Annette Dopwell's letter, Education in classical music isn't elitist, in the Sunday Guardian of March 27, was a curious revelation about students being dissuaded by "official" preferences from classical music for calypso, chutney and so on. It wasn't a secret, but for it to be said explicitly by the director of an NGO (the Classical Music Developmental Foundation) is astonishing. Moreso when you link it to another letter, Prescribing Culture, written by former curator of the National Museum, Claire Broadbridge, in the Express, September 13, 2009. She reported meetings with PNM officials obsessed with being "the inventors of local culture", and elaborate programmes for its control and dissemination. Such a strategy of "controlling culture" is not new. Its purpose is to create an "identity" with a set of ideas, embodied in material culture-music, literature, television, film, nationalist and ethnic festivals-linked to a political regime. Many scholars, including the indispensable Gordon Rohlehr, have perceived the link between the PNM's desire to control Carnival and its political survival since independence.
Half-century later the Carnival-nationalist identity thing is entrenched in the national and transnational imaginations. Its scope has expanded somewhat to include a token multi-ethnicity, which is constantly countered by apologists who underline its "African" antecedents. This identity stratagem was laid bare in 2004 when Wild On Trinidad Carnival was aired on E! TV. At the howls of protest that too many "white" people were shown, the PNM commissioned BET to do an appropriate video, underlining that African is boss. This became a template and several videos followed, including Trinidad and Tobago Carnival in Xcess (sic), Lisa Wickham Branche's BET/BET J Ministry of Tourism Trinidad Carnival Special, and many others. The stratagem has academic, populist, and other social channels. Its products include not just books but a disciplinary niche (Carnival Studies) which pervades educational curricula and academia, which feed into, if not fuse with, tourism marketing and journalism. The best example of this was the Think Conference at UWI last February, a culmination of UWI Carnival courses, degree programmes and research.
The books have an Ur-text: Errol Hill's The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre (1972). The main local ones include Gordon Rohlehr's seminal Carnival and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad, Louis Regis' The Political Calypso, and Hollis Liverpool's Resistance and Rebellion. These are complemented by piles of inferior simulacra: bumf like "Carnivalitis" etc. Foreign scholars have also studied the festival, generating a number of academic theses and books. These include (not exhaustively) Peter van Koningsbruggen's Trinidad Carnival: A Quest for National Identity, Stephen Stuempfle's The Steelband Movement, and Jocelyne Guibault's Governing Sound, and edited collections like Milla Riggio's Culture in Action: The Trinidad Carnival, Keith Nurse's (and Christine Ho's) Globalisation, Diaspora, Caribbean Popular Culture, and Sandra Pouchet Paquet's (et al) Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination.
Then there's the art. Apart from film/video there's theatre, the novels of Lovelace and Michael Anthony, and the rantings and paintings of Leroy Clarke et al. The most high-profile examples of Carnival theatre were Carnival Messiah, and its antecedent, Rawle Gibbons's Calypso Trilogy, Ah Wanna Fall. Gibbons' later Ogun Iyan, As In Pan, fuses the invention of the pan, the 1937 Labour Riots, and Orisa. These are merely the tip of the iceberg whose mass is comprised of the Learie Joseph extravaganzas and various other mass events. I am willing to be corrected on this, but I'd say Carnival products outweigh the artistic/academic production on any other topic, and the complex demonstrates how ideology translates into cultural production and dissemination. The discourse comes from all directions-media, Internet, school, university, pop culture-fuelled by "patriotism" or some variant. So whether we agree, or approve, we know the script intimately.
Two catches: first, the opportunity cost for academic, artistic and intellectual resources devoted to this production. Many crucial things like the media, cyber-culture, consumerism, alternative sexuality, class and ethnic issues are not studied because of resource diversion. This affects the ways cultural information is interpreted by academe and society, and research and policy are directed. The only studies of the Internet and the effect of soap operas locally, for example, were done by British anthropologist, Danny Miller. Decades of this has left UWI with severe deficiencies which are passed on to its graduates, who pass it on to secondary school students, who transform it to lived reality. A consequence is the absence of an appreciation of what the Humanities should teach-secular moral reasoning, an appreciation of complex emotions, and of our diversity. What is imparted is a false, indefensible confidence in "our culture", whose many gaps are filled by African-American pop culture.
Second catch: it's a sham and everyone knows it. There are counter-narratives. The main one, the Indo-narrative (actually a number of narratives), is too powerful to be seriously compromised by the state-funded juggernaut. It exists pari passu with a few contact zones (rum songs etc), and dynamics yet to be examined. Other groups (French, English, Syrian, Chinese) cultivate private identity narratives and genuflect to Carnival publicly. This leads to a schizoid social dynamic steeped in mistrust and hypocrisy, and an inability to build a platform of trust from which societies develop. This seems to be a lot to throw onto Carnival, but the line of causation is plausible. In terms of our future, half-century of Carnival nationalism has left the national imaginary barren, with no political or moral technology to restrain the unimaginable, or enable us to imagine the sublime. And that's enough with the Carnival Complex for now, I think.