Proscenium for an Aqueous Humor
1. “Seeing Blue” (2014) and “La Femme des Revenants” (2015) were photographed primarily with Nikon (D7000, D7100); “Moko Jumbies of the South” (2015) and “Jouvay Ayiti” (2015) were photographed with Fujifilm (XT-1).
2. Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 56.
3. Didion, The White Album, 11.
4. Derrida’s dynamics of “différance” comes to mind when thinking of such paradoxes and the spaces in between, though the deliberate performances of history and the ahistorical aspects of the recorded image highlight Caribbeanist Photography as a historicizing practice—always in process and (in this way) quite like the subjects themselves.
5. “If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America,” Hartman writes, “it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery” (6).
6. In Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust writes, “A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist” (Vol. I, 821).
7. Froude, The English in the West Indies, 347.
8. Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” 69.
9. Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” 69.
10. Harris, 44-5.
11. We see how damaging that has been with our attitudes toward our languages, for example, which has been maligned as “broken English” and our inventive patois downgraded at its inception to “broken French.” Ebonics and Spanglish, established languages, still vie for their legitimacy outside of obscure(d) texts and their respective communities.
Deliberative Daemonic: Making Mas Rhetorica
1. And, when a metaphor becomes obsolete, mere recognition is no longer enough, though it can seem an acceptable measure. There may be genuine relief that something has happened to break the silence, to raise the awareness of a public too busy with its own affairs to see what it has forgotten, but failed metaphors cannot speak back or argue for their proper representation or our interpretations of them.
2. Not surprisingly, the vernacular shift was described thus: “There is no gainsaying that year after year, in an alarming degree, to the number of these depraved and irresponsible wretches, who … band themselves together to the detriment of the law, order and society … Hordes of men and women, youthful in years but matured in every vice that perverts and degrades humanity, dwell together in all the rude licentiousness of barbarian life: men without aim, without occupation and without any recognised [sic] mode of existence—women, wanton, perverse and depraved beyond expression” (The San Fernando Gazette, qtd. in Brereton, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad 1870–1900, 169).
3. Brereton, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 166.
4. According to Brereton, the Diametre was comprised of “singers, dancers, stickmen, prostitutes, pimps, and badjohns.” They gathered in their respective convois and “boasted their skill in fighting, their bravery, their wit and ability in ‘picong,’ their talent in song and dance, their indifference to the law, their sexual prowess, even their contempt for the church. In short, they reversed the canons of respectability, the norms of the superstructure” (Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 166).
5. Stuart Hall’s remark, about the English not being “good at myth,” strikes an ironic chord, adding to the vulgarity somewhat. It begs the question not only of how power is imposed upon a set of peoples, but also how the violent inculcation of a particular model of power (its attendant treatment of truth and reality) can, in its essence, be quite mediocre (“Negotiating Caribbean Identities,” 24).
6. Chinese immigrants arrived as indentured laborers as early as 1806, but the vast majority of laborers came from India, arriving first in British Guiana in 1838, then Trinidad in 1845.
7. To add insult to irony, Trinidad was the first country in the world to make Emancipation Day a national holiday on August 1, 1985.
8. In Melton Prior’s sketch, Carnival on Frederick Street, Port of Spain in the Illustrated London News (May 5, 1888), although a masquer is shown holding a horned Pulcinella mask to the face of an offended clergyman, the representation is obscured by the general cultural misunderstanding and the subsequent condescensions of the artist.
9. See Browne, Tropic Tendencies, 11.
10. That is, aside from the fact that it is ridiculous to emphasize a narrative of mimicry as the genesis of Carnival when it was the Canboulay that was actually superimposed onto the imported Saturnalian activities of the planter class.
11. NALIS https://www.nalis.gov.tt/Resources/Subject-Guide/Carnival#tabposition_24145.
12. NALIS https://www.nalis.gov.tt/Resources/Subject-Guide/Carnival#tabposition_24145.
13. Relegated to historical narratives for some decades, the Negue Jadin was controversially revived in 2016 as part of Brian MacFarlane’s band “Cazabon: The Art of Living.” Drawn, as it were, from the work of nineteenth-century Trinidadian artist Jean Michel Cazabon, the section was roundly criticized for its racist representations. MacFarlane retracted the section, though the issue persists.
14. If it seemed as though there was a type of symbiosis between the haves and have-nots, history has taught us that it would be of the same sort that had racialized violence paired with capitalism, from its inception to its rise.
