All that glitters is not good for our Carnival

Culture Matters

DARA E HEALY

"Glitter is not as harmless as it looks. Conventional glitter is made of plastic (crude-oil), contains toxic substances and takes a lifetime to decompose. Also, as it’s a tiny microplastic particle, it is impossible to collect…and after it drips from people’s bodies, it will end up in our environment, seas and rivers, contaminating our ecosystem and affecting biodiversity, as many animals will confuse it with food and ingest it…”

AS A CHILD I would dart about the streets picking up discarded costumes. Although it always shocked me that anyone could so carelessly discard such beautiful items, I was glad they did. My fascination with mas and recycling was fuelled by these remarkable pieces of our Carnival history.

Admittedly, as an adult I still wanted to pick up abandoned costumes, heartbroken at the throw-away attitude to our Carnival. But my peers thought me weird (nothing new there) and obsessive (maybe a little), so I resorted to doing it when they could not see me.

Now that Mother Nature is raging against the destructive behaviour of humans, it seems my childhood obsession for recycling is perhaps what our Carnival and our society need today.

As innovative and inspiring as the TT Carnival is, apparently our celebration is responsible for more than 700,000 tons of waste every year.

The number seems too large to be true, until one reflects on the amount of waste generated by Carnival fetes, small limes and roadside jams, recognising that most of them feature single-use plastic cups, plates, cutlery and straws. Add to this the beautiful costumes that we dump in the streets, and well, we have a problem.

Internationally, artists have been using their celebrity status to tour in more environmentally friendly ways and include their fans in this new approach. One artist committed to planting a tree for each concert ticket purchased. Coldplay’s next tour will be “partly powered by a dance floor that generates electricity when fans jump up and down and pedal power at the venues,” that is, bicycles that also generate power.

Some artists ensure that their tour buses run on biofuel. Others like Sheryl Crow have been using biodegradable catering for more than ten years. Crow, along with groups like Maroon 5 and The Roots, founded the Green Music Group to “facilitate the large-scale greening of the music community as a whole.”

In our organisation, we installed a water station, provided reusable cups and asked children to walk with water bottles. We encouraged them to create instruments using discarded materials. We still talk about the amazing instruments produced by primary-school students from items they discovered around their homes and school.

While we are still a long way from returning to Carnival events with thousands of patrons, we must consider how to organise smaller events that reduce the harm we are doing to our natural environment, wildlife and marine life. Carnival event organisers have opportunities to make simple interventions such as recycling bins at concert venues that are regularly emptied.

Large Carnival bands are already encouraging use of personalised cups and provide recycling options on the road. Other bandleaders encourage masqueraders to make their own costumes, which creates possibilities for borrowing or repurposing used costumes.

Locally, one organisation has partnered with other entrepreneurs to reduce Carnival waste. They have developed ways to strip apart, clean and repurpose costumes to foster a more environmentally friendly festival, while creating sustainable business opportunities.

Our traditional masqueraders already have a history of working in harmony with Mother Earth – reusing their costumes annually, adding pieces as needed, performing the necessary rituals. In The Dragon Can’t Dance, Earl Lovelace captured the almost spiritual connection between Aldrick and the act of creating mas: “…it was only by faith that he could bring alive from these scraps of cloth and tin that dragon, its mouth breathing fire, its tail threshing the ground, its nine chains breathing, that would contain the beauty and threat and terror that was the message he took each year to Port of Spain.”

We acknowledge that in many ways our Carnival has moved away from those humble origins. However, the time has come for us to play mas and celebrate the culture that placed us on the global stage in ways that honour traditional methods. We need to make these changes now, or no matter how many of us pick up discarded costumes, it will not be enough to save us from the bigger storms that watch and wait.

Dara E Healy is a performance artist and founder of the Indigenous Creative Arts Network – ICAN