PROSCENIUM FOR AN AQUEOUS HUMOR

Aye, Mas! Ah know yuh face!

—GREETING, Traditional

Apologia

I have imagined the following scenario:

Over drinks, I would be asked, and always by someone I admire a great deal, what was my first camera. Names of giants (and dying giants) would be suggested—Canon, Minolta, Olympus, Polaroid. Nikon, which I have used, and Fujifilm, which I use now.1 Never Leica, for some reason. “Too expensive,” I’d later be forced to admit. Delivered offhandedly, in the crude, syncopated shifts that mark us as friends, the question would be one of those “innocent” questions, an “icebreaker” that would lead eventually to more serious questions of image-making and intent, ending possibly with much grander explorations of rhetoric, race, humanity, and their failed states. Before we get to slightly more complex ideas of Caribbeanist Photography in neocolonial times, I would take a long sip of what I’d be drinking. Rum, probably. Neat. Or straight, depending on where we are. Maybe on Carib Street in San Fernando at the Red Step bar, across from Pan Elders, champions of Panorama in their medium band category. Campo and Carl know my mother, and they remember the Power Station fire. (“1952,” Carl told me, once.) And they know Pan—steelpan. And they know Mas. They’ve been Fancy Sailors for decades, parading through San Fernando in their officer’s uniforms with dance steps made for steelpan music. They’ve known some wars. We all have, I suppose.

I’d grimace with the rum, then fix my face, letting it relax as I swallow, letting it set fire to my throat and then my chest, breathing in slowly and letting it cool. (“Letting,” as if I have control over these things.) I’d look away, pensive. And I’d pause. With my glass halfway between my lips and the table, it would be the indefinite pause of a man with no answer to give except for the admission of a particular and lingering shame: I can’t remember. Of course, I’ve tried. There are thousands of sunsets, the shadowy façades of this building or that, old houses that remind me of gravestones and the cruelty of time, neglected friends, strangers, half-forgotten lovers, all of them resting undeveloped in a box somewhere in New York. Not one of them would raise the memory of that first device. “Canon?” this person I admire would ask again. “Minolta?” Nothing. Sometimes, when you don’t want to betray your truth with a lie, silence picks up the scent and betrays you, anyway. So you take it for what it is. What would seem to be a common denominator among photographers would be, for me, a missing piece. An unresolved legacy.

I suppose a story about how photographs come to have an “owner” but no point of “origin” that I could recall—no first camera—is a familiar tragedy, recognizable to those of us who gather to invoke the unresolved, who find legacy at rivers’ mouths and seashores, who pay homage to those noises in the blood, offering calabash and flowers, planting flags and ringing bells with lamentations that come and go with the tide, the handmade temples that float out to the horizon on massive drumbeats. Those of us who go in search of the dark places that have given birth to us. Those of us who remember that the bowels of ships are not (our only) points of origin, and that as many echoes come from beneath waves as from beneath wooden decks and earth. These echoes pluck acoustically on the chords of a ship’s wake that plays a prelude to a dance of cocoa in the memory. Bereft of oversimplified metaphor, we can remember more freely that all traumas are incomparable in the end, leaving each of us with nothing else to tell but a story. This one will be less scandalous than forgetting one’s origins as a photographer, a story far truer than any amount of rum could make it. I will tell it anyway. I will give a “report,” as Lamming put it, “on one man’s way of seeing.”2

That is all it could be, for now.

Before the Blindness

There was, at first, the imperceptible haze that soon turned to halos around stars, around passing headlights and humming streetlights, making visible the opaque auras of regular people and the ghosts contained within them. The sky didn’t fall. No hole opened in the ground to swallow me. There was no pain. Things just began to fade, like faces in a photograph left too long in the sun. As is the case with many things, this particular beginning came not with a shock, but with subtlety: a missing detail here and there from a story I’ve become accustomed to telling. Who would notice? Before long, I would forget about it and learn to live with what I could no longer see.

It was all very normal, very mundane. I almost missed it.

In 2007, shortly before conspiring to destroy my faltering marriage, I was diagnosed with glaucoma—“open-angle” glaucoma, to be specific. I didn’t know there were other types, so I waited for my ophthalmologist to tell me what would somehow make my situation different from the other cases he’d encountered—something that would make me special, somehow. That “something” never came. The risk, delivered with the cool, disinterested tone of a man who’s done this far too many times, was the same: Blindness.

