Vulgar Fraction launches mas with community talks

“In a time when our country’s fractures bleed in every community, when we daily cry at wakes and funeral services for family and friends violently killed, Vulgar Fraction is calling us together to Isabày: Bear With-Ness.”

Bandleader and designer Robert Young said Vulgar Fraction’s annual band launches have become cultural touchpoints, and this year’s promises to create another important opportunity for dialogue.

Young conceptualised the band while listening to a podcast recording of a discussion between activist Bayo Akomolafe, peace and conflict studies professor Sa’ed Atshan and communications director Cecilie Surasky on Across Lines: Grief. He said something struck him when he heard Akomolafe talk about the Tagalog word isabày, which means “to follow together, or walk alongside.” He said to himself, the concept goes deeper than empathy or even compassion.

“It’s the ability to learn how to be in somebody else’s shoes completely, to attempt to be in someone's experience, life, or shoes and then how to understand somebody else’s perspective. Even the most wrong people feel they’re right. People have a narrative and rationale for the most atrocious situations because they cannot truly see the other side.”

The launch will be a series of small group discussions on the band’s themes. Rather than privileging the voices of a panel of experts this year, Young said he wanted to embody the spirit of isabày to allow all the audience to “Bear With-Ness” with each other. He said it was a notion that Bayo discussed, saying, "Pain creates a kind of prison and the tenderness of grief releases us from that incarceration. We need to spill in order to live.”

Young said, “That’s hard, especially when we live in a popular culture that pushes extreme sensation to distract us from our real emotions. We use things that we can buy as a stuffing for our hollowness. We can’t be with our own feelings. ‘How dare you leave me?’ ‘How dare you be bold enough to defend yourself against my attacks?’

"Violence feels like an easy option to resolve those feelings.”

Instead, he proposed, “Let’s pay attention with each other, on each other’s behalf, to have a sharing of how this moment feels. The world feels uneasy. TT feels uneasy, especially for women and vulnerable groups. Men feel uneasy because they are seen as perpetrators, not people. This event is to come and give ‘with-ness’ to each other.”

Young said there is also a relationship between the history of TT and the Caribbean and what is currently happening in Palestine.

“That happened here, 500 years ago, but there was no ability to report it the way we report it now. We have this access on our phones, in our hands where we can see it live. It happens now, when we have reached the point of hard violence against each other, the young men situation, dealing with turf.

"The turf story goes way back, if you look at stickfights, pan and steelband clashes, and their history. So the gang violence emerged out of pushing through Emancipation and resistance into stickfights, then the trade union movement, then into pan. So the gang situation has always shifted.

“There’s also always been some imposition by the state to address the violence. Some people said the talk about the violence being removed from the pan and now the bands can be manipulated and lose land and move from one place to the next and the sponsor is more important than the band now, and what used to protect the band is now loose on the block without a cultural anchor.”

A small band, Isabày: Bear With-Ness will parade on Carnival Monday and Tuesday.

A part of the Vulgar Fraction package is the ability to help design and make one’s own costume at workshops leading up to Carnival. Young said the complete costume comprises a backpack, jumper, a handkerchief for grieving, and a shield.

“We would like people to develop their own keffiyeh patterns on the jumpers and the fabric to make the mask, that revolves around their own family story or their story of being in a tight place. If you want to carry a flag, you get the jumper, prints and paints. You may get a keffiyeh that we insert the mesh into for you with a zipper, so you choose the colour mesh and the zipper, you paint your jumper and you build your flag.”

The keffieyh is a traditional headdress worn by men in the Middle East, characterised by a bold pattern. Most recently it has been associated with the struggle for a Palestinian state, according to Reuters.

The launch of Isabày: Bear With-Ness is scheduled for January 25 at The Cloth Atelier/Granderson Lab Alice Yard, 24 Erthig Road, Belmont, from 7 pm.

The Egbe Omo Oni Isese drummers will lead a procession afterwards. The event is free and open to everyone.