Ray­mond Ram­char­i­tar

The Min­istry of Arts and Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism pro­duced a droll and re­veal­ing re­port ti­tled To­ward Im­prove­ment and Ex­cel­lence: Re­port on Car­ni­val Ob­ser­va­tions 2012�2014, which it launched last Sep­tem­ber, and has avail­able for down­load on its Web site. As part of its sur­vey, some jour­nal­ists' as­sess­ments were cit­ed. Nat­u­ral­ly, this col­umn was not men­tioned.

Oth­er than the ob­vi­ous rea­sons for that (and let the imag­i­na­tion run ri­ot) the main one, I imag­ine, was that al­though some of the re­port's con­clu­sions could have been lift­ed di­rect­ly from this space, its premis­es dif­fered so rad­i­cal­ly it was sim­ply in­ac­croach­able.

The of­fi­cial po­si­tion is that Car­ni­val is na­tion­al cul­ture and can be "fixed" and re­turn to pris­tine ori­gins. My premise is that Car­ni­val is a bad­ly man­u­fac­tured, spite­ful at­tempt to cre­ate "na­tion­al cul­ture" for spe­cif­ic eth­nic and po­lit­i­cal rea­sons. It's clum­sy, waste­ful and poi­so­nous and dam­ages the na­tion much and ben­e­fits it lit­tle, if at all. The op­por­tu­ni­ty cost of Car­ni­val imag­i­na­tive­ly and ma­te­ri­al­ly is in­cal­cu­la­ble.

The pris­tine ori­gin is in 1959 (not 1881) when E Williams de­cid­ed to "na­tion­alise" Car­ni­val, which is the mod­el we con­tend with to­day. Car­ni­val has sur­vived for the same rea­sons the US fi­nan­cial sys­tem pre- and post-2008 did and does: its in­ter­locu­tors have ex­tra­or­di­nary ac­cess to the me­dia and gov­ern­ment, are im­mune to fact, and when nec­es­sary man­u­fac­ture their own. Thus the Car­ni­val as na­tion­al cul­ture nar­ra­tive has be­come or­tho­doxy, and the prac­tice a habit, de­spite mount­ing ev­i­dence of its tox­i­c­i­ty.

The point of view did not orig­i­nate with me. I came to it through my own ob­ser­va­tions, but so had many oth­ers. One of the best known cri­tiques was Wal­cott's es­say What the Twi­light Says: An Over­ture. This was a re­sponse to the ur­text of Car­ni­val as na­tion­al cul­ture, Er­rol Hill's Trinidad Car­ni­val: Man­date for a Na­tion­al The­atre. The de­bate be­tween the two po­si­tions had played out in the six­ties be­tween Wal­cott and Hill, but the con­clu­sion pre­dat­ed them.

Hill's book was the cul­mi­na­tion of a cul­tur­al cam­paign that had been waged since the end of the Sec­ond World War. An ear­ly de­fen­sive re­sponse to the propo­si­tion of a Car­ni­val na­tion­al cul­ture was iron­i­cal­ly launched by the Guyanese nov­el­ist Edgar Mit­tel­holz­er in 1945.

Writ­ing in the Guardian on No­vem­ber 13, 1945 (West In­di­an Cul­ture Needs a Firmer Ba­sis than Ca­lyp­so), Mit­tel­holz­er wrote: "Every now and then in Trinidad the top­ic keeps bub­bling up to the sur­face. Does Trinidad pos­sess a cul­ture of its own em­bod­ied in Car­ni­val, ca­lyp­so, and steel­bands?"

Mit­tel­holz­er's an­swer is un­am­bigu­ous: "left to me...I should have or­dered a ces­sa­tion of all fu­tile and tire­some ar­gu­ment and ruled that Car­ni­val be abol­ished as a bar­barous and de­grad­ing cus­tom" and ca­lyp­so be re­gard­ed as folk mu­sic and "not mas­ter­pieces of mu­sic equal in grandeur to the Eri­o­ca and Got­ter­dammerung."

