The Extraordinary City

Although the most tangible experience of Carnival in Port-of-Spain is seen during January and February, a substantial amount of planning, designing and contemplation of Carnival occurs throughout the year. When Ash Wednesday arrives, the passing of Carnival is marked by fetes and a proliferation of magazines and videos of the year’s spectacles. From July to September Trinidadian Mas Camps launch their costumes for the following year while Steelbands prepare their line ups and calypso artists develop their material for the following year. Each years Carnival represents the coming together of artists, mas camps, pan yards, government institutions and independent entrepreneurs, many whose entire lives revolve around the Carnival industry. Similarly, certain sites in the city have also evolved to be dedicated to Carnival. Some pan yards and mas camps for example have been in the same location for many years. Invaders Pan Yard for example, has been situated opposite to the Queens Park Oval since the 1930’s when they were called ‘The Oval Boys’. Its original members were some of the first to experiment with steel drums in the world. Elliot Mannette, for example, working in an iron foundry, was particularly adept at molding the drums and was one of the first to experiment with fifty gallon oil drums, creating six of the nine types of steel pans in existence. Today, Invaders Pan Yard has grown to be an iconic site within the city because of its pivotal role in the development of Trinidad’s Carnival.

Because of the interwoven relationship between the growth of Port-of-Spain and the persistent celebration of Carnival since the city’s inception, the city and the festival have become two intertwined entities. The Ordinary city of Port-of-Spain is the financial capital of the Caribbean while the Extraordinary city represents the hybridization of the varied social, cultural and political influences that have shaped the Caribbean. Carnival is the vehicle of expression that reaches out of the extraordinary city of myth, ritualistically transforming the streets of the city. The Extraordinary city is a living propensity for ecstasy that undulates just below the city’s Ordinary face. Although visible for only two months each year, the Extraordinary city is an ever-present life force that invisibly measures, mocks and occasionally overtakes the year round city. Cuban novelist Antonio Benitez-Rojo states that carnival rhythm is deeply rooted in the Caribbean:

‘…carnival, the great Caribbean celebration…spreads out through the most varied systems of signs: music, song, dance, myth, language, food, dress, body expression. There is something strongly feminine in this extraordinary fiesta: its flux, its diffuse sensuality, its generative force, its capacity to nourish and conserve (juices, spring, pollen, rain, seed, shoot, ritual sacrifice – these are words that come to stay). Think of the dancing flourishes, the rhythms of the conga, the samba, the masks, the hoods, the men dressed and painted as women, the bottles of rum, the sweets, the confetti and coloured streamers, the hubbub, the carousal, the flutes, the drums, the cornet and the trombone, the teasing, the jealousy, the whistles and the faces, the razor that draws blood, death. Life, reality in forward and reverse. Torrents of people who flood the streets, the night lit up like an endless dream, the figure of the centipede that comes together and then breaks up, that winds and stretches beneath the ritual’s rhythm, that flees the rhythm without escaping it, putting off its defeat, stealing off and hiding itself, imbedding itself finally in the rhythm, always in the rhythm, the beat of the chaos of the islands.’ ⁴

The proliferation of Carnival throughout the Caribbean and Latin America has arisen from the overlaying of similar threads of history. When analyzing the art and literature that has come out of the Caribbean and Latin America a common thread of Magical Realism dominates these expressions. Magical Realism is a genre of literature that has emerged from these territories being popularized by Latin American authors like Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Looking at painters like Frida Kahlo and even Trinidadian painter Che Lovelace, a world of dual perception becomes apparent. As a genre of literature, Magical Realism is typified by its hallucinatory imagery and dizzying combination of modern reality in an often animistic world. Stephen Sleman in his essay on Magical Realism as Post Colonial Discourse⁵ states that history in the magical realist novel, engages in a kind of ‘double vision’ or ‘metaphysical clash’ between notions of imperial history and the view of ‘real’ history based on the ‘marginalised and dispossessed voices’ of the colonial encounter. Kumkum Sangari in Politics of the Possible describes Magical Realism as occupying a liminal space between the reality of physical experience and the mythological underpinnings of a multilayered cultural experience⁶. Derek Walcott says about the art of the Antilles that:

‘Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles… 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... This is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong.  They survived the Middle Passage and the Fatel Rozack*...’⁷

This re-assembly of cultural fragments in a liminal space between physical and mythological is physically represented through Carnival in the Caribbean. The Extraordinary city represents the temporary unity of these fragments. It is a second urban condition within the city of Port-of-Spain that is part of a regional cultural condition. Carnival can in this way be seen as the regions attempt to make sense of its complex history and cultural experience. The effect of Carnival therefore is to create a sense of belonging to the city, re-grounding ones relationship to that space. It is as Mircea Eliade describes, that the power of this masquerade lies in mans need to periodically re-align himself with the sacred in the profane world. Eliade states,

‘The sacred reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world.’⁸

The principal way in which the festival makes the city sacred again is thorough the physical pathway that it takes. On Carnival days it is not only the undulating band that shapes the borders of ones experience. The parade route although physically nothing more than a series of barricades and stands which leave the streets free for masqueraders, still dictates the form and order in which thousands of revelers will experience Port-of-Spain. The Carnival route is the melody that moves through the Extraordinary city, reaching a crescendo at the judging points. The morphology of the city also shapes ones experience since sites hold personal memories as well as socio-political ones. Different neighborhoods have different widths or streets and heights of buildings. The masqueraders’ experience of movement, the density of the crowd and the psychogeography of the area are all dictated by the Carnival route. It is the single largest organizational element in the festival, though its significance is largely underestimated.