Carnival

Culture in Action – The Trinidad Experience

Milla Cozart Riggio, Milla Cozart Riggio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134487790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

This beautifully illustrated volume features work by leading writers and experts on carnival from around the world, and includes two stunning photo essays by acclaimed photographers Pablo Delano and Jeffrey Chock. Editor Milla Cozart Riggio presents a body of work that takes the reader on a fascinating journey exploring the various aspects of carnival - its traditions, its history, its music, its politics - and prefaces each section with an illuminating essay.

Traditional carnival theory, based mainly on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Victor Turner, has long defined carnival as inversive or subversive. The essays in this groundbreaking anthology collectively reverse that trend, offering a re-definition of 'carnival' that focuses not on the hierarchy it temporarily displaces or negates, but a one that is rooted in the actual festival event.

Carnival details its new theory in terms of a carnival that is at once representative and distinctive: The Carnival of Trinidad - the most copied yet least studied major carnival in the world.

Part I: EMANCIPATION, ETHNICITY, AND IDENTITY IN TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO CARNIVAL – FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT

1 THE CARNIVAL STORY – THEN AND NOW: Introduction to Part I¹

Milla Cozart Riggio

Fact evaporates into myth. This is not the jaded cynicism which sees nothing new under the sun, it is an elation which sees everything as renewed.

Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History”

The history of Trinidad Carnival is essentially the history of the peoples of Trinidad – embedded in the stories of conquest, enslavement, resistance, and indentureship, and in commercial, cultural, and ethnic exchange among the many who were forcibly brought to the place or settled there after Columbus first named the island Trinidad in 1498: Spanish, French, English, Africans, (East) Indians, Irish, Germans, Corsicans, Chinese, Syrians, Portuguese, Canadians, Lebanese, and probably more. Also present are the vestigial influences of the estimated forty thousand indigenous people who lived in the island as of 1500, from five known groups (Nepuyo, Aruaca, Shebaio, Yaio, and Garini), with some evidence of the Warao from the Orinoco region and “increasing incursions of Island Carib, the Kalipurna or Califournians” (Elie 1997: 3). It is not clear exactly when enslaved Africans were first brought to Trinidad, but trading in human lives remained legal from the mid sixteenth century to the British Abolition Act of 1807, and was carried on illegally for several decades after that. Public records indicate that most of the enslaved were Igbos, Mandingoes, Yorubas, Asantes, Hausas, and Alladas from West Africa and Kongos from the Congo Basin (Public Record Office, Slave Registration Returns T1, 501–3, cited by Liverpool 1993: 11; see also Elder 1969: 5–6).

The Spanish controlled Trinidad from 1498 until 1797, when Governor Don José Maria Chacon surrendered to the British General Sir Ralph Abercromby, with Spain formally ceding the island to the British in the Peace of Amiens in 1802. The Spanish never fully inhabited the island. After almost three hundred years of neglect, in which Trinidad – valuable mainly for its location some six miles off the coast of Venezuela – served primarily as a jumping off place in the persistent search for El Dorado, the fabulous city of gold (not only for the Spanish but for others such as Sir Walter Raleigh (see Naipaul 1969)), the 1873 Cedula of Population invited Roman Catholic settlers who were willing to swear an oath of allegiance to the Spanish to settle in Trinidad. Catholic planters were given land according to the numbers of persons in their households, including the enslaved: white planters received approximately 30 acres each, with half as many for each laborer; African and free coloured planters were given roughly 15 acres each, again with half as many for each laborer. In this way, large numbers of French Creole planters and African workers came to Trinidad from neighboring Caribbean islands in the late eighteenth century, along with free coloured planters and some African estate owners, many of whom were rewarded for fighting with the British in the war of 1812.

Faced with the problem of administering a largely Roman Catholic French-speaking population that, if given home rule, could easily vote their conquerors out of power, the British fashioned for Trinidad (later including Tobago) a Crown Colony system of government, by which these islands – the only Crown Colony in the Caribbean – were ruled from Britain. This political, social, and religious climate was already complicated by the presence of many peoples. Into the rainbow of merging cultures others quickly migrated.

