Dear Minsh,
We haven't spoken in a while and the last few times we've met, you've spent much time berating me for my Carnival articles. But when I saw your swan on stage (on the news) I stopped and stared at the image for all the time it lasted on screen. It's stayed with me, as I'm sure it has with many people. It was sad, ethereal against the dark of the evening, and the scale was an achievement in itself. The possibilities for a different scale of theatre were immediately evident.
Then came the criticism from the fellow who won: dat is not mas. A bunch of people came to your defence, but that they should need to is precisely my point in our many discussions. Your idea of the mas is not the same as the people you produce it for. As I've told you, your take on mas is Romantic. You're allowed because your practice of it is driven by true Romanticism (among other things, of course), not politics or as a con job to screw money out of the state.
My take (by contrast) has always been realistic: mas' is good for momentary contrast against normalcy; it's not good for a normal state of affairs. It's art as part of a spectrum of art, not in vacuo. The consumers in metropolitan countries who know that mas is a form of theatre see the costumes as pageantry, and the possibilities for theatre. For the consumers here, the mas is a thing in itself, with no context, no connection to art, but a kind of Ur-art, from which all other art descended. At least so some of the Carnivalists have it. And these people might be involuntarily moved by the image of the swan, but it ends there, and they move on to the next distraction.
The populist, government-sponsored "nationalistic" take on Carnival isn't an artistic or aesthetic position so much as a political one. The connection between art (especially Carnival) and politics here is positively Orwellian–and it's been like that ever since E Williams nationalised Carnival in 1959. (See the Trinidad Guardian, January 11, 1959, p3.) What exists now bears an uncomfortable resemblance to forced gaiety and incited frenzy.
Little illustration: I went to the Soca Monarch finals on Friday night, and 15 of the 20 songs were awful, but more importantly, what I saw on the grounds was a bunch of tired-looking people. They were following a programme that told them "do this and you'll have a good time." It's a look I see on the faces of many people at mas' events. It's either that or animal lust (aka smugness at conspicuous consumption).
Your achievement inside of that insanity was to use the raw material of bodies moving along pre-determined trajectories (through a grid of streets, in a pliable state of mind) and attach colour, shape and purpose to it. And it worked.
That achievement has always had enemies. The present Minister of Finance wrote you an open letter in the Guardian in 1983 (February 25), telling you last place was too good for you. He wrote: "Your presentations are preoccupied with death and the triumph of evil over good. While this may be your personal view of life there is no need to constantly remind us of this at Carnival at all times."
To be fair to the Minister, I asked him about this (before he took the high office he now holds) and he said he had since come to appreciate your genius. But the sentiment of the letter isn't singular or anomalous. Many people don't "get" it. They just want a golden calf to adore. Remember the Carnival Messiah debacle a few years ago. The collective spitting out.
But you stayed with it, and it was tremendous to see you start working again. Apropos I'm writing this for two reasons: first to tell you that you're Trinidad and Tobago's most important living artist, and you should continue to work. The second is that as you have always preached the universality of art, I thought I'd share with you the work of another great artist, whose life also suffered slings and arrows (some deserved). This was Ezra Pound, and he wrote a poem (an epitaph, actually) for (people like) you. He called it Hugh Selwyn Mauberly. (See box)
I hope you keep producing, Minsh. T&T doesn't deserve you, but keep at it. When you leave us, you'll still be our most important artist. This doesn't mean I agree with you on everything, and we'll continue to argue, of course. I look forward to it.
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the deaD art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime",
In the old sense. Wrong from the start–
No, hardly, but seeing he had been born
In a half-savage country, out of date,
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout FOR factitious bait.
The age demanded an image
Of its own grimace
Something of the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace,
Not, not certainly, the oBscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.
Christ follows Dionysus
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban casts out Ariel.
All things are A flowing
Sage Heraclitus says
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall outlast our days.
All men, in law, are equals.
Free of Pisistratus,
We choose either a knave or a eunuch
To rule over us.