Ray­mond Ram­char­i­tar

Machel Mon­tano's com­ments ad­dress­ing the al­so-rans in his big sweep-about his want­i­ng to go be­yond the "card­board cut-out, Best Vil­lage" an­tics of the rest, who re­al­ly can't call them­selves his peers, much less com­peti­tors-were re­veal­ing.

Machel's com­ments il­lus­trate the con­fu­sion among pub­lic and sup­pli­cants about the Car­ni­val com­plex-is it folk, eth­nic, na­tion­al? What rules and val­ues? "De tradis­han" or fu­tur­is­tic? The of­fi­cial tourist, gov­ern­ment, and aca­d­e­m­ic rhetoric seems very dif­fer­ent from the re­al­i­ty. It seems clear that few un­der­stand, and few­er care, what Car­ni­val means in terms of crime, ed­u­ca­tion, health and eco­nom­ic pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, but all love to as­cribe grandiose achieve­ments and po­ten­tial, for which the ev­i­dence is thin at best. Noth­ing bet­ter il­lus­trates the con­fu­sion and con­flict in the at­ti­tude to Car­ni­val than the steel pan.

Pan (like Trinidad and Car­ni­val) is the pre­cip­i­tate of the au­to­clave formed by the col­li­sion of enor­mous, ir­re­sistible forces like im­pe­ri­al­ism, colo­nial­ism, en­slave- ment and in­den­ture, mixed with ge­og­ra­phy, de­mog­ra­phy, and en­vi­ron­ment. Seen in that way, the per­spec­tive im­me­di­ate­ly en­larges. But it isn't seen this way in the pop­u­lar cre­ation sto­ry.

The pop­u­lar ver­sion of the pan sto­ry is elab­o­rat­ed in Rawle Gib­bons's play, Ogun Iyan-As In Pan, which at­tempts to link the un­der­ground Orisa move­ment in the 1930s, the But­lerite labour move­ment, and the black ur­ban un­der­class. In this ver­sion, it's all re­lat­ed-pan, his­to­ry, na­tion­al­ist pol­i­tics, eth­nic des­tiny.

Mr Gib­bons, like every­one else, is en­ti­tled to ar­tic­u­late his ver­sion of his­to­ry via art. Like very few oth­ers, Mr Gib­bons is an ac­com­plished artist. He was spec­tac­u­lar­ly suc­cess­ful in this agen­da with his (1990s) Ca­lyp­so Tril­o­gy-which pro­posed a his­to­ry of pre- and post-in­de­pen­dence Trinidad through ca­lyp­so.

But here lies the prob­lem. While the pub­lic in the 1990s was ca­pa­ble of dis­tin­guish­ing the his­tor­i­cal en­ter­tain­ment from his­to­ry, these days, the pol­i­tics and ca­pac­i­ties of the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion have changed. The re­lent­less pro­gramme over the last decade or so to fuse an Afro­cen­tric ver­sion of Car­ni­val in­to the na­tion's self-im­age has led to an epis­temic cri­sis. Now there is no dis­tinc­tion be­tween fan­ta­sy and his­to­ry (and ap­par­ent­ly eco­nom­ics), be­cause of the mas­ter nar­ra­tive which looms over the fes­ti­val. (Think of the Can­boulay reen­act­ment which in­sists on its lit­er­al­i­ty.)

But a more in­ter­est­ing sto­ry of the pan ex­ists, which speaks to the Car­ni­val com­plex. That sto­ry has three con­sti­tu­tive el­e­ments which are ab­sent from pop­u­lar ac­counts: in­tereth­nic ac­cul­tur­a­tion; moder­ni­ty; and the Unit­ed States.

The in­tereth­nic com­po­nent is the most ob­vi­ous, and I imag­ine most en­rag­ing to "na­tion­al­ists." In­di­an im­mi­grants brought per­cus­sive in­stru­ments like drums hung around the neck, small cym­bals and prayer gongs. Whether or not these in­stru­ments were "of­fered" to the rest of the so­ci­ety is ir­rel­e­vant. Their im­ages and us­es were added to the so­ci­ety's col­lec­tive mem­o­ry. So the first pans were hung around the neck and played with sticks, like small tas­sa drums. (Of course, it could be to­tal co­in­ci­dence. Tas­sa had noth­ing to do with the pan, which is a pure­ly African thing. My bad.)

