremely
reluctant to admit her, and she arrived in London in 1955 (Sherwood 1999: 22–6).
Jones founded the West Indian Gazette, which included contributions from leading
Caribbean novelists such as George Lamming and Andrew Salkey, as well as
British and international news. Jones “had a distinct socialist and anti-imperialist
perspective” (Alleyne 2002: 28), but she also had a particular perspective on
the arts. In the 1959 brochure she wrote of the “event of Notting Hill and
Nottingham” (both areas had experienced “race” riots in 1958) as the context for
“our Caribbean Carnival,” arguing that if carnival had
evoked the wholehearted response from the peoples from the Islands of the Caribbean
in the new West Indies Federation, this is itself testament to the role of the arts in
bringing people together for common aims, and to its fusing of the cultural, spiritual,
as well as political and economic interests of West Indians in the UK and at home.
(Jones, cited in Sherwood 1999: 157)

By 1962, the event at the Seymour Hall had attracted the Mighty Sparrow, one of
the most politically acute of the Trinidadian calypsonians, and the West Indian
Gazette organized another performance at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in the
north of England (Sherwood 1999: 161). Jones died in 1964, but the tradition she
had established was directly utilized in the first Notting Hill street fair which
included a distinctive West Indian Carnival presence in 1966. Darcus Howe, writer,
broadcaster, and former editor of the radical monthly Race Today,3 remembers
“five hundred revelers and a makeshift steelband in a swift turnaround along Great
Western Road, Westbourne Park and thence onto Powis Square” (Howe, interview
with Geraldine Connor).
The initiative for this event came from Rhaune Laslett, a woman of Native
American and Russian descent who was president of the London Free School. She
organized cultural events and a street procession with the aim of familiarizing
white and black people with each other’s customs, improving the image of Notting
Hill, and generating warmth and happiness (Cohen 1993: 10–11).

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By 1969, Laslett’s fair had included an Afro-Cuban band, the London Irish Girl
Pipers, Russ Henderson’s West Indian three-man band, the Asian Music Circle, the
Gordon Bulgarians, a Turkish Cypriot band, the British Tzchekoslovak Friendship
band, a New Orleans marching band, the Concord Multi-racial Group, and the
Trinidad Folk Singers. But all had appeared “within an unmistakenly British – if
not English – cultural framework” (Cohen 1993: 19).
It took some time for the Notting Hill Carnival to take on a completely Caribbean
form, organized by British black people. From 1971 onwards, the conventions of
the Trinidad Carnival, particularly the steel pan orchestra, were introduced, and
leadership came from West Indians.4 One of the main movers of this turn was
Lesley Palmer, a teacher and musician, born in Trinidad but raised in London, who
went back to Trinidad to study its carnival, returning in 1973 to work on mobilizing
steel and mas bands (Cohen 1993: 26; Palmer 1986).
The context in which carnival was created in London and Leeds is political in
the sense that making culture cannot be divorced from the social and political
system in which that culture is located. Carnival is one of the various modes
of action by which black settlers and their children changed the cultural life
of Britain. Arthur France explains the political context very clearly: carnival
was established in Leeds in 1967 as a means of taking the heat out of the racial
strife of the day. France, one of the originators of the Leeds West Indian Carnival,
was a leading member, with Calvin Beech and Gertrude Paul, of the United
Caribbean Association (formed in 1964) in Leeds, which had already initiated
a series of lobbies and demonstrations against racial discrimination in the city.
Remembering carnival in his native St Kitts, France recognized the need to
produce an event which would celebrate West Indian culture, as well as provide
time off from the conflictual business of demanding equal rights in a resistant
white society.5
The origin of the Leeds Carnival lies in a fete organized in 1966 at Kitson
College (now Leeds College of Technology) by two students, Frankie Davis (from
Trinidad) and Tony Lewis (from Jamaica). The British Soul band Jimmy James and
the Vagabonds played, Marlene Samlal Singh organized a troupe of people dressed
as Red Indians, and Frankie Davis wore his costume on the bus from Roundhay
Road to the town center. The party ended at the British Council’s International
House, off North Street.
Arthur France, who still chairs the Leeds Carnival Committee, had first suggested
starting a carnival in 1966. He approached the United Caribbean Association for
backing, but it initially rejected the idea, and then set up a committee which did not
deliver. To push his idea forward, France then selected another committee, which
included Willie Robinson, Wally Thompson, Irwin and Rounica, Samlal Singh,
Rose McAlister, Ken Thomas, Anson Shepherd, Calvin Beech, and Vanta Paul. By
1967, the carnival preparations were under way. Ma Buck was centrally involved in
the organizing, and Ian Charles’s home in Manor Drive, Leeds 6, was turned into a
mas camp in which three costumes were produced. A similar fate befell Samlal
Singh’s home in Lunan Place, Leeds 8. The first Queen Show was held in the Jubilee
Hall, on Savile Place, off Chapeltown Road, Leeds 7. The Sun Goddess – worn by
Vicky Cielto, designed by Veronica Samlalsingh, Tyrone Irwin, George Baboolal,
and Clive Watkins – took first prize. Betty Bertie designed and made a costume
called The Snow Queen, and Wally Thompson made one called The Gondola.

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Willie Robinson made Cleopatra, a costume worn by Gloria Viechwech, while the
fifth costume was called The Hawaiian Queen.
The Gay Carnival Steel Band, which later became the Boscoe Steel Band,
including Roy Buchanan, Rex Watley, Curtland, Dabbo, Tuddy, Vince, Clark,
Desmond, and others, played steel pan music in the procession that year, joined by
the Invaders, also from Leeds (led by Prentice), the St Christopher Steel Band from
Birmingham, and another band from Manchester. Troupes on the road included
the Cheyenne Indians (with Ian Charles as the Chief), the Fantasia Britannia
troupe (led by Vanta Paul), and the Sailors (organized by Willie Robinson),
and Veronica Samlalsingh and Anson Shepherd produced a children’s band. The
procession wound its way from Potternewton Park to the Leeds Town Hall, where a
crowd of about a thousand people were entertained by a steelband competition
judged by Junior Telford from London, who had brought the first Trinidadian steel-
band to Europe. That night, the Last Lap dance was held at the Leeds Town Hall.
Telford took the news back to London, and the Leeds troupes were invited to
attend the Notting Hill street fair.6 Leeds rests its claim to be the first West Indian
carnival in the UK on the fact that it was the first to be exclusively Caribbean in
form, and the first to be run by a black British organization.
Refusing the racial assumptions of imperial British culture, carnival has
appropriated and reformulated European aesthetics, combining them with
African traditions, and created a new cultural space as a tool for liberation. As
Brian Alleyne (2002: 67) points out, despite differences in detail, the existing studies
of the British Carnival all
see the development of carnival in Britain in terms of a struggle by West Indians to
make a public expression of a collective identity in the face of a structurally racist and
hostile social reality in Britain. They have treated the carnival as one instance of the
ongoing struggle of Black people to forge social and political space in Britain.

THE EMBODIED SPATIAL PRACTICES OF CARNIVAL

The established order in hierarchically organized societies always perceives the

gathering of crowds of the “lower orders” as a potential threat. The history of
the Trinidad Carnival, from the time when the former slaves began to participate
en masse in festivities that had probably been reserved primarily for the master
class, is a history of prohibitions and bans (Pearse 1956a). From the first pro-
cession, Leeds Carnival organizers have always been careful in negotiating the
route and the stewarding with the West Yorkshire Police Force, and Inspector
Roy Exley’s helpful response to the Leeds committee’s approach is warmly com-
memorated in its 25th Anniversary brochure (LWICC 1992). Nevertheless, as
Willie Robinson, a participant in the first Leeds Carnival, recollects: “As a measure
of the insecurity of the West Indian [sic] community in Leeds, some still believed
that those taking part would be arrested on the day” (LWICC 1987: 8).
Early support from the local council for the Notting Hill Carnival evaporated
in 1966, seemingly because the Free School was believed by councilors to be a
subversive organization – the Free School was at the heart of organizing local black
and white tenants against slum landlords (Cohen 1993: 13–14, citing Kensington
News press reports from July 1966 onwards).

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Notting Hill’s carnival subsequently obtained significant support from a variety

of sources, but in 1976 it was the scene of major violent protest – described in the
mass media as rioting – by young black men against the Metropolitan Police.
Fifteen hundred policemen were deployed that year, and used what some observers
described as “highhanded and severe” methods in their dealings with the youth
(Cohen 1993: 34); 325 policemen were hospitalized, and sixty people were arrested
(Race Today, September, 1976: 170). This was the starting point for a concerted
and long-running effort to remove the carnival from the streets of Notting Hill. The
police and the council were faced with determined resistance from the Carnival
Development Committee (CDC), chaired by Darcus Howe, whose arguments in
various issues of Race Today were summarized in his 1978 pamphlet The Road
Make to Walk on Carnival Day. The use of a title borrowed from Lord Kitchener’s
calypso was one of several markers of the CDC’s solidarity with the working-class
pan and mas men and women who saw the history of carnival as one aspect of the
emancipation struggle. Abner Cohen states that the intense argument between this
tendency, and the rival Carnival and Arts Committee (CAC), with its moderate,
middle-class black leadership, was finally resolved in favor of the CAC in 1981,
when the Arts Council intervened to change the funding arrangements for the
carnival (Cohen 1993: 45–51).
In a critical review of Cohen’s book, David Roussel-Milner, friend of Claudia
Jones, a founder of the Martin Luther King Foundation, carnivalist and Arts
Council worker until 1985 (Sherwood 1999: 14, and passim), argues that the CAC
was formed in order to divide the Notting Hill Carnival movement, and that the
Arts Council used the existence of two committees as an excuse to withdraw
support. He strongly implies that there was a conspiracy between the police,
the Arts Council, and the local authorities “to take control of carnival” (Roussel-
Milner 1996: 9).
When the CAC collapsed in 1988, the Carnival Enterprise Committee took over,
chaired by barrister Claire Holder, and major changes were introduced to the
organization of carnival in Notting Hill. A new framework was imposed by the
police, which included strict enforcement of an early end to the event; a 75 percent
reduction in the numbers of sound systems allowed; prevention of dancing behind
the mas bands; intensive video surveillance and interception of black youths;
strict adherence by the procession to the agreed route. Perhaps most significant of
all, the black youths who had formerly coalesced around sound systems were now
completely separated from the mobile carnival procession (Cohen 1993: 65–70).
Since then, Notting Hill Carnival has become a commercialized, highly respectable
event. Having been subjected to “an overwhelming onslaught from different
directions intended to force it out or confine in within a strait-jacket” (Cohen
1993: 9), it may appear now to be fully contained within the parameters laid down
by the establishment.
To draw this conclusion would be to overlook the spatial politics of carnival, and
the embodied performances that it enacts. Henri Lefebvre (1976: 31) argued that
“Space is permeated with social relations . . . shaped and moulded from historical
and natural elements.” As we have seen, Notting Hill is just such a space. According
to Darcus Howe: “We have captured the streets of Notting Hill and transformed
it into an arena of cultural rebellion” (Cohen 1993: 111). The “we” here is signifi-
cantly ambiguous; Howe probably refers primarily to black (Caribbean) people,

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but might well include all those white and other non-white residents who have
supported carnival and other local struggles. Michael Keith refers to this area as a
“symbolic location” and argues that Notting Hill, in the period 1975 to 1988, was
“the spatial realization of a deeply rooted historical struggle” (Keith 1993: 123–9).
In this perspective, the ascendancy of a group of black Britons described by their
opponents as “yuppie capitalists,” “coconuts,” and “lackeys” (Cohen 1993: 68)
might be regarded as one moment in the dialectic. That process took another turn
in 2002 when Claire Holder, who at least grew up in Trinidad in dialogue with
carnival, was deposed as Chief Executive of the Notting Hill Carnival Trust and
replaced by Professor Chris Mullard. According to Darcus Howe, this was the
result of a coup organized by Lee Jasper, the black British adviser to the Lord
Mayor of London (2002). The Mayor’s interest in carnival is well known (Jasper
2001), but Mullard strongly denied this allegation, arguing that there was no
pressure from the Lord Mayor’s office. His position as Chair of the Trust was
short-term, with the objective of restoring democratic involvement of all parties
engaged in the Notting Hill Carnival (Mullard 2002).
If a fully democratic process was to emerge, the radical tendency within the
London Carnival movement, exemplified by the Association for a People’s
Carnival and the People’s War sound system (Alleyne 2002: 66–74), might well
take control and restore “the working class tradition” in the London Carnival.
The formation of the Notting Hill International Carnival Committee, with its
democratic constitution and membership composed of mas bands, steelbands,
sound systems, calypsonians, participating music bands, and Notting Hill tenants
and residents’ association, indicated that such a process was in motion (La Rose
1990).
Support for this proposition comes from the Leeds Carnival. Under the leader-
ship of people dedicated to the earlier forms of carnival, who learned from the con-
flict in London, and who maintained firm opposition to hyper-commercialization,
Leeds Carnival has not only maintained a trouble-free procession throughout its
long history but has also nurtured designers, steelbands, soca sounds, and mas
bands with deep roots in the black communities of northern England. Stripping
itself of political rhetoric, negotiating carefully with the police, securing the
support of all the mas camps, with professional public relations provided by Susan
Pitter, Leeds Carnival has finessed the politics of space. It has successfully varied its
route, initially processing through Chapeltown and the city center, then basing
itself only in Chapeltown, and (in 2002) agreeing to the city council’s request for it
to enter the city center again, holding the Carnival Queen contest on a specially
constructed catwalk in the new Millennium Square outside the Civic Hall. It is
likely that in future years the Bank Holiday Monday procession will enter the city
center and hold a show in the Square. This development is a further indication
of the British-Caribbean peoples in Leeds moving from the margin to the center
(Julien and Mercer 1996).7
Another pointer to the complexity of the cultural politics of carnival lies in the
special form of embodied performativity that it represents. Mikhail Bakhtin pro-
vided an analysis of Rabelais’s representation of the sixteenth-century carnival in
France which is relevant to an understanding of the London and Leeds West
Indian Carnivals today. “[C]arnival is one of Bakhtin’s great obsessions, because in
his understanding of it, carnival, like the novel, is a means of displaying otherness:

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Fig. 22.1 Sharon Clements in The Lost Ship mas band, designed by
Hughbon Condor, Queen of the Leeds Carnival 2002.
Photograph by Max Farrar.

carnival makes familiar relations strange” (Holquist 1990: 89). One form of this
display of “otherness” is the use of extraordinary costume and often bizarre
cosmetics to transform the body’s appearance radically. This is a new type of body,
one which is often transgressive of conventional norms. Bakhtin produced a vision
of what he called “the grotesque body”:
A body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed: it is continually
built, created, and builds and creates another body . . . Eating, drinking, defecation
. . . copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, swallowing up by another body . . . In all
these events, the beginning of life and end of life are closely linked and interwoven.
(Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (1984), cited in Holquist 1990: 89)

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Fig. 22.2 Transgressive bodies: Michael Paul and Hebrew Rawlins

cross-dressing at the Leeds West Indian Carnival, 2002.
Photograph by Max Farrar.

Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism – that thoughts, words, and existences take place
only as dialogue with the other (Roberts 1994: 247) – applies to carnival because
this is one of the sites in which the grotesque body is displayed. In carnival, all
bodies are in dialogue. It would be surprising if all the excesses which Bakhtin
described in the Rabelaisian, fictional carnivalesque world of the mid sixteenth
century had survived intact in the twenty-first-century carnival in the UK (indeed,
we would argue that this reduction of excess should be addressed by carnival in the
UK today); but Bakhtin’s general point about “grotesque bodies” remains highly
relevant. In the Leeds Carnival of 2001 people played mas dressed in rags and
smeared in cosmetics to represent mud, and Captain Wenham’s Masqueraders
troupe (which was a major feature of the Leeds Carnival until very recently) were

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dressed in tatters and wore grotesque masks. Benji’s troupe once appeared as pall-
bearers, carrying a body in a gorilla mask, playing dead. In 2001 Ruth Bundey
appeared in an elephant’s mask (referencing the Hindu god Gamesh). The regular
appearance in the Leeds Carnival of men who delight in dressing as women
(Hebrew Rawlins and Michael Paul being the best examples) is another aspect of
this playful transgressiveness (see figure 22.2).8
In contemporary carnival in the UK, the “grotesque” is in dialogue with its
opposite, “beauty,” and, perhaps in keeping with the postmodern obsession with
the perfection of form according to increasingly globalized notions of what con-
stitutes beauty, this beauty form now predominates. It is important to note, how-
ever, that, in both the Leeds and the London carnivals, costumes are worn by
people of all shapes and sizes, and aesthetic standards are mainly judged according
to the artistry of the costume, rather than the beauty of the wearer. Holquist writes
that these bodies, for Bakhtin, and we would argue for today’s carnival, “militate
against monadism, the illusion of closed-off bodies or isolated psyches in bour-
geois individualism, and the concept of a pristine, closed-off, static identity and
truth wherever it may be found.” The Caribbean carnival is thus one source of
resistance to the “egotism of the West” that Bakhtin denounced (Holquist 1990:
90).

NEW BLACK SUBJECTIVITIES

Around the middle of the twentieth century, when British citizens from the West
Indies were beginning to settle in the UK, George Lamming wrote:
It is the brevity of the West Indian’s history and the fragmentary nature of the
different cultures which have fused into something new; it is the absolute dependence
on the values in that language of his coloniser which has given him a special relation
to the word, colonialism. It is not merely a political definition; it is not merely the
result of certain economic arrangements. It started as these, and grew somewhat
deeper. Colonialism is at the very base and structure of the West Indian cultural
awareness. His reluctance in asking for complete, political freedom . . . is due to the
fear that he has never had to stand. A foreign or absent Mother has always cradled his
judgement.
(Lamming [1960] 1995: 15)

This was the ideological context in which the carnival movement in the UK was
created. It is one which we would argue has almost, but not entirely, disappeared.
Stuart Hall has analyzed the change that became observable in the 1980s. He
argued that, in an earlier period of cultural politics, when black people were
“placed, positioned at the margins . . . blacks have typically been the objects, but
rarely the subjects, of the practices of representation.”
Now, as a political struggle over representation itself emerged, there was
the recognition of the extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social
experiences and cultural identities which compose the category “black”; that is, the
recognition that “black” is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category,
which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendental racial
categories and which therefore has no guarantees in nature.

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• GERALDINE CONNOR AND MAX FARRAR

Thus it is no longer possible to hypothesize an “essential black subject.” Instead,

we are “plunged headlong into the maelstrom of a continuously contingent,
unguaranteed, political argument and debate, a critical politics, a politics of
criticism” (Hall [1989] 1996: 442–4).
The debate that raged around carnival in London was a critical moment in the
representation of the conflicting subjective and political positions which are
evident in black British culture today. The actual practice of carnival then repro-
duces a variety of subjectivities on the streets of UK cities. Thus in Leeds we see the
truck hired over the past five years or so by the Pan African Cultural Group,
wearing African clothes and playing African instruments, representing themselves
quite clearly as Africans and Africanists, but not Afro-centrics: they use Kwame
Nkrumah’s socialist concept of Pan-Africanism, and some of the members are
white. The Godfather’s truck carries a precarious pile of speaker boxes, along with
a crew of older men who may well be in suspenders and brassieres, blasting out
soca hits recently imported, usually from Trinidad. These men are emphatically
Caribbeans, but their Bacchanalian followers, some of whom are their children, are
equally emphatically black British, identifying with soca as one of a variety of
musical interests, which will include soul, R&B, UK garage, hip-hop, and reggae.
While this wide variety of styles and identifications will be evident throughout
the Notting Hill Carnival, in Leeds, with the Committee’s insistence on fore-
grounding the steel pan and soca traditions, sound systems will be confined to the
periphery of the carnival. The willingness of the young Leeds Carnival revelers
to accept this limitation during the carnival period is one indication of the fluidity
of the identifications that they make.
Thus, many of these new black subjects have moved beyond the essentialism of
an earlier individualistic, tunnel-visioned consciousness toward a state of multi-
consciousness or interculturalism. Consciously or subconsciously, they have
moved toward the notion that cultural identities are actively constructed through
particular communication processes, social practices, and articulations within
specific circumstances. In doing so, they have constructed a new cultural space and
place. This new position insists upon cultural negotiation which involves a process
of linking together several elements that may not necessarily have had any previous
relation to each other. This articulation represents a movement between alternative
conceptions of truth, a movement toward a many-stranded consciousness
that moves beyond the limited definition of hybridization as a mixing of only two
strands.
Carnival plays a crucial part in blending the wide variety of identifications that
are available in postmodern, or late-modern, Britain. Inherent within the aesthetic
of carnival is the seamless fusion of arts practice and community engagement.
In particular, carnival is now seen and often used as an effective creative tool
for bringing disparate communities together in common celebration. It has
repeatedly demonstrated the potential it offers for communication and unification
across social, cultural and political boundaries, and more recently carnival
has been seen as a model for artistic and social co-operation, integration and
cohesion, ultimately offering a creative opportunity for social and political
change. Despite the commonalities that can be drawn between the carnival
activities of various British Caribbean communities, the nature and form of artistic
expression is also characterized by a diversity that is reflective of the differences

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and complexities evidenced within particular areas of the Caribbean diaspora.