Spanish Capuchin monks from Aragon had established the Mission of Santa Rosa de Arima by the mid eighteenth century (Elie 1990: 2). The Germans, who had attempted to bargain Trinidad away from the Spanish in 1680, came in force with Abercromby in 1797, leading the attack on the Laventille hills (De Verteuil 1994: 1–2). In 1802, twenty-three Chinese laborers arrived, with approximately 190 following in 1806 in anticipation of the 1807 abolition of slave trade (Millett 1993: 17). Many of these early immigrants returned to their homelands, but they were the vanguard for later arrivals; most of all, they helped to set the character for an island that at no point in its history has been dominated by one clear hegemonic authority.

Against this background is set the story of the emerging African presence in carnival. The British Act of Emancipation was enacted in Trinidad on August 1, 1834, with an “apprenticeship” period that was to last until 1840. Unrest shortened the period, and full emancipation came throughout the British West Indies on August 1, 1838. With Africans fleeing the sugar plantations for the city, new labor had to be found. After an attempt to import free Africans from other islands as well as from Africa had failed to meet the labor need, (East) Indian indentured laborers – mainly Hindus and Muslims from Uttar Pradash, Bihar, and south India – were brought in to work the estates. Between 1845 and 1917, approximately 117,000 Indians came to Trinidad.

As a result of the interlaced patterns of migration and mission activity, and the persistence of African, Hindu, and Islamic cultural rituals, twenty-first-century Trinidad has a constellation of religions as well as a kaleidoscope of cultures: Roman Catholicism (French, some Spanish, along with others, such as Irish priests and nuns), Anglicanism, Hinduism, Islam (primarily Sunni), the Church of Scotland, the East Indian Presbyterians, African religions (initially called Shango, later Orisha), Spiritual Baptists and the emergent Pentecostals and fundamentalist Christians – all with their own religious rites and festivals, celebrated by Trinidadians who in festivity cross both religious and ethnic boundaries, playing and praying together: Siparia Mai – thousands of Hindus pay homage annually to a Black Madonna in a Catholic church on Good Friday in the borough of Siparia in the south central part of the island; Divali – the YMCA, a Christian organization, burns its name in lights on the Brian Lara promenade in Port of Spain as one of the sponsors of Divali, the Hindu fall festival of lights; Hosay – a Shi’ite funereal event in St James mainly by devout Muslims – is performed in the fishing village of Cedros primarily by Hindus and Christians. Despite such openness and cross-cultural sharing of festivals and holidays, Trinidadians do struggle to maintain a sense of ethnic as well as cultural identity, in a society in which politics themselves are to a large extent based on race and religion.

Crucial to the evolution of carnival has been the conflict among the elites of Trinidad, particularly between the Anglican bureaucracy that ruled the country and the Roman Catholic planters who owned many of the estates. The Cedula of Population of the 1780s had been designed largely to maintain the primacy of the Roman Catholic faith. Initially, the British reinforced the Catholic dominance, particularly during the period of Sir Ralph Woodford’s governorship (1813–28). Determined to protect Spanish laws and customs, Woodford selected the site for the Catholic, as well as for the Anglican, cathedral. The British governor assumed a role as an officer of the Roman Catholic Church in Trinidad. However, this situation changed. In 1844, an Ecclesiastical Ordinance replaced the Roman Catholic Church by the Anglican Church, thus making the Anglican – often called the English Catholic (or EC) – Church the official religion of Trinidad until this ordinance was rescinded in 1870. During much of this period, Anglican priests were the only legal religious officers of the island; Catholic sacraments (such as marriage) were periodically unrecognized by British authorities.

Under British domination, there were effectively two – or if one counts the British as a Creole population, three – Creole traditions in Trinidad: the French Creole, of planters who had mostly been born in the Caribbean (Martinique, etc.), and the African Creole, created by enslavement. As carnival became associated with African-based street celebrations, a common Catholic sympathy as well as antagonism toward British rule evoked a partial tolerance among the French Creole elites for the canboulay revelry of the African Creole population, who after all largely spoke Afro-French patois and were Catholic-influenced if not converted. Such tolerance was on the whole not shared by the British, and often not by the industrious Bajans (Barbadians) whom the British – partly in need of an Anglican, English-speaking underclass to serve its clerical, educational, and policing needs – encouraged to enter the underpopulated island in the second half of the nineteenth century as policemen, teachers, and clerks.

CARNIVAL – THEN

Reminding us that “history” is the inevitably biased construction of those who configure our reading of the past, usually in their own image, Trinidad Carnival emerges as much from the mythology as from the history of the island. Documentary records, enmeshed in varieties of cultural mythos, weave an evolutionary narrative that merges two parallel festivals: first, that imported from Europe, primarily by French Creole planters, and including the fancy English governor’s carnival balls, together with some street masking of elite and possibly plebian participation; second, that which emerged from the African Creole emancipation ritual that came to be known as cannes brûlées (canboulay).

