High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture 1496819381, 9781496819383

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HIGH MAS

HIGH MAS C A R N I V A L A N D T H E P O E T I C S O F C A R I B B E A N C U LT U R E

PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEX T BY

KEVIN ADONIS BROWNE University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

www.upress.state.ms.us Designed by Todd Lape Publication of this work was made possible in part by a generous donation from the University of the West Indies Campus Research and Publication Grant. The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses. Copyright © 2018 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in China First printing 2018 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Browne, Kevin Adonis, author. Title: High mas : carnival and the poetics of Caribbean culture / Kevin Adonis Browne. Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018000774 (print) | LCCN 2018010235 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496819390 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496819406 (epub institutional) | ISBN 9781496819413 (pdf single) | ISBN 9781496819420 (pdf institutional) | ISBN 9781496819383 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Carnival—Social aspects—Caribbean Area. | Popular culture—Caribbean Area. | Street photography—Caribbean Area. | Carnival—Caribbean Area—Pictorial works. Classification: LCC GT4223 (ebook) | LCC GT4223 .B76 2018 (print) | DDC 394.2509729—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000774 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For My Children Layla and Kyle Browne For My Grandfathers Radcliffe “R.B.” Browne and Newallo John “N.J.” Wright

SERIES

SERIES

SEEING BLUE

LA FEMME DES REVENANTS

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Seeing Blue: Genesis of Public Executions

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La Femme des Revenants: A Queen of Sorrows

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Acknowledgments Ash Wednesday

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CONTENTS

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Deliberative Daemonic: Making Mas Rhetorica 19 A Shot in the Dark: Toward a Poetics of Caribbeanist Photography

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✦ ✦ ✦

Conclusion Notes

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Works Cited Index

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SERIES

SERIES

MOKO JUMBIES OF THE SOUTH

JOUVAY REPRISED

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Moko Jumbies of the South: Walking Stick 187

Jouvay Reprised: A People, Ground to Dust

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As you might imagine, I am not the only one wrestling with the crippling claustrophobia of black and brown existence in these times, dealing everyday with the reality that while there appears to be no safe space for us, there is more than enough space for our art, our music, our dance, our grief. Everything about us, just not us. Nor am I the only one grappling with the necessity of doing work in the midst of this reality, and forced to find my self in spite of it. But, having spent far too many hours alone, it has been my tendency throughout this project to behave as if I’ve had to endure its hardships on my own. This, I know, is both unfair and absurd—no doubt a consequence of the arrogance I’ve had to cultivate so I could see it through to a satisfactory end. But now that this particular work is done—now that I am satisfied—there is the greater and more pleasurable work of returning to a humbler place, before and beyond the grind, where gratitude resides. My thanks go first and foremost to the named and unnamed subjects of this work.

Blue Devils Ashton “Spooky” Fournillier, Steffano “Steffi” Marcano, Andrew “Nykimo” Nicholas, Alexie Lexington Joseph, Deon “Froggy” Letren, “Frenchy,” Emilio Constantine, Jeron Pierre, Ricardo Felicien, Ncosi Joyeau, Jamal Joseph, Roger Holder, Brandon “Redman” Reese, Renaldo “Uno” Constantine, Nigel “Capo Son” Pierre, Amaron St. Hillaire, and Shane St. Hillaire

La Diablesse Tracey Sankar

Moko Jumbies Stephanie Kanhai, Jonadiah Gonzales

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Jouvay Ayiti Marvin George, Fabrice Barker, Keon Eccles, Larry Richardson, Joel Chimming, Orlando Hunter, Angelique Nixon, Jabari Taitt, and Brittany L. Williams ✦ ✦ ✦

The best of this work, without a doubt, is because of you and because you have trusted me. Thank you. I have been fortunate to meet a number of people whom I consider archetypes of what I call the Caribbeanist photographer: Terry Boddie, Kibwe Brathwaite, Leah Gordon, Abigail Hadeed, Francette Hart-Ramsey, Nadia Huggins, Jason Hunte, Marlon James, Michele Jorsling, Mariama Kambon, Wayne Lawrence, Warren Le Platte, Chad Lue Choy, Mark Lyndersay, Maria Nunes, Sarita Rampersad, Chris Shand, and my brother Gerard Gaskin are among the ones who come immediately to mind. Gerard, you remind me that I am part of an evolving photographic tradition. I continue to learn—to “move the needle”—even as I insist on teaching myself to see. Elizabeth Nunez, my mentor, you put me on this path and have let me find myself along the way. I see your influence at every milestone. Christina Sharpe, my great friend and scholar, you are unfathomable. In all the ways that matter, you are for me what I hope to be for young thinkers/feelers/seers who strive to make a way in this place, or out of it, who exist and flourish in the wake of things. I adore you selfishly for the writer you’ve helped me to become. Grace N. Ngugi, you are an absolute treasure; through you, I’ve been able to sustain my hope in words at every stage of their disrepair. Special thanks go to Ayanna Gillian Lloyd, who read or listened to me read aloud, for your insistence on clarity when I thought to soar too loftily or burrow too deeply in my search for meaning to accompany these images. Joan Morgan, your timing in all things remains impeccable, lending spirit and form, strength and light to my abstractions. Gloria R. Ntegeye and Michelle Bachelor Robinson, you’ve kept me grounded as I wrote, without ever grounding me. Schuyler Esprit, you’ve given me courage, understanding, and space when no one else could or would. Your genius and generosity have given me life and live for me now in this project. I’m also deeply grateful to Dionne Brand, Carole Boyce Davies, Yaba Blay (meh sistren!), Jessica M. Johnson (¡siempre mi hermana!), I’Nasah Crockett (for Demon Days), Kimberly Juanita Brown (for “afterimages”), Robert Anthony Young, Martin Baptiste, Keithley Woolward, Rawle Gibbons, Grégory Pierrot, Keguro Macharia, Franka Phillip, Attillah Springer (Jouvayist extraordinaire), Soyini

Acknowledgments

Grey, Collin Brooke, Krista Kennedy, Casey Boyle, Nicola Cross, Asia Leeds, Cristian Grini, Simon Lee, Lorraine J. Charles, Paula Cumberbatch, LaVaughn De Leon, Elizabeth Olivier, Paul Nicholas (“Horsey”), Donahue Letren (“Two Bars”), Chevron Romain (“Poison”), and the legendary Narrie Aproo. Thanks also to Alan Vaughn because you have designed Mas for Touch de Sky Moko Jumbies with such grace, care, and deep respect; to Jesu Fournillier, Spencer Tardieu, Anil Kamal, and Mootilal Teelucksingh because you facilitated my requests without question; to Adrian Young (“Daddy Jumbie”), Shynel Camille Brizan (“De Jab Queen”), Tekel Kidale Sylvan (“Salti Lingo, D Jab King”), and Russell Grant (“Blue Jab”) for your humility, your insight, and your brilliance; to Akem Job, for being always perfectly placed. Marvin George and Camille Quamina, you are indispensable touchstones in this work, helping me to honor the inherent radicalism of my Caribbean spirit. I’m blessed to have met Dawn Cumberbatch. It was you who first encouraged me to show Seeing Blue when I lacked the courage to do so—in Paramin, no less. And, as I have worked on this project, you’ve managed every aspect of The Caribbean Memory Project with seamless patience, making time for my countless random impositions to “read something real quick, for me, nah?” and to comment in ways that resonate even now. You have, more importantly, helped me reconnect to the heart and mind of Trinidad (forcing me to articulate now the gratitude that I lack the ability to adequately express). Lisa Kernahan, you have been perfect in your witness. You are the only person to have crossed an ocean in support of my work. You know more than most about the manifested contortions of my mind and spirit, and what they have produced in me as I’ve labored. I am both fortunate and deeply grateful. I must also express my unceasing gratitude to Lois Agnew, my friend and former chair in the Department of Writing at Syracuse University, whose faith in my work has, to this day, not faltered. That support enabled me to travel on research leave to Trinidad in 2014, where I would photograph Seeing Blue. Thanks, as well, to Cheryl Glenn, Keith Gilyard, Adam Banks, Wiley Davi, Daniel Everett, Gesa Kirsch, Anthony Schreiner, and Marie Sairsingh. You’ve all done more than I expected and more than you will ever know. I reserve a great deal of thanks for Craig Gill for taking a chance on this project, on its unapologetic interdisciplinarity. Your support throughout reminds me that there are places in the academy for work like this. Thanks, as well, to Katie Keene, Emily Bandy, Shane Gong Stewart, and Todd Lape; to my copyeditor Debbie Upton; to the anonymous readers of the manuscript; and to the entire publication team at the University Press of Mississippi. My colleagues in the Department of Literary, Cultural, and Communication Studies have also been encouraging and wonderfully

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supportive. Special thanks go to Maarit Forde, head of my department. I am also especially grateful to Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, Jerome De Lisle, Sarah Kalloo-Bhagwandeen, and members of the Campus Research and Publication Fund Committee at the University of the West Indies-St. Augustine who saw merit enough in this project to award me a grant in aid of its publication. Additional thanks go to those friends and colleagues (some already mentioned) who made donations to help fund the publication of this book: Christina Sharpe, Grace N. Ngugi, Jeannine Murray-Román, Rinaldo Walcott, Mudiwa Pettus, Alan Vaughn, Sabine Broeck, Pauline Baird, Lance Harshbarger, Stephen Parks, Eve Dunbar, Mariame Kaba, Natasha Lightfoot, Schuyler Esprit, and my brother, René Farrow. You have literally given life to this work. To my other brothers, Brian Adonis, Naitche Sanowar, Kenwyn Findley, and Miguel Ayres. I’ve kept my bearings because of you. And to my family, the Brownes and the Wrights. To my mother, Eva Wright, for always being everything at all times to me. What good you see in here is the best I could do in the time I have had. I know of no better way to honor you. My hope, in this and every case, is that I’ve created something of which you could be proud—or at least as satisfied as I am. My thanks go to Raymond Quevedo (“Atilla the Hun”), David Michael Rudder, Linda M. M. Sandy-Lewis (“Calypso Rose”), Ella Andall, Nina Simone, Cesaria Evora, all the Malbecs and Shirazes, to Bombay Sapphire, to Pyrat, to Forres Park Puncheon, to Babash, and to ice. To Ron Zacapa. I am of course grateful to anyone I may have inadvertently overlooked. And finally, to you, my people. My people. I have relied on you throughout. You are all my equals and my betters, at whose feet I am privileged to sit, who teach me to love this work I do, to demand that it love me back, and to never, ever feel as though I must do this work alone, or in complete silence. Thank you. —MARACAS VALLEY, Trinidad, 2017

“Because we have been troubled . . .”

HIGH MAS a place for shapeshifters a Limbo, reconfigured, for perishable things [the] troubling [the] play of signs—their [troubled] makers the inadequacy of memory an irreconcilable history love, in motion the deliberat(iv)e personification of rhetoric—an audacity the transmutation of inarticulable will Mas between still life and afterlife the photograph the Caribbean, waiting for itself.

Flesh, well feared, takes leave with a gestured hip. The face burns.

ASH W E D N E S D AY

Patience, my Heart. Lent will come. The poor will know their place again. The yoke will settle, where it has been for the better part of our years. They have not been forgotten (do not fear their remembrances). They are poor. They forget. Spirit alone cannot employ, buys no bread, warms and waters nothing, turns to ash on their foreheads. Enough time has passed. They love out of step with reason, have learned to be thankful when music stops and streets go silent, except for the slow, scraping strides of street cleaners whose disgruntled groans follow last lap like an epidemic. And what is the favored pose for suffering people?

(Who but we can say?)

Bent over Hunched Hollowed Fasting Waiting like lazy drosophilae, dancing near the sour mouths of drunkards, who mark their rough cardinals in corner gutters before turning half-dead for home —that surveyed nonterritory of home. Where is your revolution, Lover, your activism, your arrogance? Where is your fury?

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PROSCENIUM FOR AN AQUEOUS HUMOR Aye, Mas! Ah know yuh face! —GREETING, Traditional

I have imagined the following scenario: Over drinks, I would be asked, and always by someone I admire a great deal, what was my first camera. Names of giants (and dying giants) would be suggested—Canon, Minolta, Olympus, Polaroid. Nikon, which I have used, and Fujifilm, which I use now.1 Never Leica, for some reason. “Too expensive,” I’d later be forced to admit. Delivered offhandedly, in the crude, syncopated shifts that mark us as friends, the question would be one of those “innocent” questions, an “icebreaker” that would lead eventually to more serious questions of image-making and intent, ending possibly with much grander explorations of rhetoric, race, humanity, and their failed states. Before we get to slightly more complex ideas of Caribbeanist Photography in neocolonial times, I would take a long sip of what I’d be drinking. Rum, probably. Neat. Or straight, depending on where we are. Maybe on Carib Street in San Fernando at the Red Step bar, across from Pan Elders, champions of Panorama in their medium band category. Campo and Carl know my mother, and they remember the Power Station fire. (“1952,” Carl told me, once.) And they know Pan—steelpan. And they know Mas. They’ve been Fancy Sailors for decades, parading through San Fernando in their officer’s uniforms with dance steps made for steelpan music. They’ve known some wars. We all have, I suppose. I’d grimace with the rum, then fix my face, letting it relax as I swallow, letting it set fire to my throat and then my chest, breathing in slowly and letting it cool. (“Letting,” as if I have control over these things.) I’d look away, pensive. And I’d pause. With my glass halfway between my lips and the table, it would be the indefinite pause of a man with no answer to give except for the admission of a particular and lingering shame: I can’t remember. Of course, I’ve tried. There are thousands of sunsets, the shadowy façades of this building or that, old houses that remind me of gravestones and the cruelty of time, neglected friends, strangers, half-forgotten lovers, all of them resting undeveloped in 5

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a box somewhere in New York. Not one of them would raise the memory of that first device. “Canon?” this person I admire would ask again. “Minolta?” Nothing. Sometimes, when you don’t want to betray your truth with a lie, silence picks up the scent and betrays you, anyway. So you take it for what it is. What would seem to be a common denominator among photographers would be, for me, a missing piece. An unresolved legacy. I suppose a story about how photographs come to have an “owner” but no point of “origin” that I could recall—no first camera— is a familiar tragedy, recognizable to those of us who gather to invoke the unresolved, who find legacy at rivers’ mouths and seashores, who pay homage to those noises in the blood, offering calabash and flowers, planting flags and ringing bells with lamentations that come and go with the tide, the handmade temples that float out to the horizon on massive drumbeats. Those of us who go in search of the dark places that have given birth to us. Those of us who remember that the bowels of ships are not (our only) points of origin, and that as many echoes come from beneath waves as from beneath wooden decks and earth. These echoes pluck acoustically on the chords of a ship’s wake that plays a prelude to a dance of cocoa in the memory. Bereft of oversimplified metaphor, we can remember more freely that all traumas are incomparable in the end, leaving each of us with nothing else to tell but a story. This one will be less scandalous than forgetting one’s origins as a photographer, a story far truer than any amount of rum could make it. I will tell it anyway. I will give a “report,” as Lamming put it, “on one man’s way of seeing.”2 That is all it could be, for now.

Before the Blindness There was, at first, the imperceptible haze that soon turned to halos around stars, around passing headlights and humming streetlights, making visible the opaque auras of regular people and the ghosts contained within them. The sky didn’t fall. No hole opened in the ground to swallow me. There was no pain. Things just began to fade, like faces in a photograph left too long in the sun. As is the case with many things, this particular beginning came not with a shock, but with subtlety: a missing detail here and there from a story I’ve become accustomed to telling. Who would notice? Before long, I would forget about it and learn to live with what I could no longer see. It was all very normal, very mundane. I almost missed it. In 2007, shortly before conspiring to destroy my faltering marriage, I was diagnosed with glaucoma—“open-angle” glaucoma, to be specific. I didn’t know there were other types, so I waited for my

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ophthalmologist to tell me what would somehow make my situation different from the other cases he’d encountered—something that would make me special, somehow. That “something” never came. The risk, delivered with the cool, disinterested tone of a man who’s done this far too many times, was the same: Blindness. We, the dispossessed, are expert at understating the unfathomable, but I want to be careful not to overstate the case: this is the fear of everyone who sees or hopes to see, but it wasn’t the sort of news that one would consider earth-shattering by any means. Life-altering, certainly, but not a cataclysm. It wasn’t a firm, declarative “You are going blind,” with pauses so long I could have time to contemplate the worst and bury myself in grief. Nor was it a slightly less declarative (though, no less cryptic) prophecy, “You are going to go blind.” It wasn’t exactly a false alarm, but there was, as I recall, no indication from him that I had cause to panic. It came in the same tone as the diagnosis, as if he had discovered a heat rash or a mole on my finger that could mean something. A new freckle. A new concentration of melanin. Something hereditary. Cancer, maybe. Maybe nothing. Who can say? But I’ve heard worse things walking the street, so I took it in stride, as I’d been taught to do. A matter of my survival, you understand. People like me must be very careful not to act out in certain places. An ophthalmologist’s office, for example. “Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s treatable. But if you don’t treat it, you can go blind. Very likely that you will, if you don’t treat it. It’s as simple as that, really. You have to treat it.” “Yes, I understand.” Simple as that. He then turned and left me alone with his words. It isn’t every day I am shaken from thinking of myself in the far too flexible terms of metaphor and thrust into a situation where I’d be forced—maybe for the first time—to see. So I sat, closed my eyes, and imagined what it would be like to go blind. I found that it is an unimaginable thing—the experience of seeing all my life exceeded my imaginings of what a life of not seeing would mean. Put another way: compared to what we have the chance to actually experience, whatever we imagine (no matter how grand or terrifying) will never really match up. Not really. Still, I wondered what I would miss. When I opened my eyes, I spent the next few hours (or was it days?) looking at myself in the mirror. My crafted vanities had taken a hit, and I couldn’t help but be disappointed with what I saw. We all tell ourselves stories in order to live. Sometimes, purely as a matter of survival, we lie. But this time, a familiar silence came again to betray. Devoid of symbol and adjective (which can make art or poetry of the most uninteresting things), I had occasion to see exactly what I had become: a scholar and pioneer, sometimes happily marooned in an obscure area of study, but also a (once) unrepentant liar, a cheat, a

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failed husband, a doting but mediocre father, an invented man who had constructed a place to house his abstract ambitions instead of an actual home of brick, mortar, wood, and (perhaps) love. A book, but no home. Words and images, but no family of my own. In time, I would come to realize that there would be no royalties for betraying myself, no awards for setting people aside “for the work.” Every accolade delivered in this vein will be heavy; every compliment will be trailed by an insult, whether real or imagined. In time, I would learn that suffering, particularly when it is self-imposed, doesn’t always build character. I would learn that there is no act of mercy that the guilty conscience cannot undermine and outdo with remarkable efficiency. And sometimes, when we get more than we can handle, we break. In that last moment, though, I looked away. “Enough,” I thought. Enough. Guilt doesn’t always lead to conversion. What I would give now for another look at that collection of shames and successes, of broken or missing parts, and the spaces between them. I might have tried to save my marriage instead of myself. But in the doctor’s office that afternoon, I only thought of minor things, of random remembered things, each disjointed and discrete, each stripped of its narrative and its moral. Each, painfully beautiful and (suddenly) quite rare: The functionality of unbuttoned sleeves. Corners. Butterflies. Plums. Mangoes. Red. Blue. The onyx eyes of a crapaud—its constellation of warts. Rain on hot asphalt. Plaited hair. Dogs in heat. Handwritten words. Linoleum floors. Worn wicker chairs. An old man. The color of wine. An old woman the color of sweetbread before it cools. I didn’t think of very profound things beyond my rough litany, or of who and what I might miss, or of childhood memories and other ghosts. The smiling eyes of a sometimes beautiful woman made no appearance, though I remember writing volumes at her feet.

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Thoughts of Noel, my drowned cousin, were as silent and still as his acoustic grave that languishes somewhere in Siparia. As silent were Maureen’s ashes. Lystra and Marjorie, who had not yet joined their sister, remained where they were: unremembered in San Fernando, not far from where they spent their childhoods. There was no remembrance of Vena’s round face, of her calling me “black boy,” and of me knowing that only love—love and nothing else—could come from a face like hers. Born the year my grandmother died, my first child, by then used to disrupting things, disrupted nothing. I gave no thought to the marriage I had already begun to dismantle, or to earlier and later regrets. No thought of a second child. No thought was given to my mother, whose love and mortality drove me, feverish and desperate, back to school. No thought to a long, stolen kiss in the playful shadows of a deserted high school in San Fernando. Nor to the letter I’d write to her decades later—but never send. No thought to noble causes, liberal causes. Nor to the chiseled bodies of malnourished vagrants that affirm the enduring myth of a nation’s progress, the shameless inequity of its celebrations, the denial of its obscenities. There was no Césaire, no Glissant, no James, no Fanon, no Nunez, no Walcott, no Lovelace, no Wynter, no Brand, no Sharpe. No Browne. No thought to the various metaphors of vision, opacity, and blindness that, before now, had helped me to make scholarly sense of Caribbean existence and perception. Nothing but corners, butterflies, plums . . . Some things can’t be undone, but remembering now with the same quiet dread a moment when I was first compelled to make sense of my imperfect way of seeing, I have a chance to acknowledge something more than its convenience as a rhetorical device: that is, my attempt to cannibalize what Didion might call the phantasmagoria of my experience, so I could see in spite of my failing vision, relying on what I’ve seen so I could envision what I have not yet seen, or will never see.3 This is a wish for a different, more literal version of myself, a version that is able to consider the impermanence of things on their own terms, before they and I could crystallize into memory. I’m fortunate my sight has endured to this moment. I’ll try not to rush, but time is against me. Aside from the intoxicated and grief-stricken heart, there are few things more self-indulgent and corruptible than sight, such that we see what we do not believe and believe what we cannot see. And yet, we are often subject to its defining practices—the devised mechanics and processes that emphasize its impermanence. They enable us to attach meaning to the unreliable instances and experiences of which our more creative expressions are composed. The camera and photograph are such an example. Though many other things, they are each a testament to seeing and to what cannot be seen, of seeing

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and of having seen. For some of us, they are reminders of what we have failed to see, or have learned not to. Like the devices and images in the unopened boxes and corrupted drives of a former life, they provide only cryptic evidence of our unseeing, of the uncomfortable familiarity of everyday life and what might have come before it, like a set of clichés ceaselessly renewed. Or, like an untethered paradox of fragmentations and coalescences, coming apart and together. Or, they are like the lasting impermanence of slavery and its indignities.4 Sight, offering a glimpse of life from the still, irreconcilable trappings of an enduring afterlife.5 As with all things, a still photograph has an afterlife all its own. And, as I’ve continually been taught, its fate and effects are not always subject to my control. In spite of this, or maybe because of it, I go beyond the casual encounter with photographic surfaces, with what they are in essence (paper and ink). I go in search of self-conscious moments that will outlive their participants whose subjectivities are already in motion, and who exist (far better than I) in spite of their missing parts. In that search, when navel-gazing can be at its most intense, I am also opened—overexposed. I am no longer just describing my own predicament—the onset of my personal terror—but something larger than myself. In this more literal version of myself, I see my personal constructions recede, becoming less important than what they were, only just moments ago. I am reminded, in this, that the terrors and traumas of black life are not metaphors, and that I cannot face its indignities or my recovery from them on my own. Revising Proust somewhat, I suggest that the “dignity” of the Caribbean photograph emerges not when it shows us things that no longer exist, but when it posits lived reality as a material representation of deliberative expression among ordinary people who sometimes act as though they do not see. A Mas that exceeds the limitations of Carnival. What would that mean for a photographer with no discernible genesis? This, at the very least: if the photograph represents an archive of vernacular resistance to a dual intransigence—an unimaginative future and an unimaginable past— then I would be compelled to think less of the symbolic blindness of my previous misunderstandings, less of my actual blindness, and more of what there was for me to actually see.6 Still photographs have lives of their own. Offering only a glimpse of the afterlife in which we find ourselves, they cannot show all that occurs in the in-between. That requires a bit more reflection on my part, since I also find myself engaged in one to create the other—engaged, that is, in the afterlife of my people to create something still. I think of this as a kind of alchemy, or a magic of perishable things. A kind of obeah. So I’ve come to a place where obeah still breathes, where metaphors are gathered up, picked apart, and consumed in the sun and

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(sometimes) driving rain. I know that, same as every year, I’ll soon be left to sift through Wednesday’s ashes for some semblance of the everyday, catching myself now and again to ask, shamelessly, unironically, what happened. Then, as now, I’ll seek no definitive resolution, only some clarity (complex and shamanic though it may seem). In search of Mas, I find myself in a Carnival. Trinidad Carnival, impermanent and inevitable, where daemons run loose in the garden and yard and road, and where every gesture is a signal of greater noises in the mind, the blood, and the bones that all unhinge. It feels like home to me (though I know it will always be more of a feeling than a fact).

Caribbeanness, in Part Have you seen them yet? The Blue Devils? Have you seen what they’ve made of molasses, turning it blue, wringing tradition into an even more impossible thing? Go, look. Have you seen how La Diablesse raises the tragic mulatto, before weaponizing it, before arming herself with a hoof and a chain and a spirit? And what of the unmasked Moko Jumbies? Have you seen them rejecting masks at will, allowing us to see ourselves in their synchronized grimaces, our ambitions outpaced in the expanse of their strides? This is how we take shape, literally. This is how we live without hope of reparations, fixing and fending for ourselves. This is how our beauty is filtered through the chambers of our infinite suffering. Look and see. It’s why we so often feel what we cannot always explain—forced, often, to curse or to break breathless into tears. This Mas of ours. You should see it. When you do, you will see what I mean when I say that a photograph is a fragment of Caribbeanness, a parable of the Caribbean individual who persists (fragments and all). So much of what we do, as Caribbean people, is about finding a place for ourselves—one we have made, rather than have had made for us. So much of what we do is a response to the violence that brought us here, and left us here. And we do this in a very certain knowledge: that it is not, as J. Anthony Froude famously noted, that “there are no people here”;7 rather, it’s that the “Caribbean,” as we understand and experience it, is not really a place at all but an idea of a place—not the last undiscovered country in the region, but rather a long-discovered abstraction that waits to be resolved. It’s a place populated by an ironic people who insist substance into their elusive hopes for a better life in this (non)place we call home. Mas is a performance of substance, understood here as both an abbreviation of “masquerade” and the extensive, often elaborate unfolding of a very particular lifestyle choice—an ethos. Those who adhere to this latter phenomenon of choice in a place of few choices

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don’t simply “play” Mas as some decadent escape. They make Mas. They live Mas. As such, they more than embody the essence of the thing. They are, in fact, elemental. The difference, I hope, will become clearer by the end, but let it suffice to say that I want to infuse my abstractions on matters of Caribbean being with a consideration of substance, which is derived from my interactions with the people who design, construct, and display it time after time, year after year. The substance of performance, to me, implies a certain awareness. A presence. We—Caribbean people—are present. Put another way, we are not absent from our lives. Vacant as we may sometimes appear, do not be mistaken. We are here. Even in the execution of our carnivalesque pleasures (seeming best suited to be masters of our unexamined lives), we are here. This book is about those things—Mas and photography—and about me finding my place within them. The setting, for me, is an obvious choice, if not a bit cliché to: Trinidad Carnival, where Mas is usually played, seemed a perfect place to start to explore and understand the dynamics that arise and unfurl as we continue to claim our troubled ideas of Caribbeanness in an era of failed nationalisms and predatory globalism. Mas, as one of our major expressions, is a prime example of our existential in-betweenness. That really is enough for me, but I think I should say some more about why I embrace the Carnival, in spite of what you will see are my obvious frustrations with it. Revelry is one reason. Seriously. The catharsis of a good fête must never be ignored. Ever. (Think of it as the “politics of a good party.”) I’m not a party jumbie by any means (anymore), but the need for a release is absolute and, I believe, universal. Another reason is that our constructions of culture and history— that ongoing afterlife of black and brown existence in the Caribbean—demand that we not only recognize that we have an ability to navigate the in-between with a great deal of nuance, but also that we consider how we might articulate it, should the need arise. At least, I think we owe it to ourselves to consider who, precisely, we ought to be in whatever moment we find ourselves. Carnival, Mas, and our many traditions enable us to do this. This enabling applies, for example, to questions of “authenticity” with regard to Carnival and Mas. Particularly when viewed in the absence of Calypso and Pan, the two are sometimes held up as a kind of false binary, or we see Carnival cast as an irresponsible overseer to Mas that, along with its equally troublesome siblings, Calypso and Pan, is cast as an impetuous orphan ward. Mas is then further split into two major genres: “Pretty Mas” and “Traditional Mas.” It’s an oversimplification and an absurdity. For one thing, “Pretty Mas” isn’t always pretty. Some costumes are ghastly, others unimaginative and poorly made, often falling apart before Carnival Tuesday—Mardi Gras. Headpieces are

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usually all that remains by Ash Wednesday morning and can prove a bit of a nightmare for travelers, tourists, or those content to delay their return to exile a moment longer. (Is your plumed, bejeweled souvenir “hand-luggage” or more of a “personal item?”) Other bands gauge their prettiness using an inverse ratio of beads and feathers to square inches of fabric, or with prices that are far more obscene than the design. People complain, of course, about the titillation such costumes encourage, the indelicate vanities they expose (along with everything else). “Too much like Rio,” some say. “Not enough,” others reply. Perhaps. A good cliché can sell, and people take out Carnival loans to make sure they can afford it. It’s a paradox: small island people scrambling to find a tribe that will accept them (not unlike the scramble for legacy and title in such a small place, as if it wouldn’t crumble). But however the argument unfolds, “Pretty Mas” reminds us that pretty things are (at best) ephemeral and fleeting and (at worst) deeply superficial. And expensive. Notable exceptions exist, thankfully, though we sometimes miss the convergence of village and empire on performers’ bodies, the hauntings of conquest and genocide inscribed with cross and spear, the silence of old blood among the feathers and beads and jewels, the echoes etched in their unifying themes. Violence can often be mistaken for splendor, here. It’s how we were made: black waters, spices, whips, dancing, laughter, chains, and things that work better than chains. My concern is that these Carnival-Mas binaries also cause us to mislabel what we mean by “traditional.” Whereas “pretty” may be left to the eye of the beholder, unless we choose to view tradition in terms of modification, rather than a narrow tracing of provenance—old practices to new—we would be guilty of a self-inflicted injustice. We all come from other places, so we can certainly all understand that our practices, broadly considered, are derived from many sources. They retain their integrity somewhat, but they are neither static nor insular things. Nor, for that matter, are we. It is the fate of everything that comes and goes from this place that we modify—or creolize, or syncretize, or remix—them, allowing them to soak in and then materialize in our behaviors, our cultures, our languages, our religions, and our evolving worldviews. Then we put them on display as a Caribbeanness that is as consequential as it is emergent, as acquiescent as it is resistant. How could it be otherwise, here? Why should it be otherwise? How else could cohesion—or, a cohesive pleasure—be crafted here, if not from these fragments that simultaneously make us a part and keep us apart? It’s how we’re made. I want to say just a bit more about fragments—this time, in relation to the celebration of Caribbeanness in public space. Derek Walcott, who once read my poetry, offers a familiar way in, using the trope of a broken vase:

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This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.8

In this project, I view fragmentation not only as the result of trauma. Make no mistake: It is that, and its effects are ensured by the careful and devious design of race, class, and (failing those) diversity. As a direct result, some fragments are larger than others, with their own shape, depth, dimensions, and effects. We have an opportunity, nevertheless, to consider how our many parts may realistically comprise the whole—that is, through the active coalescence of multiple fragments that do not lose their individual integrity, even with the “white scars” that Walcott suggests we all seem to share.9 The scars may bind us together, but they often do more to keep us apart. However, like the photographs in this book, I see each fragment as a simulacrum of the Caribbean individual that, along with other fragments, can give the impression of something that can be whole. And though I dare say photographs can do this work far better than words, I take Wilson Harris at his words when he says: I tell you, my friend, much subtlety and true honesty are needed in the “reading” of partial images. For the partial image—in confessing to the ground of bias in sovereign institution—appears to terrorize us, or to confuse us, though it has begun, in some degree, to free us from the absolutes that clothe our memory and to reveal a potential that has always been there for mutual rebirth within conflicting, dying, hollow generations. ... The partial image is biased, yes, but it is also in conflict with inherent bias—it is a part of something incalculably whole and stark and true. Such wholeness cannot be confined or structured absolutely; its complex nakedness and community of spirit eludes us within every mask or costume or dress . . .10

Shadowing Harris, I’d say that my concern is with how we harness the potential of fragmentation, rhetorical or otherwise, in service of a more comprehensive idea of ourselves. I’m not at all interested in completeness, especially since I agree with Harris that a perfect, “incalculable” wholeness cannot be achieved, only imagined. The more realistic wholeness—perhaps the only one possible—is a fragmented one. The point is not to undermine what other philosophers, theorists, artists, and economists see as a project to achieve

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cohesive Caribbeanness, but rather to understand that completeness is impossible to achieve and a waste of our energy. The upshot of this exercise is that we may discover a dormant truth: that fragmentation, while not essential to a functional sense of Caribbeanness, is certainly elemental—each one of us is necessary, in our own way, but also discrete. Discrete and, perhaps, self-sufficient. A broken vase is not essentially a vase, but it is elementally one, equally comprised of the stuff that could make a vase, but also endowed with the advantage of spaces in-between its fragments. To me, it is the spaces that make recovery (if not restoration) possible. Not the scars. More important, discovery can also come of this freer movement of fragments. Where does that leave us at this early stage, then? I would say with an opportunity to reframe the trope of fragmentation, however briefly, as a rhetorical device and as a means whereby we can consider (new) possibilities for our actual engagement and liberation, seeing our multiple parts as a bricolage pathway to actual unification. We may be fragmented, but by taking fragments on their own terms, and by understanding how we interact—how our moving parts move— we may also be inclined to make better use of the spaces in-between where, it can be argued, we prefer to reside. If it is common ground that we seek, then understanding the limitations of wholeness will be key. And Carnival makes that possible. Basically, if we mean to perfect our tolerance for the more difficult task of undoing the things we’ve been forced to be tolerant of, then Carnival is as good a place to start as any—even if what we think is common ground is just an illusion, and what we see as unity is nothing more than the unfortunate condition of being stuck together. It isn’t a perfect solution by any means. (For some, more than others, the memory of being stuck together is more of an intimate haunting than a metaphor of ideological inconvenience.) But I think the likelihood of cohesion among Caribbean people (or in any of our traditions) would be remote if it weren’t based on an idea of fragmented wholeness—at least, in part. That is, we may stand to benefit if we’re willing to entertain the possibility that “being Caribbean” means embracing fragmentation as a basic aspect of our existence, and considering its usefulness in the tenuous, troubling, and volatile composition of the whole. From my point of view as a rhetorician, it means believing, more importantly, in a version of Caribbeanness that is fragmented but not fundamentally broken.11 I mean, boasts of constant modification and creativity notwithstanding, have we not already been taught to see it as brokenness, taught that those who are fragmented are also broken, or that they believe themselves to be broken? What reparations go to those who are made to see themselves as irreparable? Is it really any wonder that, as a region, we remain severely underdeveloped, when we can so thoroughly despise ourselves? I don’t

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have all the answers, but it’s certainly worth a thought if it means we save ourselves the trouble of believing too firmly in a wholeness that can never be. If not now, when? If not here, where? I don’t mean to pathologize. Instead, given our realities in the region (and wherever we manage to gather), I think it’s dangerous to ignore the usefulness of those realities in favor of a myth of wholeness that we struggle to achieve. I think we’ve had enough of that and, as a result, have yet to find our bearings. Moreover, an uncritical celebration of our differences that masquerade as a mythical version of wholeness ignores the reality of Caribbeanness as a dynamic mess—it requires effort from us. We must, therefore, do more than hope that our interactions as a whole will be oriented toward the appreciation of broader conceptions—of, say, Caribbeanness and of everyday life, but there aren’t any guarantees. We’ve all brought our broken parts with us, leaving other parts unknown and others unremembered. We know that. But now what? Where does that knowledge lead us? And I don’t mean geographically. We are certainly here now, in this (non) place—caught up, as it were, in this idea of a “Caribbean”—but we must also have the audacity to be open to Caribbeanness as an articulated being. Or, we must have the greater audacity to open ourselves to what that means, to view the spaces in-between us as a place for social engagement and possibility, and to find the time to declare that we are here (though we may grieve for the many missing parts that have and will be left out of that reconfiguration). We must have the audacity, that is, to see for ourselves—and as ourselves. Just think of it: What would it mean to have a vision, and to perform it? To be image and act? Because, this is what I think you will see here, in this book: a vision and a practice, an aspiration to the vernacular and its mundane mysteries. While some may see modification as an erosion of static traditions, I see it as a kind of self-consciousness in action, a necessary step in the deliberative design of Caribbean sensibilities that more closely align with our lived realities. That is, the claiming of sensibilities that can become traditional. Tradition that takes shape on and in our own terms. This will become apparent soon enough. (Have you seen the Blue Devils?) The modification also exists in how I approach photography, in how I think the image is made. Just look. Listen to the way we talk, to what we say. See us. See how we pray and to what and to whom. Look here, in this book, at Mas. Look at how it has forced me to modify even my own explanation of it. And understand: a Mas “whose face we know” can only be known in part, but it is a face that helps us recognize the violence of our dissolution and views coalescence as an opportunity for creativity that is more deeply considered than our scars or the sighs of our histories. Rather than serving merely as static filters of assorted viscera—fragments of what we

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feel but do not know, or know but cannot explain—we are able to make material representation of those feelings from our perspective, modifying our knowledge and our explanations at will. Modifying, as methodology, as fundamental expressions of the Caribbean will. A vernacular rhetorical art. Does this mean a rejection of more “genuine articles” in favor of a blind deference to Mas? Of course not. It means only that I’m not satisfied with any celebration of Caribbean heritage that marginalizes the emergent characteristics that make us who we are now in favor of the exaltation of who we were, or might have been. Myths—of origin, especially Caribbean origin—should never be too far removed from the truths that make space for them to flourish. The same principle holds true for the performers featured here, exemplified in the inherent unsatisfaction of their portrayals, their desire to be seen, their refusal to be ignored. We’re not yet free, they remind us, but we’re not so bound as we may seem. Not so enslaved as to misunderstand the extent of our unfreedom. In the midst of the Carnival we expect to see, a reminder comes composed of blue, hoofed, and stilted creatures. A Mas that “knows” us because, well, it is us. Masmakers, the sometimes wretched ones who make and play and experience Mas, are proof of a social conscience run amok. Driven almost mad with its yearning for better things, for things more beautiful, the scars have deepened into chasms between us. We also make Mas because of this. We hold and keep ourselves together, scrambling with paints and pains, with tape and glue, with smoke and prayer and desperate pleasure, to mend ourselves. Humbly, miserably, or however we can, we bear the burden of our society’s troubles—all of its wonderful hardships, its warnings and evils, its lies and imperfect lessons. Similarly, these portrayals of Mas are the literal consequences of our intentions, collected and allowed to come together and fall apart in public, out in the open, where everyone can see. Mas: the fragmented wholeness of tradition enacted. This, I believe, is how we turn our many abstractions of what tradition can be into a series of perceptible realities, how we give form and life to them, harnessing them in service of critique and the realization of our public, personal freedoms. It’s how we recover from things we hope to forget. In Trinidad, these performances emerge as possible acts of civic awareness; each is a moment for conscious citizenship to take shape not just during Carnival, but in any state of in-betweenness that follows it. In each, we see how art—what we imagine and create there—transitions from mere motive into meaning. These moves look, to me, like love in motion. They look like Blue Devils. La Diablesse. Moko Jumbies. They look to me like practitioners of Mas, experts in the art of modification who embody the spirit of Mas.

