After two years without Carnival, students express themselves through mas making
On the surface, Carnival is about spectacle – the splendour of Trinbagonian culture, of our people, wrapped up in a dazzle of feathers, beads, glitter, soca, and steelpan. And we love it, we miss it, we can’t wait to have it back. But, beneath the spectacle, and intertwined within it, is so much more. Our collective Carnival, as a nation, and our individual experiences of Carnival, are whatever we want them to be – need them to be, in fact. And our festival bends and contorts to give us just that, so at the end, we are reinvigorated.
In recognition of the two years of loss we’ve endured due to the COVID-19 pandemic – loss of so much and in so many ways, including those Carnival celebrations we hold so dear – and wanting to provide an outlet through which we could express and release our grief, Robert Young, owner and lead designer of The Cloth, brought to the fore this more that Carnival gives when he conceptualised the theme of Vulgar Fraction’s Carnival band for 2022, ‘Mas’ Mourning – Mourning Mas’ – Becoming Wreaths’.
Vulgar Fraction, an independent mas’ production group that counts more than 20 years of Carnivals in its lifetime, encourages and facilitates participants’ creativity by involving them in the creation of their own costumes. This year, mas’ players were to use the dried leaves and flowers reflective of the wreath.
An opportunity to make their own mas’ was the outlet Dr Marsha Pearce, UWI lecturer and co-ordinator of The University’s Visual Arts Programme, knew her students needed. So, she collaborated with Young and Vulgar Fraction to turn her students’ participation in the band into a course assignment.
Dr Pearce teaches a course titled "Critical Readings in Caribbean Arts and Culture," which is mandatory for all students at the DCFA (music, dance, theatre, carnival, and visual arts) and is part of the Faculty of Humanities and Education’s Cultural Studies minor programme. Therefore, the Becoming Wreaths assignment was done by a range of students.
‘Mas’ Mourning – Mourning Mas’ – Becoming Wreaths’ was launched on February 17, 2022, at The Cloth’s atelier, Propaganda Space, in Belmont, with a panel discussion featuring Carnival practitioners and cultural scholars: Dr Pearce; Celeste Walters, art psychotherapist; Wendell Manwarren, actor, rapso artiste, music producer, and Carnival bandleader; and Addelon Banjela Braveboy, singer, songwriter, composer and Orisha high chief priest; and Ardene Sirjoo, broadcaster and producer, who served as moderator. The launch was open and accessible to the public via a Facebook livestream which was projected onto the outside wall of the atelier for anyone who wanted to view and participate in the event from nearby.
Following a tribute by Christian Strong to loved ones who have passed, Sirjoo introduced the panel and the conversation began with Pearce’s explanation of the word ‘wreath’ in the context of the theme.
‘Wreath’, Pearce explained, has roots in the word ‘writhe’, meaning “to contort ... to twist and curl the body into emotional discomfort, mental anguish or physical pain”. While the loss wrought by the pandemic has caused us to instinctively become wreaths, “to curl ourselves up … shrinking into small circles … becoming like tight fists,” she says, we can make this transformation a conscious decision, which “has the potential for openness, connection and community”.
For Pearce, this theme was a call by Vulgar Fraction “to a conscious act of opening, a deliberate shifting of ourselves from small, tight circles to something monumental,” creating a loop within which we hold our ancestors and honour those still with us. Representing “more than endings,” she said, this “infinite loop [is] a cycle powerfully marked by healing and beginnings ... a contrast to the paralysis or the going-nowhereness that immense pain can cause.”
This opening is what Pearce wanted her students to achieve through their participation in Vulgar Fraction’s band. “I experienced that shrinking in the virtual classroom setting,” she explained, as she witnessed her students deal with death and sickness, some logging into class after returning home from a hospital visit. In asking her students to “engage in this deliberate act” of becoming wreaths, she said, she wanted to “allow them the space to acknowledge, to recognise and to process what they were feeling [and] experiencing”. She also wanted them to focus on something “life affirming, celebratory of survival and what it means to exist”.
Walters followed with a distinction between grief and mourning – internal feelings vs. external expression. As “a space for us to be in community with each other … for processing, memorialising,” she said, Carnival is an appropriate tool for mourning and particularly so for “a mas’ like ‘Becoming Wreaths’ … It’s about giving people an opportunity to mourn and maybe even touch material again because, throughout this pandemic, there’s been this tactile depravation, and just interacting with the material alone can encourage that processing.”
Co-founder of local and loved rapso group, 3 Canal – which turns 25 this year – Manwarren grew up with and into Carnival. He said that 2021 was his first year without our festival and “the idea that this thing that we’ve done religiously, ritually, for the last 25 years suddenly was not there, the absence, the loss, was beyond palpable”.
He recalled a conversation with the late Tony Hall in the early days of the pandemic, where the cultural icon reminded him that Carnival “is not always about spectacle”. In allowing her students the opportunity to join the ‘Becoming Wreaths’ mas’, he acknowledged that Pearce was teaching her students that there is a deeper meaning behind our Carnival. “Every mas’ is a mas’, even the most cokey eye mas’,” he said. “We make the Carnival ... [it’s] the only time we ever fight for something, so nobody can come and tell you what form this time ought to take and what you should do.”
A religious leader, Braveboy spoke of the importance of commemorating life and death from the perspective of the If a tradition. As a priest, his role is to comfort and support bereaved families in their grief, as well as to perform burial ceremonies – of which he has done over 30 during the last four months due to COVID-19 – and he feels loss heavily. “When I look at mass mourning, I see it in so many areas of life ... We know that death is important, just like life, and both are interwoven ... [but] that moment where you are detached from that physical appearance of that person is so overwhelming at times.”
After the panellists discussed experiences of loss, grief and how the meaning of Carnival has transformed for them two years into the pandemic, Sirjoo invited Young to share his own perspective.
“There is a way I hear people talk about the pandemic,” Young began. “It’s like we lost some kind of connection to people ... to ourselves ... So the process of making the mas’,” of creating their own costume, forces the person playing the mas’ to find themselves again. “It’s allowing my brothers and sisters,” many of whom may not have picked up a paint brush in decades, to “get a chance to ... say ‘I will attempt to’ and,” Young said, “there’s a magic that happens... we explore and we explore and things came about.”
