Last weekend, I was able to go to the Revue and Kaiso House tents which visits were revealing and entertaining. (Reviews will be published in these pages.) Predictably in this first post-election Carnival, there was a good deal of PNM prating (the Prime Minister was at the Revue on Saturday), but a few other significant things were in evidence.
In the last decade, calypsonians and calypso have retained much of their signature aggressive, ethnocentric postures, but there have been changes; like a slow attenuation of the racial sentiment—which means it’s declining, not gone. But you probably won’t hear a song like Cro Cro’s Face Reality or Singing Sandra’s Genocide again. Probably.
But as that prejudice fades, the political-ethnic link has strengthened. From the number of songs aimed at the Opposition (a little less than half) it’s clear calypso tents are PNM media, as has been evident over the last decade. Even a casual listener would hear the calypsonians’ minds are firmly embedded in the black, urban worldview, and they consider this normal and natural.
While this isn’t exactly a secret, to notice it critically is not “racist.” Think of Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett-Smith’s boycotting the Oscars because no black actors were nominated in key categories. Similarly, many Trinidadians could legitimately complain the tents are not really “national,” but ethnic enclaves. That aside, my own concern is that there seems to be a renewal of, and new confidence in the ethnic-political link—black now seems to belong to PNM.
It’s not subtle; the tents’ main topic is the previous government’s corrupt ways, but also the expectation that the present one would save “us,” the nation. While I’m in agreement with the first proposition (the PP really had to go), I find the second proposition jokey. We traded worse for bad, no more.
AfroTrinidad has been the PNM’s traditional base, but its rededication in 2015 isn’t comforting. It reveals subtler forces at work, affecting the nation’s memory, history, and forgetting. (This is the title of a book by Paul Ricoeur, and a large body of literature on the subject exists.) Societies create social, collective and historical memories through the stories they tell and propagate. The memories are not always factual, but comprised of selected facts, and much fabrication.
What I heard in the tents was a version of history which openly threw around words like history, destiny, and divine right to describe the PNM’s holding office. The fact that 20 singers in two tents had almost identical opinions is not coincidence. These stories originate from the PNM’s bowels, and are disseminated these days mainly through talk radio and reinforced through the more intimate contact of the tents.
What it also means is that there’s no shared national narrative, no origin story we all agree upon, and the basis of the schism remains ethnic. Many calypsonians’ views of racism (from their songs) agree that it’s perpetrated by others on African people. Naturally, “other” people have other ideas they feel strongly about. And here’s the problem: Carnival is by far the most powerful, pervasive medium of social and state communication in the country. Its content is, in many ways, state orthodoxy which no one questions and indeed, many seek to celebrate and propagate.
This is a major reason the country will not settle into a peaceable configuration. There is a sizable segment of the population (much more than half, and not just Indians) who have their own memories and stories, and find the Carnivalist proposition absurd. Many people undermine it in various ways—from not paying taxes, to low productivity, poor work ethic, apathy, hostility in everyday affairs, to schizoid ethical systems (professing morality, behaving otherwise). Not everyone feels and acts this way, but a large enough number does to affect the society.
But there is a cogent counter to these sentiments—one more thing to blame the PP for. The PP in five years tripled the Carnival budget, from about $100 to $300 million. It did not propose meaningful alternatives to prevailing conceptions of culture and nation, instead throwing money at Carnival and Cepep to distract (it hoped) while it fixed itself, its friends, girlfriends and family.
The PP also managed to drive a wrecking ball through the already existing creative industries in its attempt to set up oversight committees comprised of cronies and toadies. Because of the sheer volume of money in the economy for the last decade, a few important cultural institutions did appear (like the T&T Film Festival and Bocas Lit Fest), but it’s a small fraction of what could have been done.
So where does that leave us in 2015? The PNM train, to paraphrase the philosopher Skatie, is back on track. Carnival is its thing, and, it is not going to change it, or contemplate any alternative cultural institutions.
This is a shame, since another thing that hasn’t changed over the years is calypso’s limitations. Its locus of ideas is small, its vocabulary smaller, and its attitude is hostile. I listened in despair to Valentino try to capture “the world” in song, and fail. I winced when the normally sublime Mudada sang about Chinese people and dog-meat. Listening to Sharlan Bailey sing a tribute to his father, Winston, I found myself wondering why the hell Shadow had stopped producing music. As if to underline, the DJ played Dingolay in the intermission, which is as close to calypso genius as anyone listening now is going to hear.
So sad. If anyone wants to do anything for calypso, they could start there: get Shadow back to work.
