High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture

Genesis of Public Executions

Note to a Self, Possessed

A screaming man is dancing. Bare. His chest and back and feet are exposed. His wireframe wings sway like mad counterweights to his light, frenetic step. Right to his left. Left to his right. His beauty and his artistry seem untamed, almost accidental. Carved, almost, from a single piece of Kapok wood.

Look.

He is dancing a familiar and vulgar reality of hard times and of pleasure, of sweetened suffering and of synchronized shadows—dancing in a way we have yet to learn. He is (as best you can tell) unapologetic. His band taunts him mercilessly, jabbing him with a rhythm beat on burned-out biscuit pans:

Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak!

This rhythm is old (only an old rhythm will do for this dance), with little space for well-worn hands and insistent feet to evolve in the time that’s passed. He and others like him pour from the everyday obscurity of a Paramin dawn and into the harsh materiality of Port of Spain—a capital of common people. Their screams are the piercing throes of a culture fighting for its life—and losing, gradually—or maybe they are the sharpened sighs of a people who struggle to endure what blue can do to bare skin. It burns. Now, the screaming man is breathing fire. He spits out the excess before it bursts into flames too close to his tongue. Two more join him with their sooted flambeaux bottles and pitchforks of wood and PVC. They, too, know how power is imposed on their bodies and their tongues. It tastes like pitch oil, like cruelty refined. Bathed in it, the stench of a smoldering dump so close to the city is almost undetectable to you, though it casts a suffocating shroud over the people in Beetham, in Morvant, and in Laventille. It can, at times, stretch farther West, into Belmont. Farther still, toward rarified Glencoe and Carenage, where my grandmother is from. Behind the bridge, another pair of devils poses with other people’s children as if they were a family. They pretend to smile for the camera. Then they scatter, abandoning their borrowed children, blocking lenses, demanding attention and money. The drama in this collection of tithes is, I think, a perfected mockery of dreams deferred.

You are their photographer. They do not know, or seem to care, who you are. And why should they? You’ve been drafted in a rush. Although your vision will produce more failure than success, more frustration than peace, you take a certain pride in seeing what you think others cannot. Now, you wait for them, knowing they will make you pay for everything you see, that their coming heralds the return of an unease you usually keep hidden away.

Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak!

The Blue Devil Mas is coming.

Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak!

This is what you must do:

First, do not run. Know that they are coming to draw things out of you. So you should try to prepare for it. When you see them, you must try to remember that your presence is a consequence of your privilege, that witness is its own responsibility. Failing to do that, you should revert to a more basic differentiation: remember who you are as you note the differences between “you” and “them.” They are grotesque and obscene, a cliché of a past that you have learned (or have been encouraged) to forget. They are playful and amusing, certainly. Fun, in a primal sort of way. But they go to an uncomfortable extreme. They drag a dismembered baby doll around with knotted rope, like they drag each other. Rope can cut when dragged along the skin, but never mind that. In this light—between sleep and wake—it’s easy to mistake them for wild, erotic things, to read their indecency and their defiance of gravity as a political statement. A physical tirade. A mounted sermon. Unlike this mob, you have learned to corral your response to such outbursts with cool, academic restraint. You have no difficulty framing their resistance as cathartic, but also blasphemous. Like them, you have earned your right to it, so it will resonate. You are as justified in your sacred rejections as you are in the hope that your unanswered prayers, your interchangeable deities, and your dougla gods provide, but you generally reserve the right to blaspheme in private, where you can curse and cry, doubt and then gather yourself. And whenever you fail to grasp what you encounter in public, you must let yourself believe it is impossible to gauge their intentions. “Really,” you should wonder, “who can read the intentions of daemons in mid-flight or mid-descent, who dance their inheritance as if they are trying to break free of their skins, or of whatever else restricts them?” This will free you from the pressure of trying to “capture” anything—people, for instance, or the metaphors they so furiously portray. In this, you may be absolved.

Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak!

Absolved of your transgressions—the lies you’ve learned to believe.

Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak!

Absolved of your truths.

You learn the rhythm, but cannot follow along before catching yourself. You’ve been here before, stumbling about, drunk with ease as you rushed to make a fool of yourself in front of them. You break it into syllables in your head now, rationalizing it: “Pak-pa-tak-tak Pa-kata-ta-katak.” You feel your body rehearse, your muscles tensing here and there, your pursing lips and tapping tongue.