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This book of parables and pieces is a Mas, too. These words are a lyric of Mas—a Caribbean lyric. Things will happen here that you do not expect—some that you cannot expect. The best you can do to prepare is to use what you do expect to happen as a temporary frame of reference, basing what you discover by accident on what you intentionally seek. Your expectations will either be met or let down. Or, like mine, they may be surpassed. This is the nature of Mas—and, fortunately, of photography. What, then, have we to fear of what we now have all too brief an occasion to see? We make Mas because we are not simply a catalogue of unnameable hurts, but something more. What should we be ashamed of, knowing that we—our bodies, our minds—are not damned? Watch. Ah go play a Mas, here. Ah go write a lyric. A lyric, with my perceptions of Mas, photography, and my self proceeding at the pitch of a certain passion. It begins where so many of us find ourselves: near the end, before moving gradually inward. Included among the various discomforts of recovery is the fact that we will sometimes feel worse than we did when we were afflicted—such that feeling better often comes at a price we would prefer not to pay. But emancipatory practice is not a gentle thing. It’s going to hurt, from time to time, but it’s a different hurt. A hurt that can heal. Try, as I do, not to reach for the familiar pains of habitual traumas. Traumas cannot love us. We know this. Doh panic. Doh run away. Hold on. Succeed where I have failed.

An Elegant Denial

D E L I B E R AT I V E DAEMONIC Making Mas Rhetorica

It’s just a man. Doh frighten. It’s just a man. See? —PARENT TO A CRYING CHILD, 2015

Those who believe in the sanctity and authenticity of vernacular cultural practices will tell you that, unless you have your bearings, it is a mistake to go in search of anything in the midst of a Carnival. They will tell you that freedom cannot be claimed in an event that emphasizes anonymity, amnesia, and abandon. Things are lost in a Carnival. Things fall apart. Metaphors fail inevitably, but there are masks to hide behind, familiar faces strangely painted.1 There are dangers. But where, other than in a Carnival, can people’s pretensions of respectability and their fragile beauties flourish together as a consummation of pent-up suffering? Where but here, in the broken heart of a bacchanal, can injustice actually be sweet, and long-soured insanities be allowed to ripen in the sun? Where better to encounter the abuser from your childhood, to watch him break as he pretends not to remember you, mispronouncing your name? (Cry but don’t bawl. Don’t tell.) Where else to run from the abuser of your adulthood, as you duck behind a swaying six-bass and the flailing precision of its player? For better or worse, the bacchanal is unavoidable. But where else will the fictive romance of our violent beginnings bloom like the magnificent Poui before falling off to rot, leaving us to gather with others who acknowledge the loss as we prance happily, desperately by? This is how it is. And because of these things—these exigencies—I would encourage you to go. Go to Carnival. Find what you find. Wherever you are in the world, Carnival will touch you and call you home to it. Not only to Trinidad (where I do this work), but also to wherever Carnivals are allowed—wherever poor people are forced to make beauty of their suffering, to make such beautiful dangerous places of their capitals, to believe (as you might). Even if you cannot come, it will shake you, subtly. In the heart of it, you will sometimes think you’re standing still, watching, listening. You’ll have to believe you’re standing still. How else could you be there to take anything in? But you’ve already been moved. You’ve been moving nonstop for days—or years. It’s best, you 19

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tell yourself, not to overthink it. You will instead be encouraged to feel the stir and shift of desires, your confidence resting in the license you hope to take with bodies whose orbiting waists come just within your reach, within range of what you hope to understand. You recite what you think is your methodology: Look but don’t touch. You learn it, almost like a mantra. This is wise. But pay attention. See how quickly things will change in front of you. “Look but don’t touch” changes, too. It moves beyond your reach, becoming more than you’ve learned to expect: Look but don’t touch Touch but don’t squeeze Squeeze but don’t grab Grab but don’t push Push but don’t hit Hit but don’t fight Fight but don’t chop Chop but don’t shoot Shoot but don’t kill You do not ask how it is that we go from “look” to “kill” with such ease, with no discernible punctuation; instead, you take to the streets, both unsettled and infinitely present in the unsurveyed mass of bodies. “Looks can kill,” you’ve been warned. You do not hoard your energy, but share liberally in the excess. More will come. You are in the “kingdom of rum,” you tell yourself. The ancestors that have made you will soon become real. More than real: present, to touch you and talk to you and laugh with you and drink with you and frighten you. And love you. They will come to strain confessions out of you, to revive you after the years and years you’ve endured to get here again, and to strengthen you for those you hope to face, or those whose faces you cannot avoid. You will not remember praying. You (as if driven by nostalgia past some looming menace) will kiss the ground. You do not say out loud that the stranger you drink with is either better or worse than you believe. You do not say that you are as daring as you are afraid to wine where former lovers and enemies can see you; that all momentum is liberating because it is violent; that there is no difference between bodies running into a fight and those running from one. (Fight. Don’t chop. Don’t shoot.) You do not say that your relief is real when you remember that the most volatile vagrant knows better than to pelt bottles at the cordoned-off crowds that have spent thousands on their perishable costumes. He will save his bottles and feast later, you say. (And he does.) There are, after all, more freedoms to consider, ones that make no room for the indignity of leaning with

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arm’s length into the souring garbage. Forget him for a while, if you can. Ignore what you cannot forget. More will come. Rest, but keep moving. These are the elegant denials of everyday life, magnified and rationalized in the vacuum of spectacle. Where better to confirm your solitude than in the company of others like yourself, who navigate their own solitude with song and dance? Those of us who still feel the stir and rush of Congo and Tassa drums long after Lent understand that Carnival is not a space for you to “be yourselves.” It never was. Instead, it is the opportunity for you to stand in witness to the oppositional interplay that occurs between things as they are and things as they ought to be—and then to join in. Carnival here is the culmination of events whose participants negotiate the clichés of official and unofficial, moving between the center and the margin, between the apparent stillness and what comes after it, between life and what passes for life in this place, mistaking one for the other. It reemphasizes the impossibility of escape from the situations that bind us—all of us. From its beginnings among the planter class who came to Trinidad in the eighteenth century, Carnival has been framed as a virtual escape from a repressed life—celebrated first among the sunburned aristocracy of thieves, then later among the enslaved.2 Its precursor, Canboulay (Cannes Brulée), was likewise framed as a “harvest festival,” part of the normal cycle of sugar cultivation in the region. Never mind the “harvesters” in question had been known to gather in Convois, or secret groups, from as early as 1808.3 Never mind, as well, that it was in those Convois that vernacular rhetorical modes were practiced and subsequently perfected.4 The vulgarity of this myth of passive adoption and appropriation may be matched only by its pervasiveness as nostalgia.5 As the public memory of a young society whose swaddling cloth is cut from a bolt of stained economic fabric. Evidence of a culture that is both sacrosanct and inaccurate (though by now it is very well known that burning the cane was a reminder not only of the necessity of fire to the successful cultivation of the crop, but also that the scorched earth was part of a global scandal of capitalism and slavery). These days, participants are obliged, through the social conditioning of watchwords and mottos, to return to work or school on Ash Wednesday with resignation and regret for all they have done or tried to do. But to the newly emancipated and falsely free, who wanted more for themselves than what Emancipation and Indentureship had originally promised, the brief luxury of equitable abandon only compounded the idea that freedom existed as a thing to be given by those who possess power, rather than taken by those who do not.6 To make matters worse, after the Canboulay Riots in 1881, the practice of flambeaux processions in the streets would be decoupled

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from its original commemoration on August 1 (Emancipation Day, though not yet an official holiday), and aligned instead with PreLenten/Saturnalia celebrations that were imported a century earlier with the plantocracy.7 The official observation of black bodies had been traded for their observances of European decree—whether devotional, nominal, or syncretic in practice.8 By 1884, and shortly after the appeasement of Governor Sanford Freeling to allow the people their “amusement,” Canboulay had been effectively stripped of its revolutionary overtones, orchestrated by the infamously brutal Captain Arthur Baker of the Royal Police. This was soon followed by the inevitable corporatization of the festival, which emerged as an even more effective measure at controlling the amusement through the sponsorship of organized competitions, complete with Kings and Queens who were crowned as Monarch in their genre of choice. We know that “compromise” from a nonbargaining position is a known misfortune of stolen people and their descendants.9 By embracing the Carnival, however begrudgingly, even some of the most jaded performers would seem to relent to the illusion that their complaints were heard, that their suffering was seen, and that their grievances mattered. (Something—anything—better than nothing, right?) Calypsonians, Steelbands, Stickfighters, Drummers, and other Jamettes would all suffer a similar fate: mastering behavior that was more becoming of “subjects” loyal to the same Crown that had ensured their continued objectification and misery. Canboulay was “replaced” with Carnival (inasmuch as any manufactured event could be said to take the place of the collective will and the emergent sensibilities of any oppressed social formation).10 The predominant enactment of black rage was consequently replaced with the prevailing reenactment of white pleasure, or the “relatively harmless” mockery of it. An example of this syncretic overlay is the Dame Lorraine, the ornately dressed “French Lady,” whose hat and mask, counterposed with exaggerated bust and buttocks, allow us to identify it as “[an] imitative of the mas played by the 18th and early 19th century French planters, who would dress up in elegant costumes of the French aristocracy.”11 Former slaves were said to recreate the masquerade, “using materials that were readily available, such as assorted rags and imitation jewellery-type [sic] items, but emphasizing and exaggerating the physical characteristics, and dancing to small bandol and cuatro ban [sic].”12 Additionally, whereas before the Riot the Negue Jadin (a field slave) had been portrayed by white planters willfully embracing the anonymity of blackface, it was re/appropriated and then performed by the very people it had been intended to mock.13 We know, now, that appropriation is not inherently revolutionary—not when the apparent subversion of empire was replaced with submission to a

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creolized imperial fantasy presented as a truth. And certainly not when the illusion of freedom—the patent unfreedom of a season designated for people to “free up”—had successfully eclipsed both the need and the desire for freedom itself. The flambeaux were all but extinguished, the drums all but silenced, as Carnival had become the main product of a society newly committed to the economy of spectacle. What need would there be to fear revolution when interrupting the Carnival had become the much greater scandal? “Don’t stop the Carnival,” we say, as if it would matter. “If they stop the Carnival,” I ask aloud, “what will happen? Will there be a revolution? Chaos?” Nothing. How could there be, when the emerging Caribbean subject was festively denied the conditions that would allow her vernacular self-interest to grow into sustained public action? What could happen in that moment, when agency is surrendered, making patrons of rulers and viewing our expressions as a privilege, rather than a right? What need for freedom in favor of the intoxication and excess of fleeting pleasures in this kingdom of rum, with its local kings and queens? Rather than commemorate their collective misery with the critique of things as they were, the people were inclined to celebrate their spectacular desire for what they imagined better to be, or how “better” would look through the lens of those who wished for them to remain as they were: wretched, voiceless, and invisible. These measures not only emphasized the apparent impermanence of any revolutionary impulse; they also amplified the intensity of its celebration with the frenzied ecstasy of sinners hoping to evade the gaze of a vengeful god—or the gaze of those made more perfectly “in his image.” By aligning the Canboulay impulse to Carnival(esque) expression, the desire for freedom (even a momentary freedom) among the vernacular class was reframed as something that was implicitly shameful, a quick and illicit pleasure for which some form of repentance would be necessary. Freedom, thus conceived, was not only sinful, but also unnatural for those who consumed their pleasures on borrowed time. There could be no place for that freedom to be authentically expressed. No place for Badjohns and Jamettes in this version, only below the eponymous Diametre line of economic class and social respectability. Eventually, they would be relegated to the ironic category of “traditional” performances. They would be forced in subsequent generations to reside, along with the inhabitants of the Diametre, in the underserved areas of novelty, mystery, and the misunderstood. In a kind of Hell.14 No matter. In spite of the fact that Carnival operates at cross-purposes with the emancipatory impulses that collide with/in it, we are discouraged from spending too much time thinking about the intricacies or their effects. Such is the function of manufactured consent: a product that

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passes for culture at the expense of culture itself, people entreated to “play themselves” rather than be themselves. In the relative marginalization of competitions, Masmakers gather to be consumed by those who prefer their threats to be passive, impotent, and entertaining, as harmless as the plastic pistols of Midnight Robbers or the humorous misdirection of Pierrot Grenades. Those without a taste for too much actual confrontation will hasten to admit that Carnival makes performers of us all for a time—but, thankfully, only for a time. Once viewed as a collective rejection of manners, it has become mythologized among the people, its hollowed-out mythology subsequently marketed worldwide to the Crusoe class. This, I suppose, is the nature of the season, where nothing is what it seems—not even freedom. In this regard, I do not think it too heavy-handed to suggest that Carnival has always been a place where rebellion comes to die, or to see its impulses publicly silenced. But Carnival, despite its many well-founded criticisms for having lost itself over time, has not suffered amnesia—it was designed to promote it. We recognize this normalization as well, and are as proud of it as we are ashamed, having “earned” the right to have a bit of fun before going back to the business of living.15 I will not lay out the countless hypocrisies and contradictions that make Carnival “the greatest show on earth” (even though it can so convincingly appear to facilitate the visible expression of ordinary people’s grievances). This is only because the expressions I see are shaped more by the willingness of Masmakers to go in pursuit of their ambitions than the likelihood that they will find themselves as imperfect as the Carnival itself. For some, it is far too easy to mistake the awkward intimacy of strange bodies for a kind of freedom, or to make the tolerance of unwanted touching into an example of the humanity we long for as a people. However, as we come to understand that everyday life in the neocolonial Caribbean involves the acceptance and indictment of socioeconomic/econosocial disappointments and political failures, we should also understand that Carnival functions not only as an acknowledgment of the indictment, but also the explicit rejection of it. That is, it is not simply a metaphor of the inescapability from our everyday lives, but a concerted commitment to the perfection of the colonial project—the choice we sometimes make to work toward material reification of it. We are not free. Carnival reminds us of this fact every year, though it should come as no surprise: People seen as commodities can never be freed, not when bound in a masquerade, their bounding perpetually circumscribed. Commodities have no rights; their descendants have no legacy. Contrary to the most wishful thinking, Carnival offers no real places of refuge, or any actual opportunities for marronage. As unfree/unfreeable citizens, the plotting, if done at all, must be done

Deliberative Daemonic: Making Mas Rhetorica

in public.16 And when Carnival is over, performances of “culture and tradition” (spent of the imperatives that helped shape them) too often fall flat, revealing themselves to be little more than temporary opiates for this year’s tragedy and tragedies to come, echoing both the failures and the refurbished hopes of the painted and glittered faithful. And besides, a space for people to be themselves can hardly be that when the gyrating hip offers no protection to the excessively flamboyant man whose daily Dame Lorraine is draped in an anonymous struggle to be seen as the woman he is, or the winged and feathered frontliner who jostles her lover for space and ignores the irony of all-inclusives that discriminate and exclude, sections that retain their rigidity in the blazing sun, on the hot road. Respectability roped in and denied. This version of Carnival is one we accept as our own without a hint of contradiction. Look closer—the Mas we play takes practice. We only pretend that we can endow ourselves with myths that any official institution is bound to recognize, but we do know better than that. We nevertheless proclaim that Carnival, whatever it is, is ours. I claim it, too, without contradiction. It is not enough to claim it, though. Not for me. By understanding the normative futility of Carnival, I think we can see more clearly how the resiliencies of finite and deeply fragmented sensibilities—evident in Mas—contribute more appropriately to a project in emancipatory practice. That is, not only with the exuberant fantasy of a departure from oneself or the triumphant return, but also with the inherent perishability of daily freedoms and the desire (if it lasts) to enact them. The old fire stick that illuminates for us the reality of undeniable loss and, in so doing, accentuates the probability of real change. My concern is with the recursive motions of people who are forced to assert themselves in spite of the gaze imposed on them. My concern is with freedom— with Mas—and not with what simply passes for it.

Those in Suffering Forged The time is short. Just as it calls out to you, it will go silent. It has to, so you learn to expect its departure, to wait for its Ash. Learn to long for it, so you can justify your annual tabanca. Learn that we are bound by/in change. Then act accordingly. Things will come, they will take a turn in the sun, then they will fade, as likely to foster hope as despair or nostalgia. These “things” have names, of course: affordable healthcare, education, security, safety, and other abstractions. They won’t come as they are. Each will be embodied as/in Mas performance within a Carnival context. Look for them. Though faded, they remain. Some will be as fleeting as the season itself, but others will

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endure. They wait for those who stay long enough (or late enough) to see what happens. So stay and look for them—eat cascadoo, if you must. In the impish screams that cannot mask the hard-kept secret of youth among children who grow up too fast. In late evening prayers that fall at awkward angles from the hands of painted men. In the supplication an inadvertent worshipper gives to a Moko Jumbie at sunset, near raucous fishermen who stop cursing to look. Look anywhere. Anywhere, before the time passes. You see, even for people who pretend to be resigned to things being the way they are, these performances evoke more than a passive nod to history. They remind us that we are still (always) in a state of becoming, making and unmaking ourselves, being constantly made and remade at the hands of others. They come like ideas of ourselves, with all the errant intentions and failed ambitions of leaders who cannot lead, followers who follow too well. Take it all in, until the dissatisfying masochism of false citizenship gives way to a kind of emotionally saturated reason. Until you no longer ask (aloud) what on Earth are we really doing, but nod more actively, grinding with greater clarity of purpose. Until you see Mas, as if for the first time. Or, like a friend you cross the road to greet after years apart: Mama, yo! If yuh see Mas! Dat was Mas! High Mas! High High Mas. It was something else! Some names pour freely from knowing lips, like blessings or obscenities: George Bailey, Stephen Derek, Harold Saldenah, Wayne Berkeley, Junior Bisnath, Carlisle Chang, Brian MacFarlane, Ivan Kallicharan, Peter Minshall, Narcenio “Señor” Gomez. Others too many or too obscure to mention. There will be no talk of strokes, of accidents, of alcoholism, egos, and madness. No talk of cancer (except at the very end, to amplify the shock). It’s to be expected. This is part of the ritual, as is our forgetting. High Mas—its familiarities and curses, its ritualistic remembrances.

Deliberative Daemonic: Making Mas Rhetorica

In What the Twilight Says, Derek Walcott writes, “A culture based on joy is bound to be shallow. Sadly, to sell itself, the Caribbean encourages the delights of mindlessness, of brilliant vacuity, as a place to flee not only winter but the seriousness that comes only out of a culture with four seasons.”17 He describes people whose agendas unfold in response to the ironic commodification of their “liberated” bodies. During Carnival, they offer themselves up for public consideration, only to see their performances quickly consumed and their attendant realities (even more quickly) forgotten. It is no irony that the comment should move me deeply, even as I am implicated in the midst of a malaise that, at times, can be both physically and spiritually crushing. Still, it does not offend me. It serves as part of that familiar paradox: being bound to this region by accident, as well as by blood and spirit and necessity. And, of course, by choice. The comment masks Walcott’s more poignant criticism that one form of seriousness can so easily be exchanged for another less obvious, less threatening form—a form of seriousness that “passes” for joy, like a “day work” passes for employment, or like emancipation passes for freedom. Because (I suppose) it must. Because few things are worse for a country’s image of itself than a citizenry comprised of joyless bodies, whether black, brown, bronzed, or burned. Moreover, it evokes a similarly joyous seriousness that emerges in “Mass Man,” wherein the speaker observes a Carnival that envelops him and those around him, tourists and citizens alike, in the terror of an unremarkable reality and the hard choices it brings. With references to the veiled actions of identifiable performers—Hector Mannix, the withheld man, Boysie—Walcott describes Masmakers who succeed only because the overt symbolisms of their masques fail.18 Though known to his audience, Hector’s visibility is amplified. His voice deepens to a resonating growl that renders him both overheard and deeply inarticulate, except for the translated declaration that “It’s just a man.” Though, perhaps not enough of a man to be seen. Likewise, the peacock cannot see for itself; it is the man withheld inside of it who sees and must negotiate the fact that, though hypervisible in the public eye, he remains infinitely unknown. He, too, is “just a man.” Also, not enough to be seen. Only the collective admonition of self-conscious masqueraders can persuade the terrified child to dance, to join them. It is a serious dance, not unlike the ceaseless invitations of Soca artists who struggle to counteract the atrophy of the everyday. In the end, for all his powerlessness and fear, it is the child, not the rigged bat, who “collapses, sobbing.”19 See him. Know that an understanding of Carnival alone would be an insufficient consolation to him. For, whereas Carnival provides a symbolic experiential frame for encountering the grievances of vernacular existence, Mas is a praxis,

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a rhetorical method for navigating Carnival, implemented by those who dare to judge and long for change: the Masmakers. There are no dead metaphors here. They come alive, then come apart in front of us, forcing us to perceive them as plainly as time, circumstance, and the problem of our missing pieces will allow. The objective here is the amplification of lived realities, rather than their concealment.20 When cynicism no longer masquerades as shallow wonder, and is drained of its illusory strength—in rhetorical terms, its “persuasiveness”—I want to believe that those who understand these realities will encounter an interpretation of tradition that sheds its mythos for less varnished meaning. A Mas, whose face we know. Until then, this meditation on Mas as documentary, as documented intimacy, and as fine art enables us to not only demystify prevailing attitudes toward Carnival, or toward the Masmakers and their tactics of design and display within a Carnival context and beyond it. It enables us to consider how we see ourselves, our world, and our place(s) in it. Mas is not a wish for utopia or a second life, a life we do not have (and may be unlikely to acquire) as we tangle tirelessly with the absurdity of finite powers. It is the conscious embrace of a fragmented life in need of critique and the choice to engage in the subsequent repositioning of oneself that makes it possible to move people. At least, for me it is. In the context of a Caribbean worldview and its respective versions of impermanences and blindnesses that resonate throughout the region, we are introduced not to the means by which to magically improve the lived experiences of practitioners, their collaborators, and their audiences, but to what comes before and after all of that: the desire for a real, lasting freedom. Magic of a more practical sort. Wholeness of a consciously fragmented nature. We know (or will come to know) that these are real people making Mas, not just playing at it. We know that they are serious. We know that they transform not so they can hide in plain sight, but so they can be seen and be taken seriously. They unmask themselves where you would expect to see them covered up. It is in these moments that the effect of Mas as a demonstrative rhetoric of public interest is located, for it is in these moments that we recognize it as conscious display, with an agenda to match. “See us,” they demand. See us. Hear us. Rather than a performance hollowed of its meaning, a Mas whose face we know functions more urgently as conscious citizenship, its potential primed for a revival in contemporary life. It offers a method by which we ourselves are revived, as well. This is a serious dance, I think. A far cry from Prior’s civility (which I will get to shortly), or even the obscene contortions of Richard Bridgens’s Negro Figuranti (1836). We devise figuranti of our own, composing a spectrum of our own peculiar design.

Deliberative Daemonic: Making Mas Rhetorica

Steffano Orlando Marcano, chive farmer, Paramin, is now no longer himself alone, but the screaming Blue Devil who rallies his painted imps to scour the grotesque streets in town. An erstwhile daemon, Tracey Sankar turns, a little white woman (lost and found) enters her, she contorts, and the glistening cheeks of her skull sharpen. Her black hoof, heavy. Entranced, her guttural speech, her “You will not defile her!” What new, familiar terrors! We almost lose her. Stephanie Kanhai battles, battles. After a high fall (her stilts, leaving her) she will reach for sugar across the ocean of a stage. A tall twisted nymph, she will unfurl, find balance, then win. Jonadiah Gonzales waits like wire to be twisted, like wood to be shaped. A world of crossroads far beneath him, he waits. But then, a child discloses himself from beneath a werewolf mask. He is not the Lagahou’s painful reversion from shapeshifter to human. Not a lost changeling but somebody boy-child. Mine, maybe. Ours. Driven by their desires to be seen as they are, they express their respective subjectivities not in metaphor, but in the most human ways. So, for me to read their images literally—that is, strained of their pungent symbolism—is to encounter not only the inadequacy of metaphor, but to come to terms with my own inability to illuminate for myself what I usually miss. This is the only way to see people: in/on their terms, looking past their transformation into other things, leaning unapologetically (as this anonymous boy-child does, with his dry, blue skin) toward the acceptance of their own subjectivity, toward their own more literal versions of themselves. Put another way: See the boy-child, his boyhood. See his threatened manhood. See him. Know that a child is not a changeling. He will grow if left to grow, and if attended to. He smiles. Laughs. There is joy. (How could I suggest otherwise?) But the joy I witness in the maelstrom of Mas is of a more deliberative sort. Which is to say, it emerges from the conscious understanding of shared languages, techniques, experiences, and values and their respective expressions in public space. It is revolutionary in this way. And what I see at the center of this whirlwind of exposed hearts and bodies in the splendor of flight, loss, and desire is a people in the midst of negotiating

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crisis, tragedy, oppression, conflict, and joy. Their complexities manifest beyond Carnival.21 In the vacant ashes of these overtired metaphors, the massive strides of Moko Jumbies in an abandoned sugar factory elicit no irony, especially among those who remember the sweet stench of sugar and machinery, or the cane trash that blew, cutlass-shaped, into every house, darkening our already dark skins. They are lived realities, you see. Our realities. Looking now (or again) at these people dressed as things we’ve learned to fear, or to ridicule out of fear, or to chastise out of scorn, or to marvel at when we emerge from the Carnival having seen men breathe and eat fire, a woman transform, or people grow and grow— as if, some might say, by magic—we encounter a teaching moment. These daemons have something to teach us, and they make their respective arguments with paint, glue, and wire, with paper, cloth, and wood. So go meet them where they are. Likewise, considerations of rhetoric, rather than a series of purely esoteric inquiries, should likewise find their practical and situational grounding in the social milieux from which their rationales, urgencies, and outcomes emerged—and within which they were executed. This is Mas. It is the materialization of vernacular motives that make their way, under the direction of the performer, from abstraction to deliberation to execution: Praxis. I take this to mean that issues of identity, race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship do not simply occur in the abstract. Mas, put another way, is not a metaphor of anything. It is not some simpler articulation of a concept we have failed, or not tried, to adequately grasp. It is, instead, a metonym—a part, a fragment that represents and can compose the whole of a thing. A people—a people, in spite of our ironies. A singular expression of a larger concept, or the partial embodiment of its failure.22 It is not an analogy of a culture, but the culture itself, deliberate and concentrated. To consider Mas rhetorical, therefore, is to consider the extent to which the motives of the Blue Devils, La Diablesse, and the Moko Jumbies align with the outcomes their performances may produce. Because, a reflection on the motives of the performance connects us to the performers, not merely to what their symbols suggest. After all, what should we presume about the characteristics of these or any moving bodies without first considering their actions to be the manifestation of their motives? Just as these are bodies that belong to people who want to move (and have demonstrated a motive to do so), we will see that their dried skins and bones carry the fragments of a debt that blood and memory are compelled to pay. Half-naked in the road. Blue black bodies, thickly coated, crack in the sun. There are horns.

Deliberative Daemonic: Making Mas Rhetorica

There are hats. There are stilts. Rum and water. Exhaustion hangs about like a specter in the powdery smoke. Tar. The music playing. The iron hot. The blood hot. We push on. Onstage. Offstage. Bodies cramp, then fall apart for Mas. The Carnival, in this sense, becomes incidental. The Mas is where they go to find what they seek, and where I have to go to find them. Further in from here to find what I find in the in-between.

