TODAY IS KADOOMENT DAY and as many as 5 000 privileged Bajans and their rich Trini cousins will be closing down the entire island to take part in an event that covers a distance a toddler could walk in a morning, if he could afford to pay a month’s worth of groceries for:
– just enough synthetic fabric to cover the parts of the body Renaissance painters couldn’t depict;
– an unlimited supply of lukewarm beers; and
– a few plastic cups of the cheapest blends of vodka, whiskey and gin on the market; you didn’t know, until you paid $600 for an all-inclusive costume, that some restaurants even made a tequila.
It would be impolite at best, and grounds for deportation at worst, for a Trini in Barbados to poke fun at a form of cultural expression which can involve up to three notes and twice that number of words per song.
So, instead of ridiculing a pretentious, expensive, fleeting public drunkenness, in which the only genuine masquerade involves the participants fooling themselves into thinking they’re doing something worthwhile, I’ll suggest people you might feel sorry for, beginning with:
– Me. I could be jumping myself, or staying home and watching good movies but, although I know I shouldn’t because I wasted the entire day doing it last year, I’ll go along to sneer at the Parade Of The Bikinis on Spring Garden Highway.
– My children. Although I well know the sum total cultural experience will be either nothing or actually negative, I’ll force my kids to stop reading their vampire novels or playing their FIFA 11, and make them walk with me from Kensington Oval to Workbench in the hot sun just to see their cousinin a bikini, which they could do with no special effort any weekend on Accra Beach.
– Media workers. Don’t feel sorry for them because they have to cover, as work, all the fun everyone else is having. Pity them because, for yet another year, they have to find a way of faking enthusiasm over the same bikinis, beads and feathers we’ve all been falling asleep watching for 20 years now, especially the ones who have to translate mindless, muscle-spasm-like, semi-bestial waist-jooking as “culture”; if that’s culture, I’m firetrucking Beethoven.
– Pastors. They have to convince hot, young, good-looking women that God does not want them to do, in a Carnival costume on Kadooment Day, in the public street, what the same pastors want them to do every night in a parked car behind some church.
– Vendors. They have to stand all day in the hot sun selling plastic crap. No, wait – be happy for them; feel sorry for people who buy them.
– Cinema owners. They’ll be giving all kinds of incentives to get people to pay to watch movies instead of watching their social superiors make spectacles of themselves for free. In 3-D. With sweat. Hardly anyone will turn up at cinemas and, even if/when they do, they’ll have to go back home because the projectionist will be jumping until after starting time.
– Machel Montano. No matter what he does, he’s just not Rihanna.
B.C. Pires is hoping for a Ka-Do-Nothing Day. Email BC@caribsurf.com