This cross-fertilization of celebratory archetypes reflects influences from a variety of
communities including Trinidadian, Barbadian, Dominican, and Jamaican. In fact
the Liverpool Carnival is a blend of cultural tradition from six Caribbean islands.
But the carnival tradition in the UK is more than simply a means of unifying
people whose origins lie in the various islands of the Caribbean sea. Thus the
Bradford Carnival has embraced contributions from Dominica and Barbados in
the Caribbean, but also includes Asian and white English cultural forms. The Unity
Day Carnival in Wolverhampton reflects Barbadian, white English and Asian
influences. At Notting Hill, the reggae of Jamaica is heard alongside the soca and
steelband of Trinidad, the samba of Brazil, and the jungle, drum’n’bass and garage
of Britain.
In fact British carnival practice has acquired its particular uniqueness and
flavor precisely because it has embraced alternative immigrant communities –
African, Asian, South American – all of whom have their own specific celebratory
promenade traditions from which they can draw.
This diversity is also reflected in the increasingly common practice for the formal
aspects and ideologies integral to Caribbean-style carnival to be borrowed,
appropriated and integrated, to enhance, and transform British carnival and
British celebratory traditions. Having been witnessed first in the early Notting Hill
street fairs, this transformation can be seen to great effect at the Barrow-in-Furness
and Luton carnivals as well as the Fish Quay Festival in North Shields, Newcastle,
where there is a long and established tradition of carnival to build upon. A
more understated approach has been taken at events such as the High Wycombe,
Reading and Dover carnivals.
Tom Fleming (1998) has produced the most sustained analysis of carnival in the
UK (in Leeds and in Bristol) which draws upon sociologies of space and identity,
but our final example of the potential for carnival to formulate and express
new identities and new cultural practices comes from Geraldine Connor’s work
Carnival Messiah. This massive production, staged in 1999 and 2002 by the West
Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds and in 2003 and 2004 in Port of Spain, represents a
unique fusion of the Caribbean Carnival with European opera. Geraldine Connor
describes herself as a “New European” – “a living exponent of the meeting of
Europe, Africa and Asia four centuries ago . . . I carry all that cultural baggage with
me.” She writes:
Carnival Messiah drags Handel’s best-known work kicking and screaming into
the new millennium . . . By superimposing traditional Western European musical
and theatrical devices on the traditional Trinidad Carnival practice, an holistic,
organic metamorphosis occurs . . . [it] creates a natural bridge of cross-fertilisation . . .
Carnival Messiah subverts the ideology of homogenisation; instead, it celebrates
difference and otherness . . . [which does not] equate to cultural separatism or imply
a kind of cultural assimilation. It should instead explore issues of divergence
and “otherness” in terms of cultural parallels and divergences, cultural uniqueness
and similarities.
(Connor 2002)

This model of identities forged in cultural and political practice takes us beyond the
entrenched positions imposed by racism. “New European” might be a self-identity

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• GERALDINE CONNOR AND MAX FARRAR

Fig. 22.3 Carnival Messiah was first performed at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds and fused
carnival traditions and music with Handel’s Messiah. Written and directed by Geraldine Connor, it used
professional actors and a cast of over one hundred people drawn from the local community. Photograph
by Tim Smith, 1999. For comparative carnival costumes see figures 7.6, 8.1–8.3.

to be adopted by those of us in Europe who read the history of that continent

as one of migration and cultural interchange, who recognize the implausibility of
describing as “white European” those whose skin colors vary from pink to olive,
and who through cultural and political practice work toward the abolition of the
category known as white (Roediger 1994; Ware and Back 2002).

CONCLUSION

This chapter has provided the bones of a history of carnival in London and in
Leeds, and it has offered an interpretation of carnival practice. Accepting that
carnival is an intensely subjective experience performed by people who cannot
escape their cultural and political histories, and thus that there are many “truths”
to be constructed around carnival, it has nevertheless argued that the tradition
in the UK is best understood as a subtle, cultural/political response to white
racism. Its subtlety lies in its production of an invisible politics, a politics which is
normally non-confrontational. Carnival in the UK understands that the anti-
human negativity of racism is effectively challenged by the embodied, human
performance of art – an art which has been created “by the people, for the
people,” which occupies and transforms public space. This is an art led by dark-
skinned people, which demonstrates their centrality to the UK cities in which
they have settled, and which includes all people of good will, whatever their

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pigmentation. As Geraldine Connor (2002) puts it: “This new cultural space then
becomes a tool of liberation for all.”

NOTES

1 This chapter arises from a paper presented by Geraldine Connor titled “Carnival as an instru-
ment of postcolonial liberation – In search of a liberative potential for the post-modern West
Indian subject” at the World Conference on Carnival, Showcasing the Caribbean held at Trinity
College, Hartford, CT, in 1998. The overall argument in this chapter is similar to the one made
at the conference, and whole paragraphs have been lifted from that speech. But, whereas the
speech contained the lyric of carnival, this chapter has the drone of academe, providing another
textual indicator of the problems and possibilities of hybridizing cultures.
2 Anne Walmsley’s meticulously researched book on the Caribbean Arts Movement says that
Jones “coordinated the first West Indian Carnival in Britain, at Porchester Hall, Bayswater”
(Walmsley 1992: 21).
3 Howe is related to the late C.L.R. James, and Race Today, published under Howe’s editorship
in London from 1974 until 1982, is the most significant British exemplar of that eminent
Trinidadian Marxist’s cultural politics (see Buhle 1988; Farred 1996).
4 Close readers may be puzzled by the shifting signifiers in this chapter. “West Indian” is used to
reflect the language of the 1960s and early 1970s. In fact the Leeds Carnival insists to this day
on calling itself the Leeds West Indian Carnival. In the 1980s, the term “African-Caribbean”
began to replace “West Indian.” The authors of this chapter use the term “Caribbean” to
reflect the importance of the other national heritages, apart from African, among people of
Caribbean descent. Alternatively, we use “black British.” Unlike some writers we use the lower
case for “black,” because we do not want to fetishize the color of human skin. Because of the
persistence of racism, these are intensely political categories and we recognize that there are
several other terms which other authors prefer.
5 Arthur France made this point in a speech given to the conference of Black and Asian Studies
Association (BASA) held in Leeds on October 19, 1996. The point has been followed in Max
Farrar’s conversations with Arthur France, in which he confirms that this was his approach to
the formation of Carnival in Leeds. BASA (formerly ASACHIB, Secretary: Marika Sherwood)
has a Newsletter obtainable from the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 28 Russell Square,
London WC1B 5DS.
6 This account of the origins of Leeds Carnival is almost identical to the one in Farrar (2001).
Arthur France recalls taking one of his early troupes to the Notting Hill Carnival on a very wet
August Bank Holiday Monday. Both Palmer (1986) and Cohen (1993: 18) give 1968 as the
year of the torrential rain. Palmer (1986) recalls “ ‘man’ from the north [Leeds] joining ‘man’
from Trinidad, and ‘man’ from the Grove . . . pulling the pan . . . the rain so steady.”
7 This account holds true in general, but the Leeds Carnival has not always been harmonious.
Three people died at the Leeds Carnival in 1990. Two were deliberate murders. One was
accidental – a ricochet from gunshot. None of the alleged perpetrators, or victims, was from
Leeds (Farrar 2001). The Committee moved swiftly to change the arrangements made by sound
systems, with full co-operation from the sound crews. The dissension that has occasionally taken
place about the organization of the Leeds Carnival has always been amicably resolved.
8 To get closer to the Leeds Carnival visit the website “Celebrating 35 years of the Leeds West
Indian Carnival,” developed by Pavilion in Leeds, at www.newmasmedia.co.uk.

269
23
“NEW YORK EQUALIZE YOU?”
CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN
BROOKLYN’S LABOR DAY CARNIVAL1
Philip Kasinitz

It has become something of a cliché to declare that New York, and specifically
Brooklyn, is both the largest city and the cultural capital of the anglophone
Caribbean. Like most clichés, this is in some ways true and in some ways mis-
leading. West Indians and their US-born children now number over one million in
the New York metropolitan area (Vickerman and Kasinitz 1999). If West Indians
from the various new nations that constituted the British West Indies before 1962
are considered together, they are the largest immigrant group in New York –
comprising roughly 24 percent of New York’s immigrant and second-generation
population and almost half of the Black population (Waters 1999).2 Much of
the soca, calypso, and reggae consumed in the Caribbean is now produced in
New York, often by artists based there at least part time. Many of the region’s
intellectual and cultural leaders now live and work in New York, as do a surprising
number of its politicians, at least when out of power. Many Caribbean products
can now be obtained more cheaply and more easily in New York than in many parts
of the Caribbean. Indeed, Milton Vickerman has recently argued that actual travel
to the Caribbean is increasingly unnecessary for West Indians seeking to maintain
a strong ethnic affiliation. Today, the middle-class black sections of Brooklyn and
Queens have come to constitute a prosperous West Indian world which many
immigrants and their children now find preferable to the impoverished original
(Vickerman 2001).
And yet, for all of this, New York is not a Caribbean city. West Indians in
New York face a social context utterly different than the one they knew in the
Caribbean, and nowhere is this more apparent than in matters of class and
race. Whether they choose to identify with, or distance themselves from, native
African Americans, West Indian New Yorkers find their lives shaped by race in a
thousand large and small ways different from the way race operated “back home”
(Foner 2001; Waters 1999; Vickerman 1998). In this new context, Caribbean
cultural activity can never really be a simple effort to retain traditions from
“back home.” Cultural forms inevitably take on new and different meanings (see
Buff 2001).

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• “NEW YORK EQUALIZE YOU?”

Nowhere is this more obviously true than in Brooklyn’s West Indian–American

carnival, the annual event that culminates in the huge street celebration which
draws one to two million participants and spectators each year to Eastern Parkway
on the US Labor Day (the first Monday of September), with an increasing number
of competitions and performances taking place the previous weekend. Given the
nature of carnival it could hardly be otherwise. The carnival tradition is one in
which social meanings are always in flux. It is an arena in which ordinary people
can critique and challenge the conditions that shape their lives. As the late Frank
Manning wrote,
Celebration does not resolve or remove ambiguity and conflict, but rather it
embellishes them. It locates these social facts . . . in a performance context in which
they can be thought about, acted upon and aesthetically appreciated. The celebrants’
hope . . . is that the rhythm of performance will find an echo in life, if only for the
moment.
(Manning 1984)

As an event in which the participants’ social identities are both crystallized and
transformed, the Labor Day Carnival struggles uneasily between two different
models of ethnic assertion: the Caribbean, and specifically Trinidadian Carnival,
on the one hand, New York’s own tradition of “ethnic” parade – such as the St
Patrick’s Day Parade and the Puerto Rican Day Parade – on the other. Yet now
larger than the events it is modeled on, carnival is increasingly struggling to create
something new, something that is rooted in the Caribbean, but in many ways is also
very much a product of New York.

ETHNICITY DANCES IN THE STREET: “OLE MAS” COMES TO BROOKLYN

Brooklyn’s Labor Day Carnival is an event that from its beginnings mixed extrava-
gant fantasy and gritty reality, escapist fun and serious purpose. Next to the stilt
walkers and the fantastic dragon, signs with commentary about United States and
Caribbean politics sometimes appear. A band of masqueraders in elaborate “Afri-
can” garb is accompanied by slogans about black pride and African unity. And the
year the Duvaliers were overthrown, the old blue and red flag of pre-Papa-Doc
Haiti waved above some of the most uninhibited of the dancers. New York politi-
cians, always drawn to a crowd, started to come to carnival in the early 1980s. As
the decade went on, national political figures began to add Brooklyn to their Labor
Day itineraries. Then, in 1991, the eyes of the nation were focused on Crown
Heights as carnival followed closely on the heels of serious racial disturbances.
Since that time the event has become the annual occasion for the New York press
to assess the state of the West Indian community, now the largest immigrant group
in this city of immigrants. Today the Labor Day procession is a defining moment in
the political and cultural life of Caribbean New York. Both its location and its
schedule are now considered inviolable.
Held annually since 1969 in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, carnival brings together
people from throughout New York and other North American cities. The crowd
includes young toughs and United Nations Ambassadors, dreadlocked rastas
and churchgoing grandmothers – a virtual cross-section of Caribbean America. In
recent years, many of the community’s more respectable members have complained

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about the raucousness of the carnival. Still, they continue to come, and to bring
their American-born children. As a festival in which people play with the idea
of identity, it is fitting that carnival has become the most visible public symbol of
New York’s West Indian community. Like the West Indian community itself,
Brooklyn’s Carnival is now too massive to ignore, and thus serves to make visible a
group of people who, caught between their status as Blacks in a racially divided city
and as immigrants distinct from the larger African-American community, have
long felt invisible (see Bryce-Laporte 1972). A festival full of uncertainties and
contradictions, carnival also presents an appropriately ambiguous public face for a
people whose role in the city’s civic life remains in flux. Like its diasporic cousin,
the London Carnival studied by Abner Cohen (1980a, 1982), it is a “contested
terrain,” a unique social space in which social and political realities are subject to
redefinition. Thus, carnival is a sphere in which the potential for both conformist
and oppositional politics is always present simultaneously. It is not merely a reflec-
tion of politics, – it is politics – a realm where new ideas about power relations may
be articulated in the context of a public drama.
The Trinidad Carnival served as a model for the Brooklyn celebration, with its
masquerades, ritualized violence, penchant for satirical calypso music, confronta-
tional politics, and status as a nation-building festival. A new, status-conscious elite
paradoxically took its cultural cues from the poor, converting symbols and slogans
of equality – “All O’ We Is One” – into expressions of national unity (Hill 1972).
Trinidad is traditionally a source of employment for persons from smaller islands.
Thus, over the years, Trinidad’s carnival forms and traditions were spread by
returning migrants to parts of the Caribbean that had their own pre-Lenten carnival
traditions, as well as to Protestant territories in which the fete was unknown.
Migrants from Trinidad and neighboring islands began to hold pre-Lenten
dances in New York during the 1920s. Then, in 1947 Jesse Wardle, a Trinidadian
immigrant, obtained a parade permit for a carnival procession from 110th Street
to 142nd Street in Harlem. Held on Labor Day, a time of year more suitable
than February for outdoor celebrations in New York, this event was sponsored by
Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (interestingly, one of the few prominent New
York black politicians of the period who was not of Caribbean descent). As Lord
Invader (1955) described the event:
Labor Day I felt happy,
Because I played Carnival in New York City.
Seventh Avenue was jumpin’,
Everybody was shakin’.
From 110th to 142nd,
We had bands of every description.
This is the first time New York ever had,
Carnival on the streets like Trinidad.

Although dominated by Trinidadian organizers, this street carnival was from its
inception self-consciously pan-West-Indian. Caribbean unity, albeit on Trinidadian
terms, was a central theme. The sheer numbers of people involved in such a highly
visible event helped to promote a sense of group identity. Scheduling the event on
Labor Day helped to break the always tenuous connection to Catholicism of the
pre-Lenten carnival and facilitated the participation of West Indians of all religions.

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In 1964, following a bottle-throwing incident between African-Americans and

Caribbean revelers (coming on the heels of a more serious outbreak of violence in
1961), the parade permit for carnival in Harlem was revoked by city officials
nervous about racial unrest. The next year, Rufus Gorin, a Trinidad-born band-
leader and longtime participant in the Harlem Carnival, attempted to organize a
new Labor Day Carnival in Brooklyn, where large numbers of West Indian
immigrants had by then settled. The small ad hoc committee he headed initially
met resistance from the city, which was hesitant to sponsor a large street gathering
of Blacks during that riot-torn period. Gorin was once even arrested in full carnival
regalia. However, in 1971, the group, now headed by Carlos Lezama, a Trinidadian
immigrant3 and machinist for the New York City Transit Authority, obtained
permission to hold carnival on Eastern Parkway, Frederick Law Olmstead’s stately
boulevard which runs through the heart of central Brooklyn’s black neigh-
borhoods. This broad Parkway is uniquely suited to the huge event – although one
can hardly imagine a use more distant from Olmstead’s genteel vision.
The number of West Indians in New York had already begun to swell following
the 1965 immigration reforms. Over the next three decades, the community and the
event grew together. The area immediately south of Eastern Parkway – which some
in the community are now campaigning to have renamed “Caribbean Parkway” –
soon became the cultural and demographic center of West Indian settlement in
New York. The ad hoc committee is now a permanent organization known as
the West Indian American Day Carnival Association (WIADCA) and is headed by
Lezama and his daughter.
Despite its massive growth, the format of Brooklyn’s carnival has changed
little over the years. During the week prior to Labor Day Monday a series of
concerts, steelband contests, and children’s pageants are held on the grounds of the
Brooklyn Museum. The events climax with a huge carnival procession on Eastern
Parkway on Labor Day itself. These “official” carnival activities are accompanied
by dozens of affiliated dances, concerts, and parties in West Indian neighborhoods
around the city. In contrast to most of New York’s numerous “ethnic” festivals, the
carnival lacks a centralized structure. The WIADCA obtains the needed permits
and deals with city officials. As the event has grown, it has also worked inter-
mittently with the city tourism and economic development officials in an attempt to
make the event more “tourist friendly.” Yet its members are more coordinators
than organizers, and they have had a frustratingly difficult time in getting carnival
participants to agree to even minor changes in the way things are done.
The dozens of dances, shows, and parties throughout the city that complement
the parade are run by individual promoters who operate independently of the
WIADCA. The various steelbands rehearse throughout the summer in “pan yards”
scattered throughout Brooklyn and Queens. While some participate in a
WIADCA-sponsored steelband contest and show at the Brooklyn Museum a
few days before Labor Day, others do not, and in recent years band leaders have
organized rival steelband shows in other locations. Indeed at times in the late 1990s
relations between the band leaders and the organization reached such a head that
a “strike” by the band leaders was often threatened, although never completely
carried out. Yet, while other groups may offer rival shows and supplementary
events, the WIADCA’s culminating procession on Labor Day itself is now clearly
sacrosanct. It is the one event everyone attends, and no one has seriously proposed

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a rival or replacement since an attempt to create a more “respectable” Labor Day

event in Manhattan failed miserably in the early 1980s.
The “mas” (masquerade) bands are also privately organized, and their leaders
are also frequently at odds with the Association. Each mas band is composed of
several dozen to several hundred elaborately costumed revelers who dance to live
or recorded music in the carnival procession. They are loosely organized around
themes that emphasize fantasy (Galactic Splendor, Splendors of the Far East, Party
in Space), ethnicity (Caribbean Unite), or current events (Cry for Freedom, Tribute
to Bob Marley). Historical themes, with costumes influenced by Hollywood epics
(Extracts from Rome), are particularly popular, as are those which use popular
culture references in bizarre juxtapositions: one band recently used the theme
Ponderosa in Hell: its masqueraders, clad in black and red, wore cowboy hats,
toy six-guns, tin stars, devil masks and wings. In general, costumes are loosely co-
ordinated but by no means uniform. In some bands all members are in costume,
although in most only a few members wear elaborate outfits while the majority
simply wear matching tee shirts. All bands, however, feature at least one or two
(and often a dozen) extremely complex and fantastic outfits that are not so much
costumes as small, one-person floats. The leaders of these bands invest a tremen-
dous amount of time and energy in carnival preparations. Sponsoring a band is
expensive, and, while most of the leaders can be described as “middle class,” none
is wealthy. Yet they frequently report investing thousands of dollars out of pocket
for band expenses. Although some of this money is recouped through the sale of
costumes, at best the bands break even, and many lose money. While the leaders
may be involved in preparations throughout the year, the costume makers usually
start to work in the early summer, with work coming to a feverish pitch in
the month preceding the carnival. Typically this work – men constructing the
mechanical parts of costumes, women sewing – takes place in rented storefronts,
basements, social clubs and private homes.
This investment of money and preparation time, as well as the bonding effect of
the common effort, serves to differentiate the thousands of core participants from
the hundreds of thousands of more casual revelers who march along in matching
tee shirts on Labor Day. Thus, in 2002, when pouring rains kept the Labor Day
crowds down, these core participants came out nonetheless. As one woman in a
gold-spangled bikini over a gold, semi-see-through body suit and a two-foot-high
gold and silver head piece explained, “Of course I am here! Where else am I going
to wear this?”
In the actual Labor Day procession each masquerade band half marches and
half dances (or in Trinidadian terms “chips”) around a flatbed truck that may carry
a calypso group or a steelband, but in recent years has been more likely to sport a
huge sound system playing recorded calypso or soca music. The trucks display
banners announcing the name of the band’s leader, its theme and its sponsors:
usually local businesses or politicians, occasionally social service organizations or
labor unions. Sometimes the vehicle itself becomes part of the display: a local
shipping company decorates its delivery van as an outrageous version of a cargo
ship, complete with real shipping barrels on the roof.
The lack of central organizational authority is evident in the form of the carnival
parade itself. The procession starts around noon with a group of dignitaries, grand
marshals (usually local business leaders, celebrities, and politicians), and city

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officials who march, or rather saunter, down the Parkway. But they do not draw
much attention, for the main body of the carnival may be a mile or more behind
them. Next come several carloads of West Indian–American beauty contest
winners who are likewise largely ignored. The crowds that line the Parkway,
eating, drinking, and talking to friends, show little interest in these “parade”
elements that are grafted rather uneasily onto the carnival form. The real carnival
begins when more than a dozen large masquerade bands, surrounding flatbed
trucks carrying musicians or sound systems, start down Eastern Parkway,
theoretically in order. This structure breaks down almost immediately, bands
stop, change direction, or simply get bogged down in a dancing mass of humanity.
The distinction between participant and spectator quickly disappears, despite the
concerted efforts of the police to maintain it. Some bands do not even finish the
three-mile route in the allotted six hours. As a dramatic event, carnival is strikingly
leaderless. There are themes and a certain ebb and flow, but no particular center
or head.
Community leaders and politicians seeking local recognition and support are
naturally attracted to huge gatherings such as carnival. Yet the event itself subverts
notions of leadership and presents a throng of autonomous individuals. This
presents politicians and the WIADCA officials with a dilemma: how does one
“lead” an event without a head or even a very clear direction? In recent years
politicians and the WIADCA have tried to tighten control over the procession. This
became a critical issue in 1995, when two hours of the event were covered on live
television. On the whole, however, efforts to remake carnival more in the mold of a
traditional ethnic parade have met with only modest success.