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Oversee

A SHOT IN THE DARK Toward a Poetics of Caribbeanist Photography

My Mania, My Mania is a Terrible Calm —DEREK WALCOTT, “Mass Man”

The light is different in the Caribbean. It behaves differently. A consequence of our location, we could argue. Light in a different place, full of different things, will be different. Two seasons of varying lengths. Wet and dry. Unannounced, clouds will gray into a curtain of rain that makes its way along the Northern Range, draping Valencia, Arouca, Tunapuna, Barataria. Then a darker gray, like the coast of Guadeloupe or Martinique at dusk—its powder blue and yellow lights. The near black pylons at Portsmouth. The black sands of Mero. The obstinate filters of bush and mist at midday on the Blanchiseusse Road. Twilight in Basseterre. The insistent staccato blue of police lights. Water, impossibly blue. Or green. Or brownish, near Pointe-à-Pierre or La Brea, where the asphalt buckets languish in the memory. Reddish, like the runoff near Kingston. Or white, crashing mercilessly at the rocks in Toco during the King Tide. Or bursting out of a standpipe near Morne La Croix or Cedros, where we sometimes stop to buy drinks that glisten and sweat in this heat. Night fires at Galeota, leaping from the tired waves and up. Up the eroding hill. Night fires at La Basse, near the wharf, the hospital, the cemetery. Our skins inhabiting that light. Our bodies corrupting the cold objectivity of sight, turning into vision. We are not damned, but sometimes this place. Light, in this place, is one of those fortunate inheritances, as we come to embody and celebrate the translucency of spirits that linger on the shore, on the road, in the forest. The light in this place will have you thinking the colors you see are a kind of beauty found only here, until you consider that the hue of a half-smoked cigarette left soaking in a rumshop glass belongs to a man who beats his wife when he cannot find peace at the end of his petit quart. You wonder what beauty there is in laying hands that cannot heal, but only for a moment. You learn to view the aesthetics of an encroaching highway on dried-up swampland, to ignore the condition of roofs that cover the hillside like a discarded archive until the wind takes them, shaking 33

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loose the big stones and heavy nails that held them. Until you realize your country is a children’s book left near an open window. Your country: an open book that no one wants to read. Your citizenship: a form of illiteracy. This may seem passé in a world of fewer and fewer surprises, of long-forgotten things. So, as an aide-mémoire to my thinking on Mas and of the work Caribbeanist Photography can do, I’ve had cause to ask without irony, “How does the Caribbeanist photographer see?” For a working definition, I will say that Caribbeanist Photography augments our subjectivities, facilitating the interplay of intent, symbolic representation, literal presentation, and interpretive engagement. Its discrete sensibilities are aligned more with display than with concealment, aligned more with demonstrating the amplification of the subject than with the immortalization of invisible, anonymous hardships. By emphasizing the desire among Caribbean people to be seen, it functions secondarily as a visual complement to the strategies of misdirection that have typically defined our oral traditions.1 Whereas our speech patterns may involve talking around things (and each other), Caribbeanist Photography is a look inward. In practice then, I ask, “How do I make an image of Caribbeanness—and Mas—that deliberately centers both the Caribbean subject and myself?” I admit to a certain bias—one that considers what will happen when my or my people’s blackness enters the frame.2 But I have cause. No analyses exist that would lead me to internalize (or emulate) a visual tradition that does not, cannot, or just refuses to see my people or me. I do not mean to suggest that Caribbeanist Photography either ignores or rejects the various “movements” in the development of Photography—from its Experimental Period, through Realism and Surrealism, Modernism, Postmodernism, and so on, into the Transhumanist present. We’ve never existed in a vacuum, so I don’t advocate some kind of “visual isolationism.” I mean, rather, that none of these traditions can satisfactorily account for the Caribbean subject. In this, I see a freedom. None can explain, to my satisfaction, expressions that emerge from the remaining fragments of gods, traditions, and languages that precede photography itself. It is a theoretical abyss from which the Caribbeanist photographer can emerge self-defined. Free, in a way. And really, what sentiments could any of these movements articulate on our behalf—from the absurdity of Pictorial aspirations, the coalescence of conflicting imagery, to the crumbling of master narratives and their persistence into our time—that have not already unfolded with violence, joy, or cynical flourish in our streets? Who but we can explain the causes of our pessimism, or even be inclined to seek an explanation for it? What dimensions of its practice haven’t

A Shot in the Dark: Toward a Poetics of Caribbeanist Photography

already come at the expense of a depressed class, the unyielding surveillance of humanity and its now-tamed and destroyed environment, the oppressive documentation of race, the decimation of languages and captured cultures, the ravaging of our bodies? When have subjugated people ever failed to serve as unwilling Chorus in the extensive play of Empire, or failed to master the harmonic tones of their anguish without tuning fork or hammer? Yet, though we may be held fast in an immortalized afterlife, in the stylized exposure to its miasmic gaze, it is still a gaze incapable of seeing us. What is the color of waiting? Is it black? Is it Mandinka black or Madras black? Is it black like me? Now, because the visual antecedents of Carnival reside much deeper in Black Antiquity than I am equipped to locate on my own, I must rely on the ironic/iconic misrepresentations that have defined vernacular existence in the New World. Deprived of the technologies that would have enabled my ancestors to visually document the history of their public performances, I turn to the work of others—former masters, whose surveillance of black and other racialized people preceded and seemed to complicate the very act of photography.3 Such is the calculus of racialized existence that we must engage its absurdities with patience. Or, when the moment comes, we must reorient ourselves to work within the capsized narrative of Caribbean history, to write or reclaim what remains of a half-broken self. (In truth, with this exploration, I also hope to gain some confidence for declarations to come, in spite of my discomfort with its inherent violence.) Less than a decade after Emancipation and the emergence of Carnival as a vernacular festival, visitors to the region were still unafraid to express their disdain for the black and brown people they encountered. Indeed, as the post-slavery anti-Reformist conversation gained momentum, writers were even more emboldened to register their whiteness with an absolute belief in the supremacy of the Crown and of its truest subjects. But there were unexpected consequences (I hesitate to call them “benefits”), of which, regarding Carnival in particular, two examples stand out. In 1847, Charles Day seemed to be describing the Diable Molassie with such accuracy that one might be grateful for the account: The primitives were negroes, as nearly naked as might be, bedaubed with a black varnish. One of this gang had a long chain and padlock attached to his leg, which chain the other pulled. What this typified I was unable to learn; but as the chained one was occasionally thrown down on the ground and treated with a mock bastinadoing [punishment by caning] it probably represented slavery.4

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Except, of course, his objectivity toward “the primitives” was counterbalanced with an unveiled racist frustration and a rather comprehensive disgust for those he encountered: Once for all, I disclaim any party. I am neither an emancipationist, nor an upholder of slavery. I have no interest in the matter either way; but, from observation, I feel assured that for negroes a restricted freedom is necessary, for they have not the judgment to conduct themselves properly, as white freemen would do; nor are they, in consequence, entitled to the same privileges.5

Framing what he thought he saw in recognizable European terms, he observed that “the predominating character was Pulinchinello [sic]; every second negro, at least, aiming at playing the continental Jack-pudding.” His descriptions went on, but I’ve been more interested in what he missed. By rendering themselves either invisible or practically unreadable, participants were able to engage in a form of what Simone Browne calls “dark sousveillance”—that is, practically removing themselves from view—leaving only a critique.6 Faced with such an opportunity, Day chose to overlook what lay un/hidden in the plainest of views: the crucial irony/iconography of black bodies that cast themselves as white buffoons within a white gaze. He missed that this was how they negotiated the violence of that gaze: with the collective mockery of a people, who learned that mockery could, in fact, prolong their lives. Noting that “whenever a black mask appeared, it was sure to be a white man,”7 Day seemed disinclined to note the obvious: embedded in the apparent mimicry of a wild but civilized Carnival were the implicit and explicit critiques of Empire. Black skins in white masks, celebrating. “This brilliant cortège,” he continued, “was marshalled forward by a huge negro, in a celestial dress, made after the conventional fashion of the angel Gabriel; and who stalked along, spear in hand, as if intent on doing dire deeds.”8 Not dire enough, as it turned out. By 1888, four years after the banning of torch processions, the immediate effects of the Canboulay Riots had faded from the public discourse, and the re-presentation of resistance as hollow mimicry had become the basis of a Carnival reconfigured for pleasure. That year, the event was documented by Melton Prior, a war correspondent for the Illustrated London News, serving as their “special artist” on a trip that included Central America, South America, and the West Indies. Depending on how one chose to look at it, his sketch, Carnival in Port of Spain, Trinidad, would either be the earliest known representation of an Anglophone Caribbean Carnival procession, or the earliest, most egregious misrepresentation of it.9 I’ve loved and loathed it for these very reasons over the years.

A Shot in the Dark: Toward a Poetics of Caribbeanist Photography

Carnival in Port of Spain, Trinidad, 1888 by Melton Prior (from the Author’s Collection)

Demonstrating a marked expansion of range compared to what Day had observed a few decades earlier, Prior’s work replicated many more of the major characters from the Commedia dell’Arte, including: Arlecchino (Harlequin), La Signora/Colombina, Pulcinella (Punch), Scaramuccia (Scaramouche), and the Dog.10 Leading the procession, the Arlecchino wears a four-point jester’s cap and a black, full-length bodysuit under black knickerbockers, from which extends its only inexplicable modification: a tail roughly the length of his body.11 In lockstep with him is Colombina, the traditional mistress to the Harlequin. Her dress covers her knees but bounces high enough to reveal striped stockings in festive mockery. Consistent with Day’s observations, their faces, along with the majority of Masmakers, are painted white.12 In contrast to the relative diversity of the masked performers, white spectators are depicted as a homogeneous, cohesive group— united, at least, in their observation and experience of the scene.13 Like his compatriots, Prior literally overlooked the acts of self-assertion and negotiation taking place in the streets by casting their actions solely in terms he could understand.14 In reality, the motives and actions of these Convois and their related performances couldn’t have been his concern. Why would I think they would be? I imagine that if Prior had actually “seen” the Arlecchino and Colombina, it

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was because he was looking at the Diable Molassie and Baby Doll, both of them classic examples of a vernacular response to economic dispossession and sexual violence. Both operated as rather obvious indictments of slavery and its legacy of toxic masculinity, which we have all inherited to some degree or another. Conditioned to accept the apparent authenticity of his reportage, his audience likewise had little need to critique his choices. As history would have it, we haven’t been quite so keen to criticize him, either. We’ve learned, instead, to cherish the historicity of his imprimatur, however inaccurate it may have been. He “saw” something. That much is certain. Whatever it was, Carnival now had a brand—a standard to which subsequent Carnivals could aspire. By the turn of the century, the image had become a quintessence, proof of a Carnival that never was.15 Gone from the public/published view were the detestable costumes of people desirous of more tangible freedoms. Even the pirates and indigenous costumes Day had observed. There are no animal costumes. No bulls or cows, bats or dragons. No vernacular daemons to teach or terrorize the suspecting and the unsuspecting. Instead, in the paint and frill, a more “civilized” Carnival iconography would be allowed to flourish—with Prior’s image at the helm—not only because it placed mimicry above the creativity of ordinary people occurring in the barrack yards and villages across the country, but also because it emphasized a desire for respect and respectability that the performance itself would promise but could never truly provide. While still celebrated for its grandeur and detail, I find that Carnival in Port of Spain, Trinidad remains a troubling reminder of the way misinterpretation and complicity enable the visual whitewashing of (a) public(’s) memory.16 In these examples, I also find a critical lesson: that Empire, as we have come to understand it, is fundamentally incapable of reflection, incapable of seeing itself reflected in the face of the other. Or, put another way, it is only capable of appreciating its debilitating effects on others as “assimilation” or “mimicry” and, thus, undeserving of either its empathy, understanding, or much else.17 Power cannot see itself in us; we make poor mirrors and are not as reflective as we may think. Nor can we truly see ourselves in it, or in whatever it reflects. No meaningful idea of ourselves will come from an exploration of its bloody chambers—only the echoes of a vacated conscience, the ghosts of long forgettings. The effects of this fact are still felt by us, and in the most inelegant material ways: the benign-sounding Windrush generation or the cartoonish-sounding “brain-drain,” for instance, which left more than a generation of low-skilled, low-paying labor to fill the void left in the islands.18 I know it seems as if I’m discussing the past, but it only seems that way. The tyrannies of then are also the tyrannies of now—the same,

A Shot in the Dark: Toward a Poetics of Caribbeanist Photography

except they’re delivered to us more seamlessly, with the subtle intensity of normal(ized), everyday life. But seen unfiltered through those blue and green waters, it can resemble the sludge that floods Port of Spain like a malady after a short downpour. So, as I consider image-making in general and the work of Caribbeanist Photography in particular, I recognize the necessity of (making) a declaration of an entirely different sort—reviving it, really, as an ethic. For the Caribbeanist photographer, I believe there may be no greater transgression than a failure to be as vulnerable as those who dare to be seen, and who can see you coming from a distance. Sometimes they will pose, other times not.

Never See? Caribbeanist Photography, like all other forms, is a consideration of light. For us, though, it is also a consideration of the legacy of light— the fact that light has enabled us to perceive “legacy” as a lingering unease about ourselves. Light, as a medium of visualized pessimism that materializes over time, crystallizing into a reality. Light, as an illumination of lost things—of loss. In spite of what a slow shutter or a shallow depth of field may make of our subjects’ edges, we often do not openly reflect on the sanctity of our likeness in such a way. But we know the contempt intimately. We’ve learned the hard way that to be a black person in this place is to be a black body. It is to be framed as a perennial outsider but not seen; a Maroon in the midst of one’s own life but never welcomed into it; one of the many outsiders, one of a multitude of bodies dis/united in the marronage of disparate nationalisms and individualisms that can barely withstand a hard rain, let alone a disaster. It is to be held within the frame of a particular gaze yet subtly, and violently, held out of focus. It is to be named, perhaps, like the epitaphic headlines on the front pages of reputable newspapers. Named, but unknown. An identified object. Or, it is to be framed as a “concept,” by a colleague, who, upon meeting me, regarded the full length of my blackness, disregarding it. Inconceivable. Articulate, perhaps, but misunderstood. Viewed similarly, we understand that to be Caribbean—existing as we do in the afterlife of slavery—is to be fundamentally inconceivable and unknowable. To be photographed in that gaze is not merely to have that unknowability composed exclusively in light and shadow, but to risk having contemptible blackness becoming permanent, as a photograph. A photograph of blackness held in perpetual contempt. It is, furthermore: to be reminded of what (not really who) you were or might have been;

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to admit finally that you are a fiction that struggles to take shape, before the lens turns toward you and you pose and you smile, in spite of your shame; to grieve for the reality of a place and time you can never know; and to toil at your fictional self-creation in the hope that it will crystallize into meaning for you, and that it might even crystallize for the rest of us. To be a Caribbeanist photographer is to recognize these risks are not exclusive to the objectified subject. Until we are understood enough to be accepted, or acceptable enough to be regarded, we are all forced to remain in the vestibule of the camera. We all wait within the miniaturized architecture of the camera, noting its lenses and frames, composing but also conspiring. For, if these are some of the inherent dangers of image-making, we will inevitably be compelled to declare ourselves accordingly. For the sake of urgency, I situate my own declaration—as human, humanist, and Caribbeanist photographer—in the very terms those former masters may have hoped, with their re-presentations, to civilize, to sanitize, and to silence. I declare that I am first and foremost a black mind in a black body, that I am alive in this afterlife. I say this—or, rather, I have had to remember how to say this— without shame or apology, and with as little hesitation as I expect to be misperceived. Whether at work or at rest, by participants or spectators, with or without a camera in my hand, there can be no pretense in this fact, nor any avoiding it for the sake of preserving respectable discussion. So listen. Understand when I say, “try not to keep too close a pace with me,” I mean only that whips crack in my memory. My majesty is borrowed and well worn, and I am punctuated with expectations of laughter and gunfire in equal measure. I mean only that I am from a small place, where I think too often of the dead and the living. In my desperate moments, I weep half-drunk to music I cannot recall, or recall only in melody, as if they’d been given to me in a dream. Is it Chopin? DesVignes? Rachmaninoff? Samaroo? Is it Brathwaite or Carter? Maybe. I declare that I am a black mind in a black body; that I shake as my people do, with such beautiful, rhythmic fear that it is mistaken for dancing; that I twist and wring myself in time with them; that, for them, I drain seduction from the photograph’s promise. I declare that I am still alive. Still, sometimes, but alive. Living, in a way, so I can see what I haven’t yet seen, coming to terms with the fact that there are people and things I will never see. But knowing my people are more than things to me.

A Shot in the Dark: Toward a Poetics of Caribbeanist Photography

So, I say, see me narrowly, at first. Then, stretching as much as you dare, learn to see the breadth of me. Echoes escape from each of my pores. Every bone would break if I do not move. My lungs would collapse if I do not bawl from time to maddening time. I am a Caribbean man, not a tantrum or a tempest. I am both image and the envisioning of that image. Its corruption. I am both the dark chamber and the subject written in light on my retina. I am both the seer and the seen, though blind. Infinite and infinitely vulnerable. I am a beauty in this light, Caribbean. A presence in the process. Simultaneous. A Caribbean man. A site, unseen. The facts of black life can often take the form of lamentations, the recursive actions of hymns and headlines that frame for us how we matter—although, now I wonder if I’ve gone too far. Of course, I’ve known about this black Caribbeanness of mine most of my life, descended as I am from a people taught to respect the panoptic reach of power and to whisper our grievances against whiteness (even when there are no white people around to catch us in the act). Vena, my grandmother, taught me, though I didn’t always have the language for it. I’ve known, but the internal politics of my blackness has only ever been a private concern, its vagaries and dangers were only my battle to wage. I know, too, that I am more than just that (just as I know that there are others to whom appeals can be made for recognition, others whose appeals matter in their own way). But I live in the world—in this skin—where the waves of invisibility and hypervisibility erode my naïveté and remind me daily that my people don’t always possess the means, the access, or the infrastructure to determine who we are and how we wish to be seen. So I say these words aloud, in a single-tone, like a lavway.19 This is not a lamentation. Though, at times, I dance it as if I were dancing a kalinda,20 my inherited bwa mounted loosely between my fingers, dancing in and out of unresolved rage like Lovelace’s Bolo before he comes apart.21 I have cause. I’ve communed over the past few years with vulnerable bodies. I photograph vulnerable bodies. And I am utterly unable to protect them. More troubling is the fact that I’ve lately come to associate being seen with an unshakable sense of dread, taking pains to negotiate the fact that I am regarded and disregarded with equal ease wherever I may be: at home, at work, in the street, at a restaurant, at an airport, in a classroom. I live with the fact that there is no safe place for me.

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If I chose to believe it, this would be my world’s message to me: You do not belong where you are—wherever that is, whoever you are or think you are. Run. Do not arm yourself. Run. Do not fight. Or walk, talk, love in the unlit streets. Run.

I am unable to protect myself most days, but I hardly ever run. It may be genetic or cultural, but I stay and try to do the work, helping when I can. I struggle with this, with the impotence of my vision, the risk of reinforcing that impotence, its futility becoming more evident in each frame. I photograph in defiance of that, and because of it all. To forestall my coming apart, I join a chorus of the tenuous witnesses that make up this place. I find reasons to go looking for them. Together, we temper our ability to negotiate the subtle disharmonies of Mas. It’s how a declaration becomes more than the sum of its words. Its utility, I tell myself, will become apparent somewhere in the midst of a Mas and after it. And make no mistake; I consider the danger of my declarations in practice, just as I consider what Caribbeanist Photography can be. Existing as I do, as a hypervisible and overexposed human, I am genuinely afraid to express the abstractions of my blackness. Most days, I would rather avoid them. But I can’t avoid them: every aspect of my life confirms the persistence of its afterlife, such that the privilege of my seeing comes at a price that demands more than my vulnerability. It emphasizes a reality I must either confess or self-consciously affirm. I choose to affirm. So see me. See us. Silently at first, before framing, before shooting. As a Caribbeanist photographer and scholar (in this very particular body of mine), I deal with the fact that my body and my vision are as constrained and endangered as my subjects. I remember being poked on the forehead by a colleague and told, “You’ve got a brain in there, man!” And asked once by another who saw me walking to my office, “Who is that fine specimen?” (We are handled and gazed upon, and the tragic strength of that violence resonates in compliments— these “well-intentioned” violations—that manage to break a person.) Regardless of whether I am behind the camera or in front of it, the frame persists, making what it will of me—of us. I can escape the gaze no more than my people can escape it. I have no more authority to see them than they have to demand their privacy from that gaze. We are—equally, unequally—subject mostly to the consumption of an audience at odds to understand us. We are often at odds to understand ourselves implicitly as equals. History has all but forbidden it. In spite of this absence of power, I still believe that attention to the

A Shot in the Dark: Toward a Poetics of Caribbeanist Photography

Caribbeanist photographic gaze can help us understand the people these photographs are intended to represent, if not understand ourselves. I proceed (perhaps naïvely) in the hope that some clarity will follow, or that I will end up there. I will use my vision and the dark chamber of my accidental body for this purpose, and to resolve the paradoxes of fragmentation and coalescence. They are both oriented toward the need for a sense of wholeness (whether unimaginable or unimagined). This is part of the burden and the joy of the craft. My sensibilities drive me, pushing hard against my physical limitations: the eyes, the once half-broken back, the poor knees. It is a small act of identification, as far as revolutions and other vernacular measures are concerned, but I am obliged not to frame my work in the same way I am framed, or to view it in the same way as I am viewed, but rather to identify with them in a way that rejects objectivity from the beginning. This is the closest I can get to my people as “a people”—the closest I have been (and felt) in decades. Now, it’s as if I am only able to find my bearings in the midst of lives already in progress, learning again to breathe among those already contorting to fit the anemic claustrophobia of the unfinished lives that came before them, defiant in spite of the intrusion of another gaze—mine, this time. Having embraced the hard-won narcissism of my troubled blackness, I still wrestle with Frantz Fanon’s warning. Regarding the mythic impulse of the “educated Negro” to reconnect himself to his people, Fanon recognizes a tendency toward an imperious voyeurism that outdoes that of the dominant culture. He finds himself, so to speak, in the “vast black abyss” of his people.22 I check myself repeatedly. Even so, it is among them—my people—that I’ve come to understand what the photograph could be for us: more than just a violation of black bodies, of our broken histories, or of the spirits we keep; more than an avoidance of the acquisitive ideals that define all acts of colonizing, but also its opposite. In short, I approach Caribbeanist Photography as a potential emancipation. Its points of focus and departure are the illegible, unknowable bodies of the practitioners who all come from elsewhere to make up the image, making new origins in the absence of other un/knowable ones. Never truly here, nor ever really still.23 Reading its inherent constraints through the filter of history, a photograph may easily be a port, or a prison cell, a temple, or the hold of a ship. But I try not to claim it as an origin in itself. I suggest, instead, that with Caribbeanist Photography, an understanding of the multiple focal points and departures will essentially constitute an argument of origins—un/known, com/posed, and re/membered. And lucky for us, for it is how we come to understand the need for a more deliberate crafting of literal presences through a consideration of the photograph—as well as our roles in its composition, production, and

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distribution. We may conclude that its relationship to Mas is almost essentialist. More accurately, we may say that each photograph is a metonym, existing as part of the almost indecipherable organic grammar of material engagement and symbolic suggestion that define our cultural experience—a fragment in need of other fragments for its meaning, like us. In the context of Caribbeanist Photography, the photograph evokes an existential paradox that I am hard-pressed to resolve on my own.24 So when I make the connection between the subject and the photograph, I don’t mean that Caribbeanist Photography is “like a Mas” in some loose, comparative sense. It is a Mas, in the particular sense of being a critical visual response (to the iconography of Charles Day and Melton Prior, of Richard Bridgens and William Blake, even of Isaac Mendes Belisario and Adolphe Duperly, who all helped illustrate the origins of representations of Blackness in the Caribbean). It is also a Mas in the sense that it implicates the photographer and the viewer in the performer’s project of self-referential exposure. In doing so, it enables the visual reorientation of how we approach the vernacular subject—that is, we are encouraged to identify (with) the subject as something more than the result of trauma and exotica, indeed as more than something altogether, as more than objects collected to populate or color the frame. As someone. This action is also a reflection on the intentions of the photographer—that is, the photographer must also participate in that reorientation. Because, if it is that the photographer in this craft wants to see differently (and I know I do) then he’d have to acknowledge the extent to which he is implicated in the event. I am a presence in the process, we must each declare. This is not just a rejection of passivity or objectivity. No, considering the idea of self-conscious presence in the photographic process, the photographer not only reflects but also refracts what he sees. At times, we refract tragic things—the tragedy of mundane things that we are compelled to refract. Thinking with Edouard Glissant, I would say that Caribbeanist Photography is also a “tragic action”25 that demands not only a declaration of the desire for a power we have never possessed, but also a visceral awareness of its overarching presence in our lives. Our collective awareness of powerlessness is something they both demand. With Caribbeanist Photography, as with Mas, we establish, understand, and sustain the legitimacy of our bonds by presenting visual evidence of what ails us. This awareness also serves as a declaration of our shared intent: to survive, to undermine the acceptance of virtual absence, and to enact a desire for meaningful presence. In spite of our stolen beginnings, we will remember that we are not merely the sum total of traumas endured by the generations that have made us. That, at least, is the idea. The enduring pessimism of Caribbeanness comes from the knowledge

A Shot in the Dark: Toward a Poetics of Caribbeanist Photography

of the idea coupled with the knowledge that our freedom has yet to occur—the fact that while we wait, we are not free. For whom, I wonder, does this constitute the greater failure? For the oppressor or the oppressed, who seem to capitulate to the cycles of oppression and who (regardless of the exhaustion they observe) still think they benefit from the operation of its tremendous machinery? My reason for all this musing ought to be clear: the camera is Empire. And, if you happen to see Blue Devils pointing at the lens, pointing into it, pointing at and into you, the significance of their indictment would be just as clear as a thesis of a vernacular critique that challenges you to reflect. Having reflected on it, I think it would be just as obvious to you as the provenance of their gestures of mockery, rejection, and threat. They will almost damn you, resisting your gaze until you show some courage, looking not at them but at yourself. They will almost damn you, until you see them and yourself in them (through the lens they make for you). They will almost damn you, until you can admit to yourself what they always already know: If Mas and the photograph are representative of Caribbean existence, then we must conclude not just that the camera, in its discrete architecture of chambers, lenses, and frames, is Empire. But also, this: Empire is a camera. Of this fact, there can be no debate. It makes things of people— metaphors, detached from their extant realities and subsequently misapplied to some concept, some foreign context. It was designed to frame and to exert control—first, over man’s environment, then more deliberately over those who populated it. It has been used to make meanings of things, of people and their ways, and to systematically undo them. Whether aesthetic or empirical, whether unscientific, mystical, or magical, this is the fact. It is inseparable from the camera’s history as its predecessors and pioneers are from my own. In plain terms, therefore, the camera is as much “the master’s tool,” as sketch artists’ pens and their intricate woodcuts for the press.26 Dehumanizing in its essence. Colonizing since Niépce’s 1826 View from the Window at Le Gras. Recalling the gaze of the camera’s pioneers, both their vantage points and their processes, I have little difficulty seeing how their impositions could leave my sentimentality for shutters and lenses relatively underexposed. Emboldened by the ethos of Mas—by the pointing finger that is both material and symbol—I have even less difficulty locating the provenance of my suspicions. For, what is metaphor in the Caribbean than memory reframed or reworded, a creative nonfiction more easily consumed? What is memory to us, a people forced to read, and to consume, ourselves in costume? What is memory to us, when history is a chronicle of sadisms for which revision offers neither recompense nor reparation? What is it to us, other than a masochism to which we return, again and again, for a

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resolution too long expired? What is metonym to us, but a photograph of our people caught in motion? If that is the case, I hope you will understand why the camera is no different in its form and no less brutal in the origin of its function than the chambers and doors of no return at Elmina. Elmina, on the Ghanaian coast—where the first ideas of us began to take shape in darkness unlike any we could imagine, where countless retinas had their first glimpse of a World they could not truly see, one which waited across the expanse of an ocean to make me and my people who we are now. Truths that may have existed before that time and space are lost to me: interrupted, stolen, and allowed to calcify into myth. Echoes of life, still in those bloody chambers, or in the sea (impossibly blue) where history was supposed to have truly begun for my people.27 My people, for whom Empire has always been a camera, for whom history is a memory only half-remembered. Before “the Caribbean” was crafted in full, my people were already irreconcilable. Unknowable. They were already only versions of their former selves by the time they emerged from the unspeakable holds of ships, spilling out raped, broken, and bloodied onto the decks, across the bouncing planks of gangways like shadowy marionettes. Strung and danced into the visuality of an unimaginable reality that had already witnessed an Indigenous genocide. They were already circumscribed with stick and stockade, with bit and piquet, with this too-different light and this too-familiar shadow, already primed for the vulgar consumption of discriminating eyes and appetites. These cruelties reverberate in the most basic functions of photographic practice, unchanged for almost two centuries. It isn’t wise to forget one’s bearings. And, whenever I do, Mas. Mas. Mas reminds me that I’ve never been to Elmina, except in memory and spirit. Its vague cruelties play on my retina as if they’d come to me in a dream like a melody of irresolute sorrows and sacred pleasures. Like a requiem for the living, who remain to haunt the afterlife of a present with something that looks like joy when performed in this light. This different light of ours. Like the different light in Moruga— where I have been, where the long tragedy of Caribbean inhumanities began with the arrival of Columbus in 1498, and where Merikins live like local enigmas, who refuse to outlive the irony of their arrival.28

Come, See! I hope you will have noticed by now that I’ve chosen to reconfigure the frame as a liberatory instrument. The critical difference for me is that

A Shot in the Dark: Toward a Poetics of Caribbeanist Photography

I see Caribbeanist Photography as an emancipatory practice. A praxis that facilitates the desire to be seen, rather than exalting the seer. By articulating a right to look that is shared among the photographer, the subject, and the viewer, all are invited to be seers, to make visual meaning of the declarations they witness. “The right to look,” Mirzoeff asserts, “is not simply a matter of assembled visual images but the grounds on which such assemblages can register as meaningful renditions of a given event.”29 This is a departure from the right claimed by Niépce or Daguerre (whose pioneering efforts were both the result of them stalking their respective environments and the people within them through windows at a distance). In rejecting their methodology at its core, the Caribbeanist photographer counteracts the effects of Empire—not by discarding the camera or even the vocabulary of the craft, but by collectively reconfiguring the impositions and compositions of power on the powerless. Of course, the old parameters of racialized subjectivities do not (ever) really disappear. We remain very much in our skins. But we also claim the potential to take new shape. In other words, absent of the desire to colonize bodies and minds (or even the presumed, imagined power to do so), the Caribbeanist photographer is freed to work with/in the revised context of the frame, perhaps even making the frame a safe place for himself. This matters to me, obviously. The craft is not without an element of self-interest. From my point of view as a Caribbeanist photographer, however, I see framing no longer as an exclusionary act of defiance misdirected or misapplied to an obstinate picturesque or a more disloyal postmodern imaginary.30 We all have access to the frame and, by default, share the responsibility for what occurs there. A photograph, then, is not just interpretation of a vision—it’s an attitude materialized. Not just the reception of the image, but the artful expression of a willful conception of image-making on the part of the photographer. Not just an argument, in other words, but also a visual poetics. A photograph, like a port, or a prison cell, or the hold of a ship, is not the only origin we perceive, but it is a site of infinite beginnings that we alone can truly envision, if not name. This means the photographer cannot merely be a passive reflection or (even more passive) a reflecting surface for all that he sees. We must also be the locus of multiple influences—political, spiritual, religious, cultural, etc.—that extend beyond the reach of the device as we craft an intricate vision of missing pieces. That is, the Caribbeanist photographer is able to both develop and be read as a body of work and as a site for curating bodies of work and the work of bodies and minds. Truth is, I can’t think of another way to consciously inhabit the space between the still life that the image embodies and the afterlife that it envisions. In flux, bound in/by change, but also in focus. Seeing—and

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being seen—not as myth but as origin. Following that, I think it will soon become necessary to not only embrace an understanding of the afterlife to which we belong, but also to forge a life of our own from it. One that, like the process of image-making, pushes past the foregone conclusion of our limited vitality in this world. (That, too, is a kind of success, isn’t it?) It may be that the life I (and others) imagine exists only between still life and afterlife as I’ve described it, and that the only difference between that life and death is the self-awareness that manifests as a critical acceptance of one’s right to refuse—a deliberate refusal and the emancipatory characteristics of that refusal expressed in the resulting image. In my case, I’ve also been fortunate to observe and understand what it means for refusal to be viewed as a reflective power, in spite of my imagined connection to my people, or theirs to me. Their refusal to become the unwitting afterlife of a photographic moment functioned as a form of self-preservation that silences the gratification of the shutter and my own desire to preserve what I had the privilege to witness. In this, I learn that I am entitled to nothing. More generally, their refusal also reinforces the idea for me now that the vernacular subject, though politically and economically dispossessed, still (always) reserves the right not to be seen. It bears noting that each refusal is an admission that my subjects, my people, and I are surveilled by this device, and more importantly that we have tacitly refused to exist solely as subjects without any real subjectivity. As each photographer embraces the solitude of this craft of still frames and moving bodies, each will already know that the idea of producing work “for its own sake” is a luxury we dare not afford. Though not all sentimentally bound by the shared fact of our powerlessness, we refuse to encounter history or the consequence of oppression as if they were our only option. We refuse to embrace the blasphemy of our fantastic, unfortunate pasts (and futures) in secret. That, too, is our right. But many of us are still ashamed, still deeply hesitant to claim the vagaries and flaws of our fragmented selves in public, where everyone can see that we are sensuous and so beautifully ambivalent. (“Never so ashamed,” as the saying goes, “as in a Carnival.”) The dust will settle again, and we will remember there are no reparations for lost vision. There are no reparations for a vision that goes unrecognized, nor one that fails to see wholeness as possible, whatever the price. Concerning such a price, Harris argues that, “The price of wholeness is a fiction that so relives the fragmentation of cultures that it cannot be duped by ideal rhetoric or faiths or falsehoods . . . [it] releases partiality to confront itself in others as a necessary threshold into the rebirth and the unity of Mankind beyond the rhetoric of salvation, beyond the rhetoric of damnation.

A Shot in the Dark: Toward a Poetics of Caribbeanist Photography

Wholeness is a third dimension in which every mask suffers the kinship of exchange, the kinship of glory, the kinship of humiliation.”31 For us, photography, the photographs, and our methods of conceiving them have to be more than they appear to be because we long to be more than missing pieces, more than celebrants in the myths of our cultural origins, more than conspiratorial shadows that wait for light. We walk and creep and dance through this afterlife of ours, through the in-betweenness of our Jouvay sensibilities, refusing (and refusing) to sit still, like ash when the party is done, when fêted blood cools, and fetid bodies make their way back home or back to the sea. Where beneficent spirits wait, hand in hand with malevolent ones— waiting for us with a history made whole. Where we see an image of ourselves waiting to take shape—a life waiting to begin again.

Comme Ça! I’ll say it again: this collection of Mas photographs—held together in the fragile context of a Carnival—is a poetics. It is grounded in an embodied struggle to gather some of the fragments of Caribbean vernacular expression into something self-referential and less incoherent than the discarded body, the errant limb, the unnecessary ruin, the unwanted parts of a fortunate pose, the unattractive and beautiful, the ugly and captivating, the fat, thin, or strong. It seeks what exists beyond the shameful perfection of a colonial vision that has hardened inside of us. It embraces the bodies hunted in the frenzied margins of daylight and nighttime, the hearts broken and hands that hold them. It envisions identity, which does not come when called, nor form out of ash and dust when ordered to do so. If this position seems a little idealistic, it’s probably because no act of self-assertion is without melodrama. More so, even with my endangered vision I see, on the jagged horizon of contemporary life, an end to the oppressive dis/ease of hegemony—a refusal of it. I see an awareness that willfully subordinates the fictions of inherited visions in favor of less filtered realities. I see these images offering a somewhat clearer view of what contemporary life has promised, and what it was perfectly designed to forestall: A wholeness pursued, but yet to be attained. A future desired, but yet to be composed. A freedom paid for, but yet to be claimed. A life posed, but yet to be seen. A reflection. A refraction. What do we know? Nothing.

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Nothing that isn’t already painfully obvious to those of us with eyes to see, or bodies to feel. Fortunately, a critique of the white gaze doesn’t require my subscription to it—or yours. Instead, we have the opportunity to see our reflections in others’ faces, in the curve and angle of bodies bending low to the ground, twisting upward, dashing laterally across the frame. This is how we understand that no gaze will ever compensate for the cynicism, scorn, and misunderstanding we have learned to keep, in secret, for ourselves. Gradually, the privilege of seeing will fade, leaving behind a stark reality: for bodies like mine that seem to exist invisibly in the ether, or those who seem to emerge from the literal underclass, crossing the Diametre into the apparent normalcy of the day to day, there is no representation of truth that slander, gossip, flattery, provocation, violence, or light will not seek or attempt to undo. This reflection, like blindness, is not a trick of light. The least the photographer can do—or needs to do—is be present to make a Mas with the camera, and hope that nothing obscures the lens as our people celebrate and suffer, searching everywhere for the courage to ask not only whose vision we emphasize if not our own, but why and what could that alternate presence really mean for us? Those things will reveal themselves in time. What I can say is this: People cannot be moved through mere abstraction. They will not allow it. And where but among others can any of us be expected to locate the equipment for living our imperfect lives, or to perfect the instrumentation of our bodies and the insinuation of our motives into public space, where neither they nor we can be denied? People, you know, are not abstractions. They cannot be moved in absentia, either. You will always have to go in search of them, even now. There really is no other way. Conversely, between still life and afterlife, between the lens and those who colonize your vision, you—Caribbeanist photographer, human—will, at times, be more like a spirit, your practice more like a haunting than an art. You are there but not there, seeing and failing to see, infinitely present but invisible. You will remain this way until the people you decide to see decide to see you, to look at you crouching and crawling, at times close enough to be a nuisance they tolerate but will not name, one they will trust but will not always believe. There, you learn (or remember) that you are in a place where spirits have a responsibility. Real or less real, ethereal or made of pained and painted flesh, even spirits have work to do. So do the work. Do the work. And let the spirits—and the daemons they possess—do theirs.

