High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture

A People, Ground to Dust

You know, I realize something:

Mas is not the embodiment of metaphor, but the other way around. It may seem a bit contrary for me to be so grounded in the literal when so much of Caribbean identity is located in symbolic action—my unironic embrace of Mas and Carnival, notwithstanding—but this is only because I do not consider symbolism alone to be the primary work of Caribbeanist Photography. It is true, for example, that many of our expressions are comprised of modes and features that make strategic use of evasion and misdirection, among other things. That is, they are used to shift the attention of the audience, allowing the practitioner to symbolically display what has generally been overlooked, and to call attention to a thing by appearing to refer to something else. Bolstered, for example, by the mythical cunning of Anansi, and infused with the cosmic divinity and playfulness of Eshu or Hanuman, the poetic arts of the shit-talker, the old-talker, and trickster are founded on the principle of things being other than what they appear to be. This, however, presumes an awareness of things as they might have been, or as they may currently be. So while it is true that symbol acts as a conduit to substantiation and meaning, I see it as a kind of remembering, an activation of an image that the symbol is intended to represent. Elmina. Zong! Moruga. Remember?

We are never too far from the symbolism of our spoken words, as well: the undulating tones, veiled threats, boasts, and riddles that we pick out from the convoluted speech of the aforementioned Midnight Robbers and Pierrot Grenades, or those of the Black Indians and Wild Indians, or drunk, disputatious friends. These oral manifestations are part of how we make sense of the world, generally deployed as one of a series of rhetorical modes: code-switching, wordplay, circumlocution, call and response, boasting/shaming, proverbs, the sermonic, and nonverbal/visual semantics.²

Similarly, we can hardly deny that every image, regardless of how literally one would hope for it to be viewed, will always be subject to some kind of symbolic interpretation.³ This, we’ve surmised, is how we separate ourselves from other animals: our expert use of symbols. I still try to encounter the materiality of my photographs more deliberately, as objects and actions as well as ideas, and with more than the relatively passive function of an artifact or archive corrupted or collecting dust. The photograph is evidence of the enduring materiality of symbolic action, and its work in this book is to center the Caribbean subject. More broadly considered, this collection exists as an argument of what I have seen and of what remains to be seen—what I have missed.⁴ Missing pieces, we know, are troublesome enough without misdirection, so my agenda (however late) has to be clear, even obvious: this is a practice intended to facilitate the viewer’s awareness of the vernacular presence, reminding us that we are a visual people, as sophisticated in the open as we are with our secrets and our subversions (in plain sight, as it were, and voluntarily stripped of unnecessary insinuations). As far as seeing goes, the only thing worse than disillusionment is blindness; the only thing worse than blindness is the willful absence of a vision. The time for declarations will soon be at an end, and we will be forced to sift the ashes for who we are. A re/discovery, of sorts that forces us to contend, finally, with the myth of who we want to be.

And so, we come, again, to this.

Trinidad and Tobago stands out in the region as a premier model of a tropical dystopia, a triumph of globalization existing in a state not even our manufactured nostalgia can hope to redeem. This can be admitted, I believe, without much debate. Come. Stay awhile. Stay in the capital of beautiful, dangerous things. Pay attention. The Trinidad and Tobago of our imaginings has, like the rest of the region, failed to survive the experiment of independence. We seem to have perfected our pretenses, our imperfect emulations, becoming what we could never really conceive. We seem to have outdone Massa long past his day, to have perfected the tyrannies of the post/colonial mentality with no hope of recompense from its designers. We seem content to frame our citizenship as a spectacular pretense of muted minds and mouths, of fat and muscular bodies forced to grind joy from suffering. We seem, as a people, to be in something of a fugue state—a kind of walking amnesia so total that we seem to have forgotten how to remember.

But although I think we’ve fallen short in many respects, none of those things is essentially true. Not completely, anyway.

We still know what Empire was. History. Camera. We know that we are still here. Still alive.

We were cast and framed in its dark chambers—remember?

Nigger /	not human
Coolie /	not good enough
Dougla /	not yet
Béké Negre /	neither person nor a nation
Coco Panyol /	neither traitor nor conqueror
Zami /	a magic too different to love
Slave /	never quite ready to govern ourselves
Savage /	not fully committed to the inner workings of power

Remember? Our laughter has a pathology. Our dancing has a pathology, traceable to those chambers.

We are a people without power.

We have never had it.