We, the dispossessed, are expert at understating the unfathomable, but I want to be careful not to overstate the case: this is the fear of everyone who sees or hopes to see, but it wasn’t the sort of news that one would consider earth-shattering by any means. Life-altering, certainly, but not a cataclysm. It wasn’t a firm, declarative “You are going blind,” with pauses so long I could have time to contemplate the worst and bury myself in grief. Nor was it a slightly less declarative (though, no less cryptic) prophecy, “You are going to go blind.” It wasn’t exactly a false alarm, but there was, as I recall, no indication from him that I had cause to panic. It came in the same tone as the diagnosis, as if he had discovered a heat rash or a mole on my finger that could mean something. A new freckle. A new concentration of melanin. Something hereditary. Cancer, maybe. Maybe nothing. Who can say? But I’ve heard worse things walking the street, so I took it in stride, as I’d been taught to do. A matter of my survival, you understand. People like me must be very careful not to act out in certain places. An ophthalmologist’s office, for example.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s treatable. But if you don’t treat it, you can go blind. Very likely that you will, if you don’t treat it. It’s as simple as that, really. You have to treat it.”

“Yes, I understand.” Simple as that. He then turned and left me alone with his words.

It isn’t every day I am shaken from thinking of myself in the far too flexible terms of metaphor and thrust into a situation where I’d be forced—maybe for the first time—to see. So I sat, closed my eyes, and imagined what it would be like to go blind. I found that it is an unimaginable thing—the experience of seeing all my life exceeded my imaginings of what a life of not seeing would mean. Put another way: compared to what we have the chance to actually experience, whatever we imagine (no matter how grand or terrifying) will never really match up. Not really. Still, I wondered what I would miss. When I opened my eyes, I spent the next few hours (or was it days?) looking at myself in the mirror. My crafted vanities had taken a hit, and I couldn’t help but be disappointed with what I saw. We all tell ourselves stories in order to live. Sometimes, purely as a matter of survival, we lie. But this time, a familiar silence came again to betray. Devoid of symbol and adjective (which can make art or poetry of the most uninteresting things), I had occasion to see exactly what I had become: a scholar and pioneer, sometimes happily marooned in an obscure area of study, but also a (once) unrepentant liar, a cheat, a failed husband, a doting but mediocre father, an invented man who had constructed a place to house his abstract ambitions instead of an actual home of brick, mortar, wood, and (perhaps) love. A book, but no home. Words and images, but no family of my own. In time, I would come to realize that there would be no royalties for betraying myself, no awards for setting people aside “for the work.” Every accolade delivered in this vein will be heavy; every compliment will be trailed by an insult, whether real or imagined. In time, I would learn that suffering, particularly when it is self-imposed, doesn’t always build character. I would learn that there is no act of mercy that the guilty conscience cannot undermine and outdo with remarkable efficiency. And sometimes, when we get more than we can handle, we break. In that last moment, though, I looked away.

“Enough,” I thought. Enough.

Guilt doesn’t always lead to conversion. What I would give now for another look at that collection of shames and successes, of broken or missing parts, and the spaces between them. I might have tried to save my marriage instead of myself. But in the doctor’s office that afternoon, I only thought of minor things, of random remembered things, each disjointed and discrete, each stripped of its narrative and its moral.

Each, painfully beautiful and (suddenly) quite rare:

The functionality of unbuttoned sleeves.

Corners.

Butterflies.

Plums.

Mangoes.

Red.

Blue.

The onyx eyes of a crapaud—its constellation of warts.

Rain on hot asphalt.

Plaited hair.

Dogs in heat.

Handwritten words.

Linoleum floors.

Worn wicker chairs.

An old man.

The color of wine.

An old woman the color of sweetbread before it cools.