Even this simple opposition must to some extent be qualified. Canboulay, the ceremony celebrating the burning of the cane (cannes brûlées), may help to explain the difficulty. On the one hand, this ceremony is thought to re-enact the extinguishing of illegal cane fires by “bands” of slaves with torches and drums in the night, as a form of emancipation celebration transferred at some point from August 1 to the two days before Ash Wednesday (when masking was allowed). From this perspective, canboulay is purely a festival of resistance, celebrating freedom and independence and linked to the notion of the reveler as vagabond. On the other hand, the cane was also burnt – as it still is today – as part of the harvest ritual. From this perspective, canboulay may be thought of as a harvest festival that in the pre-emancipation period may well have allied the planters with their field hands. Resistance existed, of course, and was feared even in its absence, but there was also at times a sense of collective destiny by a set of peoples who assimilated patterns of behavior and even moral codes that they simultaneously abhorred.

The narrative of nineteenth-century carnival has to a large extent been put together by connecting the historical dots established by relatively few eyewitness accounts (e.g. Bayley 1833; Borde 1876; Day 1852; Carmichael [1833] 1961), newspaper editorials that frequently complain about the vulgarity of street performances, and colonial records. Those who have attempted to find the figures buried in this sometimes scattered data are in themselves key shapers of the carnival story: Andrew Pearse, Andrew Carr, Daniel Crowley, Barbara Powrie, Errol Hill. In this volume, anthropologist J.D. Elder and historian Bridget Brereton, who helped to establish this historical reading, describe the structure of African canboulay celebrations and narrate a history in which carnival shifts from the elite celebrations of the first half of the century (from which the Africans and sometimes the free coloureds are to a large extent supposed to have been excluded) to the “jamette carnival” of the streets that emerged during the second part of the century, leading to what one commentator called the “legalized saturnalia of revenge” on the part of the police and especially the Barbadian Police Chief Captain Baker in the canboulay riots of 1881 (New Era, November 28, 1881), the interlocking histories of carnival and the (East) Indian Muharram celebration of Hosay, especially in the 1880s, and the middle-class takeover of carnival during the remainder of the century and into World War I. More and more complex competitions developed between the wars.

With reference to nineteenth-century carnival, this narrative has been both reinforced and complicated by the research of scholars such as John Cowley and the Afro-centric perspectives of historians such as Hollis “Chalkdust” Liverpool and Ian Smart. For instance, one must take into account the Afro-Creole fiddle-playing, drumming, probably territorial dancing societies of the early nineteenth century, with internal hierarchies ultimately reflected in the notions of what it means to be a “Carnival King” or “Queen” (see, for instance, Cowley 1996: 8, 17–18, 60; Liverpool 1993: 199–209; 1998: 30–1; 2001; Rohlehr in this volume).

The linear evolution is further troubled by the criss-crossing currents of history, the push and pull from one governor’s reign to another, the infusion of Barbadians as teachers and policemen, and perhaps most of all by the awareness of what it means for an oral culture to have its history recorded by the literate: the deep divide between those describing the events and those whose experience is being described. In this regard, Pamela Franco’s essay on the spectacular decorative quality of clothing styles and headdresses identified as “Martinican” – worn not in emulation of the ladies of the plantation culture, as has so often been assumed, but out of a daily sense of personal pride – qualifies our assumptions about the presumed inversive nature of “dressing up” as a carnival style among the so-called “jamette” women.

The unfolding picture is not yet clear. No one has fully evaluated, reconciled, and moved beyond the existing historical narratives – or considered those narratives within the perspective of specific ethnic populations. In particular, the story of the (East) Indian presence in Trinidad Carnival is yet to be explored from within the diverse Indo-Trinidadian community, though the essay by Burton Sankeralli, reprinted in this volume from The Drama Review (TDR) of 1998, does outline some of the major issues presented within the context of a particular sensibility and ritual structure. The late Carlisle Chang, in another essay reprinted from TDR, outlines but does not assess the significant Chinese presence in carnival since the 1920s. The roles of the Syrians, the Portuguese and the many ethnic “others” in the history of carnival have not been documented.

