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dissertation entitled

From Folk to Literature: The Tradition of Picong in Trinidad

presented by

Allyson E. Samuel

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment
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FROM FOLK TO LITERATURE: THE TRADITION OF PICONG IN TRINIDAD

By

Allyson E. Samuel

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
In partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
For the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2004

ABSTRACT

FROM FOLK TO LITERATURE: THE TRADITION OF PICONG IN TRINIDAD
, By
Allyson E. Samuel
My work addresses two key issues in the foundational debate that has raged in Caribbean
Literature since its inception. How does one deﬁne the uniqueness of Antillean writing,
and how can it be critically accessed? One of the current concerns for Caribbean
theorists is the necessity of providing critical lenses that do not rely completely on a
remote Western metropole, and depend instead on the rhetorical strategies that reﬂect the
material conditions and folk-consciousness of the region. Thus, my project seeks to
continue this process by looking at a similar relationship between rhetorical strategies of
the folk and Caribbean Literature. Tracing an element of Afro-Creole folk culture called
picong, from its rural roots to its manifestation in literature, provides a demonstration of
how non-mainstream culture may become a source for reading and deﬁning Caribbean

literature.

For Marlene and Mikre

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following people who helped make this work possible. First, I
want to thank the chair of my committee Dr. Kenneth Harrow for his guidance, support
and feedback. Also for encouragement and feedback, I want to thank Dr. Theresa
Melendez Dr. Greg Thomas, Dr. Isaac Kalumbu and Dr. Aime Ellis. Special thanks to
Sharon Tyree, Evette Chavez and Lisa Noelp for helping me negotiate the system. And to
the ﬁnds and family who provided emotional support and an invaluable link to the oral

tradition of Trinidad, without whom I would have had inspiration, I offer my utmost I

thanks: Terence Samuel, Ray Slavens, Bernie Hamilton and the denizens of Freddo’s.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

From Folk to Literature: The Tradition of Picong in Trinidad ........................... 1
Chapter One

Grounding the Folk: Picong as Afro-Creole Folk-Inheritance ........................... 15
Chapter Two

Becoming the picaresque: Representations of Afro-Creole Folk Culture in Nineteenth
Century Trinidad Carnival ..................................................................... 34
Chapter Three

Descendants of a Sharp-Tongued Dialectic: Calypso and the Chantwell ................ 63
Chapter Four

Wordsmith: The Folk as Literary Trope ........................................................ 83
Conclusron ..... 111
Bibliography ...................................................................................... 114

Introduction

From Folk to Literature: The Tradition of Picong in Trinidad

My work addresses Caribbean literary production in terms of its relationship with
elements of folk-culture. My project seeks to examine the role of rhetorical strategies
embedded in the Afro-Creole Trinidadian folk culture that manifest themselves in politics
and literature, and that provide a vehicle for contestation of notions of individual and
collective utterance. Although much work has been done to give a ﬁ'amework for the
interpretation of the literature that reﬂects the dynamic histories of the Caribbean, little
attention had been paid to the efﬁcacy of the rhetoric and folk-ritual of picaresque social
criticism and its hereditary offspring — the Caribbean novel. This is the axis upon which
my work turns: the dialectical opportunities provided by the picaresque folk rituals as
evidenced by Trinidad’s Carnival, Calypso and their relationship to Trinidadian literature
and politics.

This project is an exploration of the subversive and generative potential that one
ﬁnds to be an important element of the perforrnative aspects of the, folk. As the reﬂection
of peasant culture, I see the folk as a reﬂection of a diversity as ﬁgured by Edouard

Glissant—“which is neither chaos nor sterility. ..(but) the human spirit’s striving for a

cross cultural relationship, without universalist transcendence”(Di_scgurse, 98). The folk-
aesthetic, as a project of self-actualization, reﬂected the marginalization of the peasant
class through its nascent emergence in the rural villages and its positionality outside the
mainstream discourse. The received forms of the colonial language combined with the
oral traditions borne out of folk culture create a convergence of form whose dynamism
reﬂects both the material position of the peasant class, and its ability—due to its
existence outside the mainstream—to direct its gaze to the social structures which hold it
to the margins of discourse. Hence, the instability characterized by his notion of diversity
may be replicated in the oral and ritual forms that exist in the “irrupted” space of the
Caribbean The Caribbean histories of violent seizure and movement, of cacaphonic
cultural upheaval and transformation create the irrupted spaces ﬁ'om which the margin
may look at the center and contest its preeminence. These strategies create in their
positionality a dialectical relationship among ﬁgurings of class, race and inter/national
production.

The historical context for my research is located in those interactions between
colonial power and the subjects within which Trinidad’s early colonial demographic
makeup provided new ground for fashioning themselves. When Christopher Columbus
arrived in Trinidad in .1498, he named it for the Holy Trinity, beginning the conquest of i
the island in its naming for his ambitions to claim the land in the name of Catholicism
and God, not necessarily in that order. He found the land peopled by the aboriginal
peoples known as the Awaraks, and to a much lesser extent, the Carib peoples who had
been decimated by an earlier series of wars of conquest against the Arawaks. Spain, in

turn found Trinidad to be of little importance compared with other Spanish-controlled

islands that were producing goods to send back to Europe. It wasn’t until Spain found
use in the enslavement of the Arawaks who were used to further establish a presence on
the island, that the country began to send a series of governors to oversee the process of
turning a proﬁt ﬁ'om the resources of their new territory.