SERIES

SEEING BLUE For all the seeing it can enable, this craft is one of conjuring our missing pieces—pieces missing from the start, or shortly after it. It is the collection and tenuous resetting of broken bones and of kept, forgotten pieces. It is a conjuring up of missing things that cannot be bestowed with sight alone, but also with vision. It’s what’s required to see what exists beyond the boundary of the frame and beneath the mystery of unexplored shadow. Emerging from a need to respond to the ubiquitous stain of Empire, it does not memorialize, nor can it create what is not there to be seen. (In time, you will see that neither Mas nor this craft will allow those things.) It is, rather, the art of memory’s inadequacy, the declaration that there is something worth remembering, worth seeing, and worth looking for—and that it is gone away from you (returning, now and again, in parts, like a flawed lover to your mad and vulnerable days). We are here to embrace all of it, knowing we entangle ourselves as much in loss and missing as with challenges of sight. —PARAMIN AND PORT OF SPAIN, 2014

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Seeing Blue

Brandon “Redman” Reese picks up dollar bills with his mouth. Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2015.

Seeing Blue

Ashton “Spooky” Fournillier, bandleader of the “Redhead Devils,” at Traditional Mas Competition at Adam Smith Square, Woodbrook, 2016

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Seeing Blue

Steffano “Steffi” Marcano blows fire toward the Judges’ Area during Traditional Mas Competition. Adam Smith Square, Woodbrook, 2016 (right) “Steffi” dances. Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014.

Seeing Blue

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Seeing Blue

Seeing Blue

Jeron Pierre, with face painted white and a mouth full of “blood” (red food dye). Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014. (left) Deon “Froggy” Letren, known for “crying” before he blows fire. Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014.

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Alexie Joseph, Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014. First in a series of two.

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Alexie Joseph, Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014. Second in a series of two.

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“Steffi” reminds us that “all skin-teeth ent joke.” Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014.

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Jamal Joseph, after the last performance of the day. Adam Smith Square, Port of Spain.

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“Steffi” at Traditional Mas Competition. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2014.

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Alexie Joseph sprays fire. Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014.

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A boy (anonymous) in a wolf mask. Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014.

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Brandon’s wirebended wings. Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014.

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A “Boy Wolf” held in check by an older, more experienced Blue Devil. Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014.

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“Froggy” blows fire from a flambeau (torch) after crying and pretending to pray to it. Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014.

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A dismembered baby doll, bloodied and blue. Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014.

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“Froggy” blows fire for the crowd, having gone through his extensive crying ritual. Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014.

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A Blue Devil holds a dollar on “The Avenue.” Ariapita Avenue, Woodbrook, Port of Spain, 2014. (right) Alexie Joseph applies paint to his face. Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014.

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Ncosi Joyeau points at the lens, indicting and inviting the viewer to reflect. Ariapita Avenue, Woodbrook, 2014. (right) Syncretism of Catholic iconography and less obvious features of African and Hindu traditions that center (on) the body. Woodbrook, Port of Spain, 2014.

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A refusal of access. Ariapita Avenue, Woodbrook, 2014. (right) “Steffi” dances. Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014.

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Shane St. Hillaire attempts to interact with a distracted spectator. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2014. (left) “Frenchy” crosses the main stage in the Queen’s Park Savannah, after competing throughout the city. Port of Spain, 2014.

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Sharing a laugh after a performance, Emilio Constantine embraces himself. Adam Smith Square, Port of Spain, Trinidad, 2014. (right) “Spooky” blows fire for Traditional Mas Competition. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2014.

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Renaldo (“Uno”) offers an alternative to “begging” and other forms of materialism. Queen’s Park Savannah, Port of Spain, 2014. (left) Shane St. Hillaire makes his presence felt on the Queen’s Park Savannah stage. Port of Spain, 2014.

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Nigel Pierre, resting after the Queen’s Park Savannah performance. Victoria Avenue, Port of Spain, 2014. (right) “Steffi” feigning shock. Ariapita Avenue, Woodbrook, 2014.

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Of seeing and of being seen. Queen’s Park Savannah, Port of Spain, 2014.

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Tracey Sankar admonishes the photographer, or whoever she imagines will see the image. Port of Spain, 2014.

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“Frenchy” at rest. Revellers revel, spectators spectate. South Quay, Port of Spain, 2014.

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Roger Holder interlocks with a police constable. Piccadilly Greens, Port of Spain, 2014.

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Amaron St. Hillaire, a Blue Devil painted in white, leads his group out of the darkness. Fatima Junction, Paramin, 2014.

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Ricardo Felicien, a Blue Devil painted in white and sequined, during Traditional Mas Competition. Adam Smith Square, Woodbrook, 2016

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Andrew “Nykimo” Nicholas, another white devil, gets glittered for a performance in St. James Amphitheatre. St. James, 2017.

Note to a Self, Possessed

S E E I N G B LU E Genesis of Public Executions

A screaming man is dancing. Bare. His chest and back and feet are exposed. His wireframe wings sway like mad counterweights to his light, frenetic step. Right to his left. Left to his right. His beauty and his artistry seem untamed, almost accidental. Carved, almost, from a single piece of Kapok wood. Look. He is dancing a familiar and vulgar reality of hard times and of pleasure, of sweetened suffering and of synchronized shadows—dancing in a way we have yet to learn. He is (as best you can tell) unapologetic. His band taunts him mercilessly, jabbing him with a rhythm beat on burned-out biscuit pans: Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! This rhythm is old (only an old rhythm will do for this dance), with little space for well-worn hands and insistent feet to evolve in the time that’s passed. He and others like him pour from the everyday obscurity of a Paramin dawn and into the harsh materiality of Port of Spain—a capital of common people. Their screams are the piercing throes of a culture fighting for its life—and losing, gradually— or maybe they are the sharpened sighs of a people who struggle to endure what blue can do to bare skin. It burns. Now, the screaming man is breathing fire. He spits out the excess before it bursts into flames too close to his tongue. Two more join him with their sooted flambeaux bottles and pitchforks of wood and PVC. They, too, know how power is imposed on their bodies and their tongues. It tastes like pitch oil, like cruelty refined. Bathed in it, the stench of a smoldering dump so close to the city is almost undetectable to you, though it casts a suffocating shroud over the people in Beetham, in Morvant, and in Laventille. It can, at times, stretch farther West, into Belmont. Farther still, toward rarified Glencoe and Carenage, where my 91

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grandmother is from. Behind the bridge, another pair of devils poses with other people’s children as if they were a family. They pretend to smile for the camera. Then they scatter, abandoning their borrowed children, blocking lenses, demanding attention and money. The drama in this collection of tithes is, I think, a perfected mockery of dreams deferred. You are their photographer. They do not know, or seem to care, who you are. And why should they? You’ve been drafted in a rush. Although your vision will produce more failure than success, more frustration than peace, you take a certain pride in seeing what you think others cannot. Now, you wait for them, knowing they will make you pay for everything you see, that their coming heralds the return of an unease you usually keep hidden away. Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! The Blue Devil Mas is coming. Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! This is what you must do: First, do not run. Know that they are coming to draw things out of you. So you should try to prepare for it. When you see them, you must try to remember that your presence is a consequence of your privilege, that witness is its own responsibility. Failing to do that, you should revert to a more basic differentiation: remember who you are as you note the differences between “you” and “them.” They are grotesque and obscene, a cliché of a past that you have learned (or have been encouraged) to forget. They are playful and amusing, certainly. Fun, in a primal sort of way. But they go to an uncomfortable extreme. They drag a dismembered baby doll around with knotted rope, like they drag each other. Rope can cut when dragged along the skin, but never mind that. In this light—between sleep and wake— it’s easy to mistake them for wild, erotic things, to read their indecency and their defiance of gravity as a political statement. A physical tirade. A mounted sermon. Unlike this mob, you have learned to corral your response to such outbursts with cool, academic restraint. You have no difficulty framing their resistance as cathartic, but also blasphemous. Like them, you have earned your right to it, so it will resonate. You are as justified in your sacred rejections as you are in the hope that your unanswered prayers, your interchangeable deities, and your dougla gods provide, but you generally reserve the right to blaspheme in private, where you can curse and cry, doubt and then gather yourself. And whenever you fail to grasp what you encounter

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in public, you must let yourself believe it is impossible to gauge their intentions. “Really,” you should wonder, “who can read the intentions of daemons in mid-flight or mid-descent, who dance their inheritance as if they are trying to break free of their skins, or of whatever else restricts them?” This will free you from the pressure of trying to “capture” anything—people, for instance, or the metaphors they so furiously portray. In this, you may be absolved. Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! Absolved of your transgressions—the lies you’ve learned to believe. Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! Absolved of your truths. You learn the rhythm, but cannot follow along before catching yourself. You’ve been here before, stumbling about, drunk with ease as you rushed to make a fool of yourself in front of them. You break it into syllables in your head now, rationalizing it: “Pak-pa-tak-tak Pa-kata-ta-katak.” You feel your body rehearse, your muscles tensing here and there, your pursing lips and tapping tongue. Tread carefully. The camaraderie of casual identification has its risks where daemons are concerned; it can be enough to strike you dumb and motionless when you see how much they resemble you, and to know that these similarities are more than the crude mimicry of your daily practice. You have not crushed and boiled Reckitt’s blocks, mixed with lard in the hilltop yards of Paramin for an impossible blue. There are no clouds in your bedroom. Your aversion to stains is well reasoned. You know only traces of Patois, kept as trinkets (mine are from women who have loved me from time to time). Bo mwen? No kiss comes. Bo mwen, souplé? A kiss comes, reluctantly. Rèv, rèv. Dream, dream, only to wake in want of a kiss. You are an outsider. An avowed castaway. But they will see you— through you. They will see that you have long stopped believing in the power of blue to ward off maljoe—having gone some distance from your beginnings, you place no truth in “bad eye,” or in the various evils others can do.1 Your superstitions are undone by theories,

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debunked by modernized and postmodern things, by a cynicism that sustains you. You know that, to theorize effectively, you must first learn to forget where you’ve come from. Forgetting isn’t new to you. Your fears of an encroaching posthumanity have eclipsed your sense of the supernatural, forgetting that the Soucouyant, the Lagahou, and the Douen have long perfected their methodologies. You’ve grown up to ask, in all seriousness, “What does a Maroon care about Blue things?” You will dismiss the absurdity of your response and recoil as they approach you. Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! Calling yourself “Calibanesque—a child of Caliban,” you will laugh like an orphan. Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! But they will see you, and that will make you uncomfortable—not so much with what they see, but because your pretensions are useless in this moment, where you are unable to hide from them. So, to protect yourself, you have to remember that this is “just” a performance and, more importantly, that you are nothing like them. Certainly, they’re not devils—not actually—but it’s more than that. It’s a matter of your class, rather than your race. Your pedigree. Your training and your choices. You do not lower yourself to rolling around in the backed-up gutters of the capital, or pretend to feed on its garbage (washing down what you “eat” with the end of a drink you’ve confiscated from a man or a child caught unawares). This, you must believe, is why they, or any of our social martyrs, exist: to do for us what we would never do, to take our shame and despair and make light of the darkness in ourselves that we prefer to deny. In this light, anyone pretending to be a devil could be mistaken for the Devil himself, so it’s much easier to cast maljoe on them, even if you no longer believe in that sort of thing. The metaphor is a disturbing comfort, as only a metaphor steeped in an enduring disquiet can help you to deal with the literal absurdities of everyday life. Horns. Tails. Pitchforks. Fire. Metaphors do not suffer like we do. They can take it. They’re not devils, but men and women and children who seem uniquely engineered to endure these streets. This knowledge will help you to keep your distance for a while—until “seems” begins to come apart. Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak!

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Other people will look on with an unmistakable exotic wonder, as if they’d never seen people like them before. They will seem to marvel at the improbable contortions, at the remarkable will and endurance these performers possess. They will see “possession” as a giving off of darkened light—an emanation. “How strong they are!” “How resilient!” “My God! Where do they find the energy?” “How on earth do they keep themselves from coming apart in the maelstrom?” Offer compliments, when insults will not do. “This,” the onlookers say, “is the authentic ‘culture’ of an able-bodied underclass—its old and its young—who would rather play than work. How amazing!” Like you, the onlookers feel privileged to see what they see, relieved that they are not actively hated for being who they are, that they might be loved and accepted for who they could never be. They do not need to ask how public expressions of hatred or resentment could affect the tourist image of this event, or if the access they’re given is also “just” a performance. Whether permission is merely performative, or whether it will grow into acceptance is for you to consider as you continue trying to photograph and represent them, while setting yourself apart (but not too far apart). Pay attention, though. Be careful. You must protect yourself however you can, though all of your delusions will come apart after a while and will give way to less complicated things, facts that will linger and wait for you in the silence, between beats. Believe me. Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! This is part of why they exist: to take on the insults, allowing themselves to be seen as public metaphors of our unspoken torment. And not all devils are blue—some are white. They all work as much from the fierce arrogance of love as from the careful choreography of their own madness and loss, reminding us that our presence here is accidental; that we were not meant to survive; that even in this heat, even covered in blue, their beauty is our beauty; that that beauty is sometimes just a fortunate adaptation to unfortunate circumstance. They come now to remind us of this—and of our selves. The substance of their daemonic appeals is comprised of grunts and screams and threats to touch their unblemished spectators. This is their soliloquy. They demonstrate for us the in/adequacy of language to articulate

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the necessity of their presence and the typically understated principles of our vernacular humanity. These principles have been present from the Blue Devils’ inception as one of the more vibrant modifications of the nineteenth-century “Molasses Devil”—the Diable Molassie, which, as history would have it, were quite black.2 It has come to be described as a “begging Mas”—thus, one must “pay the Devil” for his photograph, for his attention, or for him to leave you alone and untouched. Knowing this, you may be inclined to ask what drives them to beg, to ask what existing conditions make the gesture of outstretched hands meaningful in these times? What causes them to pick your hard-earned, over-handled, and increasingly rare dollars up from the ground with their teeth? What is wrong with them? And what is it to beg, anyway, in a society that has bankrupted itself? What is dignity here, or shame? Who can say? Like so many of our misinterpretations of Mas, however, the characterization as beggars seems wholly inadequate. People are not allegories of the hardships they face, nor do they engage purely in symbolic terms with the circumstances that drive them to make Mas. There is substance to the styles they portray. Given its origins in black resistance (with blackened bodies) to white domination, it isn’t difficult to see how this Mas could be adapted for a critique of national/regional economic failures—or proof, more narrowly, of the limitations of material resources in a society unable to secure any kind of reparations for all of its people. The dance is public, after all, a critique derived from our society’s failure to ensure an alternative to the dehumanizing practices of old and new colonialisms: inequity, injustice, improper education, improper roads. As such, their “begging” questions far more than our (too) human limitations. It asks us to consider our collective contortions of love and pride and shame, the awkward attempts to evade, the lengths we go to deny that we have let ourselves down as a nation and a people—let ourselves down, having aspired, having achieved. That dance of interminable questioning is theirs to do, the burden of our grief they each carry from stage to stage—station to station—for our collective pleasure, disgust, and relief. Daemons, too, have crosses to bear. Theirs and ours. We watch them bear it all. Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! Our dance is a more private one, comprised of assorted failures and sporadic successes scattered along the way. Few see our frantic negotiations, caught up, as they are, in a dance of their own. However, if it is that we have no recourse but to see ourselves in the eyes of prancing performers—realizing that we at least owe ourselves the

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privilege of reflection—then we’ll discover that regardless of where we dance, whatever road we take, whatever our meanderings, we should count ourselves fortunate that we end up in the same place: here, now, in the company of people who require neither our money nor our approval, who look to possess no moral authority over us (except that which we willingly enable). Blue Devils. People, in whose apparently inexplicable rage we hope to see more than a mere theory of reflective practice. After all, if “God is a Trini,”3 as some will attest, then logic will insist that Trinis make spectacular devils. But, still, “we” are nothing like “them.” Temporary comforts aside, we each still have a price to pay for what we see, even if it is our peace of mind—especially then. This is the bargain. We each must contend with torments of our own design. We each must reconcile what it was that brought us onto this road, as it languishes like a razed monument beneath our wayward feet. In a way, my reconciliation began with the literal descent into Fatima Junction in Paramin—into a place of old, overlapping resemblances. A small band of devils found me standing there disillusioned and half-vacant, as if I were looking at a Hinkson mural.4 Ashton. Steffano. Shane. Emilio. Sterlyn. Some younger, anonymous ones. Drafted into their care, I realized there were no atheists on these hilltops—these Paramin hilltops, which are the inverted foxholes of so many daily battles. I would trust them to prop me up and deliver me without cynicism from the hills above Maraval back to my people and to myself—to another, earlier beginning. The city, and everyone in it, would fall away.

Portrayals of Being The following year, I will walk the streets of Port of Spain like a great Blue King. A crown of horns, bound in twisted blue fabric around my head and neck, a silver cup hanging. King of my own pan-beaten blues, I will walk with deliberation, talking with unfrightened children (Yuh does listen to yuh Mummy and Daddy? Yes. Yuh behaving? Yes. Yuh doing good in school? Yes. Alright.) before they ask me to chase them. I will take their money. Yes. I will deny their parents’ requests for free pictures. They will pay. Pay. Pay for the children, too. I will talk to other Blue Devils, marking time with them as we latch desperately on to whatever rhythm dominates the moment. Then another. And another. I will take deep breaths to stay cool, to do the work of my painted pores. I will try not to hyperventilate. When I dance, I will mostly trace the steps of derelicts and drunkards. Before imagining myself barefoot on burning coals, I will trace careless routes to places I have only imagined. The road will burn worse after

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a few hours, then cool after a few days. Corns and calluses will harden when I dance. I will scream at the rhythm, breaking it, joining with it: Pakpataktak! [Eeee!]tatakatak! Pakpataktak! [Eeee!]tatakatak! I will scream and scream as if I finally understand the mysteries of my exile, dancing to the edge of my rationality, grinding myself to dust. I will dance in agony, as if I knew I wouldn’t heal, as if the broken back and clouded eyes would heal themselves. I will dance, careless. As if I were mad. These things will all happen the following year—2015. It will be a turning point. But I don’t know this yet. I will have a sense of it by nightfall, peeling the remains of the day from my skin, letting it wash down the drain. I just don’t know it yet. Before too long, the devils of the present would leave me alone to contemplate a bargain I had struck and, till then, had failed to uphold. I would have to run to catch up. (Now, all around me—coming in and out of focus—a sudden, imperfect memory causes a rupture as my imperfect vision fails. I have to attend to it, or lose my bearings entirely.) ✦ ✦ ✦

1981. “Ethel” is Road March. Catelli beats “The Unknown Band” for Panorama. Both are songs by Austin Lyons. “Blue Boy.” Blue Boy, before “getting high.” Before interrupting his own ironic ascendancy to “Super Blue.” Before losing his teeth, scrambling for his dignity with golden epaulets that danced on his drooping shoulders as he performed on a corner in San Fernando. Eric Williams, this young nation’s father, is still alive (as are my uncles, Frank and his half-brother Peter). This will be their year, too, but they don’t know it yet. I remember running barefoot in the road with my mother. I am almost 7 years old. I am in the immediate aftermath of my first spectacle. Of course, other spectacles—some magical, others more mundane—hung about: The couple of men who loved each other and seemed to have no names.

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Miss Jack, the widow who looked like we thought a Soucouyant ought to look. Everard, in whose puncheon-drenched chest a tempest raged and raged. Ann, who was mad most days but was harmless, in spite of it all. Aziz, who loved her madly and followed her everywhere, in spite of it all. Folkit, the “reformed” pedophile. Jeffrey, his unreformed counterpart. Squeeze Eye, my cousin’s friend. Gow Chee, his brother. A white horse that turned, my mother said, into a man whose name everyone seemed to know. Each life was an alias of an earlier wish for better outcomes in spite of their unavoidable fates. Each had their spectacles, but this one was mine: She wore a cotton nightie, my mother, which moved slightly at the hemline when the fan turned toward her, its spinning blades blurring into a disc bolted loosely behind a wire cage. Her nightie was blue. And I, little and black, wore a “jersey” and “jockey shorts.” It was raining. There was the leaking roof, buckets and bowls kicked aside, the slippery, varnished floor. And then, the private warfare turned public, pouring out into the yard. Rain in a country with only two seasons has a peculiar way of failing to wash things away—illusions, for example—instead making more visible the things that happen in the dark. A hard rain can cause poorly painted secrets to run. It can leave nostalgia waterlogged, making black skins, and other surfaces, reflective. A hard rain can teach. It was a simple enough lesson, prone as we are to dangerous habits that often harden into customs of denial. When one comes of age in a culture of misogyny, patriarchy, self-hate, and abuse of unimaginable forms, it’s an effective shorthand. “Doh get in man and woman business.” Shorter still: “Doh get in dat.” She man cutting she tail? Doh get in dat. He wife horning him? Doh get in dat. Yuh brother feelin’ up he son? Doh get in dat. Yuh sister pregnant fuh she father? Doh get in dat. Dis one chop dat one, den shoot de other one? Doh get in dat. I learned the rhythm of this denial, dancing it like a kalinda, but only in my memory. What is bacchanal to a child? What is rhythm?

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Dohgetindatatak! Pakatatakatak! Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! (breathe) (breathe) Dohgetindatatak! Pakatatakatak! Pakpataktak! Pakatatakatak! We danced it screaming, my mother and I, refusing to be silent as “everything turn ole mas.” I want to think she knew better than to get involved, but I know my mother. She had already been knocked down in the bacchanal, a metal beam only just missing her head. And there I was, screaming as my mother screamed, the two of us in full voice like a warmed-up alto and soprano, screaming in unison, barefoot and half-naked in the yard. We conspired on that night to save our own lives, running the mile and a half to Aunty Marjorie’s house. Pakpataktak: the sound of bare feet—a mother’s and son’s—as they run for their lives through the streets of San Fernando. Running possessed. Out the yard. Down the steps. Left on Carib Street. Left on Rushworth.

Right on Upper Hillside Street.

Right on Blanche Fraser. Left on Donaldson, right on Richards, quick left on Scott, right on Princess Margaret. Right on Turton. Left. Safe, hand in hand, breathless and shining. We almost come to ruin on the heels of that litany. Our conspiracy left us barefoot, skipping puddles for fear of stones or glass beneath the surface. In the rain that night, our embattled bodies shone. But what remains, for me, are my mother soaked to the bone in blue, the explosions of rage that lay half-coiled beneath our emancipated tongues, the epileptic contagions of fear and reflex, the way love in motion can look like terror in the eyes of a child. I remember our emancipation. I learned some things from my mother that night: 1. In the futility of trying to save someone who refuses to be saved, you will be forced, out of desperation, to save yourself. 2. There is a price to pay for refusing the tyranny of custom, for living at a crossroad. 3. Run, if you have to, but doh run away.

Seeing Blue: Genesis of Public Executions

I remember her scream, how it was both precedent and punctuation to our escape, the Pakpataktak of bare feet on the road—the road that saved us both from the harsher consequences of this particular truth: run, but doh run away. How we danced it that night! Doh run away. Doh run away. Doh run away. Doh run away. The next day, we went home, like victims returning to the scene of a crime. ✦ ✦ ✦

2014. Another Carnival (the one that began this essay, future to the past of my youth, past to the present memory). I go looking for Blue Devils. I am driving hard on the long stretch between San Juan and Santa Cruz with the windows halfway up, speeding past La Regalada, a great house on a languishing cocoa estate. (We were known for cocoa, once, and hope to be again.) Explosions of sound are muffled by the bush, and my fury smoothens to a drone. A good distraction leading up to this moment, but I’ve already turned off the incessant campaigns for Road March. The “Minister of Road” will take win, again. I’m not bitter, but I’ve tired of it. Sirens in the distance remind me to keep my eyes on the road as I stuff the empty bottle under my seat, where other bottles rumble around like hardened drunkards at the abrupt end of an overpriced fête. This recklessness is not just my blending in, or taking solitary part in the unfreedom of another Carnival. It’s more like desperation, a welcome departure from other more resolute tensions. I shouldn’t be behind a wheel—I already know this, as random roadblocks have taught me—but such things are easier to ignore as I emerge enraged from another quarrel with a woman I’ve loved imperfectly for yet another year, pretending I’ve forgotten my mother’s lessons. This particular failure is worse than mal yeux, for though it is clear to me that my self-contempt led me to this place, it is my reflection that will cure me in the end. I have been unwilling to, and for good reason. Personal terrors can look like love in motion when love has left you standing still, or when you want to leave but love to stay, when love is past its prime and the rituals of “man and woman business” leave us both stranded at another crossroad, neither damned nor

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blessed. Just “there.” Keeping score. Marking time, like an act of patriotism lovers share when they find themselves in a state of crisis. “Man and woman business” and its myths of need and belonging. Doh run away. Stay. Come back. Kiss me. These are the only oaths of allegiance we take. We’re the same, you and I. There are moments between sleep and wake that make the pain worth having. Our fleeting intimacies can look like forgiveness in spite of the hollowed-out kindnesses of days to come, or the loneliness to follow. Doh get in dat. Ours is a history of bad relationships, and we mark ourselves as “Caribbean neocolonials,” classically fated to suffer for things we think we know. To hurt for this thing we think we love. To sing out our souls for it, even if we’re sometimes out of tune. This thing we cannot leave—this tragic romance of Caribbean being. We’ve mastered (or surrendered to) the intimacy of this monstrous afterlife. Having situated the conditions of our contemporary social tragedies in the absence of historical ones, we no longer see the point of asking what it costs to perfect this monstrosity and to perform it over and over again. For people content to be commodities, the question is moot. (Instead of a question, then, a prophecy: No more coffee, cocoa, or cane. Oil will follow soon enough—or not soon enough—and will take us with it.) Damn it! This gaslight has been on for hours. I’m being careless. But so many things are faulty here, it’s just one more malfunction. Soon, there will be a sputter. Soon, the engine will cough and spit. I have adjusted to and learned, with some difficulty, to ignore the symptoms. I haven’t broken down yet, but I wonder how much further I can go. Anyway, I’m leaving the valley now, starting the climb up to the North Coast Road. The engine complains with its subtle tremors. (Don’t all failing things complain?) I stop a short while after for an old fisherman on the road to Maracas, who tells me I should be careful not to pick up strangers in these times. He never tells me his name. “Trinidad is no longer what it was, you know.” “Yes, sir. I keep hearing so. But how I could just leave you on the side of the road?” “Well, thanks,” he says, easing into the seat with a groan. “I just coming back from town. Had to go and get something for the boat.” “I hear you, Uncle. Things different. I does move with the spirit, nah.” We drive in silence along the North Coast Road, narrow and serpentine. Quiet minutes pass like years between absent-minded friends—in these times, it’s enough for me that a “friend” is nothing more than a stranger with no agenda. And, as my anxieties dissipated like smoke from a tired bushfire and as I thought of the ashy, driedout iridescence of this man’s twice-broken fingers, I recalled what it was that brought me—curious, desperate, and unarmed—to this place. Blue Devils.

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“Uncle, listen, nah? How to get to Paramin from here?” “Take Fond Pois Doux Road. You can’t miss it.” “Nice! Thanks, thanks!” “You better have good brakes, eh? Them hills not easy.” I leave him a few minutes later at the fishing depot in Maracas—taking a left at the junction, where pirogues line the shore like upturned buttresses. It’s still early. Corbeaux seem less idle, as they track the stinking carcass of a dog (or a person) discarded in the valley. As I make my way back to Fond Pois Doux, I realize I am subject entirely to forces I cannot name. This, and not the iconoclasm of my symbol-breaking curiosity, is the only thing that will save me. Days later, I’m back on the road I started on, back in the heart of Port of Spain. The road seems empty. All the people are here, all except the Blue Devils. They have no time for my contemplations and are gone. I have to run again to catch up. There’s work to do.

The Deal The Caribbeanist photographer, having emerged from a history of broken things and missing pieces, knows better than to aspire to the outdated luxury of art for its own sake. Every image is also a reminder of a struggle for access: continuously sought, easily denied, and always only tenuously granted. A reminder of the very public executions of our subjectivities—our being in this place. A reminder, too, of the path through my own crossroads that I would have to take. You see, I’m unable to separate my anxieties from the images that come of my efforts, but these photographs are not only the materializations of my selfish aspirations and challenges, but also something of a mandate—a mission I’ve set for myself and my people. In photography, I try to look for those missing pieces, to see what cannot be expressed, to express what cannot be understood, and to understand what cannot be seen. It is a hope, both false and real, born not of humility but of a vanity I cannot reconcile on my own. I suppose because I have failed at more appropriate forms of nostalgic reflection over the past few years, I’ve been able to think of ways I might claim a more compelling version of myself. (I had hoped for at least a fitting allegory of my struggle that would help me to get through the day.) Looking for that self during Carnival is, at best, unadvisable. And certainly, in the course of this project, I’ve been fortunate to see people who are typically unseen burst open to greet and embrace the broken promise of their liberation in a way no one can miss. Their self-declarations burst, all in accord, from their mouths like pitch oil flames. The sublime, undeniable splendor of these public executions. Who can miss it, or fail to go in search of it?

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What I’ve also found here, in Trinidad, is that I am deeply insecure, and that the subjectivity I have embraced for more than twenty-five years is little more than a bricolage phantom conjured in a vacuum. In false exile, I’ve longed for the comfort of strangers who seem to see me and understand me without much effort. (Longed for it enough to ignore every warning.) I have longed for touch, for the contact only other people can give. I should have known that I would find an uncomfortable truth in the un/masked familiarity of this half-forgotten state. I’d been warned. But hope, like nostalgia, is a waking dream, a favorite privilege for a people in denial. Beyond the scope of Carnival in Trinidad, it’s no secret we live in a world that seems committed to human suffering (seen, for instance in the nonchalance that can follow long-winded eulogies). As such, the persistence of hope can appear unwise—even irresponsible—in lieu of other more urgent, more definitively violent responses. But hope enables people like us to deal with our disappointments with something that looks more like grace than despair. “Better must come.” It must, but only because we’ve taught ourselves to live a life in which the very act of “living” is based on the idea that we would be better off dead. That is, a “better” that never comes, though it must, is one that comes too late for those no longer alive to see it. Rewards that cannot be enjoyed. They come too late to do much good to those in need of them. Too late to mean much of anything, except to those left behind to claim the privilege of witness without the burden of action—having been there to see, without having to do anything about it. Too late, like a eulogy for a people who forget that “inheriting the earth” is a metaphor for the grave, and who so quietly disperse after the last prayer is uttered, the last hymn is sung, and errant clumps of dirt are thrown. Or, it is like a photograph. Photography, too, is a matter of hope—of losing it, as well as finding it. And there are times the stark and vulgar cruelty of this craft and my mediocrity within it are more than I can bear. The choices— whether to photograph or not—are unforgiving enough. There are the images I take, those I wish I’d taken, and those I can never take. Each is an inadequacy I am forced to accept. Along with the lapsing coordination of my hand and eyes, atrophied silences develop behind the lens, and the scope and range of narratives I construct lead no further than what I struggle to see. These problems are by my own design— my carelessness with localized traumas, for which neither folklore nor history nor even religion can offer any meaningful release. These problems and the images they yield send me inward, where there is still life. And why not? There is no other fellowship behind the lens. Nor much faith, except in the temporary idolatry of lenses and bodies, shapes and light. It’s a solitary place, full of lonely people. You will know this if, by chance, you manage to explore the unattended

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chambers in the castle of your skin, where the spaces between thought and act, idea and word, vision and touch are enough to form echoes that can silence the very doubts that gave rise to them. You will see that the arrogance of your aloneness offers no real entitlement, only the pathetic and irreconcilable fact that you will have to go beyond the boundaries of overindulgent self-loathing. This, finally, is how you reconcile things, how you will make enough space for an image of your people to develop, whether you are a part of it or not. Then you will discover that solitude is not a privilege. At least, not where Caribbeanist Photography is concerned. No one comes looking for you behind the lens. You have good reason for the solitude, of course. If put to proper use, it will eventually become part of your methodology—essential to your process. In time, you hope your solitude will turn to silence; your silence will turn to deliberation; deliberation will lead to vision; vision will lead to action. You learn to trust it, to prefer it after a while. You will do good work because of it. “Good work,” however you (or those you hope to move) may define it. It is also sometimes the case that in order to see clearly what this good work can be, you have to look behind you and in the periphery for what lingers in the blur. Have the courage to turn, and to go in search of better ways to see. This, I think, is what it means to have a vision: not merely seeing, but going in search of better and better ways to see. In the case of these performances, our experiences involve not only our responses as an audience, but also our reflections on the experiences that gave birth to them—or gave birth, at least, to their misinterpretations. To me, the consequence of this more focused approach is a localization of meaning that takes shape at the expense of grander academic claims. Those may come later, in some other form. For the moment, though, the specificity of this project is as strategic as it is personal. This is where I enter, and how I come to pay such insufficient tribute to Mas as an art and an aspiration to the vernacular, rather than a study of it. I come with a consideration of photography and of seeing that function beyond the privilege and constraint of abstract thought. So pay attention to what you see and feel. Pay attention. Like us, leaping daemons are never still, even if they appear to be. They are always plotting a way out. Unlike us, they require no sympathy for having fallen short of what they’ve forgotten. Perhaps, in the end, it is not that “we” are not like “them,” but that they are exactly like us, except we struggle to find what they seem to have found. Except, once found, they take it, cover it in blue, and leave it all in the road, daring us to make of it what we will.