Tread carefully. The camaraderie of casual identification has its risks where daemons are concerned; it can be enough to strike you dumb and motionless when you see how much they resemble you, and to know that these similarities are more than the crude mimicry of your daily practice. You have not crushed and boiled Reckitt’s blocks, mixed with lard in the hilltop yards of Paramin for an impossible blue. There are no clouds in your bedroom. Your aversion to stains is well reasoned. You know only traces of Patois, kept as trinkets (mine are from women who have loved me from time to time).

Bo mwen?

No kiss comes.

Bo mwen, souplé?

A kiss comes, reluctantly.

Rèv, rèv.

Dream, dream, only to wake in want of a kiss.

You are an outsider. An avowed castaway. But they will see you—through you. They will see that you have long stopped believing in the power of blue to ward off maljoe—having gone some distance from your beginnings, you place no truth in “bad eye,” or in the various evils others can do.1 Your superstitions are undone by theories, debunked by modernized and postmodern things, by a cynicism that sustains you. You know that, to theorize effectively, you must first learn to forget where you’ve come from. Forgetting isn’t new to you. Your fears of an encroaching posthumanity have eclipsed your sense of the supernatural, forgetting that the Soucouyant, the Lagahou, and the Douen have long perfected their methodologies. You’ve grown up to ask, in all seriousness, “What does a Maroon care about Blue things?” You will dismiss the absurdity of your response and recoil as they approach you.

Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak!

Calling yourself “Calibanesque—a child of Caliban,” you will laugh like an orphan.

Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak!

But they will see you, and that will make you uncomfortable—not so much with what they see, but because your pretensions are useless in this moment, where you are unable to hide from them. So, to protect yourself, you have to remember that this is “just” a performance and, more importantly, that you are nothing like them. Certainly, they’re not devils—not actually—but it’s more than that. It’s a matter of your class, rather than your race. Your pedigree. Your training and your choices. You do not lower yourself to rolling around in the backed-up gutters of the capital, or pretend to feed on its garbage (washing down what you “eat” with the end of a drink you’ve confiscated from a man or a child caught unawares). This, you must believe, is why they, or any of our social martyrs, exist: to do for us what we would never do, to take our shame and despair and make light of the darkness in ourselves that we prefer to deny. In this light, anyone pretending to be a devil could be mistaken for the Devil himself, so it’s much easier to cast maljoe on them, even if you no longer believe in that sort of thing. The metaphor is a disturbing comfort, as only a metaphor steeped in an enduring disquiet can help you to deal with the literal absurdities of everyday life. Horns. Tails. Pitchforks. Fire. Metaphors do not suffer like we do. They can take it. They’re not devils, but men and women and children who seem uniquely engineered to endure these streets. This knowledge will help you to keep your distance for a while—until “seems” begins to come apart.

Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak!

Other people will look on with an unmistakable exotic wonder, as if they’d never seen people like them before. They will seem to marvel at the improbable contortions, at the remarkable will and endurance these performers possess. They will see “possession” as a giving off of darkened light—an emanation.

“How strong they are!”

“How resilient!”

“My God! Where do they find the energy?”

“How on earth do they keep themselves from coming apart in the maelstrom?”

Offer compliments, when insults will not do. “This,” the onlookers say, “is the authentic ‘culture’ of an able-bodied underclass—its old and its young—who would rather play than work. How amazing!” Like you, the onlookers feel privileged to see what they see, relieved that they are not actively hated for being who they are, that they might be loved and accepted for who they could never be. They do not need to ask how public expressions of hatred or resentment could affect the tourist image of this event, or if the access they’re given is also “just” a performance. Whether permission is merely performative, or whether it will grow into acceptance is for you to consider as you continue trying to photograph and represent them, while setting yourself apart (but not too far apart).

Pay attention, though. Be careful.

You must protect yourself however you can, though all of your delusions will come apart after a while and will give way to less complicated things, facts that will linger and wait for you in the silence, between beats. Believe me.

Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak!