15. In 2014, the anthem for that amnesia was Kerwin Du Bois’s “Forget about It.” The song epitomizes the escapist impulse of the Soca genre that emerged in the 1970s and was used to rationalize and implicitly critique the failure of sociopolitical commentary associated with Calypso.
16. Indeed, while it may seem to some that Carnival takes place beyond the scrutiny of official surveillance, and that the bacchanal is sacrosanct, one would have difficulty finding an event more organized and watched than this.
17. Walcott, 13.
18. Collected Poems 1948–1984, 48.
19. Collected Poems 1948–1984, 48.
20. In Tropic Tendencies, I note that “one of the objectives of rhetoric seen from a cultural perspective is to preserve and solidify the prevailing aspects of identity among members of a particular social group. Another is to gain a deeper, more robust self-conscious understanding of effective discourse practices among members of that group” (2). This book is concerned primarily with the latter objective.
21. Carnival embodies the tension further highlighted by Antonio Benítez-Rojo in The Repeating Island, wherein “the groups in power channel the violence of the oppressed groups in order to maintain yesterday’s order, while the latter channel the former’s violence so that it will not recur tomorrow” (307). The normalization of this experience of the everyday undermines the apparent efficiency of the dialectic Benítez-Rojo describes, even as its effects calcify in the lives of those who have power, those who desire it, and those who seem to have abandoned that desire altogether.
22. In Tropic Tendencies, I suggest that “the differences that obscure the viability and complexity of the Caribbean ethos and identity have traditionally involved the application of one device (metaphor) where another (metonymy) would be more effective for articulating particular displays…. [A] metonymic Caribbean gaze deliberately harnesses metonymy as a strategy to emphasize contiguity in two thematic areas: on the one hand, the masque and the people on whose behalf it is deployed, and on the other, the deployment of the masque and the larger system it is intended to critique. The Caribbean use of metonymy relies, therefore, on a sense of realistic representation based on the detection and perceived significance of recognizable, distinctive, and characteristic signs, arranged in a given text, that resonate with a vernacular Caribbean audience while simultaneously invoking the overarching system that is up for critique. As a consequence, it provides a discursive and performative bridge to a hitherto unexplored dimension of rhetoric that is rooted in the culture, identity, and ethos of the people from that region” (17–18).
A Shot in the Dark: Toward a Poetics of Caribbeanist Photography
1. This, as Glissant points out in “Cross-Cultural Poetics,” is mostly evident in the oral and literary expressive traditions that traverse the sociolinguistic and rhetorical matrices of vernacular articulation.
2. Dark Matters, 161.
3. In 1840, Adolphe Duperly, a French lithographer, had established his photography studio in Jamaica. While none of his photographs depict any Carnival scenes, according to Elizabeth Bohls, his lithograph Rebellion in the Island of Jamaica in January 1832. The Attack of the Rebels on Montpelier Old Works Estate in the Parish of St. James’s, the Property of Lord Seaford is regarded as one of the more significant acts of visual rhetoric in the nineteenth century (Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, 1770–1833, 50–53).
4. Day, Five Years’ Residence in the West Indies, 313. Emphasis mine.
5. Day, Five Years’ Residence, 312–13. Emphasis in original.
6. According to Browne, this is “a way to situate the tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight” (Dark Matters, 21).
7. Day, Five Years’ Residence, 314.
8. Day, Five Years’ Residence, 315.
9. Isaac Mendes Belisario, a Sephardic Jew of Jamaican birth, was the first to document John Canoe costumes in 1837–1838. Additionally, Harper’s Weekly, on March 6, 1880, reported on President Ulysses S. Grant’s visit to Havana. A Carnival was featured on the front cover.
10. Also present, but to a lesser degree, are the Pavironica family (Sandrone, Pulonia, and Sgorghiguelo). See Olly Crick and John Rudlin, Commedia dell’Arte.
11. A dangling modifier. ;)
12. The Illustrated London News, corroborating Day’s observation decades before, noted that the masquers are predominantly black (475).
13. Just as the colonial underclass had determined the need for revolutionary displays of solidarity, there was a corresponding urgency for Prior to demonstrate that whites could perform their own acts of solidarity in the colonies—or, to have them appear to the audience as if they did. Incidentally, the insertion of an unmasked white face becomes a gesture to dismiss the existing schism between native-born whites and “local” whites.
14. The sketch was subsequently engraved and set to print by P. Naumann Jr. and W. H. Overend.
15. The photographic process had already eclipsed Prior’s drawings, in terms of available technology, half a century earlier. This suggests his method, like that of his contemporaries of the form, already bore the conceit of a medium capable of visually constructing reality without seeing a thing. Rather, the objectified subjects of their work were visualized—made to fit the frame—but were in no way seen. Their way of seeing effectively disqualified them.
