The last Carnival column

BitDepth#1501

Mark Lyndersay

FOR MOST of the 30-year life of this column, I've used this space, around this time, to comment on the state of the nation's signature festival.

The commentary had been running for at least a decade before BitDepth came along, and it seems appropriate, barring some particularly egregious development in the festival, to bow out of commenting any more.

At least part of the reason is that I've said everything I felt moved to say about Carnival over the years, sometimes repeatedly, so that's done.

If you're curious, you can find some of the writing over the last decade or so here: https://cstu.io/12e636.

Carnival is, overwhelmingly, a young person's game.

As it has evolved from a street parade of thoughtful and elaborate costumes into a fortnight's marathon of pardy, the industrious commitment to nationwide wining has steadily pushed its contemplative, artisan elements to the periphery and sometimes off the stage entirely.

My involvement has always been that of observation and documenting, in the thing, as the elders would say, but never of the thing.

Carnival may never have interested me as participatory entertainment, but it's remained endlessly fascinating as process and expression in a uniquely Trinidadian/Tobagonian medium.

That's resulted in a total disinclination on my part to, for instance, wine down low (even when that was easier to do) even as I'd go into investigative overdrive pondering why the Mighty Shadow phrasing of a lyric, or curiosity about what was under the flimsy fabric costumes of the Original Whipmasters when they flogged each other mercilessly (correct answer: nothing).

Even as I held this year's Carnival at arm's length, the sight of a medium-sized J'Ouvert band trying to implement ropes to partition their players while two portable toilets wobbled dangerously on a nearby flatbed truck raised fascinating parallels between this paint-spattered jumping under sodium vapour lights and the customer service innovations of Tribe.

Returning to my portraits of local calypsonians working in tents led me back to the Divas calypso tent, where I'd started the project in February 2020.

A half-decade later, I found an almost entirely new cast and an energising spirit of support and camaraderie that suggested a woman-led calypso tent is a very different proposition from the traditional testosterone-fuelled aggregations that have coaxed the traditional calypso tent to the brink of extinction.

Calypso continues to be crippled by the compromises a past generation made with government for subsidy. Freed of an imperative to entertain a wide cross-section of society, mudslinging and venal verse chased away half of the tent audience and most of the remainder left to listen to soca performed in fetes.

But these are old concerns that should be widely understood, if adamantly ignored at this point.

Entirely too many institutional systems created by stakeholder representative bodies and the NCC continue their efforts to narrow the path to true innovation and creativity in the music and masquerade.

Those bodies remain numb to the increased flux in audience engagement. Among the three stakeholder groups, only Pan Trinbago is recording an upsurge in audience interest.

Carnival masquerade bands may be expanding their customer base, but the emphasis remains vigorously insular, masqueraders playing mas for themselves, not the thinning audiences.

Even the lure of television cameras has dimmed for the be-feathered with the upsurge in capable selfie cameras and ready-made video streaming and capture.

A modern mas band doesn't need an audience or even television coverage, it just needs a good DJ, all-inclusive drinks and good light.

The Carnival of 2025 is not my Carnival, but no era of the festival has ever inspired nostalgia for me.

Freed of such sentiment, it's clearer that there is a fundamental change in the way the event is realised today.

Managing it using the same structure that was first devised 68 years ago under the Carnival Development Committee seems particularly misguided.

But the big wheel keeps on turning. Copyright remains as misunderstood this year as it has been for the last 25. The Grand Stand stage remains the catch-all for events, although it is really constructed for large steelbands, unwieldy kings and queens and the large mas band category. Everything else gets lost in its grey expanse.

"That's the way we've always done it" is the
Arbeit macht frei of modern Carnival management, an unintentionally ironic architecture that defies the festival's mercurial evanescence that fails to cater to the participants and audiences almost universally ignore it in favour of attractions that speak to the potential of a new century's Carnival.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there