The cause of all this was "an epi­dem­ic of arti­ness that has warped our per­spec­tive con­sid­er­ably" and it was on­ly "thor­ough the mists of our present delir­i­um" that we saw our­selves as "a peo­ple with a dis­tinc­tive cul­ture." The re­al­i­ty was (and is) that "our mu­sic and art and lit­er­a­ture are just in the process of be­ing born."

Mit­tel­holz­er's ire was two pronged. The first was aes­thet­ic–"an art-spir­it can­not spring in­to be­ing overnight." The sec­ond was prac­ti­cal: the met­ro­pol­i­tan per­cep­tion which Car­ni­val seemed de­signed to con­firm, and its con­se­quences.

Cit­ing his British pub­lish­er's ob­jec­tions to ma­te­r­i­al in his books which had West In­di­ans speak­ing stan­dard Eng­lish, Mit­tel­holz­er wrote: "The Eng­lish and Amer­i­cans, in their home­lands, con­sid­er us West In­di­ans to be noth­ing more than a pack of 'na­tives' with 'quaint' cus­toms–'quaint' songs and 'ex­ot­ic' dances. In their films, on their stages, in their books, we are de­pict­ed as back­ward peo­ple...who go about half-nude, our women in grass skirts, and whose nat­ur­al habi­tat is the jun­gle.

Ac­cord­ing­ly they see us as be­ing pos­sessed of strange su­per­sti­tions and ig­no­rant be­liefs..."

The con­se­quences of this, he con­tin­ued, in­clud­ed West In­di­an clas­si­cal singers (like Amy Mc­Crack­en, who had writ­ten to the Guardian a few weeks be­fore), be­ing told in the UK that the BBC did not want West In­di­an clas­si­cal singers, since their idea was to "let the West In­di­ans ex­press them­selves in terms of their 'na­tive art'."

The dan­ger in Car­ni­val as cul­ture, he con­clud­ed, "peo­ple in the north (would) re­tain their...im­pres­sions of us...as back­ward and half-sav­age." Sev­en­ty years lat­er, as point­ed out in this col­umn more than once, a whole in­dus­try of writ­ers, film­mak­ers, cul­ture vul­tures and aca­d­e­mics has emerged to ser­vice this per­cep­tion, with great suc­cess, with mon­u­ments like Car­ni­val Mes­si­ah.

But to re­turn to 1945-46. Mit­tel­holz­er was re­spond­ing to the first state­ments of what would be­come or­tho­doxy to­day. In 1946, for ex­am­ple, Al­bert Gomes wrote more than one spir­it­ed de­fence of the steel­band in the Guardian, cel­e­brat­ing its orig­i­nal­i­ty and its abil­i­ty to har­ness the cre­ative en­er­gies of the hope­less and the un­der­class.

Oth­er apol­o­gists in­clud­ed Har­ry Pitts, Os­caret Claude, and Charles Es­pinet, who pre­sent­ed the first his­to­ries and made the first at­tempts to cre­ate a cul­tur­al nar­ra­tive for the steel­band. Claude, on March 2, 1946, not­ed: "Wasn't Pythago­ras in­spired to make the mu­si­cal scale by lis­ten­ing to the var­i­ous sounds pro­duced by a black­smith's anvil? Isn't mu­sic on the pi­ano pro­duced by a suc­ces­sion of blows on strings from lit­tle ham­mers?"

These spir­it of these apolo­gias still ex­ists, but it miss­es, de­lib­er­ate­ly, Mit­tel­holz­er's point. Car­ni­val might be a folk fes­ti­val, ca­lyp­so might be folk mu­sic, and ar­tis­ti­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly in­ter­est­ing and use­ful. But to present them as ful­ly formed na­tion­al cul­ture, and equal and equiv­a­lent to the qual­i­ty and scope of met­ro­pol­i­tan art, mu­sic and cul­ture (which sta­tus Car­ni­val apol­o­gists crave so des­per­ate­ly) is fool­ish and dan­ger­ous.