CARNIVAL AND ETHNIC IDENTITY

Brooklyn’s carnival is an “ethnic” event in a city where ethnicity is enormously

politically salient. Yet while carnival clearly asserts a massive presence in New
York, it does not offer the opportunity to make a strategic statement: it is too
anarchic to be manipulated or to support a structure. The WIADCA leadership
strives to project an image of ethnic distinctiveness and solidarity, self-consciously
invoking New York’s tradition of ethnic politics. As Lezama writes: “To West
Indians, as one of the many ethnic minorities in New York, the need for social
collaboration, the introduction of a feeling of community and brotherhood are
variables critical to us in maintaining our existence within the wider sphere of other
ethnic groups” (WIADCA souvenir brochure, 1983). A former Association officer
puts it more directly: “We expect the powers that be to recognize carnival as part of
our culture, as the culture of any other group is recognized.” This notion, that West
Indians are an ethnic group like other ethnic groups, implies the presence of clearly
recognized political leaders to whom the “powers that be” can pay deference
and who may serve as brokers between the state and the ethnic population. The
WIADCA presents itself as such a group, yet its claims to leadership over the event
are problematic.
Yet, if carnival does not create group leaders, it does assert group boundaries.
More than any other event it visibly embodies the emerging pan-West-Indian
identity now evident in New York. As early as 1976, the calypsonian Mighty
Sparrow sang:

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• PHILIP KASINITZ

You can be from St. Cleo, or from John John

In New York, all that done.
They haven’t to know who is who,
New York equalize you!
Bajan, Grenadian, Jamaican, “toute monde,”
Drinking they rum, beating they bottle and spoon.
Nobody could watch me and honestly say,
they don’t like to be in Brooklyn on Labor Day!

It is worth noting that the pan-ethnic identity Sparrow sings about is very much a
creation of the New York context. Indeed, he invokes a classic New York image: at
a time when cultural critics in the academy are seeing “resistance” everywhere
in postmodern culture, Sparrow’s New York is that stubbornly modernist city in
which the newcomers can remake themselves. New York’s carnival, for him, is
not about clinging to Caribbean tradition, but rather the opportunity to create
something which, while rooted in the Caribbean, is essentially new. This assertion
of a New-York-based pan-West-Indian identity is one of the reasons why carnival
has become so important in New York, despite the fact that the majority of
Afro-Caribbean New Yorkers come from nations with no carnival tradition. The
importance of carnival lies in the fact that, while it is unquestionably “ethnic,” its
tradition of satire, inversion, creativity, and innovation leaves the content of West
Indian identity unfixed. It thus creates a space in which a reformulation of identity
and a realignment of social relations are possible.
Of course, to the extent that Trinidadian symbols have been central to the carni-
val, the defining of this new West Indian identity takes place on unequal terms.
While people throughout the anglophone Caribbean and Haiti attend carnival
along with growing numbers of Latinos and African-Americans, the WIADCA,
the steelbands and the masquerade bands are still dominated by Trinidadians.
Carnival is highly developed in Trinidad, and naturally Trinidadians bring with
them the skills to mount the festival. Yet this Trinidadian tradition is put forward as
an expression of West Indian identity. Thus, in New York, carnival continually
vacillates between its Trinidadian roots and its pan-Caribbean agenda.
Music has played a central role in the negotiation of cultural politics that occurs
during carnival. In its early years the concerts presented on the Brooklyn Museum
grounds featured overwhelmingly Trinidadian entertainers. The 1974 carnival pro-
gram lists a steelband competition, an ole mas competition, a costume competition,
and a “calypso tent” – all distinctly Trinidadian cultural forms. By 1976, however,
the WIADCA – which, as Hill (1994) notes, was still almost entirely Trinidadian –
added a “Night in the Caribbean” on the Saturday before carnival. This concert
featured Jamaican reggae, Haitian dance troupes, and even a group from Costa
Rica. In 1983, in an attempt to include more Jamaicans and more young people in
general, the organizers added “Reggae Night” to the festivities on the Thursday
night preceding Labor Day. The reggae concert was both part of the carnival and
distinctly separate from the weekend’s other events. “The Jamaicans,” Lezama
noted to the Jamaican Weekly Gleaner, August 15, 1983, “wanted their own night.”
In 1987, a “Haitian Night” was added as well.
These divisions can also be seen on Eastern Parkway itself. In the late 1970s Hill
and Abrahamson (1980) observed that young reggae fans tended to group around

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sound systems at one end of Eastern Parkway and on side streets, listening to
recorded Jamaican music, while Trinidad-style street “jump up” predominated
in the middle of the carnival throng. Of course not all young reggae fans are
Jamaican. However, many young New York West Indians choose to express them-
selves in the Jamaican mode, just as their elders tend to articulate their ethnicity in
terms of Trinidadian origin. By the 1980s a few reggae bands mounted on trucks
joined in the procession, and both reggae and soca could be heard throughout the
Parkway. In the 1990s soca dominated the mas bands, but it was contemporary
reggae, Jamaican dancehall music and African-American hip-hop that poured out
of the windows and the sound systems set up along the side streets.
While the WIADCA has sought to encourage the participation of all West
Indians, it continues to define the “real” carnival traditions in Trinidadian terms.
The Association and other Trinidadian groups have sought funding to train young
United-States-born West Indians in such skills as costume making and steelband
music, thus promoting their own particular definition of West Indian culture. They
have also sponsored an annual “Kiddie Carnival,” held during the afternoons
preceding the Saturday and Sunday night carnival shows. In an event modeled on
the much more massive children’s carnivals of Trinidad, children compete for
prizes for the best costumes and chip and wine to calypso on the big stage as proud
parents fawn and flashbulbs click. The WIADCA sees these events as ways to
pass on “ethnic traditions” to the young. Indeed, for many middle-aged parents,
Kiddie Carnival is a far more acceptable version of West Indian culture than the
rasta-influenced, Jamaican-based hybrid of the late 1970s or the gangsta-rap-
influenced versions of dancehall music favored by the youth of the 1990s.
In the late 1980s, leaders of the steelbands and several of the larger mas bands
took their own step toward restoring the “authentic” Trinidadian roots of carnival
– albeit one which favored the more raucous and less respectable side of the
Trinidadian tradition than that put forward by the WIADCA. Tired of being
literally drowned out by the recorded music from the sound-trucks that now
dominate Eastern Parkway on Labor Day, they created their own central Brooklyn
procession. Known as j’ouvert (“break of day”), sometimes spelled “jou-vay,” this
parade starts at 3:00 a.m. on Labor Day morning, a time when nothing is likely to
drown out the steelbands. Even at that hour the jouvay celebration draws tens
of thousands of revelers, most of whom later make their way to the more pan-
Caribbean Eastern Parkway procession (Allen and Slater 1998). Jouvay is a loud,
hard-partying event, with dancers with blackened bodies, spontaneous drumming
as well as plenty of steel pan. On the one hand, it is far more consistent with older
Trinidadian traditions, some of which are now being eclipsed in Trinidad as well
(see Brown 1990). On the other hand, it is also something of a protest against the
WIADCA’s increasing respectability as well as against the behavior of the police,
who during the Guiliani administration became far more aggressive in closing
down pan yards for excessive noise and other “quality of life” violations. In this
sense jouvay is both more traditional than the Eastern Parkway fete and, at the
same time, more consistent with the confrontational racial politics favored by many
younger West Indians and West Indian–Americans. For these young people, the
WIADCA’s “ethnic” model fits imperfectly on the reality of a group that, despite
their ethnic distinctiveness, find their life chances far more shaped by their racial
identity as black people in America.4

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CARNIVAL, RACE, AND POLITICS

The underlying ambiguity of the West Indian community’s relationship with the
rest of black New York comes to the surface in the carnival. Despite frequent talk
of black unity and allusions to Pan-Africanism, carnival, by its nature, differenti-
ates West Indians from other Blacks. The early organizers believed that these differ-
ences should remain within a narrowly defined “cultural” realm. Carnival provided
an arena where they might be expressed far more directly than they could be in the
realm of government and politics. In recent years, however, politics has come more
openly into the carnival. In 1984, New York’s leading black radio station, WLIB,
arranged a carnival appearance by the Reverend Jesse Jackson. The following year
a number of politicians (only a few West Indian) seized upon carnival as an
opportunity to get their message across and had undertaken partial sponsorship
of mas bands so that their names would appear on the band trucks. Thus,
signs saluting “City Councilwoman Rhoda Jacobs” and the “Greater Flatbush
Independent Democratic Club” and urging “Andrew Stein for City Council
President,” “Roy Innis for Congress” (in 1986), and even “Free South Africa” hung
alongside those naming Caribbean bakeries, shipping companies, and restaurants.
Yet the question of whether carnival should be explicitly political soon became a
source of controversy in the community. As Colin Moore, an activist associated
with the left wing of New York’s Caribbean leadership, wrote in the Caribbean
News in 1985,
the organizers of the carnival have not outgrown their parochial roots. The gentlemen
from Laventille, Sangre Grande and Arima still view carnival as an opportunity to
“play mas.” They could not perceive its broader cultural implications or political
significance. As a result of this shortsightedness, this gerontocracy of aging “mas
men” has been unable to impose the discipline, organization and creativity necessary
to transform the carnival from a Laventille affair into a Caribbean event, from a
Brooklyn Road March into a citywide media event, from a backyard bacchanal into
a significant political event.
A few years later, tragic events would, indeed, turn carnival into a political event,
whether the “aging mas men” wanted it so or not.
Since its early days the Brooklyn Carnival had survived several attempts by
Hasidic Jews of the Lubavitcher sect, whose World Headquarters is on the Eastern
Parkway along the carnival route, to have it banned or moved. Over the years, as
the rest of the Jewish population of Crown Heights moved out (and West Indians
moved in), members of this tight-knit Hasidic sect had chosen to stay and to
continue to build institutions in the area. Indeed during the 1970s and 1980s their
numbers had grown steadily and they continued to buy large amounts of property
in the neighborhood. Yet, despite widespread feeling among West Indians that the
small Hasidic community wielded power far out of proportion to its numbers in
Crown Heights, the Jewish group had been notably unsuccessful in their efforts to
stop the carnival. Indeed resistance to the festival may have actually helped the
WIADCA forge close relationships with local politicians, many of them Jewish.
During the 1980s, as the numbers of both Caribbean and Hasidic residents grew in
Crown Heights, tensions over real estate, crime, and the actions of Hasidic security
patrols often strained relations between the groups. Yet by and large they lived
together peacefully, if not amicably.

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Then on August 19, 1991, a car driven by a Hasidic Jew – part of the Lubavitch
Grand Rebbe Menachem Schneerson’s motorcade – jumped a curb in Crown
Heights, killing a seven-year-old Guyanese boy named Gavin Cato. Rumors,
eventually disproved, quickly spread throughout the neighborhood that a Hasidic
ambulance service had ignored the child while rushing the uninjured driver from
the scene. Several hours later a group of about twenty black youths fatally stabbed
a Hasidic student named Yankel Rosenbaum. Three nights of rioting followed in
which groups of Blacks and Hasidim clashed in the streets, Jewish families were
attacked in their homes, and stores belonging to black, white, and Asian merchants
were looted. Black youths marched to the World Headquarters of the Lubavitcher
Hasidic sect on Eastern Parkway, where some hurled rocks and bottles and shouted
anti-Semitic slogans. Mayor David Dinkins, the city’s first African-American
mayor, repeatedly called for calm and was himself briefly trapped by rock-throwing
black youths during a condolence call on the Cato family.
By week’s end a massive police presence had quelled the violence, yet the anger
remained on both sides, At a loss to explain the outburst in the generally stable
Caribbean community, some observers attributed the violence to young people
“from the projects” spurred on by “outside agitators” – in other words, to a native
African-American “underclass.” This analysis was half true at best. While most of
the Caribbean community was horrified by the violence, many youths in the streets
were immigrants and their grievances went far beyond the accident. “This is like a
trench town,” a Jamaican teenager told a reporter from New York Newsday, “The
wicked and the rich have had their day. Now we can stand up and be heard.” In
fact, one of the most shocking things about Crown Heights was that resentment of
the Hasidim seemed just as common among home-owning, middle-class Caribbean
immigrants as among poor Blacks, whether native or foreign-born.
Caribbean community leaders, while denouncing the violence and condemning
anti-Semitism, gave voice to their own longstanding grievances against the
Hasidim. The easy equivalence they drew between the accident and the murder
revealed the depth of their sense of historical injustice. For their part, the Hasidic
leadership saw the killing as only the latest chapter in their own narrative of
victimization. They were quick to describe the Crown Heights events as a
“pogrom” and even to draw comparisons to Kristallnacht. Both “sides” – if one
can talk about “sides” in a riot – perceived themselves as victims. Empathy was in
critically short supply.
The African-American activists who dominated media coverage of the Crown
Heights events proved more effective as lightning rods for popular discontent
than the Caribbean leadership. But, as tempers cooled, many in the Caribbean
community came to see these activists as exploiting a tragic situation. One of the
most visible, Sonny Carson, hurt his own cause with clumsy attempts at ethnic
politics, such as unfurling a Guyanese flag at Gavin Cato’s funeral.5
The Crown Heights riot occurred less than two weeks before Labor Day. Under-
standably, city officials viewed the prospect of hundreds of thousands of carnival
revelers on Eastern Parkway with considerable trepidation. Hasidic leaders called
once more for the event to be canceled, and several African-American politicians
suggested that it might be moved to a less charged location. Yet the WIADCA
insisted that carnival should go forward on Eastern Parkway, as always. “Nothing
is going to happen!” Lezama insisted on the Thursday before Labor Day. “I am

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going to walk down the Parkway and if the head Rabbi wants to come with me, he
is welcome! This is what the city needs now!”
Going ahead with carnival was an enormous risk. Violence would gravely
threaten its future and any overture to the Hasidim would certainly be attacked by
some in the black community as a sell out: “a shame before God” is how Sonny
Carson described it. Yet Lezama, who has made carnival his life’s work, under-
stood the community. He first made it clear that the event would not be moved and
that he would not consider bowing to Hasidic pressure. Once that was established,
however, he surprised many by putting aside years of bad feelings and inviting
representatives of the Hasidic community to join the event. To the surprise of many
more, they accepted. On Labor Day the crowd was a bit more subdued than usual,
but it greeted the Rabbis politely, and the day came off without incident: “Peace
on the Parkway” was the year’s slogan. The deep wounds that drive New York’s
racial politics were not healed, or even forgotten. Yet, for most of the people on the
Parkway, two weeks of tension had been enough. For one day, at least, peace on
the Parkway seemed like a good idea.
The ambivalence with which the Caribbean community viewed the riot was,
not surprisingly, best captured in a calypso. In 1992 the Mighty Sparrow’s
“Crown Heights Justice” was among the most memorable songs of that year’s
Trinidad Carnival, and the following Labor Day it could be heard throughout
central Brooklyn. On the one hand it was a call for peace:
Why do we have this confrontation?
Violence will not solve our situation.
We must learn to live in peace, live in Peace!
Preacherman, Rabbi, Priest, live in Peace!
Sparrow goes on to invoke harmony between West Indians and Jews:
History will show from slavery to holocaust,
The whole world know, so we have to live in peace,
No reason to fight like beasts; live in peace!
Pain and suffering we have borne,
Blacks and Jews should live as one,
And celebrate; here life is great!
No Swastika. No slave master!
Instead we fight the endless fight,
Right here, where we live, here in Crown Heights . . .
This call for harmony is followed by a reiteration of longstanding grievances:
My reason for being upset is plain to see,
The special treatment you get from Albany . . .
No cops on my block to complain to,
But police around the clock to protect you – from who?
The song’s refrain put the emphasis on justice, along with a quote from Marcus
Garvey:
All we want is Justice!
Don’t deny the Justice!
All the excuses, all the lies,

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Can’t stifle the children’s cries.

For the little boy who died,
And the little girl who cried, Ethiopia will rise-again! . . .
The system is pregnant with fault, but it mustn’t fail.
Guilty drivers go to jail!
That’s what we call justice!

Conspicuous by its absence was any mention of “justice” for the Hasidic scholar
who died not by accident but at the hands of an angry mob.
In 1994 controversy with the Hasidic community arose again, with the con-
vergence of Labor Day and Rosh Hashanah. Again Lezama rebuffed attempts by
city officials to have the event rescheduled. He and other West Indian community
leaders argued that carnival might not be as old as Rosh Hashanah, but it was no
less important and should be treated with the same respect. Yet once the City
assured the continuation of the event on the Parkway, Lezama went out of his way
to reassure the Hasidic leadership that the event would end on time, and to
coordinate the activities of the two communities in a less confrontational manner.
Some members of the Hasidic community could not be placated, while some
Caribbeans and African-Americans criticized Lezama for being overly solicitous
of Hasidic support. Yet the majorities in both communities seemed satisfied, if
not completely happy, with the division of scarce public spaces at these sacred times
of the year. And make no mistake about it: carnival has now sanctified both
the Eastern Parkway site and the Labor Day date, for New York’s West Indian
community.
The controversy in 1994 also resulted in an increase in media attention. Carnival
has given the New York media the opportunity to review the state of the Caribbean
community and to question the identity of a people who are both black and
immigrant in a city usually divided between Blacks and the children of immigrants.
And the peaceful end of the 1994 controversy appealed to the media’s comfort with
ethnic celebration over racial confrontation. Thus in 1995, two hours of carnival
were televised live for the first time, and Lezama’s “aging mas men” occupied center
stage. Their particular version of pan-Caribbean ethnic identity enjoyed a uniquely
prominent position in the community’s efforts to define itself, at least for the
moment.
Since that time, with Lezama and his contemporaries beginning to fade from the
scene, the WIADCA has begun to face an inevitable succession crisis. This largely
voluntary association started out running a small block party and thirty years later
found themselves running the largest regularly scheduled public event in North
America. They generally did so with remarkable skill, grace, and energy. Yet they
also resisted new blood, were reluctant to formalize their procedures, and were
often suspicious of those outside their circle. Today, US-born and raised West
Indian New Yorkers, many of non-Trinidadian origin, are coming to play a leader-
ship role in the event. As these second-generation Caribbean New Yorkers take over
carnival, it remains to be seen whether they will make it into something more in
keeping with the typical “ethnic parade,” along the lines of St Patrick’s Day or the
Puerto Rican Day parades. On the other hand, many of those who now “play mas”
on the Parkway are, in fact, new immigrants, who came from a very different
Caribbean than the one Lezama and his colleagues left more than half a century

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ago. Will these newcomers seek to “keep it real” in a traditional Port of Spain
mode, as the growth of jouvay seems to suggest? It is, of course, too early to say.
For now, carnival remains the place for presenting and dramatizing the idea of a
Caribbean community in New York. So long as carnival remains in flux, it will
continue to provide the social and temporal space in which notions of group iden-
tity can be played with and contested if never completely resolved. It will thus
continue to interest anyone trying to make sense of the changing ethnic landscape
of this increasingly global city.

NOTES

1 Portions of this chapter have been previously published in Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York:
Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) and are
reprinted with permission.
2 Terminology becomes difficult when differentiating between Afro-Caribbean immigrants and
other Black Americans. Both can and do use the term “African-American.” For purposes
of clarity, I use “West Indian” and “Afro-Caribbean” to refer to the immigrants and their
children, “native African-American” to refer to blacks whose forebears have been in the US
more than two generations, and “Blacks” to refer to both groups.
3 Lezama was actually born in Venezuela, to Trinidadian parents. Like many English-speaking
West Indian immigrants born in Spanish-speaking nations, he considers himself West Indian,
not Latino.
4 It is worth noting that the Black victims in the most celebrated cases of police brutality and
mob violence over the last decade and a half have almost all been black immigrants, not native
African-Americans: Michael Stewart, killed in Howard Beach, and Yusef Hawkins, killed in
Bensonhurst, were from Trinidad; Patrick Dorismond, killed by the police, and Abner Louima,
police torture victim, were both Haitian; Amadou Diallo, mistakenly shot forty-one times by the
police, was from West Africa.
5 For more on Carson and his ambivalent relations with the Caribbean community see Kim
(2000).

