In 2006, Carnival in the Colombian city of Barranquilla received special recognition. That is when the United Nations Educational, and Cultural Organization designated the celebration as part of humanity’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage”. Doing so, UNESCO positioned the bacchanal alongside the art of baking baguettes in France, wrestling as practiced on the Korean peninsula, and ceremonial dances in Zambia.
However, the word “intangible” gets a little complicated in our context. The ultimate value of the festivities is something that participants experience emotionally – a feeling of solidarity that cuts across economic and generational divides, a sense of continuity in times of uncertainty. But in all societies, the things that are truly cherished are inevitability reflected in material culture. Thus, Barranquilla boasts a superb museum where visitors can see the elaborate gowns worn by past carnival queens, and a variety of masks crafted for revelers on parade. Similar collections can be found in other cities, from Mobile to Montevideo and beyond.
Literature also highlights the preoccupations of individual authors, and the environments in which they work. This month, we launch a brief series examining some ways The Tradition has been described on the printed page.
The vibrant Carnival of Trinidad & Tobago has inspired similar festivities on other English-speaking Islands. Asked to name the most famous Trini of all, young hedonists might offer Nailah Blackman, Machel Montano, or another soca artiste. Fans of cricket will surely mention renowned batsman Brian Lara. Members of The Swedish Academy have given the nod to V.S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature. The jubilee is seldom a central theme of his fiction; references are subtle. For that very reason, a close reading illuminates just how important the celebration is to residents of the Twin Island Republic.
On Trinidad, the customs and folkways of enslaved Africans fused with those of French and Spanish colonizers. The British captured the island in 1797. After slavery was abolished in 1834, indentured agriculturists from India further enriched the colony’s diversity. Among them were the forbears of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul.
A House For Mr. Biswas, arguably Naipaul’s greatest work, takes a broad, unsentimental look at the Indo-Trinidadian community. Mohun Biswas, the title character, is born amidst the vast sugar fields of the interior. Though poor, he is of the Brahmin caste, and receives a basic education courtesy of his mother’s relatives.
While working as an itinerant sign painter, he becomes betrothed to Shama, a marriageable daughter of the prominent Tulsi family. Over the course of their life together, Mohun emerges as a most unlikable figure. Resentful of his dependence on the Tulsis, he is too vain and lazy to make a clean break. Yet through his eyes, we penetrate the workings of a society in flux.
During the period covered by the book, Carnival was mainly celebrated by the white and Afro-Caribbean populations. Even so, there are hints of a growing cultural synthesis. While managing the family grocery in small rural town, Biswas crosses paths with a certain Mungroo.
Mungroo was the leader of the village stick-fighters. He was a tall, wiry, surly man, made ferocious in appearance by a large handlebar moustache, for which the villagers called him Moush, then Moach. As a stickman he was a champion…it was Mungroo who had organized the young men of The Chase into a fighting band, ready to defend the honour of the village on the days of the Christian Carnival and the Muslim Hosein.
Trinidadian stick-fighting, also known as calinda, is a form of martial arts. During the colonial era, when planters gave their workers time off for holidays, many engaged in the sport. Fighters from neighboring plantations would gather to compete. Supporters of the combatants sang Creole tunes, lauding their respective champions and ridiculing their opponents. Over time, these songs formed the basis for calypso.
The novel is largely based on the author’s family history. Unsurprisingly, the focus is on characters of South Asian descent. Blacks are described with little depth, but generally in a positive light. This was, alas, not always the case.
A House For Mr. Biswas was first published in 1961, a year before Trinidad & Tobago achieved independence. Naipaul had been living in the UK since 1950, when he won an Oxford scholarship. In his later novels, he betrays a curious longing for the old British Empire. Guerillas, from 1975, depicts a fictional West Indian nation threatened by a violent revolutionary cult. A Bend in The River, published four years later, takes place in an African country like that known, at the time, as Zaire. Echoing the most racist tropes of Victorian propaganda, locals come across as menacing, childlike, or both. Naipaul was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990.
Such attitudes were hardly well-received in his native land. On a personal level, he developed a reputation as an abusive misogynist. In contemporary Trinidad & Tobago, his prose style is admired, but his overall legacy is ambiguous at best.
This makes his first book, from 1959, all the more remarkable. Set in a hardscrabble section of Port of Spain, Miguel Street reads like a cycle of linked short stories, rather than a novel per se. Spanning the 1930s and 40s, the narrator recounts incidents from his boyhood and adolescence. He remains nameless throughout, a device that centers the entire neighborhood as protagonist.
The urban experience is not always pleasant, but characters of all ethnicities are rendered with wit, compassion and affection. Miguel Street comes across as a place that is eminently musical – resounding with the rhythms of conversation and the popular melodies that have been at the heart of Carnival for decades. We meet the vagabond poet who calls himself Black Wordsworth:
‘How you does live, Mr. Wordsworth?’ I asked him one day.
He said, ‘You mean how I get money?’
When I nodded, he laughed in a crooked way.
He said, ‘I sing calypsoes in the calypso season.’
‘And that last you the rest of the year ?’
“It is enough.’
In the Chapter titled “Love, Love, Love, Alone”, Mrs. Hereira, a newcomer to the street, confides her marital woes to a neighbor. Despite her distress, the bride repeatedly rejects advice to leave her brutish husband. Exasperated, her well-meaning confidant archly evokes Lord Caresser’s hit calypso about King Edward VIII:
The era depicted also coincides with the rise of steel pan music, which Naipaul deftly chronicles:
It was people like Big Foot who gave the steel-bands a bad name. Big Foot was always ready to start a fight with another band…You would think that when he was beating his pan and dancing in the street at Carnival, Big Foot would at least smile and look happy. But no. It was on occasions like this that he prepared his sulkiest and grimmest face; and when you saw him beating a pan, you felt, to judge by his earnestness, that he was doing some sacred act.
Despite his personal prejudices, in Miguel Street, the author captures the optimism and energy of a colony on its way to becoming a nation. Doing so, he inadvertently bolsters T&T’s claim to be considered the ultimate Carnival country.
An excellent achievement by the writer of this fine "Stack." Improving our knowledge of VS Naipaul and improving our knowledge of Trinidad music
I've wanted to read him, but knew the reputation of his most famous book. Thanks for suggesting these two others.