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LA FEMME DES REVENANTS We see differently because we are different. The objective of Caribbeanist Photography is not merely to adopt or mimic conventional ways of seeing that simulate power, and then to creolize them. Rather, the objective is to incorporate, complicate, and ultimately relegate those powers to the periphery. Caribbeanist photographers have enough to do as it is: struggling for who struggle to be seen, deriving our vision from the tenuous traditions that have forged us and those we see, navigating the irreconcilable distances and silences between us. If we are, in fact, beautiful and dangerous (and we are), we should know that it is a hard-worn beauty, a danger tempered with grievance and blood, rebellion and failure. Our way of seeing gives us leave to note the visible silences caught in the still life of frozen eyes and blackened mouths, the pains of aging locked in shadowed wrinkles too old to dance in the light. (How their translucent edges glisten on the asphalt!) With the lens, we seem to dance a dance for the seen and the unseen. —PORT OF SPAIN, 2015

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Tracey Sankar painting her body. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015. (left) Tracey Sankar as La Diablesse, Traditional Mas Competition. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar securing the knot on the headtie, to which the horns are sewn. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar’s hands, from shadow into light. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar and husband Shervaun Charleau, who was murdered later that year. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar’s hands. White paint everywhere, on hands and body, and fabric. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015.

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(left) Tracey Sankar on hands and knees, taking on the hoof. First in a series of four. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015. (right) Sankar taking on the hoof. Second in a series of four. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015.

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(left) Sankar taking on the hoof. Third in a series of four. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015. (right) Sankar taking on the hoof. Fourth in a series of four. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar waits, composing herself for the Traditional Mas Competition. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015. (left) Tracey Sankar makes a readjustment to the petticoat. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar and her beads, a crucial element in reverence to Erzulie Freda, the Haitian Vodun deity and syncretized patron of La Diablesse. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015. (right) Tracey Sankar, dressed and possessed, waits to approach the staging area for Traditional Mas Competition. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar and husband Shervaun Charleau take a moment to chat as they wait for her number to be called. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015. (right) Tracey Sankar, La Diablesse, with anonymous man in background. Traditional Mas Competition. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar laughs (at me) before Traditional Mas Competition. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015. (left) Tracey Sankar’s hoof, hand, and branchbroom. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar and the branch-broom. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar, after her Dimanche Gras performance at the Queen’s Park Savannah. Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar as La Diablesse, with daughter Nathaniel Charleau as a Dame Lorraine. Mardi Gras. South Quay, Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar approaching the final competition stage. Mardi Gras. South Quay, Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar at the Crossroads. Mardi Gras. South Quay, Port of Spain, 2015. (left) Tracey Sankar, Queen of Sorrows. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar, leaving the Traditional Mas stage at Victoria Square with a last look, dragging her chain behind her. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015. (right) Carnival 2015. Tracey removes the hoof after her debut performance of La Diablesse, unbuckling the shoe she had modified for a kind of authenticity. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar, with cigarette, following her debut performance of La Diablesse. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015. (left) Tracey Sankar, after removing the hoof, struggles to compose herself. Victoria Square, Port of Spain, 2015.

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Tracey Sankar, heartbroken and overwhelmed after the final performance of the Carnival 2015 season. Mardi Gras. South Quay, Port of Spain, 2015.

Demimonde

LA FEMME DES REVENANTS A Queen of Sorrows

In the week before Carnival, Victoria Square in Port of Spain is a staging ground full of funny, beautiful, frightening things.1 It is not a place for dilettantes or pretenders—though children, with their mix of wonder and cynicism, are safe to roam between the costumes, unfazed and unharmed by the perpetual snarl of any number of creatures. One child will stand defiantly at a Dragon’s mouth, looking in to the man it has swallowed. He will stare and stare, then say, “I not afraid of you.” He is incapable of lying. The Dragon nods, believing what he says. Other children will join him: “Me neither.” “You’s a man inside that.” “You can’t fool me!” They will move on to confront another masquer with the same irreverence, their attentions spanning the entire length of the pageant, along Park Street from Richmond Street to Victoria Square West. These are children who seem to have been born old souls, though I resent the reference. I think nothing of it for a moment, borrowing from them the preference for seeing things as they appear, and leaving aside what I cannot see for myself. Near the loosely barricaded mouth of the stage, the Masmakers form an uneasy procession. Coffin-shaped generators from the ad hoc lighting blend with the ceaseless buzz of transformers, the higher-pitched hum of streetlights, the music loud enough to cause loosely held lenses to tremor. Beneath all that seems familiar, a dread. I ignore my racing heart, the knots in my stomach, the nausea. I look, instead, for what all this anticipation could yield. And in defiance of the now too common refrain: “Trinidad not like it used to be.” We often miss the irony of longing for the very colonialism that got us to this place, such that a wish for better circumstances doesn’t push us into an unknown future that we must craft for ourselves, but backward to a time when we didn’t have to disappoint ourselves or be bothered with the impossibilities and prolonged absurdities of (post-in)dependence, when things were “better,” and children had “manners,” and women wore decent, respectable things, and men were better able to manage their indiscretions. We often miss the role design and consequence play in the demise of a state. We take past as preparation. But if we were to dig just a little, we’ll find that, in the most crippling ways, Trinidad is exactly like it used to be: our talent for smiling our bitterness, our faith in flawed cunning, the sanctity of cliques, whether well mannered or well armed. Why should Trinidad—or any place engineered to fail—revert to the heyday of a dehumanizing project so it could be “like it used to be?” For manners’ 135

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sake? What good can come of wishing for the very conditions that led us here? Nostalgia has its uses, and none of them are good. I should concentrate. Now, the greater challenge for me will be to find the best lighting for a portrayal of a Mas that cannot be missed. Maneuvering in the available light, the overabundance of it, could constrict the vision and leave everything overexposed. It’s worth noting that if you should lose your battle with light, and if the pendular suspension of dis/belief doesn’t enable you to swing with surrealistic ease between the supernatural and the mundane, then it is better to avoid the place altogether. Police and their barriers can offer no protection, nor can family or friends who have battles of their own. Gasps can drown out the music, leaving you to navigate the tide of droning whispers by yourself, forcing you to feel what you cannot understand. Here, the experts gather to conspire against the rigidity of the traditions that seem to bind them. Now, while I can’t say for certain that the invisible dead come to dance with the living, I see the living dance the dance of people who are no longer alive: the massive, loose-headed dance of a papier-mâché Bookman; Jab Jabs, clad in purple velvet and little diamond-shaped mirrors, whose bullwhips circle their colored down-feathered masks like a gyre before cracking on the backs of another Jab Jab; hydrophobic Dragons that exaggerate their difficulty crossing drains and gutters as if they were being forced to do it; Anansi who negotiates the twisted web of chicken-wire and bended wire or, as miniature skulls, now dangle wildly on the boundary of a cemetery constructed on a Midnight Robber’s massive hat. There are so many visualizations of death and damnation that it can be easy to forget these are people so happy to be alive to play another Mas that they can barely wait to cross the stage and show us all what they’ve done. They understand the public performance of irony better than anyone I’ve ever seen. I see their aspirations and efforts leaping from the thick, smoking tongues of pitch oil flames, from the hieroglyphic scribbling of massive books to declare both their descent into hell and their temporary ascent into the land of the living. I am unable to see spirits in this chaos. I don’t have that gift, but I notice their unmistakable presence on the twisting spines of silken Bats that furl and unfurl as if they were regions—their own miniature nations. Black Indians conspire in a coded Yoruba patois to storm the stage before their time, the big-bottomed Dame Lorraines saunter like metronomes, and Burrokeets rear impatiently before galloping away. Fancy Indians wait in silence, almost vanishing, until a rain dance or a war dance, until shaking life from the ethereal edges of their dyed feathers, until a speech they alone can understand. Others come late to close the procession: Blue Devils. Moko Jumbies follow. People wait long into

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the night to see them. They all dance an afterlife as if they’ve always known it—because they’ve always known it. And honestly, what else should one expect from a people who promise to make Mas at their own funerals, though they hardly ever do? Others do it for them—their heartbroken spouses, at times, with a Fancy Sailor’s steps—dancing the distinctive Marrico, Pachanga, dancing the Skip Jack and the Camel Walk, dancing the undancing corpse to the grave, dancing the unbeating heart to the furnace. But this Mas—this “Queen of Sorrows” Mas—that Tracey Sankar chose seemed different from the others. It was an embrace of private sorrow and the public display of frailties that (though known) could no longer be ignored. So, at the side of the road, a little way off from the graceful turbulence of the procession, she prepared to invoke our conscience—and to trouble it, deeply. A short time later, from behind the obscenities and premature wreckage of costumes that failed at the last minute and the elaborate boats and swans, banquets2 and instruments that adorn the recommissioned caps of the Fancy Sailors, a broken woman found the courage to emerge. It is said that the story of La Diablesse—the deviless—originated in Martinique. She makes one of her first appearances as “La Guiablesse” in Lafcadio Hearn’s Two Years in the French West Indies (1890). She is undoubtedly a modification of the much more pervasive trope of the “tragic mulatto” woman, whose very existence was the literal embodiment of racialized violence, rape and incest, miscegenation, and the consequent split-mindedness that make us “Caribbean” at the hands of those who would control the fate of entire peoples. She is a trope founded, incidentally, in a historical truth—the account is Hearn’s attempt to reconcile his desire for Caribbean women with his tendency to consume them, to colonize their bodies before abandoning them. Patriarchy cannot hide, and it cannot help itself. Nor can racism. Each will always find a way to record its abuses. Each will flaunt its disdain. Concerning La Diablesse, more specifically, my sense is that she was brought to Trinidad after the Cedula of 1783 enticed Spanish loyalists and Catholics to populate Trinidad, then a sparse outpost. Fleeing the inevitable Revolution, many French came, along with the people they enslaved, their languages, and freed black people, with all their myths and truths of troubled origin. To me, she’s always been here because I’ve never known a time without her. She’s familiar, almost like family.3 Hearn and I are not alone in this, I am sure. Wherever we find ourselves, we are certain to find women like her, particularly when we have cause to explain our respective societies’ disdain for black women, the peculiar alchemy of blood and skin, the bones and spirits that comprise them. We boast about their beauty, loving and hating what we think is the sensuality

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of their strides, the implicit sexuality of their bodies in motion, their consumable skins, their sweet, sharpened tongues. Don’t we also cut our teeth on our homegrown myths about them? The stories we tell to get the better of them. Stories of a love we cannot describe—love for the black thing, the dark thing, the brown skin thing, the red thing, to say nothing of the dougla and spanish thing, the at-times elusive prize of the white thing. This is a love so utterly Caribbean that we end up making colored things of women without apology. These indescribable desires lead, inevitably, to unspeakable acts, which our “culture” subsumes and excuses. What is one to do? Patriarchy, we understand, can only be perfected in the absence of the patriarch. Racism perfected in the hyperpresence of race. And that’s what we’re after, isn’t it? Perfection. Mustn’t we outdo the doer, beating him, finally at his game? Our perfect, inexcusable patriarchy—yours and mine. Our problematic “we have no problem” with race. Enter La Diablesse: a deformed francophone woman of mixed blood, a scorned mulatto woman whose broad hat conceals a beautiful face that will turn ghastly before murdering you or throwing you naked into a “picker patch.” A bitterness, whose clothing conceals a cloven hoof that grounds her bestiality. She abhors cigarette smoke. She preys on the minds of jealous women and the bodies of married men. She is the manifestation of their attempts to rationalize their lust and infidelity, the inexplicable desire for what they—we—have been taught to despise. She is a shapeshifter, molded from myth into the shape of a woman who can never be loved, who will always be in want of it, who will be cursed to walk the in-between in search of it. She judges those of us who witness with awe the inhabitation of beings and the manifestation of familiar and unfamiliar spirits, yet (because we have misunderstood the nature of possession) say nothing of the bruised skin and split lips of mothers and sisters and friends—except in hushed tones, behind welted backs, where not even the victims can hear them swear it would never happen to them. These things are normal to those of us who know that blue-black marks are the overtures to cruelties that can only end badly, like the guttural expiration that follows the crescendo of a rehearsed bawl. (But doh get in that, remember?) La Diablesse is the extended convenience of a woman’s body in this place, a manmade archetype of Caribbeanness in the shape of a fractured femininity. Is it really a surprise that a being tasked with carrying the burden of that toxic manhood would be so deformed? La Diablesse is also an effigy, the first and last victim of her mythic rage, betrayed by the inherent sensuality of her name (and of its softening article). When she is invoked in speech, there is a kind of secret that begins as an invitation to the macabre and ends smoothly where the tongue meets the roof of the mouth in an illicit whisper. Spoken

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softly, slowly, she escapes your tongue with uneasy grace: La-Di-ablesse. This is how we become primed for what we are about to see, for what words themselves are intended to illustrate, but what they will ultimately fail to do. For the seer, it’s a different story, isn’t it? We are obliged to look beyond the performative decencies, beyond the apparent goodness of the majority, not merely to count ourselves among them in the hope our own flaws do not betray us or become obvious to anyone but ourselves. Speaking for myself, wherever silence and self-denial masquerade as the collective will, I try to look for the outliers. I’m often alone and feel less alone in their company. Their pain and solitude are less inauthentic than my hardened denials, the voids left by their missing pieces less difficult to see than my self-delusions. This choice, though, was one I didn’t have to make. It wasn’t a choice I could make. She had chosen me to tell whatever story I could, just as the Mas had chosen her.4 Tracey, a natural parrhesiastes, saw in me no risk of ventriloquism, no effort to silence her.5 How could I when it was her voice—her hyperlocalized version of Caribbean feminism—that I would rely on to direct my lens? How, when it was her intellectualism I craved but could only imagine as I fumbled to create an image of her and her Mas?

A Woman, Horned On the surface of this tragic mixed-blood, mixed-race woman, we can see—easily, I think—a kind of corporeal inversion: the application of white paint that covers her blackness, consuming her flesh, turning the vitality of her skin to desiccated bone on a hot February night. Imperialism, presented in its typical form as white dominance is symbolically re/claimed and re/colonized, inhabited anew by the black female form, creating a Caribbean sensibility/subjectivity that emerges at the syncretic crossing of West African spiritualities and the materialization of European desires (and, I suspect, vice versa). I think we can see that. The inversion of her black, mixed body and her willful application of a literal (and, therefore, absurd) whiteness together stage a critique of the narratives of race, class, and their implied respectability with a projection of her vulgar(ized) body into the public. Somewhat less overt is the indictment sanctified in her Vodun scribblings that reach back into history to claim whiteness as atrophy, rather than a prize she (or any of us) might have won. It is an indictment of the irreconcilable causes of suffering related specifically to the residue of memories that collect on black women’s bodies.6 The precedents of which can be located with a shameful, tragic ease.7 But, forced to look inward at what the analysis might yield, I’m careful not to commit the error of imposing myself too harshly, to (as

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the old people say) “know my place” and recognize the hierarchy of affect(ations) at play in this moment.8 It was clear, at least to me, that Tracey had entered into a transaction more costly to her than the challenge of “confront[ing] us with our own corruptibility”9 as Blake might have attempted, or as Mas can sometimes do. We’re acutely aware of our corruptions, aren’t we? We’re skilled enough at locating the corruptions of others, making sport of it with picong and fatigue. For Tracey it was something more. Something like a modification, an interweaving. Something like the combined iconographies of a past she never knew that were grounded in a present she alone could see. I observed her metamorphosis in a kind of agony I felt I hadn’t earned, turning into the voyeur I hoped never to become. (The shutter is loudest and at its most disruptive in these times—not unlike having a coughing fit at a funeral—and I was too aware of the inherent profanity of its awkward mechanics. I had to be more deliberate. Slower, quieter.) But she had already begun to fall into character, into the transaction that saw character fall into her. A pendular action: from a state of becoming to a state of being, from being to having been, and back again, then resting in the in-between, still as painted stone. Before long, I couldn’t say who had fallen into whom. At this, the vulgarized nexus that was her half-naked body (and marginalizing the patriarchy of my imposition), a drama unfolded: Erzulie Freda of the Rada family of Haitian Loa was invoked in one breath. Her counterpart, Beata Maria Virgo Perdolens, Our Lady of Sorrows, was invoked in another. I tried to mark the movement, checking my own breathing to avoid the shake and drift of my lens, but the Caribbeanist photographer will almost always be a hair’s breadth behind the moment. Her performance had already begun. She would come to shroud the “purity” of the moment with her own agenda, one that threatened to undo the illusion of purity altogether—a litany of secular hurts would now be recited to rhythms she alone seemed to detect, and which she alone seemed to consider sacred: Erzulie Freda Spirit of Love

Beata Maria Virgo Perdolens Mother of Suffering

Your Vévé of Heart and Cross, hand-drawn Your Cross and Sword-pierced Heart I, made for tears and longing, for vengeance I, for whom there is no comfort, loss with no end I I, for whom there is no comfort,

La Femme des Revenants: A Queen of Sorrows

loss with no end. Anima Sola Dolorosa

I, made for tears and longing, for vengeance I come for vengeance.

Embodying the eternal suffering of an abandoned woman and her evacuated womb would depend on the strength of her desire to be possessed. She had to make the chamber of her own body into a more legible text for reading with terrifying clarity a history of personal abuse and the monstrously subtle shape of lingering hurt. Her body, like La Diablesse’s, crumbled into the decrepitude of an obscene and enduring silence, shuffling like an artifact of a history ashamed to admit what it continues to accept: a violence fully domesticated. She was, as Wilson Harris put it, “at home in the pathos of her dress.”10 There was no question of it. Draped and painted in this dilapidated pathos, what could home be for her but a Hell? Hers is a response to the everyday circumstances of abuse, a text composed to trouble the spirit and craft from silence the sentiment for which La Diablesse was originally intended to portray. It was inevitable. She had to make this Mas in this way. It was the exacting cost of her assertion. The so-called “curse” of La Diablesse, amplified in Freda’s unfailing love and La Beata’s unending sorrow, meant that her narrative would begin from a place of solitude and lamentation, of unanswered prayer. I was soon convinced that Tracey’s unfortunate identification with each of these figures was not mere experimentation or some careless danse macabre, but a conjuring of a specific ethos—literally, the character of La Diablesse—invoked to contend with the assumptions and expectations that contemporary Caribbean society has reserved for certain women’s bodies, and for whatever brutalities they face at the hands of those who love and hate them. Who feels it knows it. I almost expected her skin to come loose and flail like an old tarpaulin against her ribs, until I remembered that they were painted on—tarred, in a way, in white. The preparation was harrowing for her: Stretching/twisting/painting smoking/whining/cursing praying/talking/cursing painting/talking stretching

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bending over on hands and knees. On hands and knees, rocking back and forth, moaning. Loved and violated, on hands and knees, for the hoof to be fitted. Inducing labor on hands and knees. Moaning, writhing, spine bending like an old gangway at the port, twisting like a stiff bullwhip. And then, deeper in character with the hoof finally attached, with the chain firmly knotted at her waist, and the hat securely pinned, she fell silent. Exhausted, even before the Mas could play—it was the final detail on a discarded canvas. Dragging up to the stage, frightening people along the way. She moved as though she was in search of a man who had been her husband in another life, a man she could no longer see and had to seek with hoof and dragging chain. But it was this life, on this night. A gulf had grown between them, and crossing it had become more taxing. On this night, their love was an exquisite performance of a prophecy in mime—the elegant denial of a coming hurt. So as she waited to cross the stage, the two of them sat with just enough time to rest a bit and talk.11 As they sat, drifting closer to and farther apart from each other—negotiating, in a way—it was impossible to tell who it was that led and who followed, or which of them was ever really there to begin with. What was to become of her in all that fabric? How to explain to anyone who could not see with their own eyes that the location of her deliberate intersectionality was lost in the progressive turmoil of her loose, unfolding creases? Who but she could tell that she had become martyred to her own cause, a trickster at her own crossroads, her own eshu? How could she know who would remain to follow the casket of the other through the streets of Port of Spain? How, other than in Mas, could she play the open secret of a scandal she had not set in motion. I stared at her—at the things that consumed her—but saw no temptress that night, nor any night after that. She smelled not of perfume and decaying flesh, as legend dictates, but of sweat and drying paint. She smelled like an old laborer. She laughed only when she was out of character, when the hoof had caused her foot to cramp, and she had to sit on the curb. Later, as she sat exhausted on that curb following her first performance, she would be warned of the dangers wearing the hoof would bring. A generation had passed since Helen Humphrey moved across the Savannah stage as Minshall’s “Queen of Danse.” That was 1980. “Remember what happened?” he asked. Of course she knew the spiritual risk of getting lost inside herself, still drenched in the afterglow. She had only just come out of the trance that had her bend and lurch and bawl like a

La Femme des Revenants: A Queen of Sorrows

woman who had known beatings. She pulled off the hoof, reaching high beneath her skirt for the hand-cut edge of the pantyhose that stretched like a black umbilical cord before slipping soundlessly from her small, human foot—it was the amputation of a diseased limb, her brief liberation from it. (Carnival hadn’t started in earnest, yet.) Then, she lit a cigarette and listened to a man describe her experience to her—again. It was a familiar imposition. She wouldn’t bother to curse this time, to say that there had already been rituals—at home, in the church, on the road—to prepare her for the burden she dragged invisibly across the stage, for the apparition she would become. But how could she know what new curse would be invoked as she sought to articulate her grief? How could she know what would happen? Who would tell her that her husband would soon be murdered, or that she would now have to endure her guilt for having survived, the abandonment and ridicule she would have to bear with irresolute grace? I couldn’t know. The lens is incapable of prophecy. It couldn’t whisper to her what neither it nor I could foresee. Viewed through the narrative of lust and vengeance, the coincidences are hard to miss. Viewed through the lens of the victim, perennially blamed, they become impossible to ignore. I chose the latter, as much as that were possible to do. She alone knows what she intended, though her performance appeared to be a solicitation of the public conscience, a kind of judgment that no eye could see, and no tongue could adequately describe. From that perspective, it was both epilogue to a story she hoped to conclude and prologue to one she had not imagined. In an effort to pour all of her pain into the careful cut and stitch, and to make for herself a home (finally, a home) of Mas, a false prophecy seemed to grow out of her irreconcilable misfortunes, foreshadowing the brutal consequence of accumulated deeds: a few months after Carnival, on the eve of All Saints—La Toussaint, we still call it—the man who helped her hoof in place, her husband, was a dead man. Murdered on a desolate hill outside Port of Spain. Who will fail to notice the irony? A man rejects the wife who has opted to play La Diablesse, only to condemn himself, only to meet his demise in the way foreshadowed by her performance, her dress, her dragging chain, her hat and hoof. Sometimes, though, what we read as an ironic situation is only our denial, or our inability to admit to the uncompromising cruelty of the human condition and our tacit acceptance of it. No doubt the experience of our many atrocities has left us all misshapen in their wake, our missing pieces scattered about our lives in a mangle of truth and rumor. As a result, we sometimes mistake our superstitions for

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causes, framing our misfortunes as magic, and situating our rationale too firmly in the shifting sands of coincidence and bad luck.

Grieving Room But people talk. They have no real sympathy for abandoned women in this place. For some of us, their recovery is of no great priority. Their shame will cancel it out. Whether wife or mistress, their hearts break infinitely, audibly, without recourse. There will still be talk—it’s what people do. They will say there is no real honor in dressing like an abandoned woman—a horned woman. They will say that every woman here is either horned or will be horned. Every woman a cuckold, or one in waiting. They will say, as they often do, that “She hardened. She look for that. Let she take what she get.” They will transpose the characteristics of this portrayal onto her, reifying the idea of women as perpetual victims of their own design, of La Diablesse as eternally damned in her handmade dress. They will mock the deities she tried to invoke. They will make her a handmaiden to her own demise. They will make her a whore to her own suffering. Then they will just forget where these things have their origins. (I say that as if origins matter to us, who talk and forget in these cynical times.) It is no secret that the Caribbean is a place where women are discarded as a matter of pride. No, not merely discarded. They are shamelessly, almost routinely violated, too often murdered and left to rot beneath Savannah trees and on riverbanks and in department stores in the heart of the capital. Focused on Tracey’s all-toopresent agency, it was tempting not to be concerned at all with the “origins” of particular savageries, or whether they were inheritances, aspirations, or fundamental defects in the spirit. For a moment, La Diablesse eclipsed all of that, colonizing the foreground of every frame—turning background into foreground, the shame of culturally accepted abuse into a kind of victory. The norm settled into place again: wherever the Caribbean woman finds herself, she is subject to the scornful “desire” of the masculine gaze and the undeniable violations that reside at the core of its touch—we sharpen our manhoods on their bodies, perfecting (as “love”) all the aspects of our intimate monstrosities. “If they don’t beat we, they don’t love we!” We’ve heard them, the tired aphorisms of rationalized acceptance that mark our culture, oxidizing into the fabric of an imagined society like a bloodstain. We laugh knowingly and go about our business, as if silence really can save us from anything more than the embarrassment of doing nothing. Our well-crafted silence is the hidden needlework of scar tissue. (Doh get in that. She man cutting she ass? She look for it.

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Ent she stay?) What of “origins,” then, of where we come from? As a people, fragmentations and traumas notwithstanding, are we not supremely equipped to dismiss the legitimacy of women’s suffering with mockery and nonchalance without the imposition of masters? In them, we find the perfect foils, which bear the burden of men’s cowardice (in what we might call our natively “Caribbean” context). A beating is mystifying, an embarrassment we must not name—or dare not name. And besides, we know better than to place any real stock in things we cannot really know. Don’t we? Is it really a beating? Isn’t it better to pretend not to know, if only to deny what we’ve always known? I suppose, though I’d argue that what we think of as the irrelevance of origins, of their inherent caution, is proof only of our failure as a people to heed, to learn, or to change. The failures are not with origin, but with our refusal to make more of them, to bend them to our collective self-defined will. To see ourselves differently. We find little room for the myth of origin when we declare ourselves to be free, with “freedom” being little more than the inadequate analogue of a history made in someone else’s image, like a Carnival. What is “freedom” for the ones we cannot leave? We complain, as needed, using our misery to embolden the fragility of our homegrown patriarchy. We endear ourselves to them before our compliments expire like Ole Mas placards in the city’s drains. Even our short-lived shames take on the tropical forced-ripe artistry of a castration we hesitate to identify. Who are we when we elect to be ourselves? The result, we know, is not always flattering. Near the hem of her dress, there were aspects of my own history that I felt were visible to her alone that night. I have learned to ignore my terrors, but they came rushing at me. (Out the yard. Down the steps. Left. Right.) These truths haunt me like impatient prophecies. This must be how it is for everyone, I wonder. Or, perhaps not. Who can be certain? What is certain is that there’s nothing romantic about a woman gearing up to be mocked, nothing inherently noble about it. When the spirit mounts and the performer’s body becomes a text that can be read, the performer becomes part of her audience. And sometimes the cruel congress of talking, dancing people turns to make a Mas of a Masmaker’s grief, makes an outsider of the subject, who looks at herself in horror to ask, “What have I done?” What, indeed. This, I suppose, is a consequence of a nation so accustomed to the illusion of its freedom that there is no longer a need for things that remind us of our patent unfreedom. Or, perhaps we have too many. Too many characters who read themselves too literally. Midnight Robbers who move around now at any time, their speeches shortened, their weapons real. Hell, they confirm for us, is right here, and they mean to hasten our departure from it into some new, worse unknown. What use do we have for the owl that was once a

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Jumbie Bird? What fear should we have of myth when the tyranny of everyday life prevents us from believing in them—and ourselves? And who should believe the Pierrots Grenade when we see how their hollowed-out words drain us of our loyalties and our decency in the media, both old and new? How, one wonders, is “Independence” really pronounced when it comes bound up in a cabal of scraps and fancy words, like a Carnival costume? Silence is going to save us, we hope, though it hasn’t yet. Eventually, we will all understand this as a fact of our Caribbean existence. Like all things that culminate in this swirl of bodies, the things that make us happen between Carnivals, in our preparation for it, through upheavals and recoveries that seem to have nothing to do with Mas at all. But, until connections are revealed, recognizable even in shadow, we forget. Some of us will muse on the interplay of motive, method, and outcome that attend the choice to make Mas, to make sense of ourselves in the public solitude. Then, we will also forget, or forget to speak. Sometimes, though, when we are faced with realities that refuse to be ignored, the fanciful imaginings and gossip will come apart as it does for me now. This La Diablesse was a Mas born of violations of women’s bodies, of unapologetic patriarchal weakness, and the inherent vulnerabilities of power. Unique because of its unspoken normalization. Because of it, I am forced to consider the unavoidable violence of my own gaze, its misleading gratifications. There is no other way to approach La Diablesse. Each frame of this series, and the hundreds I’ve discarded to shape what it would eventually become, is proof that I am part of a very cruel cycle that begins with the public admission of a personal torment, continues with the intrusion of witness and the cooptation of a body, and ends as a surface to be read, touched, and handled. I am complicit, in spite of her permission. She could not be saved, nor did she want to be. Instead, she composed a narrative of her own grief—then and in the months before and after—and watched as it dried up and cracked on her skin. Cast in this mold, she left herself open to the infinite subjection of a gaze. Set against the backdrop of bodies, both free and enslaved, these legacies of breaking and broken women remain, like photographs remain: as inexplicable afterimages of a monstrous desire for cruel intimacies, the curse of fundamental illegitimacy we all hope to undo. Tracey had chosen this Mas over all things, offering up her body in a battle for her sanity and her spiritual life. She would pay for it, but not she alone. We pay for it, too. Things like this are hard to take without the benefit of laughter or old talk or music to blunt our anxieties. But we have to take it. We have to see, even if it means that we dance ourselves to the grave, or others will do it for us.12 We do the best we can to deal with what we’ve done, hoping not to be deformed by our

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shame, and lucky not to fall apart beneath the burden of our torment. We—Tracey and I—bonded in the torment of our unresolved failures, our shared history of breaking ourselves and other things. We were both, in a way, proof of failures made public. She allowed me to see her, making it impossible for me to ignore my various infidelities. I saw them more clearly, then, as if she were my conscience. As if they were so many pretty bones scattered across an empty plate, my appetite cursed and divine. As if I had gorged myself on misplaced attentions without any resolution. I longed for something that would demystify this performance, instead of forcing me to shoot so uneasily, but the guilty conscience cannot undo itself. I looked into a kind of abyss—my black vision turned toward her inverted white(ned) gaze—mediated by the woman who now sees me seeing her. And I saw my tempers, my rages, my capacity for unbridled violence, my fear of magical women, and I was terrified. Tracey Sankar—La Diablesse—out in the open, for everyone with eyes to see. But not, as it turns out, a prophecy. Not for us. We learn, from young, not to fear dragons, or the men inside them. Who can fool us? We can move so seamlessly from raised voices to “Yuh want to hit me? Then go ahead, if yuh name man. Hit me, nah?” that I sometimes wonder if such things as love and want and woman and man are a nostalgia, little more than the heirlooms of Empire that, having oversatisfied itself on our bodies and corrupted itself and us, now passes its dissatisfaction onto us to make a new Mas of old sorrows, to make a series of decisive moments crafted on a sidewalk in Port of Spain. Sometimes, it is the case that we suffer openly, carrying our grudges and our hurts around with us, like things inherited from a master who cannot love. Sometimes, that’s all it could be. But only sometimes. Other times, the damage is entirely our doing, and it is that which will threaten to undo us all.

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MOKO JUMBIES OF THE SOUTH Behind the lens, I am (I tell myself ) alone, driven only by my intentions. (Who else would it be operating the shutter and rings, fumbling my way to an image?) It is a fiction, I know. But if I hope to devise an imaging of Mas or a cohesive self, or an idea of my people who call themselves into awareness and account, I’m compelled to ask the Moko Jumbies about their Mas. “Why Stick?” The response is so matter of fact, so obvious, that I might have been embarrassed to repeat it. “Stick?” she laughs, “Stick is life, boy. Stick is joy. Stick is happiness. Stick is everything. Yeah. I could be in real pain, like serious pain. Like, for instance, last year (2015), I was in serious pain, and I want to walk on that stick, to cross the stage. That was the night of Dimanche Gras. I fell the night of the Finals. I fell and I damaged my knee. And I gone up on the stage. Yeah. Them telling me let somebody else walk it. I want to walk that stick. Have to. Stick? Stick is a love, yes. Stick is life.” Yes. These things we do by faith—not by sight alone, but by feel. “Spirit,” she adds, “at the end of the day.” This is a terrifying thing, this terrible clarity. At least for me. —STE. MADELEINE AND TARODALE, 2015–2016

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Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, June 2015. (right) Jonadiah Gonzales, “Fisherman of Souls.” Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, June 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai in Silhouette. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, June 2015.

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Jonadiah Gonzales’s Lines. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, June 2015.

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Jonadiah Gonzales on the Crushed Walkway. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, June 2015.

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Jonadiah Gonzales Crossing the Water. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, June 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, Reflected. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, June 2015.

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Jonadiah Gonzales Unfurls. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, June 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales. Walking by. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, June 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales at a Rooftop. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, June 2015.

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Jonadiah Gonzales and Stephanie Kanhai against Pipe Matrix. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai, Reclining in the Pipe Matrix. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, June 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai Reclines at the Front Gate, Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, June 2015.

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Jonadiah Gonzales and Stephanie Kanhai, “Tying Up.” King’s Wharf, San Fernando, June 2015.

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Jonadiah Gonzales, King’s Wharf, San Fernando, June 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, King’s Wharf, San Fernando, June 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai, King’s Wharf, San Fernando, June 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai, Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, July 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, UsineSte. Madeleine Cooling Towers, Ste. Madeleine, July 2015. (left) Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, Usine-Ste. Madeleine Cooling Towers, Ste. Madeleine, July 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, UsineSte. Madeleine Cooling Towers, Ste. Madeleine, July 2015. (right) Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, Usine-Ste. Madeleine Cooling Towers, Ste. Madeleine, July 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, Looking Down. Usine-Ste. Madeleine Cooling Towers, Ste. Madeleine, July 2015. (left) Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, Usine-Ste. Madeleine Cooling Towers, Ste. Madeleine, July 2015.

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Jonadiah Gonzales between the Cooling Towers. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, July 2015.

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Jonadiah Gonzales. Usine-Ste. Madeleine Cooling Towers, Ste. Madeleine, July 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai and the Sugar. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, July 2015.

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Jonadiah Gonzales and Stephanie Kanhai Embrace. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, July 2015.

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Jonadiah Gonzales. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, July 2015. (right) Jonadiah Gonzales. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, July 2015.

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Jonadiah at the End of the Day. Usine-Ste. Madeleine, Ste. Madeleine, July 2015.

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Stephanie in Silhouette #1. King’s Wharf, San Fernando, June 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai in Silhouette #2. King’s Wharf, San Fernando, June 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai in Silhouette #3. King’s Wharf, San Fernando, June 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai and Akem Job in Silhouette. King’s Wharf, San Fernando, June 2015.

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Jonadiah Gonzales in Silhouette. King’s Wharf, San Fernando, June 2015.

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Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales in Silhouette. King’s Wharf, San Fernando, June 2015.

