‘Peacock’ in moko mas

MOKO JUMBIES took over Belmont's roads last week Thursday night as mas bands Moko Sõmõko and Vulgar Fraction held a "spontaneous" parade for the third year in a row.

For about three hours, starting at Caribbean fashion house The Cloth, the bands danced occasionally disrupting a car trying to pass the unauthorised parade. This was part of the co-launch of the bands.

Alan Vaughan, designer of Moko Sõmõko, donned his moko-persona as Baron LaKwa, a Haitian Loa, to parade through the street. In Haitian mythology, Baron LaKwa is a spirit of death. However, Vaughan said the Baron loves to celebrate life and is an expression of individuality and pleasure.

"I like the anarchy. People think he is dangerous. He can be scary, but give him rum and tobacco and he's good," he said.

Somewhere in the middle of the parade, the members of the procession stopped at a nearby bar and picked up beers. For the rest of the night Baron La Croix was dancing through the streets drinking a Stag. He was often seen perched on walls smoking his pipe.

Vaughan said he did not choose Baron LaKwa as his moko-persona, but the Baron chose him, and that spirit propels him despite injury.

"I have a broken Achilles tendon. As soon as I put on the stick, I don't feel a thing. It's like a manifestation of a spiritual form that comes into me," Vaughan said.

Vaughan, from Newcastle, England, has been flying to Trinidad for 25 years to celebrate Carnival. He started making moko jumbie mas in 2012.

Moko Sõmõko's 2019 presentation will be called Palace of the Peacock, inspired by Guyanese writer Wilson Harris, who died last year.

Vaughan said when Harris died in March 2018, he read his obituary and became fascinated by his interpretations of magical realism. He read Palace of the Peacock and was mesmerised.

Palace of the Peacock is about the journey of an ethnically diverse group of people up the rough waters of one of Guyana's rivers. The party is led by a second-generation colonist named Donne who is hunting a woman who ran away from him named Mariella. The group was looking for slaves.

Describing the plot, Vaughan said: "When they reach the waterfall at the end, the whole thing (expedition) has disintegrated – people drowned. They are climbing up the cliff, and above it they see a tree on the savannah that turns into a peacock and the peacock's eyes turn into windows. And through those windows they are looking out into mirrors of the souls, past lives, looking at those people. Our mas is embodying a lot of complicated things."

Vaughan expressed surprise that Harris's seminal 1960 book was not easily accessible in the bookstores but understood that it's a difficult and complicated post-modernist text that many would not be able to appreciate.

Vaughan's costumes, some made for stilt-walking and others for ground-walkers, are a dazzling sparkle of gold and silver. Though Vaughan did not want to reveal the names of the costumes yet, he said one was inspired by the beauty of Mariella, whom he describes as a universal figure of womanhood, another piece was inspired by the colours of by the glittering gold of sunlight reflecting in the river’s water.

He said after he read the book it took him a long time to conceptualise how he would execute his mas.

"Complicated costumes take a few months in the cutting and sewing, but the making of the costumes is the shortest part. The longest part is understanding why you must make it and what you have to embody. I had no clear vision of what the costumes would be. It's been a year of pulling the costumes together. Most of the time is thought process."

Moko Sõmõko, means moko family, and the group has moko jumbies from all over TT, from the seasoned to the novice.

One of the youngest members is Jaden Rogers, a seven-year-old moko jumbie who attends Rosary Boys' RC. Rogers was six when he first saw Vaughan on stilts. He immediately became entranced by stilt-walking and begged his aunt, Jenny Rogers, to let him learn the art.

Last year he accompanied Vaughan on the kings' stage and will do the same this year. Last week Roberts paraded through Belmont with the other moko jumbies.

"I like being a moko jumbie because it's so fun. I can do tricks," he said.

He tried to do one for Sunday Newsday, and had to ask his aunty to hold him so he could balance for the trick.