As the Arawak numbers-were reduced through illness and relentless labor, Spain
sought to increase the population of the island by introducing slavery. According to
historian Michael Anthony, at the turn of the seventeenth century, Trinidad had begun to
establish itself as a slave-owning outpost:

The proﬁts involved were great, and there was much competition among
the maritime nation of Europe to secure the right to supply slaves to the
Spanish West Indies. In 1701 a French company won the contract, and
promised to supply 48,000 Africans over a period of ten years. (219%
T_ﬁn_idad 35)
With the decision to acquire such a large number of Africans for work in the colony, it
became apparent that more settlers were needed to increase the European population of
the island. Yet, underlying this need, was the belief that larger numbers of planters
would also serve as a deterrent against uprisings. Hence, Spain enacted the Cedula of
Poblacion.l The Cedula provided land for anyone of the Roman Catholic faith, as long as
they were allies of Spain. This stipulation of faith made it possible for French settlers to
move to Trinidad and ﬁnd a welcoming atmosphere in which to set up shop. Thus, the
island became populated with African slaves and Spanish and French settlers. As a

result, the demographic in which the enslaved Africans found themselves included an

 

‘ Meaning “The CedulaofPopulation.”

elite of French and Spanish planters who lived under the relatively less repressive
Spanish laws. Under these laws, according to Anthony, “slaves should be taught the
Roman Catholic faith, they should be allowed two hours a day to do their own work, they
were to have sufﬁcient accommodation, and they should be encouraged to marry M
m 45).” While each of the considerations given the slaves were more lenient than
in the French and English colonies, it took very little accommodation on the part of the
colonial elite to provide these concessions because the were a means to bind the slaves
ever more closely to their masters—and thus was seen as a lesser evil—by the colonial
elite. Because of this, when the British took the island in 1787, they encountered an
unusual conundrum—their administration was seen as hostile to both the French and
Spanish because they sought to eliminate the French and Spanish cultural hold on the
island and to relegate even those meager concessions to slaves and he blacks as non-
existent.

This contestation would eventually manifest itself in attempts of the British to
eliminate rituals of picong, and other elements of Afro-creole culture. This repression
served as a means of establishing English cultural control of the island, and as a means of
establishing their might over their local European counterparts. As a result, practices
such as picong came to be seen as one of the means to disrupt the English agenda.

Following this, I use aspects of Afro-creole Trinidadian oral tradition, to discuss
the ways in which the impulse of contestation borne out of the milieu of slavery and
European cultural and administrative conﬂict is performed as picong, both in the scrvice
of the slaves and in the service of the French and Spanish conﬂict against the English. In

the pre-emancipation contest of the chantwell, the picaresque existed in the songs sung by

slave chantwells of the nineteenth century to denigrate plantation owners, as well as to
excoriate other chantwells and their supporters. Aﬁer emancipation the population of
Port-of-Spain, Trinidad’s capital, became ﬁlled with people of different classes living in
close proximity with each other. Of the poorest elements of the social hierarchy, the
jamette class or demimonde emerged. For this group, organized by community or
neighborhood, the chantwells were the lead singers of the bands, made famous by their
biting witticisms directed against colleagues and the icons of respectability, such as the
colonial government. As the lead singers of nineteenth-century stickfighting Carnival
bands, their designation as “jamette” reﬂected their representation in society, “below the
line” or the diametre. The word jamette was a derivation of diametre, and “amounted to
a class in the community, the people below the diameter of respectability or the
‘underworldede3 1). I will examine their
position in society, and the vehicle of picongesque folk culture, as a means of engaging in
social critique.

Because the chantwells (and chanterelles) become important participants in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century carnival, and carnival itself exists as a
cacophony of voices of various classes—a focus on the dialectics of representation would
further the understanding of the appropriative and dynamic nature of the ritual. The
masking of the French planters in ﬁgures such as the negre jardin (ﬁeld slave) and the
free blacks’ post-emancipation masquerade of “Dame Lorraine,” a mincing, large-
posteriored caricature of a French lady, served to reﬂect the antagonisms and liminality
of the folk masque. The folk singing that characterized the art of the chantwell carried

over into the performance of calypso, creating a forum for both entertainment and social

commentary that borrowed heavily ﬁ'om the picong of the chantwells. Thus, an oral form
formerly relegated to the peasant villages, the urban lower-class, and the barrack-style
living of the demimonde is later reﬁgured and dynamically altered to emerge as part of a
major festival as the social commentary calypso. Calypsonians of both the lower class
and the bourgeoisie turned and fashioned this form to support their social and ideological
beliefs. Because calypso could be used to address the political issues of the dayuboth to
support and attack the underpinnings of legislation—a discussion of the power and impact
of its use of picong will give insight into the ways in which elements of this folk-form
permeate and replicate antagonistic discussions about class identity. Though nationally
projected as a signiﬁer for creole culture— here understood to be that which is Aﬁican
and European—picong, or the peeling away of an opponents ideologies using satirical and
picaresque verbal wordsmithing, becomes a potential signiﬁer of individual and
collective self-actualization and resistance for varied communities within the conceptions
of nationhood.

Trends in the study of Caribbean folk culture seek to articulate the crossings and
spaces that exist between the folk and literary expression. In his essay “The Problem of
the Problem of Form,” Gordon Rohlehr articulates the debt to the oral tradition that is
owed by some Caribbean texts, and the inherent indeterminacies that reﬂect a post-
modernist imperative:

If oral tradition directs our attention to assemblies of people, the lime, the
calypso tent, church, grounation, cult, drum dance, performance, narrative,
song, and sermon. Modernist aesthetics may raise problems of void or

vortex, chaos or silence, the irrelevance of the individual, the

dehumanization of art and the emergence in an incomprehensible universe
of the art object as its own circular self-contained world, exploring itself,
echoing itself; and sometimes with enviable, worm-like ﬂexibility, even
copulating itself. . .many of our writers have been simultaneously attracted
to both sets of possibilities, so that the same works may contain the
tension between two poles of shaping. (3)
My dissertation will explore the potentialities that emerge ﬁ'om the interrelationship of
oral and written forms in politicizing the folk, while seeking from this connection the
folk’s inﬂuence of the written. As part of a colonial heritage in which, the written was
privileged over the oral, Aﬁ'o-Creole folk culture in Trinidad was largely relegated to the
status ofthat population of poor, black—and after the 1880s—colored middle class. As A
function of oral culture, the folk was seen as a remnant of an uncivilized minority culture.
For this reason, I ﬁnd in the dialectic created by that hierarchy, a point of departure for
observing representations of power and social critique in the received written forms and
the overlappings, ﬁssures, and the “worm-like ﬂexibility” of orality.