There seems to be no urgency in this fact, nor any outrage at what we witness because of it—the curse, some would say, of being a numerical majority in the kingdom of rum. The regular occurrence of our local atrocities and their unvarnished broadcasts seem hardly to cause a ripple on the idyllic surfaces of our Caribbean societies. Nothing much seems to happen here. There are no riots, no memorials for executions (extrajudicial or otherwise) occurring here and a world away, no sustained movements to address the murders of women that bookend the years.

Except, of course, for Mas. It incites. It moves. And we move with it. Except, maybe, for a terrifying stir in the bones of people who have had enough and look past the peeling façade of objective reality toward an unapologetically subjective one. We don’t need to go back to Blake’s Flagellation for evidence of such brutalities—do we?—for the exigency to which we are now called on to respond. We don’t need to go anywhere else at all. All the devils, armed in vulgarized “culture” and “tradition.” To our credit, we have daemons in our midst to offer responses on our behalf. They’re not always painted, nor do they all shift like cane stalks in the breeze. They look just like us. In the meantime, perhaps until understanding occurs, we will continue to make something of our suffering. Mas. Art. This is my attempt, how I say that suffering and the recovery from suffering are not casual tropes for my people. For, though we’ve learned to endure, we see how those we know and those we do not know are left on the street to rot like garbage, their children left to console themselves in the vacuum. These states are real. At least, more real than any image I compose.

Things are falling apart, as always. These unheeded warnings of another season play out like a crude dialectical prophecy, leaving all our denials intact in the way a skeleton is intact after the flesh has long decayed, or like ruins whose pallid columns defy the sun and rain. Or like tired people chipping home after a Carnival. Too tired even for cynicism, we seem to have gone past atrophy, exceeding the expectations of our former masters, mastering our wretched condition with newer and newer trappings. These are not hopeful times for civic engagement. But the reality of our pessimism offers a vantage point. It is from there I argue that we possess the potential of more concrete aspirations, in spite of what we’ve been conditioned to think about ourselves. We are always willing to try, I would argue—willing to fail, trying. We are not the first (or last) culture to be in crisis, after all. In the failed project that was Empire, we have many peers along the hyperextended spine that is our archipelago—part of our inheritance of being improperly unseen, improperly constructed. This place, whatever we make of it, is mine and is yours. So let it not be said that we know nothing of hegemony, or of the marginalizing arts of silence and forgetfulness that are heightened during Carnival. In spite of it all, we stand to be liberated. Though, not without the discomfort of facing what this season can sometimes make of its devotees.

About thirty kilometers from Port of Spain, an old Mas man sits in his front yard after feeding his birds. Slow moving—almost shuffling—you see that he has collected dirt and dust as he goes to sit amid the ruins of a life in Carnival. Here is a helmet. Here, an axe. Black beads. He speaks a creolized Yoruba dialect, commands and threats dart from his lips, then greetings, then a smile. He and all his possessions have fallen into a pile of disrepair. Soon comes the impulse to heap charities, pity, and prayers upon him, though he has sought none. He is an old Mas man, demanding modest honoraria in exchange for his recollections.

He’s been in this thing for eighty years, now. And, like most Masmakers, he has very little to show for it. Plastic trophies, feathers, and photographs cannot be pawned in this (non)economy.

Things remain from that visit:

The squalor.

The exposed red brick.

The cobwebbed bathroom.

The unswept floor.

The tossed clothes,

all dirty.

The stink of bird-droppings mixed in

with dust and the dried ink of old newspapers.

The white enamel pot half-filled

with urine—golden, pungent—in the

corner.

If this tragedy fails, as others do, to make any of us cringe in reflexive disgust, or cause us to shake our heads and weep for him (though, admittedly, always a bit more for ourselves), or reach for a verse, or some vaunted Arthurian or Ozymandian reference from our education—our colonization, really—then where do we locate empathy for a widowed man still so tragically wed to a tradition that he knows will horn him, a tradition that offers no royalties to any of its legends? It is easier to ignore him. Even I sometimes pretend to forget, so I won’t have to drink tea for anyone else’s fever, or volunteer as a martyr for anyone else’s shames. It’s not at all pleasant what his life has become. But the scene is no different from the aftermath of any Carnival. Carnival, a more recent past that we can more easily recognize, one that is not too far gone, or one that looks less like our frail and ailing elders, less like a fading legend crumbling beneath his inevitable obsolescence—his mortality, frankly—as likely to be forgotten as venerated, both with equal effect. I wonder: which of our Masmakers faces the same fate, rotting away in a chamber at the end of their careers?