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TRINIDAD CARNIVAL GLOSSARY
Carol Martin

Trinidadian carnival terms, like carnival, resist definitive definitions, making

this glossary almost antithetical to carnival. Yet Trinidadian carnival terms
indicate important distinctions between African, East Indian, and European
influences while foregrounding Trinidadians’ conception of carnival as a dynamic
social and political event. So wherever possible this glossary includes multiple
spellings, resulting from transcriptions of terms from a vibrant oral culture,
competing definitions, and multiple histories. The aim of assembling this glossary
is to indicate, from sometimes competing and contradictory explanations, an
understanding of what carnival – a defining event of Trinidad and Tobago culture –
has been and what it is becoming.
[Editor’s note: For this volume some features, such as capitalization and
spelling, have been normalized for the sake of consistency, though in Trinidadian
usage, they are not so standardized. We have, however, left the multiple spellings
that reflect the richness of an oral culture in the glossary, which now contains
variants the reader may not find in the text. However, some textual variants
remain, as for instance the variation between mas’ and mas, or the capitalization of
Jouvay or Grandstand and North Stand, when such terms are used with particular
emphasis.]
Terms in italics have their own entries in the glossary.

authentic Indian See Black Indian and Fancy Indian.

Baby Doll A traditional carnival character in which girls demand financial support from
accused “fathers” in the crowd. This mas now exists primarily as a revival of a mas that was
popular in the 1930s and 1940s. See traditional mas.

bacchanal Rowdy behavior, a party; any situation in which there is excessive confusion.

Bad Behaviour Sailors Traditional carnival characters in sailor suits, often wearing
slogans such as “Sailors Astray,” who roll on the ground and in the gutter to simulate
drunkenness. Some bad behaviour sailor costumes include a red and white cotton jersey

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fabric sack worn over the head with eyeholes and a dangling red phallic nose (sometimes
referred to as “long-nose sailors”). Also known as Dirty Sailors.

bad johns Street-toughened fighters connected to communities and steelbands, who

aggressively defend territory, dignity, and honor.

band This term denotes either a music band, such as a brass band or a calypso band, or
a group of performers who masquerade (“play mas”) together on carnival Monday or
Tuesday or in Children’s Carnival. In the latter case, the term may be used to designate one
entire group of traditional characters (traditional character bands), of jouvay players who
belong to one group (jouvay band), or one group of masqueraders, known as a mas band.
A single mas band may have as few as twenty-five people or as many as ten thousand or
more masqueraders. Each mas band is designated by a specific name, which often refers
to the theme of the costumes in a particular year. The term also implies territorial gangs. See
calypso, devil bands, jouvay, mas band, and traditional mas.

Bat A traditional carnival character who mimes bats.

bele, bélé, belle, belair, bel air A dance, originally from the French bel air, known through-
out the West Indies. Possibly it comes from the Bele tribe on the Senegal River, West Africa.
In the nineteenth century, it was a topical satiric or eulogistic song, and also a drum dance.

Black Indian A traditional carnival character with a painted black face inspired by
African and indigenous peoples. Costumes are predominantly black, often with large,
elaborate feathered and beaded headdresses of many kinds. Black Indians say they speak an
unidentifiable but “original people’s ” language.

Black-and-white-face Minstrels Minstrels in whiteface, who play banjos, guitars, or now

most often cuatros and sing plantation songs from the southern US, and who developed
from Trinidadians imitating American whites in blackface. Other instruments include
clappers and chac-chacs.

Blue Devils Covered in blue mud, spewing red drool to imitate blood, Blue Devils typically
act berserk, sexual, and ravenous. To a degree their costumes are open to personal
preference and can include pitchforks, various kinds of masks, wings, and horns. In
Paramin, the mountain village home to an important Blue Devil band, laundry bluing
is mixed with vaseline to make the mud. Blue Devils from Paramin also refer to them-
selves as Jab Jabs although they are more like Jab Molassis than Jab Jabs, both of whom
are devils. See Jab Jabs and Jab Molassi.

bois, poui The wooden stick used in stickfighting, from the French word for wood, bois.
Poui is another name for bois, named for the poui tree whose wood is used to make the
sticks. Bois can also be cut from gasparee, balata, or anare wood. Stickfighters give their
sticks names such as “teaser” or “pleaser.” A “mounted stick” is one that has been treated,
often by an obeah priest, insuring injury to an opponent.

bongo wakes All-night wakes for the dead at the home of the deceased in which bongo
drums and other instruments are played.

Burrokeet, Burokit, Burroquite, Burokeet A traditional carnival character in a donkey

costume. From the Spanish burroquito, little donkey. The structure is made from wire
covered with fabric or papier-mâché and a cloth that hangs from the frame to cover the

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masquerader’s legs. Very familiar to European, Middle Eastern, and Indian communities,
this masquerade predates medieval times; see Soumarie.

caiso, kaiso, cariso, caliso Early names for calypso. See calypso.

calinda See kalinda.

callaloo A traditional Trinidad dish typically made of a mixture of ingredients including

leaves of the dasheen plant, ochro (okra), crab, and salt meat. The term is sometimes
popularly used to refer to the cultural mix that is found in Trinidad. Callaloo is also the
name of Peter Minshall’s mas-making company.

calypso The music and rhythm native to Trinidad closely associated with lavway, the
call-and-response of stickfighting. Stickfighting chants endowed calypso with rhythm,
melodies, and a combative, satirical manner. Although the word is probably from the
Hausa caiso, a praise/critical singer of West Africa, when it was transcribed into English in
the mid twentieth century its reference was changed to Calypso, the Greek muse of music
and daughter of the Titan Atlas.

Calypso Monarch, Calypso King The traditional calypso title of “Calypso King” was
changed to “Calypso Monarch” in the 1970s when Calypso Rose was the first woman to win
this title.

canboulay, cannes brulees, cannes brûlées Derived from the French for “burning cane”
(though other definitions as improbable as the patois for “cane rat” have been suggested).
Canboulay is a celebration of resistance and emancipation, reenacting the days when
enslaved Africans were driven with cracking whips to put out fires set by vandals on
sugarcane plantations. Cane was also burnt before harvesting to control reptiles, centipedes,
scorpions, and other pests. Thus, canboulay may have been associated both with dangerous
and cruel forced labor and with the harvest festivals at the end of a season of heavy labor
marked by the final burning of the cane stubs. Canboulay used to be celebrated on August 1,
the date of emancipation. Subsequently it was moved to midnight of Dimanche Gras.
Contemporary jouvay, which begins the two days of celebration before Ash Wednesday, was
thus originally a celebration of emancipation. See jouvay and Dimanche Gras.

carnival dances See chip, fireman, jump-and-wave, and wine.

carnival Monday The Monday before Ash Wednesday when people play jouvay in the early
morning hours. Carnival Monday any band (fancy or traditional) or individual may play
mas with all or part of their costumes, or even in alternative attire. Carapichaima has the
largest regional Monday carnival on the island. Monday evening devil bands congregate in
Paramin mountain village. A variety of Monday night fetes and steelband competitions
occur in various locations. See jouvay, play mas, fete, devil bands, and steelband.

carnival Tuesday This is the last day of carnival before Ash Wednesday. It is the day all the
pretty mas, the pageantry, the big mas bands come out into the streets. Revelers come into
the streets as early as 8:00 a.m. to play mas at the many competition sites and anywhere they
feel like it. The day ends with las lap.

Cedula of Population, Cédula de Población The invitation, issued first in 1776 and then
extended in 1783, by King Charles III of Spain for foreigners to settle in Trinidad. A
memorandum from Grenadian French planter Roume de St Laurent, who visited Trinidad

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in 1777, initiated the immigration. All foreign settlers had to be Roman Catholic subjects of
nations in alliance with Spain, and had to agree to abide by Spanish laws. This migration –
fueled by the incentive of free land – created a large French population within the Spanish
state. Land was also given to Free Colored and African Creole planters; those who had
fought with England in the war of 1812 took up this offer.

chantwell, chantrel, chantuelle, shantwell The lead singer of canboulay and kalinda bands,
an early version of a calypsonian who calls for the response in a call-and-response song.
Also, the lead singer in Shango and Rada worship. From the French chanterelle, solo singer.

chip, chipping, chippin, chippin’ Shuffling to the down beat of a carnival song in a manner
that has subtle rhythmic reverberations in the rest of the body. Chippin is a ubiquitous,
simple carnival dance uniting people – young and old – in a pulsing flow of group move-
ment. Everyone who plays mas chips.

chutney A bawdy folk music from India brought by indentured laborers.

chutney soca, soca chutney The fusion of African and East Indian music of Trinidad and
Tobago. Chutney soca mixes African and East Indian rhythms, uses Hindi words and Indian
instruments such as the harmonium and hand drum, and Indian dances. Chutney soca
includes contributions of East Indians such as Sandar Popo and Drupartee Ramgoonai.

Creole In Trinidad, Creole designates identification with both foreign ancestry and
native birth. In the nineteenth century, there were two Creole traditions: French and
African. More recently this idea of Creole has been contested by some Indo-Trinidadians
who have begun to identify themselves as Indo-Creole. The term is also used to indicate the
hybrid Caribbean language also sometimes termed as French patois.

cuatro A four-string guitar believed to have been introduced to Trinidad by Venezuelans,

used in Christmas parang music as well as in minstrel and other bands. See parang music.

Dame Lorraine A traditional carnival character who originally mocked French plantation
wives. In carnival, cross-dressing men as well as women played the character, but it is now
primarily a female masquerade. The all-over floral print dress of this mas is augmented with
a padded posterior and breasts, and sometimes a pregnant belly. Formerly this masquerade
took the form of Dame Lorraine plays.

devil bands Bands that play jouvay by wearing horns and tails and carrying pitchforks. See
jouvay.

Dimanche Gras French for “fat Sunday,” the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. Dimanche
Gras activities of various kinds take place throughout the island, including the Dimanche
Gras show at Queen’s Park Savannah.

Dragon A traditional carnival character traced back to 1908 when Patrick Jones, inspired
by Dante’s The Inferno, created a dragon-type depiction of Lucifer.

East Indian A term used in the West Indies for those whose ancestors immigrated to
the Caribbean from (any part of) India, initially used to distinguish them from native
populations known as “Indian” or “Amerindian.”

engine room The percussion section of a steelband consisting of drums, tambourines, bells,

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brake drums, scrapers, and rattles. The engine room, like that of a ship, drives the band.
Also the percussion section of a Jab Molassi band.

English Catholic Trinidad term for the Church of England. English Catholic is an
expansion of the acronym EC (English Church), used primarily in reference to schools.

extempo A competitive form of calypso in which opponents extemporaneously compose

and sing clever and humorous repartee; usually in a competitive duel.

Fancy Indian A traditional carnival character also sometimes colloquially called

authentic Indian. This character is arguably carnival’s most carefully researched. Players’
study goes beyond costumes and dance styles to include lifestyle, religious beliefs, and social
structures especially of the Seminole, Cherokee, Cree, and Plain tribes. Fancy Indians wear
war bonnets with brightly colored feathers, and their costumes have embroidery, beads,
chokers, shields, and painted tunics.

Fancy Sailor See Fireman, King Sailor, Sailor.

fete A party with music, dance, and food, from the French word fête meaning festival.

Fireman A traditional carnival character, costumed to aggrandize the image of the sailor
who stokes the ship’s engine. A type of Fancy Sailor, firemen wear blue or gray rather than
white costumes, don pipes, black beards, goggles, hats that look like crowns, and long
stokers with animal decorations such as dragons or fire at the tip. The firemen’s dance is a
distinctive sliding step that recalls stoking the engine. See King Sailor, Sailor.

flambeau A glass bottle filled with a wick and kerosene and lit. Sometimes Blue Devils
carry flambeaux and spit kerosene through the flames to create clouds of fire in the streets.

fol The heart-shaped breastplate, usually covered with mirrors, worn by stickfighters,
Jab Jabs, Clowns, Neg Jardins, and Pierrot Grenades.

free coloureds Persons of color in the Caribbean, who were not enslaved. This term
ordinarily refers to mulatto or mixed-blood brown-skinned persons, rather than darker-
skinned Africans. They were part of the overall Creole population, given certain privileges
but often restricted, even though they might be both wealthy and educated. In Trinidad,
under Governor Chacon, they were forbidden to serve in the Cabildo, or government.
Restrictions varied throughout the nineteenth century. When population is figured, the free
coloured are often grouped with the Africans (or “blacks”) as persons of color.

gayelle The stickfighting arena – a circle created by spectators.

Grandstand, Grand Stand, Grand Stands The permanent spectator stand on the south side
of the Queen’s Park Savannah in Port of Spain.

Guarahoon, Warahoon, Warraoun, Guarrahoon A traditional carnival character derived

from the Guaro people of the Orinoco River region of Venezuela who, until the 1930s,
regularly rowed in their pirogues to Trinidad. There are two opposing descriptions of
Guarahoons: painted red with rookoo dye and wearing entirely red clothing and zig-
zagging through the streets; and, painted black suggesting a reference to Black Indians
and runaway enslaved Africans who intermarried with native Indian tribes. Guarahoons are
also colloquially called Red Indians and, less frequently, Wild Indians. Until the 1950s,
Guarahoons were said to have spoken several authentic Indian languages.

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iron band A predecessor to steelbands, iron bands consist of brake drums and oil drums.

Jab Jab A traditional carnival character that looks like a happy medieval European clown
but is nevertheless a whip-carrying devil. A Jab Jab wears a painted mask made of thin wire
mesh (probably buckram) covering his entire face. His costume consists of red and yellow,
red and black, or yellow and black horizontal striped dagged shirts and pants. Marabou
feathers line the seams of his often sequined and appliquéd shirt and pants. His head is
hooded, and his costume can also be embellished with a cape and breastplate. The Jab Jabs’
fierceness is revealed in their songs and chants. Traditionally, they attack rival groups of
Jab Jabs. They crack their whips in the air and challenge one another to exchange lashes. Jab
Jab derives from the French diable, modulated into the patois jiable and from that to Jab Jab,
twin devils or double devil. Blue Devils in Paramin call themselves Jab Jabs (or Jabs).

Jab Molassi, Jab Molassie, Jab Molasi, jabmalassie A traditional carnival devil character.
A Jab Molassi’s costume consists of covering the entire body, including face and hair, with
originally molasses, and now mud, tar, and/or grease, often in different colors – blue, red,
white. Blue Devils are a form of Jab Molassi.

jam and wine See wine.

jamette, jamet Jamette or jamet refers to followers of canboulay bands in the latter half of
the nineteenth-century carnival. Carnival during this period is sometimes called “jamette
carnival.” Jamette also refers to women who followed kalinda. Later its usage designated
prostitutes and street-tough women who followed steelbands. A word of disputed origins,
jamette may be from the French diametre meaning boundary, border.

jouvay, j’ouvert, jouvert, jourvert, jour ouvert, jou ouvert Trinidadian jouvay is derived from
the French jour ouvert, the opening day of carnival which begins (often officially 2:00 a.m.)
the Monday morning before Ash Wednesday. Jouvay is a nocturnal mas that breaks up
shortly after dawn. Thousands of revelers in old clothes covered with mud, or as Blue or Red
Devils, or drenched in black oil (Oil Men) fill the streets. They chip and wine as they follow
steelbands or sound systems on tractor-trailors, or they create their own music by beating
biscuit tins. Contemporary jouvay, the two days of celebration before Ash Wednesday,
was originally a celebration of emancipation. Especially among middle-class Trinidadians
“j’ouvert” has again regained popular usage. For some, the French pronunciation obscures
the Trinidadian transformation of carnival from a celebration of the European plantocracy
to the African-inspired carnival of emancipation.

jouvay devil bands Jouvay devil bands chip to big trucks carrying massive and powerful
sound systems, to pan carried through the streets on street racks, or to rhythms beaten on
biscuit tins the Monday morning before Ash Wednesday. The registration fee for a jouvay
devil band may include the cost of a costume, drinks on the road, and perhaps a fete in a
jouvay yard before going on the road.

jump-and-wave An exuberant dance of simultaneous jumping and waving the arms that,
when done in large groups of masqueraders, creates an elating sense of mass movement –
the individual in continuous bodily flow with the group.

jump up To participate in carnival masquerade, especially pretty mas. The term also
describes those who crash a band or play las lap in street clothes. A man might jump up in a
band in street clothes to protect his girlfriend or keep her company.

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kalinda, kalenda, calinda, calenda, calender, calenda, batille bois The stickfight, its dance,
and its songs derived from a mock-combat dance of African origin that was a popular form
of entertainment on plantations throughout the islands. Perhaps partially derived from
quarterstaffs, the hardwood sticks the enslaved carried to beat snakes, officially banned in
1810. The kalinda is the dance referred to by French planters as the origin of canboulay.
Gatka is a stickfight dance practiced by Trinidadians of East Indian descent. (Forms of East
Indian martial arts that may be related to gatka include parikanda, the martial art related to
Chhau dances of Orissa and Bihar in north India, and the Punjabi gutka.) See stickfighting.

kalinda chants Chants handed down from one generation of chantwells to the next, used to
embolden stickfighters.

King Sailor, Fancy Sailor A traditional character who wears an elaborate costume
consisting of multicolored large sequins, feathers, borders of bright tulle and feather boas,
epaulets, medals, badges, small mirrors, and sometimes bottle caps affixed onto white shirts
and pants and topped with a bandolier. The most famous leader of Fancy Sailor bands is
recently retired Jason Griffith of Belmont (Port of Spain), who worked with Jim Harding,
an originator of the sailor mas.

las lap Literally the very last time for music, dance, and drink before Ash Wednesday. A
well-known las lap takes place in Port of Spain at the St James roundabout (traffic circle) in
the cool of the night after the hot carnival Tuesday. With a slow and softer tempo, las lap is
an opportunity to wind down. At midnight the final ritual takes place when the police van
arrives to end the action, signaling the end of carnival for the year.

lavway The calypso call-and-response, also used in stickfighting. A good lavway makes use
of double entendres in a melodically interlocked call-and-response. A French patois word
that comes from le vrai (the truth) or perhaps le voix (the voice).

liming To spend time talking, laughing, drinking with other people.

mas, mas’ Mas is the Trinidadian word for masquerade. Some people prefer “mas” to
carnival. Mas is part of the triumvirate: calypso, pan, and mas. See play mas.

mas band A group of mas players ranging in size from a few dozen to several thousand
often under the direction of one individual who designs the costumes. Mas bands compete
for prizes in three major categories: large bands (always eight hundred or more, ranging up
to as many as eight thousand in one band), medium bands (ordinarily 251–799), small
bands (ordinarily 51–250), and, for the first time in 1998, mini-bands (11–50). These size
categories may vary. Large bands have separate sections with different costumes unified
by an overall theme, dancing or jumping up behind powerful sound systems mounted on big
trucks. Costumes, performance, and music all comprise a band. Well-known past band-
leaders include George Bailey, Stephen Lee Heung, and Harold Saldenah, among others. At
present, some of the foremost bandleaders include Peter Minshall, Stephen Derek, Albert
Bailey, Wayne Berkeley, and Richard Afong.

mas camp The location where the costumes of a specific band are assembled and
distributed and where rehearsals, if any, are held.

masquerade To dress in carnival costume, dance, and parade in the streets. See mas and
play mas.

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Midnight Robber A traditional carnival character who accosts spectators with an auda-
cious barrage of slang and double talk aimed at getting them to give up their cash. Midnight
Robber’s speech – his robber talk – is dangerous, bombastic, and boastful. He brags about
the strength of his villainy, his murders of millions. Often the robber is avenging wrongs
done to his family generations ago. The Midnight Robber’s costume includes a whistle to
announce himself, frilly trousers, an embroidered shirt, a cape, a fake gun or dagger, and a
huge brimmed hat usually adorned with items depicting the theme of the robber’s speech for
that year. A coffin often appears on either the robber’s hat or his shoes. The robber can
be dressed fully in black, or he may dress as a Fancy Robber wearing an excess of
decorations. The Midnight Robber disputably originates in the traditions of Western
African griots or storytellers with influence also from American western movies.

military mas Mas that includes representations of any form of military.

minstrels See Black-and-white-face Minstrels.

Moko Jumbie When this stilt-walking traditional carnival character is asked where he is
from, he responds that he has walked all the way across the Atlantic Ocean from the West
Coast of Africa. A Moko Jumbie is the spirit of Moko, the Orisha (god) of fate and
retribution who emphasizes that even as he endured centuries of brutal treatment he
remains “tall, tall, tall.” His head touches the sky, as he stands astride the crossroads to
waylay unwary late-night travelers. Moko Jumbies are found throughout the West Indies.
Traditional Moko Jumbies wear long pants or skirts (covering the stilts) and cover their
faces. Now, any stilt walker in carnival might be called a Moko Jumbie.

mounted stick A bois that has been treated or ritually poisoned by an obeah healer to
insure injury to an opponent.

mud mas Mud mas is played during jouvay following Dimanche Gras; also sometimes
played on carnival Monday and Tuesday. Revelers coming from fetes, performances, and
their homes cover themselves with brown, red, white, green, or blue mud and dance through
the street until dawn. Some feel that experiencing sunrise after dancing all night covered
with mud is a mystical or transcendental experience essential to carnival.