In examining oral tradition, Carolyn Cooper’s W articulates this
relationship as an “antagonism/complementarity”(3) which takes into account the ability
of the two forms to converge and diverge according to the situational variability of the '
preeminence of each form. She suggests that “if the oral broadly deﬁned, does achieve
status once it appears in written form, it nevertheless contaminates the written as
subversive praxis”(3). The suggestion of oral tradition as a contaminant further invokes
the issues of class inscriptions on the folk as a derivative of mainstream culture, and its

potentiality as a form that both explodes and signiﬁes upon mainstream discourse. She

notes that the Jamaican dialect ”assumes the burden of the social stigrnatization to which
the practitioners of Afrocentric ideology in Jamaica are continually subjected”(2). Hence
the hierarchy of literature and the folk becomes representative of the colonial structure
which privileges the written Western structures over the orality of peasant2 folk-culture.
This invokes the dialogic nature of the folk in its relationship to the written—the
double-voiced interrogation existing in each utterance—as ﬁgured by Mikhail Bakhtin. I
look to the folk inﬂuence on Trinidadian Carnival as a ﬁguring of this double-voicedness.
Aligning my work with Cooper’s notion of the “subversiveness” of the oral
tradition, I view the picaresque in nineteenth century carnival as the voice under the
smface of the ofﬁcial format of the festival. In concert with this idea, I invoke Judith
Butler’s notion of performance “destabilizing the very distinctions between natural and -
artiﬁcial, depth and surface inner and outer through which discourse almost always
operates”(f&r_r_dg m1; xxix). This moves my work on Trinidadian carnival beyond
Bakhtin’s notion of European carnival as an inversion of high and low culture
manifesting itself in the celebration of the materiality of the grotesque body. Burton’s
notion of Trinidad’s Carnival as one that does not exist as a reversal of high and low, but
as an intensiﬁcation. He claims instead that “what happens is not fundamentally at
variance with what happens all year, it is less a ritual of reversal. .. than a ritual of
intensiﬁcation in which forces that govern the ordinary are expressed with particular
salience, clarity and eloquence”(Afrﬂrggle 157). He sees this as a contestation of
inside and outside, setting his view at variance with Victor Turner’s notion of carnival as

reﬁ'acting subversive tendencies. My position is that it is a not a reversal of high and low

 

szpwmmmesenmmenmfomeidm,msfenedaleedmmghmemndaMaesmeﬁm
ofnon-rnainstreamEmopsanculture.

or a simple dialectic between inside and outside, but a contestation of margin and center
in which both rub against each other and overlap—a constantly moving and interrelating
of folk and mainstream discourses.

My current concern seeks to apply critical lenses that do not rely heavily on any
metropole and depend instead on a rhetorical strategy that reﬂects the material and
psychic consciousness of the region as reﬂected in the microcosm of the community.
Speciﬁcally, I see picong as a reﬂection of a collective and individual Trinidadian Afro-
Creole, Caribbean, folk-culture experience. Such a strategy would have the advantage of
addressing the social and political tensions embedded in a work, that are processed and
revealed through the use of the folk’s vernacular, ritual, and oral register, and are easily
overlooked in the process of forcing an external cultural template onto the text.

My project would localize this process ﬁirther by looking at a similar relationship
between traditional Trinidadian construct of picong and its literary representations. By
examining the inﬂuences and importance of the rhetorical strategy of picong, as an oral
technique of both traditional West Aﬁican and Trinidadian singers, I historicize its
inﬂuence by linking it with that which is represented as constitutive of the island’s Afro-
Franco creolized colonial past. One feature of the process of picong is the layering of
critical meanings, both political and mythological within the structure of the commentary.
In the pro-emancipation state, the balladeer used it to trope folk-culture, which signiﬁed
slave culture—and to address his message of resistance to the peasant class, while
ostensibly entertaining the ruling class. By the very act of its performance, both fOr the
elite and underclass, picong-in-song proved the capacity of the individual from the

perceived margins of colonial culture, to possess a wit that could potentially function to

excoriate. those whom s/he currently sought to entertain. In the ritual of presentation for
an elite audience, its presence says, “here I have the tool to subvert notions of a lack of
rationality, although presently, they are not overtly being used against you.” Considering
its potentiality as a source of resistance to being erased from the discourse of colonialism
and slavery, picong exists in the act of the performance before the ruling class as a
liminal site for ideological contestation. In addition, in its unadulterated form, picong
ﬁrnctioned as means of voicing the material and psychological situation of afro-
Trinidadian in their discourses of resistance.

Picong ﬁgures interculturally as social commentary through its satirical and
picaresque structures that reverse the theme of West African praise singing and produce
early nineteenth-century Trinidadian balladeering. Both the African praisesinger and the
chantwell were charged with the tasks of entertaining with demonstrations of
wordsmithing, yet the latter could—and frequently did—subvert that process by turning
his razor wit on those whose repressive systems deﬁned society’s politics. Hence, the
chantwell—by deﬁnition of his low caste status and his troubadour entree into the ruling
classes—could speak both individually and collectively about the politics of the
repressive colonial system.

Since picong’s cultural ﬁrnctions have been appropriated for contemporary
literary and political use, it is imperative that its signiﬁcance as a critical tool be assessed.
» This study is important to the ﬁeld of Caribbean Literature for two reasons: First, it
furthers work in the understanding of what constitutes a Trinidadian tradition, and by
extension gives speciﬁcity to generalized claims concerning Antillianite or Creolite.

Secondly, it contributes to current missions to document the substantial contribution of

10

oral tradition to Caribbean literary theory, and thus provides substance—and indeed
challenges such theorizing by illuminating the complexity inherent in a reading the
folk/literary continuum.

In order to detail the powerful social inﬂuence of picong, and the political
conﬂicts arising from their compositions, it is necessary to examine the skirmishes in
nineteenth and twentieth century newspaper accounts and their reﬂection of the national
discourses of what constitutes mainstream identity. As the new millennium begins, .
Trinidad is engaged in a ﬁerce battle over the legitimacy of use of picong by the news
media to critique governmental institutions. Hence this project would allow me to
examine the sociopolitical role that this tradition of satire has played in various debates

over the intersections between representations of national and folk identity.