16. Ironically, John Cowley reports that José M. Bodu was “indignant” at the illustration because his friend and “esteemed fellow-colonist, Mr. Arnold Knox, is transformed into a watchmaking establishment” (Carnival, 188–90).
17. As one of a host of denials from then till now, the refusal of reparations and remuneration for planters inconvenienced by Emancipation comes to mind, further complicated by the wave of American imperialism that threatened the waning economic sovereignty of the Crown in the latter part of the century.
18. This was no doubt exacerbated by the legacy of “New Poor Laws” (1834) that essentially removed social responsibility for the poor; this implied that the condition of poverty was a consequence of failures on the part of the poor. All were absolved by the Crown, as the oppressive economic and material situation became the responsibility of those who suffered, their fault.
19. The precursor to calypso, often sung in Yoruba, French Patois, or English. It is still used by stickfighters.
20. A stickfighter’s dueling dance.
21. Lovelace, The Wine of Astonishment, 107.
22. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 14.
23. This is what Hall argues (isn’t it?), that we are framed fundamentally with the trope of “somewhere else.” Stuart Hall, “Negotiating Caribbean Identities,” in New Caribbean Thought, 28.
24. Arguing that Trinidadian society has failed so far to embrace the practice of photography “within our consciousness or sphere of cultural reflection,” Mark Raymond suggests that questions of the role of photography in helping us to understand our existence and our condition require that we view the photograph “not only as record but as cultural production—as art” (13).
25. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 52.
26. Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that the originary contexts of what he refers to as the “permanent crisis of visuality” were “the slave plantations, monitored by the surveillance of the overseer, the surrogate of the sovereign.” It therefore bears noting that in a very real way, the photographer can very easily reprise or maintain the overseer’s role in the name of posterity, journalism, or documentary. I am not only aware of this danger for myself, but deeply mindful of it in the work of others, the “modern division of labor” that the virtual transparency of the camera’s visualizing boundary suggests (475).
27. Walcott, “The Sea is History,” 364. And, lest I be so naïve as to forget that antiblackness is not exclusive of black people, I am obliged to recall Audre Lorde’s “Poem #8” in Between Our Selves (1976).
28. The irony may be summed up as: “The enemy of my enemy is not my friend but my master.” Merikins were African American veterans of the War of 1812, who were freed and enlisted into serving the Crown, fighting for the British against Americans. Between 1814 and 1816, First through Sixth Companies of the Corps of Colonial Marines were given the choice to emigrate to Trinidad and were granted land in the south of the island. Their descendants were part of the first black middle class in Trinidad, establishing themselves in all aspects of civic, political, and industrial developments.
29. “The Right to Look,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 477.
30. Of course, one of the challenges with decolonization is that it so very closely resembles trauma. This is because there is no indication that the outcome would be much different—except for a clear conception of what must come after. The distinction, in short, is that it must include a vision, one that operates in contradistinction to the illusions we have come to prefer.
31. Harris, Carnival Trilogy, 44.
Seeing Blue: Genesis of Public Executions
1. A creolization of mal yeux, French for “bad eye” or “evil eye,” a spell of misfortune caused by hatred, jealousy, or grudge on the part of the ill-intended toward the virtuous or the vulnerable. For obvious reasons, babies are the most susceptible. For protection, they are given a “guard,” which include indigo blue, three pieces of clove, a grain of garlic, gum of aloes, asafetida seeds, a piece of parchment paper with Psalm 23 written on it, and a piece of silver. Enclosed with an inside stitch and fitted with a medal of St. Christopher, the pouch is attached to the baby’s undergarments, where it cannot easily be reached or interfered with. “Jumbie doh like dem thing,” my cousin Dionne and his partner, Cassandra, remind me as we sit in the yard of my childhood home in San Fernando. In Erin, at my grandfather’s home, my aunts Beverly, Joanette, and Michaelene remind me that it can also occur as a result of adoration, of putting children above God. My mother reminds me of the cross beneath their feet and in their hands. Another cure, should the guard fail, is a jhare—a ritual massage.
