Two myths that won't die are that Carnival is a tourist attraction and makes a profit. I devoted several columns to this last year, and am loath to repeat myself, but to summarise: the State directly supports Carnival with more than $100 million. This in addition to indirect costs, like overtime for police, healthcare institutions, and local government workers to clean up after the parties.
Then hidden costs: The "Carnival message" of noise, crude sexuality, contempt for the law and general loutishness, transmitted through schools, the media, and even churches, with the imprimatur of the State (without a cogent counter narrative), distorts national consciousness, shared values and ideals. Add lost work time, in unwanted pregnancies and Aids, and so on. If the cost of all elements I've identified here are quantified, and tourist receipts exceed the costs, ok, Carnival makes a profit.
If you think these effects can't be quantified, you're just playing dumb. The venerable Dr Bratt in these pages (on Feb 7) reported a study from the journal Child Abuse & Neglect, which quantified the costs of child abuse. Studies that calculate the dollar value from everything from health to illiteracy are common. Everywhere except here. (Google "Where is the Wealth of Nations"-a 2006 World Bank report.) But OK, tourism, seriously: look at the transaction. What are we selling? Is anyone naïve enough to assume that the majority of tour-ists are coming (all due respect to Ray Funk and my pals Tom and Susan) to listen to calypso and steel pan and watch moko jum-bies?
Check out Caribbean Dispatches, Beyond the Tourist Dream, a (2006) collection of articles by expats and locals edited by Jane Bryce, from UWI, Cave Hill, to see what tourists really want. Some "tourists" come to sexually exploit desperate men, wom-en and children, and generally to do things that would get them arrested at home. Many come for the spectacle of Third World misery. Others come for the "unspoilt" Edenic nature; the antithesis of civilisation. (And Trinis migrate in the hundreds of thousands to the Metropole to escape just these things.)
This point (of the region being the place for anything-goes depravity) isn't new. Mimi Scheller, in her brilliant book, Consuming the Caribbean, unpacks the notion, arguing that the Caribbean has been, from Columbus's journals, constructed as a site of excess, sensual orgy, and where the moral constraints of civilisation are suspended. After centuries of this, "Northern consumers are able to experience their proximity to Caribbean people as pleasurable even when it manifestly involves relations of subordination, degradation or violation." This has been noted by observers from Nietzsche to Naipaul. Its bald statement in Dispatches shows how comfortable we have become, and have made the Me-tropole, with thinking of us as primitive and morally insensate.
But there's more. Trinis seem to revel in being the opposite of civilised. Superficially, this is an inversion of colonial values. During colonialism, the coloured races strove for the cultural and material achievements of the coloniser. A knee-jerk reaction post-colonialism was to assert that what the white people branded as uncivilised was "valid" and equivalent to metropolitan "high" culture. This has been encouraged and endorsed by an unfortunate set of liberal "Northern" scholars, in books like Culture in Action, The Trinidad Experience.
But Naipaul had a different take. As he observed in the Middle Passage: "Nothing pleases Trinidadians more than to see their culture applauded by white American tourists in nightclubs" by living up to the tourist stereotype. This intuits the Fanonian sickness which underlies the Carnival display. Below this self-caricature and self-immolation are a still unresolved, and unarticulated, desire for white approval, and, psychologically, a desire for adult authority to intervene, to stop us from harming ourselves. As the society becomes more desperate, the Carnival becomes more frantic, crude, and loud. In a very real sense, it is a collective scream for help. The figure of the tourist is the surrogate metropolitan parent whose approval and intervention are craved.
Of course, it doesn't seem that way. In the shows, the fetes, the general uproar, people seem to be having the time of their lives: Happy, ebullient, and all that. I doubt that any of them think they're looking for anybody's approval. But look at the sources of the Carnival narrative, its central rites, like the Canboulay, and you'd see it comes from an oldish crew, still wounded from colonialism, or Black Power, or something like that, for which they want revenge. The PNM listened to them because they are the PNM's archetypes. The PP listens because they don't know better. The result? Deny the evidence. Bring more Carnival.
You hear the malaise in the "resistance" talk, making criminals into heroes, and the desperate holding up of the steel pan as the apotheosis of "our" culture. The sad truth about pan is that it is an admirable musical instrument. But none of its supporters treat it like a musical instrument; for them, it's a political/ethnic instrument. This is obvious to all, and the ethnic chauvinism embedded in the rhetoric turns off people who might be otherwise drawn to it. This is why Pan Trinbago is always broke, vex, and looking for state welfare. And that pretty much sums up the whole Carnival. If it were a well-organised good time had by all, who could object? But it's not that; it's not that at all.
In the late 19th century, large fairs and other travelling shows toured the empire, showing off human, animal and floral and faunal exotica. Those shows' ideological orientation was, enfolded in awe and wonder, to underline the primitiveness of the outposts of empire, and the normalcy of the centre to justify domination of people who would destroy themselves otherwise. Well, we've created our own show to achieve that, though "achieve" might be the wrong word.