Chapter One:
Grounding the Folk: Picong as Afro-Creole Folk-inheritance in Trinidad

In this chapter, I look at the relationship of picong, as it relates to the historical
milieu of slavery, and to the interaction of different elements of society in its pre-
emancipation fashioning. Picong, as a part of the folk register, exists in that complex
relationship of signs, which together form the folk consciousness. Its individual elements
form a complete and referential connection, sign invoking sign—which functions as a
language of self-actualization. I examine how the power-structure of the island’s
inhabitants was formed during—and just after—the period of slavery, as well as its
connection to the repression borne out of the dialectic between French and Spanish

Creoles,and enacted against the English. From its consistent appearance in various

ll

aspects of Trinidadian Afro-Creole culture—ﬁom the capitulation of the island to the
British in 1787, to its current incarnations—it has wielded a unique and far-reaching
sphere of inﬂuence. Although the Spanish and French shared a distaste for Aﬁican and
Aﬁ'o-Creole culture, they found a common resentment with the black underclass at the
administrative and cultural impositions of the English. This shared hostility led the
ﬁanco-spanich cultural elite to transfer the ritual of picong to a critique of the oppressive
nature of their British neighbors.

From this period to Eric Williams’ “Massa Day Done” speech, I trace the

political use of picong to attack government and societal ills.

Chapter Two:

Becoming the Picongesque: Representations of Afro-Creole Folk in Nineteenth
Century Trinidadian Carnival

This chapter will examine the mid-century period of Carnival in Trinidad to
elaborate on the processes through which picong ﬁrst enters the mainstream public arena.
I examine here the Black impetus to enter the festival as a means to enact the afﬁrmative,
accommodative, and combative rhetorics of picong. Linking the rituals of wordsniithing
that were a part of plantation life for slave, and through the slaves—their masters, to its
reappearance in the form of the participatory elements blacks brought into the pre-Lenten
ritual, exposes the ways in which picong is used by the peasantry and underclass to
refashion nineteenth-century Trinidadian Carnival by their very participation and

presence within the ritual.

12

Chapter Three:

Descendants of a Sharp-Tongued Dialectic: Calypso and the Chantwell

Looking at one of the most relevant and direct descendants of calypsonians, the
early folk singers known as chantwells, I locate their class inspirations and relevance of
tools that the calypsonian inherited from those early singers. Those who were
accustomed to extemporaneous critique, and who achieved renown through their
blistering attacks on each other, and on the plantation elite, were the earliest form of
Trinidad calypsonian. Moving ﬁ'om this point, one can see the borrowing that takes place
from the oral tradition of the pre-emancipation practitioners to contemporary songster
counterparts. Picong then provides a reading of the heteroglossic nature of colonial
Trinidad and its tradition of singing the folk and the mainstream into a dialectial

relationship.

Chapter Four:
Wordsmith: The Folk as Literary Trope

This chapter focuses on the nature of orality in Trinidad’s post-colonial Caribbean
context. Using several Caribbean texts, such as Hollis Liverpool’s “Brain Drain,” Merle
Hodges’ W and Earl Lovelace’s The mason Can’t Dance, I point to
the manner in which Trinidadian authors reference the culture of the folk as a means of
articulating a particularly localized folk aesthetic. Utilizing the vernacular speech of the

Aﬁ'o-Creole folk, in song, theater and vitriolic commentary, writers have found picong to

13

be a valuable means of imbuing a text with the cadence and rhetoric of a relevant, but
marginalized, culture.

For my purposes in this work, I ﬁnd the sheer variety and manifestations of
picong in local culture demonstrate that it moves beyond the simply iconic feature of a
cultural element, long since past. Instead, it continues to ﬁrnction as a living example of
oral tradition, in which its self-constitutive aspects negate it as a relic and continually re-

fashions it to serve new processes.

.14

Chapter One:

Grounding the Folk: Picong as Afro-Creole folk-inheritance in Trinidad

When I was about eighteen and student-teaching in Port-of—Spain, I went to the vendor across the street
to get a breakfast sandwich. The old lady selling these treats had a stand on the sidewalk. As I reached the
ﬁ'ont of the customer line, she handed me my sandwich and said loudy, and in my direction, “they playinz

saint in the day, and talcin ' so much man in the night. ” As I reached ﬁrward to accept my food and my
change, I said under my breath, but loud enough for my voice to carry, “At least we are still young enough

to get men. " The old woman swelled like an angry crapaud and let loose widr a blistering commentary,
and I quickly retreated Late thin afternoon, when I returned ﬁom school, she was still piconging my
family background and my—as she saw it—negligible assem.

-Bernie Hamilton"

In the above anecdote, the speaker illustrates the commitment necessary to the
enactment of picongesque critique. The relentlessness of the attack, the multi-pronged
and layered catalogue of faults, and most signiﬁcantly perhaps, the rotating audience of

customers and passersby create the theater that produces picong.

15

In this chapter I look at the method by which the folk aesthetic is grounded in .-
theoretical discussions of agency, ritual, and referential relationships to social practices. I
align myself with practices that do not seek a ﬁnite deﬁnition of the purpose of the folk,
but instead explores its potentialities as a discourse, in contestation, in concert, and, in
excess, of the dominant ideology of society.

For my purposes, the folk is characterized as the aesthetics of perforrnative ritual
grounded in the peasant classes ﬁrst, then through the lower, and is later reﬂected in.
mainstream performance. This “transversality,” part of a “historical convergence
underneath” the mainstream discourse reﬂects the remaking that takes place in the New
World, producing the folk as a product that is formed as a process of that convergence
(Glissant, 65). I look to picong as part of a Trinidadian oral tradition, embedded in the
folk, that points to the generative aspects of performance. As a theatrical form, it
participates in the processes of becoming that give the marginalized a voice, individually
and communally.

In this connection, I also build upon Glissant’s notion of the Caribbean theater as
transformative. He notes, “theater is the act through which the collective consciousness
sees itself and consequently moves forward. . . at the beginning there can be no nation
without a theater”(l96). It is this idea of “beginning” that one ﬁnds to be useful in the
picongesque, for it is borne out of an environment in which old oral rituals were taken by
the slaves and combined with dominant cultural vehicles to form—for the lowest echelon

of colonial Trinidadian society—this constitutive element of folk culture. Therefore,

 

3Personalinterview. 1998.

16

because picong accesses both a community’s past and its dynamic ﬁiture, its performance
is an act of remembering history.