I didn’t think of very profound things beyond my rough litany, or of who and what I might miss, or of childhood memories and other ghosts. The smiling eyes of a sometimes beautiful woman made no appearance, though I remember writing volumes at her feet. Thoughts of Noel, my drowned cousin, were as silent and still as his acoustic grave that languishes somewhere in Siparia. As silent were Maureen’s ashes. Lystra and Marjorie, who had not yet joined their sister, remained where they were: unremembered in San Fernando, not far from where they spent their childhoods. There was no remembrance of Vena’s round face, of her calling me “black boy,” and of me knowing that only love—love and nothing else—could come from a face like hers. Born the year my grandmother died, my first child, by then used to disrupting things, disrupted nothing. I gave no thought to the marriage I had already begun to dismantle, or to earlier and later regrets. No thought of a second child. No thought was given to my mother, whose love and mortality drove me, feverish and desperate, back to school. No thought to a long, stolen kiss in the playful shadows of a deserted high school in San Fernando. Nor to the letter I’d write to her decades later—but never send. No thought to noble causes, liberal causes. Nor to the chiseled bodies of malnourished vagrants that affirm the enduring myth of a nation’s progress, the shameless inequity of its celebrations, the denial of its obscenities. There was no Césaire, no Glissant, no James, no Fanon, no Nunez, no Walcott, no Lovelace, no Wynter, no Brand, no Sharpe. No Browne. No thought to the various metaphors of vision, opacity, and blindness that, before now, had helped me to make scholarly sense of Caribbean existence and perception.

Nothing but corners, butterflies, plums …

Some things can’t be undone, but remembering now with the same quiet dread a moment when I was first compelled to make sense of my imperfect way of seeing, I have a chance to acknowledge something more than its convenience as a rhetorical device: that is, my attempt to cannibalize what Didion might call the phantasmagoria of my experience, so I could see in spite of my failing vision, relying on what I’ve seen so I could envision what I have not yet seen, or will never see.3 This is a wish for a different, more literal version of myself, a version that is able to consider the impermanence of things on their own terms, before they and I could crystallize into memory. I’m fortunate my sight has endured to this moment. I’ll try not to rush, but time is against me.

Aside from the intoxicated and grief-stricken heart, there are few things more self-indulgent and corruptible than sight, such that we see what we do not believe and believe what we cannot see. And yet, we are often subject to its defining practices—the devised mechanics and processes that emphasize its impermanence. They enable us to attach meaning to the unreliable instances and experiences of which our more creative expressions are composed. The camera and photograph are such an example. Though many other things, they are each a testament to seeing and to what cannot be seen, of seeing and of having seen. For some of us, they are reminders of what we have failed to see, or have learned not to. Like the devices and images in the unopened boxes and corrupted drives of a former life, they provide only cryptic evidence of our unseeing, of the uncomfortable familiarity of everyday life and what might have come before it, like a set of clichés ceaselessly renewed. Or, like an untethered paradox of fragmentations and coalescences, coming apart and together. Or, they are like the lasting impermanence of slavery and its indignities.4 Sight, offering a glimpse of life from the still, irreconcilable trappings of an enduring afterlife.⁵

As with all things, a still photograph has an afterlife all its own. And, as I’ve continually been taught, its fate and effects are not always subject to my control. In spite of this, or maybe because of it, I go beyond the casual encounter with photographic surfaces, with what they are in essence (paper and ink). I go in search of self-conscious moments that will outlive their participants whose subjectivities are already in motion, and who exist (far better than I) in spite of their missing parts. In that search, when navel-gazing can be at its most intense, I am also opened—overexposed.

I am no longer just describing my own predicament—the onset of my personal terror—but something larger than myself. In this more literal version of myself, I see my personal constructions recede, becoming less important than what they were, only just moments ago. I am reminded, in this, that the terrors and traumas of black life are not metaphors, and that I cannot face its indignities or my recovery from them on my own. Revising Proust somewhat, I suggest that the “dignity” of the Caribbean photograph emerges not when it shows us things that no longer exist, but when it posits lived reality as a material representation of deliberative expression among ordinary people who sometimes act as though they do not see. A Mas that exceeds the limitations of Carnival. What would that mean for a photographer with no discernible genesis? This, at the very least: if the photograph represents an archive of vernacular resistance to a dual intransigence—an unimaginative future and an unimaginable past—then I would be compelled to think less of the symbolic blindness of my previous misunderstandings, less of my actual blindness, and more of what there was for me to actually see.⁶ Still photographs have lives of their own. Offering only a glimpse of the afterlife in which we find ourselves, they cannot show all that occurs in the in-between. That requires a bit more reflection on my part, since I also find myself engaged in one to create the other—engaged, that is, in the afterlife of my people to create something still. I think of this as a kind of alchemy, or a magic of perishable things. A kind of obeah.

