Are we really happy here
With this lonely game we play
Looking for words to say?
Searching but not finding understanding anyway
We're lost in a masquerade
-This Masquerade, George Benson
It's like you just got a one-way ticket to the twilight zone. You land in this alien place where the people look familiar and sound familiar but there's something very different. It's kind of sickening really. In this cacophonic bacchanal called the North Stand, the sound of many sleepless nights of preparation is lost.
Lost to riddim sections beating to the drum of corporate dollars. Rum and tassa flow regardless of the who is on the stage. If you're not in a crew, well zaffeh you. And like the worst ghetto gangsters the crew leaders dare you to try and stop their party. If you're not part of a crew you don't belong. You don't have a band, you don't stand a chance. Sponsors are the prettiest gangsters. They brand their logos on the bodies of the full range of Trinidad beauty.
They are robbing the culture. Slapping pan in the face, hard with dull bass throbbing from their sound systems. But the Government gives their blessing and takes the money. Outside the twilight zone you hear all kinds of stories. Tickets for $1,000. Pan Trinbago scalpers. On the track women sell mediocre roast corn and tourists try to learn to wine. On the stage men, women, children, tanties playing their hearts out. A Tobago flagwoman does a split that no one in the North Stand sees, because we're in the North Stand we're so fricking cool. The pan is sweet. So sweet your teeth hurt and your soul wants to burst out of your chest and you look around in wonderment at the Northern Range hills all around the Savannah like your mother's embrace.
There's VIP this and air-conditioned that for the government ministers. I wonder if there's a green room for pannists. A place where a flagwoman could powder her nose or a panman could pass water. But they're just the help. They come to our shiny new Savannah stage to be an entertaining side-show while girls in micro shorts pose for shots to show off their nice teeth. And not to mention how cool they are that they've come to the Savannah. It's only pan. It's not like it's real art, you know. It provides a good background to the real party going on here with corporate gangsters who shoot down culture and then boast about how they're doing something good for their community. Massa day done and come back again with new massas who look like the old slaves.
In postmodern Trinidad the ironies are so much more ironic than you think. The pan is sweet. There's a lot of tata too. And bands that should just go home. But the musicians look happy. Happier than the people in the North Stand wearing so much make-up and boots to match that they look like they will end up in a shiny puddle in the cacophonic bacchanal. It is mind-blowing, this dichotomy of wealth of music and paucity of cultural awareness. It is mind-blowing, the vibration of souls in this place. Where else in the world do people dance their music? So many hundreds of people coming together to play music on one day. The creative possibilities are endless, not to mention how music could be the ultimate balm for the many many Trinidad pains. But the monetising possibilities are the ones that take focus and the corporate gangsters treat our culture like a George Street sex worker.
There are many casualties in this microcosm of everything that is right and wrong with Trinidad. There are many dead things littered on the ground and we cross over, oblivious. The story has a happy ending.
Night falls and silence comes to the North Stand. Well, not silence but not pointless noise either. The real celebration begins. Now that the light is gone the fakers retreat. Their day's masquerade over. The music soars and those who are left behind start to levitate. The real pan jumbies come out. They have been waiting in the wings for their moment. They play themselves and I am happy that it looks and feels familiar again. No disrespect. No contempt. No fakery. Just good music and bess wines and people that you know and don't know and wouldn't mind knowing emancipating themselves from their crews and making a big Savannah love for their pan. It feels like home again.