The Ministry of Arts and Multiculturalism produced a droll and revealing report titled Toward Improvement and Excellence: Report on Carnival Observations 2012�2014, which it launched last September, and has available for download on its Web site. As part of its survey, some journalists' assessments were cited. Naturally, this column was not mentioned.
Other than the obvious reasons for that (and let the imagination run riot) the main one, I imagine, was that although some of the report's conclusions could have been lifted directly from this space, its premises differed so radically it was simply inaccroachable.
The official position is that Carnival is national culture and can be "fixed" and return to pristine origins. My premise is that Carnival is a badly manufactured, spiteful attempt to create "national culture" for specific ethnic and political reasons. It's clumsy, wasteful and poisonous and damages the nation much and benefits it little, if at all. The opportunity cost of Carnival imaginatively and materially is incalculable.
The pristine origin is in 1959 (not 1881) when E Williams decided to "nationalise" Carnival, which is the model we contend with today. Carnival has survived for the same reasons the US financial system pre- and post-2008 did and does: its interlocutors have extraordinary access to the media and government, are immune to fact, and when necessary manufacture their own. Thus the Carnival as national culture narrative has become orthodoxy, and the practice a habit, despite mounting evidence of its toxicity.
The point of view did not originate with me. I came to it through my own observations, but so had many others. One of the best known critiques was Walcott's essay What the Twilight Says: An Overture. This was a response to the urtext of Carnival as national culture, Errol Hill's Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre. The debate between the two positions had played out in the sixties between Walcott and Hill, but the conclusion predated them.
Hill's book was the culmination of a cultural campaign that had been waged since the end of the Second World War. An early defensive response to the proposition of a Carnival national culture was ironically launched by the Guyanese novelist Edgar Mittelholzer in 1945.
Writing in the Guardian on November 13, 1945 (West Indian Culture Needs a Firmer Basis than Calypso), Mittelholzer wrote: "Every now and then in Trinidad the topic keeps bubbling up to the surface. Does Trinidad possess a culture of its own embodied in Carnival, calypso, and steelbands?"
Mittelholzer's answer is unambiguous: "left to me...I should have ordered a cessation of all futile and tiresome argument and ruled that Carnival be abolished as a barbarous and degrading custom" and calypso be regarded as folk music and "not masterpieces of music equal in grandeur to the Erioca and Gotterdammerung."
The cause of all this was "an epidemic of artiness that has warped our perspective considerably" and it was only "thorough the mists of our present delirium" that we saw ourselves as "a people with a distinctive culture." The reality was (and is) that "our music and art and literature are just in the process of being born."
Mittelholzer's ire was two pronged. The first was aesthetic–"an art-spirit cannot spring into being overnight." The second was practical: the metropolitan perception which Carnival seemed designed to confirm, and its consequences.
Citing his British publisher's objections to material in his books which had West Indians speaking standard English, Mittelholzer wrote: "The English and Americans, in their homelands, consider us West Indians to be nothing more than a pack of 'natives' with 'quaint' customs–'quaint' songs and 'exotic' dances. In their films, on their stages, in their books, we are depicted as backward people...who go about half-nude, our women in grass skirts, and whose natural habitat is the jungle.
Accordingly they see us as being possessed of strange superstitions and ignorant beliefs..."
The consequences of this, he continued, included West Indian classical singers (like Amy McCracken, who had written to the Guardian a few weeks before), being told in the UK that the BBC did not want West Indian classical singers, since their idea was to "let the West Indians express themselves in terms of their 'native art'."
The danger in Carnival as culture, he concluded, "people in the north (would) retain their...impressions of us...as backward and half-savage." Seventy years later, as pointed out in this column more than once, a whole industry of writers, filmmakers, culture vultures and academics has emerged to service this perception, with great success, with monuments like Carnival Messiah.
But to return to 1945-46. Mittelholzer was responding to the first statements of what would become orthodoxy today. In 1946, for example, Albert Gomes wrote more than one spirited defence of the steelband in the Guardian, celebrating its originality and its ability to harness the creative energies of the hopeless and the underclass.
Other apologists included Harry Pitts, Oscaret Claude, and Charles Espinet, who presented the first histories and made the first attempts to create a cultural narrative for the steelband. Claude, on March 2, 1946, noted: "Wasn't Pythagoras inspired to make the musical scale by listening to the various sounds produced by a blacksmith's anvil? Isn't music on the piano produced by a succession of blows on strings from little hammers?"
These spirit of these apologias still exists, but it misses, deliberately, Mittelholzer's point. Carnival might be a folk festival, calypso might be folk music, and artistically and culturally interesting and useful. But to present them as fully formed national culture, and equal and equivalent to the quality and scope of metropolitan art, music and culture (which status Carnival apologists crave so desperately) is foolish and dangerous.