GUYANA’S Mashramani celebrations
are usually more than a week in duration – not like other festivals in our sister Caribbean territories. However, because of the sheer pageantry and spectacle, the stimulus for exuberance and participation, the one day devoted to the staging of the carnival – often the climax of the longer celebrations – therefore represents the grand finale or public party that is itself a theatre of fun, frolic and some say, deeper meaning.
What are the not-so-obvious aspects of these West Indian jump-up and tramp calypso-based displays?
Named differently in different parts of the Caribbean and Guyana – CARNIVAL, CROP-OVER, GOOMBAY, RARA (in Haiti), MASHRAMANI – they are intended to be mobile cultural extravaganzas of masquerade dance, music, art and ‘walk-and-wine’. But Caribbean-Americans, for example, point to the descriptions and explanations of an eminent Antiguan, the Rev. Dr. Kortright Davis, Professor of Theology at Howard University. Says the Prof: “Carnival has to be seen as the major social process of ‘soul purging’ for the people, the time when the lighter side of life takes over, when the harsh truths of daily social existence are altered for a while. When the rites of reversal become powerful statements of the other side of human life.”
Even more than that, asserts Prof. Davis the festivals create “a liberating experience’ for Caribbean – Americans and Canadians and their brothers and sisters at home in the West Indies, if only for a day. To them, it a chance to recharge life’s batteries and drop the social class masks which often divide them, be they lawyers, doctors, priests, bus drivers, sophisticated ladies, sanitation workers or unemployed youths” whether CARIBANA in Canada or Carnival in Trinidad these West Indian festivals also now serve as Tourism-oriented products with definite – and much needed – economic spin-offs. From costume manufacture entrepreneurial possibilities, before, during and after these events.
Caribbean journalist Tony Best has also quoted Jamaica’s Rex Nettleford and Trinidad’s Errol Hill who spoke of the West Indian masqueraders using “masks to disguise; music to affirm, and dance to celebrate” and of the “syntheses of fusion of folk-forms and art-forms between native and alien cultures and tradition”. The massive back-drop or canvas against, or on which all this is painted is, of course, Caribbean MUSIC. On New York’s Eastern Parkway all day on Labour Day, for example, any other musical form but the Caribbean’s seems FORBIDDEN. It’s absolutely endless, genuine, vintage, calypso soca, reggae, dance-hall, zouk or salsa from steel-bands, brass bands and numerous, powerful, electronic sound systems.
So it’s worth a thought, worth remembering: the Caribbean and Guyanese carnivals – by whatever name they’re known, right here in the region, in Notting Hill, London, Boston, Miami or New York, are really manifestations of a deeper fundamental truth. In a word, our masqueraders and revellers are manifesting in celebration, the achievements, joys, sorrows, frustrations and challenges facing us all.
Quite a serious side of the “fun” isn’t it?
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