National Carnival Commission (NCC) The National Carnival Commission of Trinidad

and Tobago succeeded the Carnival Development Committee (CDC), and was formed
in 1991 to make carnival a viable national, cultural, and commercial enterprise; to pro-
vide a managerial and organizational infrastructure for presentation and marketing of
carnival performances and products; and to establish ongoing research and preservation
of carnival.

Neg Jardin, Negre Jardins, Negres Jardins, Negue Jardin An early masquerade, apparently
played by liberated Trinidadians in satiric mockery of their former enslavement and by
plantation owners as derisive imitation of the enslaved.

North Stands, North Stand The temporary viewing stand built each year in the Queen’s
Park Savannah across the stage from the Grand Stands. In the North Stands groups of
observers, known as posses, stake out and claim their viewing territory for carnival comp-
etitions. North Stand viewers have a mystique of participation – chanting, waving, dancing –
that carries throughout the carnival season but is strongest at the Panorama prelims. How-
ever, since 2002 the prelims have been held in individual pan yards, changing the rhythm of
the season and challenging the mystique of the North Stands on prelim day.

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obeah A West African system of medicine which uses skulls, bones, shells, and feathers and
is often a theme in carnival bands.

ole mas, old mas, ol’ mas An old style of satiric and parodical masquerade involving acting
out puns. Old clothes, also an important part of jouvay, are usually worn. Some now resist
the use of this term, preferring traditional mas instead.

Orisha, Orixa In Trinidad, Orisha is the traditional religion of people descended from the
Yoruba of West Africa. Candomblé and Cuban Santeria are offshoots of this religion. In
Trinidad, as well as elsewhere in the Caribbean and Brazil, the religion is commonly called
Shango after one of its principal gods. Orisha means “god” in the Yoruba language of West
Africa.

pan A melodic percussion instrument unique to Trinidad, the steeldrum, made initially out
of discarded oil drums. Sometimes refers to other metal containers such as biscuit tins, or to
the music created by beating pan. See Panorama, pan rand de neck, pan yard, and steel band.

Panorama The carnival season steelband competition begun in 1963, with the finals
currently held on the weekend before Ash Wednesday. Under the control of Pan Trinbago,
Panorama has four competition divisions: North, South, East, and West. It is divided into
preliminary competitions (prelims), semifinals, and finals. Regional competitions are part
of the national competition, though each region has its own champion. Panorama prelims
are legendary for the energy of its supporters in the North Stands of the Queen’s Park
Savannah, though since 2002 prelims have been held in the pan yards.

pan round de neck A steelband that carries its pans suspended from a sash tied around the
neck. Also called traditional steelband. This is an early form of pan that is still played
competitively.

pan yard The practice area and home of a steelband. The concept of “yard” merges
the Trinidad concept of barracks with the African idea of a central space surrounded by
dwellings, and includes a sense of home as well as a gathering place. Pan yards are where
pannists and others often lime as well as play pan, and may have seats for spectators and
vending stands. See pan.

parang Traditional Spanish-Trinidadian Christmas music involving serenading from

house to house and, in more recent times, playing private and public performances and
competitions during the long parang season lasting from early October to January 6.

patois See Creole.

picong An acerbic, satirical, or taunting verbal exchange.

Pierrot Grenade A traditional carnival character, a jester in the guise of a schoolmaster,

with pretensions to learning while dressed in rags. The proof of Pierrot Grenade’s wisdom is
his ability to spell any polysyllabic word, in his own unique way, weaving a story with each
syllable. His costume consists of many small strips of brightly colored fabric, sometimes a
book, a schoolmaster’s whip, and previously – although not necessarily now – a mask or
face paint. The name is French patois for a Grenadian clown.

Pissenlit, Pisse en Lit, Pisenlit Performed at least until the 1950s when it was finally out-
lawed for vulgarity (having been periodically outlawed earlier, as in 1895), Pissenlit was

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played by men dressed as women in transparent nightgowns and carrying or wearing only
menstrual cloths stained with blood. In French, pis en lit means to piss in bed. Occasionally
revived today.

play mas, play mas’, masquerade, play mask To put on a costume and participate in a mas
band or jump up in the streets. This is the key action of carnival from which everything else
comes. The expression “to play mas” is part of Trinidadian vernacular, connected to the
idea “to play yourself” or “do your thing.” See mas, band, and jump up.

poui See bois and kalinda.

pretty mas, fancy mas Today’s dominant form of masquerade emphasizing beautiful
costumes with elaborate decorations. To some extent, pretty mas developed as middle-class
participation in carnival increased, although the Afro-Creole carnival also emphasized
“dressing up and looking good,” from early on in the nineteenth century. Some feel that
growth of pretty mas has led to the decline of traditional characters, the eclipse of ole mas,
and commercialization of carnival. Many pretty mas costumes are now decorated bikini-
style garments.

Queen’s Park Savannah The Queen’s Park Savannah was sold by the Pechier family to the
people of Trinidad and Tobago in 1817. The family reserved a lot of 6,000 square feet to be
used as a family burial ground. The Savannah served as cricket and football grounds with
no permanent structure for either. However, as early as the 1850s horseracing paddocks,
grandstands, and a racecourse were built under the patronage of Governor Lord Harris.
After the Victory Carnival of 1919, some carnival competitions were held in the Savannah,
which slowly became the central competitive arena for carnival. A permanent grandstand
was eventually erected on the south side.

rapso Rapso combines rap and calypso, and was influenced by the chantwell and the
speech of traditional characters such as the Midnight Robber and Pierrot Grenade. Brother
Resistance, one of rapso’s major originators, described rapso as the poetry of calypso, the
consciousness of soca, and the power of the word. See calypso and soca.

Red Indian A colloquial name now considered a misnomer for Guarahoon. The confusion
of Red Indian with Guarahoon probably originates with conflating North American
Indians with the mas derived from the Guaro of Venezuela in which the skin is covered with
red dye.

Road March A music competition on the streets of Port of Spain on carnival Monday and
Tuesday. The calypso or soca which is played most often as mas bands pass through the
downtown performance venue or cross the Queen’s Park Savannah stage on those two days
is ruled the Road March winner for the year. Thus, this competition is determined entirely
by what song those who control the music trucks providing music for the masqueraders
choose to play as the bands cross the stage or through the venue. There is no predetermined
agreement about this music.

rookoo, roucou A berry whose juice is used for red color, especially for Guarahoons.

Sailor A traditional carnival character dating to the nineteenth century, influenced by

American naval presence during World War II. There are several specific types of sailors,
each with its own costumes and dances or movements. See Bad Behaviour Sailors, Fancy
Sailors, firemen, and King Sailor.

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Shango One of the principal Yoruba gods of West Africa, the Caribbean, and Brazil. The
religion itself is often called Shango in Trinidad. See Orisha.

soca Described by Ras Shorty I, one of the main originators, as the soul of calypso, soca
is a fusion of East Indian rhythms with the African musical structure of calypso inflected
with influences from North American soul music. Sometimes identified as “party music,”
today soca is a generic term used for most of the new music coming out of Trinidad
and Tobago.

Soumarie, Sou-marie, Sumari A traditional carnival character consisting of an Indian

horse and rider. An East Indian version of Burokeet.

sound system Mobile amplification systems consisting of many bass boxes, mid-range
boxes, high-end boxes, and amps hauled through the streets on a sound-blasting juggernaut
eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer. Thousands of masqueraders follow each of these mobile
sound systems, a part of carnival since the 1970s.

steelband, steel band, steel orchestra Musical groups consisting of steeldrums, with a
percussive engine room, that emerged in Trinidad in the 1940s from the African working
class. The music has an African aesthetic: repetitive, syncopated, with a strong beat
and dense polyrhythms. Street orchestras also play European classical music and popular
tunes.

stickfighter One who practices the martial art of stickfighting. Stickfighers usually fre-
quent a particular gayelle, which may have a recognized champion. They often challenge
each other to stickfights within the gayelle. A “gayelle” is literally the circle in which a
stickfight takes place, often in front of a pub. But the term also implies a collective sense of
stickfighters who belong to one group, identified by the place of the gayelle. Stickfighters
from one gayelle will not ordinarily fight others from the same gayelle in an open com-
petition, though the competitions organized by the National Carnival Commission have
challenged this practice.

stickfighting, stick fighting, stick play A martial art probably originating in African stick
play, enhanced in Trinidad with the sticks used on plantations for protection against snakes.
Stickfighting is accompanied by drumming and by chants or songs called lavways, sung by
singers known as chantwells. Stickfighting has a strong ritual element and involves dancing
and clever footwork as well as fighting. There is also an Indian form of stickfighting,
referred to in Trinidad as kalariyapayyatt or gatka and other kinds of Indian martial arts.
See kalinda.

tamboo bamboo, tambour-bamboo, tambour bands Polyrhythmic percussion made by

beating bamboo sticks of varying lengths against the ground (hence “tambour” or drum).
Probably derived from Ghana, this rhythmic beating led to beating metal piles by the youths
of Laventille, who later invented the steel drum.

tassa drums East-Indian-derived drums made from goat skins stretched over clay bases.
Tassa drums are carried with a shoulder strap and played with sticks. Large bass drums,
struck by the hands, or by one hand and one stick, are sometimes called tassa.

traditional mas Traditional mas includes traditional characters, vintage calypso, pan, and
ole mas. Traditional mas bands are local and individual in tone as distinct from the massive
fancy mas bands. In traditional mas, the interactions of traditional characters are typically

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on a small scale. Characters interact with spectators in close proximity. Baby Dolls, Moko
Jumbies, Blue Devils, and Midnight Robbers provoke spectators into giving them money. The
stories of Pierrot Grenades are meant to be heard, as is the robber talk of the Midnight
Robber and the lost language of Black Indians. Both men and women now perform many
traditional characters.

Victory Carnival of 1919 Banned for two years because of World War I, carnival resumed
in 1919 with the Victory Carnival, organized by the newly established Trinidad Guardian
newspaper, despite talk by the British colonial authorities of banning it for good, marking
victory in war and for carnival. Carnival gradually became a national expression with
extensive media coverage.

vintage calypso An early narrative form of calypso in which calypsonians dressed in felt
hats and tailored suits spun actual incidents into pointed social and political commentary.

White-face Minstrels See Black-and-White-face Minstrels.

Wild Indians Wild Indian is a term no longer acceptable to some people in Trinidad or
Tobago as it connotes savagery. But it continues to be used as a reference to various forms
of Amerindian masquerade.

wine, win’, wining Dancing emphasizing fluid pelvis rotations, either alone or in full
physical contact front or back with another person. The expression comes from winding
the hips in a circle. The erotic movement can be traced to various African dances. Jam and
wine have approximately the same meaning.

An extended version of this glossary is printed in Milla Cozart Riggio (ed.), The Drama Review,
42(3): 220–35 (1998), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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WORKS CITED

UNPUBLISHED INTERVIEWS

Abbott, Stella, interview with Dawn Batson, Barataria, Trinidad (June 6, 2002).
Anonymous San Fernando Amerindian Masquerader, interview with Hélène Bellour and
Samuel Kinser (1996).
Barrow, Carlton “Zigilee,” interview with Kim Johnson, Port of Spain (February 20, 1993).
Beddoe, Jeffrey, personal communication with Kim Johnson (n.d.).
Brancker, Nicholas, interview with Jocelyne Guilbault, Barbados (March 12, 1997).
Brown, Ernest, personal communication with Kim Johnson (1997).
Christopher, Bolo, personal communication with Carlisle Chang (1997).
Constance, Zeno, interview with Burton Sankeralli (1997).
Edwards, Frances, personal communication with Jacob D. Elder and Lennox Pierre (1954).
Ganase, Pat, interview with Skye Hernandez (1997).
Girdharrie, Solo, interview with Skye Hernandez (1997).
Grant, Eddy, as interviewed on The Breakfast Club, TV 6, Port of Spain (January 28, 1994).
Howe, Darcus, interview with Geraldine Connor (n.d.).
Howe, Darcus, interview with Max Farrar (June 8, 2002).
Jules, Neville, interview with Dawn Batson, Port of Spain (June 6, 2002).
Jules, Neville, interview with Kim Johnson (1996).
Kitchener, Lord, interview with Gordon Rohlehr (1986).
Lezama, Carlos, interview with Philip Kasinitz (1991).
Mark, Raymond, “One Man,” interview with Kim Johnson (1995).
Mullard, Chris, interview with Max Farrar (September 27, 2002).
Pierre, Lennox, interview with Tony Hall on Late Night Lime, produced by Christopher
Laird (1990).
Ravi Ji (Ravindranath Maharaj), interview with Burton Sankeralli (1997).
Ravi Ji (Ravindranath Maharaj), interview with Milla Cozart Riggio (2004).
Sanoir, Andrew, interviews with Martin W. Walsh (1997, 1998, 2000).
Sanoir, James, interviews with Martin W. Walsh (1997, 1998, 2000).
Yearwood, Edwin, interview with Jocelyne Guilbault (Barbados, August 6, 1997).

TRINIDAD NEWSPAPERS

Chronicle Port-of-Spain Gazette

Daily News Recorder
Evening News Review
Fair Play San Fernando Gazette
New Era Sunday Guardian
Palladium Trinidad Guardian

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Music.
Coltrane, J. (1974) Interstellar Space, ASD9277, ABC Impulse.
Lord Invader (Rupert Grant) (1946) Calypso at Midnight, New York: Rounder.
—— (1955) Labor Day, Folkways Records.
Louisana Repertory Jazz Ensemble of New Orleans, Marching, Ragging and Mourning:
Brass Band of New Orleans, 1900–20.
Mighty Sparrow, The (1963) “The Outcast,” in The Outcast, NLP 4199, National.
—— (1976) Mas in Brooklyn, Recording Artists Productions.
—— (1992) Crown Heights Justice, Charlie’s Records 004.
Mitchum, R. (1995) Calypso Is Like so, Scamp, SCP 9701–2, Capital Records.
Ras Shorty I (1978) Soca Explosion, SCR 1004. New York: Charlie’s Records.
Soca Divas (2000), Rituals, CO7200.
White, M. (1991) Dr. Michael White Crescent City Serenade, Antillies: Island Records.

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306
INDEX

NOTE: Page numbers in italics mean information is in an illustration or caption. Page numbers
followed by n indicate a note; glos means that there is a Glossary entry. References are to
Trinidad Carnival unless otherwise indicated.

Abbott, Stella 199, 200 Amerindian masking 129–45, 176; costumes

Abercromby, Sir Ralph 39, 40, 73 131, 132, 136, 138, 139–40, 143, 144, 145,
Abimbola, Wande 69 176, 284, 287; headdresses 130, 133, 134,
Abiodun, Rowland 69 176, 284; history of 133–5; see also Black
abolition see emancipation Indians; Red Indians; White Indians; wild
aboriginal peoples see indigenous peoples indians
Abrahamson, R. 276–7 Amiens, Treaty/Peace of 31, 39
Abyssinian Jab 147 Amkpa, A. 250, 251
Ackrill, Lyle 87 Ammon, Dr Robert 87–8
Act of Emancipation (British) 31, 40 amplified pans 35
activities of value: and “festival world” 22 Anansi 216
Adilla, George “Jamesie” (Duke of ancient Greece and carnival 13–14, 121, 190
Marlborough) 214, 215 Andall, Ella 215
adolescence 26 Andrews Sisters, The 216, 217
Afong, Richard 36, 89, 289 Angelou, Maya 216
African Creoles 27, 30n, 57, 62, 83, 286; and Anglican Church (Church of England) 41,
“Indian Carnival” 77, 78, 79; “jacketmen” 287
56, 62; language 43; racial tension 81–2; in animal masks 15, 48, 284–5
social order 41, 53, 80, 94 Anthony, Michael 133
African Methodist Church 88 anti-Semitism 278–81
Africans: creativity 189; free Africans in Appadurai, Arjun 234
Caribbean 40; influence on calypso 213–14; Applewhite, Charles 256–7
influence on carnival 13, 14, 15, 27, 40, Approo, Narrie 107
48–50, 88, 94, 95; influence on dress 65–6; Argos (newspaper) 33
influence on steelband 187–8, 189–90, 195, Arnold, Patrick 202
210, 212; religions 40, 88; slaves in Trinidad Arnoldi, Mary Jo 69
39–40; see also African Creoles; cannes Aronson, Lisa 69
brûlées; ethnic communities Arrival Day celebrations 81, 82–3
agrarian origins of carnival 19, 24, 29n Arrow (calypsonian) 221, 222
Ahye, Molly 163 Arts Council (England) 261
Alexander’s Ragtime Band 33–4, 197 Ash Wednesday see carnival season
Alfred, Cecil 244n Asia: diasporic carnival 15; influences on
Alfred, Rodney 156n carnival 14; South Asian American
Alice jamette carnival band 56 Trinidadians 5; see also Chinese
All Stars Steel Orchestra 51; see also Trinidad community; Indian community
All Stars Steel Orchestra Asian Music Circle 259
Alleyne, Brian 260 Association for a People’s Carnival 262
Aloes, Sugar 81, 83, 226 Atilla see Quevado, Raymond Ignatius
Americas: carnival in 14–15, 19; see also Atlanta Olympic Games 122–3, 125
North America Atwell, Winifred 35

307
• INDEX

audience participation 7–8, 25, 118, 120, 149, Bertie, Betty 259
210 Bertphone 35
“audiotopia” 229 Best, Lloyd 24, 241
Australia 15 Betancourt, Sterling 34, 202
Authentic Indian see Fancy Indian Bettelheim, Judith 248
authority: carnival subversion 3, 15, 19, 44 Bhagee/Bargee music (Guiana) 215
Bible stories 88
Baboolal, George 259 Big Drum Dance (Grenadines) 52
Baburam, Mukesh 83 Billouin, Henry Schuller 214
Baby Doll 164, 166, 283glos bin Laden, Osama 44, 233
bacchanal 21, 283glos biscuit tin bands 33–4, 197; Blue Devil bands
Bad Behaviour Sailors 156n, 178–9, 188, 146, 147, 148, 149, 161
283–4glos; in drama 164, 166 Bishop, Pat 185
bad johns 29n, 44, 52, 54, 188, 189, 192, Black Ball band 56
284glos Black Elk band 132, 135–45
Bailey, Albert 171, 180, 289 Black Indians 107, 141, 142–3, 144, 284glos
Bailey, George 101, 124, 289 Black Power movement 29n, 35, 242, 248
Bajans (Barbadians) 41, 42 “black” as social construct 265–6
Baker, Captain 42, 51, 57–8, 59, 60 Black Stalin (calypsonian) 219, 230
Bakers band (French Band) 56, 57 black-and-white-face Minstrels 5, 106, 284glos
Bakhtin, Mikhail 3–4, 13, 15, 262–5 Blackman, Garfield see Ras Shorty I
Balliger, Robin 234, 235 Blakie, Lord (calypsonian) 200
bamboo see tamboo-bamboo bands Blanc, Norman le 62
bands 284glos; canboulay bands 50, 51–2; blood-drooling devils 150, 153, 177, 284; see
Chinese-Trinidadian influence 87–90; also Blue Devils; Jab Jabs; Jab Molassi
jamette bands 54–5, 56–61, 63; mas bands Blue Boy 222
101, 152, 284, 289glos; parade of bands 36; Blue Devils 79, 110, 193, 284glos, 288; bluing
Queen of the Carnival Bands 35; security process 149; history 146–8; jouvay band
measures 25; territoriality 20, 26, 188, 200; (John D’Arcy Lee) 89; Paramin Blue Devils
see also biscuit tin bands; mas bands; road 6, 146–56; photographs 157–61, 177, 180;
march; steelbands; tamboo-bamboo bands see also Jab Jabs; Jab Molassi
Baptists 223; see also Spiritual Baptists Blue Indians 141–2
Barabas, Miguel 256 boa constrictors 147–8
Barbadians 41, 42 “boatheads” 130
Barbarossa (Afong mas band company) 89, bodily functions 15, 19, 55, 291
152 Bodu, Ignacio 61–2
Barcelona Olympic Games 121–2, 127 body and carnival 262–5
Barnard, Malcolm 65 bois 284glos; see also stickfighting
Barnes, Orman “Patsy” 34 Bois d’Inde band 56
Barrow, Carlton see Constantine, Carlton “bomb” competition 209
Barrow Bonaparte, Belgrave 34
Barrow-in-Furness carnival 248, 267 bongo drums 183, 220, 284; bongo wakes
Bartholemew, Wilson “Thick Lip” 198 284glos
bass drum: skin 195, 197; steel 34, 35 bore pan 35
Bastide, Andrew de la 34 Boscoe Steel Band 260
Bat character 8, 79, 116, 284glos bottom-up play 10, 11
Beckles, George 203 boundary crossing 13, 19; and costume 97, 98,
Beddoe, Jeffrey 205 99, 100; physical space 24
Beech, Calvin 259 Boy Bishop 14
Belafonte, Harry 215, 216 Boys Town 200
Belasco, Lionel 214 Bradford Carnival 267
bele/belair 70–2, 74, 109, 213, 215, 284glos Bradley, Clive 163, 203
Belfon, Denise 238n Brancker, Nicholas 234
Benjai 238n Brazil 3, 14
Benjamin, Sheldon “Shel Shok” 238n Brereton, Bridget 42
Benji 265 Britain: conquering of Trinidad 31, 73;
Bennett, Louise 246 Crown Colony governorship 39–40, 41;
Berger, John 64, 212 diasporic carnival 14, 246–8, 255–69;
Berkeley, Wayne 289 steelbands in 207; see also England;
Berkley, Lady 207 Notting Hill Carnival