These are realities that neither he, nor any performer, nor even I can escape in these times. A recession recently announced will help bear this out. This fading man reminds me—all of us—that there is no nostalgia for old and ugly things, for used and dirty things, things on the margins. No nostalgia for young, beautiful things, either. No nostalgia for poor, black things. Nostalgia cannot flourish in mossy drains and on the broken backs of municipal garbage trucks that compete for our collective scorn as they pass. And yet, this is where the material and psychic efforts of countless Masmakers end up, stripped of their romanticism and their hedonism. Wait a few months, and the incessant chip-step will blend soon enough with the bone-shaking bass, and the senses will be shocked again into the maniacal somnambulism of another Jouvay. We hope to wake up from another Carnival again, if not fully.

As for my case, I’ve grown wary of taxonomies. I’ve preferred to embark, instead, on this photographic exploration of becomings: the idea that a deliberative vision can help illustrate and give form to the motives of ordinary people. Maybe I’ve passed it, or it has passed me. Either way, I sometimes forget how precious and finite my days are. A more grounded pedagogy—a liberatory methodology of the oppressed, if you like—should follow, but I am not yet at the point of answering the questions it would undoubtedly raise.5 My questions are, as a result, far simpler: Are we redeemable, or are we damned? And how is it that we are not damned?

For answers, I go where I’ve been compelled to go. Really, where else could an answer be found, or given, than in a Carnival—in a Mas?

Jab Se Yo Neg⁶

It may easily be argued that all our celebrations are just as hollow and jingoistic as any Carnival. Independence Day and Republic Day come to mind, where flags and pennants are no different from feathers and beads. For those who have stood in the sun for a parade to celebrate a nominal independence, the sun will burn just the same as it would on Carnival Monday, though with more fanfare and a good deal less dancing. Every season will have its anthem playing as penance for every ritual. Where Carnival differs more significantly is in the disproportion of its apparent splendor to the paucity of actual change among those who go to great expense to ensure they are seen (and missed). Steeped in this irony, the most committed Masmakers have learned—like the rest of us—to endure the problems and push on, scars and all. By now, though, it ought to be clear that I consider the reflection on vernacular expression—Mas in yuh Mas—to be a viable path to the enactment of conscious citizenship. I accept that it may not be replicable, owing to the peculiarities and particularities that abound in the region. We each have our own thing. Fortunately, I’ve not gone in search of the divine, but of those who inhabit it—those normally withheld in silence or invisibility, yet find me deserving enough of their attentions and anxieties, their aspirations and ideas. Those qualities, at least, resonate—Carnival or no Carnival—among us.

From them, I take the following advice: Whenever we have cause to think of what Carnival in Trinidad is, has become, and desperately needs to be, we must look for it in fleeting moments that manifest in people who find their way to it, through it, and from it. Look, without condescension, at what they—at great personal and spiritual cost—make of themselves and of the traditions, troubles, and the joys that bind them and free them. It’s a methodology of the self—the vernacular self, implicated in every outcome it has occasion to observe. The self as subject, finally present. Now, some advice of my own: To see what there is to be seen, you must look deliberatively for your self. (Your own self.) Work out your hypocrisies with vigilance, and your salvation without complaint. Go in search of what you’ve learned to ignore. Reject what you think you know of yourself in favor of what remains to be seen, even if these things never reveal themselves, avoiding you at every turn, leaving you stranded (behind your lens or in front of it). Even if they disappoint; these things are meant to disappoint. It’s why we hold on, why we push.

At least, this is what you must do when you see Mas moving like love in motion, or if you’ve ever felt threatened or disgusted by the limbs and tongues that dangle in public like the unfinished confessions of people in the in-between. And yes, the chaotic remembrances of historical terrors, when performed in the context of a competition, are hardly revolutionary. But ask yourself: what is it we deny in ourselves that now causes us to recoil in disgust at what we find? What happens when we see ourselves being reflected back at us, face to face, filtered in drying blue, hairy-hoofed, or from atop wooden stilts? Will we, having found an answer to any of these questions, continue to dance without consequence? (Have we ever danced without consequence? Is that even possible for us?)

And (since we’re here), let me emphasize that Masmakers owe us nothing, nor does Mas itself. I often wonder what we could be “owed” when we can be so selfish, so self-absorbed. Can a child “owe” something to a parent? Can the dead “owe” the living? Or the past the present and future? Framed more reasonably, I wonder what are we owed that we aren’t first willing to give freely to others. What good are reparations, for example, to those who prefer to revel in disrepair, or whose bodies bear a debt neither time nor blood will ever repay? What need have we for daemons when we break and torment ourselves with such mundane efficiency? Can they shoulder such burdens for us in these post-everything times? (We’re not yet post-temporal, are we?) Haven’t they brought us far enough that we can now take up the critique with equal fury and go the rest of the way? If anything, they are catalysts, conspiring with us to bring about the revival of our self-awareness, displays of a public conscience performed not for their sake but ours. Foisting our commitment to declension onto them, we who think we see them now find ourselves on the back-end of a jeremiad we’ve neglected to heed: inaction, like willful ignorance, is a kind of damnation.

