Time out or Time in? – Trinidad and Tobago Carnival as a World Elsewhere

Milla Cozart Riggio

"Despising…the City, thus I turn my back. There is a world elsewhere."

Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 3.3.134-35

 

As stereotypically portrayed, the Carnival King is the figure imagined five hundred years ago by Pieter Breughel in his famous representation of "The Battle between Carnival and Lent": lecherous, gluttinous, parodic, and obese – fattened for the kill after a short reign. Carnival so imagined either subverts existing order comically or threatens it dangerously..

This idea is not entirely wrong. Carnival does partially ally itself with that which is dirty, bestial, or mythically primal: feces, mud, menstrual blood are often on parade. Devils appear as characters of resistance. However, despite its tendency to subvert or invert hierarchy, Carnival affirms as well as negates. Beside the satiric and parodic, especially in the Americas, there are Kings and Queens who reign in the Carnival world because of their beauty, just as there are Carnival artists, musicians, and designers whose influence and reputation extend well beyond the festival itself.

Using the premier Carnival of the West Indies, that of Trinidad and Tobago as a model, I want to turn the photo negative in which Carnival appears only as the dark shadow defined by what it displaces, into a positive: to focus on Carnival as "time in" rather than or in addition to "time out." I willl define Carnival not by what it negates, those elements of public order, vocation, rules of law and government that are suspended, inverted, or temporarily discarded but by what it affirms: art, community, procreative sexuality, life defined in terms of genetic continuity and measured by natural cycles and seasons of growth and decay, life and death.

To oversimplify, I am pointing to the way in which Carnival, at least in Trinidad and Tobago (and I think elsewhere), manifests a set of values associated with the artistic expression of a localized Community. Such communities ordinarily co-exist within a larger urban setting.,though in Trinidad and Tobago, where Carnival is – unusually, I think – a national, rather than a local, festival, small villages and rural communities often join in the festivities, either by "going to town" or in villages and boroughs like Carapichaima, creating their own regional celebrations.

Modern Carnivals, despite their many particular distinctions, collectively evoke the world of so-called "traditional" communities in which a man [or woman], in the words of Peter Burke, "lives in remembrance of one festival and in expectation of the next." But though it is a seasonal festival Carnival is urban, not agrarian, its history associated with the history of the cities with which it is largely identified. Carnival is not only in the city, it is in some essential respect also "of" the city. Grounded in antithesis and opposition, its driving engine is competition, often with territorial implications. The festival ritualizes, sublimates, and sometimes overtly threatens violence, often in defense of territory. Early Carnival "bands" in Trinidad were, essentially, paramilitary groups, "bands" in the sense of territorial street gangs, rather than performing groups, fighting to defend their individual turf, primarily as determined by City Streets: Henry Street, French Street.

This same kind of rivalry extended to the early steel band movement, when following World War II, steel bands were "bad John" enclaves fighting for their space, a struggle that climaxed in the 1970 Black Power Movement, when all but one steel band in Port of Spain boycotted Carnival in a collective moment of protest. Fighting to protect urban spaced bounded by city streets, or even "clashing" or competing for artistic primacy, striking and boycotting as a protest: these are city activities, functions of cohabiting with others in a densely populated area. Other aspects of urbanity in Carnival include: its incredible noise, its multiplex character (pan, steel drums, calypso, folk dance, carnival plays, street festivals, elite masquerade balls…..), its density and its intensity.

In Trinidad, Carnival has also appropriated discarded objects of urban industrialization: wheel hubs, used as percussive instruments in the "engine room" of steel orchestras; the discarded American oil drums used to create the one new acoustic instrument of the 20th century, the steel drum. And, most recently, the highly controversial use of the BIG TRUCK, the 16 wheel semi-trailer flatbeds on which are mounted the electronic bands (David Rudder and Charlie’s Roots; Byron lee and the Dragonaires) or dee jays who blare Soca into the streets, in a thundering, driving rhythm that shakes houses. Such is NOT a country sound (though it has been imported to small village squares all over Trinidad).

In other ways, however, Carnival does not initially seem to belong to the City as we usually think of it. By affirming the values of neighborhood and community that always struggle for recognition against corporate and centrally governing urban infrastructures, Carnival may be said in a sense to bring the village, in the form of the neighborhood, the ghetto, the family, the community, into the city. Carnival, thus, affirms not only the restorative value of festivity but also a concept of cultural and individual history, seen not as the story of public institutions, centralized governments, systems of law and order, governing economies, or even the conquering or the subjugating of peoples, but as the encoding and imprinting of genetic, cultural, and artistic legacies, of cultural memory embodied in dance, music, and fantasy. Carnival in Trinidad offers any individual on the island an opportunity to realize their fantasy concepts of themselves (or as the Trinis say "play yuhself,"), to find the authenticity that links them to the disguise of their choice., disguises which as often as not leave the face unmasked.

