J’Ouvert origins – Once Upon a J’Ouvert, part one of three-part series

Sonja Dumas

THE fountain in the middle of Woodford Square, now somewhat dilapidated, sits quietly as people walk past it. According to its plaque, it was “Presented to the Borough of Port of Spain by Gregor Turnbull Esquire of Glasgow, AD1866,” which makes it 159 years old. Whenever I’m in the square, I’m always fascinated by the fact that the fountain would have silently witnessed what we term “Jamette Carnival.”

I would call Jamette Carnival the mother of J’Ouvert and a major catalyst of the Carnival we know today. It is a confluence of energies rooted in resistance and celebratory practices emerging from Canboulay.

That word likely comes from the French words for “burnt cane” – cannes brûlées – creolised by West African pronunciation. Fires sometimes broke out in the canefields (often mysteriously, to be sure) and the Africans from various plantations would take torches to go to the burning site to address the crisis.

In the post-Emancipation period, they took the culture of these flambeaux, or burning torches, as a highly visual symbol of their freedom.

Some Canboulay iterations later, Jamette Carnival emerged. This is where the essence of African-Caribbean festival expression as we know it seeped deeply into the imagination of the wider population, which had previously expressed Carnival mainly as a series of balls at the mansions of plantation owners.

After 1838, the immediate post-emancipation period, there was the rise of West and Central African culture in Port of Spain, where the African people, many relegated to impoverished communal living spaces called barrack yards in the less developed, easternmost section of the city, expressed their resistance, resilience and resourcefulness out of the belly of their new circumstances.

Imagine, in 1866, and years after, that the Woodford Square fountain was privy to stick-fighting and drum rhythms and people processing through the streets, many of whom playfully portrayed grotesque characters – often caricatures of the ruling European classes.

These characters fuelled the classic objectives of the carnivalesque – a temporary inversion of social norms and an upending of a system that had brutalised so many. Imagine the colonial authorities attempting on occasion to enact ordinances to quell the drumming and the gathering of people, because this non-European version of Carnival was just too offensive. Imagine the Canboulay Riots of 1881, where Africans fought the colonial authorities for the right to express themselves in Carnival – and won.

So while the Jamette Carnival was a moment of ease and celebration, its underlying root was one of the resilience of a people. It was never just a street party – it was a sociopolitical statement. And the best of J’Ouvert of today seeks to keep that fire burning.

Many years ago, a friend described J’Ouvert as the moment when “everyone becomes more beautiful.”

How is this possible when the grotesque is so present? When people pretend to drink urine out of posies (it’s really alcohol), and when they parade in costumes with distended body parts and douse themselves with paint, mud, chocolate and oil? It’s because the whole point of J’Ouvert is transformation, empowerment and cleansing. It is a time when the spirit of each person can acknowledge the inversions of life, and in the collective shuffling from darkness to light on a strip of road in the middle of the city, they can step into a new dawn – both literally and figuratively. The term J’Ouvert itself is creole for the French Jour Ouvert, or “open day.” You open the day by going from the darkness of the early morning to the light, and you revel in your own transformation and in the transformation of those around you. That’s a beautiful thing to do.

Also years ago, I posted “Happy New Year” on social media on a sunny J’Ouvert morning. I’ve seen others doing the same thing on subsequent J’Ouvert mornings, so I suppose they agree. And I probably wasn’t the first one to think about it like that, anyway.

More than the first day of the Gregorian calendar (January 1), J’Ouvert really does symbolise an official annual renewal for many of us.

Like Jamette Carnival before it, J’Ouvert is a social equaliser in its pure form. In the classic J’Ouvert band, you can’t tell captain from cook, especially if they’re parading behind a mask of paint or oil or a fanciful (traditionally homemade) covering of the face. You could be wining or rubbing up on a millionaire or on an unhoused person (or on an unhoused millionaire, because I’m sure there are some of those around also), and once certain boundaries aren’t crossed, everyone is happy.

In that transient street encounter, you let the person into your world of joy, and, if only for a few seconds or minutes, you celebrate the connectedness of life with them.

So when I see the trappings of contemporary, big-band “pretty mas” making their way into J’Ouvert bands (like rope to keep people out of the band, and mass-produced, Halloween-like plastic props), my mind goes back to the colonial projects of exclusion, and I shake my head that we are again at this uncomfortable juncture.

One of my mentors, the late great Tony Hall, jokingly but cryptically once said to me about our world-famous two-day event that Monday was mas and Tuesday was Carnival.

He was distinguishing between the foundational reasons for our Carnival and the commercial machine that it has become.

I appreciate that nothing stays the same, and that the serious commodification of Carnival began in the early twentieth century and expanded significantly after World War II. So making money in Carnival is not a new thing.

But as the festival increasingly morphs into a series of exclusive, pricey events, the original intention of J’Ouvert may become a thing of mas past.

Sonja Dumas thinks the occasional Caribbean cultural thought, which she tends to turn into words, dance or film.