We recall that photography, from its beginnings, has enabled the examination of things not merely as they once were, but as they were thought to be.1 Couched in privilege, the “objective” potential of the frame exposes an even greater violence of racism and its conventions of classification. It should go without saying that such a practice intentionally depersonalizes subjects, making them into things to be regarded rather than perceived, engaged, and (perhaps) understood. Conceived and composed by whoever had the means to make a photograph, subjects and objects were “immortalized.” Seeing, as such, was an expression not only of power over bodies and other things, but also of the power to bind them to the seer’s conception of the past by locating them eternally in the moment they were perceived. For me, and people like me, this has been a problem. Even armed with an instrument of power, the potential for true subjection is a power I do not inherently possess. If ever I lose my bearings, or get confused, I remind myself that the perpetual crisis of endangered black life and the frequency of black death have made doing this book necessary. We do not only exist in the aftermath of slavery, but rather insist on a presence somewhere between the still life of inadequate memory and the afterlife of a history we have yet to reconcile. This is where we are and who we are.
Such things can remain abstract, personal, and unjustified. Like the jumbies and other spirited things that lurk in shadow and in plain sight, my experience of photography can remain magical and undisturbed by the nuisance of my questioning. I am free (I tell myself) to deny the significance of whatever I wish, to silence whomever I choose. But it doesn’t remain abstract for very long. Each time I hold the camera to my eye, I embrace with one hand and reject with the other a legacy that was not designed to consider my humanity, or that of my people. It is the same gaze that, in latter times, has framed the refusal of the tourist’s camera as a “backward” and “primitive” impulse, as an inarticulate “hostility” to the racialized gaze of the West—hostility, we understand, to the inherent principles of conquest and capital.2 This same vision, operating in perpetuity (and seemingly without contradiction), is as familiar to me as my own. So in spite of the apparent “visual lacuna” of Caribbean bodies in the history of photography, I cannot pretend that we are late arrivants to this conversation.3 Not when our bodies come before the lens. We inhabit this damned afterlife as a matter of course, beyond the reach of panic and reward, as if it were a foregone conclusion. But we’re not damned. We see how everyday life can hasten the erosion of our memory of ourselves. But the effects of erasure are never total, and we’re compelled to find ourselves in awkward spaces, only to find that we are still here, in spite of ourselves. So we make Mas, invoking memory to avoid the troubles that come with forgetting. In this place, where past is played as present, a mortal Masmaker can take on the qualities of godlike things she can barely remember. And the echoes of borrowed bones are gathered up in memory. In Mas, we remember that we’re not yet so diminished, though our remembrances—of former things, people, places—involve a time that can never be regained, not even in photographs. The resulting performances are among some of the most fleeting visions of our missing parts—these times that have come and gone, taking parts of us and others as they pass, leaving us in a futile scramble to recover from them. What we miss may be gone forever, but some things remain as more than fragments among the bones, as more than whispers in the rubble. Put a slightly different way, the awareness of loss will demand inquiry.
When we read Mas too closely as a metaphor of reiterative experience—as a “life on repeat”—we miss a crucial point of what it means to create in the midst of crippling stagnation. To change things from the ground up. The festival is annual, yes. And every year, we are called upon as an audience to gauge the effectiveness of a performance in relation to past performances. We’ve learned to seek out the patterns, so we could measure and compare their desires, probabilities, outcomes, etc., which are undergirded by shared intention and (re)invention, as well as an abiding capacity for critique.4 How beautiful/big/shiny!How magnificent!Nice, but not like it was in____whenever. This is all fairly standard, if not always fair. But to align Mas too closely with a festival of restrictions seems wrongheaded to me, especially when we have opportunities (and the responsibility) to go beyond it. Particularly when we understand that the major trope of Caribbean cultural existence is not tradition, per se, but the (re) invention of tradition. Not sameness, but change.
Not Carnival in its loosely “traditional” sense, but Mas.