308
• INDEX

Britain investment in oil 86 centuries – Atilla the Hun and Lord

British Tzchekoslovak Friendship band 259 Executor, “Dookani,” 224; Dan, Maximus
Brooklyn Labor Day Carnival 5, 25, 29, 50, “Vampire” (2002) 230; Blakie, Lord
246, 248, 249, 270–82; Crown Heights riots “Steelband Clash” (1954) 200; Chalkdust
and after 29n, 278–82; and ethnic identity (Hollis Liverpool) “Kaiso versus Soca”
275–7; historical development 89, 272–3; (1978) 219, “Ram the Magician” (1984)
jouvay celebration 277, 282; Kiddie 224; Composer “Cacadah” (1964) 218;
Carnival 277; mas element 274–5; official Crossfire steel orchestra “Another Night
organization 273–4, 277; and politicians Like This” 209; Delamo [“I, dougla, I
271, 274–5, 278 staying neutral”] 225; Dempster, Sanelle
Brother Marvin 81–2 “River” (2001 Road March winner) 185;
Brother Resistance 292 Duncan, Selwyn (dance band) “Ruby” 205;
Brown, Alyson 122, 169, 180 Fighter, King “Sookie” (1964) 224; Garcia,
Brown, Ernest 205 Chris “chutney Bacchanal” (1996) 82;
Bruegel, Pieter 15, 16 George, Iwer “Bottom in the Road” (1998)
Buchanan, Roy 260 226; Gypsy “Little Black Boy” 185; Grant,
Buck, Ma 259 Eddy “Black-skinned Blue-eyed Boy” (first
Buddha float 105 soca recording 1970) 221; Invader, Lord
bull drum 32, 195, 197 “Labor Day” (1955) 272, “Rum and Coca
Bundey, Ruth 265 Cola” (1946) 217 – recorded by The
Burgie, Irving (Lord Burgess) 215 Andrews Sisters 217; Invaders steel
burlesque 49, 162 orchestra “Skokian” 208; Kitchener, Lord
Burroquites/Burrokeets 8, 89, 284–5glos; “Rainorama” 221, “Road Make to Walk on
Indian version 79, 293; see also Soumarie/ Carnival Day” (1963) 256, “Sugar Bum”
Sumari mas (1978) 219, reception in Jamaica 219;
Butler, Uriah “Buzz” 197 Laventille Rhythm Section “jouvay” (1998
Byron, Nydia 168, 180 mud mas chant) 223; Lion, Roaring
“Caroline” 214; Maestro, “Fiery” (1976)
Caillois, Roger 19 218, “Tempo” (1975) 218, 221; Mann,
caiso 51, 285; see also calypso Sonny “Lotay La” (1996) 81, 82; Marvin,
calinda/calendas see cannes brûlées; kalinda; Brother “Jahaaji Bhai (1966) 81, 82;
stickfighting Montano, Machel and Xtatic “Big Truck”
call and response 163, 196, 210, 286, 289 (1997) 231, “Come Dig It” 233, “Jab Jab”
callaloo 285glos 230, “Real Unity” 226, “Toro Toro” 153,
Callaloo: carnival play 46n, (Minshall mas 194; Penguin (Sedley Joseph) “The Devil”
band) 116, 120, 124–5; Minshall mas band (1980) 219; Ras Shorty I [Lord Shorty,
company 285 Garfield Blackman] “Endless Vibrations”
calypso 14, 15, 33, 189, 213–27, 285glos; (1975) 221, “I Make Music” (1976) 222,
Chinese protagonists 89–90; and “Indian Singers” 221, “Indrani” (1973) 80,
community 26; cross-over success 216–17, 221, “Kalo Gee Bull” (1974) 221, “Mango
221–2; and drama 162, 165; historical Long” (1958) 221, “Om Shanti” 80, 222,
development 62, 213–14; Indian 224, “Soul Calypso Music” 222, “Whom
protagonists 79–80, 81; influences on God Bless” (1979) 221; Rose, Calypso
214–15; Man Better Man 163; opposition “Gimme More Tempo” (1977 Road March
to 216; pan calypsos 218; political calypsos winner) 218; Rudder, David “The Engine
219, 222, 226, 231; and racial tension 81–2; Room” 79, 84n, 207, “The Ganges and the
rapso 224, 292glos; and soca 219–21, 222–7, Nile” (2000) 185, 225, 226; “The Power and
228–9, 232, 234–5; song titles see calypso/ the Glory” 188, “Panama (1988) 215, 222;
soca/chutney soca song titles; and Sandra, Singing “Voices from the Ghetto”
stickfighting 213, 285; vintage calypso (calypso monarch title 2002) 185; Shadow
294glos; see also caiso “Bass Man” (1974) 218, 221, “Constant
Calypso contest 45 Jamming” (1976) 218, “Poverty is Hell”
Calypso King/Monarch 34, 81, 165, 216, (1993/4) 219; Sparrow (Mighty/ Slinger
285glos; junior contest 104 Francesco) “Crown Heights Justice” (1992)
Calypso Rose 218, 219, 221, 223, 285 280, “De man is de man in de van” (1963)
calypso tents 46, 49, 50, 62; (Brooklyn) 276; 256, “Jean and Dinah” (calypso monarch
(Jamaica) 223 1956) 165–6, recorded by Robert Mitchum
calypso/soca/chutney soca song titles (listed (1957) 216, “Maharajin” (1982) 80, 224,
under singer/composer, bandleader, or band ): 226, “Maharajin’s Sister (1983) 224,
Trinidad and Tobago, twentieth/twenty-first “Maharajin’s Cousin” (1984) 224, “New

309
• INDEX

York Equalize You” (1976) 275–6, Carnival Development Committee (Notting

“Outcast” 200, “Robbery with V” (1961) Hill) 261
220, “Rose” (1960) 219, “The Slave” (1963) Carnival Enterprise Committee (Notting Hill)
216; Squibby “Iron Man” 221; Stalin, 261
Black “Vampire Year” (1982) 230; Carnival Improvement Committee 33, 36, 43
Superblue “Jab Molassie” 230, “Soca Carnival King 15, 16–17, 42, 95
Baptist” (1980) 223, “Zingay” (1980s) 223; Carnival Messiah (Connor) 267, 268
Tanker, André “Ben Lion” (2002) 185, 233; Carnival Monday 285n; see also carnival
Taxi (music band) “Dollar Wine” (early season
1990s) 222, “Frenchmen” 222; unidentified Carnival Queen contest 18, 42, 89, 190;
artist “Calypso Shouter” 215; “Bhagi diasporic carnival 257; disruption 35, 46n;
Pholourie” (period of 1920s and 30s) 224, sponsorship 34, 35
“Dookani” 224, “Gi Sita Rambo” 224; carnival season 14, 45–7
United Sisters “Four Women to One Man” Carnival Sunday 32; Dimanche Gras 43, 46n,
(1995) 219; “Whoa Donkey” (1994) 219; 285, 286glos; see also carnival season
Yearwood, Edwin “Redemption” 233; carnival theory 3–11; urban dialectic 13–30
Trinidad and Tobago, nineteenth century “I Carnival Tuesday 36, 285glos; see also
prefer a jacketman” 222; “Jerningham the carnival season; Mardi Gras Carnival
Governor” 62; “When Ah Dead Bury Me Carr, Andrew 42
Clothes” 196; Other countries: Jamaica Carriacou island 52
“Sly Mongoose” 33, 214; Martinique “the Carson, Sonny 279, 280
Bread we Eat” 71; “L’Année Pasée 214; Casablanca Steel Orchestra 34, 205, 206
“Little Brown Girl” 71; New Orleans Jelly Cassagnac, M. Granier de 67
Roll Morton “Winin’ Boy Blues” (1920s) Cassanova, Derek 168, 180
215; unidentified artist “Panama” (1920s) caste system 76
215; Notting Hill, London, Peters and Lee Castro, Fidel 21
“Don’t Make me Wait too Long,” 256. Catholicism 39–40, 41, 49, 94, 95, 286; see also
Camps, Helen 163 English Catholic Church
Canada see Montreal; Toronto Catlin, George 136
canboulay see cannes brûlées Cato, Gavin 279
Canclini, Nestor Garcia 230–1 Cazabon, Jean Michel 67
cane burning 15, 285; festivals see cannes Cedula of Population 31, 39–40, 41, 65,
brûlées 285–6glos
cannes brûlées (canboulay) 14, 15, 31–2, Cerf-Volants 56
48–52, 285glos; bands 50, 51–2; conflict and Chacon, Don José Maria 39, 73, 287
riots 32, 33, 42, 51–2, 53, 58, 59, 63, 71; Chalamelle, E.F. 63
dress 74; features of 49; historical origins Chalkdust (Hollis Liverpool) 42, 219
41–2, 48–9, 50, 57, 196; kalinda 49, 51–2, Chancellor, Sir John 33
289; in nineteenth-century jamette carnival chandler 197
57–61, 63; as precursor of contemporary Chang, Carlisle 43, 79, 86, 88–90, 101, 113
carnival 50; processions 49, 50, 57, 58, 59, chants: kalinda chants 51, 289glos
60; as resistance 49, 50, 57; suppression 49, chantwells (shantwells) 50, 51, 54, 196,
53, 57–8, 59–61, 63, 77, 196; women’s role 286glos
50–2 Charles III, king of Spain 285
canti carnascialeschi 15 Charles, Hubert Raphael (Lion) 33
Captain Wenham’s Masqueraders 264–5 Charles, Ian 257, 259, 260
Carapichaima Carnival 80–1, 96, 103, 104, Charles, Rudolph 35, 203
105, 167, 170, 172, 174, 175, 178, 179, Charleston era 86–7
180 Charlie’s Roots 20, 222; see also Rudder,
Carib Tokyo 200 David
Caribana, Toronto 246, 248, 249, 250, 253 children: and carnival experience 109–10;
Carmichael, Mrs A.C. 69, 95 children’s carnival 101–2, 103, 277;
carnival: origins of 13–15; see also history of diasporic carnival 260;NCC camps 104,
carnival 107, 142, 164; schools’ involvement 103–4
Carnival and Arts Committee (Notting Hill) Chinese community: Christopher brothers’
261 1920s heyday 85–7; immigration 31, 32, 40,
Carnival Bands Association 89 85; origins of names 85; role in carnival 43,
Carnival Bands Union 34 85–90; in steelbands 206
Carnival Development Committee 34, 88, 89; Chinese Laundry 90
see also National Carnival Commission chipping 286glos

310
• INDEX

Christian religions 40–1; see also African costumes 28, 45, 48, 50, 55, 56; Amerindian
Methodist Church; Anglican Church; masking 131, 132, 136, 138, 139–40, 143,
Baptists; Pentecostalism; Presbyterianism; 144, 145, 176, 284, 287; boundary crossing
Roman Catholicism 97, 98, 99; costume balls 61; diasporic
Christmas: carnival season 45, 47n, 67, 72; carnival 259–60, 274; jamette carnival 42–3,
social customs 95 74; jewelry 67–8, 70; Martinican dress 42–3,
Christopher, Chin-yu 85–7 65–75; Minshall interview 109–16; Neg
Christopher, Choy-yin 85–7 Jardins 95–7; and otherness 262–4; parade
Christopher, Con-chin (Bolo) 85–7 87; surrealist costumes 111; see also
Chu Foon, Pat 256 headdresses
Church of England 41, 287 cowbells 79
chutney 81–2, 224–5, 286glos; and women 81, “cowheads” 147, 177
224, 225 Cowley, John 42, 107n
chutney soca 82, 224–6, 229–30, 286glos; song Crazy (soca singer) 82
titles see calypso/soca/chutney soca song Creole languages 33, 40, 43, 50, 286
titles Creole tradition 41, 59, 63, 87, 286glos; dress
Chutney Soca Monarch contest 36 73–4; social order 41, 53, 59, 63, 80, 97; see
Cielto, Vicky 259 also African Creoles; French Creoles
cinema, influence of 135, 200 Cro Cro 81, 83, 226
Cipriani, Captain A.A. 43 cross-gender dressing 15, 55, 110, 286, 291;
cities: as site of carnival 19–20 Leeds Carnival 264, 265; prohibition 97
Clarke, Jean (Jean in Town) 166 Crossfire 34, 208–9
class see social class Crowley, Daniel 42, 101, 130, 131, 142, 155n
“Clause Seven” 216 Crown Colony 40
Clements, Sharon 263 Crown Heights incident 278–82
clock time 23 cuatro 86, 201, 286glos; see also quatro
clowns see Fancy Clown; Pierrots Cuba 14, 21
cockade hat 73, 75 cultural hybridity 6, 9, 267
Cohen, Abner 261, 272 cultural politics: diasporic carnival 246,
Coker, Leo 203 251–3, 262–8, 271–2
College of Science and Technology, and cultural production: bricolage 66; dress as
Applied Arts of Trinidad and Tobago 203 cultural product 64–5; and soca 231,
Collins, Wallace 257 237–8
colonialism 3; appropriation of carnival cultural reconversion 230–1
189–90 Cupid, John 8, 104, 164, 242
coloured people see free coloureds cutters 32, 195, 197
Columbus, Christopher 31, 39
Columbus Day 187 Dabydeen, D. 249
commedia dell’arte 14 Daily News 61
commercialism 5, 9, 28, 292; diasporic Dame Lorraine 5, 49, 110, 286glos; dramas
carnivals 250–1; and soca 232–3 162
communitas 29n Dan, Maximus “Vampire” 230
community and carnival 19, 20, 26–7 “dancehall” music/soca 214, 223
competitive element of carnival 7, 8, 9, 11, 19, dancing: African/cannes brûlées 49, 50; bele/
46n; historical origins in canboulay 50; belair 43, 70–2, 74, 109, 213, 215, 284glos;
steelbands 208–9; territoriality 20; see also chipping 286glos; dance dramas 163;
Carnival Queen contest; Jab Jab harichand dance 79; jab dancing 147, 148;
Competition; Panorama Competition jam and wine 149, 193, 233, 294glos; quelbe
Composer (calypsonian) 218 (Tobago) 50; societies 42
Concord Multi-racial Group 259 Dandridge, Dorothy 216
Condor, Hughbon 263 danger of carnival 7, 15, 19, 21, 188; in
Connor, Edric 51, 52, 162–3, 258 diasporic carnivals 243; see also violence
Connor, Geraldine 163, 267, 268 Danois band 56
Constantine, Carlton Barrow (Zigilee) 203 Dante (The Inferno) 286
consumerism 20–1, 28 Darrell, Peter 111
“coolies” 77–8 Darway, Norman 198
Cooper, Michael 201 Davidson, Philmore “Boots” 34, 201
Coq d’Inde ponde dance 74 Davis, Curtis 209
Corail band 56 Davis, Cynthia 203
Corsican immigrants 85, 87 Davis, Frankie 259

311
• INDEX

Day, Charles 74, 133 79, 89, 197, 293glos; women drummers 50,
decency see obscenity in carnival; 52; see also biscuit tin bands; pans;
respectability steelbands; tamboo-bamboo bands
Dedierre, Camille 71 dub 214
Delamo 225 Duke of Marlborough (George Adilla) 214,
Delano, Pablo 104 215
DeLeon, Raphael (Roaring Lion) 49, 214,
215, 219 East Indian immigrants 40, 43, 286glos; see
democracy and carnival 3, 25 also Indian community
Dempster, Sanelle 185, 219, 221 East Indian Jab Jabs 156n; see also Jab Jabs
Derek, Stephen 104, 289 Easter 45
Desperadoes Steel Orchestra 35, 192, 200, Eastern Europe 19
205, 206, 207 Ebony steel band 256
devil bands 285, 286glos Ecclesiastical Ordinance 41
devils 15, 188, 288; in “Indian festival” 79; see Edinborough, Felix 107
also blood-drooling devils; Blue Devils; Jab education and carnival 103–4; NCC camps
Jabs; Jab Molassi; molasses devils 104, 107, 142, 164; study of steelband 203
dialectic see carnival theory Edwards, Frances 51
Diallo, Amadou 282n Eicher, Joanne 64
diasporic carnival 6–7, 14–15, 241–82; Eid 45
appropriation of space 25, 256; cultural Eisenhower, Dwight D. 101, 102
politics 253, 262–8, 271–2; economic issues Elder, J.D. 42, 51, 241
251–3; and identity 241, 248–51, 256, Elizabethan theatre 121
265–8, 270, 275–7; in Leeds and London emancipation 19, 31–2, 40, 48, 57, 187;
255–69; organizational entries 252–3; pan- celebration of 14, 42, 49, 285;
Caribbean characteristics 248; policing 250, Emancipation Act 31, 40; and steel band
260–1, 279; and racial tension 29n, 256–60, tradition 187–94; see also jouvay
273, 278–82; as resistance 256; retro emancipation jouvay tradition 187–94
colonialism 7; reverse globalization 245–54; emigration: loss of home 212; see also
soca music 235–7; spatial practices 260–5; diasporic carnival
as tourist attraction 250, 273; see also engine room 20, 201, 207, 286glos
Brooklyn Labor Day Carnival; Leeds England: diasporic carnival 14, 246–8,
Carnival; Notting Hill Carnival 255–69; history of carnival 14; see also
Dickens, Charles 23, 29n Leeds Carnival; Notting Hill Carnival
difference in Trinidad Carnival 4 English Band 57
Dimanche Gras 43, 46n, 285, 286glos English Catholic (EC) Church 41, 287glos
Dinkins, David 279 English language 33, 62
Dionysia 13–14 “ephemeral” music 209–10
“dirt” in carnival 15 epistemology and “festival world” 22, 27–8
Dirty Sailors see Bad Behaviour Sailors Equal Opportunities Act: “Clause Seven” 216
Discovery Day 187 ethnic communities 39, 85; assimilation 77,
disguise and mas 93–7, 110 78, 80, 83; blending identifications 266–9;
Divali festival 40–1, 45, 82 and identity 4–5, 94, 270; in New York
D’jamettres 56 270–1, 271–3; and police brutality 282n; see
D’Midas (Derek mas band company) 104 also African Creoles; Chinese community;
Dorismond, Patrick 282n diasporic carnival; French Creoles; Indian
Dover Carnival 267 community; racial conflicts
Dragon character 172, 188, 286glos Eurocentric elite 80
Dragonaires music band 20; see also Lee, Eurocentrism 189–90
Byron Europe: carnival in 13, 14, 247, 248; see also
drama: popular theatre 162–6 Britain
dress: Martinican dress 42–3, 65–75; Evening News (San Fernando) 198, 199
significance of 64–5; see also costumes Executor, Lord (Phillip Garcia) 49, 214, 215,
drug-taking: Hosay festival 77 224
drums and drumming 32, 33, 49, 86; extempo/extempore calypso 62, 190, 287glos
Afro-Creole groups 42, 50; for Blue Devil
jab bands 149; cannes brûlées 49, 50, 52; in Falassi, Allesandro 4
Chinese mas 89; colonialist family 26, 28, 30n
accompaniment 195–6; drumming in Fancy Clown 88; see also Pierrots
school 188, 204, 205; tassa drums 77, 78, fancy dress balls 61