This is part of why they exist: to take on the insults, allowing themselves to be seen as public metaphors of our unspoken torment. And not all devils are blue—some are white. They all work as much from the fierce arrogance of love as from the careful choreography of their own madness and loss, reminding us that our presence here is accidental; that we were not meant to survive; that even in this heat, even covered in blue, their beauty is our beauty; that that beauty is sometimes just a fortunate adaptation to unfortunate circumstance. They come now to remind us of this—and of our selves. The substance of their daemonic appeals is comprised of grunts and screams and threats to touch their unblemished spectators. This is their soliloquy. They demonstrate for us the in/adequacy of language to articulate the necessity of their presence and the typically understated principles of our vernacular humanity. These principles have been present from the Blue Devils’ inception as one of the more vibrant modifications of the nineteenth-century “Molasses Devil”—the Diable Molassie, which, as history would have it, were quite black.2 It has come to be described as a “begging Mas”—thus, one must “pay the Devil” for his photograph, for his attention, or for him to leave you alone and untouched. Knowing this, you may be inclined to ask what drives them to beg, to ask what existing conditions make the gesture of outstretched hands meaningful in these times? What causes them to pick your hard-earned, over-handled, and increasingly rare dollars up from the ground with their teeth? What is wrong with them? And what is it to beg, anyway, in a society that has bankrupted itself? What is dignity here, or shame? Who can say? Like so many of our misinterpretations of Mas, however, the characterization as beggars seems wholly inadequate. People are not allegories of the hardships they face, nor do they engage purely in symbolic terms with the circumstances that drive them to make Mas. There is substance to the styles they portray.

Given its origins in black resistance (with blackened bodies) to white domination, it isn’t difficult to see how this Mas could be adapted for a critique of national/regional economic failures—or proof, more narrowly, of the limitations of material resources in a society unable to secure any kind of reparations for all of its people. The dance is public, after all, a critique derived from our society’s failure to ensure an alternative to the dehumanizing practices of old and new colonialisms: inequity, injustice, improper education, improper roads. As such, their “begging” questions far more than our (too) human limitations. It asks us to consider our collective contortions of love and pride and shame, the awkward attempts to evade, the lengths we go to deny that we have let ourselves down as a nation and a people—let ourselves down, having aspired, having achieved. That dance of interminable questioning is theirs to do, the burden of our grief they each carry from stage to stage—station to station—for our collective pleasure, disgust, and relief. Daemons, too, have crosses to bear. Theirs and ours. We watch them bear it all.

Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak!

Our dance is a more private one, comprised of assorted failures and sporadic successes scattered along the way. Few see our frantic negotiations, caught up, as they are, in a dance of their own. However, if it is that we have no recourse but to see ourselves in the eyes of prancing performers—realizing that we at least owe ourselves the privilege of reflection—then we’ll discover that regardless of where we dance, whatever road we take, whatever our meanderings, we should count ourselves fortunate that we end up in the same place: here, now, in the company of people who require neither our money nor our approval, who look to possess no moral authority over us (except that which we willingly enable). Blue Devils. People, in whose apparently inexplicable rage we hope to see more than a mere theory of reflective practice. After all, if “God is a Trini,”3 as some will attest, then logic will insist that Trinis make spectacular devils.

But, still, “we” are nothing like “them.”

Temporary comforts aside, we each still have a price to pay for what we see, even if it is our peace of mind—especially then. This is the bargain. We each must contend with torments of our own design. We each must reconcile what it was that brought us onto this road, as it languishes like a razed monument beneath our wayward feet. In a way, my reconciliation began with the literal descent into Fatima Junction in Paramin—into a place of old, overlapping resemblances. A small band of devils found me standing there disillusioned and half-vacant, as if I were looking at a Hinkson mural.⁴ Ashton. Steffano. Shane. Emilio. Sterlyn. Some younger, anonymous ones. Drafted into their care, I realized there were no atheists on these hilltops—these Paramin hilltops, which are the inverted foxholes of so many daily battles. I would trust them to prop me up and deliver me without cynicism from the hills above Maraval back to my people and to myself—to another, earlier beginning. The city, and everyone in it, would fall away.

