the extraordinary city

‘The urban festival provides  a bridge between the ordinary city of everyday experience and the extraordinary city- projected in part by the festival – of idealistic and technological urbanism; of utopian hopes, projects and illusions.’

Alan J. Plattus (1987)

Port-of-Spain, as I have come to know it, is an urban composition of many silent stories. These stories are hidden behind the bravado of a decaying colonial façade and monolithic concrete walls. Few would argue that Port-of-Spain is a city, almost devoid of its own architectural articulation. It’s urban articulation has not been revisited since colonial times; its current form is almost exclusively a product of accretion without any urban vision. Of course the flip side to this apparent absence of intentional architectural and urban form, may be that there is no absence at all! That this collage of a life that we have built for ourselves as Caribbean people, is not the absence of civilised urban forms; it may very well be, as Walcott says, the restoration of shattered pieces that comprise out streets and city. My sense is that the physical manifestation of Port-of-Spain does not matter as much as the manifestation of the ‘extraordinary city’, as Alan Plattus puts it, that stands invisible but not unfathomable, year round; erupting physically from the shadows of monuments and past barrack yards; for 2 days in February.

Trinidad gained it’s independence from British rule on August 1^st 1962. There is a tendency to assume therefore that a mere 47 years ago, the independent country of Trinidad & Tobago was born; fully formed and articulate – ready to govern itself and create it’s own way of living. Even within contemporary thought, there is a dizzying fracture between the celebration of independence and the reconciliation of the separate stories that previously existed between the 3 major racial groups of the island before independence. The way forward, as politics of the time embraced, was to never look back.

‘Post Emancipation society can be seen as a struggle on the part of the mass of ex-slaves and their descendents to make emancipation meaningful…’

The Colonial Caribbean in Transition

I will now say flatly that neither the Africans nor the Indians, the 2 races that now comprise roughly half and half of the population of Trinidad, in either of their cultural histories at the time of independence would have had any notion of city building. That I feel is an important thing to say, since it underlies the dilemma of creating place or space, as the Western world would understand it. This is also central to understanding the power of Carnival in creating a space, and place and a kind of knowing that transcends the Western vision of space; to occupy the kind of ritualistic universe that is second nature to both Africans and Indians. In a sense, creating the façade, the setback from the street, the side walk, the width of the street and it’s mirror image on the other side; is physically the colonial story of Trinidad. The occupation of the streets, the ritualised movement through them, the masks, the paint, the feathers and the drums – are different stories that originate in Ancient Greece and Rome, in West Africa and in India.

Carnival in Trinidad is therefore different from the European vision of the carnivalesque. Where Bakhtin speaks of role reversal and liberation from conformity, Carnival in Trinidad embodies the ‘means to render our lives believable…’ as Marquez puts it. It is the physical culmination of centuries of collective imagination and is the vehicle through which the people of the New World screamed the relevance of their existence. The Caribbean or Latin American carnival is a revision of the European Carnival. By this I mean that it erupted on the same plantations of the French masquerade, but is not itself just masquerade. The African religion of the then slaves shaped the carnival of the Caribbean and Latin America into a hybrid of masquerade, possession and the struggle for liberation. 

tbc