Cutters’ Epic

MOKO JUMBIES OF THE SOUTH Walking Stick

Hog Plum. Guava. Pommerac. Breadfruit. Dasheen. Carraillie. Long Mango in a yard near Princes Town. Bachacs negotiate a gorge outside the rotten galvanized fence, freezing with our stride past in long evening shadows. Prometheans: nigger man and coolie woman, chained to this chain of particular thought and tongue, almost turn to ash in Ste. Madeleine. We convene by Bird, longtime breather of black sickles that dance around us like an illness. Bird, whose stilted board house waits for paint and hardens itself, where the wavering insecurity of cane cutters, too, hardens in the bachac’s drooping sun. The lefthander’s cutlass mocks us from the corner. Fork and hoe conspire when we curse ourselves with no sense of irony. Ste. Madeleine burns. Ogun dances the blade. The Indian one whispers and swallows scraps of Hindi left on her tongue. The Shouter pantheon rattles. We take turns sucking our teeth. Dreams, man. Dreams we can barely afford. The Muslim shrugs. The Christian shrugs. There, beneath the rafters and breaking floor, we laugh and take our absolution in a glass. Yes. We swallow spirits, have eaten sugar and salt, have held 187

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no great contempt for the motion of grass or sand, for Usine’s dust to sweeten our sharp, embittered word. Long Mango. Dasheen. Guava. Cane. Bush rum bottle cracking, thinning out blood— too thick for a mainland. A dying tractor pulls late and long through the old talk, coughing like an old laborer. We stop talking and look, like mourners. What drives the cutlass and sickle lies entrenched in vacant eyes. A bounty of dead stalks passes us, stripped and carted to Usine like a sacrifice. Light sepia grin, still as photographs, lies—a bronze face dims, blackens. Shines. Some choose land, taking sugar for water. I remember almost drowning.

Morning, My People If you’ve ever been at a crossroads, with a history such as the one that makes us Caribbean, you’ll know one thing above all else: Sometimes you will come apart at your seams—but not always. Hold on. Sometimes, in spite of all, you will struggle to keep your integrity. Call it faith, if you like, or something quantum. But hold on. Lower the raised voice, temper the hurried pace of what you’ve come to believe is life here. Then, stop to ask, “How is it that I am here, now?” You discover that all pasts are prophecies. We sometimes come apart, but how else could we be here if we hadn’t held on and held ourselves together through it all? In the very small hours of the morning, our man-made gods are indistinguishable

Moko Jumbies of the South: Walking Stick

from the spirits they emulate. Spirits are indistinguishable from the things they possess. The old—who’ve lived and now sleep less and less—know this. Regrets and hesitations cloud and consummate, and fears stalk the periphery, cloaked in silence. Not a perfect silence, though. Crapauds punctuate my misgivings as if they were friends, testing their stamina with long chirps and old, familiar songs (of a singular strain and tone). Adrenaline spikes, as expected, and I forget the irony of something sweet coming from such ugly things. In spite of my half-remembered prayers, it disrupts my efforts to be calm in this dark. I feel uneasy, but I know the Kiskidee will burst into song soon enough. Others will join in.1 I stand at the front gates of the Usine-Ste. Madeleine sugar factory with Jonadiah, a Moko Jumbie King from the South.2 We make small talk and smoke a few cigarettes, our exhalations lit by distant flickering lampposts. Stephanie, the Queen of the Band, is coming. Dawn will bring her. Her gold crown will catch light like a sieve. Secretly, I want to believe those in the cars that pass (“one today, one tomorrow”) are not yet cynical enough to question the intentions of Moko Jumbies, of spirits whose smoking faces they cannot recognize in the dark. I want them to be afraid enough not to interfere with us at this hour. But these, we are often reminded, are dangerous, dangerous times: love is at a premium; our black lives do not matter as they should; and every shadow is armed. A stigma waits in every direction. My fears writhe in the penumbric orgy of hardened desperation, twisted minds, broken hearts, and idle hands. Jonadiah and I laugh, the talk making us seem more comfortable in the darkness. Thankfully, the moment hasn’t yet arrived for me to ask myself if madness brought me to this place at this hour, or if this is just another crossroads. Does some trickster god sit somewhere laughing and waiting to see if all my talk of “no panicking” will suddenly come apart? Is it Anansi or Eshu, who both know too well that I’ve run away from things before, that I’ve known too many crossroads? (I’ve shut my eyes to other things until they passed.) Or, is it just the sway of restless palmettos reciting an ancient Tempest? I am not yet terrified, but my thoughts of what it takes to make a photograph fade in that moment, and I lose my bearings. It’s a blessing, I tell myself, to try and find my way in a place I no longer understand. A blessing to lead people—and to follow them—into the dark. In the hollow of this fading night, I hear things. No panic. I know the living are the ones to be feared. (Eva taught me.) This island—wind-blasted and wound-up, like all the others—is full of noises. I expect them. This causes no panic—not when the soft thud of rubber at the squared ends of cedar poles reminds me of more mundane things:

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The pestle with its mortar half full, the persistent throb of a healing wound, the pounding of a closed frustrated hand on a closed wooden door, the harsh beauty of our rhythms. In a way, I suppose this makes me guilty of a rather localized blasphemy: humanizing one of our remaining fragments of a god, just when some would say it has begun its resurgence. I confess openly to it. I can only think in human ways, you see. When I first saw them at Victoria Square that night, my sentimentalities flared as if I’d recalled some ancient thing—or, a fragment of a thing I couldn’t conceive. But, getting close enough to see, to ask their permission, I saw they were more perishable than I might have thought. Sentient. Like my private gods, they’d know me by name and my grandfather’s name, calling me “Browne.” Not “Kevin.” Looking for them to show me who they were, I confessed my temptation to ask naïve questions. What could they show me about the limitations of the world that I’d refused, until lately, to see for myself? What does a Caribbean pessimist do with the unfulfilled imaginings of his former deities? Those questions, and other, more foolish ones, would have to wait. At least until Carnival was over and we had a chance to meet where we now find ourselves: in Ste. Madeleine. By day’s end, moving from this graveyard to King’s Wharf in San Fernando, I will have seen them a bit more clearly, at least by the time I move the camera from my face, readjust my aperture, and admit to the enduring poverty of my oversimplified vision. I’m getting ahead of myself, and I sometimes forget that photography is often about taking the time for things to unfold. Right now, it’s only Jonadiah and me, waiting and smoking. In an hour or so from now, day will break to reveal the undeniable decay of our surroundings, the brutality of a former grandeur, and the far worse brutality of inevitable obsolescence. Ste. Madeleine, home to a massive thing that was once a factory. It languishes like a Dimanche Gras monstrosity, bereft of whoever gave life to it, danced it into being, and moved it painfully, gloriously, across the stage. Every trace of this gutted behemoth of a onetime sugar factory will pass into oblivion, and our bodies will suffer the same fate as the interminable belts and gears of this broken place. But not yet. In the shared impermanence of the passing day, we would all come to possess a geometry of motion more finite, more complex, and more beautiful—not a dance, per se, but a certain angular beauty. For a moment, infinitely ours. And we, infinitely ourselves. Infinite in this finite moment. So I begin here, with them—or, rather, I begin with a fragment of what their Mas invoked. I feel something ominous in this transmuted space. Something like history, or guilt, but I am not alone here.

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Water Stand Up Traditions ought to be treated as soluble things, like ink dropped in water or sugar left at the base of a cup left unstirred. In theory, they seem crystalline and discrete, their adherents requiring no explanation. There is a logic to them, a place and a role for every bolt and scrap. No thread will come undone, dangling at an unattended hem or cuff. The sugar and oil and rum will be consumed in tribute, poured as libation, drunk. The protocol has its function. Structures have their purpose (even if it means we must dance ourselves out of its grasp). But when festivals subside, they can dissolve with quick and troubling ease. We see how vulnerable they are, amid the misunderstandings and misrepresentations that arise, and in our constant negotiations of/with them. Their vulnerabilities are, of course, ours. Forgetting and carelessness are as cultural for us as the too easy kissing of teeth, as commonplace as old talk and the maco. This is not much of a revelation—a crisis, at times, but not always. I am more interested in the expressions of vernacular knowledge that cannot be imitated. In short, I am interested in magic—call it the magic of perishable things. That’s what we are, you know: perishable, finite. It’s what we have in common with Moko Jumbies. (If the coming and going of our seasons haven’t already persuaded you, then take note of your slowing pace at morning or evening, of your bones that will ache with coming rains and passing clouds, of gravel that will collect at the back of your throat at the passing of another Masmaker. And another. Their finite bodies, like ours, are infinitely engaged in the alchemy of change, of time and deliberate motion.) Tracing the fluidity of Stephanie and Jonadiah’s bodies, the more complicated things fall away. Ask her to trace the jagged provenance of her own classic features, her nose and cheekbones. Ask him to recall his path from Government School on Rushworth Street, up through Carlton Lane, where the Moko Jumbie found him. Then consider the mysteries of their authenticity. And of your own. Then ask, as I do, “What is authenticity in a place like this? What is pure or genuine in the wake of our ongoing dissolution? Even our languages exist within a continuum of dissolution and constant change, our tongues often taking the kind of liberties we have yet to truly experience for ourselves. Our tongues, such disloyal ambassadors of the meanings we intend. We are not pure, nor are we capable of being authentic in such basic, essentialist terms. No, theirs is a distinctly Caribbean sensibility, refracting the influences that converge on their bodies, in the Mas they compose, in the images they allow me to make. And while it may seem inauthentic to have Orisha combined with the Moko Jumbie (itself a modified form of the West African Moko tradition

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being fused in the Caribbean with a Jumbie, a spirit), it would only be because we limit our understandings of modification to religious practices—Santería, Shango Baptists, Vodun. I don’t. These Moko Jumbies will not allow it. Not in Trinidad anyway, where our mixed gods bless and curse us with equal intensity. Not when modification is at the very heart of our Caribbeanness, transforming our perishing bodies—like magic. Know that if, by chance, you hear it being argued that these Mas performances are not magical at all, it will almost certainly be by those who have yet to witness the ghost of Vaslav Nijinsky—the Russian ballet dancer—behind them the following year, floating across the Queen’s Park Savannah on the ancient shoulders and narrow petrified ankles of a Moko Jumbie. Floating, in exquisite drag. Floating, its designer would intimate, on the suspension of our disbelief. Minshall’s Dying Swan, carried out of its mythic purity in carved cedar slippers, carried on the notes of a solitary tenor pan across the stage. A Dying Swan, whose frantic wings are the careful, muscular arms of a black man meters high. The Jumbie of a ballerina as a Dying Swan, who now heralds the need for a shift in national and regional consciousness, shifting back to Mas. A proper Moko Jumbie re/ appropriating the discourses of Empire to critical global effect. This is how we know that the ghost of a ghost is a man. dressed as a woman portraying a man dancing as a woman designed by a man. There is no real contradiction here—no space, in this reality, for even the possibility of it. Not in the midst of this deliberative fluidity called Mas. There are no lines to blur, or boundaries that can deter its reach. No tricks. Not here—in the in-between—where past knows no past, and present is prophecy taking shape. This is Mas. High, High Mas. High Mas and the uneasy citizenship of these dark bodies, unfolding before me now in an abandoned place. King Sugar. Unfurling, as they make a haunted place their own, crafting precedent out of a forgotten place. Jonadiah: The Fisherman of Souls. Stephanie: The Sweet Waters of Africa. Orishas of salt and sweet waters—

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Yemaya and Oshun Water and Water Ghost of Ghost Spirit of Spirit Flesh and Bone Come by Sea Dance by Rivers. Small hours carry sound as if it were gossip, but their incantations are quiet this early in the morning. You will have to see what you cannot hear, feel what you cannot see. See how their black Caribbean bodies inhabit the design, as if they were almost drowning. I remember almost drowning—in the sea, in a river. They play the Mas as proof of something unforced—a constructed radicalism, maybe?— that betrays the emancipatory intentions of design and designer.3 See them invoke Caliban (Césaire’s modified version, naturally), floating as they undo the curse of the appropriating hand. See how your own gaze moves further afield, almost as if it were a Moko Jumbie. This is High Mas: the Moko Jumbie in Trinidad, claimed and transformed, suspended between the relative stasis of “tradition” and the nonexistence of unattainable fantasy.4 For different (and, I suppose, legitimate) reasons, I expect they will continue to be cast in a narrow litany of symbolic actions. (Can Empire believe in magic?) And, certainly, the steeled frame for this ballet of sugar and oil will seem inevitable: that troublesome white gaze, and the bodies it will always try to colonize, has a way of making magical things seem mundane. Cast in the shadow of an impulse that consumes all it surveys, these portrayals of salt and sweet water deities will only be “prophetic” in an ironic sense: that it seems tragic and unavoidable, like the fate of the people who wish to believe in it, while their own taps flow rusty, or cloudy and over-chlorinated, or not at all. We must do better than that. I think our long-muted sensibilities demand better of us. We are familiar with waters of every sort. They are too familiar to us, the living archives who bear the affective memory of an afterlife. We may have danced the grief out of our public lamentations, but we know the shape those hurts can take in our daily lives. We know how to hold on. This same message is amplified in the immortal stride of Moko Jumbies, the mortal prophets of Mas. And if we choose, for a moment, to forget that their impossible gait only resembles those of distant gods retained in the minds of roughly transplanted people, we can still mistake them for magical things. (Anansi, moving spider-like across the stage?) We can gaze in awe—at their disproportionate limbs, the miles of fabric that clothe them, their defiance, their slow beauty—and remember that they are not merely given to

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spectacle or haste, or that they struggle to retain their relevance with the frenetic contortions of a dance that comes too easily. We might remember that theirs is also a discourse of intimacy, of silence, and of vision. We might remember that, although they fall from time to time, their height is a burden they seem born to carry. We might remember what Moko Jumbies say when they gather around a bottle and glass and cigarettes to talk and drink and smoke, or bathed in a sun’s setting light when darkness meets us on the other end of the day: “Stick is life.” This, in part, is what we might expect to find when we consider the utility of the Moko Jumbie, its “place” in these times; that in our encounter with the embodied ancestral knowledge of Mas, we also encounter the ancestors themselves and the imperfect, unmasked humanity of those who invoke them now. Those who, like this place, will be ancestors themselves after a time. It seems inevitable. Out here, nothing is immune to the indifference of passing time, and the reluctant decomposition of an abandoned factory is like any other structure left to crumble: this place is its own graveyard, its own memento mori. Now, as we walk around inside of it, we seem to be haunted. We look like addicts (“pipers”), who avoid the watchmen to scavenge the catacombs for copper wire. In the in-between of a once busy place, we look around as it threatens at every turn, in every abandoned room, to outlive us with its stained steel, vacant lockers, peeling paint, and settled oil—oil that would usurp the former national industry, proclaiming our citizenship. In an oil economy—a post-sugar economy—that citizenship is Oedipal. It now lies fallow, its former fields settled by government housing that covers the undulating hills like a rough pastel-colored patchwork of contemporary lives. In the light of such a moment, with these young Moko Jumbies strapping their new limbs to their existing ones, or stretched out on a gate, it is possible to see how the hardened muscles of laboring bodies can foretell the eventual disappearance of the places that bind them and the emergence of new ones that will attempt to bind them again. Breaking as they bind. Tarodale, they call it. “Little Laventille,” others call it, its pastel homes laid out like a cynical homage to another place in Trinidad that we’ve learned to fear: Laventille, in the north of the island, near Cocorite, where other Moko Jumbies walk. Amid the rambling promises of politicians, we struggle everywhere to rise above our self-contempt, don’t we?5 Here though, in the still, over-sweetened putrefaction of this dead industry, we understand that there are no graves deep enough to contain a culture unaware of its death/that refuses death/that insists life. No force strong enough to deny it. In the darkness and the light that follows, we find that there is no chamber dark enough

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for a people who are deeply aware of the afterlife in which they find themselves. We remember that we cannot completely extract Mas from the framing mechanisms of history and language any more than the fabric that sways around us like a forgotten Mad Bull kite strung with fraying marlin. However much we wish it weren’t the case, they circumscribe our inventions in very real ways—we live the afterlife of a particular history, its unfortunate legacy embedded in our brains, leaping (though creolized) from our mouths. The ghosts of our conquerors still gather there to conspire. In spite of it all, we still manage to create, if dangerously, from our own dark chambers—the ones we dare to claim in these small hours. Walking into and out of that same place, Jonadiah and Stephanie insist themselves past the myth of a half-remembered authenticity, insisting a freedom to express themselves in terms that extend beyond the parameters of the festival, reaching not just outward to the world, but inward to the very interior of the island. To its heart—well, one of its hearts. Ste. Madeleine, where generations of sugar were cultivated and carted. This imperative both to move beyond and within the parameters is what fuels their attempts to engage those of us who inhabit the spaces in-between with an air of grace and rancorous humor. They seem to flow with comparative simplicity out of and into the in-between spaces that we try, with great difficulty, to navigate. This is not spiritual in the sense of the infusion of a disembodied wisdom, but rather the deliberate possession of a vernacular aesthetic whose face we know and have cause to follow. Magical. Following, then, beyond the familiar victories and disappointments of the season, I watch their metamorphoses, how they inhabit the leaking, rusted aftermath of this abandoned place, then outgrow it. Looking closely as they negotiate the remains of a destruction no one could prevent, I ask myself (I still don’t dare ask them), “What can man-made gods do for those of us who fail to recognize them? What good are prophets to those who ignore them? Where do they—or any of us—truly belong, if not in the absurdity of a Carnival? Is man the measure of a Moko Jumbie—or of Mas—or is it the other way around?” Is the ghost of a ghost a man? If so, then what is a woman? Who are they together and apart? Who can say? As for me, although I am a god of my own shortcomings, holding sway over my failures and the troubles they bring, I see my abilities and aspirations much better depicted in the Moko Jumbies’ humanity. And, in spite of myself and the rest of us, these Moko Jumbies—Stephanie and Jonadiah—are human, each a party to the other’s strengths and insecurities. I harbor no illusion, nor do they. Their clasped hands, their sometimes uneasy embrace above my head, remind me of the gulf between my people and me—the tacit condescensions of distance and closeness that keep us together

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and apart. I see their fatigue in the unforgiving afternoon sun. They glisten and perspire and take long breaths, leaning against cold steel pipes. They flirt and laugh, but there are secrets. Secrets. They are so much like new lovers, still learning the curves and corners of the other with patient pleasure. Like old lovers, theirs is a private dialect of upturned lips and furrowed brows—faces chiseled out of sandstone and polished enough to reflect the damaged beauty of an entire people. Their quiet intimacies. The knowing looks they share of a desire to inhabit each other’s spaces are hard to miss. (Almost drowning in their company, I remember a riddle: Water stand up, water fall down—what is that? Sugar Cane.) Their subtleties are as light and hardy as sugar cane arrows before they are burned into ash and forgetting. Nothing lasts in this place, people say. I see how they fall and fall out, how they remain in mortal want of a reality that may be promised but never attained. Not here, anyway. Young as they are, I see how desperately each fights to stave off the effects of age and irrelevance in the other. Understandable, for if you’ve ever felt the lance of time—the agonizing back, the rusty hinge of a hip, the sunburned shoulders and hardened knees, the fractured heart—then you must have asked, “Where do we find ourselves, eventually, if not in each other’s imperfect care? What comfort can we honestly expect to receive in our acoustic solitude?”

The Strange Diplomacy of Remembrance I sometimes wonder what becomes of a people who seem only to imagine a past, a people for whom the past brings no real comfort. I wonder if it is the same as having no future. I wonder if it’s a kind of widespread self-betrayal. Moko Jumbies, on the other hand, do not seem to share my anxieties. They seem to have no need to rush. It may be because they can’t fly or run away (like some of us do), or because the people they’re meant to lead have so far been unwilling to follow in their footsteps, or of those who’ve used tradition to make an imperfect way for them. People tend to blame the messenger, but who can say? Whatever happens, they stay with the people, in spite of how they or those people change or fail to change. They remain. So I remain. Together, we manage not to come apart. Bound as we are to this place—and to each other—we’ve inherited the hardened syntheses of race and class, of time and place, of bitterness and melancholy, of rum and oil, steel and sugar. But it’s only when stopping past the hills and looking into the empty cauldron of a place, or counting the sporadic flicker of lights that flash behind loosened aluminum sheets, that I can also understand how connected we

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are to such ugly things. When bodies intersect with industry in these small hours, each becomes the other’s master, having been exposed to the elements of their mutual neglect. Pipes leak. Some burst. Beams rust and petrify. And the workers and walkers who work and walk these spaces—these gangways, pipes, and beams—crystallize, then dissolve at the end of their respective days. Like tradition. At the confluence of inadequate memory and vision, there is no difference between what we have made and what we have aspired and failed to be. No difference between a dead factory and the living descendants of its former workers. In truth, we do not need to ask what happened here. There’s always—always—been blood in the sugar. And fire. We’ve been (the) burning cane in this region for centuries. Cannes Brulée. Canboulay. Remember flambeau. Remember cutlass. The watchdog, in the end, was less than hostile. The watchmen overslept. We inspected the abandoned computers, gauges, and notebooks. We goose-stepped livewires, water puddles, sledgehammered paths, and whatever other dangers awaited us. All so we could find a space for something beautiful, so we could find beauty in a space that never possessed it. In the wake of failed nationalized experiments— sugar and, lately, oil and natural gas—industry and technology can appear to eclipse what we think of as “tradition.” But we also know how stubbornly, how beautifully, we resist. We looked askance at these ruined things, knowing that they signified the coming ruin of other things, the choreographed descent of flesh and metal into entropy. How perfectly they showed us things about ourselves we would rather avoid: the deaths of loved ones, our own deaths, the gradual silences of people we once knew as they go about their lives unconcerned about us, the loneliness we feel as new ideas of ourselves take shape after the collapse of our once rigid hypocrisies, the encroachment of self-pity and bitterness, the struggle for forgiveness and grace. We resisted, imperfectly, to make Mas and to play it as a literal reflection of ourselves. For many of us, reflection involves recovery work: the stirring up and denial of traumas, of beatings, both private and public, to see what we find in the darkness, what we see and ignore. It’s messy. Every gesture, every word, every claim will disrupt a legacy that runs deep in our breakable bones. Deeper still in our history (the sighing, epic memory of our former selves). In the search for ourselves, we find that

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we are often compelled to speak from absences, to (re)create presences from our splintered echoes. This aligns with the role of Caribbeanist Photography, as I’ve noted, which is grounded in continued attempts to offer visual evidence of the obvious, and to go in search of what is missing. In so doing, it offers us new ways of seeing for ourselves. And, if it is the threat of invisibility we face, or the deliberate unseeing and unhearing of our classically underclassed bodies, then we ought to consider what it is that speaks to us from the deep, as well as the high. We know that if we stand in the sun long enough, our shadows will make Moko Jumbies of us. We will need to be more than mere sundials unto ourselves, though, marking the passing of our days with patience, with the sophisticated complaint and quiet regularity of a timepiece. We will have to let the romanticism of our singular powers fade and put aside the myth of our self-sufficiencies and false authenticity. We will have to believe, as these walkers do, that our presence—our being present—will complement the pantheon of supernatural creatures that traverse the in-between. In doing so, we will remember and reaffirm (for whoever cares to see) that our lives are not abandoned factories, our hearts are not gravestones. Nor are we the direct descendants of sugar. Things will change again as they did for us when the sky darkened and we prepared to leave (only to return, to see it once again as we met it and to retrieve what we’d left behind). They have to change. So take a breath. Stand still. Get your bearings. Then walk, slowly at first, into it. Know that Moko Jumbies signify our human ambitions to be what we cannot be, allowing us to portray the inevitable acceptance of our limitations, the imperfections of humanity, the lying shadows, the moving dust, and the defiant ashes of which we are all composed. By day’s end, I would discover that there are differences between ourselves and the things designed to make us suffer, even though there may be no difference between sea sand and sugar for people who understand that the grief of crossing an ocean can never be sweetened. Some time later, I will think of my mother and my children. I will think of blood in the sugar and the legacy of diabetes that marks our bodies in this unfeeling place, removing our limbs, leaving us hobbled. Other things will become clear to me: Stephanie hunches her shoulders when she stands, shifting her hip to the right so she can untie a knot; imported Demerara sugar granules adhere to her warm hands, beneath her nails; she needs to eat sweet things whenever she walks the stick—sweets, in tribute to Oshun so she can walk without

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falling and so undermine the buttresses of this rotting colonialism. And then, to clear the rot of neocolonialism, its newer, more potent form. Sugar alone will not do. Almost breathless by sunset, I would learn that even now the dilapidated heart of this haunted place is incapable of loving my people—monsters, or their eroding carcasses, cannot love. No matter. I prefer to go in search of them—my people—in the asymmetrical sinews that stretch across the chest and burning shoulders of an exhausted Moko Jumbie. Jonadiah is made of flesh and blood. He is a man. And as he stands without his stilts, bathing half-crucified in fluorescent light against a brick wall, I consider the amputations of spirit that we have all had to endure, just to be able to walk and live here. I consider the prosthesis of “tradition,” and how our knees buckle collectively beneath the marvelous, perishable things that collect like cane trash in our skins. Here is a man. Here is a woman. Multitudes rumble in the spaces between them, and my hands shake as if something beautiful were about to happen.

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JOUVAY REPRISED It is far too easy to claim that Caribbean society is comprised largely of people who wish to be fooled. Or, that in the unlikely absence of someone to fool us, we devise means for fooling ourselves. Our luminaries dare to curse the ones who feed them and allow them to forget. We forget. This, we hear and learn to repeat, is Trinidad. This is how it is in the Caribbean. But, I wonder, how are we unlike any other society that responds to the distraction of spectacle, embracing the illusion as if it were real, and committing a great deal of time, effort, space, and material in the process? We are people, too. I’d like to think there’s more to us than the obvious problems being people entails. I have to think that our citizenship— our bone-deep belonging to this place—is more than a pappyshow. That the blindness is long, but temporary. —PORT OF SPAIN, 2015

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Jouvay Reprised

Keon Eccles blows fire at a Crossroads (Keate St. & Frederick St.), Port of Spain, Emancipation Day (August 1), 2015. (left) Fabrice Barker performs a Red Devil Mas, a modification of the Jab Molassie, Brian Lara Promenade, Port of Spain, Emancipation Day, 2015.

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Fabrice Barker, Brian Lara Promenade, Port of Spain, Emancipation Day, 2015.

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Orlando Hunter as Jab Molassie/Lansetkód. Brian Lara Promenade. Port of Spain, Emancipation Day, 2015.

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Brittany L. Williams as modified Lansetkód, Brian Lara Promenade. Port of Spain, Emancipation Day, 2015. (left) Tracey Sankar and Joel Chimming as Blue Devils. Brian Lara Promenade, Port of Spain, Emancipation Day, 2015.

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Orlando Hunter as Jab Molassie/Lansetkód. Brian Lara Promenade. Port of Spain, Emancipation Day, 2015.

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Jabari Taitt as Jab Molassie/Lansetkód with wireframe horns at a Crossroads (Park St. & Frederick St.). Port of Spain, Emancipation Day, 2015.

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Larry Richardson, a longtime Mas man, in handmade mask of wiremesh, painter’s tape, painter’s mask, and a plastic 2-liter soda bottle cut to fit his mouth. Frederick Street, Port of Spain, Emancipation Day, 2015. (left) Tracey Sankar and Joel Chimming as Blue Devils at Besson Street. Port of Spain, Emancipation Day, 2015.

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Larry Richardson, in handmade mask. Frederick Street, Port of Spain, Emancipation Day, 2015. (right) Orlando Hunter as Jab Molassie/Lansetkód. Financial Complex, Port of Spain, Emancipation Day, 2015.

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Brittany L. Williams with sign (“CARICOM Take a Stand”). Port of Spain, Emancipation Day, 2015. (left) Orlando Hunter, amid flagpoles. Brian Lara Promenade, Port of Spain, Emancipation Day, 2015.

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Neg-la Vye1

J O U VAY REPRISED A People, Ground to Dust

You know, I realize something: Mas is not the embodiment of metaphor, but the other way around. It may seem a bit contrary for me to be so grounded in the literal when so much of Caribbean identity is located in symbolic action—my unironic embrace of Mas and Carnival, notwithstanding—but this is only because I do not consider symbolism alone to be the primary work of Caribbeanist Photography. It is true, for example, that many of our expressions are comprised of modes and features that make strategic use of evasion and misdirection, among other things. That is, they are used to shift the attention of the audience, allowing the practitioner to symbolically display what has generally been overlooked, and to call attention to a thing by appearing to refer to something else. Bolstered, for example, by the mythical cunning of Anansi, and infused with the cosmic divinity and playfulness of Eshu or Hanuman, the poetic arts of the shit-talker, the old-talker, and trickster are founded on the principle of things being other than what they appear to be. This, however, presumes an awareness of things as they might have been, or as they may currently be. So while it is true that symbol acts as a conduit to substantiation and meaning, I see it as a kind of remembering, an activation of an image that the symbol is intended to represent. Elmina. Zong! Moruga. Remember? We are never too far from the symbolism of our spoken words, as well: the undulating tones, veiled threats, boasts, and riddles that we pick out from the convoluted speech of the aforementioned Midnight Robbers and Pierrot Grenades, or those of the Black Indians and Wild Indians, or drunk, disputatious friends. These oral manifestations are part of how we make sense of the world, generally deployed as one of a series of rhetorical modes: code-switching, wordplay, circumlocution, call and response, boasting/shaming, proverbs, the sermonic, and nonverbal/visual semantics.2 Similarly, we can hardly deny that every image, regardless of how literally one would hope for it to be viewed, will always be subject to some kind of symbolic interpretation.3 This, we’ve surmised, is how we separate ourselves from other animals: our expert use of symbols. I still try to encounter the materiality of my photographs more deliberately, as objects and actions as well as ideas, and with more than the relatively passive function of an artifact or archive corrupted or collecting dust. The photograph is evidence of the enduring materiality of symbolic action, and its work in this book is to center the Caribbean subject. More broadly considered, this collection exists as an argument of what I have seen and of what remains to be seen—what I have missed.4 Missing pieces, we know, are troublesome enough without misdirection, so my agenda (however late) has 217

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to be clear, even obvious: this is a practice intended to facilitate the viewer’s awareness of the vernacular presence, reminding us that we are a visual people, as sophisticated in the open as we are with our secrets and our subversions (in plain sight, as it were, and voluntarily stripped of unnecessary insinuations). As far as seeing goes, the only thing worse than disillusionment is blindness; the only thing worse than blindness is the willful absence of a vision. The time for declarations will soon be at an end, and we will be forced to sift the ashes for who we are. A re/discovery, of sorts that forces us to contend, finally, with the myth of who we want to be. And so, we come, again, to this. Trinidad and Tobago stands out in the region as a premier model of a tropical dystopia, a triumph of globalization existing in a state not even our manufactured nostalgia can hope to redeem. This can be admitted, I believe, without much debate. Come. Stay awhile. Stay in the capital of beautiful, dangerous things. Pay attention. The Trinidad and Tobago of our imaginings has, like the rest of the region, failed to survive the experiment of independence. We seem to have perfected our pretenses, our imperfect emulations, becoming what we could never really conceive. We seem to have outdone Massa long past his day, to have perfected the tyrannies of the post/colonial mentality with no hope of recompense from its designers. We seem content to frame our citizenship as a spectacular pretense of muted minds and mouths, of fat and muscular bodies forced to grind joy from suffering. We seem, as a people, to be in something of a fugue state—a kind of walking amnesia so total that we seem to have forgotten how to remember. But although I think we’ve fallen short in many respects, none of those things is essentially true. Not completely, anyway. We still know what Empire was. History. Camera. We know that we are still here. Still alive. We were cast and framed in its dark chambers—remember? Nigger / not human Coolie / not good enough Dougla / not yet Béké Negre / neither person nor a nation Coco Panyol / neither traitor nor conqueror Zami / a magic too different to love Slave / never quite ready to govern ourselves Savage / not fully committed to the inner workings of power

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Remember? Our laughter has a pathology. Our dancing has a pathology, traceable to those chambers. We are a people without power. We have never had it. There seems to be no urgency in this fact, nor any outrage at what we witness because of it—the curse, some would say, of being a numerical majority in the kingdom of rum. The regular occurrence of our local atrocities and their unvarnished broadcasts seem hardly to cause a ripple on the idyllic surfaces of our Caribbean societies. Nothing much seems to happen here. There are no riots, no memorials for executions (extrajudicial or otherwise) occurring here and a world away, no sustained movements to address the murders of women that bookend the years. Except, of course, for Mas. It incites. It moves. And we move with it. Except, maybe, for a terrifying stir in the bones of people who have had enough and look past the peeling façade of objective reality toward an unapologetically subjective one. We don’t need to go back to Blake’s Flagellation for evidence of such brutalities—do we?—for the exigency to which we are now called on to respond. We don’t need to go anywhere else at all. All the devils, armed in vulgarized “culture” and “tradition.” To our credit, we have daemons in our midst to offer responses on our behalf. They’re not always painted, nor do they all shift like cane stalks in the breeze. They look just like us. In the meantime, perhaps until understanding occurs, we will continue to make something of our suffering. Mas. Art. This is my attempt, how I say that suffering and the recovery from suffering are not casual tropes for my people. For, though we’ve learned to endure, we see how those we know and those we do not know are left on the street to rot like garbage, their children left to console themselves in the vacuum. These states are real. At least, more real than any image I compose. Things are falling apart, as always. These unheeded warnings of another season play out like a crude dialectical prophecy, leaving all our denials intact in the way a skeleton is intact after the flesh has long decayed, or like ruins whose pallid columns defy the sun and rain. Or like tired people chipping home after a Carnival. Too tired even for cynicism, we seem to have gone past atrophy, exceeding the expectations of our former masters, mastering our wretched condition with newer and newer trappings. These are not hopeful times for civic engagement. But the reality of our pessimism offers a vantage point. It is from there I argue that we possess the potential of more concrete aspirations, in spite of what we’ve been conditioned to think about ourselves. We are always willing to try, I would argue—willing to fail, trying. We are not the first (or last) culture to be in crisis,

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after all. In the failed project that was Empire, we have many peers along the hyperextended spine that is our archipelago—part of our inheritance of being improperly unseen, improperly constructed. This place, whatever we make of it, is mine and is yours. So let it not be said that we know nothing of hegemony, or of the marginalizing arts of silence and forgetfulness that are heightened during Carnival. In spite of it all, we stand to be liberated. Though, not without the discomfort of facing what this season can sometimes make of its devotees. About thirty kilometers from Port of Spain, an old Mas man sits in his front yard after feeding his birds. Slow moving—almost shuffling—you see that he has collected dirt and dust as he goes to sit amid the ruins of a life in Carnival. Here is a helmet. Here, an axe. Black beads. He speaks a creolized Yoruba dialect, commands and threats dart from his lips, then greetings, then a smile. He and all his possessions have fallen into a pile of disrepair. Soon comes the impulse to heap charities, pity, and prayers upon him, though he has sought none. He is an old Mas man, demanding modest honoraria in exchange for his recollections. He’s been in this thing for eighty years, now. And, like most Masmakers, he has very little to show for it. Plastic trophies, feathers, and photographs cannot be pawned in this (non)economy. Things remain from that visit: The squalor. The exposed red brick. The cobwebbed bathroom. The unswept floor. The tossed clothes, all dirty. The stink of bird-droppings mixed in with dust and the dried ink of old newspapers. The white enamel pot half-filled with urine—golden, pungent—in the corner. If this tragedy fails, as others do, to make any of us cringe in reflexive disgust, or cause us to shake our heads and weep for him (though, admittedly, always a bit more for ourselves), or reach for a verse, or some vaunted Arthurian or Ozymandian reference from our education—our colonization, really—then where do we locate empathy for a widowed man still so tragically wed to a tradition that he knows will horn him, a tradition that offers no royalties to any of its legends? It is easier to ignore him. Even I sometimes pretend to forget,

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so I won’t have to drink tea for anyone else’s fever, or volunteer as a martyr for anyone else’s shames. It’s not at all pleasant what his life has become. But the scene is no different from the aftermath of any Carnival. Carnival, a more recent past that we can more easily recognize, one that is not too far gone, or one that looks less like our frail and ailing elders, less like a fading legend crumbling beneath his inevitable obsolescence—his mortality, frankly—as likely to be forgotten as venerated, both with equal effect. I wonder: which of our Masmakers faces the same fate, rotting away in a chamber at the end of their careers? These are realities that neither he, nor any performer, nor even I can escape in these times. A recession recently announced will help bear this out. This fading man reminds me—all of us—that there is no nostalgia for old and ugly things, for used and dirty things, things on the margins. No nostalgia for young, beautiful things, either. No nostalgia for poor, black things. Nostalgia cannot flourish in mossy drains and on the broken backs of municipal garbage trucks that compete for our collective scorn as they pass. And yet, this is where the material and psychic efforts of countless Masmakers end up, stripped of their romanticism and their hedonism. Wait a few months, and the incessant chip-step will blend soon enough with the bone-shaking bass, and the senses will be shocked again into the maniacal somnambulism of another Jouvay. We hope to wake up from another Carnival again, if not fully. As for my case, I’ve grown wary of taxonomies. I’ve preferred to embark, instead, on this photographic exploration of becomings: the idea that a deliberative vision can help illustrate and give form to the motives of ordinary people. Maybe I’ve passed it, or it has passed me. Either way, I sometimes forget how precious and finite my days are. A more grounded pedagogy—a liberatory methodology of the oppressed, if you like—should follow, but I am not yet at the point of answering the questions it would undoubtedly raise.5 My questions are, as a result, far simpler: Are we redeemable, or are we damned? And how is it that we are not damned? For answers, I go where I’ve been compelled to go. Really, where else could an answer be found, or given, than in a Carnival—in a Mas?

