Carnival is not a product

BitDepth#1286

THE history of Carnival as a cultural festival is deeply entwined in both this country's experience as a colony and as a source of resource extraction.

There are some interesting parallels that emerge if you compare the development of Carnival with the growth of the oil and gas industry in Trinidad and Tobago.

Carnival began as an act of defiance and its very structure was shaped around the kind of giant middle finger that old mas maestro Dick Butts might have created to flip at the coloniser architectures that systematically stripped this country of everything it could produce.

In its design, the event was a self-immolating act, an Icarus-like soaring to the heavens, leaving only ashes behind on the day after Carnival Tuesday. Costumes were collected and dumped by city disposal trucks.

For long decades, the music we produced was banned, in the name of Lent, from being played the day after it was trumpeted from every street corner.

It was flared gas as culture, burned away in a consuming act of ignorance and misunderstanding of the value of everything that we created with love and enthusiasm for long months.

Carnival is no more a product than the extractive industries are a product. They are both systems which are supported by the creation of products, but the way they were handled was vastly different. Making a product in the petroleum sector was the entire point of the industry. Carnival's managers, however, did everything possible to do exactly the opposite. If there were ever a word like "deproductise," it would apply to the management of the festival.

The executive effort to make Carnival an ephemeral event ensured that every effort to package, produce or preserve it has been met by stout resistance and contempt.

The Culture Ministry should take a long, serious look at the history of the Energy Ministry and how it managed a finite natural resource. The NCC should examine the work of the NGC, to see how a state agency routed a resource from burning into the air into a value proposition that sustained TT for decades.

So many spontaneous acts of transcendent art and expression have disappeared over a century and a half of institutional carelessness.

Until 2020, the annual Carnival celebration remained a system of flared gas, burning off its best and brightest in the name of a tradition of competition, ignoring the value of collaboration. The incandescent beauty of that mass immolation distracts from the monumental destructiveness that has characterised the festival. Just because something is pretty doesn't mean that it isn't toxic and wasteful.

Perhaps the best thing to happen to Carnival as an event was its covid19-mandated cancellation.

Without the trappings and boundaries that have evolved to contain it in a hamster wheel of activity, its creative contributors now have a chance to think about what they have really been doing and to pose the questions that the distraction of constant partying kept postponing.

The potential is vast. If a creative product can be effectively packaged and streamed into a West Indian living room, it can also be delivered and enjoyed anywhere in the world. By closing our little stages for 2021, we now have an opportunity to consider how to make our creative work ready for a vast, diverse global stage.

There will be mistakes, there will be wrong turns and there will be failures, but if we reconsider Carnival as both cultural nexus and creative product engine with the same inventiveness we invest in producing it, the returns are potentially incalculable.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there.