High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture

By Kevin Adonis Browne

Overall Winner of the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture explores Caribbean identity through photography, criticism, and personal narrative. Taking a sophisticated and unapologetically subjective Caribbean point of view, the author delves into Mas—a key feature of Trinidad performance—as an emancipatory practice. The photographs and essays here immerse the viewer in carnival experience as never before. Kevin Adonis Browne divulges how performers are or wish to be perceived, along with how, as the photographer, he is implicated in that dynamic. The resulting interplay encourages an informed, nuanced approach to the imaging of contemporary Caribbeanness.

The first series, “Seeing Blue,” features Blue Devils from the village of Paramin, whose performances signify an important revision of the post-emancipation tradition of Jab Molassie (Molasses Devil) in Trinidad. The second series, “La Femme des Revenants,” chronicles the debut performance of Tracey Sankar’s La Diablesse, which reintroduced the “Caribbean femme fatale” to a new audience. The third series, “Moko Jumbies of the South,” looks at Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, a pair of stilt-walkers from the performance group Touch de Sky from San Fernando in southern Trinidad. “Jouvay Reprised,” the fourth series, follows the political activist group Jouvay Ayiti performing a Mas in the streets of Port of Spain on Emancipation Day in 2015.

Troubling the borders that persist between performer and audience, embodiment and spirituality, culture and self-consciousness, the book interrogates what audiences understand about the role of the participant-observer in public contexts. Representing the uneasy embrace of tradition in Trinidad and the Caribbean at large, the book probes the multiple dimensions of vernacular experience and their complementary cultural expressions. For Browne, Mas performance is an exquisite refusal to fully submit to the lingering traumas of slavery, the tyrannies of colonialism, and the myths of independence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Sep 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781496819390

Kevin Adonis Browne

Kevin Adonis Browne is a photographer, poet, archivist, and scholar of contemporary rhetoric and Caribbean culture. His previous books include Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean. He is currently based in Trinidad, where he works at the University of the West Indies-St. Augustine.

Book preview

ASH WEDNESDAY

Flesh, well feared, takes leave

with a gestured hip.

The face burns.

Patience, my Heart.

Lent will come. The poor will

know their place again.

The yoke will settle, where

it has been for the better

part of our years.

They have not been forgotten (do not

fear their remembrances).

They are poor.

They forget. Spirit alone cannot employ,

buys no bread,

warms and waters nothing,

turns to ash on their foreheads.

Enough time has passed.

They love out of step with reason,

have learned to be thankful

when music stops and streets go silent,

except for the slow, scraping strides of street cleaners

whose disgruntled groans follow last lap like an epidemic.

And what is the favored pose for suffering people? (Who but we can say?)

Bent over

Hunched

Hollowed

Fasting

Waiting

like lazy drosophilae, dancing

near the sour mouths of drunkards,

who mark their rough cardinals in corner gutters before turning half-dead for home

—that surveyed nonterritory of home.

Where is your revolution, Lover,

your activism,

your arrogance?

Where is your fury?

PROSCENIUM FOR AN AQUEOUS HUMOR

Aye, Mas! Ah know yuh face!

—GREETING, Traditional

Apologia

I have imagined the following scenario:

Over drinks, I would be asked, and always by someone I admire a great deal, what was my first camera. Names of giants (and dying giants) would be suggested—Canon, Minolta, Olympus, Polaroid. Nikon, which I have used, and Fujifilm, which I use now.¹ Never Leica, for some reason. Too expensive, I’d later be forced to admit. Delivered offhandedly, in the crude, syncopated shifts that mark us as friends, the question would be one of those innocent questions, an icebreaker that would lead eventually to more serious questions of image-making and intent, ending possibly with much grander explorations of rhetoric, race, humanity, and their failed states. Before we get to slightly more complex ideas of Caribbeanist Photography in neocolonial times, I would take a long sip of what I’d be drinking. Rum, probably. Neat. Or straight, depending on where we are. Maybe on Carib Street in San Fernando at the Red Step bar, across from Pan Elders, champions of Panorama in their medium band category. Campo and Carl know my mother, and they remember the Power Station fire. (1952, Carl told me, once.) And they know Pan—steelpan. And they know Mas. They’ve been Fancy Sailors for decades, parading through San Fernando in their officer’s uniforms with dance steps made for steelpan music. They’ve known some wars. We all have, I suppose.