The sec­ond el­e­ment that pro­duced the pan is less ob­vi­ous: moder­ni­ty. With moder­ni­ty came a new tech­no­log­i­cal/eco­nom­ic par­a­digm (in­dus­tri­al­i­sa­tion), which re­quired more metal­lic ma­te­ri­als, mak­ing larg­er amounts of scrap met­al avail­able for oth­er us­es. The mass-pro­duced oil drum pro­vid­ed the ba­sic de­sign of the pan. (Think about it: no oil in­dus­try, no plen­ti­ful sup­ply of oil drums, no steel pan.)

Moder­ni­ty al­so brought changes in con­scious­ness: peo­ple ap­proached their en­vi­ron­ment (and each oth­er) very dif­fer­ent­ly. The mys­tique of di­vine ir­rev­o­ca­bil­i­ty was stripped from na­ture, en­abling peo­ple to think more adap­tive­ly and in­no­v­a­tive­ly about re­for­mu­lat­ing "giv­en" ma­te­ri­als and land­scape to cre­ate "non-nat­ur­al" ob­jects and en­vi­ron­ments.

And the third el­e­ment that pro­vid­ed the heat and pres­sure to catal­yse the re­ac­tion of these forces was the (WWII) US Army. The Amer­i­cans brought tech­nol­o­gy, mon­ey, and icon­o­clasm. They in­vad­ed the so­ci­ety look­ing for love and trou­ble. They de­mys­ti­fied white­ness. They cre­at­ed new routes for mon­ey through the so­ci­ety (ie, made peo­ple rich who wouldn't be­come rich oth­er­wise), and fa­tal­ly wound­ed the em­bry­on­ic class struc­ture.

Amer­i­ca trans­formed a back­ward agri­cul­tur­al colony in­to a mod­ern pro­to-na­tion. (Al­though there was a down­side: the so­cial body de­vel­oped but the so­cial mind re­mained in child­hood. As we see to­day. Every­where.) That trans­for­ma­tion, more than any­thing, is what cre­at­ed the steel pan, and Trinidad as we know it. Im­por­tant­ly, ma­te­ri­als from the war ma­chine were made avail­able, the young ur­ban men had means to earn mon­ey, and the new so­cial and eco­nom­ic life pro­vid­ed leisure time and the con­scious­ness of pos­si­bil­i­ty, spurred by the Amer­i­cans' avid con­sump­tion of lo­cal en­ter­tain­ment.

Stephen Stuempfle in his book, The Steel­band Move­ment, al­ludes to this cre­ative com­plex, as does Har­vey Nep­tune's Cal­iban and the Yan­kees, but lo­cal pan lore has con­fined the sto­ry of the pan to "na­tion­al­ist" nar­ra­tol­ogy and in­ter­pre­tive schema. This (now or­tho­dox) his­to­ri­og­ra­phy ne­glects cru­cial in­tan­gi­bles about Tri­ni-dad, then and now: the mas­sive im­port­ed com­po­nent to its every­day life, the loose class struc­ture which al­lows groups to in­ter­min­gle, ge­og­ra­phy which for­bids group iso­la­tion, an un­usu­al re­cep­tive­ness to the new and for­eign, and a very flex­i­ble moral­i­ty.

This Trinidad-flu­id, xeno-philic, and moral­ly elas­tic-re­sem­bles the Car­ni­val we live in but not the one we are taught. The ef­forts of a few, re­mark­ably ef­fec­tive eth­nic zealots try­ing to "write" a dif­fer­ent na­tion in­to the na­tion­al imag­i­na­tion, us­ing Car­ni­val as a spear-point, and to im­pose an in­ter­pre­tive frame for it, have caused de­struc­tive cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance be­tween what we live, and what we think we live.

• Con­tin­ued next week