2. Similar iterations include the Jab Jab of Grenada, the Lansetkód of Haiti, and Neg Marron of French Guiana.
3. David Rudder and Carl Jacobs, “Trini to de Bone,” 2003.
4. Jackie Hinkson, Trinidadian muralist and painter.
La Femme des Revenants: A Queen of Sorrows
1. The venue was changed in 2015 to Adam Smith Square in Woodbrook.
2. Earl Lovelace refers to these and other traditions—the griot as calypsonian and flag-woman as sword-wielding devotee of Shango—as syncretic performances based on African retentions that may have lost some of their relevance. Hence, their unproblematic (albeit sanctioned) visibility in public.
3. And isn’t it just as obscene to limit our conceptions of Caribbeanness—in terms of myth, magic, or sheer materiality—to any one island? Regardless of the supposed origin of its protagonist, who was first to be ravaged in Imperial or independent hands? Who was it that tore her apart, and where? Whose mixed child was first to be sold away? Who saw and said nothing, saw and did nothing? Who ran first? I wonder what utility is there to be found in any one of those answers that could serve us now?
4. In an interview with Tracy Assing, she insists, “I never choose the mas. The mas choose me. It speaks to you. So you can’t just think that at the end of the day, you put on a costume. It doh work like that. You awakening something. And for me the folklore starts from somewhere. All stories have a beginning, and when it hands down through generations it takes on different faces and different meanings for everybody.” Caribbean Beat, Issue 143. http://caribbean-beat.com/issue-143/carnival-is-mine#axzz4Ubx6uipv.
5. As a further reminder, I have Joy James, who writes, “The discomfort that arises from the telling of black women’s stories may have more to do with the reluctance to hear the abuse and struggle, pain and anger embedded in the tale; this may be particularly so if the narratives are encountered through commercial culture. Inadvertently, as black women manage images auctioned in a market they do not control, black feminisms function as spectacle and black feminists as storytellers for a society nursed on the colonized frame” (Shadowboxing, 10–11).
6. According to Kimberly Juanita Brown, “The residue of sexual exploitation on slave women’s bodies is the afterimage of the black diaspora, the puncture of the past materializing in the present. It is an insistently visual spectacle—racial coding wrapped in the chromosomal legacy of the black Atlantic, and it is no accident that the projections of slave memory manifest themselves onto black women’s resistant flesh” (Repeating Body, 18).
7. One might notice in her twisted spine William Blake’s Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave (1791), inclined perhaps to trace the aftermath of its atrocities to the fetal body behind the rock in Carlisle Chang’s Inherent Nobility of Man (1961).
8. Like Blake, who considered the event “a most affecting spectacle.” Changing it, Marcus Wood reminds me, from “a most miserable spectacle” in the manuscript version of the book (Blind Memory, 236).
9. Wood, Blind Memory, 237.
10. Harris, Carnival Trilogy, 36.
11. When I showed the image to her some months later, she would laugh and tell me that they were talking about their children. The talk, she recalled, was a good one. I remember them laughing between frames, but I think I was just too slow to catch it. In between the laughter and the macabre, I managed to glimpse both the intimacy that comes with familiarity and contempt, and with the varying distances that exist between people as they come into their own. Her husband never got to see it.
12. In 2016, “Calypso Rose,” a longtime survivor of domestic abuse at the hands of her former husband, released “Abatina,” an infectious ballad of a woman whose desperation for the respectability of marriage led to her death. In the course of the turbulence, “few were inclined to believe” that Abatina could be so brutalized by her handsome, charming husband. “They called her a liar,” Rose laments. Until it was too late. “Tina shoulda outlive us, now we pray that she will forgive us.” Her ghost now haunts us, the listeners, whose inaction make us the dancing accomplices to the crime. The song, as we might expect, was a hit.
Moko Jumbies of the South: Walking Stick
1. Pitangus Sulphuratus, a songbird indigenous to the region.
2. Erected almost a century after Roume de Saint Laurent’s speculations of the island in 1777, Usine-Ste. Madeleine was a place made for the dead—more accurately, the “work till yuh dead”—since 1870, before being itself put to death in 2003.
3. I refer, here, to Alan Vaughn, designer of “Esu Ajagura” and “The Virgin Queen” (2016); “The Fisherman of Souls” and “The Sweet Waters of Africa” (2015); “Lagahoo, Nightmare of the Planters” and “La Diablesse de la Revolution” (2013); and “The Crow” and “Fire” (2012).
