Stopped at Grand Gate

Last weekend the Caribbean Premier League came to Arnos Vale, and St Vincent and the Grenadines opened its gates to the self-styled Biggest Party in Sport. There were drone shows in the night sky and franchises from across the region on the field. But what caught my eye, and set my social media alight, was something far older than T20 cricket.

It was the Monkey Band, moving through the spectacle as it once moved through my childhood.

The responses came pouring in, mostly from Vincentians over fifty, and they were a chorus of memory. One friend recalled a masquerader named Coochy who terrorized her village. Another asked whether I remembered Kong and Jump Steady from Questelles and Mahoe saying “I will run all under the bed just hearing their name”. A woman remembered her girlhood at Lowmans Hill, she and her siblings running and screaming as the band passed on its way to town.

From the Leeward coast came the fullest portrait of all, a creature called Kaiyah, oiled down, horns on his head, a ring in his nose, tethered with chains, who would make his rounds through Barrouallie, children taking cover, before moving on to Layou. Kaiyah, one famous commenter recalled, had inherited the role from a man called Gurrie, who had once sent him to spend time under his own bed. This was no novelty act, it was an institution, with a lineage and a succession.

The Monkey Band was not entertainment in the gentle sense it was menace made into theatre. Performers blackened with charcoal, dressed in crocus bag, leaping, snarling, rushing the crowd, sometimes led by a keeper with a whip. We did not applaud the Monkey Band we survived it and told the story afterwards with the pride of survivors.

And then it fell away. Not because the performers died out, and not because the children stopped being deliciously afraid, but because a judgment settled over it. The mas people said it was nasty. It was backward, it was not what a respectable, modernizing society should parade before the world. Interrogate that judgment and you find it was never really ours. Colonial society had spent centuries comparing African people to monkeys, one of the crudest instruments in the toolkit of dehumanization. Whether the Monkey Band began as a defiant seizure of that insult, converting degradation into theatrical power, or as a survival of the insult itself, the record does not settle. But the verdict that killed it, nasty, backward, uncivilized, was Eurocentrism speaking through our own mouths. We looked at our inheritance through the colonizer’s eye and flinched.

No single story captures this better than the story of the day Kaiyah tried to take his mas to town. He made it as far as Grand Gate, at the entrance to Kingstown, where he was stopped and turned back. The reason reportedly given was that he would frighten the tourists.

The mas was barred from the capital for the tourist’s comfort. Today, the mas is being summoned back for the tourist’s appetite. The same foreign eye issued both verdicts, banishment then, revival now, and at no point in between did we ask what we ourselves thought the mas was worth.

The perversity deepens. When the Monkey Band appeared at Arnos Vale, several people told me they had assumed it was “a Grenada thing”. Within a generation, we had forgotten it was ever ours. And the Grenada thing they meant, the jab jab, from the French Creole djab, devil, was ours too. Look again at Kaiyah, oiled body, horns, chains. That is a jab figure, walking the Leeward road within living memory. We did not lack the tradition; we had surrendered it.

Grenada chose differently. The jab jab was for generations the roughest edge of J’ouvert, the mas polite society kept at arm’s length. Grenada embraced it, named it, claimed it and today it is the island’s most recognizable cultural export, precisely because, in a world drowning in bikini-and-beads sameness, people hunger for something that could only have come from one place. And here is the irony that stings, the same Vincentians whose parents rejected the mas now board flights to Spicemas and to Brooklyn to play jab in someone else’s colours. We are tourists to our own inheritance.

Some blame the young, saying they have lost interest in things cultural- witness the thinning crowds at pan and calypso shows- and want only what is expensive and glamorous. There is something to this, but children do not bury traditions, they inherit the burials of their parents. A generation raised to see Kaiyah as an embarrassment could hardly be expected to see him as an asset.

Yet an asset is exactly what he is. The global entertainment economy can manufacture almost anything, drone shows, franchises, resorts replicated from Bali to Barbados until they are indistinguishable. The one thing it cannot manufacture is Kong of Questelles, because Kong is not a product he is a sediment of history, carrying in his body the whip, the charcoal, the defiance, the survival. The drones at Arnos Vale came from abroad but the Monkey Band came from us. Ask which one the visitor will remember, and which one cannot be booked for next year’s match in another country. Authenticity is the one asset globalization cannot counterfeit, and we hold deep reserves of it.

I have argued in this column that no one is coming to save us and that Caribbean development will be built from assets we already own. Our masquerade inheritance is such an asset, and Grenada has shown it can be dignified and monetized at once. But there is a condition, and it is the heart of the matter. We must learn to value the inheritance before the visitor validates it, not because he does. A people who need foreign permission to love themselves have not yet finished the work of emancipation.

So let the Monkey Band come back, rough, and whole. Let Kaiyah’s heirs finish the journey he began into the heart of the capital. And this time, let no one stop them on account of the tourists, for the day we stop waiting for the world’s verdict on our own creations is the day the chains on the mas and on our minds finally come off.

• Professor C. Justin Robinson is Pro Vice Chancellor and Campus Principal, UWI Five Islands Campus