I’d grimace with the rum, then fix my face, letting it relax as I swallow, letting it set fire to my throat and then my chest, breathing in slowly and letting it cool. (Letting, as if I have control over these things.) I’d look away, pensive. And I’d pause. With my glass halfway between my lips and the table, it would be the indefinite pause of a man with no answer to give except for the admission of a particular and lingering shame: I can’t remember. Of course, I’ve tried. There are thousands of sunsets, the shadowy façades of this building or that, old houses that remind me of gravestones and the cruelty of time, neglected friends, strangers, half-forgotten lovers, all of them resting undeveloped in a box somewhere in New York. Not one of them would raise the memory of that first device. Canon? this person I admire would ask again. Minolta? Nothing. Sometimes, when you don’t want to betray your truth with a lie, silence picks up the scent and betrays you, anyway. So you take it for what it is. What would seem to be a common denominator among photographers would be, for me, a missing piece. An unresolved legacy.

I suppose a story about how photographs come to have an owner but no point of origin that I could recall—no first camera—is a familiar tragedy, recognizable to those of us who gather to invoke the unresolved, who find legacy at rivers’ mouths and seashores, who pay homage to those noises in the blood, offering calabash and flowers, planting flags and ringing bells with lamentations that come and go with the tide, the handmade temples that float out to the horizon on massive drumbeats. Those of us who go in search of the dark places that have given birth to us. Those of us who remember that the bowels of ships are not (our only) points of origin, and that as many echoes come from beneath waves as from beneath wooden decks and earth. These echoes pluck acoustically on the chords of a ship’s wake that plays a prelude to a dance of cocoa in the memory. Bereft of oversimplified metaphor, we can remember more freely that all traumas are incomparable in the end, leaving each of us with nothing else to tell but a story. This one will be less scandalous than forgetting one’s origins as a photographer, a story far truer than any amount of rum could make it. I will tell it anyway. I will give a report, as Lamming put it, on one man’s way of seeing.²

That is all it could be, for now.

Before the Blindness

There was, at first, the imperceptible haze that soon turned to halos around stars, around passing headlights and humming streetlights, making visible the opaque auras of regular people and the ghosts contained within them. The sky didn’t fall. No hole opened in the ground to swallow me. There was no pain. Things just began to fade, like faces in a photograph left too long in the sun. As is the case with many things, this particular beginning came not with a shock, but with subtlety: a missing detail here and there from a story I’ve become accustomed to telling. Who would notice? Before long, I would forget about it and learn to live with what I could no longer see.

It was all very normal, very mundane. I almost missed it.

In 2007, shortly before conspiring to destroy my faltering marriage, I was diagnosed with glaucoma—open-angle glaucoma, to be specific. I didn’t know there were other types, so I waited for my ophthalmologist to tell me what would somehow make my situation different from the other cases he’d encountered—something that would make me special, somehow. That something never came. The risk, delivered with the cool, disinterested tone of a man who’s done this far too many times, was the same: Blindness.

We, the dispossessed, are expert at understating the unfathomable, but I want to be careful not to overstate the case: this is the fear of everyone who sees or hopes to see, but it wasn’t the sort of news that one would consider earth-shattering by any means. Life-altering, certainly, but not a cataclysm. It wasn’t a firm, declarative You are going blind, with pauses so long I could have time to contemplate the worst and bury myself in grief. Nor was it a slightly less declarative (though, no less cryptic) prophecy, You are going to go blind. It wasn’t exactly a false alarm, but there was, as I recall, no indication from him that I had cause to panic. It came in the same tone as the diagnosis, as if he had discovered a heat rash or a mole on my finger that could mean something. A new freckle. A new concentration of melanin. Something hereditary. Cancer, maybe. Maybe nothing. Who can say? But I’ve heard worse things walking the street, so I took it in stride, as I’d been taught to do. A matter of my survival, you understand. People like me must be very careful not to act out in certain places. An ophthalmologist’s office, for example.