Jab Se Yo Neg6 It may easily be argued that all our celebrations are just as hollow and jingoistic as any Carnival. Independence Day and Republic Day come to mind, where flags and pennants are no different from feathers and beads. For those who have stood in the sun for a parade to celebrate a nominal independence, the sun will burn just the same as it would

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on Carnival Monday, though with more fanfare and a good deal less dancing. Every season will have its anthem playing as penance for every ritual. Where Carnival differs more significantly is in the disproportion of its apparent splendor to the paucity of actual change among those who go to great expense to ensure they are seen (and missed). Steeped in this irony, the most committed Masmakers have learned—like the rest of us—to endure the problems and push on, scars and all. By now, though, it ought to be clear that I consider the reflection on vernacular expression—Mas in yuh Mas—to be a viable path to the enactment of conscious citizenship. I accept that it may not be replicable, owing to the peculiarities and particularities that abound in the region. We each have our own thing. Fortunately, I’ve not gone in search of the divine, but of those who inhabit it—those normally withheld in silence or invisibility, yet find me deserving enough of their attentions and anxieties, their aspirations and ideas. Those qualities, at least, resonate—Carnival or no Carnival—among us. From them, I take the following advice: Whenever we have cause to think of what Carnival in Trinidad is, has become, and desperately needs to be, we must look for it in fleeting moments that manifest in people who find their way to it, through it, and from it. Look, without condescension, at what they—at great personal and spiritual cost— make of themselves and of the traditions, troubles, and the joys that bind them and free them. It’s a methodology of the self—the vernacular self, implicated in every outcome it has occasion to observe. The self as subject, finally present. Now, some advice of my own: To see what there is to be seen, you must look deliberatively for your self. (Your own self.) Work out your hypocrisies with vigilance, and your salvation without complaint. Go in search of what you’ve learned to ignore. Reject what you think you know of yourself in favor of what remains to be seen, even if these things never reveal themselves, avoiding you at every turn, leaving you stranded (behind your lens or in front of it). Even if they disappoint; these things are meant to disappoint. It’s why we hold on, why we push. At least, this is what you must do when you see Mas moving like love in motion, or if you’ve ever felt threatened or disgusted by the limbs and tongues that dangle in public like the unfinished confessions of people in the in-between. And yes, the chaotic remembrances of historical terrors, when performed in the context of a competition, are hardly revolutionary. But ask yourself: what is it we deny in ourselves that now causes us to recoil in disgust at what we find? What happens when we see ourselves being reflected back at us, face to face, filtered in drying blue, hairy-hoofed, or from atop wooden stilts? Will we, having found an answer to any of these questions,

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continue to dance without consequence? (Have we ever danced without consequence? Is that even possible for us?) And (since we’re here), let me emphasize that Masmakers owe us nothing, nor does Mas itself. I often wonder what we could be “owed” when we can be so selfish, so self-absorbed. Can a child “owe” something to a parent? Can the dead “owe” the living? Or the past the present and future? Framed more reasonably, I wonder what are we owed that we aren’t first willing to give freely to others. What good are reparations, for example, to those who prefer to revel in disrepair, or whose bodies bear a debt neither time nor blood will ever repay? What need have we for daemons when we break and torment ourselves with such mundane efficiency? Can they shoulder such burdens for us in these post-everything times? (We’re not yet post-temporal, are we?) Haven’t they brought us far enough that we can now take up the critique with equal fury and go the rest of the way? If anything, they are catalysts, conspiring with us to bring about the revival of our self-awareness, displays of a public conscience performed not for their sake but ours. Foisting our commitment to declension onto them, we who think we see them now find ourselves on the back-end of a jeremiad we’ve neglected to heed: inaction, like willful ignorance, is a kind of damnation. The inversion should come as no surprise. In this place, we are all as likely to find redemption among pretending daemons as among the man-made gods we force to compete and campaign for our affections and waning attentions. Though we pretend not to notice or understand the desire for actual emancipation in the course of everyday life, we all arrive at the same conclusion, eventually: None of this is the daemons’ doing, but our own. We don’t suffer because of them. They do not bind us and torment us. Other things prevent our liberation, which exceed the limitations of what deamons can imagine— beyond the daemonic imaginary. Our imagined tormentors do more to obscure our more human failings than these performers ever could. These cause no terror as they move from stage to stage with frenzied pace and singular focus. Our afflictions and what we make of them are another story. Each of us, the old will say, “have a copy to read.” For my part, I had hoped to be a better son, a better man by now. A better former husband. A better father. But my vision blurs more often these days, and I feel as though I am running out of time. I want to feel connected to everyone and be everywhere, but between my frantic breaths things go past that I’ve never seen. In the claustrophobic press of othered bodies, familiar faces look with disaffected eyes through my lens. I miss them, terribly sometimes. Regardless of how I express my vision, I know that my struggle to understand those I encounter may be viewed as too much of an imposition and fail in the end. This, as I understand it, is not a dilemma. I just leave them

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alone after a while, and go chasing after my own vision with the same urgency I recognize in the flailing limbs and frenzied pace of people dressed as metaphors. I am bound to find something there. Even so, I am not immediately invited to consider the vulgarity of my actions when I subject the protruding vertebrae and the hard-faced expressions of a half-naked masquer wrapped in rope and chains to the relative immobility of an image. Aside from the mostly quiet operations of my conscience, I am not forced to explain the inherent violence of my desire or the moments of arousal that brush past my intellectualism and speak to (and from) the innermost parts of me. I need not think too much of my vulnerable manhood or my need for kinship and other absent things. Except that I choose to do so, to offer up my explanation. Even then (even now), I am never far from asking what must it mean to have my vision mediated by a white gaze, whose incorrect idea of my people lingers, haunting us all even now. It’s one of the ironies of image-making all image-makers must face: however personal our approach, we remain liable to overarching cultures of subjection. And yet, I insist that the ubiquity of that gaze should cause no panic, neither for me nor the Caribbeanist photographer, who (at least in my mind) is accustomed to its impositions. There are other gazes to consider. Ours, for starters. And, besides, no useful act (aside from survival) can occur in a panic. More to the point, no deliberation can be expressed in a panic. No battle of any kind is waged, or won, in a panic. Healing cannot take place in a panic. Or, so I tell myself.

Danse Croisée As I have intimated, a book about photography is also a book about managing darkness in its relation to light. Connotations and easy associations notwithstanding, these are dark days for us, so I hope the analogy possesses some merit toward the realization of what it means to be Caribbean in these times. The photographs can only do part of this work. They represent a particular reality, but are not of that reality—once published, they have a reality all their own. Mas (the “particular reality” that these photographs attempt to represent) belongs to the reality of it’s time, which continues even now. This book is about a desire for power—vernacular power—that rejects the tendency for aversion and denial, embracing the hardened shame of our long silences. But this is only part of it. To me, the desire for power must emerge from the unceremonious acknowledgment of its absence. This acknowledgment—and nothing else—is the foundation upon which every emancipatory practice is based. If we choose to view ourselves in defiance of our

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pretenses, we then have a responsibility to push and stretch ourselves, even to the point of rupture. During Carnival, we are united for a time in that rupture. Within such eases and constraints, I invoke a Fanonian desire: to “induce man to be actional, by maintaining in his circularity the respect of the fundamental values that make the world human.” Fanon calls this the “utmost urgency for he who, after careful reflection, prepares to act.”7 This may be where metaphor and metonym part and encircle each other in a way we can more easily understand: an image of Caribbeanness as a series of “Mas Actions” that extend beyond the limitations of the Caribbeanist photographer’s frame—where I hope they work as a more practical complement to my self-indulgent abstractions. Fortunately, Mas and the myriad images of its daemons have their own roles to play. Regarding this final series, that role may be to herald an instance of Mas when aligned even more closely with an agenda. On Emancipation Day in 2015, the political activist group Jouvay Ayiti performed a Mas in the streets of Port of Spain. Regarding themselves in the Convois tradition that preceded Carnival and Mas in the Caribbean, the group convened in 2010, following the earthquake that devastated the nation of Haiti. Conceived by Rawle Gibbons and Marvin George at the University of the West Indies–St. Augustine, the group’s name and its mandate is both an homage to the Jour Ouvert (Jouvay), of greeting the dawn in Trinidad Carnival, and to the racial-epistemological connection to Haiti (Ayiti, the Taino word for the island). In many ways, it seems to draw on the sense of deep indebtedness and guilt in Rudder’s Haiti, I’m Sorry—“One day we’ll turn our heads,” he sings. “One day” can easily never come. Many days have, in fact, come and gone since then, leading us here with our heads hardly turned and things barely changed. Their “Mas Action” was a protest-procession of black(ened) bodies in response to that failure. Rejecting the sanctioned boundaries of Carnival, Jouvay Ayiti invoked the original Canboulay on the day of its original celebration. Invoked, as well, are our Haitian contemporaries who invade the streets of Jacmel to chastise the limitations of their respective fates with bodies just as black. It was a handmade performance, a rare process in the age of fancy, unoriginal things. Rarer still in the off-season, and proof (I think) of the organic unfolding of Mas. Regarding the provenance of the wireframe horns worn by Jabari Taitt (Plate 8), for example, Marvin George recounts: We met him a few years ago through an alumna (Anisty Cyrus, now Frederick) of a spoken word programme (Wordsmiths) which Camille used to run between 2008 and 2011 I think; Anisty is now a graduate of the Theatre Arts BA, too. Anyway, he was interested in acting, monologues at the time. He did some work with my group, Mount

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D’Or Cultural Performers in Best Village too in 2015. Now he does work in fashion design. He came to Jouvay Ayiti though through his love for what he could do with his hands. Fabrice Barker brought him. The horns though were made by Aisha Provoteaux, when she was in the BA in Visual Arts [at UWI]. It was part of her costume for Jouvay Ayiti’s 2013 Jouvay presentation, “Mamaguy and Pappyshow in a Family Bacchanal.” Aisha is now one of Jouvay Ayiti’s directors.8

To me, those horns were the sublime coalescence of a political agenda in public space. I can, at times, be overly romantic. But, as they mixed themselves in with other modified traditions—Ifa devotees, Spiritual Baptists, Earth people, Pentecostals, and old revolutionaries—there was little doubt that pleasure of the carnivalesque had been traded in this moment for the opportunity to deliver their arguments and appeals publicly, in the sun. And it was at Aisha Provoteaux’s hands that the literal handing over of the horns had occurred—there must be room for a Poetics in this process. The Mas was aimed at raising public awareness and outrage over the suffering of Haitian people (and less for ourselves, who also suffer from inaction). Their response to crises of UN occupation, its spreading of cholera, the resulting deaths, and the displacement of Haitian descendants in the Dominican Republic, Dominica, and the Bahamas, was a direct link between Mas and acts of conscious citizenship in public space. Who could miss it? What need have we for an explanation? Don’t we already know what is happening here? It is this: Parading along the route in wireframe horns and pink paper frills, dragging along draped in lace and dry-rotted fishnets, courting the ridicule of your obesity at the gates of the Royal Jail, or standing with skull and tarred corbeau feathers to spit fire in front of a church, a nearly naked black man painting himself black, illuminated in the corrupted shadow of the Financial Complex. With bejeweled bra and “too-short” shorts, an already twice-painted woman has already swallowed gas behind the bridge—she laughed to be seen as much as to be heard. Who should try to make sense of these things, as if they were some careless contradiction in need of resolution, as if we don’t already know that we’re not yet free? Remember the Lansetkód of Jacmel, or the Jab Jab of St. Georges who raise the Revo’s dead, or the Neg Marron of French Guiana, or the Blue Devils who punctuate the Canboulay—the Kambulay reclaimed—at Piccadilly Green? I remember them because I confess that I am unable to forget the activism of the moment, not when the violence of rolling blackouts is so much harder to miss at midmorning. Not when the tolerance for mauby-colored water requires a particular brand of faith. Not when the apparent desire for the gradual extermination of black minds—in Trinidad or anywhere else—is counteracted by the obscene utility of

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a permanent underclass that is perpetually despised, yet always present. Or rather, there but not really present. Necessary but, somehow, not wanted. This crisis alone would explain the emancipatory potential of the photograph, and underscore the importance of a Caribbeanist perspective. It does for me.

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We recall that photography, from its beginnings, has enabled the examination of things not merely as they once were, but as they were thought to be.1 Couched in privilege, the “objective” potential of the frame exposes an even greater violence of racism and its conventions of classification. It should go without saying that such a practice intentionally depersonalizes subjects, making them into things to be regarded rather than perceived, engaged, and (perhaps) understood. Conceived and composed by whoever had the means to make a photograph, subjects and objects were “immortalized.” Seeing, as such, was an expression not only of power over bodies and other things, but also of the power to bind them to the seer’s conception of the past by locating them eternally in the moment they were perceived. For me, and people like me, this has been a problem. Even armed with an instrument of power, the potential for true subjection is a power I do not inherently possess. If ever I lose my bearings, or get confused, I remind myself that the perpetual crisis of endangered black life and the frequency of black death have made doing this book necessary. We do not only exist in the aftermath of slavery, but rather insist on a presence somewhere between the still life of inadequate memory and the afterlife of a history we have yet to reconcile. This is where we are and who we are. Such things can remain abstract, personal, and unjustified. Like the jumbies and other spirited things that lurk in shadow and in plain sight, my experience of photography can remain magical and undisturbed by the nuisance of my questioning. I am free (I tell myself ) to deny the significance of whatever I wish, to silence whomever I choose. But it doesn’t remain abstract for very long. Each time I hold the camera to my eye, I embrace with one hand and reject with the other a legacy that was not designed to consider my humanity, or that of my people. It is the same gaze that, in latter times, has framed the refusal of the tourist’s camera as a “backward” and “primitive” impulse, as an inarticulate “hostility” to the racialized gaze of the West—hostility, we understand, to the inherent principles of conquest and capital.2 This same vision, operating in perpetuity (and seemingly without contradiction), is as familiar to me as my own. So in spite of the apparent “visual lacuna” of Caribbean bodies in the history of photography, I cannot pretend that we are late arrivants to this conversation.3 Not when our bodies come before the lens. We inhabit this damned afterlife as a matter of course, beyond the reach of panic and reward, as if it were a foregone conclusion. But we’re not damned. We see how everyday life can hasten the erosion of our memory of ourselves. But the effects of erasure are never total, and we’re compelled to find ourselves in awkward spaces, only to find that we are still here, in spite of ourselves. So we make Mas, invoking memory to avoid the troubles that come with forgetting. In this place, 229

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where past is played as present, a mortal Masmaker can take on the qualities of godlike things she can barely remember. And the echoes of borrowed bones are gathered up in memory. In Mas, we remember that we’re not yet so diminished, though our remembrances— of former things, people, places—involve a time that can never be regained, not even in photographs. The resulting performances are among some of the most fleeting visions of our missing parts—these times that have come and gone, taking parts of us and others as they pass, leaving us in a futile scramble to recover from them. What we miss may be gone forever, but some things remain as more than fragments among the bones, as more than whispers in the rubble. Put a slightly different way, the awareness of loss will demand inquiry. When we read Mas too closely as a metaphor of reiterative experience—as a “life on repeat”—we miss a crucial point of what it means to create in the midst of crippling stagnation. To change things from the ground up. The festival is annual, yes. And every year, we are called upon as an audience to gauge the effectiveness of a performance in relation to past performances. We’ve learned to seek out the patterns, so we could measure and compare their desires, probabilities, outcomes, etc., which are undergirded by shared intention and (re)invention, as well as an abiding capacity for critique.4 How beautiful/big/shiny! How magnificent! Nice, but not like it was in ____ whenever. This is all fairly standard, if not always fair. But to align Mas too closely with a festival of restrictions seems wrongheaded to me, especially when we have opportunities (and the responsibility) to go beyond it. Particularly when we understand that the major trope of Caribbean cultural existence is not tradition, per se, but the (re) invention of tradition. Not sameness, but change. Not Carnival in its loosely “traditional” sense, but Mas. I am not overly concerned with these binaries, except to complicate them.5 We’re often forced to deal uncomfortably with the costumed malaise of academic discourse, while our world changes in ways our ancestors could not have foreseen. Whatever the situation, whether at the center or the margin, my people and I are steeped in the enduring violence of whiteness. I’m more interested in the activity that unfolds in the in-between. It is literally our shared point of historical departure and contemporary subjectivity as a Caribbean people. We remain rapt in its myriad legacies: language, culture, industry, everything, everywhere. These are already known (too well, I’d say, as even the most random encounter with our past or present will confirm). So while it may be too late for essentialisms, I still want to look forward to an alternative. A way of seeing. If Mas has taught us anything at all it’s that we cannot arrive at meaning through contentions of purity (because we are not pure), but through the painstaking cultivation and refinement of our many parts—the moving

Conclusion

ones and the missing ones. We certainly begin—and end—with the urgency of an imperfect humanity, but I get a sense from my people that we intend to do more than survive. At least, this is what my soluble traditions suggest. Canboulay, remember? Yes, Kambulay. We know by now that Mas is founded on the idea that vernacular assertions are made not (only) through veiled appeals, but (also) through direct appeals by performers who may or may not be veiled. However, en route to the liberation of Mas from the constraints of un/seeing, there are no limits to the permutations of design and execution that performers are able to enjoy. For those who’ve embraced tradition enough to change it, no veil is necessary. No mask could suffice. This is not always an easy thing being without a mask. It can hurt. I want to do this work. It’s important work—necessary for me, I think—but it can hurt. At times, even I have to look at what has already gone to ruin to find the proof of things that might have been foreseen, knowing they can never be forestalled. At times, I am crippled by my own despair, weeping in anticipation of some minor catastrophe. At other times, I have to go where I do not belong so I can come to terms with what I’ve managed to forget. Each of these involves the afterlife, a discourse that has suggested (insisted) that my people were not intended to survive. (I think it must have been a shock to have survived when simple endurance was all that was required, before dropping dead.) I know, I know. I need to be careful. Should I fail in this attempt, I will tell myself, more modestly, that this book has saved my life. And it has. And it will. I am thinking, more simply now, about the lines my people and I will need to cross (and cross again) to be recognized in this place. Perhaps we are too committed to subtleties that betray us. Or, perhaps it is we who betray ourselves, taking subtleties alone as proof of some deep sophisticated change. A change so sophisticated, so nuanced, that we may have missed it. Or, just as likely, that it didn’t happen at all; that it was, in the end, only a grand charge. People who know metaphor—that is, all of us—know that each is preceded by the material circumstances and experiential challenges that gave birth to their significance. None spring, fully formed, from the ether. They spring, instead, from a certain fact, both tragic and material, that our minds remain deeply colonized by a collective, cultural refusal to acknowledge and understand the ordinary. The tragedy of the colonized mind is founded in its almost total inability to cause a revolt against itself. No “self ” can come of the colonized mind. You will find that it is impossible to revolt against something that does not exist. The colonized mind is a cruel, cruel fiction—it cannot imagine. Looking now toward the sun, welcoming the morning, you realize that you do not wake to the truth of yourself by passing through memory and myth

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into dream, but by actually waking. You must do the work of waking up. Some may, with good reason, prefer to remain in the beautiful dream of a Carnival that has never existed. I sympathize, taking some of that denial for myself, drinking it in without much hesitation. Acts of self-gratification, as far as indulgences go, are much sweeter than self-awareness, much softer and forgiving than self-acceptance. True reflection is, of course, an impossible thing, so we’re fooling no one. We can never really see ourselves by looking—not really. We can never catch a glimpse into the windows of our own souls. We can only see what we appear to be. We can, by extension, see ourselves as something of an affect, something perceived and composed through others—as concepts, refracted. Photographed. ✦ ✦ ✦

Anyway, I’ve already said too much here. The rest remains to be seen. Ah gone.6

Proscenium for an Aqueous Humor

NOTES

1. “Seeing Blue” (2014) and “La Femme des Revenants” (2015) were photographed primarily with Nikon (D7000, D7100); “Moko Jumbies of the South” (2015) and “Jouvay Ayiti” (2015) were photographed with Fujifilm (XT-1). 2. Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 56. 3. Didion, The White Album, 11. 4. Derrida’s dynamics of “différance” comes to mind when thinking of such paradoxes and the spaces in between, though the deliberate performances of history and the ahistorical aspects of the recorded image highlight Caribbeanist Photography as a historicizing practice—always in process and (in this way) quite like the subjects themselves. 5. “If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America,” Hartman writes, “it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery” (6). 6. In Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust writes, “A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist” (Vol. I, 821). 7. Froude, The English in the West Indies, 347. 8. Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” 69. 9. Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” 69. 10. Harris, 44-5. 11. We see how damaging that has been with our attitudes toward our languages, for example, which has been

maligned as “broken English” and our inventive patois downgraded at its inception to “broken French.” Ebonics and Spanglish, established languages, still vie for their legitimacy outside of obscure(d) texts and their respective communities.

Deliberative Daemonic: Making Mas Rhetorica 1. And, when a metaphor becomes obsolete, mere recognition is no longer enough, though it can seem an acceptable measure. There may be genuine relief that something has happened to break the silence, to raise the awareness of a public too busy with its own affairs to see what it has forgotten, but failed metaphors cannot speak back or argue for their proper representation or our interpretations of them. 2. Not surprisingly, the vernacular shift was described thus: “There is no gainsaying that year after year, in an alarming degree, to the number of these depraved and irresponsible wretches, who . . . band themselves together to the detriment of the law, order and society . . . Hordes of men and women, youthful in years but matured in every vice that perverts and degrades humanity, dwell together in all the rude licentiousness of barbarian life: men without aim, without occupation and without any recognised [sic] mode of existence—women, wanton, perverse and depraved beyond expression” (The San Fernando Gazette, qtd. in Brereton, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad 1870–1900, 169). 3. Brereton, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 166. 4. According to Brereton, the Diametre was comprised of “singers, dancers, stickmen, prostitutes, pimps, and badjohns.” They gathered in their respective convois and “boasted their skill in fighting, their bravery, their wit and ability in ‘picong,’ their talent in song and dance, their indifference to the law, their sexual prowess, even their 233

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contempt for the church. In short, they reversed the canons of respectability, the norms of the superstructure” (Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 166). 5. Stuart Hall’s remark, about the English not being “good at myth,” strikes an ironic chord, adding to the vulgarity somewhat. It begs the question not only of how power is imposed upon a set of peoples, but also how the violent inculcation of a particular model of power (its attendant treatment of truth and reality) can, in its essence, be quite mediocre (“Negotiating Caribbean Identities,” 24). 6. Chinese immigrants arrived as indentured laborers as early as 1806, but the vast majority of laborers came from India, arriving first in British Guiana in 1838, then Trinidad in 1845. 7. To add insult to irony, Trinidad was the first country in the world to make Emancipation Day a national holiday on August 1, 1985. 8. In Melton Prior’s sketch, Carnival on Frederick Street, Port of Spain in the Illustrated London News (May 5, 1888), although a masquer is shown holding a horned Pulcinella mask to the face of an offended clergyman, the representation is obscured by the general cultural misunderstanding and the subsequent condescensions of the artist. 9. See Browne, Tropic Tendencies, 11. 10. That is, aside from the fact that it is ridiculous to emphasize a narrative of mimicry as the genesis of Carnival when it was the Canboulay that was actually superimposed onto the imported Saturnalian activities of the planter class. 11. NALIS https://www.nalis.gov .tt/Resources/Subject-Guide/Carnival #tabposition_24145. 12. NALIS https://www.nalis.gov .tt/Resources/Subject-Guide/Carnival #tabposition_24145. 13. Relegated to historical narratives for some decades, the Negue Jadin was controversially revived in 2016 as part of Brian MacFarlane’s band “Cazabon: The Art of Living.” Drawn, as it were,

from the work of nineteenth-century Trinidadian artist Jean Michel Cazabon, the section was roundly criticized for its racist representations. MacFarlane retracted the section, though the issue persists. 14. If it seemed as though there was a type of symbiosis between the haves and have-nots, history has taught us that it would be of the same sort that had racialized violence paired with capitalism, from its inception to its rise. 15. In 2014, the anthem for that amnesia was Kerwin Du Bois’s “Forget about It.” The song epitomizes the escapist impulse of the Soca genre that emerged in the 1970s and was used to rationalize and implicitly critique the failure of sociopolitical commentary associated with Calypso. 16. Indeed, while it may seem to some that Carnival takes place beyond the scrutiny of official surveillance, and that the bacchanal is sacrosanct, one would have difficulty finding an event more organized and watched than this. 17. Walcott, 13. 18. Collected Poems 1948–1984, 48. 19. Collected Poems 1948–1984, 48. 20. In Tropic Tendencies, I note that “one of the objectives of rhetoric seen from a cultural perspective is to preserve and solidify the prevailing aspects of identity among members of a particular social group. Another is to gain a deeper, more robust self-conscious understanding of effective discourse practices among members of that group” (2). This book is concerned primarily with the latter objective. 21. Carnival embodies the tension further highlighted by Antonio Benítez-Rojo in The Repeating Island, wherein “the groups in power channel the violence of the oppressed groups in order to maintain yesterday’s order, while the latter channel the former’s violence so that it will not recur tomorrow” (307). The normalization of this experience of the everyday undermines the apparent efficiency of the dialectic Benítez-Rojo describes, even as its effects calcify in the lives of those who

have power, those who desire it, and those who seem to have abandoned that desire altogether. 22. In Tropic Tendencies, I suggest that “the differences that obscure the viability and complexity of the Caribbean ethos and identity have traditionally involved the application of one device (metaphor) where another (metonymy) would be more effective for articulating particular displays. . . . [A] metonymic Caribbean gaze deliberately harnesses metonymy as a strategy to emphasize contiguity in two thematic areas: on the one hand, the masque and the people on whose behalf it is deployed, and on the other, the deployment of the masque and the larger system it is intended to critique. The Caribbean use of metonymy relies, therefore, on a sense of realistic representation based on the detection and perceived significance of recognizable, distinctive, and characteristic signs, arranged in a given text, that resonate with a vernacular Caribbean audience while simultaneously invoking the overarching system that is up for critique. As a consequence, it provides a discursive and performative bridge to a hitherto unexplored dimension of rhetoric that is rooted in the culture, identity, and ethos of the people from that region” (17–18).

A Shot in the Dark: Toward a Poetics of Caribbeanist Photography 1. This, as Glissant points out in “Cross-Cultural Poetics,” is mostly evident in the oral and literary expressive traditions that traverse the sociolinguistic and rhetorical matrices of vernacular articulation. 2. Dark Matters, 161. 3. In 1840, Adolphe Duperly, a French lithographer, had established his photography studio in Jamaica. While none of his photographs depict any Carnival scenes, according to Elizabeth Bohls,

Notes

his lithograph Rebellion in the Island of Jamaica in January 1832. The Attack of the Rebels on Montpelier Old Works Estate in the Parish of St. James’s, the Property of Lord Seaford is regarded as one of the more significant acts of visual rhetoric in the nineteenth century (Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, 1770–1833, 50–53). 4. Day, Five Years’ Residence in the West Indies, 313. Emphasis mine. 5. Day, Five Years’ Residence, 312–13. Emphasis in original. 6. According to Browne, this is “a way to situate the tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight” (Dark Matters, 21). 7. Day, Five Years’ Residence, 314. 8. Day, Five Years’ Residence, 315. 9. Isaac Mendes Belisario, a Sephardic Jew of Jamaican birth, was the first to document John Canoe costumes in 1837–1838. Additionally, Harper’s Weekly, on March 6, 1880, reported on President Ulysses S. Grant’s visit to Havana. A Carnival was featured on the front cover. 10. Also present, but to a lesser degree, are the Pavironica family (Sandrone, Pulonia, and Sgorghiguelo). See Olly Crick and John Rudlin, Commedia dell’Arte. 11. A dangling modifier. ;) 12. The Illustrated London News, corroborating Day’s observation decades before, noted that the masquers are predominantly black (475). 13. Just as the colonial underclass had determined the need for revolutionary displays of solidarity, there was a corresponding urgency for Prior to demonstrate that whites could perform their own acts of solidarity in the colonies—or, to have them appear to the audience as if they did. Incidentally, the insertion of an unmasked white face becomes a gesture to dismiss the existing schism between native-born whites and “local” whites. 14. The sketch was subsequently engraved and set to print by P. Naumann Jr. and W. H. Overend.

15. The photographic process had already eclipsed Prior’s drawings, in terms of available technology, half a century earlier. This suggests his method, like that of his contemporaries of the form, already bore the conceit of a medium capable of visually constructing reality without seeing a thing. Rather, the objectified subjects of their work were visualized—made to fit the frame—but were in no way seen. Their way of seeing effectively disqualified them. 16. Ironically, John Cowley reports that José M. Bodu was “indignant” at the illustration because his friend and “esteemed fellow-colonist, Mr. Arnold Knox, is transformed into a watchmaking establishment” (Carnival, 188–90). 17. As one of a host of denials from then till now, the refusal of reparations and remuneration for planters inconvenienced by Emancipation comes to mind, further complicated by the wave of American imperialism that threatened the waning economic sovereignty of the Crown in the latter part of the century. 18. This was no doubt exacerbated by the legacy of “New Poor Laws” (1834) that essentially removed social responsibility for the poor; this implied that the condition of poverty was a consequence of failures on the part of the poor. All were absolved by the Crown, as the oppressive economic and material situation became the responsibility of those who suffered, their fault. 19. The precursor to calypso, often sung in Yoruba, French Patois, or English. It is still used by stickfighters. 20. A stickfighter’s dueling dance. 21. Lovelace, The Wine of Astonishment, 107. 22. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 14. 23. This is what Hall argues (isn’t it?), that we are framed fundamentally with the trope of “somewhere else.” Stuart Hall, “Negotiating Caribbean Identities,” in New Caribbean Thought, 28. 24. Arguing that Trinidadian society has failed so far to embrace the

practice of photography “within our consciousness or sphere of cultural reflection,” Mark Raymond suggests that questions of the role of photography in helping us to understand our existence and our condition require that we view the photograph “not only as record but as cultural production— as art” (13). 25. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 52. 26. Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that the originary contexts of what he refers to as the “permanent crisis of visuality” were “the slave plantations, monitored by the surveillance of the overseer, the surrogate of the sovereign.” It therefore bears noting that in a very real way, the photographer can very easily reprise or maintain the overseer’s role in the name of posterity, journalism, or documentary. I am not only aware of this danger for myself, but deeply mindful of it in the work of others, the “modern division of labor” that the virtual transparency of the camera’s visualizing boundary suggests (475). 27. Walcott, “The Sea is History,” 364. And, lest I be so naïve as to forget that antiblackness is not exclusive of black people, I am obliged to recall Audre Lorde’s “Poem #8” in Between Our Selves (1976). 28. The irony may be summed up as: “The enemy of my enemy is not my friend but my master.” Merikins were African American veterans of the War of 1812, who were freed and enlisted into serving the Crown, fighting for the British against Americans. Between 1814 and 1816, First through Sixth Companies of the Corps of Colonial Marines were given the choice to emigrate to Trinidad and were granted land in the south of the island. Their descendants were part of the first black middle class in Trinidad, establishing themselves in all aspects of civic, political, and industrial developments. 29. “The Right to Look,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 477. 30. Of course, one of the challenges with decolonization is that it so

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very closely resembles trauma. This is because there is no indication that the outcome would be much different— except for a clear conception of what must come after. The distinction, in short, is that it must include a vision, one that operates in contradistinction to the illusions we have come to prefer. 31. Harris, Carnival Trilogy, 44.

Seeing Blue: Genesis of Public Executions 1. A creolization of mal yeux, French for “bad eye” or “evil eye,” a spell of misfortune caused by hatred, jealousy, or grudge on the part of the ill-intended toward the virtuous or the vulnerable. For obvious reasons, babies are the most susceptible. For protection, they are given a “guard,” which include indigo blue, three pieces of clove, a grain of garlic, gum of aloes, asafetida seeds, a piece of parchment paper with Psalm 23 written on it, and a piece of silver. Enclosed with an inside stitch and fitted with a medal of St. Christopher, the pouch is attached to the baby’s undergarments, where it cannot easily be reached or interfered with. “Jumbie doh like dem thing,” my cousin Dionne and his partner, Cassandra, remind me as we sit in the yard of my childhood home in San Fernando. In Erin, at my grandfather’s home, my aunts Beverly, Joanette, and Michaelene remind me that it can also occur as a result of adoration, of putting children above God. My mother reminds me of the cross beneath their feet and in their hands. Another cure, should the guard fail, is a jhare—a ritual massage. 2. Similar iterations include the Jab Jab of Grenada, the Lansetkód of Haiti, and Neg Marron of French Guiana. 3. David Rudder and Carl Jacobs, “Trini to de Bone,” 2003. 4. Jackie Hinkson, Trinidadian muralist and painter.

