Bamsee politics

Culture Matters

DARA E HEALY

“…in 1868 laws were passed to ban the features that whites disliked and to which they objected. These included the Cannes Brulees, sexual displays and violent intergroup feuding of the revellers. These three features, to the whites, characterised Jamette Carnival, described as the buffoonery of low and stupid folk.”

– Hollis Liverpool, Rituals of Power and Rebellion

THROW WAIST. Wine down. Small wine. Social wine. Tief a wine. Wine back. You get the idea – wining is such an integral aspect of our culture that there are dozens of terms to describe the different moods and variations of the dance. Wining is the dance most associated with the TT Carnival and although it has been perfected by people of all ethnicities and classes, it is inspired by traditional African movements.

For instance, a traditional dance from Uganda is performed by women who add colourful pieces of fabric around their waist. They shake their lower bodies at extreme speed, emphasising the movement of their buttocks.

The Igbo dance of Nigeria is similar, performed by women in a low squat, moving side to side, again emphasising the hips and buttocks.

Egyptian belly dancers perform upright, displaying the expert ability to rotate their hips and buttocks from the waist, while turning around themselves or sometimes varying their height while executing the movement.

But the one most like the wining style popular in TT and the Caribbean is the Chakacha dance of the Swahili people from coastal Kenya and Tanzania. Here, the women present the backs of their bodies to the viewer. They spread their legs wide and rotate their buttocks only, backs straight, going lower and lower to the ground, sometimes looking back flirtatiously, sometimes turning around themselves or covering a wider space with variations of the wining movement. Sound familiar?

As in the 19th century,when laws were passed to ban the practice of traditional African religion or to remove Carnival from its emancipation origins and align it to the Christian commemoration of Lent, today the 2023 Carnival regulations evoke an age-old problem.

There must be law, there must be order. And certainly, it would please many women and activists to see action being taken against those who create, sing and play music denigrating women. However, enough time has passed for the State to understand that rules must work in sync with and respect for the cultural traditions of the people.

As such, specifics in the law are required. Cultural expression in the eyes of one segment of the population may be interpreted as an example of the “rude licentiousness of barbarian life,” as the San Fernando Gazette in 1871 described masqueraders.

Is "double entendre" to be considered an offence, as it often alludes to the sex act or ridicules people in authority?

The bois, a weapon, is key to kalinda, a traditional African martial art form. In the Ifa/Orisa belief system, it is common practice to seek spiritual guidance for the representation of deities during theatrical performances and other story-telling rituals.

How are these to be managed and co-ordinated during Carnival and across the many religious and cultural practices that exist? How do we propose to control the gatka stick, the jab jab whip or the Paramin blue devils?

Artists channel their creativity to “defy taboos and talk openly about issues of sex, pleasure, consent, human connection, violence, and abuse.” Our Carnival is grounded in resistance, manifested through protest songs, performance and costumes, deliberately crafted to shock the elite.

Critically, the masquerade was also about reclaiming the power that would have been lost to poverty, unemployment and the mental trauma of daily survival. In this regard, Carnival moved beyond theatre and performance to an embodiment of personhood, a reclaiming of human dignity, if only for a few days or weeks.

Some of the early trauma would have revolved around sexual stereotyping of the bodies of black women or women of colour. During enslavement, it was claimed that African women could not be raped because legally they were deemed to be someone’s property. Regularly abused as prostitutes, their African or non-white body types were sexualised. Thus, white women “were portrayed as models of self-respect, self-control, and modesty…but black women were often portrayed as innately promiscuous, even predatory.”

Historically, efforts to "clean up" Carnival have often been clumsy, without generating the long-term results we need. Reforms should therefore be discussed to avoid stakeholders wining on the recommendations.

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