The image of Caliban, Prospero’s slave is now a familiar trope to Caribbeanist
scholars who have found in his dialectical relationship with his “master” is a useful trope
to articulate the repressive situation of colonial peoples in the Caribbean. Glissant’s
reading of the hierarchic elements imbedded in the tale point to its colonialist ideologies:

In this totalizing equilibrium, a hierarchy was established, from Caliban to
Prospero; and it is not difﬁcult to see that Caliban-nature is contrasted
from below with Prospero-culture...1n The Tempest the legitimacy of
Prospero is thus linked to his superiority, and epitomizes the legitimacy of
the West. . .History is written with a capital H. It is a totality that excludes-
other histories that do not ﬁt into that of the West. . .Wﬁ)
Rather than locate this history merely in the chronological, what Glissant would call
“(H)istory,” it situates itself in “(h)istory”—that which is negated by the dominant
culture.4 His notion of theater being an “act” that serves to link the community coincides
nicely with the self-identiﬁcation that arises out of a theatrical practice. Therefore, I
invoke this vision of theater for picong in the enactment of the verbal dissection it
characterizes in song, performance and literature. Picong’s perforrnativity, as a
manifestation of the folk, proceeds historically from the naturalization of a European-
centered discourse, with which it can exist as a destabilization of that ideology.
In “Partial anths,” his introduction to Writin ul e, “the Poetics and Politics

of Ethnography,” James Clifford reiterated the science of ethnography and anthropology

 

‘ Sec Glissant’s discussion of the Western imposition of I-Iistory(chronologieal) with
history(commimallpcrsonal).

l7

as one in which the process of interpretation was deliberately hidden ﬁ'om an association
with writing or literature. The result of this was an assumption that no subjective
inﬂuence ﬁ'om the researcher was brought to bear on the process of documenting culture.
In the 19808, when this approach to the study of human culture was critiqued on the basis
of its notion of the researcher as (somehow) an absent gaze—one that records, but does
not judge, circumscribe, and produce through categorization. Taking this into
consideration, I approach the study of elements of folk culture by referring to its practice
and potentialities. Caribbean writers and theorists have dealt with these problems of
cultural and political inquiry by seeking to replicate-in-reading the collective material and
political existence of its people. My examination of the inﬂuence of, and inﬂuences
upon, folk practices is built upon readings of its rhetorics, perforrnative and political
ﬁrnctions.

According to Gordon Rohlehr in “The Problem of the Problem of Form,” two
poles have guided our writers in the achievement of shape: the oral traditions of the West
Indies and certain aspects of the aesthetics of modernism”(3). As a signiﬁcant source of
inspiration and “shape,” the culture of the folk reveals itself as a unique source of socio-
political potentiality. The other pole, the modernist aesthetics of instability and ﬂux, is
seen by Rohlehr to be composed of modernist tropes of instability, change, the negation
of traditional notions of chronology, and the independence of art (“The Problem of the
Problem of Form,” 3). For my purposes, the inﬂuence of oral tradition is situated, not at
one pole opposite the imperatives of modernism, but dynamically moves amongst all
aesthetics that make up the Afro-Creole Trinidadian experience—inﬂuencing

History/history, ideologies of the dominant discourse, and its margins.

18

Antonio Benitez-Rojo purports that one “re-read the Caribbean in a manner in
which the text reveals its own textuality”(The Repeating Island 2). Since part of that
textuality is the folk, one ﬁnds that its power inﬂuences the inscriptions of Caribbean
cultural products and their ability to direct their gaze at both the center and its own
center, namely the masses for whom speaks, and ﬁom whom it emerged. What is useful
here in the examining the ﬁrnction of the folk, is the notion of change and generation as
foundational aspects of the Caribbean experience. The Caribbean historic-cultural
landscape is deﬁned by its emergence in a collision of ideological impositions that sought
to create its existence as marginal to that of a metropolitan administration. The folk has
been read as an important force for the subversion of the dominant culture’s impositions.
It’s ﬂexibility, historical referents, and community-building dynamics take it beyond a
simply subversive function to expressions of being and creating. In its political

incarnation, it serves to replicate and transform itself for these purposes.

mam

In the years since 1498, when Columbus arrived in Trinidad, a sea change in the
population occurred. As a possession of the Spanish Empire, it became a goo-political
site upon which diverse groups would enact the colonial processes of displacement,
inscription and re-inscription.

When Columbus claimed Trinidad, he formally connected Europe with the “New
World,” thus began a systematic erasure of the two main Amerindian tribes, the Arawaks
and the Caribs. Naming the island for the Holy Trinity, he assumes that his arrival is a

sign of God’s blessing on his endeavor to the claim “new” lands, subjects, and converts

l9

to Christianity. As an economic venture, Trinidad at this time could not produce the
necessary capital to sustain itself. Thus, in the 17003, while the thirteen North American
colonies fought for their ﬁeedom, Trinidad becomes a colony of slavery. To combat the
low population density and to help the colony to become more prosperous, Spain
proposed a Cedula of Population: I
The principal incentive offered was a free grant of land to every settler
who came to Trinidad with his slaves. Every white emigrant was entitled
to four and sevenths fanegas (an old Spanish unit of measurement
equivalent to 30 acres) for each member of his family and half as much for
each slave he introduced. Free colored or ﬁ'ee black settlers who
emigrated as property-owners and slaveholders were entitled to half the
amount granted to the white emigrant, and a proportionate grant for each
slave. (Brereton W 13)

Through the Cedula, blacks and colored members of society to allowed to own
slaves and land. When Sir Thomas Picton was appointed governor, alter the island’s
takeover by the British in 1797, he found the attitude of the more permissive Spanish
towards ﬁee black and colored classes to be unnecessarily lenient. The new
administration dismissed the forrner’s allowances to these groups:

Many of the ﬂea blacks were prosperous men who greatly resented having
to live in the twilight world between the slaves and the whites, and they
were constantly angered at the petty restrictions imposed on them, such as

being forced to carry a lantern at night, which emphasized their lack of

20

social status. They formed a powerful group especially susceptible to the
republican ideals of liberty and equality. (Anthony Emily; 60)
Thus, with Spain’s capitulation, the social makeup of the inhabitants of the island
underwent a socio-political change. This meant that a non-European segment of the
population occupied a dual position as having material and economics rights denied to
the slaves, yet existing outside of the center and the margin:

