Think of the visual spectacle of Carnival, and what images come to mind? Acres and acres of kinetic colour, plumes and satins, beads and glitter? The sultry pleasures of barely-clad flesh on sensuous display? The elaborate fantasies of pretty mas? Yes, but there’s another side of Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, darker, dirtier, sometimes even sinister, embodied in the forms of traditional mas. Consider the masked, pistol-brandishing Midnight Robber with his aggressive lyrics and black cape adorned with skulls, a projection of our collective fears of violence. Or the bat with his tunic of fur and quivering wings, recalling creepy things that approach in the tropical night. Or the varied taxonomy of devil mas: the Bookman with his record of damned souls, the rampaging dragon barely kept in check by his attendant imps, the blue devils and red devils, jab molassies glistening black, lunging with their pitchforks and spitting flame — like the enraged spirits of those who died enslaved on colonial plantations, returning to jog our memory.
Because, despite the best efforts of today’s profit-driven mega-bands, Carnival is not merely the world’s greatest street party — it’s that, but it always has been and still is a ritual of memory and self-knowing, a public enacting of tragic and painful truths, an assertion of resilience in the face of history. Indian mas reminds us of the centuries-long suppression of the Caribbean’s indigenous peoples, and their stubborn survival. Sailor mas is a mocking riposte to imperial hegemony — reducing a mighty military threat to the jokey dance of drunk sailors on shore leave. Towering high above us and moving with superhuman agility and grace, moko jumbies summon ancestral spirits from across the Middle Passage, protecting or admonishing in turn.
Like joy and regret, love and hate, reality and dream, Carnival contains — is even powered by — the contradictions and reversals of the human condition. There’s no better illustration than the work of Carnival’s two pre-eminent philosophers: the late calypsonian the Mighty Shadow, with his “bass man from hell,” and masman Peter Minshall, creator of Danse Macabre, Santimanitay, and the techno-mutant monster Man Crab — thrilling and chilling at once. Carnival is truest to itself, perhaps — as we are truest to ourselves — when the beauty and the beast meet in a dance of mutual recognition, each seeing each in the other, belonging forever together.