Much remains to be done. Among the many issues we are as yet unable to factor into the history of carnival is a clear understanding of the role of education in the nineteenth century, particularly among the African Creole population. What are the implications, for instance, of John Jacob Thomas – the son of freed slaves who was fluent in French patois (which he calls Creole), English, French, Latin, and Greek – at age 29 in 1869 writing The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar, a language that he characterizes as “framed by Africans from a European tongue,” the grammar of which he formulates from “bellairs, calendas, joubas, idioms, [and] odd sayings” (see Thomas [1869] 1969, Buscher: Introduction, iii, “Preface,” v)? Or of the existence of The Trinidad Sentinal, an African-owned newspaper in the late nineteenth century (see Cowley 1996: 54)?

CARNIVAL – NOW

Since it was initially marketed as a tourist attraction by the newly established Carnival Improvement Committee, headed by the Mayor of Port of Spain and chaired by Captain A.A. Cipriani in the late 1930s (see Rohlehr 1990: 295, 328), carnival has been increasingly claimed as the signature event of the emerging nation. Sustaining this claim required cleaning up the festival, eradicating its vulgarity, violence, and danger in the name of “decency” and respectability. In the words of Eric Williams in 1962: “Play mask, stay sober, and do not misbehave” (Trinidad Guardian, February 3, 1962). In this vein, Panorama, first established to celebrate Independence in 1962, began the process of marketing steel drums as the national instrument of the newly independent Trinidad and Tobago, but at the cost (it is claimed) of taming the fiery “warriorhood” of the street-fighting gangs that formed many of the first steelbands. Errol Hill, who dramatized the link between nationhood and carnival in scripted Dimanche Gras plays in 1963 and 1964,² likewise struggled to bring a sense of decency and decorum into the carnival arena.

Not that this impulse was new. It was, in fact, a characteristic remnant of Victorianism, epitomized by L.A.A. De Verteuil, who in 1884 blasted female members of “bands notoriously formed for immoral purposes” for “singing … as if in defiance of … all decency” (De Verteuil [1858] 1884; quoted in Cowley 1996: 75). Indeed, the dialectical opposition between respectability and vagabondage lies at the heart of an event that is as competitive as it is celebratory. The vitalizing tension of Trinidad Carnival results partly from the vulgarity that opposes even as it aspires to join so-called “civilized society.” The struggle has a complex dialectical duality. Partly, it expresses the human need to resist authority, to “get on bad,” to idealize the outlaw who has the nerve to break the rules. Such need is compounded in situations of racial or class oppression, in which those who make the laws impose them on groups or cultures other than themselves. In such situations, the outlaw becomes more than mythic lawbreaker. Almost inevitably masculine, he is also an avenger of wrongs. This energy, which operates throughout carnival, along with the more general impulse to “free” oneself from disciplined and legal constraints, associates the local history with the broader human impulse. It is no surprise that even in the United States during the masquerading season of 2002, among the most popular adult Halloween masks was that of Osama bin Laden.

On the other hand, the motivating impulse is also to obtain respectability: very few vagabonds treasure their poverty or their pariah status; mostly, they want to be respectable, to be enfranchised, to have a stake in the system they take so much pleasure in metaphorically (and sometimes literally) mooning. Once they have achieved such status (as for instance when steel drums ceased to be the forbidden pleasure of youth or the enclaves of the bad johns and became the highly marketed national instrument), then some other form of vulgarity inevitably arises to replace that which has been subsumed. The history of the festival – from the mid nineteenth century, when street vendors with the glint of profit in their eyes first began to defend carnival, to the present – is the continuous story of commercialization, assimilation, and nostalgia for a purer, if sometimes rougher past.

Part of this story that remains is the resistance to, as well as embracing of, the festival. There are those who still see it today as many saw it in the nineteenth century as degenerate, racist, and wasteful. These include many fundamental Christians, those who signed a petition in 1995 to try to force Peter Minshall to change the name of his mas band Hallelujah on the grounds of sacrilege; many devout Muslims and Hindus resist what they see as the debauchery of the event and the waste of money and national resources. Often those who feel this way take their children camping on the beach or in town centers for the two...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Theorizing Carnival
• Part I Emancipation, Ethnicity, And Identity In Trinidad And Tobago Carnival – From The Nineteenth Century To The Present
• Part II Playin' Yuhself – Masking The Other Tradition and change in carnival masquerades
• Part III Pan And Calypso – Carnival Beats
• Part IV Carnival Diaspora
• Trinidad Carnival Glossary
• Works cited
• Index