To put it simply, I do not believe that Carnival simply "brings order to chaos." No, its "communitas" is a place to live as well as to visit. The festival manifests what what Shakespeare called "a world elsewhere," a festive world of community, when community is allied with art and artistic expression. Carnival sides with Community and Neighborhood in its perpetual struggle against City Hall, the local against the central, private versus public, family versus government. Every time you try to get money for neighborhood community centers, or fight to restore art and music to public education, you are affirming the carnivalesque as I wish to define it.

To be sure, Carnival allies itself with festive consumption, rather than with thrift: Eat, drink, be merry and spend in a day what you may have worked a year to save, says the Carnival reveller. And the prudent among us often cluck our tongues and say, reproachfully, "but what about shoes for the children and bread for the table." I do not, of course, wish to condone poverty or to suggest neglect of the family. But there are among us -- artists and teachrs -- who have foregone large salaries, possible wealth, prestige, and visible social position in order to produce theater, build masks, make films, or in some other way to dwell in the world of the arts. It is that world that Carnival affirms, taking over the road "make to walk on Carnival day" to manifest values that are, at least in a carnival culture like that of Trinidad and Tobago, present the year round.

Despite its excess Carnival is not Saturnalian. It has its own sense of limits that stops far short of the true Dionysian. In celebrating sexuality and fertility, Carnival affirms both the power of the libido and its inevitale result – the birth of children (Often, it is said by producing them; the birth rate is presumed to go up in carnival cultures nine months after Carnival). Nevertheless, Carnival has its own internal rules, its sense of decorum that limits excess and creates courtesy, even in the midst of what is called the "Bacchanal" of its revels.

Using T&T carnival as a model, I will briefly name and illustrate 3 aspects of what I am calling the Carnival ethos that positively manifests Carnival as Time In, rather than, or in addition to, "Time Out." – 1) Trini Time, 2) Arts and Community, and 3) the inbuilt principle of decorum.

    1. The Value of Time

Time is basic to Carnival theory. The concept of "liminality" (the word meaning threshold) is usually glossed as "time out of time," a period of suspension when the time clock stops. Conversely, what is called "Trini Time" – which grants a license to disregard punctuality – is the definin feature of ordinary "time," not only in Trinidad, but under other names throughout much of the West Indies. Ordinarily, the term is used deprecatingly, in a tone of apology, without recognition of the extent to which this simple phrase denotes in itself a way of life, implicit to a carnival culture.

Most Trinis do not wear and many do not mind a watch. They tell time by the sun, or they ask strangers on the street, often Americans, wearing a watch. But this is a fiercely independent people, who tend to value their freedom. Having so far avoided the brothel house of international tourism (only 2% of the gross national product in Trinidad is from tourism), many Trinis – like 83 year old Theresa Morilla Montano, whom you see here in one of her many carnival roles as a "Minstrel Boy" -- prefer to vend vegetables on Charlotte Street, or perhaps to vend nuts on the corner, to giving up the control of their own time for the sterile regularity of punching a time clock.

The concept of a "time clock" is derived from the need to keep factory workers anonymously and simultaneously at work on production lines. Modern weekends have replaced festival and holy-days as times of work stoppage. In this sense, the clock itself is and had always been the enemy of the festival world. Trini Time, which disregards this clock, is antithetical to "production" in the modern industrial sense of the term. But it favors the production of carnival costumes, of religious festivals, or birthday parties, weddings, wakes and funerals, and other forms of celebration for which the work-a-day world is set aside not because they matter less but precisely because in the flow of human life, they matter more. On one's deathbed, it is often said, noone wishes to have spent more time at the office.

See from this angle, Trini Time is not a careless disregard of Time, but another way of measuring time – the time scheme if you will, of carnival’s world elsewhere. Once you take the clock out of the picture, time itself ceases to tick and tock in a regularly beating way. As any child waiting for recess knows, not all minutes are the same length. Time is a variable commodity, to be valued, used, and spent in individual ways.

Pace is very important, and it varies. For many Trinbagonians, the pace of life is speeded up, rather than slowed down, by Carnival. For those working in mas camps where costumes are made – all but the "factory" camps where costumes are completed and neatly hanging in rows weeks before canival – the pressure to produce carnival forces both paid workers and the many volunteers to work long nights, often around the clock. As any performer knows, the kind of intensely focused, sleep-deprived concentration releases a level of energy and, episomologicallly a different kind of perception than one finds within the regularity of a controlled and methodical routine: dangerous on the production line or the hospital emergency room, but effective for the artist.