I The aim of the colored strata was to penetrate as far as possible into white
society. They disparaged their ancestral past and strove to eliminate or
conceal all evidence of their Negroid origin. They accepted and
internalized all the myths about black inferiority, and imitated with
exaggerated ﬁdelity, the cultural patterns of the European.(l_{ag& 20)

This serves to make early notions of marginality—the colonial administration as center,
the colonial subject as margin—incomplete’, for this is a series of margins and a series of
centers, intersecting within the power dynamics of the colonial environment. The
inequality of the grants reﬂect the degree to which the European colonial structure was
envisioned as a means of the circumscribing the non-European body both within, and on
the margins, of the mainstream discourse. Although remnants of the native peoples still
lived in isolated areas, their population suffered from the rigors of forced labor under the
Spanish. Living in the rural and hilly areas, natives were kept apart ﬁ'om the social
structure—and with their population decimated by the Spanish—were relegated a non-

status similar to that of the slaves. After emancipation, the indentured workers from-the

 

5 See Ashcroft, Grifﬁths and Tiﬁin’s The Empire Writes Back for further foundational discussions of

21

Indian Subcontinent, were brought in to replace the slave labor that had been lost through
emancipation:
They reacted defensively. Geographical, residential and occupational
separation was reinforced by the Indians’ protective use of cast, religion,
village community and traditional family organization to cushion them
from contact with a hostile society. (The processes of existence in
Trinidad required their separation ﬁ'om the society of former slaves.
Glitter! 115)
Thus, the East Indians became the isolated from the unvoiced cultural alliance between
the French elite and the their Aﬁican former slaves against the British government.
According to historian Bridget Brereton:
The essential reality was that the Indians came to a society that was hostile
to them, a society whose attitudes ranged from tear to contempt to
indifference.(I;Ii_'_g9g 115)

Thus, there was created a rigid social structure in which the French and Spanish settlers
and their creole oﬂ‘spring became the representative colonial elite. Each group developed
interconnected and discrete cultural practices. By the mid-nineteenth century, the groups
saw more interaction than had happened prior to the end of slavery in 1834. Andrew
Pearse, writing of the mid-nineteenth-century, demonstrates the makeup of the folk:

As for the folk, by 1860 its composition was extremely heterogeneous.
The was a nuclear group consisting of . . .ex-slaves, and their children,
nurtured in both French and English plantation traditions, descendants of

the non-slave small settlers, labourers and artisans of African or mixed

22

descent, free Aﬁicans to the number of about 7,000 who had immigrated

during the preceding 20 years, and Spanish-speaking peons. (Pearse,

“Carnival in Nineteenth Century Trinidad” 36)
As each group .moved from the slave period to post-emancipation, their cultures came
into a more dynamic interchange. While the English took control of the island in 1797,
the Spanish and French elite were forced to make way for the English colonial
administration. This feat was not without its complications; the French so dominated the
island’s mainstream elite that their language and the patois became the dominant
language of the center, and of the slaves that lived on the island before capitulation.

It was, in part, through the language and the anti-English politics of the mostly
Catholic French and Spanish that the folk element of picong came to the notice of the
mainstream gaze. Unwilling, in cultural aesthetics, to acquiesce to the capitulation to
England, the French and Spanish gave a tacit support to certain aspects of Afro-creole
folk traditions that were found to be offensive by the English.

Picong became a means by which the Afro-creole folk is utilized to encounter the
English colonial administration. When picong is brought out into the open, ﬁ'om the
drum dances, wakes and festivals of the slaves and free Aﬁicans, through the medium of
Carnival, and other social events in which the under and lower classes participated, it
functioned as personal/communal/social critique. When picong came to the attention of
the planter class during slavery, masters of its sword-like wit were singled out within the
slave community—and without, in the patronage of men like Pierre Begorrat whose

matte de kaiso(master of kaiso),6 Gros Jean, was renowned for his ability to use picong

 

6 Sec “Mitto Sampson on Calypso Legends ofthe Nineteenth Century,” arranged and edited by Andrew
Pearsc. W. Vol.4, 1956.

23

against his master’s enemies—thus transferring a folk practice into an offensive tool for
the master’s use. .

Within the slave community, there existed a number of social societies for the
purposes of performing rituals brought ﬁ'om Aﬁica and others created in the vortex of
cultural displacement. The imposition of colonial languages and ideologies served to
create a power dynamic in which the dialogic nature of language-interaction in a colonial
context became more apparent. Hand in hand with this cultural production came the
ideologies of language that reiﬁed the metropole and negated that of the various margins.
In the imposition of the colonial language, the centers replicate the colonial process by
presenting its own language as a means of power. In this manner, the dominant culture
makes normative its language as a means of bringing the margin into existence, through '
its linkage of its speech with mobility towards, and incorporation into, the center. As a
result, this makes the process of interrogating the diverse strands of power—social,
administrative, historical—within the colonial hierarchy a function of the master’s
language. Vernacular processes from the margin, such as picong, then subvert this power
construct by very eﬂ‘ectively critiquing the center from outside of this normative
construct. Picong thus becomes the marginalized attacking with a tool unrecognized, and
as a result, it is therefore able to be dismissed by the dominant culture.

