THE CARNIVAL STORY
- 162 YEARS OF MAS
By Terry Joseph
Sunday Express
February 20, 2000
Page 14
Although a major part of the Trinidad Carnival mystique lies in its
unique ability to bring people of diverse backgrounds together in harmonious
circumstances, the festival was not born to such noble pursuits.
From
the inception of street parades in 1839 and for more than 100 years thereafter,
the celebration flowed in two distinctly different social streams - upper and
lower classes - occasionally coming to confluence in times of overt
patriotism. Curiously enough, that
condition was often induced by Britain's wartime adventures.
For
the most part, the upper classes held their masked balls in the great houses of
sugar estates during the 19th century Carnivals, then mobilized the
mas (but maintained their distance), by using the trays of lorries as their
stage until well into the 1950s.
Over
the same period, first the free blacks and later emancipated slaves took to the
streets on foot with a revelry largely rooted in tribal customs, to which they
added parodies of their former masters and a few inventive
characterizations. The roots music came
from chantuellees, the lead singers, who were composing special songs for their
bands from as early as 1785.
During
the first 50 years of the 20th century, the Carnival was affected by
global and domestic conflict. There
were World Wars and local gang riots, but creativity flourished in peacetime.
Pan
was invented. Early development of the
instrument far exceeded the speed of its acceptance across the board. Calypso went international and people
actually made their own mas costumes or at least participated in the exercise.
In
the second half of that same century, Carnival first rose to a level of
extraordinary splendour, then hit a sharp curve. The burst of creativity that came in its glory days radiated from
both social groups and was identifiable in every component of the
festival. Historical and tribal mas
presented educational and aesthetically pleasing images. Pan development enjoyed both diversification
and a sense of urgency and calypso chalked up a reprise of its golden age.
However,
by the turn of the 1990s, much of the applause earned earlier in the period had
subsided, as the festival had undergone a categorical shift of focus, one that
clearly pleases the majority, but continues to be a source of bother to more
than a few.
Like
the rest of the society, Trinidad Carnival had in fact been touched by a number
of social and economic realities. The
Black Power movement that began at the turn of the 1970s and the boom economy,
that followed far too soon to keep reason intact, changed spending habits at
all levels.
This
national windfall, which helped to fund the rise of disc jockeys and music
bands of extraordinary amplification, dramatically changed every aspect of the
festival too. Its benefits did not
however trickle down to the level of pan research and development, stalling the
progress that had been made with the instrument up to that time.
In
addition, there was women's liberation, the creation of soca, a runaway cost of
living, computer-aided design ad marketing of mas bands, production-line
manufacture of costumes, the popularity of synthetic fabrics, emergence of the
entrepreneurial producers and performers, the effect of radio and television
and the fitness craze.
Applied
concurrently, these deceptively unrelated components had the capacity to
irretrievably alter the form and content of the Carnival. Slowly at first, but completely by the end
of the 20th century, the festival changed from a cutting-edge
creative crucible, to a market-driven, manufactured commodity.
Mas
dumped traditional themes and elaborate portrayals, opting for minimal clothing
and fantasy presentations. Once an
integral part of pre-Carnival fetes and the main parade, pan music was
sequentially marginalized. Traditional
calypso first gave way to soca, and then lost further ground when the Road
March became the most lucrative form of a new genre called "festival
music".
The
most dramatic shift however took place in the very gender of the masquerade,
with women moving from a laughably small minority of the costumed revelers back
in the 1950s, to what the National Carnival Bands Association (NCBA) now
estimates at fully 85 percent of the annual parade population.
From
the lower-class jamettes of the mid-20th century, the streets
largely surrendered in the latter-day to the aerobics-oriented lovelies of the
middle-class. Consider now that more
than 55,000 masqueraders crossed the Queen's Park Savannah stage during the
1999 Carnival.
This
series, which from today will appear this week in the Express, will
trace some of the hallmark events that took place during the past 162 years of
Carnivals (during WWII, the festival was banned for four years), highlighting
icons, major factors, groups and personalities in the change process and
stopping on occasion to do real-time comparisons with today's Carnival.
We
shall examine calypso's major leaps, as well as the hurdles it failed to clear. From its first known verses, through the
watershed 1939 contest, when the first prize was $20, to the end of the century
when Singing Sandra took home more than $300,000 for her win.
But
it was not just the money and the mas.
As we shall see, there was also the mayhem.