So I’ve come to a place where obeah still breathes, where metaphors are gathered up, picked apart, and consumed in the sun and (sometimes) driving rain. I know that, same as every year, I’ll soon be left to sift through Wednesday’s ashes for some semblance of the everyday, catching myself now and again to ask, shamelessly, unironically, what happened. Then, as now, I’ll seek no definitive resolution, only some clarity (complex and shamanic though it may seem). In search of Mas, I find myself in a Carnival. Trinidad Carnival, impermanent and inevitable, where daemons run loose in the garden and yard and road, and where every gesture is a signal of greater noises in the mind, the blood, and the bones that all unhinge. It feels like home to me (though I know it will always be more of a feeling than a fact).

Caribbeanness, in Part

Have you seen them yet? The Blue Devils? Have you seen what they’ve made of molasses, turning it blue, wringing tradition into an even more impossible thing? Go, look. Have you seen how La Diablesse raises the tragic mulatto, before weaponizing it, before arming herself with a hoof and a chain and a spirit? And what of the unmasked Moko Jumbies? Have you seen them rejecting masks at will, allowing us to see ourselves in their synchronized grimaces, our ambitions outpaced in the expanse of their strides? This is how we take shape, literally. This is how we live without hope of reparations, fixing and fending for ourselves. This is how our beauty is filtered through the chambers of our infinite suffering. Look and see. It’s why we so often feel what we cannot always explain—forced, often, to curse or to break breathless into tears. This Mas of ours. You should see it. When you do, you will see what I mean when I say that a photograph is a fragment of Caribbeanness, a parable of the Caribbean individual who persists (fragments and all).

So much of what we do, as Caribbean people, is about finding a place for ourselves—one we have made, rather than have had made for us. So much of what we do is a response to the violence that brought us here, and left us here. And we do this in a very certain knowledge: that it is not, as J. Anthony Froude famously noted, that “there are no people here”;7 rather, it’s that the “Caribbean,” as we understand and experience it, is not really a place at all but an idea of a place—not the last undiscovered country in the region, but rather a long-discovered abstraction that waits to be resolved. It’s a place populated by an ironic people who insist substance into their elusive hopes for a better life in this (non)place we call home.

Mas is a performance of substance, understood here as both an abbreviation of “masquerade” and the extensive, often elaborate unfolding of a very particular lifestyle choice—an ethos. Those who adhere to this latter phenomenon of choice in a place of few choices don’t simply “play” Mas as some decadent escape. They make Mas. They live Mas. As such, they more than embody the essence of the thing. They are, in fact, elemental. The difference, I hope, will become clearer by the end, but let it suffice to say that I want to infuse my abstractions on matters of Caribbean being with a consideration of substance, which is derived from my interactions with the people who design, construct, and display it time after time, year after year. The substance of performance, to me, implies a certain awareness. A presence. We—Caribbean people—are present. Put another way, we are not absent from our lives. Vacant as we may sometimes appear, do not be mistaken. We are here. Even in the execution of our carnivalesque pleasures (seeming best suited to be masters of our unexamined lives), we are here.

This book is about those things—Mas and photography—and about me finding my place within them. The setting, for me, is an obvious choice, if not a bit cliché to: Trinidad Carnival, where Mas is usually played, seemed a perfect place to start to explore and understand the dynamics that arise and unfurl as we continue to claim our troubled ideas of Caribbeanness in an era of failed nationalisms and predatory globalism. Mas, as one of our major expressions, is a prime example of our existential in-betweenness. That really is enough for me, but I think I should say some more about why I embrace the Carnival, in spite of what you will see are my obvious frustrations with it. Revelry is one reason. Seriously. The catharsis of a good fête must never be ignored. Ever. (Think of it as the “politics of a good party.”) I’m not a party jumbie by any means (anymore), but the need for a release is absolute and, I believe, universal.

Another reason is that our constructions of culture and history—that ongoing afterlife of black and brown existence in the Caribbean—demand that we not only recognize that we have an ability to navigate the in-between with a great deal of nuance, but also that we consider how we might articulate it, should the need arise. At least, I think we owe it to ourselves to consider who, precisely, we ought to be in whatever moment we find ourselves. Carnival, Mas, and our many traditions enable us to do this. This enabling applies, for example, to questions of “authenticity” with regard to Carnival and Mas. Particularly when viewed in the absence of Calypso and Pan, the two are sometimes held up as a kind of false binary, or we see Carnival cast as an irresponsible overseer to Mas that, along with its equally troublesome siblings, Calypso and Pan, is cast as an impetuous orphan ward. Mas is then further split into two major genres: “Pretty Mas” and “Traditional Mas.” It’s an oversimplification and an absurdity. For one thing, “Pretty Mas” isn’t always pretty. Some costumes are ghastly, others unimaginative and poorly made, often falling apart before Carnival Tuesday—Mardi Gras. Headpieces are usually all that remains by Ash Wednesday morning and can prove a bit of a nightmare for travelers, tourists, or those content to delay their return to exile a moment longer. (Is your plumed, bejeweled souvenir “hand-luggage” or more of a “personal item?”)