A famous use of picong in mainstream politics is the “Massa Day Done” speech
delivered in 1961, by Dr. Eric Williams, a man who would become Trinidad’s ﬁrst black
Prime Minister, and who would heavily inﬂuence Trinidadian politics ﬁom the 19503 to
the 1980s. In it, he brings the folk to bear on the processes of political debate,

demonstrating in the process its rhetorical roots in the oppositional dialogue of the

24

margin. This margin, deﬁned in terms of language seeks to reproduce itself in arenas
ostensibly dominated by the center. The vernacular, so necessary to the traditional
performance of picong, dances in opposition to the normative colonialist project in which
the language of the master is set up as the only vehicle in which one might enter in to
discussion with the center: i
The capacity for ‘ole talk’, ‘mauvais langue,’ and the ability to give
‘fatigue’ are important ways in which Trinidad and Tobago used language
to survive, and to create new space for historic possibilities. To ‘speak
properly’ and to manipulate language has been of enormous importance to
the people of Trinidad and Tobago. Apart ﬁom an oral storytelling
tradition that allowed self-expression in any manner that one chose, and ..
allowed for a great deal of ﬂexibility, skill, and diversity, the concern for
the proper use of formal English always has been a preoccupation of the
society. (Cudjoe “Politics of Language” 755)
Already bringing with them a consciousness of the power inherent in a mastery of
language, from the folk vernacular and within the context of participation in the milieu of
the center, the disenﬁ'anchised utilized oral tradition to articulate their place in the
colonialist contest of language inscriptions. It was one in which the rhetoric of well-
speaking is re-formed to penetrate the center from both the language of rural enclaves and
its urban counterpart—that of the street.
With the history of conﬂict between the French and the English for control of the

hegemonic aspects of social being, the method of verbal dueling, in the conﬂictual

25

debates of the centers, overlap, so that each European culture inhabiting the island
becomes signiﬁed upon by Williams’ performance of picong.
What was Massa Day, the Massa Day that is done? Who is Massa?
Massa was more oﬁen than not an absentee European planter exploiting
West Indian resources; both human and economic. . .On his West Indian
Sugar plantation Massa employed unfree labour. He began with the
labour of the slaves ﬁ'om Africa, and followed this with the labour of
contract workers from PortugaL China and then from India. The period of
Massa’s ascendancy, the period of Massa’s domination over workers who
had no rights under the law, the period of Massa’s enforcement of a
barbarous code of industrial relations. . . lasted in our society for almost 306
years. (2-3)
Williams grounds his critique in the history of the island, pointing to series of margins
that the metropoles inscribed as other, in order to justify the impetus of production that is
part of the “civilizing” project of colonialism. His method of interrogation represents the
staging of the picongesque ritual, embodying a resistance to the imposition of nonhistory,
or rather a subversion of the underpinnings of History as it is perceived in the masters’
world view. He foregrounds this sense of opposition to the dominant culture by locating
the force of his performance in his sense of folk continuity, employing the traditions of
ranconteurship and social/historical critique that is drawn from the old rituals and
reconﬁgured inside and out of traditional usage. In addition to attacking the “Massa,”
Williams made a point of directing a signiﬁcant portion of his vitriol at that segment of

society for whom he felt a singular contempt—the colored middle class:

26

If Massa was generally white, but not all whites were Massa, at the same
time not all Masses were white. The elite among the slaves were the
house slaves. Always better treated than their colleagues in the ﬁeld, they
developed into a new caste in West Indian society, aping the fashion of
their masters, wearing their cast-off clothing, and dancing the quadrille
with the best of them. To such an extent did Massa’s society penetrate the
consciousness of these people, that Haitian independence, which began
with a ﬁght for ﬁeedom for the slaves, ended up with a ridiculous imperial
court of a Haitian despotism with it café-au-lait society and its titles, its
Duke of Marmalade and its Count of Lemonade, exploiting the Negro
peasants. (7)
This strategy of attacking a group close to the center, and who had adopted its
underpinnings of race and class inscription, made Williams a compelling ﬁgure to the
masses of disenfranchised whose construction with in the social hierarchy was—to be
absent ﬁ'om it. Considering that the group here critiqued were historically also slave
masters, and who, although they shared Aﬁican ancestry with them, kept themselves
apart and read themselves as center to the slaves’ margin, it is apparent that the chasm
between the two worlds remained great. Williams’ invocation of the speech-style of the
street remakes him in the gaze of the center as other folk ﬁgures who were and are
, deﬁned by the vernacular of the folk tradition. Rohlehr emphasizes this point by pointing
to the link that Williams’ role as social commentator has with traditional elements of

lower and underclass aspects of the Carnival tradition:

27

A language of violent challenge had always been a part of Trinidad’s
masquerade performance, might indeed, have been the only truly
‘national’ characteristic that cut across race, color and class behaviors in
- the turbulent chaos over which Williams presided in the pre-Independence
period. Like the Midnight Robber, the Stickﬁghter, the Wild Indian, the
sans humanite Calypsonian, the Bad John, the aristocratic Pierrot of the
. old time Carnival, Williams and every other signiﬁcant politician
employed the register of the street. (“The Culture of Williams,” 856-7)
Each of the ﬁgures mentioned come out of the rituals and festivals brought out of
the rural enclaves circumscribed by the plantation system. They were brought
into the mainstream through the vehicle of Carnival. In the post-emancipation
period, the former slaves penetrated the ostensibly European ﬂavor of the
masques during the 1830s bringing with them characters that permeated their folk
practices. In each instance, the ﬁgures lived through their speech. The Pierrot
Grenade, for instance, was costumed in his oration and is the carnival masque
most demonstrative of picong:
Undoubtedly the supreme jester in the Trinidad Carnival is the Pierrot
Grenade. Although there are individual masqueraders who by their dress
and paraphernalia present satire or burlesque on prominent local
personalities, world ﬁgures or public affairs booth local and foreign,
introducing form subtle humour to frank comedy in the Carnival

celebrations, the Pierrot Grenade by dress, manner, and discourse, his

28

wide commentaries, and his irrepressible poking of fun at men and things.

(197)
Carrying a whip and dressed fantastically in multi-colored clothes with bells attached, he
demonstrated his verbal repertoire to the crowds of onlookers. One of the main aspects
of his performance was the challenge other pierrots encountered in the streets to verbal
combat. The result of which was physical/verbal conﬁontation in which the whips and
words entered into signifying relationship—each one referring continuously to the other.
Similarly, the bar's men or stickﬁghters used the songs of their attendants and followers to
incite battle by piconging their opponents.

