Bacchanal Time!

The Rainbow Voyager

BACCHANAL TIME

By Simon Lee

It's three o'clock on a Monday morning in late February. Most of the world is still asleep but in Siegert Square in Woodbrook, a western suburb of Port-of Spain, Trinidad, the gathering crowd is very much awake.

Dark figures clad only in black briefs, dip into paint pots, coating themselves in glistening red, white blue or black, or combinations of all four. Others don oblong masks, festooned with long strips of material and I'm frequently caught off balance when a familiar voice greets me from under an impenetrable mask of paint: "Buh is really you boy? How you going?"

A muscular grease streaked `devil' in black tights secures his wire tail and, horns on head springs into a low crouch, menacing those around with his pitchfork. In the bandstand young moko jumbies poise on one stilt like insomniac cranes, occasionally swaying to the beat of the drums.

It's almost `Jouvert' (from the French - jour ouvert - day break), the dawn of another Trinidad Carnival and soon there will be thousands on the road: mud bands, blue devils, jab molassi (molasses devils), old mas and jouvert bands joining with the steelbands and DJ trucks in a spontaneous, riotous celebration of King Carnival.

I'm in the thick of the jouvert band `Jocks Tuh Pose', whose punning name (jocks to pose/juxtapose) in the best tradition of Trini-talk is playful, suggestive and provocative. For multi-media artist Steve Ouditt it was the "complete sense of liberation" which characterises Jouvert that attracted him to designing the band. Also "A band offered an inexpensive medium for being "as outrageous as you want.

The band "Jocks Tuh Pose" on Jouvert morning
Photo by Sean Drakes

While the main carnival has become commercialised, dominated by large expensive and elaborately costumed `mas' (from masquerade) bands, there is a growing perception that Jouvert is closer to the roots of carnival, when the ex slaves satirised their former masters, vented their frustrations and celebrated their freedom with the wildest of excesses.

As the octogenarian calypsonian Roaring Lion puts it in his `Jouvert Barrio': Long time carnival had plenty bacchanal. Actor Wendell Manwarren, who helped conceive Jocks Tuh Pose with Ouditt, was told by his father when researching Jouvert of mud men playing mas "with frogs in their mouths and alligators in the band!"

The darkened city echoes with the bass, beat, and brass of soca music which drifts though the empty streets from countless house parties. To the infectious refrain of one of this season's favorites (`She gave me one injection in my mid section'), I pick my way through clusters of masqueraders to the nearby Brooklyn Bar, long time haunt of steelbandsmen and badjohns (tough guys) where I `fire a shot' of white rum to dispatch the pre-dawn chill and then it's back to Jocks Tuh Pose, who are ready for the road.

Although still in jeans, as an honorary member of the band, I fall in behind the pick-up with its four African drummers on board as we swing out into the broad expanse of Ariapita Avenue and head for town. An unrecognisable hangs a shining biscuit tin round my neck and `catching the spirit', possessed by Jouvert I pound my tin in time with the drummers as we `chip' (shuffle) down the road.

Soon Ariapita is dense with revellers and a truck approaches from the opposite direction, red light flashing . Aboard are Tripoli Allstars beating sweet pan in a frenzy. Jocks Tuh Pose wavers to a halt, then galvanised by the singing steel some `posers' start to jump up, while others grab the nearest darkened form and start to`wine': the classic hip rolling, bottom swinging, pelvic thrusting dance of carnival, before surging forward.

As the crowd thickens with oncoming mudmen and ferocious devils, I glimpse a friend darting through the band like a demented Jackson Pollock, flailing red paint across the moving human canvas from his gallon pot. "What happen now general?" I accost him. "I busy like hell admiral," he replies, gleefully slapping my face with his dripping brush.

With the moko jumbies leading the way we pass the old Lapeyrouse cemetry with enough noise to summon the sleeping spirits to join us, our momentum fuelled by rum imbibed from crescent shaped leather pouches and the propulsive African drums.

When we reach Memorial Park, by the Queen's Park Savannah, the sky over the Northern Range is clearing and as the sun's first rays dazzle through a silk cotton tree, the combined roar of thousands rises in celebration. It's bacchanal time again.