312
• INDEX

Fancy Indians 139, 142, 176, 287glos Garaud, Louis 70

fancy mas 101, 292glos; “fancy masques” 55; Garcia, Chris 82
see also pretty mas Garcia, Phillip (Lord Executor) 49, 214, 215,
Fancy Sailors 79, 188, 289glos; see also 224
Fireman character; King Sailor; sailor Garib, Raul 79
characters Garlin, Bunji 221, 238n
Fanon, Frantz 74 gatka (gadka) 84n, 96, 289, 293
Farquhar, Canon Max 201 Gay Carnival Steel Band 260
fascism and racial conflict 257–8 gayelle 287glos, 293
Fastnachtspiele 14, 15 Geertz, Clifford 121
Feast of Fools 14 gendered representations 250
Fernandez, Denzil “Dimes” 35 George, Iwer 226
fertility 19, 21 Germany: Caribbean presence 40; carnival 19,
Festival of Britain 34, 202 50; Fastnachtspiele 14, 15
“festival world” 21–8; and community 26–7; Gervais, Allan 203
epistemology and social value 22, 27–8; Gibbons, Rawle 163
space in 24–5; time in 22–4 Gilroy, Paul 233, 237
fete 287glos Girdharrie, Solo 78, 79
fiddle-playing 42 Girl Pat 203
Fight Between Carnival and Lent, The global approach to carnival 8–9, 11; reverse
(Bruegel) 15, 16 globalization 245–54
films, influence of 135, 200 Goddard, George 35, 201–2
fire blowing 148, 150 Godfather, The 266
Fireman character 287glos Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 19
Fish Quay Festival, North Shields 267 Goffman, Erving 64, 74
Fitzgerald, Henry (Mighty Terror) 220 Golden City band 56
flambeaux (torches) 32, 49, 51, 72, 287glos; Gomes, Albert 201
see also torchlit processions Gomes, Sa 49
Fleming, Tom 267 Gopinath, Gayatri 236
Flourbag Sailors 188; see also Bad Behaviour Gordon Bulgarians 259
Sailors, sailor characters Gorin, Rufus 273
fol (breastplate) 96, 287glos Graham, Colin 111
food of carnival 19, 285 Grandstand 7, 192, 287glos; see also Queen’s
Foon, Pat Chu 256 Park Savannah
Foster, Helen 69 Grant, Charles (Gorilla) 33, 258
foulé 32, 195, 197 Grant, Eddy 221, 224
France, Arthur 257, 259 Gray, Herman 237–8
France 14, 19, 31, 87; see also French Creoles Greece, ancient 13–14, 121, 190
Francisco, Slinger see Mighty Sparrow Grenade, Pierrot 291glos
Franco, Pamela 42–3 Grenier, Line 228
Fraser, L.M. 51–2 Griffith, Jason 289
Frazer, Sir James 19, 29n Griffith, Joseph 34, 202
free coloureds 31, 59, 63, 287glos; women of Grimm brothers 19
color 69 grotesque 15; “grotesque body” 263,
Free French Steel Orchestra 34 264–5
Free School 260 Grow More Food 200
Freeling, Sir Samford 58 Growling Tiger (Neville Marcano) 49, 215
French Band (Bakers band) 56, 57 Guarahoons (Warahoons) 86, 142, 187,
French Creoles 32, 56, 286; belair dance 70–1; 287glos, 292; origins 130–2, 141; see also
immigration to Trinidad 65; language 33, Wild Indians
40, 50; language of calypso 214; Neg Guinness Cavaliers 256
Jardins 95–6; opposition to calypso 214; in guitar, Spanish 86
social order 41, 59, 63, 73, 80 gutka 289
French Revolution 65, 70, 72–3, 108n Guy, Cyril “Snatcher” 199
Frith, Simon 233 Gypsy 185

gadka see gatka Haiti: in Brooklyn carnival 271; revolution

Ganga Dhaara (River festival) 84n 70–1, 73
gangs 20, 43, 189, 200, 284; jamette bands 54, Hall, Stuart 65, 236, 245, 265–6
56–61, 63; territoriality 188, 200 Hall, Tony 51; Jean and Dinah 165–6

313
• INDEX

Hallelujah band 44, 116, 122 Hosay festival 41, 45, 77, 83n, 84n 243; riots
Halloween masks 44 33, 42, 77–8
Hamilton, Sir Robert 49, 59 House of Black Elk 132, 135–45
Handelman, Don 9–10 Howe, Darcus 258, 261–2
Harding, Jim 289 Hugues, Victor 75n
harichand dance 79 Hurston, Zora Neale 215
Harlem Carnival 235, 245, 272–3; see also Hussein (grandson of Muhammad) see
Brooklyn Labor Day Carnival Hosay festival
Harlem Nightingales 200 hybridity 6, 9, 267
Harrigan, Roland 203
Hart, Edmond 88, 89 identity and carnival 93–7; see also national
Hart’s New Generation 88 identity
harvest rituals 14, 19; cannes brûlées 41 Illustrated London News 133, 134
Harvey, David 25 indentured immigrants: Chinese 31, 85;
Hasidic Jews 29n, 278–81 Indian 5, 32, 76, 78, 85
Hassan (grandson of Muhammad) see Hosay Independence Carnival 46n
festival Indian community 28, 44, 78; Arrival Day
Hawkins, Yusef 282n celebrations 81, 82–3, 225; in diasporic
Haynes, Patsy 202 carnival 236, 253; East Indian immigrants
Hazell, Sheynenne 104 40, 43, 286glos; influence on carnival 76–84,
headdresses: Amerindian masking 130, 131, 104, 105; musical influence 80, 184, 197,
132, 133, 176, 284; Blue Devils 147, 153–4, 224–5, 229–30; see also Hinduism
177; Martinican dress 68–70 Indian martial arts 289; see also gatka
Hell Yard steelband 198 Indians see Amerindian masking;
Hell’s Kitchen 200 Guarahoons; Indian community; Wild
Henderson, Russ 259 Indians
Henley, Hazel 203 indigenous peoples 39, 129–30, 131–2, 141;
Herbert, Christopher “Tambu” 218, 222 see also Amerindian masking
Hernandez, Denzil 203 Indo-Creole 286
Heung see Lee Heung industrial and pre-industrial tradition 19–20;
hierarchy of carnival 7, 8, 11 use of time 23
High Wycombe Carnival 267 Inniss, L.O. 49, 54
Hill, D.R. 276–7 interculturalism 7, 11, 266; see also
Hill, Errol 35, 42, 43, 46n 162, 213, 256; Man multiculturalism
Better Man 113–14, 163 “international music” 228–38
Hinds, Allison 219, 221 intoxication 19
Hindu Prince (calypsonian) 79 Invader, Lord (calypsonian) 217, 272
Hinduism 40–1, 76–7, 224–5; Hindu Invaders Steel Orchestra 34, 200, 208–9, 260
community in Trinidad 28, 44, 83; inversion 9, 11, 14; suspension of normal time
renaissance 82–3; see also Indian 15
community iron bands 174, 197–8, 289glos
Hintzen, Percy 236 Irwin, Tyrone 259
history of carnival: Amerindian masking Islam 41, 44, 76, 77, 84n
133–5; Blue Devils 146–8; calypso 62, Italy 14
213–14; cannes brûlées 41–2, 48–9, 50, “Ivory and Steel” recording 35
57–61, 196; establishing origins 13–14;
Hosay 77–8; jamette carnival 54–63; jab dancing: Paramin Blue Devils 147, 148–55
steelbands 34, 187–203, 205; in Trinidad Jab Jab Competition 152, 153
and Tobago 3–5, 31–6, 41–7, 50; as urban Jab Jabs 86, 88, 146, 287–8glos; costume 96;
history 19–20 Indian influence 78–9; see also Blue Devils;
hobbyhorse see Burroquites/Burrokeets; East Indian Jab Jabs
Soumarie/Sumari mas Jab Molassi 79, 86, 110, 188, 288glos; and
Holder, Claire 261, 262 Blue Devils 146, 284
Holland see Netherlands Jack, Stanley 258
Holman, Ray 203 “jacketmen” 56, 62
Holquist, M. 265 Jackson, Rev. Jesse 278
home, loss of 212 Jagessar, Lionel and Rosemarie 144
Honoré, Brian 107 “Jahaaji Bhai” (calypso) 81–2
hornblowing 49, 50 Jai, Rikki 80, 81
Hosang, David 153 Jamaica: and diasporic carnival 253, 276–7;

314
• INDEX

Jonkannu celebration 67–8; musical Calypso King; Carnival King; Carnival

influences 223, 231 Queen
James, C.L.R. 210, 232, 241 Kinser, Sam 155
James, Daisy 206 Kitchener, Lord (calypsonian) 21, 79, 217,
jamette carnival 32, 42, 288glos; costume 74; 218, 219–20, 221, 256
jamette bands 54–5, 56–61, 63; in Kootoo see Sanoir, Andrew
nineteenth century 53, 54–63; obscenity in Krosfyah 221, 234, 235
55–6, 61, 62, 63, 74; women’s costumes 42–3 Kun, Josh 229, 230
jamettes 75n, 166
jamming 294 La Rose, John 256
Jasper, Lee 262 Labor Day Carnival see Brooklyn
Jaycees 35 Lai, Manzie 87
jazz and calypso 215 Laird, Christopher 51, 100
“Jean and Dinah” (calypso) 216 Lamming, George 265
Jean and Dinah (play) 165–6 las’ lap 8, 285, 289glos
Jean in Town (Jean Clarke) 166 Laslett, Rhaune 258
Jeffers, Levi 257 Late Night Lime (TV program) 51
jewelry 67–8, 70 Latin American music and calypso 214
Jews and Labor Day riots 29n, 278–81 Laventille Rhythm Section 223
Ji, Ravi see Ravi Ji lavway 285, 289glos 293
Jimmy James and the Vagabonds 259 Lawbreakers Steel Orchestra 206; see also
John the Baptist 94 Renegades
Johnson, Astor 163 Layne, Lancelot 224
Jones, Claudia 258, 261, 269n le Blanc, Norman 62
Jones, Patrick 34, 286 Leacock, George 107n
Jonkonnu celebration (Jamaica) 67–8 Lee, Byron 20, 90, 223
Joseph, Damien 153, 156n Lee, Dr John D’Arcy 89
Joseph, Patrick 147, 148, 149 Lee Chong Serenaders 90
Joseph, Puggy 107 Lee Heung, Elsie 88
Joseph, Sedley (Penguin) 219 Lee Heung, Stephen 79, 88, 89, 113, 289
jouvay devil bands 284, 288 Leeds West Indian Carnival 255–6; and black
jouvay (J’ouvert) 7–8, 33, 87, 101, 110, subjectivities 265–6, 267–8; historical
288glos; Brooklyn Labor Day Carnival 277, context 257, 259–60; policing 260; space
282; and calypso 223; historical origins 46, and cultural politics 262–5
196, 285; and steel band tradition 187–94 leela 76–7, 79
jouvay popular theatre process (JPTP) Lefebvre, Henri 24–5, 261
164–6 Lend-Lease agreement 87
Juju Warriors 187, 188 Lent see carnival season
Jules, Neville 198, 199, 201, 208–9 Lewis, Tony 259
jump-and-wave dance 288glos Lezama, Carlos 273, 275, 279–80, 281
jumping up 288glos limbo dancing 168
Junior Telford 260 liminality 15–19, 22
liming 289glos
kabuki characters 88 Little Sparrow 215–16; see also Mighty
kaiso 51, 285; see also calypso; stickfighting Sparrow
“kaisoul” 221, 224 Liverpool, Hollis “Chalkdust” 42, 219
Kalabari region, Nigeria 69, 79n Liverpool Carnival 267
kalariyapayyatt 293; see also gatka London see Notting Hill Carnival
kalinda 288–9glos; dance 289; see also cannes London Development Agency 252
brûlées; stickfighting London Melodians 207
Kallicharan, Ivan 79 London Rhanne Irish Girl Pipers 259
Keate, Governor 54 long-noses 15; see also Bad Behaviour Sailors
Keith, Michael 262 Lord Mayor of London 262
Kelman, Bertram 203 Lorraine, Dame see Dame Lorraine
Kernahan, Michael 203 “Lotay La” (calypso) 81, 82
King Devil 147, 149–50 Louima, Abner 282n
King Fighter 224 Louis XIV, king of France 89
King Sailor 289glos; see also Fancy Sailor; Louis XV, king of France 89
sailor characters Louis XVI, king of France 70
kings and queens 15, 16, 50, 95; see also Louisiana 14; see also Mardi Gras

315
• INDEX

Lovelace, Earl 165, 186 Sarragossa (1997) 89, Botay (1998) 89,
Lubavitcher sect 278–81 Jewels of the Nile (1999) 89, Xtassy (2000) 89,
ludic 9–10 Arena (2001) 89, Untamed (2002) 89 ;
Lukács, Georg 212 Ammon, Robert – Gods of Olympus (1954)
Lupercalia 13–14 87, Richard II (1955) 87, La Fiesta Brava
Luton carnival 248, 267 (1956) 87–8, Atlantis (1958) 88,
Lyndersay, Mark 233 Conquistadors (1959) 88, China in Peace and
War (1960) 88; Flagwavers of Sienna (1962)
macajuel (boa constrictor) 147–8 88; Chu Foon, Pat (Silver Stars Steel
McAlister, Rose 259 Orchestra) – Gulliver’s Travels (1963) 256;
McBurnie, Beryl 163 Lai, Manzie – The Moors (1939) 87,
McIntosh, Ronnie 221 Knights of the Round Table (1940) 87,
McMillan, M. 250–1 Apaches (1946) 87, Daniel Boone (1947) 87,
madras 69–70 Leopard Men 87; Lee Heung, Stephen and
Maestro (calypsonian) 218, 219, 221 Elsie – Japan, Land of the Kabuki (1964) 88,
“Maharajin” (calypso) 80, 224 Les Fêtes Galantes de Versailles (w. Horse
Mail, Thomas 136 Ballet of Louis XIV) (1965) 89, Crete
Malick Folk Performers 168, 180 (1966) 89, China: The Forbidden City (1967)
Man Better Man (Hill) 113–14, 163 89, Primeval – Rites of Spring (1968) 89,
Manchester Free Trade Hall 258 1001 Nights (w. Magic Horse costume)
Mancrab character (Minshall) 117–20, 124–5 (1969) 89, Conquest of Space (1970) 89,
Mann, Sonny (“Lotay La”) 81, 82 Yucatan (1971) 89, Russian Fairy Tales
Mannette, Ellie 34, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202 (1972) 89, East of Java (1973) 89, Terra
Manning, Frank 245, 248–9, 271 Firma (1974) 89, We Kinda People (1975)
Manning, Patrick 36 89; Minshall, Peter (Callaloo Company) –
Manolete (bullfighter) 88 Paradise Lost (1976) 115, 116, Zodiac
Manwarren, Wendell 185 (1978) 113, 116, River (1983) 79, 116–20,
Marcano, Neville (Growling Tiger) 49, 215 Callaloo (1984) 116, 120, 124, Golden
Mardi Gras Carnival 3, 5, 19; Amerindian Calabash (1985) 116, 120, 125, Carnival is
masking 137–8, 140; history 31, 46–7n, Colour (1987) 79, Tantana (1991) 79,
195–6 Hallelujah (1995) 116, 120, 124, Song of the
Maribones 56 Earth (1996) 120, 124, Tapestry (1997) 120,
Mark, Raymond “One Man” 205 124, This is Hell (2001) 169, 180 (for other
market forces see commercialism Minshall TT mas bands, see Minshall
marli doundoun (Tobago) 50 timeline 126); Yee-Foon, Archie – The Field
Marshall, Bertie 35, 201, 203 of the Cloth of Gold (1963) 88; see also devil
martial arts 289; see also stickfighting bands
Martinez de la Macorra, Celia 24–5 mas camps 289glos; and community 26, 27;
Martinican dress 42–3, 55, 65–75; headdresses House of Black Elk 132, 135–45; NCC
68–70; political significance 70–5 camps 104, 107, 142, 164; working time
Martinique 46n 23
Marvin, Brother 81–2 masks: animal masks 15, 48, 284–5; calypso
mas/masking 8, 93–180, 289glos; Brooklyn (metaphorical) 217; Halloween 44;
carnival 274; and identity 93–7; Indian nineteenth-century masques 54, 55;
influence 79; mud mas/masking 15, 46, 110, papier-maché 87; Venetian 14
174–5, 193, 284, 288, 290glos; in nineteenth Masquerade contest 45
century 53–4, 55, 60; prohibition 33, 54; masquerades 14, 45, 72, 289glos
restrictions on 97; and social class 97–8; Massé, Father Amand 130
traditional mas 291, 293glos; wild man matador women 51
masking 15; see also Amerindian masking; May Day festivities 14
masks; playing mas Melodians Steel Orchestra 207
mas bands 101, 113, 152, 242, 277, 278, 284, Melody (calypsonian) 217, 220
289glos; Band of the Year 89; Trinidad mas Menuhin, Yehudi 209
bands by title, chronologically listed under Merchant (calypsonian) 221
masman or designer’s name: Ackrill, Kyle – “message” calypsos 218
(1951–4) Genghis Khan 87, The Greatest Miami Carnival 252
Show on Earth 87; Afong, Richard (Savage, Michael K. Hall Community School, Tobago
Barbarossa companies) – Cipango (1993) 27
89, Picasso (1994) 89, East of Sumatra Midnight Robber 5, 8, 79, 116, 188, 190,
(1995) 89, Comanchero (1996) 89, 289glos; in drama 164, 165, 166

316
• INDEX

midsummer celebrations 8, 14 Music Ordinance 33, 196, 216

Mighty Growler (calypsonian) 219 music reading 207–8
Mighty Sparrow (Slinger Francisco) 215–16, musical notation 209
217–19, 220, 221, 224, 226; and British Muslims see Islam
Carnival 256, 258; and Calypso Monarch
contest 34, 165, 216; “Crown Heights Naipaul, V.S. 213
Justice” 280–1; “Jean and Dinah” 165, 216; National Association of Trinidad and Tobago
“Maharajin” 80, 224; on New York West Steelbandsmen 35, 202
Indians 275–6; “Outcast” 200; see also National Carnival Bands Association 36, 45
Little Sparrow National Carnival Commission (NCC) 36, 45,
Mighty Terror (Henry Fitzgerald) 220 290glos; children’s camps 104, 107, 142,
military mas 101, 188, 290glos 164; and stickfighting 293
Mills, Rhoda 258 national identity: and diasporic carnival 241–2,
Minshall, Peter 8, 109–28, 163, 193, 289; 248–51, 256, 265–8, 270, 275–7; and music
Callaloo 46n 120, 124–5, 285; Hallelujah 44, 217, 228–38; and Trinidad Carnival 25; see
116, 122; Hummingbird costume 111–12, also African Creoles; Africans; Chinese
113, 256; Indian influence in work 79; Joy to community; French Creoles; Indian
the World 122; Man Better Man 113–14; community
mas timeline 126–8; Olympic Games shows National Steel Orchestra 36
121–3, 125; Paradise Lost 113, 114, 115; National Steelband 35
River 79, 117–20, 124–5; Shakespeare Native Indians see Amerindian masking
influence 111, 113; The South 122–3; NCC see National Carnival Commission
Tapestry 120, 123; see also mas bands Neg Jardins 56, 74, 79, 95–6, 195–6, 290glos;
Minstrel Boys, The 106 restrictions on 97; stickbands 57
minstrels 5, 106, 284glos “neo-Europeans” 80
Mitchum, Robert 216 Netherlands, The 14, 19, 56
modernity 210, 212 New Orleans see Mardi Gras Carnival
Mohammed, Bobby 79 New York: multiculturalism 11; see also
Moko Jumbie 79, 86, 242, 290glos Brooklyn Labor Day Carnival
molasses devils 15, 79, 288glos; see also Jab Newgates 59–60
Molassi Nigeria 69, 79n
Monk, Theolonious 210 Nkrumah, Kwame 266
Montano, Machel 194, 221, 226, 230, 231, North America: diasporic carnival 14–15,
234 246–8; see also Canada; United States
Montano, Theresa Morilla 106, 107, 151 North Shields Fish Quay Festival 267
Montreal carnival 244n north stands 7, 46, 192, 193, 290glos; see also
Moore, Colin 278 Queen’s Park Savannah
Moore, Egbert (Lord Beginner) 215 North Stars Steel Orchestra 34, 35
Morilla Montano, Theresa see Montano, Northcote, Dr Sidney 202
Theresa Morilla notation 209
Morris, Ken 87, 88 Notting Hill Carnival, London 25, 246, 248,
Mosley, Sir Oswald 257–8 255–7, 268; and black subjectivities 265–6;
mounted sticks 284, 290glos commercialization 250; economic issues
“mouth bands” 204–5 252; historical context 258–9; Minshall’s
movies, influence of 135, 200 designs 113, 256; organizing bodies 261,
mud masking (mud mas) 46, 110, 174–5, 180, 262; policing 250, 260–1; spatial practices
193, 288, 290glos; mud bands 101, 174; see 260–2; violence 249, 250, 257–8, 261
also Blue Devils; jouvay Notting Hill Carnival Trust 262
Muharram 77; see also Hosay festival Notting Hill International Carnival
Mulatresse de la Martinique 66 Committee 262
“mulatresse” dress 71, 74 Nuremberg 19; Fastnachtspiele 14, 15
Mullard, Chris 262 Nurse, Keith 236, 237
multiculturalism 11, 94, 95, 248–9, 266
Murgas of Uruguay 14 obeah 290glos
music of carnival 183–238; ethnic mix in obscenity in carnival 55–6, 61, 62, 63, 74; see
Brooklyn carnival 276–7; Indian influence also vulgarity of carnival
80, 184, 197, 224–5, 229–30; see also bands; oil drums 200
biscuit tin bands; calypso; calypso/soca/ oil industry 23, 24, 32, 33, 80, 86
chutney soca song titles; pan; singing; soca; Oil Men 288
steelbands; tamboo-bamboo Old Testament stories 88