Portrayals of Being

The following year, I will walk the streets of Port of Spain like a great Blue King. A crown of horns, bound in twisted blue fabric around my head and neck, a silver cup hanging. King of my own pan-beaten blues, I will walk with deliberation, talking with unfrightened children (Yuh does listen to yuh Mummy and Daddy? Yes. Yuh behaving? Yes. Yuh doing good in school? Yes. Alright.) before they ask me to chase them. I will take their money. Yes. I will deny their parents’ requests for free pictures. They will pay. Pay. Pay for the children, too. I will talk to other Blue Devils, marking time with them as we latch desperately on to whatever rhythm dominates the moment. Then another. And another. I will take deep breaths to stay cool, to do the work of my painted pores. I will try not to hyperventilate. When I dance, I will mostly trace the steps of derelicts and drunkards. Before imagining myself barefoot on burning coals, I will trace careless routes to places I have only imagined. The road will burn worse after a few hours, then cool after a few days. Corns and calluses will harden when I dance. I will scream at the rhythm, breaking it, joining with it:

Pakpataktak! [Eeee!] tatakatak!

I will scream and scream as if I finally understand the mysteries of my exile, dancing to the edge of my rationality, grinding myself to dust. I will dance in agony, as if I knew I wouldn’t heal, as if the broken back and clouded eyes would heal themselves. I will dance, careless. As if I were mad.

These things will all happen the following year—2015. It will be a turning point.

But I don’t know this yet.

I will have a sense of it by nightfall, peeling the remains of the day from my skin, letting it wash down the drain. I just don’t know it yet.

Before too long, the devils of the present would leave me alone to contemplate a bargain I had struck and, till then, had failed to uphold. I would have to run to catch up.

(Now, all around me—coming in and out of focus—a sudden, imperfect memory causes a rupture as my imperfect vision fails. I have to attend to it, or lose my bearings entirely.)

♦ ♦ ♦

1981.

“Ethel” is Road March.

Catelli beats “The Unknown Band” for Panorama.

Both are songs by Austin Lyons. “Blue Boy.”

Blue Boy, before “getting high.” Before interrupting his own ironic ascendancy to “Super Blue.” Before losing his teeth, scrambling for his dignity with golden epaulets that danced on his drooping shoulders as he performed on a corner in San Fernando.

Eric Williams, this young nation’s father, is still alive (as are my uncles, Frank and his half-brother Peter).

This will be their year, too, but they don’t know it yet.

I remember running barefoot in the road with my mother. I am almost 7 years old. I am in the immediate aftermath of my first spectacle. Of course, other spectacles—some magical, others more mundane—hung about:

The couple of men who loved each other and seemed to have no names.

Miss Jack, the widow who looked like we thought a Soucouyant ought to look.

Everard, in whose puncheon-drenched chest a tempest raged and raged.

Ann, who was mad most days but was harmless, in spite of it all.

Aziz, who loved her madly and followed her everywhere, in spite of it all.

Folkit, the “reformed” pedophile.

Jeffrey, his unreformed counterpart.

Squeeze Eye, my cousin’s friend.

Gow Chee, his brother.

A white horse that turned, my mother said, into a man whose name everyone seemed to know.

Each life was an alias of an earlier wish for better outcomes in spite of their unavoidable fates. Each had their spectacles, but this one was mine:

She wore a cotton nightie, my mother, which moved slightly at the hemline when the fan turned toward her, its spinning blades blurring into a disc bolted loosely behind a wire cage. Her nightie was blue. And I, little and black, wore a “jersey” and “jockey shorts.” It was raining. There was the leaking roof, buckets and bowls kicked aside, the slippery, varnished floor. And then, the private warfare turned public, pouring out into the yard.

Rain in a country with only two seasons has a peculiar way of failing to wash things away—illusions, for example—instead making more visible the things that happen in the dark. A hard rain can cause poorly painted secrets to run. It can leave nostalgia waterlogged, making black skins, and other surfaces, reflective. A hard rain can teach. It was a simple enough lesson, prone as we are to dangerous habits that often harden into customs of denial. When one comes of age in a culture of misogyny, patriarchy, self-hate, and abuse of unimaginable forms, it’s an effective shorthand. “Doh get in man and woman business.”

Shorter still: “Doh get in dat.”

She man cutting she tail? Doh get in dat.

He wife horning him? Doh get in dat.

Yuh brother feelin’ up he son? Doh get in dat.

Yuh sister pregnant fuh she father? Doh get in dat.

Dis one chop dat one, den shoot de other one? Doh get in dat.

I learned the rhythm of this denial, dancing it like a kalinda, but only in my memory. What is bacchanal to a child? What is rhythm?