The inversion should come as no surprise. In this place, we are all as likely to find redemption among pretending daemons as among the man-made gods we force to compete and campaign for our affections and waning attentions. Though we pretend not to notice or understand the desire for actual emancipation in the course of everyday life, we all arrive at the same conclusion, eventually: None of this is the daemons’ doing, but our own. We don’t suffer because of them. They do not bind us and torment us. Other things prevent our liberation, which exceed the limitations of what deamons can imagine—beyond the daemonic imaginary. Our imagined tormentors do more to obscure our more human failings than these performers ever could. These cause no terror as they move from stage to stage with frenzied pace and singular focus. Our afflictions and what we make of them are another story. Each of us, the old will say, “have a copy to read.”

For my part, I had hoped to be a better son, a better man by now. A better former husband. A better father. But my vision blurs more often these days, and I feel as though I am running out of time. I want to feel connected to everyone and be everywhere, but between my frantic breaths things go past that I’ve never seen. In the claustrophobic press of othered bodies, familiar faces look with disaffected eyes through my lens. I miss them, terribly sometimes. Regardless of how I express my vision, I know that my struggle to understand those I encounter may be viewed as too much of an imposition and fail in the end. This, as I understand it, is not a dilemma. I just leave them alone after a while, and go chasing after my own vision with the same urgency I recognize in the flailing limbs and frenzied pace of people dressed as metaphors. I am bound to find something there.

Even so, I am not immediately invited to consider the vulgarity of my actions when I subject the protruding vertebrae and the hard-faced expressions of a half-naked masquer wrapped in rope and chains to the relative immobility of an image. Aside from the mostly quiet operations of my conscience, I am not forced to explain the inherent violence of my desire or the moments of arousal that brush past my intellectualism and speak to (and from) the innermost parts of me. I need not think too much of my vulnerable manhood or my need for kinship and other absent things. Except that I choose to do so, to offer up my explanation. Even then (even now), I am never far from asking what must it mean to have my vision mediated by a white gaze, whose incorrect idea of my people lingers, haunting us all even now. It’s one of the ironies of image-making all image-makers must face: however personal our approach, we remain liable to overarching cultures of subjection. And yet, I insist that the ubiquity of that gaze should cause no panic, neither for me nor the Caribbeanist photographer, who (at least in my mind) is accustomed to its impositions. There are other gazes to consider. Ours, for starters. And, besides, no useful act (aside from survival) can occur in a panic. More to the point, no deliberation can be expressed in a panic. No battle of any kind is waged, or won, in a panic. Healing cannot take place in a panic. Or, so I tell myself.

Danse Croisée

As I have intimated, a book about photography is also a book about managing darkness in its relation to light. Connotations and easy associations notwithstanding, these are dark days for us, so I hope the analogy possesses some merit toward the realization of what it means to be Caribbean in these times. The photographs can only do part of this work. They represent a particular reality, but are not of that reality—once published, they have a reality all their own. Mas (the “particular reality” that these photographs attempt to represent) belongs to the reality of it’s time, which continues even now. This book is about a desire for power—vernacular power—that rejects the tendency for aversion and denial, embracing the hardened shame of our long silences. But this is only part of it.

To me, the desire for power must emerge from the unceremonious acknowledgment of its absence. This acknowledgment—and nothing else—is the foundation upon which every emancipatory practice is based. If we choose to view ourselves in defiance of our pretenses, we then have a responsibility to push and stretch ourselves, even to the point of rupture. During Carnival, we are united for a time in that rupture. Within such eases and constraints, I invoke a Fanonian desire: to “induce man to be actional, by maintaining in his circularity the respect of the fundamental values that make the world human.” Fanon calls this the “utmost urgency for he who, after careful reflection, prepares to act.”7 This may be where metaphor and metonym part and encircle each other in a way we can more easily understand: an image of Caribbeanness as a series of “Mas Actions” that extend beyond the limitations of the Caribbeanist photographer’s frame—where I hope they work as a more practical complement to my self-indulgent abstractions. Fortunately, Mas and the myriad images of its daemons have their own roles to play. Regarding this final series, that role may be to herald an instance of Mas when aligned even more closely with an agenda.