317
• INDEX

ole (old) mas 88, 101, 193, 291glos, 293glos Pierre, Lennox 51, 52, 201
Ollivierre, Rudolph “Fisheye” 198 Pierrot Grenade 86, 291glos
Olympic Games 121–3, 125 Pierrots 61, 96; under license 97
Oratorical mode 214 Pile, Oscar 203
ori-inu 69 ping-pong 34, 199, 201
Orisha/Orixa 94, 215, 291glos Pissenlit 55, 61, 62, 291glos
Osama bin Laden 44, 233 Pitter, Susan 262
otherness 4, 262–4 Plains Indians 132, 135–45
Oval Boys 200 playing mas 9–11, 43, 292glos; playing royal
15, 16, 50, 95; see also mas/masking
’pagnol parandero orchestras 86 Plummer, Denyse 219
Palmer, Lesley 259 Poison (mas band) 44–5, 81
Pamberi Steel Orchestra 184–5 police brutality 282n
pan see biscuit tin bands; pans; steelbands policing carnival: diasporic carnivals 250,
Pan African Cultural Group 266 260–1, 279; in nineteenth century 42, 51,
pan calypsos 218 57–61, 63
pan round de neck 149, 211, 291glos politics: and calypso 219, 222, 226, 231;
Pan Trinbago 35, 36, 45, 194, 202 cultural politics 246, 251–3, 262–8, 271–2;
pan yards 26–7, 34, 46, 47n, 54, 291glos and diasporic carnival 271–2, 274–5, 278;
Panday, Basdeo 36, 80, 81, 226 and steelbands 187–94, 203; in Trinidad
Panorama Competition 35, 36, 43, 46, 203, 187–94, 222, 226, 241–2
205–6, 218, 291glos; critique of 192, 194; popular music: soca 228–38
Indian contingent 79 Port of Spain Gazette 55
pans 198, 199–200, 201, 291glos; historical Portugual: image of men 75n; influence on
development 34, 35; pan round de neck carnival 43
149, 211, 291glos; see also drums possession 164–5
paramilitary groups 20 poui 284glos; see also stickfighting
Paramin Blue Devils 6, 146–56, 284; code of Powell, Adam Clayton 272
conduct 148, 151; dangers of performance Powrie, Barbara 42
153; experience of 150–1; history 146–8; Preacher (calypsonian) 221
innovations 152–3; photographs 157–61, 177 Presbyterianism 76
parang 291glos; pagnol parandero 86 press: and Brooklyn carnival 281; and
parikanda 289 suppression of jamette carnival 58–9
party calypsos 218, 219, 222 pretty mas 55, 61–2, 101, 193, 292glos;
party music see soca Amerindian masking 136; see also fancy
“Patch Eye” 203 mas
Patois Mass 6 prison mas 97, 98, 99, 100
Patterson, O. 246 public participation 7–8, 25, 118, 120, 149,
Paul, Gertrude 259 210; white communities in diaspora 248
Paul, Michael 264, 265 public/private spheres and dress 64–5
Paul, Vanta 259, 260 Puerto Rico 14
Peace Ordinance 33, 60
Pearse, Andrew 42 quadrophonic pan 35
Peau de Canelle band 56 quatro 201; see also cuatro
Penguin (Sedley Joseph) 219 Queen of the Carnival Bands 35, 46n
Pentecostalism 116 queens see Carnival Queen contest; kings and
People’s Choice contest 120, 121 queens
People’s National Movement (PNM) 35, 36, Queen’s Park Savannah 7–8, 34, 39, 47n, 59,
189, 190, 203; see also Williams, Eric 88, 192–3, 256, 292glos
People’s War 262 quelbe (Tobago) 50
Perez, Ralph 214 Quevado, Raymond Ignatius (Atilla the Hun)
periphery-to-center cultural flow 246 33, 49, 224
Persad, Kamal 225
Phagwa festival 45, 82–3, 84n, 184, 225 Rabathally, Steve 222
phallic symbols 15, 284 racial conflicts 21, 29n; and calypso 81–2; and
Phillip, Jimi 35 diasporic carnival 29n, 256–60, 273, 278–82
Phillip, N.M. 245 “ragga soca” 223
picardía 15 Raja (calypsonian) 79
pichakaaree competition 82–3, 225 Raleigh, Sir Walter 39
picong 62, 214, 217, 291glos Ramdin, Wilfred Henry 144

318
• INDEX

Ramdin-Jackman group 145 Rudder, David 20, 79, 163, 185, 207, 215, 222,
Ramgoonai, Drupatee 80, 81, 224 223, 226, 227
Ramlila/Ramleela festival 45, 76–7, 84n rules of carnival 21
Rampersad, Indrani 224 rural tradition and carnival 19–20, 29n
rapso 224, 292glos Russia 3
Ras Shorty I (Garfield Blackman) 35, 80,
219–20, 221–2, 229, 292 Sabbatarianism 23, 29n
Ravi Ji 78, 84n, 184, 185, 225 Sachs, Hans 14
Rawlins, Hebrew 264, 265 sailor characters 79, 101, 292glos; sailor hat in
Reading Carnival 267 female costume 56; White Face Sailors 256;
reading music 207–8 see also Bad Behaviour Sailors; Fancy
Red Army steelband 34, 200 Sailors; Fireman character; King Sailor
Red Indians 54, 79, 130–2, 141, 292glos; in Sailors Astray (mas band) 178, 179, 180
plays 162; see also Guarahoons St Christopher Steel Band 260
reggae 219, 276–7 St James the Apostle vegigante processions 14
religion: disguising rituals 94; festivals in St John’s celebrations 14
Trinidad 40–1, 45, 76–7; and origins of St Kitts-Nevis 255, 257, 259
carnival 5, 13; resistance to carnival 44, 49, St Laurent, Roume de 285–6
116; see also Anglican Church; Baptists; St Lucia Police Band 34
English Catholicism; Orisha; Roman St Pancras Town Hall, London 258
Catholicism Saldenah, Harold 88, 142, 289
Renegades Steel Orchestra 79, 192, 200, 203, S’Amandes band 56
205–6 Samaroo, Jit 79, 203, 206
republicanism 73 Samaroo Jets 79, 203
resistance: carnival as 42, 44, 49, 50, 57, 256; Samlal Singh, Marlene 259
to carnival 29n, 44, 49 Samlalsingh, Veronica 259, 260
respectability 19, 28, 43–5, 55, 61, 63, 97 San Fernando, Trinidad: early steelband
restraints on carnival 21 incident 198; House of Black Elk 132,
reverse globalization 245–54 135–45; Indian influence 77, 78, 79
Richmond, Anthony 257 San Fernando Gazette 54
Riggio, Milla Cozart: Minshall interview San Fernando SeaBees 211
109–25 Sandiford, Susan 166
Rio de Janeiro 3, 14 Sankeralli, Burton 43
Rising Sun Steel Orchestra 34 Sanoir, Andrew (Kootoo) 146, 148, 150, 152;
“ritual” soca 223 in performance 153–5, 157–61
Roach, Mary Ellen 64 Sanoir, James 147–8, 150
Roach, Sonny 198 Sanoir, Jason 153
Road March 33, 193, 218, 243, 292glos Sans Humanité 214
Roaring Lion (Raphael DeLeon) 49, 214, 215, Santería 107n
219 Santiago de Cuba 21
Robber see Midnight Robber Saraswatee 206
Robinson, A.N.R. 36 satirical songs 15, 49, 50
Robinson, Sir William 61 Saturnalia 13–14, 29n, 56
Robinson, Willy 259, 260 Savage 89
Rogers, Bill 215 Savannah Carnival Committee 34
Rohlehr, Gordon 232, 237 Savannah stage see Queen’s Park Savannah
Rollins, Sonny 217 Schechner, Richard 13; Minshall interview
Roman Catholicism 39–40, 41, 49, 94, 95, 286; 109–25
see also English Catholic Church School Steelband Festival 35
Roman festivals 13–14, 189 schools and carnival 103–4; drumming in
Roman noses 15 school 188, 204, 205
Rome carnival 19 Scott, James 72
Rondon, Elise 109, 112 Sealey, Granville 34, 202
rookoo berry 292glos seasons: carnival season 14, 45–6; seasonal
Rosenbaum, Yankel 279 time 23, 24
Rounica 259 Senghor, Leopold 230
Roussel-Milner, David 261 Set Girls 67
Royal Cedula of Population 31, 39–40, 41, 65, sexual excess 19, 21; obscenity in carnival
285–6glos 55–6, 61, 62, 63, 74; opposition to chutney
royalty see kings and queens 224–5; and soca 233

319
• INDEX

Seymour Hall, London 258 social protest 21, 24

Shadow (calypsonian) 218, 222, 223, 257 social spaces and structures 22
Shah (calypsonian) 79 social value 24, 27–8
Shakespeare, William 20, 21, 27; influence on societas 29n
Minshall 111, 113 SOKAH music 35; see also soca
Shango 40, 94, 156n, 189, 291, 292glos songs: satirical songs 15, 49, 50; see also
shantwells (chantwells) 50, 51, 54, 196, calypso; calypso/soca/chutney soca song
286glos titles; singing; soca
Sharpe, Len “Boogsie” 163, 203 Soumarie/Sumari mas 79, 173, 293glos; see
Shepherd, Anson 259, 260 also Burroquites/Burrokeets
Sherwood, Marika 258 Sound Revolution 221
Shohat, E. 248 sound systems 293glos
Shorty, Lord see Ras Shorty I South Asian American Trinidadians 5
Shouters 189, 215; see also Spiritual Southern Symphony Steel Orchestra 34
Baptists space in “festival world” 24–5, 26, 27, 28;
Shrovetide 14 diasporic carnival 256, 260–5; and soca
Shulman, David 9–10 music 229; social spaces and structures 22
sight reading 207–8 Spain 14, 19, 31, 39–40, 285–6; and
signification of dress 64–5 Amerindian masking 130–2, 133
Silkie, Lord (calypsonian) 257 Sparrow see Little Sparrow; Mighty Sparrow
Simmonds, Austin 203 Spencer, Rhoma 166
Simon, Winston “Spree” 34, 198 Spider Web pan 35, 202
Singh, B.M. 104 Spiritual Baptists 40, 215; see also Shouters
Singh, George 226 spirituality of carnival 27–8
Singh, J. 79, 104 Spoiler (calypsonian) 217
Singh, Marlene Samlal see Samlal Singh sponsorship: Carnival Queen contests 34, 35;
Singh, S. 104 political sponsorship 278; steelbands 28,
singing: extempore 62, 287glos; women’s 35, 203
singing 43, 50–1; see also calypso; Square One (calypsonian) 221
shantwells; soca; songs Squibby (calypsonian) 221
Singing Sandra 185 Stalin (calypsonian) 219, 230
Siparia Mai festival 40 Stam, R. 248
ska music 223 Starlift Steel Orchestra 209
Slater, John 204 Steelband Association 34, 35, 201–3
Slater, Tony 203 Steelband Music Festival 35, 202
slavery in Trinidad 5, 39–40; see also steelbands 20, 29n, 84n, 187–212, 293glos; bad
emancipation; indentured immigrants reputation 200; competitiveness 208–9; and
“Sly Mongoose” (song) 33, 214 diasporic carnival 260, 273; engine room
Smart, Ian 42 20, 201, 207, 286glos; historical
Smith, Dudley 34, 202 development 34, 187–203, 205; Indian
Smith, James H. 34 influence 79; instruments 20, 34, 35, 149,
snakes 147–8 197–8, 199–200, 201, 211; pan calypsos 218;
soca 45, 183, 184, 220, 228–38, 292–3glos; pan yards 26–7, 34, 47n, 54, 291glos; as
Amerindian mas 137; and calypso 219–21, performance 162–3; and political history
222–7, 228–9, 232, 234–5; chutney soca and 187–94, 203; reading music 207–8;
Indian influence 80, 82, 224–6, 229–30, sponsorship 28, 35, 203; tuning 34, 201,
286glos; commercialization and 203; women in 203, 206, 207; worldwide
international success 232–3; as cultural participation 204; see also pan calypso; pan
production 231, 237–8; diasporic carnivals yards; Panorama Competition; pans;
235–7, 242, 266, 270, 277; song titles see World Steelband Festival and individual
calypso/soca/chutney soca song titles; steelbands listed under band name
song-writing 238n; technological Steiner, George 209–10
innovations 232–3; women protagonists 230 Stephens, Theo 34
soca chutney see chutney soca Stewart, Michael 282n
Soca Divas 230 stickfighting (calinda/kalinda) 50, 61, 84n,
Soca Monarch contest 36, 81 288–9glos 293glos; African influence 14;
social class: and carnival in nineteenth bois 284n; and calypso 213, 285; and
century 53–4; Creole social order 41, 53, 59, canboulay 49, 51–2, 289; chants 51,
63, 80, 97; and mas 95, 97–8; and 289glos; and jouvay 188; mounted sticks
steelbands 26, 206 284, 290glos; Neg Jardins 95–6; bands in

320
• INDEX

nineteenth-century streetfights 56–7; stick traditional carnival characters 5, 8, 9, 101,

bands 196; stickfighters 293glos; women 107; in contemporary drama 163–4; in
competitors 51; in women’s dress 74 diasporic carnivals 242
stilt-walking 242, 290 traditional mas (ole mas) 88, 101, 193, 291,
Strasser, Wilfrid 101, 102, 123; ancestry 108n 293glos
subjectivities of diasporic carnival 265–8 transvestism 15, 55–6; see also cross-gender
subversive aspects of carnival 15, 19 dressing
Sugar Aloes 81, 83, 226 Treaty/Peace of Amiens 31, 39
sugar cane see cane burning Trinbago Unified Calypsonians’ Organization
Sullivan, Nestor 184–5 (TUCO) 36, 45
Sumari see Soumarie/Sumari mas “Trini Time” 22–4
Superblue (calypsonian) 36, 221, 223, 230 Trinidad All Stars Steel Orchestra 208–9
surrealist costumes 111 Trinidad All Steel Percussion Orchestra
surveillance culture 5, 250 (TASPO) 34, 202
Switzerland 86 Trinidad and Tobago: as British Crown
Syncopators Steel Orchestra 34 Colony 40, 41; carnival see Tobago:
Syrians 43 carnival in; Trinidad Carnival, concept of
family in 28, 30n; Creole traditions 41;
tadjahs 77; see also Hosay festival diaspora see diasporic carnival; economics
Talcum Powder Sailors 256 of 251–2; émigré community 4–5, 242;
Talma, Colin 226 history 31–6, 39–41, 72–3; immigration into
tamboo-bamboo bands 33, 62, 293glos; and 31, 32, 40, 41, 65, 76, 85, 285–6;
jab dance 147; and origins of steelband independence 35, 165; indigenous peoples
196–7 39, 129–30, 141; industry and oil 23, 32, 33,
Tanker, André 163, 185, 215, 233 80, 86, 185–6; political history 187–94, 222,
TASPO 34, 202 226; religious mix 40–1, 76–7; slave
tassa drums 78, 79, 197, 293glos population 39–40; Spanish rule 39–40; see
Taxi soca band 222 also Tobago
Telford, Junior 260 Trinidad and Tobago Music Festival 34, 202
tents 46, 49, 50, 62 Trinidad and Tobago National Steel
territoriality 20, 26, 188; appropriating space Orchestra 36, 203
24; dancing societies 42 Trinidad and Tobago Review 23–4
Terror see Mighty Terror Trinidad Calypso and Musicians Advertising
theatre: popular theatre 162–6 Association 33
Theatres and Dance Halls Ordinance (1934) Trinidad Calypsonians Union 33
216 Trinidad Carnival 14, 18; aspects of 9–10;
theory: of carnival 3–30; of space 24–5 and Brooklyn carnival 272, 276–7;
Thomas, Hamilton “Big Head” 198 carnival season 14, 45–6; and carnival
Thomas, Jacob 214 theory 3–11; categories 99, 101–3; Chinese
Thomas, John Jacob 43 contribution 43, 85–90; and community
Thomas, Ken 259 5–6, 26–7; cultural hybridity 6; and
Thompson, Wally 259 education 103–4; evolving nature 6–7,
Three Kings’ Day (Twelfth Night) 45, 47n 44–5, 116; and globalization 245–54;
time: carnival season 14, 45–6; in “festival historical development 3–5, 31–6, 41–7,
world” 22–4, 26, 27, 28, 29; perceptions of 50; Indian contribution 76–84;
23; suspension of normal time 15, 19 intercultural components 7; levels of 8;
“time clock” concept 23 and market forces 5, 9, 28; masquerade
Tobago: carnival in 5, 50, 107n 244n; see also carnival 8; nineteenth-century attitudes
Trinidad Carnival 53–63; nineteenth-century Hosay 77–8;
Tobago Heritage Festival 107n nineteenth-century Martinican dress
Tokyo Steel Orchestra 34 65–75; official carnival 7, 8, 9; organizing
top-down play 9–10, 11 bodies 45, 290; political significance 241–2;
torchlit processions 49, 50, 51, 57, 58, 59, 60; regional carnivals 103; resistance to 29n, 44;
see also flambeaux season for 14, 45–6; and space 25; time in
Toronto: Caribana 25, 50, 246, 248, 249, 250, 22–4; Trinidad and Tobago Carnival 5, 6, 7;
253 Victory Carnival (1919) 33, 97, 294;
Tourism and Industrial Development vulgarity in 43–4, 53; world stage 8–9; see
Company of Trinidad and Tobago Ltd also cannes brûlées; costumes; history of
(TIDCO) 5 carnival; jouvay; mas bands; pans;
Traditional Carnival Character festival 164 steelbands; stickfighting

321
• INDEX

Trinidad Folk Singers 259 Watley, Rex 260

Trinidad Guardian 33, 97, 199, 294; Carnival Weber, Max 27
Queen sponsorship 34, 35 weekend and “time clock” concept 23
Trinidad Sentinel, The 43 Wells, Rudy 203
Trinidad Tent Theatre 163 West, Rex 90
Tripoli Steel Orchestra 34 West Indian American Day Carnival
trucks 20, 25, 97, 274, 293 Association (WIADCA) 273–4, 275, 276,
True Blues 56 277, 279–80, 281
Tucker, Marcia 236 West Indian Carnival 14–15
Tulsidas 76 West Indian Carnival, Brooklyn see Brooklyn
tuning steelbands 34, 201, 203 Labor Day Carnival
turbans: Martinican dress 68–9 West Indian Federation 217, 258
Turino, Thomas 231 West Indian Gazette 258
Turner, Victor 15, 29n White Devils 152
Twelfth Night (Three Kings’ Day) 45, 47n White Face Sailors 256
White Indians 141
unclean symbols 15 Whitefaced Minstrels 5, 106, 284glos
United Caribbean Association 259 Wilberforce Steelband 257
United National Congress (UNC) 36 Wild Indians 79, 88, 130, 131, 139, 148, 213,
United Sisters 219 287, 294glos; in dramas 162; historical
United States 216, 242: diasporic carnivals origins 129, 140–1; see also Guarahoons
246–8; presence in WWII 165; US Navy wild man masking 15
Steelband 204; see also Brooklyn Wilkinson, W. 33
Unity Day Carnival, Wolverhampton 267 Williams, Anthony 34, 35, 201, 202
urban dialectic of carnival 13–30 Williams, Eric 35, 43, 165, 191, 241; and
urban space 24–5 calypso 217–18, 231; and emancipation
Urich, Friedrich 72, 75n jouvay tradition 189, 190–2; promotion of
Uruguay 14 steelbands 203
Wilson, Elizabeth 73
vagabonds 43–4; vagabondage 19, 28 Wilson, Frederick “Mando” 203
Valentino (calypsonian) 219 Wilson, Victor “Totee” 198, 203
Valmiki 76 wining 149, 233, 294glos
value and “festival world” 22, 27–8 Wolverhampton Unity Day Carnival 267
Vaughan, Sarah 216 women: in Black Elk mas 136–7; as Blue
VE Day celebrations 34, 87, 199 Devils 152; canboulay musicians 50–1, 52;
vehicles in carnival 97; see also trucks and chutney 81, 224, 225; Jean and Dinah
Venice carnival 19; masks 14 drama 165–6; Martinican dress 42–3,
Verteuil, L.A.A. de 43 65–75; singing 43, 50–1; and soca 230; and
Vickerman, Milton 270 steelband 203, 206, 207; stickfighters 51; as
Victory Carnival (1919) 33, 97, 294 traditional characters 106, 107; women of
Viechwech, Gloria 260 color 69
vintage calypso 294glos Woodford, Sir Ralph 41, 45
violence 21, 45, 188; bad johns 189, 284glos; work time 23
in diasporic carnivals 243, 249, 250, 257–8, “workaday world” vs. “festival world” 19,
261; jamette bands 56–7, 59–60, 63; riots 21–8
33, 42, 51–2, 58, 59, 63, 78; steelband “world music” soca 228–38
clashes 200 World Steelband Festival 36, 194, 202–3
VJ Day celebrations 34, 199 World War I 33, 97, 294
vulgarity of carnival 43–5, 50, 53, 97; jamette World War II 34, 165, 199
carnival 54–6; see also obscenity of carnival
Xtatic soca band 234; see also Montana,
Walcott, Derek 116, 163 Machel
Wald, Gayle 228
Waldron, Roderick “Tench” 204 Yearwood, Edwin 233, 234, 235
Walsh, Tilman 155n Yeates, George 205
Warahoons [Warao] see Guarahoons Yee-Foon, Archie 88
Warao people 39, 129–30, 131–2, 141 Yoruba see Orisha/Orixa
Wardle, Jesse 272
Watchman (calypsonian) 81, 226 Zigilee (Carlton Barrow Constantine) 203
Watkins, Clive 259 Zuberi, Nabeel 233

322