Stage gone bad

It’s now 90 days since last year’s local government election, yet there’s still no official release of the full results to the public by the Elections and Boundaries Commission. I’ll keep shouting about this here till the banananess of it matters to someone in the republic.

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It’s the season of lamentation.

No, not Lent; that’s a marketing season for fast food companies. It’s the period of our annual Carnival post-mortems which, this year more than usual, seem to fill the opinion pages, whether editorials, columns or letters. Their hand-wringing and finger-wagging predictable; the mourning of the mas and music of long ago; the wails about vulgarity and decay. Perhaps the same complaints we’ve been making about the jamette Carnival since the 1860s.

Following my precipitous obituary last week, contributions to the genre this week come from Tony Fraser, Peter Ray Blood, Mark Lyndersay, and Raffique Shah, who made me smile at that enduring characteristic of TT media – the licence to comment without observation.

Their evaluations focus particularly on calypso among other elements of the wondrous mangrove that is our Carnival. I was delighted to hear resonance across several commentaries of my “one rule of calypso” idea – that a good calypso must be memorable.

There’s no denying Carnival has changed.

My favourite resistance to this, when middle-class young people in Port of Spain inquire about my J'Ouvert plans – which band I plan to play with – is to explain how novel and fascinating the commodification of J'Ouvert participation is. How quickly a huge group of people have lost touch with the concept that J'Ouvert is the teenager from Covigne coming down the hill headed to town in his grandmother’s nightgown. About being your own transgressive portrayal, not part of a horde of consumers. Finding yourself chipping behind your panside of choice, not only within ropes around a sound system. Or a communal portrayal, like Pinetoppers’ in 1970 that we’ve been reading so much about this week.

I’m unhappy with many ways Carnival has become commodified. But vilification of the Socadrome and rope-and-bathsuit mas bands, their multi-truck caravans of earsplitting sound systems, bars, thousands of boxed lunches and scores of moving toilets – which have dried up the cottage economy of street vending – denies that these are some of the most successful Carnival innovations.

Unlike others in the chorus of lamentation, I believe Carnival can accommodate a whole lot of different ideas and practices. Jamette and bourgeois Carnivals can co-exist – and perhaps always have.

Besides Carnival having changed, what’s equally axiomatic is that one of its enduring features is its chronic mismanagement by the state. All the same, I don’t understand our knee-jerk turn to grief over everything we dislike in this small, malleable place.

Instead of lamenting, why won’t we create the Carnival we want? If anything, for all the stubborn dysfunctions in areas where it is most “organised,” Carnival – and the Carnival economy – remain spaces of incredible possibility and potential for successful innovation.

Isn’t the 3canal show one evolution of the calypso tent we are all singing the death knell for? And if Aloes, Cro Cro and Watchman’s turning the sandemanite of calypso onto Indians instead of singing nation-building songs of racial harmony played such a pivotal role in tents’ demise, shouldn’t we document and replicate that as one the most effective consumer boycotts in local history. Another Carnival feat.

Like most of my generation, I’ve never been a fan of power soca. My arthritic knees never grasped its thirst to trample and shell it down. Dating back to Blueboy, I’m breathlessly miserable whenever forced to stamp across the savannah stage. But I am amazed at how our imagination of mas is conjured each year by road march contenders around the fetish of that stage.

I’m trying to be a better anthropologist, to listen more carefully to understand what I call our post-colonial Carnival. How it is unlike the Carnival my generation grew up with, centred on the idea of playing a mas for an audience whose approval or fear – or simply gaze – were necessary to recognition. On the one hand, one has to admire how mas, post-colonially, has jettisoned this eagerness for the validation of the other. How it has become a ritual of playing oneself.

But on the other hand, stubbornly embedded in its exhibition of nakedness is that identical urge to be witnessed – not as breathtaking, but as a wajang; that same mindful performance – not of nobility or fearsomeness, but of bad behaviour.

For all the raggedness and narcissism of the modern parade of bands evidenced on Tuesday – when even the pretentious television broadcast commentary seemed withered – Iwer and Kees reminded me, with a sense of awe, that mas remains fundamentally about spectacle.