“January 15, 1995. Lately, words have been assailing me. Words like ashes, cocoyea brooms, sem, chataigne, roti, chunkaying, lepaying, washing wares. Everyday domestic words from long ago, a far-off time and place. Other words fly past me like spectres, and they want something—words like gloaming, lovevine, lianas, pois-doux, zaboca, mango vere, pomme-cythere, Manzanilla, calypso, J’Ouvert morning, ginga, carilee, googoonie, chuntah, calchul. Patois words and Hindi words. Words are ghosts, ancestors on this side. They are not symbols. They are alive and sensate—full of flesh and stone and jagged edges. Word jumbies.”—Ramabai Espinet, The Swinging Bridge
Carnival in Trinidad is not a festival. It is a force. A release, a reckoning, a world turned inside out. Though the revelry begins long before, there is no hierarchy for two days. There is a brutal colonial past that cannot be rewritten that returns with a blast of brass and a rush of bodies moving in time. It is an inheritance of fire, a survival, a remembering.
There is nowhere else on earth where history is danced like this, where the ghosts of the enslaved and the indentured rise, not in mourning but in celebration, where the present bursts through the seams of the past, too bright, too loud, too alive to be contained.
Women have always been at the centre of it. From the days when they played their mas in secret yards, away from the judgement of those who would rather see them silent, to now, when they lead the biggest bands down the streets of Port-of-Spain, sequined and sweating, daring the world to look away.
The phrase Carnival is Woman came from the way women took the masquerade and made it their own, from the defiance of Dame Lorraine, the parody and power of the jamette women, the way they carried steelpan when it was forbidden, the way they danced when they were told to stay still. Carnival is Woman is not a declaration. It is a fact.
Writers like Merle Hodge and Ramabai Espinet have shaped their stories around it—not only as a spectacle but as a space where the struggle for identity, voice, and belonging plays out in the most visceral way. Their work understands that Carnival is not just feathers and music; it is resistance made joyful, rebellion set to rhythm.
Merle Hodge, born in 1944 in Trinidad, wrote Crick Crack, Monkey in the heat of post-colonial reckoning. She was young, she was sharp, she was suspicious of easy answers. The book remains one of the most incisive portraits of what it means to be caught in the web of conflicting cultural demands, the push and pull of the colonial education system, and the uneasy inheritance of African ancestry in a society that had internalised European superiority.
If there was a way out, it wasn’t going to be found in the genteel drawing rooms of Port-of-Spain, nor in the hard-scrabble backyards of those who refused to be tamed. It was going to be fought for. Carnival, in its lawlessness, in its brief suspension of hierarchies, was always part of that fight.
Hodge has never written a novel that so completely takes Carnival as its subject, yet its presence is always lurking beneath the surface of her work. She has spoken of how its roots lie in defiance. “Carnival was born out of the refusal to be erased,” she has said. “It was never meant to be a showpiece. It was a claim.”
Hodge has not been sentimental about its transformations, the way its rougher edges have been sanded down, the way it has been packaged and sold. But she has acknowledged, too, that within its excess, within the bodies that still move to rhythms older than they can name, something persists. “Even when we don’t know it,” she has said, “we are remembering.”
Ramabai Espinet, born four years later, grew up in San Fernando, in a household where Carnival was not for “people like them.” Indo-Trinidadian women were not meant to wine in the streets. They were not meant to move that freely. “We watched,” she has said. “We did not play.”
She left for Canada in her twenties, found a world in books, and found herself frustrated by the gaps. Few stories told what she knew to be true: that the daughters of indenture had their own ghosts, their own rebellions, that their silences were not compliance but a kind of strategy, a kind of waiting.
Espinet wrote The Swinging Bridge as a corrective. In it, her protagonist Mona, far from Trinidad, reconstructs a world she never quite belonged to, a family splintered by migration, by history. And Carnival is both alluring and distant. “For Indo-Caribbean women, Carnival has become a space of transformation,” Espinet has said. “Where the sari meets the sequined costume, and traditional rhythms blend with soca beats.”
If Hodge’s preoccupation has been with Carnival’s politics, Espinet’s has been with its possibilities—what it means to finally step into it, to claim it.
They come from different vantage points, Hodge and Espinet. One whose people always had a stake in Carnival, one whose people had to carve out space within it. One whose criticism is sharpest when it is about what has been lost, one who sees what has yet to be gained. But they agree on its significance, on the way it acts as both a mirror and mask. It is never just a festival. It is history on display. It is a reckoning. It is, for many, the only place they can be fully themselves.
Women have been here since the beginning. Since the jamettes, defiant and unbowed, ruled the backyards and barrack yards of Port-of-Spain, their voices slicing through propriety. Since women picked up the steelpan and carried it through the streets, though men said it was not theirs to carry. Since the calypso tents, where men reigned, were cracked open by a woman who refused to sit outside.
Calypso Rose, born McCartha Linda Sandy-Lewis, kicked the door down in 1978, winning Calypso Monarch when it was still called Calypso King, forcing the competition to change its name. No Madam, she sang, and she made it the law. The song helped push for minimum wage legislation, making clear that calypso was never just melody, but a weapon.
Now there are others. Destra Garcia, wild, loud, the Queen of Bacchanal. Fay-Ann Lyons, daughter of Superblue and Lady Gypsy, who took every crown while pregnant, belly round, voice steady, feet sure. The women who wear their feathers like armour, who wine without apology, who take up space, and take the road.
And now, once again, it returns. The streets will belong to the Carnival woman. Have always belonged to her. The women who move through the mas, who pick up their skirts and throw their heads back in laughter, who stomp down the stage with a rhythm that could shake the bones of the dead.
The city is humming with it. Costumes are being fitted. Steelbands are tightening their notes, and roads are being cleared for the only thing that truly matters. J’Ouvert will break before dawn, with mud, with paint, with bodies flinging themselves into the street, unrecognisable, undone.
The sun will rise, and the bands will take the road, thousands pouring into the city, pulsing to the music, moving towards something that cannot be named, only felt. The masqueraders will cross the stage in gold, in silver, in barely-there scraps of fabric that shimmer like scales, like skin, like sweat. And now, once again, at least for two days, the women will lead them.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media journalist and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir, Love The Dark Days.
Author inquiries: irasroom@gmail.com
