Of Carnival, time and flowers in the road

SONJA DUMAS

THAT Carnival took a different turn this year is an understatement. The streets were strangely barren without the reverberations of too-loud music trucks, the pitched bits of costumes in the gutter, the pretty feathers and beads bobbing up and down ad nauseam on bikini-ed bodies or chests with ripped pectorals – all part of the DNA of the festival.

I kept waiting for the occasional gorilla band, the blue/white /red/black /green and, yes, yellow devils, to appear.

Or maybe I’d turn the corner and see a cluster of midnight robbers pulling an elaborate coffin plastered with socio-political protestations, or moko jumbies gliding ten feet in the air through the streets like gods and goddesses of a different cosmos, or the magnificent feathered headdresses of the Indian bands, a homage to Native Americans.

But there was nothing. No enormous powdered sailor band, no pansides, no bona-fide Minshall costumes or even Minshall rip-offs. No tiny children, for whom mas is serious business, wearing their costumes with determined frowns.

Where were the bottled-water stands and varieties of alcohol sold at obscene prices, the Inspector Baker-like police standing up in de people road to watch de people, or the security guards silently holding on to security ropes for the profligate bands fighting to get to the Socadrome or the Savannah?

And where would I have been? I would have been walking along some main vein of the city, just me with my camera, chipping betwixt and between, sidestepping throngs of people, encountering, seeking or avoiding a wine, perambulating for miles with an energy that never happens outside the festival.

In 2021, that serendipity wasn’t allowed. Instead, the pandemic bottlenecked us into a menu of online experiences, collapsing our physical immersion in a ritual festival into a series of video episodes in two dimensions.

You would think that we would have been prepared for this. We had had nine or ten months of unending online experiences prior to the Carnival season; we should have been accustomed.

But despite this forced and extended preparation, or maybe because of it, I just couldn’t wrap my head around the 2021 Carnival digital normal. It went beyond the loss of that intersection of space, ritual and movement – those things that engage the participant regardless of the type of participant you might be. Time itself had been pulled apart.

Think about those sci-fi films where the protagonist, caught in a time warp, has to abandon the once-immutable linearity of time to save the world or themselves. In like fashion, the lockdown forced us into the consumption of a non-linear Carnival. A Carnival on demand.

So you Facebooked this Carnival show and YouTubed that soca presentation, scrambling to see something – for fear of missing out on everything. Or maybe you did in fact miss out, and resigned yourself to seeing it later. Maybe. You could wheel and come again. Maybe. You could watch the same Carnival show more than once over a number of days. Probably.

Linear time, psychologically but not temporally disrupted for the population since the first 2020 lockdown, felt even more jagged in the Carnival moment.

But was it just my imagination? After all, there have been archival videos of Panorama finals, calypsonians, and Carnival bands all over YouTube for years. Live and “throwback” digital experiences are anything but new. Just put the keywords “Sparrow,” “Machel,” “Rose,” “Destra,” “Rikki Jai,” “jab jab,” “jab molassie,” “jamette” or whatever into a search engine and a host of past digital performances is at your fingertips.

So what was different in 2021? The absence of the physical, three-dimensional, tactile experience as a foundation for that online two-dimensionality was the difference. The non-Carnival masks in the street were the difference. The uncertainty of a covid19 world was the difference.

And for me, the inability to storm a J’Ouvert band on Monday morning before the crack of dawn was the biggest difference of all.

Carnival has its own geography; its own psycho-topographical map through the cities and towns and villages of the country. It lives in the nooks and crannies of these spaces and as chaotic as it is, there is a certain spatial and temporal logic (or illogic) to which we’ve become accustomed. We claim space before daybreak, in the hot sun and in the cool of the evening, and inscribe a piece of ourselves on the physical landscape for those two days. Even those who avoid or reject Carnival likely understand this.

But when that is absent, and the pulse of the thing that you want to experience in real time is reduced to fractal-like dimensionality in the online space, the discomfort of an unwelcome sci-fi version of the festival sets in, and you’re not quite sure what you experienced. At least, I’m not sure what I experienced.

What I’m sure about is what I wanted to feel. I found that feeling on Ash Wednesday morning. I had gone jogging. That isn’t the usual Ash Wednesday morning routine for me, but it wasn’t a routine Ash Wednesday.

I plodded along, my mind wandering, trying to process what I saw/didn’t see/needed to see online to still figure out what Carnival had really been over the past 48 hours. I ran below an overgrown bougainvillea bush whose branches rose like giant tentacles above me. They were dangerously entangled with overhead wires, like an over-big costume on Carnival Tuesday on Tragarete Road, with handlers scrambling to poke it out of harm’s way. A myriad of fallen flowers from the bush littered the ground.

But I wasn’t seeing flowers in the road; all I heard was a riddum in meh head and all I saw was a pink and peach section of a Carnival band below my feet. I was a moko jumbie looking down at the band. I heard the music. I felt the space.

That was my true Carnival 2021.

Sonja Dumas is the founder of the Zum Zum Children’s Museum, choreographer, dance practitioner, writer, filmmaker and arts development consultant.