Other bands gauge their prettiness using an inverse ratio of beads and feathers to square inches of fabric, or with prices that are far more obscene than the design. People complain, of course, about the titillation such costumes encourage, the indelicate vanities they expose (along with everything else). “Too much like Rio,” some say. “Not enough,” others reply. Perhaps. A good cliché can sell, and people take out Carnival loans to make sure they can afford it. It’s a paradox: small island people scrambling to find a tribe that will accept them (not unlike the scramble for legacy and title in such a small place, as if it wouldn’t crumble). But however the argument unfolds, “Pretty Mas” reminds us that pretty things are (at best) ephemeral and fleeting and (at worst) deeply superficial. And expensive. Notable exceptions exist, thankfully, though we sometimes miss the convergence of village and empire on performers’ bodies, the hauntings of conquest and genocide inscribed with cross and spear, the silence of old blood among the feathers and beads and jewels, the echoes etched in their unifying themes. Violence can often be mistaken for splendor, here. It’s how we were made: black waters, spices, whips, dancing, laughter, chains, and things that work better than chains.

My concern is that these Carnival-Mas binaries also cause us to mislabel what we mean by “traditional.” Whereas “pretty” may be left to the eye of the beholder, unless we choose to view tradition in terms of modification, rather than a narrow tracing of provenance—old practices to new—we would be guilty of a self-inflicted injustice. We all come from other places, so we can certainly all understand that our practices, broadly considered, are derived from many sources. They retain their integrity somewhat, but they are neither static nor insular things. Nor, for that matter, are we. It is the fate of everything that comes and goes from this place that we modify—or creolize, or syncretize, or remix—them, allowing them to soak in and then materialize in our behaviors, our cultures, our languages, our religions, and our evolving worldviews. Then we put them on display as a Caribbeanness that is as consequential as it is emergent, as acquiescent as it is resistant. How could it be otherwise, here? Why should it be otherwise? How else could cohesion—or, a cohesive pleasure—be crafted here, if not from these fragments that simultaneously make us a part and keep us apart? It’s how we’re made.

I want to say just a bit more about fragments—this time, in relation to the celebration of Caribbeanness in public space. Derek Walcott, who once read my poetry, offers a familiar way in, using the trope of a broken vase:

This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.8

In this project, I view fragmentation not only as the result of trauma. Make no mistake: It is that, and its effects are ensured by the careful and devious design of race, class, and (failing those) diversity. As a direct result, some fragments are larger than others, with their own shape, depth, dimensions, and effects. We have an opportunity, nevertheless, to consider how our many parts may realistically comprise the whole—that is, through the active coalescence of multiple fragments that do not lose their individual integrity, even with the “white scars” that Walcott suggests we all seem to share.⁹ The scars may bind us together, but they often do more to keep us apart. However, like the photographs in this book, I see each fragment as a simulacrum of the Caribbean individual that, along with other fragments, can give the impression of something that can be whole. And though I dare say photographs can do this work far better than words, I take Wilson Harris at his words when he says:

I tell you, my friend, much subtlety and true honesty are needed in the “reading” of partial images. For the partial image—in confessing to the ground of bias in sovereign institution—appears to terrorize us, or to confuse us, though it has begun, in some degree, to free us from the absolutes that clothe our memory and to reveal a potential that has always been there for mutual rebirth within conflicting, dying, hollow generations.

