THE LOSS OF CARNIVAL (PART 1)
Ships involved in the American Slave trade
Come with me if you can on a metaphysical journey backwards through time to Trinidad’s first carnival. No. Not the version celebrated by the French Catholic aristocracy in 1783, not that mulled manifestation consisting of dinners, masquerade balls and staged hunts. Please, if you dare, close your eyes, still your breath and conjure in your mind’s eye the Carnival of 1835[1]. Your soul remembers the way back. The temporal map is installed as part of your subconscious subroutine and your knowledge of it’s pathways is instinctual. As surely as leatherbacks find their way back to Paria Bay every year between the months of March and August by referencing some atavistic dogma, so too you remember that first real Carnival. The first Carnival of the hoi polloi, the masses.
The Carnival of 1835 was the first Carnival following the 1833 presentation of the Emancipation Bill to parliament by Thomas Buxton. The bill became law on August 1, 1834 and the newly emancipated peoples endeavored to weave August 1st into the spiritual and cultural fabric of Trinidad with festivities commemorating this alien concept called freedom. The very freedom to celebrate freedom was something novel, but the freed men and women were determined to learn the proper means of observance for that which was once merely, ethereal, and aspirational had coalesced into the corporeal.
The persons of newly minted liberty were not starting with a blank slate for they had retained the only possession that could not be stripped from them, the memories of their culture. They also referenced Canboulay. The word Canboulay is a bastardization of the French words, which translated mean “burnt canes.” Canboulay started as a harvest festival and originally occurred at its appropriate calendrical situation at the end of the sugar season in June. The same susceptibility to syncretism which gave birth to shango and orisha, now worked to meld together the passion of Canboulay with the pomp of the masquerade balls of the aristocracy. The result was a new thing entirely.
Imagine. A grandmother and a mother and a daughter, slaves all. They have been stripped of their names, their culture and practically all aspects of their personhood. For these women, freedom of movement is a whispered sacrilege and freedom of speech is a blasphemous notion the possession of which is punishable by death. And now these women are free and free to celebrate their freedom. Imagine the unbridled ferocity of their passion, imagine the focus with which those women apply themselves to the dances of the first Carnival. They are rapturous, achieving a sort of near divinity as the glow of their joy radiates into the visible spectrum.
The unbridled nature of the new Carnival celebrations offended the aristocracy, they complained about the ribald nature of the dances, they whined about the dangers posed by the sticks of the calinda. They expressed outrage at how the inclusion of Sunday as part of the Carnival celebrations was a transgression of the Sabbath. Thus, the sticks were outlawed, Carnival celebrations were limited to Monday and Tuesday and in 1881 Captain Arthur Baker was dispatched to disperse the Canboulay itself. But the aristocracy should have whined earlier and more boisterously for by 1881 Carnival was well beyond their power to curtail and any restrictions imposed by the aristocracy merely set industrious minds to work in finding loopholes.[2]
Memorial Park Trinidad
Carnival has been cancelled before. The celebrations did not occur from 1942 to 1945 - the years of the Second World War. In 1972, during the pendency of the polio epidemic, Carnival was also suspended. However, since 1972 Carnival has assumed an air of inevitability, invincibility. After all, the celebrations were not cancelled in 1991 and took place a mere seven months after a large portion of Port of Spain burned to ashes as an indirect result of an attempted coup d’état.
The circumstances of 2020 are a reminder that this most Trinbagonian of celebrations is in fact mortal. Some might dismiss the cancellation of Carnival as a mere inconvenience, others might rationalize its cancellation as an absolutely indispensable component of maintaining our country’s national security, still others will lament the significant financial losses that shall, without a doubt, be incurred. The foregoing are not poor rationales. But the loss of Carnival is not merely a financial loss but a spiritual loss as well. Carnival after all is a celebration freedom and thus an inadvertent reminder of what necessarily preceded that freedom, for freedom is best illustrated by the absence thereof. The sweat of the J’ouvert revelers are libations poured out for the souls of departed slaves and the nameless numbers who could only dream of freedom. The upbeat notes of Kaiso is their funeral dirge and the metallic rhythms of the steelpan are a reminder of the non-rhythmic clanking of their shackles and coffles. Carnival is as much for them as it is for you. How then shall we remember those who celebrated that first Carnival? How shall we pay our respects to them? How shall we recoup a Carnival lost? A year, even one year without this important observation of our ancestry is one year too many.
[1] Emancipation was initially celebrated on August 1 but the emancipation celebrations eventually merged with Carnival celebrations.
[2] The steelpan was invented in part due to restrictions placed on traditional percussion instruments.