Don’t worry, he said, it’s treatable. But if you don’t treat it, you can go blind. Very likely that you will, if you don’t treat it. It’s as simple as that, really. You have to treat it.

Yes, I understand. Simple as that. He then turned and left me alone with his words.

It isn’t every day I am shaken from thinking of myself in the far too flexible terms of metaphor and thrust into a situation where I’d be forced—maybe for the first time—to see. So I sat, closed my eyes, and imagined what it would be like to go blind. I found that it is an unimaginable thing—the experience of seeing all my life exceeded my imaginings of what a life of not seeing would mean. Put another way: compared to what we have the chance to actually experience, whatever we imagine (no matter how grand or terrifying) will never really match up. Not really. Still, I wondered what I would miss. When I opened my eyes, I spent the next few hours (or was it days?) looking at myself in the mirror. My crafted vanities had taken a hit, and I couldn’t help but be disappointed with what I saw. We all tell ourselves stories in order to live. Sometimes, purely as a matter of survival, we lie. But this time, a familiar silence came again to betray. Devoid of symbol and adjective (which can make art or poetry of the most uninteresting things), I had occasion to see exactly what I had become: a scholar and pioneer, sometimes happily marooned in an obscure area of study, but also a (once) unrepentant liar, a cheat, a failed husband, a doting but mediocre father, an invented man who had constructed a place to house his abstract ambitions instead of an actual home of brick, mortar, wood, and (perhaps) love. A book, but no home. Words and images, but no family of my own. In time, I would come to realize that there would be no royalties for betraying myself, no awards for setting people aside for the work. Every accolade delivered in this vein will be heavy; every compliment will be trailed by an insult, whether real or imagined. In time, I would learn that suffering, particularly when it is self-imposed, doesn’t always build character. I would learn that there is no act of mercy that the guilty conscience cannot undermine and outdo with remarkable efficiency. And sometimes, when we get more than we can handle, we break. In that last moment, though, I looked away.

Enough, I thought. Enough.

Guilt doesn’t always lead to conversion. What I would give now for another look at that collection of shames and successes, of broken or missing parts, and the spaces between them. I might have tried to save my marriage instead of myself. But in the doctor’s office that afternoon, I only thought of minor things, of random remembered things, each disjointed and discrete, each stripped of its narrative and its moral.

Each, painfully beautiful and (suddenly) quite rare:

The functionality of unbuttoned sleeves.

Corners.

Butterflies.

Plums.

Mangoes.

Red.

Blue.

The onyx eyes of a crapaud—its constellation of warts.

Rain on hot asphalt.

Plaited hair.

Dogs in heat.

Handwritten words.

Linoleum floors.

Worn wicker chairs.

An old man.

The color of wine.

An old woman the color of sweetbread before it cools.

I didn’t think of very profound things beyond my rough litany, or of who and what I might miss, or of childhood memories and other ghosts. The smiling eyes of a sometimes beautiful woman made no appearance, though I remember writing volumes at her feet. Thoughts of Noel, my drowned cousin, were as silent and still as his acoustic grave that languishes somewhere in Siparia. As silent were Maureen’s ashes. Lystra and Marjorie, who had not yet joined their sister, remained where they were: unremembered in San Fernando, not far from where they spent their childhoods. There was no remembrance of Vena’s round face, of her calling me black boy, and of me knowing that only love—love and nothing else—could come from a face like hers. Born the year my grandmother died, my first child, by then used to disrupting things, disrupted nothing. I gave no thought to the marriage I had already begun to dismantle, or to earlier and later regrets. No thought of a second child. No thought was given to my mother, whose love and mortality drove me, feverish and desperate, back to school. No thought to a long, stolen kiss in the playful shadows of a deserted high school in San Fernando. Nor to the letter I’d write to her decades later—but never send. No thought to noble causes, liberal causes. Nor to the chiseled bodies of malnourished vagrants that affirm the enduring myth of a nation’s progress, the shameless inequity of its celebrations, the denial of its obscenities. There was no Césaire, no Glissant, no James, no Fanon, no Nunez, no Walcott, no Lovelace, no Wynter, no Brand, no Sharpe. No Browne. No thought to the various metaphors of vision, opacity, and blindness that, before now, had helped me to make scholarly sense of Caribbean existence and perception.

