Si­mon Lee

A sprite­ly oc­to­ge­nar­i­an ex­e­cutes nim­ble dance steps, skip­ping on the balls of his feet and strik­ing bo­is­man pos­es, while his youth­ful au­di­ence gaze on in ad­mi­ra­tion tinged with as­ton­ish­ment. Eighty-six-year-old Nar­rie Ap­proo is demon­strat­ing an Imp dance, but he's bet­ter known as the old­est sur­viv­ing Black In­di­an mas­quer­ad­er from the band War­riors of Huara­can.

Ap­proo has been play­ing mas since he was sev­en and de­scribes him­self as "the ac­tion man." Grow­ing up in Har­mo­ny Hall, John John, where there were five or six drag­on bands, in­tro­duced him to the Imps but be­sides his ma­jor role as Black In­di­an, he's al­so played Long Nose Sailor and Fire­man (or stok­er) in sailor bands, all of which re­quire the kind of en­er­gy and skil­ful co-or­di­na­tion which have not de­sert­ed him af­ter near­ly 80 years of mas. He was in­duct­ed in­to the War­riors of Huara­can by his god­par­ents Claudius Pierre and Eu­do­ra Thomp­son of Cas­cade, who were king and queen of the band, re­spec­tive­ly.

A not-so-qui­et re­vival of tra­di­tion­al mas is un­der­way, ap­pro­pri­ate­ly enough bub­bling up from one of the is­land's well­springs of Afro-Cre­ole cul­ture in Bel­mont. De­sign­er Robert Young of The Cloth, long es­tab­lished in his own in­ter­na­tion­al niche mar­ket with his range of ap­pliqu� de­sign trop­i­cal-friend­ly clothes, has ven­tured in­to the world of mas. His in­de­pen­dent band Vul­gar Frac­tion will be bring­ing out Black I, an in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the tra­di­tion­al Black In­di­an mas.

Ap­proo's dance demon­stra­tion and the talk which ac­com­pa­nies it are part of a wel­come col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween a younger gen­er­a­tion alien­at­ed from the con­sumer/com­mod­i­ty cul­ture of main­stream Car­ni­val and the crafts­men and women and vet­er­an mas­quer­aders of tra­di­tion­al mas.

This evening's "in­ter­ac­tive talk" is one of the Un­con­quered se­ries, or­gan­ised by writer and self-styled "jou­vay­ist" At­til­lah Springer and pre­sent­ed in Robert Young's Pro­pa­gan­da Space at 24 Erthig Road, Bel­mont.

Black In­di­an mas has res­o­nances for Trinidad and in­deed the wider Caribbean, which the more fa­mil­iar Wild or Fan­cy In­di­an mas can­not claim. Black, as op­posed to Red or North Amer­i­can, In­di­an refers to the Cre­ole mix of Africans and Amerindi­ans, as in the case of the Gar­i­fu­na or Black Caribs of St Vin­cent, who were ex­iled from their is­land home­land by the British in 1797, even­tu­al­ly set­tling on the coastal strip of Be­lize, Hon­duras and Nicaragua. Sim­i­lar Black In­di­an com­mu­ni­ties de­vel­oped in Haiti, on the South Amer­i­can main­land and in some of the south­ern states of Amer­i­ca, no­tably Louisiana, where Black In­di­ans have long fea­tured in New Or­leans' Mar­di Gras.

Join­ing Nar­rie Ap­proo at last week's Pro­pa­gan­da Space talk ses­sion was cur­rent king of the Huara­can War­riors An­drew Patrick who proved just as en­er­getic as Nar­rie when it came to danc­ing and who was even more vol­u­ble, emit­ting blood-cur­dling war cries and whoops, or de­liv­er­ing chants in a lan­guage de­rived from Aru­a­can, Yoru­ba and Cre­ole. Patrick em­pha­sised the West African fes­ti­val el­e­ments in tra­di­tion­al Black In­di­an mas, draw­ing the dis­tinc­tion be­tween their cos­tum­ing and that of oth­er In­di­an bands: "We use nat­ur­al ma­te­r­i­al and re­sources- riv­er beads, cowhorn, cobo feath­ers and snails."

Al­though a de­fin­i­tive date for when Black In­di­an mas made its first ap­pear­ance in Trinidad Car­ni­val is still lack­ing, Patrick pin­point­ed the 1924 pil­grim­age to Louisiana as an in­spi­ra­tional cat­a­lyst. He al­so not­ed that "pure whites" al­so play the Black In­di­an mas in Louisiana. Patrick cer­tain­ly car­ries him­self with the pride and au­thor­i­ty of an artist, who in­sists he's not mere­ly play­ing a char­ac­ter but con­tribut­ing to an art form. He men­tions the fact that Ap­proo has been work­ing on his head­dress since Oc­to­ber; the head­dress, wig, feath­er­ing and bead­work be­ing in­te­gral dis­tin­guish­ing fea­tures of the cos­tume. He's equal­ly em­phat­ic that the war­riors' grace­ful dance is "not win­ing" but a form of homage to the gods.

If the Black In­di­an mas keeps alive some of the un­writ­ten and ne­glect­ed his­to­ry of mar­gin­alised and de­monised Cre­ole com­mu­ni­ties of the re­gion, it al­so speaks di­rect­ly to some of their de­scen­dants. Robert Young him­self re­cent­ly dis­cov­ered his own in­dige­nous an­tecedents, through rel­a­tives in St Kitts and lo­cal Kali­na­go ac­tivist Tra­cy Ass­ing, who was a vo­cal mem­ber of the night's in­ter­ac­tive talk.

For the man of The Cloth, his col­lab­o­ra­tion with the War­riors of Huara­can has both per­son­al and con­cep­tu­al cur­ren­cy. "How do we make the Black In­di­an rel­e­vant to now?" he queries. There are the ob­vi­ous is­sues of the en­vi­ron­ment and our woe­ful treat­ment or rather ne­glect of our in­dige­nous past and its sur­vivors, the bones dis­cov­ered in the foun­da­tion of the Red House a glar­ing re­minder of both colo­nial and then in­de­pen­dent na­tion in­dif­fer­ence.