Dohgetindatatak! Pakatatakatak!

Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak!

(breathe)

Dohgetindatatak! Pakatatakatak!

Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak!

We danced it screaming, my mother and I, refusing to be silent as “everything turn ole mas.” I want to think she knew better than to get involved, but I know my mother. She had already been knocked down in the bacchanal, a metal beam only just missing her head. And there I was, screaming as my mother screamed, the two of us in full voice like a warmed-up alto and soprano, screaming in unison, barefoot and half-naked in the yard. We conspired on that night to save our own lives, running the mile and a half to Aunty Marjorie’s house.

Pakpataktak: the sound of bare feet—a mother’s and son’s—as they run for their lives through the streets of San Fernando. Running possessed.

Out the yard.

Down the steps.

Left on Carib Street.

Right on Upper Hillside Street.

Left on Rushworth.

Right on Blanche Fraser.

Left on Donaldson, right on Richards, quick left on Scott, right on Princess Margaret.

Right on Turton.

Left.

Safe, hand in hand, breathless and shining. We almost come to ruin on the heels of that litany.

Our conspiracy left us barefoot, skipping puddles for fear of stones or glass beneath the surface. In the rain that night, our embattled bodies shone. But what remains, for me, are my mother soaked to the bone in blue, the explosions of rage that lay half-coiled beneath our emancipated tongues, the epileptic contagions of fear and reflex, the way love in motion can look like terror in the eyes of a child. I remember our emancipation.

I learned some things from my mother that night:

1. In the futility of trying to save someone who refuses to be saved, you will be forced, out of desperation, to save yourself.

2. There is a price to pay for refusing the tyranny of custom, for living at a crossroad.

3. Run, if you have to, but doh run away.

I remember her scream, how it was both precedent and punctuation to our escape, the Pakpataktak of bare feet on the road—the road that saved us both from the harsher consequences of this particular truth: run, but doh run away. How we danced it that night!

Doh run away.

The next day, we went home, like victims returning to the scene of a crime.

♦ ♦ ♦

2014.

Another Carnival (the one that began this essay, future to the past of my youth, past to the present memory).

I go looking for Blue Devils.

I am driving hard on the long stretch between San Juan and Santa Cruz with the windows halfway up, speeding past La Regalada, a great house on a languishing cocoa estate. (We were known for cocoa, once, and hope to be again.) Explosions of sound are muffled by the bush, and my fury smoothens to a drone. A good distraction leading up to this moment, but I’ve already turned off the incessant campaigns for Road March. The “Minister of Road” will take win, again. I’m not bitter, but I’ve tired of it. Sirens in the distance remind me to keep my eyes on the road as I stuff the empty bottle under my seat, where other bottles rumble around like hardened drunkards at the abrupt end of an overpriced fête. This recklessness is not just my blending in, or taking solitary part in the unfreedom of another Carnival. It’s more like desperation, a welcome departure from other more resolute tensions. I shouldn’t be behind a wheel—I already know this, as random roadblocks have taught me—but such things are easier to ignore as I emerge enraged from another quarrel with a woman I’ve loved imperfectly for yet another year, pretending I’ve forgotten my mother’s lessons.

This particular failure is worse than mal yeux, for though it is clear to me that my self-contempt led me to this place, it is my reflection that will cure me in the end. I have been unwilling to, and for good reason. Personal terrors can look like love in motion when love has left you standing still, or when you want to leave but love to stay, when love is past its prime and the rituals of “man and woman business” leave us both stranded at another crossroad, neither damned nor blessed. Just “there.” Keeping score. Marking time, like an act of patriotism lovers share when they find themselves in a state of crisis. “Man and woman business” and its myths of need and belonging. Doh run away. Stay. Come back. Kiss me. These are the only oaths of allegiance we take. We’re the same, you and I. There are moments between sleep and wake that make the pain worth having. Our fleeting intimacies can look like forgiveness in spite of the hollowed-out kindnesses of days to come, or the loneliness to follow. Doh get in dat. Ours is a history of bad relationships, and we mark ourselves as “Caribbean neocolonials,” classically fated to suffer for things we think we know. To hurt for this thing we think we love. To sing out our souls for it, even if we’re sometimes out of tune. This thing we cannot leave—this tragic romance of Caribbean being. We’ve mastered (or surrendered to) the intimacy of this monstrous afterlife. Having situated the conditions of our contemporary social tragedies in the absence of historical ones, we no longer see the point of asking what it costs to perfect this monstrosity and to perform it over and over again. For people content to be commodities, the question is moot. (Instead of a question, then, a prophecy: No more coffee, cocoa, or cane. Oil will follow soon enough—or not soon enough—and will take us with it.)