Nothing but corners, butterflies, plums …

Some things can’t be undone, but remembering now with the same quiet dread a moment when I was first compelled to make sense of my imperfect way of seeing, I have a chance to acknowledge something more than its convenience as a rhetorical device: that is, my attempt to cannibalize what Didion might call the phantasmagoria of my experience, so I could see in spite of my failing vision, relying on what I’ve seen so I could envision what I have not yet seen, or will never see.³ This is a wish for a different, more literal version of myself, a version that is able to consider the impermanence of things on their own terms, before they and I could crystallize into memory. I’m fortunate my sight has endured to this moment. I’ll try not to rush, but time is against me.

Aside from the intoxicated and grief-stricken heart, there are few things more self-indulgent and corruptible than sight, such that we see what we do not believe and believe what we cannot see. And yet, we are often subject to its defining practices—the devised mechanics and processes that emphasize its impermanence. They enable us to attach meaning to the unreliable instances and experiences of which our more creative expressions are composed. The camera and photograph are such an example. Though many other things, they are each a testament to seeing and to what cannot be seen, of seeing and of having seen. For some of us, they are reminders of what we have failed to see, or have learned not to. Like the devices and images in the unopened boxes and corrupted drives of a former life, they provide only cryptic evidence of our unseeing, of the uncomfortable familiarity of everyday life and what might have come before it, like a set of clichés ceaselessly renewed. Or, like an untethered paradox of fragmentations and coalescences, coming apart and together. Or, they are like the lasting impermanence of slavery and its indignities.⁴ Sight, offering a glimpse of life from the still, irreconcilable trappings of an enduring afterlife.⁵

As with all things, a still photograph has an afterlife all its own. And, as I’ve continually been taught, its fate and effects are not always subject to my control. In spite of this, or maybe because of it, I go beyond the casual encounter with photographic surfaces, with what they are in essence (paper and ink). I go in search of self-conscious moments that will outlive their participants whose subjectivities are already in motion, and who exist (far better than I) in spite of their missing parts. In that search, when navel-gazing can be at its most intense, I am also opened—overexposed.

I am no longer just describing my own predicament—the onset of my personal terror—but something larger than myself. In this more literal version of myself, I see my personal constructions recede, becoming less important than what they were, only just moments ago. I am reminded, in this, that the terrors and traumas of black life are not metaphors, and that I cannot face its indignities or my recovery from them on my own. Revising Proust somewhat, I suggest that the dignity of the Caribbean photograph emerges not when it shows us things that no longer exist, but when it posits lived reality as a material representation of deliberative expression among ordinary people who sometimes act as though they do not see. A Mas that exceeds the limitations of Carnival. What would that mean for a photographer with no discernible genesis? This, at the very least: if the photograph represents an archive of vernacular resistance to a dual intransigence—an unimaginative future and an unimaginable past—then I would be compelled to think less of the symbolic blindness of my previous misunderstandings, less of my actual blindness, and more of what there was for me to actually see.⁶ Still photographs have lives of their own. Offering only a glimpse of the afterlife in which we find ourselves, they cannot show all that occurs in the in-between. That requires a bit more reflection on my part, since I also find myself engaged in one to create the other—engaged, that