I am not overly concerned with these binaries, except to complicate them.5 We’re often forced to deal uncomfortably with the costumed malaise of academic discourse, while our world changes in ways our ancestors could not have foreseen. Whatever the situation, whether at the center or the margin, my people and I are steeped in the enduring violence of whiteness. I’m more interested in the activity that unfolds in the in-between. It is literally our shared point of historical departure and contemporary subjectivity as a Caribbean people. We remain rapt in its myriad legacies: language, culture, industry, everything, everywhere. These are already known (too well, I’d say, as even the most random encounter with our past or present will confirm). So while it may be too late for essentialisms, I still want to look forward to an alternative. A way of seeing. If Mas has taught us anything at all it’s that we cannot arrive at meaning through contentions of purity (because we are not pure), but through the painstaking cultivation and refinement of our many parts—the moving ones and the missing ones. We certainly begin—and end—with the urgency of an imperfect humanity, but I get a sense from my people that we intend to do more than survive. At least, this is what my soluble traditions suggest. Canboulay, remember? Yes, Kambulay.
We know by now that Mas is founded on the idea that vernacular assertions are made not (only) through veiled appeals, but (also) through direct appeals by performers who may or may not be veiled. However, en route to the liberation of Mas from the constraints of un/seeing, there are no limits to the permutations of design and execution that performers are able to enjoy. For those who’ve embraced tradition enough to change it, no veil is necessary. No mask could suffice. This is not always an easy thing being without a mask. It can hurt. I want to do this work. It’s important work—necessary for me, I think—but it can hurt. At times, even I have to look at what has already gone to ruin to find the proof of things that might have been foreseen, knowing they can never be forestalled. At times, I am crippled by my own despair, weeping in anticipation of some minor catastrophe. At other times, I have to go where I do not belong so I can come to terms with what I’ve managed to forget. Each of these involves the afterlife, a discourse that has suggested (insisted) that my people were not intended to survive. (I think it must have been a shock to have survived when simple endurance was all that was required, before dropping dead.)
I know, I know. I need to be careful. Should I fail in this attempt, I will tell myself, more modestly, that this book has saved my life. And it has. And it will.
I am thinking, more simply now, about the lines my people and I will need to cross (and cross again) to be recognized in this place. Perhaps we are too committed to subtleties that betray us. Or, perhaps it is we who betray ourselves, taking subtleties alone as proof of some deep sophisticated change. A change so sophisticated, so nuanced, that we may have missed it. Or, just as likely, that it didn’t happen at all; that it was, in the end, only a grand charge. People who know metaphor—that is, all of us—know that each is preceded by the material circumstances and experiential challenges that gave birth to their significance. None spring, fully formed, from the ether. They spring, instead, from a certain fact, both tragic and material, that our minds remain deeply colonized by a collective, cultural refusal to acknowledge and understand the ordinary. The tragedy of the colonized mind is founded in its almost total inability to cause a revolt against itself. No “self” can come of the colonized mind. You will find that it is impossible to revolt against something that does not exist. The colonized mind is a cruel, cruel fiction—it cannot imagine. Looking now toward the sun, welcoming the morning, you realize that you do not wake to the truth of yourself by passing through memory and myth into dream, but by actually waking. You must do the work of waking up. Some may, with good reason, prefer to remain in the beautiful dream of a Carnival that has never existed. I sympathize, taking some of that denial for myself, drinking it in without much hesitation. Acts of self-gratification, as far as indulgences go, are much sweeter than self-awareness, much softer and forgiving than self-acceptance. True reflection is, of course, an impossible thing, so we’re fooling no one. We can never really see ourselves by looking—not really. We can never catch a glimpse into the windows of our own souls. We can only see what we appear to be. We can, by extension, see ourselves as something of an affect, something perceived and composed through others—as concepts, refracted. Photographed.
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Anyway, I’ve already said too much here. The rest remains to be seen. Ah gone.6