Carnival and `playing mas' (masquerade) is the quintessential Caribbean experience, the highest expression of Creole culture, a communal festival of release, purification and unity. For Gordan Rohlehr, Professor of West Indian Literature at the University of the West Indies and cultural analyst,

"Carnival makes a space in the routine of our lives and within that space there's a ceremony of renewal. People actually look younger, there's a vibrancy, a life.

"Carnival creates a space where you can dream and within that space folly is accepted, the unserious is accepted. People become like children, so it's also a ceremony of innocence. It gives you a little ease from the norm of brutally cynical life and this can happen in so so many different ways: for some it's simply the act of putting on the mask; for others it's the calypsos, the music or the fetes and activities associated with carnival."

Throughout the islands, the acknowledged `mother of all carnivals' is the Trinidad Carnival which has won the reputation as being `the greatest show on earth'.

Each year the creative energies of a host of artists, designers, musicians, composers, panmen, singers, dancers, actors and craftsmen are focused on `the greatest annual theatrical spectacle of all time.'

Introduced to Trinidad by Roman Catholic French planters at the end of the eighteenth century, this pre-Lenten festival whose origins lie in a pagan rite of worshipping the nature deity, has since evolved eclectically, embracing the cosmopolitan cultures of the island: the French and English settlers, descendants of African slaves, East Indian and Chinese identured labourers.

After Emancipation in 1838, Carnival passed from the hands of the Fench Creoles, with their masked balls, into those of the largely African urban underclass. The `Jamet' Carnival (from the French `diametre'- the other half or underworld) was both a celebration of deliverance from bondage and an opportunity to settle scores between rival bands, pitched battles
were fought with sticks, stones and bottles.

Middle class sensibility was affronted by the Pisse-en-lit or `Stinker ' bands of men dressed in transparent nightgowns, waving bloodstained menstrual cloths and singing obscene songs or the alarming habit of `matadors' (retired prostitutes) of suddenly exposing their breasts to street spectators. The nineteenth century press regularly condemned carnival for its violence and immorality, characterising it as `an annual abomination'; `an orgy indulged in by the dissolute of the town' or `a diabolical festival'!

Although sanitised after a series of violent confrontations with the authorities, the spirit of the Jamet Carnival survives in the transvestism and explicit sexuality of contemporary carnival, the smut and double entendre of some calypsos. The violent rivalry has been subsumed in the steelband competitions.
Trinidad carnival, the catalyst for the creation of calypso and soca music, the steelpan along with an extraordinary array of surreal, fantastic and elaborate costumes, has spread its influence as far New York and Notting Hill, Miami and Toronto. Its designers are in demand worldwide. Peter Minshall the doyen of mas, designed the opening ceremony of the Barcelona Olympics, last year's football World Cup and is on the design team of the Atlanta Olympics.

Other islands, especially those without a French background and established carnival tradition like Jamaica and Barbados, have followed the Trinidad model but have re-scheduled the date to avoid competition.

I arrive in Barbados towards the end of the Crop-Over Festival in early August. By mid Monday morning I'm on the Black Rock main road in St Michael, as the Grand Kadooment (from an archaic Bajan word meaning `a do' or `grand occasion') gets underway.

The inmates of the psychiatric hospital are glued to the railings, as anxious as the crowd outside for the arrival of the first bands en route from parading at the national stadium to their final destination at Spring Garden. A portly matron in lime green lycra cycle shorts remarks philosophically "Oi doan see nuttin wrong wit tekkin a lil wine me wais. Yuh cyan wine when yuh dead."

The roadside is cluttered with stalls doing a brisk trade in fishcakes and barbecued chicken, dispensing Banks beers and flasks of Mount Gay rum. The road bursts to life with the sounds of soca band Krosfyah and an advance guard armed with dayglo whistles thunders past.

The masqueraders, the majority of them women as in Trinidad, in their black and greens depicting `Barbados 95' are transfixed by the music in a continuous fast forward `wine.'

As other bands pass I can't help reflecting that in comparison with the imaginative excess which is the norm in Trini mas, most of the costumes are basic: bra and shorts, headress and standard. There are no Fancy Sailors with aircraft carriers on their heads, no Kings or Queens of bands whose costumes move on wheels in their train. But there are quite a few T shirt bands!