BitDepth#1447

Mark Lyndersay

ON THE track leading to the Savannah stage this year a reimagining of the Carnival Village was built and named after John Cupid. It's safe to say that almost nobody had an idea who he was and even fewer had met him.

Early in my career as a photographer, I'd often find myself working with Cupid on one cultural project or another, most of them an impenetrable mix of the eccentric and whimsical.

Rituals are normally clearly articulated practices based in faith or worship that reinforce a particular worldview. Traditions are practices that are passed on from generation to generation. Events are gatherings or incidents that command the attention of groups of people.

Carnival, restaged every year and culminating in the two days preceding Ash Wednesday, has always been a messy mix of all three, with a heady dose of a fiercely individualistic culture mixed in.

TT hosts an abundance of culturally specific festivals and a long tradition of assimilating and adapting them to our particular tastes, so it shouldn't be surprising that Carnival is subject to continuous adaptation and evolution.

When I was a child, Carnival was still very much a "road made to walk" event. Bands were sometimes small and local, parading through a small sector of the city centre, though free to jump up wherever the whimsy took them.

The Grand Stand stage was the Trinidad Guardian's solution to the problem of a scattered festival, by attracting bands with prizes for appearing there.

Other parts of the city centre, keen to have both bands and their audience in their spaces, followed suit and the modern Carnival parade route was born.

The formalisation of this arrangement was the work of the State, working through the Carnival Development Committee, to create rules and structure in an intricate prize-giving process, centralising control of what was, until then, a spontaneous, grassroots celebration that coalesced around its creators.

Popular calypsonians gathered their peers into successful calypso tents.

Steelbands, then fiercely territorial, had their energies harnessed to the bridle of formal competition, music encouraged to become the weapon of choice.

The State's involvement in the engine room of the festival and its insistence on its idea of order increased slowly and incrementally over decades.

Stakeholder organisations, created to represent sectors to the State, were co-opted into the idea of a Carnival that was largely decided on behind closed doors at the CDC and, later, the NCC.

This created a festering miasma of deliberate kleptocracy and unintentional consequences.

Not all traditions are worth carrying on. For decades we set aside the fruits of our calypsonians' labours promptly at midnight on Carnival Tuesday, consigning them to an icebox from which many would never thaw.

What Carnival needs is a serious rethinking of its entrenched competition economy and evaluating a move to the structured, creator-friendly framework used by the best Arts Council programmes.

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