Things I Have Withheld by Kei Miller

Author:Kei Miller [Miller, Kei]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838852801
Google: fDwGEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2021-05-05T23:00:00+00:00

8

OUR WORST BEHAVIOUR

Now everyone jump up and show me

your worst behaviour

Just show me your worst behaviour

Wine up with your worst behaviour

Start the bacchanal!

—Skinny Fabulous

Carnival in Trinidad has a particular and layered history. It is a wild story that involves French planters sailing from the Old World to the New and then from island to island, trying to outrun revolutions—first the one in France, and then the one in Haiti, but no matter how far they ran, a revolution would eventually find them; it involves enslaved people and their emancipation and burning stalks of sugar cane (cannes brülées) held high above their heads; it involves stick fighters and chantwell singers who would evolve into calypsonians and then later into soca artists; it involves riots and a brutal militia and at least one young man dying while two of his friends are taken to hospital.

The history of Jamaica Carnival is much thinner. The event is still seen by many as a poor facsimile of the real thing that takes place in Trinidad and Tobago. History, however, only requires the passing of time, one year stacked upon another, and someone to document it. So then, let this moment be recorded—that in Jamaica, in the Road March of 2013, an incident happened that caused such a scandal across the island that for days people wrote furious letters to the newspapers or called in to one of the island’s daytime radio talk show programmes, each of them—the letter-writers and the callers­—­frothing over themselves to see who could express the greatest outrage.

Something of the sort had happened before in Trinidad. After Emancipation when the French planters saw black bodies include themselves in what had been their own private revelry, they filled the Port of Spain Gazette with pronouncements of disgust:

“Diabolical!”

“All immorality and no refinement!”

“Wretched buffoonery!”

“An annual abomination!”

Island to island, carnival to carnival, this history has repeated itself. In 2013, Carnival spectators in Jamaica watched in horror as bodies that they would have preferred sidelined, included themselves in the masquerade, and by the inclusion of their spectacular bodies, they changed the meaning of the mas.

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