Carnival One

Carnival today is not the same as it used to be. Of course not, we will say. Vincy Mas today is much “Bigger and Better” than first time Carnival. I won’t argue against that. In fact I want to look at a different side of carnival, not so much the Mas, but instead the meaning. Yes, I think that Carnival has a meaning and it was easier to discern in old time Carnival or what I call Carnival 1.{{more}}

“A salvation document” is what I called Carnival, many years ago, when I made a Christian reflection on the subject. That is what Carnival 1 was. When she wrote her essay on “Emancipation Day”, Professor Bridget Brereton quoted one commentator and entitled her paper “The Birthday of our Race”. Birthday, the movement from foetus to infant is a revolution, so was emancipation from slavery, and Carnival became Emancipation’s annual birthday party, its celebration of salvation – a living document unfolded and embellished each year.

At Emancipation time in 1838, much of the Christian leadership joined with the colonial state and the former slave owners in an ideology of bondage without chains. They spoke for God and told the blacks to “keep freedom cool”, not to rejoice too much but to join with Massa and keep the old order stable as if nothing had really changed. Imperial Christianity refused to acknowledge that emancipation was a revolution. Carnival was the answer to that Negation. To echo St Paul as he wrote to the regional Christian movement in Galatia (Gal. 5:1) “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery”. That is how Carnival got its meaning. That creole protestant movement against imperial religion and faith in bondage was Carnival 1. It followed the tradition of Martin Luther (MLK too), St Paul and others. Today, we must excavate and discern this faith of our mothers and fathers, not to reject God, but to affirm and confess that when God acts to set us free, let no one try to keep the bonds on our minds and spirit. Carnival, a living salvation document.

That early Carnival seems also to have said no, no, no, not only to the moral bondage of colonial Caribbean governance, it was negation also of the European esthetics which told people how to look beautiful, even how to walk and dance decent, and especially how to look down on things that were African or Arawak, or Calinago. Carnival took all those teachings and turned them all into hogwash. Look at the basic ‘Mas’ items of early Carnivals. ‘Monkey band’ Wild Indian, Boozie/Bruizee back, ‘djab djab’. All of them are playing with the history of ideas that colonialism fostered, twisting them out of shape. Carnival seemed to be insisting that a creole esthetic, a reimaging of whom the society must lift up, model and emulate, was a project to be kept on the agenda. Carnival 1 was therefore a contest, a contestation of meanings, powered by working people.

While we may see Carnival 1 as a people’s movement, it quite naturally, did not penetrate equally all ‘the people’. As a movement of celebration and struggle, it was neither homogeneous nor hegemonic. To put it another way, Carnival 1 never tried to and never did ‘win power’ as the normal way of thinking in society. It did not become a community covenant, moulding Caribbean society around the achievement of freedom and the extension of freedom. Yet I would say that for 100 years or so, what Carnival 1 did was to project and reenact a Caribbean negation, a rejection of a covenant to stay in bondage. Further, Carnival 1 was giving notice that a liberating salvation had not only begun, it was calling souls to make it become a more substantial, a more directed and a more inspired revolutionary salvation.

That was Carnival 1.