Damn it!

This gaslight has been on for hours. I’m being careless. But so many things are faulty here, it’s just one more malfunction. Soon, there will be a sputter. Soon, the engine will cough and spit. I have adjusted to and learned, with some difficulty, to ignore the symptoms. I haven’t broken down yet, but I wonder how much further I can go. Anyway, I’m leaving the valley now, starting the climb up to the North Coast Road. The engine complains with its subtle tremors. (Don’t all failing things complain?) I stop a short while after for an old fisherman on the road to Maracas, who tells me I should be careful not to pick up strangers in these times. He never tells me his name.

“Trinidad is no longer what it was, you know.”

“Yes, sir. I keep hearing so. But how I could just leave you on the side of the road?”

“Well, thanks,” he says, easing into the seat with a groan. “I just coming back from town. Had to go and get something for the boat.”

“I hear you, Uncle. Things different. I does move with the spirit, nah.”

We drive in silence along the North Coast Road, narrow and serpentine. Quiet minutes pass like years between absent-minded friends—in these times, it’s enough for me that a “friend” is nothing more than a stranger with no agenda. And, as my anxieties dissipated like smoke from a tired bushfire and as I thought of the ashy, dried-out iridescence of this man’s twice-broken fingers, I recalled what it was that brought me—curious, desperate, and unarmed—to this place. Blue Devils.

“Uncle, listen, nah? How to get to Paramin from here?”

“Take Fond Pois Doux Road. You can’t miss it.”

“Nice! Thanks, thanks!”

“You better have good brakes, eh? Them hills not easy.”

I leave him a few minutes later at the fishing depot in Maracas—taking a left at the junction, where pirogues line the shore like upturned buttresses. It’s still early. Corbeaux seem less idle, as they track the stinking carcass of a dog (or a person) discarded in the valley. As I make my way back to Fond Pois Doux, I realize I am subject entirely to forces I cannot name. This, and not the iconoclasm of my symbol-breaking curiosity, is the only thing that will save me.

Days later, I’m back on the road I started on, back in the heart of Port of Spain. The road seems empty. All the people are here, all except the Blue Devils. They have no time for my contemplations and are gone. I have to run again to catch up. There’s work to do.

The Deal

The Caribbeanist photographer, having emerged from a history of broken things and missing pieces, knows better than to aspire to the outdated luxury of art for its own sake. Every image is also a reminder of a struggle for access: continuously sought, easily denied, and always only tenuously granted. A reminder of the very public executions of our subjectivities—our being in this place. A reminder, too, of the path through my own crossroads that I would have to take. You see, I’m unable to separate my anxieties from the images that come of my efforts, but these photographs are not only the materializations of my selfish aspirations and challenges, but also something of a mandate—a mission I’ve set for myself and my people.

In photography, I try to look for those missing pieces, to see what cannot be expressed, to express what cannot be understood, and to understand what cannot be seen. It is a hope, both false and real, born not of humility but of a vanity I cannot reconcile on my own. I suppose because I have failed at more appropriate forms of nostalgic reflection over the past few years, I’ve been able to think of ways I might claim a more compelling version of myself. (I had hoped for at least a fitting allegory of my struggle that would help me to get through the day.) Looking for that self during Carnival is, at best, unadvisable. And certainly, in the course of this project, I’ve been fortunate to see people who are typically unseen burst open to greet and embrace the broken promise of their liberation in a way no one can miss. Their self-declarations burst, all in accord, from their mouths like pitch oil flames. The sublime, undeniable splendor of these public executions. Who can miss it, or fail to go in search of it?