The partial image is biased, yes, but it is also in conflict with inherent bias—it is a part of something incalculably whole and stark and true. Such wholeness cannot be confined or structured absolutely; its complex nakedness and community of spirit eludes us within every mask or costume or dress.…¹⁰

Shadowing Harris, I’d say that my concern is with how we harness the potential of fragmentation, rhetorical or otherwise, in service of a more comprehensive idea of ourselves. I’m not at all interested in completeness, especially since I agree with Harris that a perfect, “incalculable” wholeness cannot be achieved, only imagined. The more realistic wholeness—perhaps the only one possible—is a fragmented one. The point is not to undermine what other philosophers, theorists, artists, and economists see as a project to achieve cohesive Caribbeanness, but rather to understand that completeness is impossible to achieve and a waste of our energy. The upshot of this exercise is that we may discover a dormant truth: that fragmentation, while not essential to a functional sense of Caribbeanness, is certainly elemental—each one of us is necessary, in our own way, but also discrete. Discrete and, perhaps, self-sufficient. A broken vase is not essentially a vase, but it is elementally one, equally comprised of the stuff that could make a vase, but also endowed with the advantage of spaces in-between its fragments. To me, it is the spaces that make recovery (if not restoration) possible. Not the scars. More important, discovery can also come of this freer movement of fragments.

Where does that leave us at this early stage, then? I would say with an opportunity to reframe the trope of fragmentation, however briefly, as a rhetorical device and as a means whereby we can consider (new) possibilities for our actual engagement and liberation, seeing our multiple parts as a bricolage pathway to actual unification. We may be fragmented, but by taking fragments on their own terms, and by understanding how we interact—how our moving parts move—we may also be inclined to make better use of the spaces in-between where, it can be argued, we prefer to reside. If it is common ground that we seek, then understanding the limitations of wholeness will be key. And Carnival makes that possible. Basically, if we mean to perfect our tolerance for the more difficult task of undoing the things we’ve been forced to be tolerant of, then Carnival is as good a place to start as any—even if what we think is common ground is just an illusion, and what we see as unity is nothing more than the unfortunate condition of being stuck together.

It isn’t a perfect solution by any means. (For some, more than others, the memory of being stuck together is more of an intimate haunting than a metaphor of ideological inconvenience.) But I think the likelihood of cohesion among Caribbean people (or in any of our traditions) would be remote if it weren’t based on an idea of fragmented wholeness—at least, in part. That is, we may stand to benefit if we’re willing to entertain the possibility that “being Caribbean” means embracing fragmentation as a basic aspect of our existence, and considering its usefulness in the tenuous, troubling, and volatile composition of the whole. From my point of view as a rhetorician, it means believing, more importantly, in a version of Caribbeanness that is fragmented but not fundamentally broken.11 I mean, boasts of constant modification and creativity notwithstanding, have we not already been taught to see it as brokenness, taught that those who are fragmented are also broken, or that they believe themselves to be broken? What reparations go to those who are made to see themselves as irreparable? Is it really any wonder that, as a region, we remain severely underdeveloped, when we can so thoroughly despise ourselves? I don’t have all the answers, but it’s certainly worth a thought if it means we save ourselves the trouble of believing too firmly in a wholeness that can never be. If not now, when? If not here, where?

I don’t mean to pathologize. Instead, given our realities in the region (and wherever we manage to gather), I think it’s dangerous to ignore the usefulness of those realities in favor of a myth of wholeness that we struggle to achieve. I think we’ve had enough of that and, as a result, have yet to find our bearings. Moreover, an uncritical celebration of our differences that masquerade as a mythical version of wholeness ignores the reality of Caribbeanness as a dynamic mess—it requires effort from us. We must, therefore, do more than hope that our interactions as a whole will be oriented toward the appreciation of broader conceptions—of, say, Caribbeanness and of everyday life, but there aren’t any guarantees. We’ve all brought our broken parts with us, leaving other parts unknown and others unremembered. We know that. But now what? Where does that knowledge lead us? And I don’t mean geographically. We are certainly here now, in this (non) place—caught up, as it were, in this idea of a “Caribbean”—but we must also have the audacity to be open to Caribbeanness as an articulated being. Or, we must have the greater audacity to open ourselves to what that means, to view the spaces in-between us as a place for social engagement and possibility, and to find the time to declare that we are here (though we may grieve for the many missing parts that have and will be left out of that reconfiguration). We must have the audacity, that is, to see for ourselves—and as ourselves. Just think of it: What would it mean to have a vision, and to perform it? To be image and act? Because, this is what I think you will see here, in this book: a vision and a practice, an aspiration to the vernacular and its mundane mysteries.