4. Stilt walking is a fairly global practice. In Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre (1972), Errol Hill reminds us that the Moko Jumbie’s appearance in Caribbean Carnivals goes back to at least the late eighteenth century, with the observations of Bryan Edwards in The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies (1793). Performances evolved throughout the region, with stilts remaining the only true constant of the form. In The Jumbies’ Playground (2012), Nicholls offers some insight into the possible origins of the form, tracing some of its most authentic representations to the nation dances in Carriacou. He however concludes that the Moko/Mocko/Moco of the Moko Jumbies could only “refer to the Moko in a symbolic rather than actual sense—that is, to their Africanness” (247). Bracketing the problematic implications of a “symbolic Africanness,” the dissolutions Nicholls points out are a familiar characteristic of an afterlife existence. Hill, for example, points out that in Trinidad the Moko Jumbie “had lost its ritual significance [as a cult figure] and was purely entertainment” (The Trinidad Carnival, 12).
5. “Tarodale Residents Demand Better Roads,” Trinidad Guardian, August 22, 2011.
Jouvay Reprised: A People, Ground to Dust
1. “Old black man.” From “Possum,” an 1860 calypso (Warner-Lewis, 212).
2. Tropic Tendencies, 32.
3. I recall Debret and Blake’s representations of black life, death, and the innumerable cruelties that punctuate the two. Their visualizations call for us as viewers to go deeper, as I’d begun earlier with Day and Prior, to uncover and recover what the artists’ intentions actually managed to obscure.
4. I am reminded, here, of Sartre’s comment that Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs “never gossip. They are not ideas. They give us ideas. Without doing so deliberately” (Colonialism, 24). Praising his nominalism, Sartre identifies what I think is a significant distinction between the “decisive moment” of Street Photography, which Cartier-Bresson had coined, and the deliberative aspects of Caribbeanist Photography. Though, as is the case with masquers, a great deal of these images are made in the street, where the implicit desire for materialist outcomes that precede their explicit performances enable us to make a key distinction between them and the surrealist “happenings” that characterize Cartier-Bresson’s oeuvre.
5. For the researcher interested in such things, some pertinent questions may include: What (if anything) can we learn from them? What price do we pay for ignoring them? What terrors lie in seeing ourselves as we are? What lies are we willing to tell others to get to a greater truth of ourselves? What difficulty is there in admitting plainly, openly, that the futility of our efforts at adornment often end up in gutters, strewn across lawns, in yards, staining the vaulted walls of the capital? What risk do we take in seeing ourselves surveilled, of looking past the amnesia of ignorance, or the misconceptions and misinterpretations that we learn to collect with efficiency? What, in this hell on earth, have we become? Having creolized the surrealist tendencies of the original carnivalesque sensibilities of our “former” masters, and having subsequently managed to manipulate the material and symbolic explorations of an unknowable afterlife (in Mas), what can we become?
6. “The black man is the devil.” This appears in an untitled 1870s calypso on the internalization of evil and the polarizing effects of racism toward black bodies (Warner-Lewis, 212). The song is both an inversion of the masking ritual integral to Carnival festivities and a deeper immersion into a clearly syncretized Christian iconography—Holy Communion. This no doubt symbolizes the desire to gain access to material recompense by consuming the symbolic body of the oppressor. It is no stretch to conceive of how this might be the case, given that they had already had more evidence than they needed that the inheritance of the earth by the meek was nothing more than a metaphor for the grave. It was their only inheritance—not land, per se, but the earth on which they stood, worked, suffered, and died. The elements/evidence of Caribbean Pessimism is all encompassing, like the gaze of Empire that (even in its demise) maintains such crippling hold on the minds and bodies of those who dare to be free.
7. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 197.
8. Correspondence with Marvin George, January 3, 2017.
1. The “Polygenics” of Louis Agassiz comes immediately to mind. See Christina Sharpe’s discussion in In the Wake (2016).
2. In Imaging the Caribbean, Patricia Mohammed notes, “Caribbean peoples have … come to resist and resent the camera lens, partly because they feel that the photographer benefits from their image, [and] others because they want to protect their privacy from a prurient outsider gaze” (335).
3. Abstract to Krista Thompson, “The Evidence of Things Not Photographed: Slavery and Historical Memory in the British West Indies,” 39.
4. Tropic Tendencies, 127.
5. Such arguments, in my view, are easy enough to construct but difficult to refute. Those committed to binaries, however, may do far better to note that while it is one thing to acknowledge one’s oppression, it is another thing entirely to emulate oppressive practices. Or, perhaps they could struggle to extract the bitter essence of their own liberation from equally bitter discourses. I try to ask more complicated questions of Mas, which means (among other things) that I necessarily reject the binaries that have defined our previous/present attitudes toward Mas and the Carnival that sometimes precipitates it.
6. Of course, now that I am finished, I am frightened again. Only a little less than I was before.