It is Carnival week here in Trinidad even though the actual two days of the masquerade, Monday and Tuesday, have already gone. The promoters are still trying to scrape the bottom of the money pit with various events and I am back to 3 a.m. on Monday morning when the masquerade starts with “J’ouvert” (pronounced Joo-vay but aka “Old Mas”) which translates into dawn or daybreak.
I was taking my two daughters, Marsha and Jasmine, clad in their $500 costumes (essentiallya white T-shirt with the band’s name and black shorts) to join with the other members of their band through streets already crowded with other people doing the same thing. I had succumbed to a virus which was so severe, harmful and hostile that I believe the word “virulent” derived from it, except that “sick like a dog” should have been added with perhaps “feeling to dead” as a lagniappe.
It must have been the virus but my mind wentback to what seemed like several centuries and Iwas a little boy in the canefield and coconut community of Carapichaima in Central Trinidad and early one morning, before daybreak on what had to be Carnival day, my cousin Joe and I jumped out of bed, woken by an increasingly loud clatter of many biscuit and oil tins and many voices raised in whatwe first thought was some kind of fight.
We stood at the side of the roads and could barely discern in the mist a group of what we thought were demons but later identified as residents of the nearby village of Orange Field in various stages of undress and inebriation who passed by in a cacophony of bottle, spoon, and mixed accompaniment shouting the words of the popular calypsoDrink Ju-C.
My adventures in the J’ouvert trade resumedmany years after. I was interested in a band named Go Naked In The World but found out that you had to pay for the costume. The one I remember best was a gathering of the literati and glitterati in a band that was meant to be a delicious pun. A couple of the prominent figures in the band were recovering addicts and decided to spread the message and celebrate their status with a J’ouvert band. From the moment we met it was clear to me that the name and pun ABand On Drugs, a play on the word “abandon”,was in deep trouble. It was not the members butthe steel band that had been chosen to provide the musical accompaniment.
From the moment I stepped into the gathering crowd, I realized that the marijuana was in greatercirculation than I was and had circulated severaltimes already. Now this was nothing to sniff at. These were recovering addicts who started their slide to cocaine via marijuana and here, in the half-darkness, could not be easily identified and in that anonymity and the familiar atmosphere could lapse into a relapse.
I know that on Carnival (and most other days) the police tend to be on their own high from a combination of power and smuggled drinks passed on the sly to them by their buddies and batchies. But there we were, when daylight broke, heading east along the main drag, Independence Square, to the big
stand full of people guarded by hundreds of police waiting to view the mas’ and the marijuanasmell rose to a new high. We call it “baddening”the head and clearly the heads of the panmen were badder than John Wayne and Lee Marvin or Jason Statham on his own.
They were obviously transported and transporting and playing to the beat of a definitely different drummer altogether. Some time during my initial bout with the virus (which it won by a massive knockout by lifting me off my feet like George Foreman did to Joe Frazier) I tried reading. In good times or in bad times, this has been my way, my respite and my sanctuary.
With this virus though, it got mixed up with a lot of other stuff but I distinctly remember reading about O’Shaughnessy’s On The Preparations Of The Indian Hemp, Or Gunjah; Their Effects On The Animal System In Health, And Their Utility In The Treatment Of Tetanus And Other Convulsive Diseases. Gunjah’s other name, in India and among Indians, is “bhang”.
TS Eliot wrote, “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” It comes from the final stanza of his poem The Hollow Men. In the starkness of the morning sunlight, I left the hollow men with their hollow pans and walked away, not with a bhang but a whisper. “Ah gone,” I muttered and left despondent.
• Tony Deyal was last seen looking at his daughterat J’ouvert and watching his money jumping up.