On Emancipation Day in 2015, the political activist group Jouvay Ayiti performed a Mas in the streets of Port of Spain. Regarding themselves in the Convois tradition that preceded Carnival and Mas in the Caribbean, the group convened in 2010, following the earthquake that devastated the nation of Haiti. Conceived by Rawle Gibbons and Marvin George at the University of the West Indies–St. Augustine, the group’s name and its mandate is both an homage to the Jour Ouvert (Jouvay), of greeting the dawn in Trinidad Carnival, and to the racial-epistemological connection to Haiti (Ayiti, the Taino word for the island). In many ways, it seems to draw on the sense of deep indebtedness and guilt in Rudder’s Haiti, I’m Sorry—“One day we’ll turn our heads,” he sings. “One day” can easily never come. Many days have, in fact, come and gone since then, leading us here with our heads hardly turned and things barely changed.

Their “Mas Action” was a protest-procession of black(ened) bodies in response to that failure. Rejecting the sanctioned boundaries of Carnival, Jouvay Ayiti invoked the original Canboulay on the day of its original celebration. Invoked, as well, are our Haitian contemporaries who invade the streets of Jacmel to chastise the limitations of their respective fates with bodies just as black. It was a handmade performance, a rare process in the age of fancy, unoriginal things. Rarer still in the off-season, and proof (I think) of the organic unfolding of Mas. Regarding the provenance of the wireframe horns worn by Jabari Taitt (Plate 8), for example, Marvin George recounts:

We met him a few years ago through an alumna (Anisty Cyrus, now Frederick) of a spoken word programme (Wordsmiths) which Camille used to run between 2008 and 2011 I think; Anisty is now a graduate of the Theatre Arts BA, too. Anyway, he was interested in acting, monologues at the time. He did some work with my group, Mount D’Or Cultural Performers in Best Village too in 2015. Now he does work in fashion design. He came to Jouvay Ayiti though through his love for what he could do with his hands. Fabrice Barker brought him. The horns though were made by Aisha Provoteaux, when she was in the BA in Visual Arts [at UWI]. It was part of her costume for Jouvay Ayiti’s 2013 Jouvay presentation, “Mamaguy and Pappyshow in a Family Bacchanal.” Aisha is now one of Jouvay Ayiti’s directors.8

To me, those horns were the sublime coalescence of a political agenda in public space. I can, at times, be overly romantic. But, as they mixed themselves in with other modified traditions—Ifa devotees, Spiritual Baptists, Earth people, Pentecostals, and old revolutionaries—there was little doubt that pleasure of the carnivalesque had been traded in this moment for the opportunity to deliver their arguments and appeals publicly, in the sun. And it was at Aisha Provoteaux’s hands that the literal handing over of the horns had occurred—there must be room for a Poetics in this process. The Mas was aimed at raising public awareness and outrage over the suffering of Haitian people (and less for ourselves, who also suffer from inaction). Their response to crises of UN occupation, its spreading of cholera, the resulting deaths, and the displacement of Haitian descendants in the Dominican Republic, Dominica, and the Bahamas, was a direct link between Mas and acts of conscious citizenship in public space. Who could miss it? What need have we for an explanation? Don’t we already know what is happening here? It is this: Parading along the route in wireframe horns and pink paper frills, dragging along draped in lace and dry-rotted fishnets, courting the ridicule of your obesity at the gates of the Royal Jail, or standing with skull and tarred corbeau feathers to spit fire in front of a church, a nearly naked black man painting himself black, illuminated in the corrupted shadow of the Financial Complex. With bejeweled bra and “too-short” shorts, an already twice-painted woman has already swallowed gas behind the bridge—she laughed to be seen as much as to be heard. Who should try to make sense of these things, as if they were some careless contradiction in need of resolution, as if we don’t already know that we’re not yet free? Remember the Lansetkód of Jacmel, or the Jab Jab of St. Georges who raise the Revo’s dead, or the Neg Marron of French Guiana, or the Blue Devils who punctuate the Canboulay—the Kambulay reclaimed—at Piccadilly Green?

I remember them because I confess that I am unable to forget the activism of the moment, not when the violence of rolling blackouts is so much harder to miss at midmorning. Not when the tolerance for mauby-colored water requires a particular brand of faith. Not when the apparent desire for the gradual extermination of black minds—in Trinidad or anywhere else—is counteracted by the obscene utility of a permanent underclass that is perpetually despised, yet always present. Or rather, there but not really present. Necessary but, somehow, not wanted. This crisis alone would explain the emancipatory potential of the photograph, and underscore the importance of a Caribbeanist perspective. It does for me.