La Femme des Revenants: A Queen of Sorrows 1. The venue was changed in 2015 to Adam Smith Square in Woodbrook. 2. Earl Lovelace refers to these and other traditions—the griot as calypsonian and flag-woman as sword-wielding devotee of Shango—as syncretic performances based on African retentions that may have lost some of their relevance. Hence, their unproblematic (albeit sanctioned) visibility in public. 3. And isn’t it just as obscene to limit our conceptions of Caribbeanness—in terms of myth, magic, or sheer materiality—to any one island? Regardless of the supposed origin of its protagonist, who was first to be ravaged in Imperial or independent hands? Who was it that tore her apart, and where? Whose mixed child was first to be sold away? Who saw and said nothing, saw and did nothing? Who ran first? I wonder what utility is there to be found in any one of those answers that could serve us now? 4. In an interview with Tracy Assing, she insists, “I never choose the mas. The mas choose me. It speaks to you. So you can’t just think that at the end of the day, you put on a costume. It doh work like that. You awakening something. And for me the folklore starts from somewhere. All stories have a beginning, and when it hands down through generations it takes on different faces and different meanings for everybody.” Caribbean Beat, Issue 143. http://caribbean-beat.com/issue-143/ carnival-is-mine#axzz4Ubx6uipv. 5. As a further reminder, I have Joy James, who writes, “The discomfort that arises from the telling of black women’s stories may have more to do with the reluctance to hear the abuse and struggle, pain and anger embedded in the tale; this may be particularly so if the narratives are encountered through commercial culture. Inadvertently, as black women manage images auctioned in a market they do not control, black feminisms function as spectacle and black feminists as storytellers for a

society nursed on the colonized frame” (Shadowboxing, 10–11). 6. According to Kimberly Juanita Brown, “The residue of sexual exploitation on slave women’s bodies is the afterimage of the black diaspora, the puncture of the past materializing in the present. It is an insistently visual spectacle—racial coding wrapped in the chromosomal legacy of the black Atlantic, and it is no accident that the projections of slave memory manifest themselves onto black women’s resistant flesh” (Repeating Body, 18). 7. One might notice in her twisted spine William Blake’s Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave (1791), inclined perhaps to trace the aftermath of its atrocities to the fetal body behind the rock in Carlisle Chang’s Inherent Nobility of Man (1961). 8. Like Blake, who considered the event “a most affecting spectacle.” Changing it, Marcus Wood reminds me, from “a most miserable spectacle” in the manuscript version of the book (Blind Memory, 236). 9. Wood, Blind Memory, 237. 10. Harris, Carnival Trilogy, 36. 11. When I showed the image to her some months later, she would laugh and tell me that they were talking about their children. The talk, she recalled, was a good one. I remember them laughing between frames, but I think I was just too slow to catch it. In between the laughter and the macabre, I managed to glimpse both the intimacy that comes with familiarity and contempt, and with the varying distances that exist between people as they come into their own. Her husband never got to see it. 12. In 2016, “Calypso Rose,” a longtime survivor of domestic abuse at the hands of her former husband, released “Abatina,” an infectious ballad of a woman whose desperation for the respectability of marriage led to her death. In the course of the turbulence, “few were inclined to believe” that Abatina could be so brutalized by her handsome, charming husband. “They

Notes

called her a liar,” Rose laments. Until it was too late. “Tina shoulda outlive us, now we pray that she will forgive us.” Her ghost now haunts us, the listeners, whose inaction make us the dancing accomplices to the crime. The song, as we might expect, was a hit.

Moko Jumbies of the South: Walking Stick 1. Pitangus Sulphuratus, a songbird indigenous to the region. 2. Erected almost a century after Roume de Saint Laurent’s speculations of the island in 1777, Usine-Ste. Madeleine was a place made for the dead—more accurately, the “work till yuh dead”—since 1870, before being itself put to death in 2003. 3. I refer, here, to Alan Vaughn, designer of “Esu Ajagura” and “The Virgin Queen” (2016); “The Fisherman of Souls” and “The Sweet Waters of Africa” (2015); “Lagahoo, Nightmare of the Planters” and “La Diablesse de la Revolution” (2013); and “The Crow” and “Fire” (2012). 4. Stilt walking is a fairly global practice. In Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre (1972), Errol Hill reminds us that the Moko Jumbie’s appearance in Caribbean Carnivals goes back to at least the late eighteenth century, with the observations of Bryan Edwards in The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies (1793). Performances evolved throughout the region, with stilts remaining the only true constant of the form. In The Jumbies’ Playground (2012), Nicholls offers some insight into the possible origins of the form, tracing some of its most authentic representations to the nation dances in Carriacou. He however concludes that the Moko/Mocko/ Moco of the Moko Jumbies could only “refer to the Moko in a symbolic rather than actual sense—that is, to their Africanness” (247). Bracketing the problematic implications of a “symbolic

Africanness,” the dissolutions Nicholls points out are a familiar characteristic of an afterlife existence. Hill, for example, points out that in Trinidad the Moko Jumbie “had lost its ritual significance [as a cult figure] and was purely entertainment” (The Trinidad Carnival, 12). 5. “Tarodale Residents Demand Better Roads,” Trinidad Guardian, August 22, 2011.

Jouvay Reprised: A People, Ground to Dust 1. “Old black man.” From “Possum,” an 1860 calypso (Warner-Lewis, 212). 2. Tropic Tendencies, 32. 3. I recall Debret and Blake’s representations of black life, death, and the innumerable cruelties that punctuate the two. Their visualizations call for us as viewers to go deeper, as I’d begun earlier with Day and Prior, to uncover and recover what the artists’ intentions actually managed to obscure. 4. I am reminded, here, of Sartre’s comment that Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs “never gossip. They are not ideas. They give us ideas. Without doing so deliberately” (Colonialism, 24). Praising his nominalism, Sartre identifies what I think is a significant distinction between the “decisive moment” of Street Photography, which Cartier-Bresson had coined, and the deliberative aspects of Caribbeanist Photography. Though, as is the case with masquers, a great deal of these images are made in the street, where the implicit desire for materialist outcomes that precede their explicit performances enable us to make a key distinction between them and the surrealist “happenings” that characterize Cartier-Bresson’s oeuvre. 5. For the researcher interested in such things, some pertinent questions may include: What (if anything) can we learn from them? What price do we pay for ignoring them? What

terrors lie in seeing ourselves as we are? What lies are we willing to tell others to get to a greater truth of ourselves? What difficulty is there in admitting plainly, openly, that the futility of our efforts at adornment often end up in gutters, strewn across lawns, in yards, staining the vaulted walls of the capital? What risk do we take in seeing ourselves surveilled, of looking past the amnesia of ignorance, or the misconceptions and misinterpretations that we learn to collect with efficiency? What, in this hell on earth, have we become? Having creolized the surrealist tendencies of the original carnivalesque sensibilities of our “former” masters, and having subsequently managed to manipulate the material and symbolic explorations of an unknowable afterlife (in Mas), what can we become? 6. “The black man is the devil.” This appears in an untitled 1870s calypso on the internalization of evil and the polarizing effects of racism toward black bodies (Warner-Lewis, 212). The song is both an inversion of the masking ritual integral to Carnival festivities and a deeper immersion into a clearly syncretized Christian iconography—Holy Communion. This no doubt symbolizes the desire to gain access to material recompense by consuming the symbolic body of the oppressor. It is no stretch to conceive of how this might be the case, given that they had already had more evidence than they needed that the inheritance of the earth by the meek was nothing more than a metaphor for the grave. It was their only inheritance—not land, per se, but the earth on which they stood, worked, suffered, and died. The elements/evidence of Caribbean Pessimism is all encompassing, like the gaze of Empire that (even in its demise) maintains such crippling hold on the minds and bodies of those who dare to be free. 7. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 197. 8. Correspondence with Marvin George, January 3, 2017.

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Conclusion 1. The “Polygenics” of Louis Agassiz comes immediately to mind. See Christina Sharpe’s discussion in In the Wake (2016). 2. In Imaging the Caribbean, Patricia Mohammed notes, “Caribbean peoples have . . . come to resist and resent the camera lens, partly because they feel that the photographer benefits from their image, [and] others because they want to protect their privacy from a prurient outsider gaze” (335). 3. Abstract to Krista Thompson, “The Evidence of Things Not Photographed: Slavery and Historical Memory in the British West Indies,” 39. 4. Tropic Tendencies, 127. 5. Such arguments, in my view, are easy enough to construct but difficult to refute. Those committed to binaries, however, may do far better to note that while it is one thing to acknowledge one’s oppression, it is another thing entirely to emulate oppressive practices. Or, perhaps they could struggle to extract the bitter essence of their own liberation from equally bitter discourses. I try to ask more complicated questions of Mas, which means (among other things) that I necessarily reject the binaries that have defined our previous/present attitudes toward Mas and the Carnival that sometimes precipitates it. 6. Of course, now that I am finished, I am frightened again. Only a little less than I was before.

WORKS CITED

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Smith, Katherine M. “Lansetkód: Memory, Mimicry, Masculinity.” In Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti. London: Soul Jazz Publishing, 2010. 71–93. Stedman, J. G. Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. London: J. Johnson & J. Edwards, 1796. Szarkowski, John. The Photographer’s Eye. Reprint. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007. Thompson, Krista. “The Evidence of Things Not Photographed: Slavery and Historical Memory in the British West Indies.” Representations 113 (Spring 2011): 39–71. Walcott, Derek. “Mass Man.” Collected Poems, 1948–1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987. ———. “The Sea is History.” Collected Poems, 1948–1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987. 364. ———. What the Twilight Says. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. Warner-Lewis, Maureen. Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Space, Transforming Culture. St. Augustine: University of the West Indies Press, 2000. 212. Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. 236.

INDEX

A “Abatina,” 4 Absence, 12, 42–44, 102, 138, 198, 201, 218, 224 Abyss, 34, 43, 147 Activist group. See Jouvay Ayiti Adam Smith Square, 53, 54, 61, 78, 89, 236n Aesthetics, 33, 45, 195 Africa, 192, 237n Afterimages, 146, 236n Afterlife of slavery, 39, 229, 233n Aftermath, 98, 195, 221, 236n Agassiz, Louis, 238n Agency, 23, 144 Alchemy, 10, 137, 191 Allegory, 96, 103 Amnesia, 19, 24, 218, 234n, 237n Anansi, 136, 189, 193, 217 Ancestors, 14, 20, 35, 194, 230 Anima Sola Dolorosa, 141 Antillean art, 14 Anti-Reformism, 35 Aperture, 190 Appeals, 41, 95, 226, 231 Archipelago, 14, 220 Architecture, 40, 45 Archives, 10, 33, 193, 217 Ariapita Avenue, 70, 72, 74, 82 Aristocracy, 21, 22 Arouca, 33 Ash Wednesday, 11, 13, 21 Assing, Tracy, 236n Atrocities, 143, 219, 236n B Baby Doll, 38, 68, 92 Bacchanal, 19, 99, 100, 226, 234n Badjohns, 23, 233n Bahamas, 226 Bailey, George, 26 Baker, Arthur, 22 Bands, 5, 91, 97, 98, 189, 233n, 234n Barataria, 33 Barker, Fabrice, 203, 226 Barrack yards, 38 Basseterre, 33 Bats, 38, 136 Beata Maria Virgo Perdolens, 140, 141 Beauty, 11, 19, 33, 41, 91, 95, 107, 137, 190, 193, 196, 197 Beetham, 91 Béké Negre, 218

Belisario, Isaac Mendes, 44, 235n Belmont, 91 Belonging, 102, 201 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, 234n Berkeley, Wayne, 26 Besson Street, 211 Betrayal, 6, 7, 8, 138, 139, 193, 231 Biscuit pans. See Pakpataktak Bisnath, Junior, 26 Blackface, 22 Black feminisms, 236n Black Indians, 136, 217 Blackness, 34, 39, 41–44, 139 Black women, 137, 139, 236n Blake, William, 44, 140, 236n Blanchiseusse, 33 Blindness, 6, 7, 9, 10, 17, 28, 41, 50, 201, 218 Blood, 6, 11, 13, 27, 30, 31, 49, 57, 107, 137, 138, 188, 197–99, 223 Blue Boy. See Lyons, Austin Blue Devils, 11, 16, 17, 29, 30, 45, 70, 92, 96, 97, 101–3, 136, 207, 211, 226 Bohls, Elizabeth, 234n, 235n Bookman, 136 Boundaries, 51, 105, 136, 192, 225, 235n Boysie, 27 Brand, Dionne, 9 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 40 Brereton, Bridget, 233n, 234n Bridgens, Richard, 44; Negro Figuranti, 28 British Guiana, 234n Brown, Kimberly Juanita, 236n Browne, Michaelene, 236n Browne, Simone, 36, 234n, 235n Browne, Vena, 9, 41 Bullwhip, 136, 142 Burdens, 17, 43, 96, 104, 138, 143, 145, 147, 194, 223, 233n Burrokeets, 136 Bush rum, 188 Bwa, 41 C Caliban, 94, 193 Calypso, 12, 22, 234–37nn Calypso Rose, 236n Camel Walk, 137 Cameras, 5, 6, 9, 40, 42, 45–47, 50, 92, 190, 218, 229, 235n, 238n Camps, Gregory (Campo), 5 241

242

Index

Canboulay, 21–23, 36, 197, 225, 226, 231, 234n Cannes Bruleés, 21, 197 Canoe, John, 235n Capitalism, 234n Carenage, 91 Caribbeanist Photography, 5, 33, 34, 39, 40, 42–44, 47, 50, 103, 105, 107, 140, 198, 217, 224, 233n, 234n, 237n Caribbeanness, 11–13, 15, 16, 34, 41, 44, 138, 192, 225, 236n CARICOM, 215 Carl, James, 5 Carnival, 12, 226, 237n Carnival on Frederick Street, Port of Spain, Trinidad 1888. See Prior, Melton Carnival Tuesday, 12 Carraillie, 187 Carriacou, 237n Carter, Martin, 40 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 237n Cascadoo, 26 Castle, Gregory, 234n, 235n Catelli (Trinidad All Stars), 98 Catholicism, 72 Cazabon, Jean Michel, 234n Cedros, 33 Césaire, Aime, 9, 193 Chang, Carlisle, 26, 236n Charleau, Shervaun, 120 Childhood, 8, 9, 19, 27, 29, 94, 99, 100, 135, 223, 236n Chimming, Joel, 207, 211 Chipping, 219 Chip-step, 221 Chopin, Frédéric François, 40 Citizenship, 26, 30, 34, 192, 194, 201, 218; conscious, 17, 28, 222, 226 Coalescence. See Fragmentation Coco Panyol, 218 Cocorite, 194 Colonialism, 24, 49, 218, 233–35nn Columbus, Christopher, 46 Commodities, 24, 102 Constantine, Emilio, 78, 97 Constantine, Renaldo “Uno.” See Uno Convois, 21 Corbeaux, 103 Corps of Colonial Marines. See Merikins Costumes, 12–14, 20, 22, 38, 45, 135, 137, 146, 226, 235n, 236n

Cowley, John, 235n Crick, Olly, 235n Cumberbatch, Dawn, 189 Curses, 11, 92, 138, 141, 143, 146, 147, 187, 192, 193, 201, 219 Cynicism, 28, 50, 94, 97, 135, 219 Cyrus, Anisty, 225 D Daemon, 11, 29, 30, 38, 50, 93, 95, 96, 105, 219, 223, 225, 233n Daguerre, Louis, 47 Dame Lorraine, 22, 25, 136 Danse Macabre, 141 Dark chamber, 41, 43, 195, 218 Day, Charles, 35–38, 44, 235n, 237n Death, 48, 136, 194, 197, 226, 229, 233n, 236n, 237n Debret, Jean-Baptiste, 237n Declarations, 27, 35, 39, 40, 42, 44, 47, 51, 218 Decolonization, 235n Defiance, 42, 43, 47, 92, 135, 193, 198, 224 Deformities, 138, 146 Deities, 92, 144, 190, 193 Demerara, 198 Demonstrative rhetoric, 28 Denial, 9, 19, 21, 99, 104, 139, 142, 143, 197, 219, 224, 232, 235n Derrida, Jacques, 233n Descendants, 22, 24, 197, 198, 226, 235n Designing, 12–14, 16, 28, 97, 104, 135, 144, 192, 193, 218, 226, 231, 237n DesVignes, Winsford, 40 Deviless. See La Diablesse Diable Molassie, 38, 96; Charles Day’s 1847 description of, 35 Diametre, 22, 23, 50, 233n Didion, Joan, 9, 233n Dignity, 10, 96, 98, 233n Dimanche Gras, 149, 190 Discourse, 36, 192, 194, 230, 231, 234n, 238n Displays, 12, 13, 28, 34, 137, 217, 223, 234n, 235n Dohgetindatatak. See Pakpataktak Dominica, 226 Dominican Republic, 226 Doors of no return. See Elmina Douen, 94 Dougla, 92, 138, 218 Dragons, 38, 136, 147

Dragon’s Mouth 135 Dread, 9, 41, 135 Dreams, 92, 187 Dress, 14, 30, 118, 141, 143, 144, 145, 192, 224 Drowning, 188, 193, 196 Drums, 21, 23 Drunkards, 3, 97, 101 Du Bois, Kerwin, 234n Dump. See La Basse Duperly, Adolphe, 44, 234n, 235n Dust, 48, 49, 98, 188, 198, 217, 220, 237n Dystopia, 218 E Earth People, 226 Ebonics, 233n Eccles, Keon, 203 Echoes, 6, 13, 25, 38, 41, 46, 105, 198, 230 Economies, 23, 194, 220 Education, 25, 96, 220, 233n Edwards, Bryan, 237n Elmina, 46, 217 Emancipation, 18, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 35, 43, 47, 48, 100, 193, 203, 207, 211, 212, 215, 223, 224, 225, 229, 234n, 235n, 237n Embodiments, 30, 137, 217 Empires, 13, 22, 35, 36, 38, 45–47, 51, 147, 192, 193, 218, 220, 237n Enactments, 17, 22, 25, 44, 222 Endurance, 95, 231 Enslaved people, 17, 21, 137, 146 Environment, 35, 45 Envisioning. See Vision Erin, 236n Erzulie Freda, 118, 140, 141 Escape, 12, 21, 41, 42, 101, 221 Eshu, 142, 189, 217 “Esu Ajagura,” 237n Ethel, 98 Ethos, 11, 45, 141, 234n Europe, 22, 36, 139 Evidence, 10, 21, 44, 198, 217, 219, 237n, 238n Evil eye. See Mal yeux Excesses, 20, 23, 91 Exigency, 19, 219 Exile, 13, 98, 104, 233n Experiences, 7, 9, 11, 17, 37, 44, 143, 191, 229, 230, 234n

Index

Experimental Period, 34 Exposure, 35, 44 F Failure, 30, 39, 45, 92, 96, 101, 107, 145, 225, 234n Faith, 104, 135, 149, 188, 226 Family, 8, 92, 136, 137, 140, 226, 235n Fancy Indians, 136 Fancy Sailors, 5, 137 Fanon, Frantz, 9, 43, 225, 235n, 237n Fantasy, 23, 25, 193 Fate, 10, 13, 22, 102, 137, 190, 193, 221 Fatima Junction, 97 Felicien, Ricardo, 89 Festivals, 21, 22, 35, 191, 195, 230 Fête, 12, 49, 101 Figuranti, 28 Fire, 5, 21, 25, 30, 33, 54, 57, 78, 91, 94, 197, 203, 226, 237n Flambeaux, 21, 23, 36, 91 Flames, 91, 103, 136 Flesh, 3, 50, 139, 142, 193, 197, 199, 219, 236n Folklore, 104, 236n Fond Pois Doux Road, 103 “Forget about It.” See Du Bois, Kerwin Forgetfulness, 6, 26, 94, 191, 196, 229 Fournillier, Ashton “Spooky,” 78, 97 Fragmentation, 10, 11, 13–17, 25, 28, 30, 34, 43, 44, 48, 49, 145, 190, 226, 230, 233n Frame, 18, 27, 34, 39, 41–47, 50, 51, 144, 146, 193, 218, 225, 229, 235n, 236n Freda. See Erzulie Freda Freeling, Sanford, 22 French Lady. See Dame Lorraine “Frenchy,” 77, 86 Froude, J. Anthony, 11, 233n G Galeota, 33 Gaze. See White gaze Genocide, 13, 46 George, Marvin, 225, 237n Gibbons, Rawle, 225 Glencoe, 91 Glissant, Edouard, 9, 44, 234n, 235n Gods, 34, 92, 188, 190, 192, 193, 195, 223 Gomez, Narcenio, 26 Gonzales, Jonadiah, 29, 150, 169, 170, 173, 178, 189–92, 195, 199 Gossip, 50, 146, 193, 237n

Grace, 104, 139, 143, 195, 197 Grant, Ulysses S., 235n Graves, 9, 104, 137, 146, 237n Grenada, 236n Grief, 7, 96, 143, 145, 146, 193, 198 Grievances, 22, 24, 27, 41, 107 Grotesque, 29, 92 Guadeloupe, 33 H Haiti, 118, 140, 225, 226, 236n Haitian Loa. See Rada family Hall, Stuart, 234n, 235n Hanuman, 217 Harris, Wilson, 14, 48, 141, 233n, 236n Hartman, Saidiya, 233n, 236n Havana, Cuba, 235n Hearn, Lafcadio, 137 Hegemony, 49, 220 Hill, Errol, 237n Hinkson, Jackie, 97, 236n Holder, Roger, 87 Hoofs, 11, 29, 114, 115, 123, 130, 133, 138, 142, 143 Horizon, 6, 49 Horns, 30, 94, 97, 225, 226 Humphrey, Helen, 142 Hunter, Orlando, 212, 215 Hypervisibility, 27, 41, 42 I Iconography, 36, 38, 44, 72, 140, 237n Identity, 30, 49, 217, 234n Ifa, 226 Illustrated London News, 36, 234n, 235n Indentureship, 21 Independence, 146, 218, 221 Inequity, 9, 96 Infidelities, 138, 147 Inheritance, 33, 93, 144, 220, 237n Injustice, 13, 19, 96 Intellectualism, 139, 224 Intersectionality, 142 Intimacy, 24, 28, 102, 194, 236n Invention, 195, 230 Invisibility, 41, 198, 222 Islands, 13, 38, 189, 194, 195, 225, 234–37nn J Jab Jabs, 136 Jacmel (Haiti), 225, 226

Jacobs, Carl, 236n Jamaica, 234n, 235n James, C. L. R., 9 James, Joanette, 236n James, Joy, 236n Jamettes. See Diametre Jhare, 236n Job, Akem, 184 Jones, Joy, 236n Joseph, Alexie “Lexington,” 70 Joseph, Jamal, 61 Jouvay (Jour Ouvert), 49, 201, 221, 225, 226, 233n, 237n Jouvay Ayiti, 225, 226, 233n Joyeau, Ncosi, 72 Jumbies, 11, 12, 17, 26, 30, 136, 145, 149, 189, 191–96, 198, 199, 229, 233n, 236n, 237n K Kalinda, 41, 99 Kallicharan, Beverly, 236n Kallicharan, Ivan, 26 Kambulay. See Canboulay Kanhai, Stephanie, 29, 150, 166, 169, 170, 173, 189, 191, 192, 195, 198 Kingdom of rum, 20, 23, 219 Kings, 33, 97, 189, 192; and Queens, 22, 23 Kingston, Jamaica, 33 Kiskidee, 189 L La Basse, 33, 91 La Brea, 33 La Diablesse, 11, 17, 30, 101, 107, 109, 118, 120, 130, 133, 137–39, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147, 233n, 236n, 237n “Lagahoo, Nightmare of the Planters,” 237n Lagahou, 29, 94 Lamming, George, 6, 233n Lansetkód, 207, 212, 226, 236n La Regalada, 101 Laventille, 91, 194 Lavway, 41 Legacy, 6, 13, 24, 38, 39, 195, 197, 198, 229, 235n, 236n Leica, 5 Lens, 23, 40, 45, 50, 72, 104, 105, 107, 139, 140, 143, 149, 222, 223, 229, 238n Lent, 3, 21 Letren, Deon “Froggy,” 57

243

244

Index

Light, 33, 39, 41, 46, 49, 50, 91, 92, 94, 95, 104, 107, 135, 136, 188, 189, 194, 196, 199, 224 Limbo, 1 Limbs, 193, 194, 198, 222, 224 Lorde, Audre, 235n Love (in motion), 17, 100, 101, 222 Lovelace, Earl, 9, 41, 235n, 236n Lyons, Austin, 98 M MacFarlane, Brian, 26, 234n Maco, 191 Magic, 10, 28, 30, 144, 191–93, 218, 236n Mal yeux, 93, 94, 101, 236n Mamaguy, 226 Manhood, 29, 138, 144, 224 Mannix, Hector, 27 Maracas, 102, 103 Maraval, 97 Marcano, Steffano “Steffi,” 29, 54, 74, 82, 97 Mardi Gras, 12, 129 Maroon, 39, 94 Marrico, 137 Marronage, 24, 39 Martinique, 33, 137 Martyrs, 94, 221 Masks, 11, 17, 19, 22, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 36, 37, 49, 104, 135, 136, 145, 191, 211, 212, 220–23, 230, 231 Masquerades, 11, 16, 22, 24, 28, 139 Masques, 27, 135, 224, 234n, 235n, 237n Memento mori, 194 Merikins, 46, 235n Metaphors, 6, 7, 15, 24, 29, 30, 45, 94, 104, 217, 225, 230, 231, 233n, 234n, 237n Methodology, 17, 20, 47, 105, 221, 222 Metonymy, 234n Midnight Robbers, 24, 136, 145, 217 Mimicry, 36, 38, 93, 234n Minshall, Peter, 26 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 47, 235n Miscegenation, 137 Misogyny, 99 Misrepresentation, 35, 36, 191 Modernism, 34 Mohammed, Patricia, 238n Moko Jumbies, 11, 17, 26, 30, 136, 149, 189, 191–96, 198, 199, 233n, 237n Molasses, 11, 96 Molasses Devil. See Diable Molassie

Morne La Croix, 33 Moruga, 46, 217 Morvant, 91 Mothers, 5, 9, 98–100, 140, 198, 236n Motive, 17, 30, 37, 50, 146, 221 Mulattos, tragic, 11, 137, 138 N Naumann, P., Jr., 235n Neg-la Vye, 217 Neg Marron, 226, 236n Negotiations, 21, 37, 41, 42, 96, 187, 191, 195 Negro Figuranti, 28 Negue Jadin, 22, 234n Neocolonialism, 5, 24, 102, 199 New Poor Laws, 235n Nicéphore, Joseph (Niépce), 45, 47, 49, 224, 235n, 238n Nicholas, Andrew “Nykimo,” 90 Nicholls, Robert W., 237n Nikon, 5, 233n Normalization, 24, 146, 234n North Coast Road, 102 Nostalgia, 20, 21, 25, 99, 104, 136, 147, 218, 221 Nunez, Elizabeth, 9 O Obeah, 10 Obscenities, 9, 26, 137 Ogun, 187 Old-talker, 217 Ole Mas, 100, 145 Olly, Crick, 235n Olympus, 5 Opacity, 9 Oppression, 30, 45, 48, 238n Orisha, 191, 192 Oshun, 193, 198 Overend, W. H., 235n Ozymandias, 220 P Pachanga, 137 Pakpataktak, 91–96, 98, 100, 101 Panorama, 5, 98 Papier-mâché, 136 Pappyshow, 201 Paramin, 29, 51, 91, 93, 97, 103 Parrhesiastes, 139 Patois, 93, 136, 233n, 235n Patriarchy, 99, 137, 138, 140, 145

Petit quart, 33 Photography, 5, 12, 16, 18, 33–35, 39, 42–44, 47, 49, 103–5, 107, 190, 198, 217, 224, 229, 233–35nn, 237n Piccadilly Greens, 54, 57, 70, 74, 226 Pierre, Jeron, 57 Pierre, Nigel “Capo Son,” 82 Pierrots, 24, 146, 217 Pitangus Sulphuratus, 237n Pitchforks, 91, 94 Pointe-à-Pierre, 33 Possessions, 95, 138, 195 Postmodernism, 34 Praxis, 27, 30, 47 Prayers, 17, 26, 92, 104, 141, 189, 220 Pretty Mas, 12, 13 Princes Town, 187 Prior, Melton, 28, 36–38, 44, 234n, 235n, 237n Proust, Marcel, 10, 233n Provoteaux, Aisha, 226 Q Quamina, Camille, 225 “Queen of Danse,” 142 “Queen of Sorrows,” 129, 135, 137, 236n Queen of the Band, 189 R Race, 5, 14, 30, 35, 94, 138, 139, 196, 233n, 234n Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 40 Rada family, 140 Rape, 46, 137 Raymond, Mark, 235n Realism, 34 Rebellion, 24, 107, 235n Rebellion in the Island of Jamaica in January 1832. The Attack of the Rebels on Montpelier Old Works Estate in the Parish of St. James’s, the Property of Lord Seaford, 235n Reckitt’s (blue) blocks, 93 Recovery, 10, 15, 18, 144, 197, 219 Reese, Brandon “Redman,” 52, 65 Reflection, 10, 30, 38, 44, 47, 49, 50, 97, 101, 103, 105, 197, 222, 225, 232, 235n Remembrances, 3, 9, 26, 196, 222, 230, 233n Reparations, 11, 15, 48, 96, 223, 235n Retinas, 41, 46

Index

Rèv, 93 Revolutions, 3, 23, 137, 237n Rhetoric, 5, 28, 30, 47–49, 105, 217, 234n, 235n; affect, 232; device, 9, 15, 234n; method, 28; performances, 34 Richardson, Larry, 211, 212 Richmond Street, 135 Rio de Janeiro, 13 Riots, 21, 36, 219 Robbers. See Midnight Robbers Romanticism, 198, 221 Ross, Cassandra, 236n Royal Jail, 226 Royal Police, 22 Rudder, David Michael, 225, 236n Rudlin, John, 235n S Sacredness, 14, 46, 92, 140 Saint Laurent, Roume de, 237n Saldenah, Harold, 26 Samaroo, Jit, 40 San Fernando, 5, 9, 98, 100, 166, 190, 233n, 236n San Juan, 101 Sankar, Tracey, 29, 109, 114–15, 117–18, 120, 123, 129–30, 133, 137, 139–41, 144, 146, 147, 207, 211 Santa Cruz, 101 Santería, 192 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 237n Sexuality, 30, 138 Shadows, 9, 49, 91, 187, 198 Shango Baptists, 192, 236n Shapeshifters, 1, 29, 138 Sharpe, Christina, 9, 238n Siparia, 9 Skip Jack, 137 Slavery, 10, 21, 35, 36, 38, 39, 229, 233n, 235n, 238n Soucouyant, 94, 99 Spectators, 37, 40, 95 Stephens, Noel, 9 Sterlyn, Pierre, 97 St. Hillaire, Amaron, 88 St. Hillaire, Shane, 77, 81, 97 Stickfighters, 22, 235n Stilt walking, 237n Supernatural, 94, 136, 198 Superstitions, 93, 143 Surrealism, 34 Symbolism, 7, 27, 29, 45, 193, 217

Syncretism, 13, 22, 72, 118, 139, 236n, 237n T Tabanca, 25 Taino, 225 Taitt, Jabari, 225 Tarodale, 149, 194, 237n Tassa, 21 Technology, 35, 197, 235n Temptation, 190 Terrors, 10, 27, 29, 100, 101, 145, 222, 223, 237n Thompson, Krista, 238n Tobago, 218 Toco, 33 Traditional mas, 12, 54, 78, 109, 117, 118, 120, 123, 130 Tragedies, 6, 25, 30, 44, 46, 102, 220, 231 Tricksters, 142, 189, 217 Trinidad, 234–36nn Tunapuna, 33 U Underclass, 50, 95, 229, 235n Unfreedom, 17, 23, 24, 101, 145 Uno, 81 Unseeing, 10, 41, 103, 107, 198, 220 Usine-Ste. Madeleine, 150, 166, 169, 170, 173, 178, 188, 189, 237n Utopia, 28 V Ventriloquism, 139 Vernacular, 10, 16, 17, 19, 21, 23, 27, 30, 35, 38, 43–45, 48, 49, 96, 105, 191, 195, 218, 222, 224, 231, 233n, 234n Vévé, 140 Victoria Avenue, 82 Victoria Square, 135, 190 View from the Window at Le Gras 1826. See Nicéphore, Joseph (Niépce) Violations, 42, 144, 146 Violence, 11, 13, 16, 34–36, 38, 42, 50, 137, 141, 146, 147, 224, 226–28, 234n “Virgin Queen, The,” 237n Visibility, 27, 236n Vision, 9, 16, 33, 41–43, 47–51, 92, 98, 105, 107, 136, 147, 190, 194, 197, 218, 221, 223, 224, 229, 230, 236n Vodun, 118, 139, 192 Voice, 27, 100, 139, 188

Vulgarity, 21, 224, 234n Vulnerabilities, 39, 41, 42, 51, 146, 191, 224, 236n W Walcott, Derek, 9, 13, 14, 27, 33, 233–35nn Warner-Lewis, Maureen, 237n West Africa: Moko tradition, 191; spiritualities, 139 West Indies, 36, 137, 225, 233n, 235n, 237–38nn White gaze, 36, 50, 193, 224 Whiteness, 35, 41, 96, 139, 230 Wholeness, 14–17, 28, 43, 48, 49 Williams, Brittany L., 207, 215 Williams, Eric, 98 Windrush generation, 38 Wings, 91, 192 Wireframe, 91, 225, 226 Witnesses, 21, 29, 47, 48, 92, 104, 138, 146, 192, 219 Women, 93, 94, 135, 137, 138, 144, 146, 147, 219, 233n, 236n Wood, Marcus, 236n Wright, Dionne, 236n Wright, Eva, 189 Wright, Frank, 98 Wright, Lystra, 9 Wright, Peter, 98 Wright-Smith, Marjorie, 9, 100 Wynter, Sylvia, 9 Y Yards, 11, 38, 93, 99, 100, 145, 187, 220, 236n, 237n Yemaya, 193 Yoruba, 136, 235n Z Zami, 218 Zong, 217

245