What I’ve also found here, in Trinidad, is that I am deeply insecure, and that the subjectivity I have embraced for more than twenty-five years is little more than a bricolage phantom conjured in a vacuum. In false exile, I’ve longed for the comfort of strangers who seem to see me and understand me without much effort. (Longed for it enough to ignore every warning.) I have longed for touch, for the contact only other people can give. I should have known that I would find an uncomfortable truth in the un/masked familiarity of this half-forgotten state. I’d been warned. But hope, like nostalgia, is a waking dream, a favorite privilege for a people in denial.

Beyond the scope of Carnival in Trinidad, it’s no secret we live in a world that seems committed to human suffering (seen, for instance in the nonchalance that can follow long-winded eulogies). As such, the persistence of hope can appear unwise—even irresponsible—in lieu of other more urgent, more definitively violent responses. But hope enables people like us to deal with our disappointments with something that looks more like grace than despair. “Better must come.” It must, but only because we’ve taught ourselves to live a life in which the very act of “living” is based on the idea that we would be better off dead. That is, a “better” that never comes, though it must, is one that comes too late for those no longer alive to see it. Rewards that cannot be enjoyed. They come too late to do much good to those in need of them. Too late to mean much of anything, except to those left behind to claim the privilege of witness without the burden of action—having been there to see, without having to do anything about it. Too late, like a eulogy for a people who forget that “inheriting the earth” is a metaphor for the grave, and who so quietly disperse after the last prayer is uttered, the last hymn is sung, and errant clumps of dirt are thrown.

Or, it is like a photograph.

Photography, too, is a matter of hope—of losing it, as well as finding it. And there are times the stark and vulgar cruelty of this craft and my mediocrity within it are more than I can bear. The choices—whether to photograph or not—are unforgiving enough. There are the images I take, those I wish I’d taken, and those I can never take. Each is an inadequacy I am forced to accept. Along with the lapsing coordination of my hand and eyes, atrophied silences develop behind the lens, and the scope and range of narratives I construct lead no further than what I struggle to see. These problems are by my own design—my carelessness with localized traumas, for which neither folklore nor history nor even religion can offer any meaningful release.

These problems and the images they yield send me inward, where there is still life. And why not? There is no other fellowship behind the lens. Nor much faith, except in the temporary idolatry of lenses and bodies, shapes and light. It’s a solitary place, full of lonely people. You will know this if, by chance, you manage to explore the unattended chambers in the castle of your skin, where the spaces between thought and act, idea and word, vision and touch are enough to form echoes that can silence the very doubts that gave rise to them. You will see that the arrogance of your aloneness offers no real entitlement, only the pathetic and irreconcilable fact that you will have to go beyond the boundaries of overindulgent self-loathing. This, finally, is how you reconcile things, how you will make enough space for an image of your people to develop, whether you are a part of it or not. Then you will discover that solitude is not a privilege. At least, not where Caribbeanist Photography is concerned.

No one comes looking for you behind the lens. You have good reason for the solitude, of course. If put to proper use, it will eventually become part of your methodology—essential to your process. In time, you hope your solitude will turn to silence; your silence will turn to deliberation; deliberation will lead to vision; vision will lead to action. You learn to trust it, to prefer it after a while. You will do good work because of it. “Good work,” however you (or those you hope to move) may define it. It is also sometimes the case that in order to see clearly what this good work can be, you have to look behind you and in the periphery for what lingers in the blur. Have the courage to turn, and to go in search of better ways to see. This, I think, is what it means to have a vision: not merely seeing, but going in search of better and better ways to see. In the case of these performances, our experiences involve not only our responses as an audience, but also our reflections on the experiences that gave birth to them—or gave birth, at least, to their misinterpretations. To me, the consequence of this more focused approach is a localization of meaning that takes shape at the expense of grander academic claims. Those may come later, in some other form. For the moment, though, the specificity of this project is as strategic as it is personal. This is where I enter, and how I come to pay such insufficient tribute to Mas as an art and an aspiration to the vernacular, rather than a study of it. I come with a consideration of photography and of seeing that function beyond the privilege and constraint of abstract thought.

So pay attention to what you see and feel. Pay attention.

Like us, leaping daemons are never still, even if they appear to be. They are always plotting a way out. Unlike us, they require no sympathy for having fallen short of what they’ve forgotten. Perhaps, in the end, it is not that “we” are not like “them,” but that they are exactly like us, except we struggle to find what they seem to have found. Except, once found, they take it, cover it in blue, and leave it all in the road, daring us to make of it what we will.