While some may see modification as an erosion of static traditions, I see it as a kind of self-consciousness in action, a necessary step in the deliberative design of Caribbean sensibilities that more closely align with our lived realities. That is, the claiming of sensibilities that can become traditional. Tradition that takes shape on and in our own terms. This will become apparent soon enough. (Have you seen the Blue Devils?) The modification also exists in how I approach photography, in how I think the image is made. Just look. Listen to the way we talk, to what we say. See us. See how we pray and to what and to whom. Look here, in this book, at Mas. Look at how it has forced me to modify even my own explanation of it. And understand: a Mas “whose face we know” can only be known in part, but it is a face that helps us recognize the violence of our dissolution and views coalescence as an opportunity for creativity that is more deeply considered than our scars or the sighs of our histories. Rather than serving merely as static filters of assorted viscera—fragments of what we feel but do not know, or know but cannot explain—we are able to make material representation of those feelings from our perspective, modifying our knowledge and our explanations at will. Modifying, as methodology, as fundamental expressions of the Caribbean will. A vernacular rhetorical art.

Does this mean a rejection of more “genuine articles” in favor of a blind deference to Mas? Of course not. It means only that I’m not satisfied with any celebration of Caribbean heritage that marginalizes the emergent characteristics that make us who we are now in favor of the exaltation of who we were, or might have been. Myths—of origin, especially Caribbean origin—should never be too far removed from the truths that make space for them to flourish. The same principle holds true for the performers featured here, exemplified in the inherent unsatisfaction of their portrayals, their desire to be seen, their refusal to be ignored. We’re not yet free, they remind us, but we’re not so bound as we may seem. Not so enslaved as to misunderstand the extent of our unfreedom. In the midst of the Carnival we expect to see, a reminder comes composed of blue, hoofed, and stilted creatures. A Mas that “knows” us because, well, it is us.

Masmakers, the sometimes wretched ones who make and play and experience Mas, are proof of a social conscience run amok. Driven almost mad with its yearning for better things, for things more beautiful, the scars have deepened into chasms between us. We also make Mas because of this. We hold and keep ourselves together, scrambling with paints and pains, with tape and glue, with smoke and prayer and desperate pleasure, to mend ourselves. Humbly, miserably, or however we can, we bear the burden of our society’s troubles—all of its wonderful hardships, its warnings and evils, its lies and imperfect lessons. Similarly, these portrayals of Mas are the literal consequences of our intentions, collected and allowed to come together and fall apart in public, out in the open, where everyone can see. Mas: the fragmented wholeness of tradition enacted.

This, I believe, is how we turn our many abstractions of what tradition can be into a series of perceptible realities, how we give form and life to them, harnessing them in service of critique and the realization of our public, personal freedoms. It’s how we recover from things we hope to forget. In Trinidad, these performances emerge as possible acts of civic awareness; each is a moment for conscious citizenship to take shape not just during Carnival, but in any state of in-betweenness that follows it. In each, we see how art—what we imagine and create there—transitions from mere motive into meaning.

These moves look, to me, like love in motion.

They look like Blue Devils. La Diablesse. Moko Jumbies.

They look to me like practitioners of Mas, experts in the art of modification who embody the spirit of Mas.

This book of parables and pieces is a Mas, too. These words are a lyric of Mas—a Caribbean lyric. Things will happen here that you do not expect—some that you cannot expect. The best you can do to prepare is to use what you do expect to happen as a temporary frame of reference, basing what you discover by accident on what you intentionally seek. Your expectations will either be met or let down. Or, like mine, they may be surpassed. This is the nature of Mas—and, fortunately, of photography. What, then, have we to fear of what we now have all too brief an occasion to see? We make Mas because we are not simply a catalogue of unnameable hurts, but something more. What should we be ashamed of, knowing that we—our bodies, our minds—are not damned?

Watch.

Ah go play a Mas, here. Ah go write a lyric. A lyric, with my perceptions of Mas, photography, and my self proceeding at the pitch of a certain passion. It begins where so many of us find ourselves: near the end, before moving gradually inward. Included among the various discomforts of recovery is the fact that we will sometimes feel worse than we did when we were afflicted—such that feeling better often comes at a price we would prefer not to pay. But emancipatory practice is not a gentle thing. It’s going to hurt, from time to time, but it’s a different hurt. A hurt that can heal. Try, as I do, not to reach for the familiar pains of habitual traumas. Traumas cannot love us. We know this.

Doh panic. Doh run away. Hold on. Succeed where I have failed.