I was in two minds about whether to say anything about the Dimanche Gras spectacle, but the remarkable story in the CNC3 news on Ash Wednesday settled it. This was the one where a black man was prevented from boarding a train by a bunch of British soccer hooligans in Europe, who chanted: "We are racist. And we like it."
Apart from being a stark reminder that the European enlightenment ended some time ago, it was a reminder of the ordinariness of enormity, so much so that perpetrator and victim accept it as normal. Which brings me to Dimanche Gras. It wasn't surprising that all calypsonians were anti-government. Contemporary Carnival and its media, it bears repeating, are PNM creations, and were simply doing what they were designed to do.
What was surprising was how casually and confidently racism was deployed from the start, with the first singer, Queen Victoria, who wanted to "save (her) identity from Moonilal" and other "tiefing traitors." This because in the new PP disposition of spoils there's "none for Creole." This is pretty unambiguous, and not anomalous. It echoes the tents, where the illustrious Dr Liverpool reflected that lands in Penal and Tableland should be given to Africans. Gary Cordner in Kaiso house sang of "Mousi and Mousa" romping in the treasury, to the exclusion of Africans, and less overt sentiments essayed by other singers.
I suppose the singers should be given credit for varying the tone while staying on message. Karene Asche, ever reliable for a queasy ten minutes (cf Be Careful What you Wish For) went sotto voce, with Every Knee Shall Bow. Her second song found another way to point a finger at the Government and its ethnicity without actually saying so, via inequality: "We cannot ignore it any more /While some eating lobster, is crumbs for the poor". Further, the poor should be careful of "Greeks bearing gifts". It's a smooth elision of black/poor, and lobster-eating government/Indian, in case you missed it, and the implicit proposal is that this all happened in the last five years.
Bunny B's ISIS song focused on "two racists" (of Indo persuasion) in Trinidad constituting a crisis the PM should deal with rather than ISIS. It's an astounding proposal for foreign policy � do not risk the wrath of ISIS by condemning it. Was it tongue in cheek? If so, the tongue was split, and I didn't notice the bit in the cheek, only the bit hissing racial imprecations. His second song, Tame Tame Tame, which suggested the PP had tamed some otherwise fierce warriors like Makandal Daaga and Errol McLeod, managed to slip in "Lincoln Douglas pull off he dashiki for a dhoti".
Duane O'Connor at least didn't blame the government for the loss of his house, probably because he got a HDC house soon after his own burned down just before the competition. His second song called on "the children of Abraham /to eat the Passover lamb" as a precursor to voting the PP out of office. Is this over-reaching for a metaphor the sign of a poorly stocked mind, or a deliberate (or even unconscious) conflation of race, religion and politics? (If so Karene Asche's Every Knee takes on a new significance.)
In general, this is in keeping with the tone of Dimanche Gras ever since the UNC came in in 1996. What makes this trend interesting in 2015 is Mr Shak's Lyrics Cartel, which reported that many calypsonians apparently share "the same five writers". Apart from putting an end to the claim of calypso is a poor man's newspaper and the national "artform" (and even if it's ten or twenty composers) it suggests something more insidious.
It could be that calypso and the discursive bits of Carnival, which all sound so similar, do not come from a variety of sources, but from a small group of people. And the small group is aided and abetted by whoever it is that keeps selecting the same type of songs for Dimanche Gras every year. (I've been watching this since 2002.)
Dimanche Gras's nature (as expressed in the calypso) seems to emblematise the ideative core of the Carnival (which is separate from the mas, the concerts and fetes, which are almost separate satellites, orbiting the giant sphere of government money). Its characteristics are:
�2 It is a PNM product, and hostilely and violently so;
�2 It has a strong, noxious racial tinge to its worldview which materializes in lyrics and sentiments cited above;
�2 It is entirely dependent on the state for its sustenance. In effect, the state is keeping hate alive.
The questions that arise from this are:
1. Why would the state fund this? And don't the million dollar prizes encourage whatever talent there is out there to aim for this rotten centre, while starving other arts institutions of new talent and state funding?
2. Million-dollar institutions exist, at both universities and independently, which are devoted to "Carnival studies". What exactly do these institutions do, if not study the economics, history, and social psychology of what is ostensibly the "national" festival?
3. What exactly are the criteria of calypso judging and do they include a mandate to exclude racism and hate-mongering?
These questions are not new and I just ask them again since repetition seems to be key in getting Trinis' attention. But we all know what the answers are.