Inhabiting mas

It’s that season where we sleep-deprived columnists get very imaginative in meeting print deadlines, filling word count with Carnival banalities and extended soca lyrics. I totally identify.

I’m yet to master the Carnival art of balancing work obligations and the ritual imperatives of the festival. I welcome lessons.

I came in Tuesday night (sense the filler coming?) after going back to see Sing De Chorus with my sister — Rawle Gibbons and Marva Newton’s important theatrical musical on the social history of calypso in the 1930s to ’50s, staged by a wonderful creative team including active calypsonians. I sat at the computer struggling through sleep to–type–a–few–more–words, for perhaps two hours, trying to e-mail an overdue report to a donor.

My struggle with Carnival work-life balance comes in part from growing up in an Afro-Saxon household where it was something secondary, and not integral.

Despite that upbringing, however, I do have a firm adult belief in jumbies; if there’s anything spiritual I still think is real.

And, yes, there is one on the Cocorite roadway; and this Carnival season it’s overturned a car, a maxi and an SUV, and split a truck. My neighbours scoff at my suggestion, though, saying the only sacrifice needed to prevent further accidents is slowing down.

At any rate, believing in jumbies, I jumped eagerly into Franka Philip’s social media thread this week about Carnival jumbies. She advances a polytheistic theory: that there’s more than one kind. I’m agnostic on that count.

But I’ve written before about the Carnival jumbie that visits me. It usually manifests somewhere around Cipriani statue, as the rhythm in the band slows after crossing the Downtown stage, the sweet tightness from the alcohol finally arrives, and a rush of meaning descends about why this pain in my big toe and blister in my crotch make epiphanic sense. There’s another jumbie I know as well, though; one Andre Tanker wrote about, in a not well-enough known tune sung by Destra — one that makes you cry as you wine to pan.

Franka was pondering the existence of a Carnival jumbie who comes to provoke philosophical and melancholic angst.

Perhaps about Carnival itself. How hopeless its organisation and the State’s engagement with it remain, well into a new millennium, should readily rouse deep questions about ourselves as a people.

But I feel a deeper sort of existential panic about Carnival. It’s what kicks up when, as my columnist-friend David Bratt shared this week, not so young people ask where you playing J'Ouvert and it is not a geographic question, or who you playing J'Ouvert with, and it is not about the identity of the person separated from you by mud and oil. It is an inquiry about who you will pay money — for mud, for sound-system trucks, for drinks that take money away from people your money now pays to hold ropes to protect you from people like themselves.

Young people don’t imagine a J'Ouvert that is not about consumption and protection; but about jamettery, expression and participation.

It was jumbiesquely ironic to witness David deploy authentic memories of what I doubt came close to jamette J'Ouvert experience to disturb the cultural amnesia of a generation that doesn’t even have that version of Jouvay as a reference.

I played mas in Port of Spain for the very first time in 1980. And not again until 1996.

At my private primary school’s 1960s Carnival parties, the oldster educators would announce a jump-up competition, with a prize for the line of revellers who ended up on a particular side of the room when the music was stopped. A handful of us cluelessly Saxon children would simply move to that spot and jump up and down. Literally.

By 1980, however, I had somehow acquired enough culture — waiting eagerly for my small section in Peter Minshall’s Danse Macabre to set foot on the ramp to the Savannah stage, when the bandleader inserted himself in front of us providing instructions in his well-known accent as to how to wine the mas — to resist.

It wasn’t just his Whiteness I resisted. The mas I had bought was no longer his; I somehow knew, without instruction, that I inhabited it now.

We’ve long moved away from the days when you made your own mas, or at least participated in doing so. But reading David and Franka, what jumbies me is how new generations learn what I — the hopelessly culturally illiterate child — somehow mastered by adulthood about inhabiting mas. About the ownership of a road or a costume. Something I can’t disconnect from ownership of a country.

And the terror worsens when someone reminds me, after a lovely Queen's Hall show (so proud of Mizz Jinnay!) which laments the sanitation of the jamette Carnival, who led the movement towards charging for J'Ouvert.

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