The international marketing of pan has allowed stageside steel bands – the Desperadoes, the Renegades, the Skiffle Bunch and others – to travel to performances in France, Argentina, Japan, New York where they have, as for intance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Carnegie Hall, triumphed. I do not want in any sense to romanticize poverty, and certainly the sponsorship of steel bands by multinational companies like AMOCO, or Shell, or even West Indian Companies like the West Indian Tobacco Company (WITCO) is highly controversial. Nevertheless, giving impoverished young pannists an opportunity to travel broadens their education and increases their horizons, allowing them the kind of privilege that we academics also claim: a chance to enter the jet set world without entering the corporate world. Being able to take irregular periods of time off from work helps make such travel possible. The ongoing struggle between those who would stress efficiency, as a value in itself, and those who sometimes fiercely resist regimentation is marked by contrasting attitudes toward time and by the sometimes contradictory responses toward this division.

Arts and the Community

When the Despers, as the Desperadoes steel orchestra is called, won their first of three, so-called "hat trick" pan festival championships in 1986, the entire Laventille hill turned out to celebrate, as they do after every victory, including this year’s panorama competition, claiming a triumph that belongs not just to the band but to the entire hill. Pat Bishop, who led the Band through its three festival victories, tells about meeting women at a standpipe on the morning after their first festival win; women she would not ordinarily see as she directed their men in their long unmeasured nights of preparation for the festival, said gratefully, "Miss, when we hear the sound of pan, it all right with us. We know he be with you" [Interview, 1997].

In the panyard and not aimless on the streets: As the Despers story makes clear, Carnival and its related arts, of which playing pan is a major example, provides meaning in the lives of many who, without this recourse, would wander hopelessly, with nowhere constructive to go. One function of pan, as of all carnival arts, then, is to provide an alternative to the latent destructiveness of the streets. Indeed, panyards provided a haven for young men who sought their identity on the streets in earlier decades. The yard itself provided a sense of place, an alternative family that understood the needs of young men at risk better perhaps than their own families. For many poor boys, pan provided the only meaningful "time in" their lives. In the late 40s and 50s and into the 60s, the panyards were territorial strongholds, replacements in their way for the bands of stickfighters of an earlier period, establishing strongholds defended when necessary by violence.

The early steelbands not only provided a home and a haven for boys of the street, but they also brought middle class boys into forbidden pleasures, often across class lines. In the inevitable period of rebellion against parental authority that accompanies the rites of passage to manhood (or in a usually different fashion) womanhood, sneaking out to play pan provided a creative world elsewhere for middle class boys. This is an instance of TIME OUT, from the disciplined training of a middle class home, that provided constructive, rather than destructive, TIME IN the panyard, a training ground for adulthood, very much as Shakespeare’s Prince Hal learns to become a good king Henry V by liming in the pubs and taverns of Cheapside. Such training expands horizons and allows independence at the crucial stages of adolescence when youth develops autonomy, separating itself from parents to establish its own identity. Crossing class lines also helps Middle Class, leisured youth to avoid the pitfall of those who learn too late, to their peril, that they have "ta’en too little care" of those less privileged than themselves.

Calypso and Mas, the other two forms of Carnival, also create communities. The panyard, calypso tents, and mas camps are strongest during the high carnival season, from January 6 to Ash Wednesday, but they function all year round. But the effect of carnival on community in Trinidad is not limited to the communities that carnival actually creates. It also impacts existing neighborhoods, communities, and families in significant ways.

In the United States, we spend millions of dollars of government money, often unsuccessfully, attempting to generate a link between art and community. In Trinbago, such arts spring as if from the soil itself: the narrow lanes of Belmont may now as often as not house folks who live apart from their neighbors, and yet at the corner of Clifford St. and Belmont Circular Road, a small steel band thrives each year in hope and expectation, until it falls silent after the preliminary pan competitions, which it never survives. Similar small panyards can be found in Port of Spain, Woodbrook, Diego Martin and throughout the island; children’s mas camps in front rooms of tiny houses. Competitions in schools, often impoverished schools, train students to write songs, draw carnival pictures, play pan, and develop a sense of national pride through the festival. Indeed, the Michael K. Hall Community School in Tobago, which in 1998 won the Better Business Award as the best small business in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, uses Carnival arts along with other aspects of indigenous culture as a thematic center for teaching elementary aged school children the basic lessons they need to learn: mathematics, reading, social studies.

Governed, finally, by the laws of hospitality, which are always more courteous than the laws of production, Carnival welcomes its revellers to its feast, and so long as you don’t take foolish chances (such as wandering alone down quiet side streets, especially in the dark – exactly the warnings one would heed in the city at any time of year), you will be surprised at the degree to which the internal decorum of the event governs and limits the excess of the fete.

Back