The Wild Indian masque was marked by the performance of each group of the
language they created by melding traditional Amerindian words and phrases with the
registers of aﬁ'o-creole patois. In creating a performance history for the masque,
masqueraders incorporated historical fact with the stereotypes of the local tribes as
presented by the colonial elite. According to Daniel J. Crowley:

(Wild) Indians are supposed to come over ﬁ'om Venezuela, ﬁ'om a village
or area called ‘lokain’ which is probably Los Canos (Spanish for ‘drains’
or ‘tributaries’), the swamps of the Ironic Delta. Actually aboriginal
Indian of the Guarao, Guarajo, ‘Warrahoon’ tribe ﬁom this area brought
beads, parrots, and hammocks, and other products to Trinidad to barter
until the 1920s, when they were prohibited. (“Traditional Masques,”
W244 63)

The temrinology used to describe the traditional aboriginal masques as Indian

reﬂect the adoption, at least in part, of the inscription of the native tribes as savage,

29

untamed and outside of proper society. The fact that former slaves and their descendants
should ﬁnd in it one of the most popular inspirations for carnival performance points to a
desire to achieve a measure of the symbolic ﬁ'eedom troped by the masque. This created
a psychic divergence from the constructs of civilization as posed by the social elite.
Similarly, the sans humanite calypsonian, descendant of the slave chantwells or
lead singers, masters of picong, brought into the mainstream the tradition of songs of
satire and vicious criticism. The phrase sans humanite formed a part of the introduction
to calypsos that were songs of picong. Its meaning, “without humanity,” prepares the
listener for the airing of dirty laundry, affirming the right of the singer to critique without
sanction whomever he/she sees ﬁt. This phrase, coming as it does ﬁom the milieu of he
folk—that segment of society that shares customs and rituals and a way of being outside -
that of the mainstream—reﬂects the fears felt by the plantation elite that picong could be

used as means of undermining the discourse of the center, thus destroying it.7

Em

This interrelatedness and separateness of inﬂuences make the Trinidadian Afro-
creole vernacular an opportune site for new approaches to reading. Newness, as
articulated by C.L.R James proceeds from the major signposts of Caribbean history, the
plantation and slavery. He links the islands through this “peculiar history’TLach
Mm 391), the effects of which created “an original pattern, not European, not
Aﬁican, not part of the American main, not native in any conceivable sense of the word,

but West Indian”(39l). Seeing this as a departure ﬁom the Western national conception

30

of history as a uniﬁed chronological whole, he looks to “newness” to reﬂect the
disjointed, ruptured reality of the Caribbean identity—one might say, its hybridized
reality. This Newness then, is a paradigm that evokes a Caribbean identity borne out of
the colonial history that creates, out of disparate groups, a cacophonous subjectivity. This
subject, aware of the essentialism inherent in his/her construction by the metropole,
recognizes within the self, the capacity to turn inward and draw from this wellspring of
history and place.

In regarding this inwardness as new, James traces its progression form a form of
resistance to Western hegemony, to a subjectivity that is aware of the e uniqueness of its
selﬂrood. He notes the forerunner of this paradigm as negritude’s search for self-
actualizing discourse in the face of the Metropole’s negation. “The African way of life of
the Haitian peasant became the axis of Haitian literary creation”(394). While negritude
focused on the Aﬁican inﬂuence as the originary site, newness goes beyond this
totalization to draw upon that identity which is remembered in the national Caribbean
experience. IfWestern discourse creates for the Caribbean writer, distance from the
island, newness is reapproaching that island with an awareness of this ambivalence intact.
Since Caribbean cultures are not essentially, metropolitan and not essentially native, as
none of the disparate groups of the plantation system may claim an originary there, they
may share the locus of their historical experiences as site ﬁom which to deﬁne a national
culture not conﬁned to the idea of nationhood, but to those experiences which overlap in
Caribbean histories.

By bringing the folk to bear on mainstream discourses, performers of picong give

voice to the uniqueness that characterizes their identity by deﬁning newness through

 

7Idiscussthisingr'eaterdetailinClnpter3.
.31

going beyond negritude’s essential Aﬁican self, while continuing its project of
articulating the erased subject into existence. Jamaican author Michele Cliff deﬁnes this
sensibility as: .
Retracing the African part of ourselves, reclaiming as our own, and as our
subject, a history sunk under the sea, or scattered as potash in the
caneﬁelds, or gone to bush, or trapped in a class system notable for its
rigidity and absolute dependence on color stratiﬁcation. (Cliff 14)
The oppostionality to this order subverts the ﬁxity of the ideology of color prejudice,
creates the post-colonial subject as an inheritor of the tradition of local resistance in the
act of invoking that which is meant to be ignoreduthe psych-social landscape of the
plantation and its locus as a site ﬁ'om which a source of power is drawn for self-
actualization of the masses.

Acknowledging the presence of subjectivities shaped by the assumption of the
colonialist racial and cultural ideologies, and a resistance to thenr, Williams evokes the
notion of the colonial subjectivity as dynamic—traversing ideas of high/low cultural
boundaries. In effect there is an assumption of Anglocentrism, that is evoked in the
elite’s reading 0 f the language wars, bringing to light a sense of identity that turns on a
heritage was intended to made unapparent by the gaze of dominant order.

These lingual structures which are a part of the island’s cultural landscape-
-locating the folk as a site for the subject to articulate identity—the particularity of the
island’s constitutive power for identity comes not simply from place, but from relational

connections between elements of the hierarchy constituted by their dialects.

32

This transmission of history-in-performance is an act of return to the island’s
rural/social past to provide a sense of opposition to the imposition of nonhistory. Hence,
the desire to retain and refashion the folk, ﬁgures less as a project whose sole use is to
negate the inﬂuence of the center, more as a process of encountering and remembering
the self in each act of performance, and looks ultimately inward—toward the psychic and
physical locus of the land. This cacophonous subjectivity, of which the folk is but one
aspect, articulates a Caribbean convergence of history and culture. Thus, in each
performance, hybridized landscapes break apart and reconstitute themselves, contesting

the space in which the modernity of the elite stages its relevance.

33

Chapter Two

Becoming the Picaresque: Representations of Afro-Creole Folk Culture in

Nineteenth Century Trinidad Carnival

The role of the folk practice of picong8 in Trinidad’s Carnival provides a useﬁrl -.
means of articulating the rhetorical strategies of resistance of people of African descent to
the interlocking colonial systems of race and class repression. The process of examining
the festival’s place as a site for the performance of the ritual, one must consider the
nineteenth century celebrations of both the black slaves in their pre- and post
emancipation festivals and the French creole planter classes’ pre-Lenten festivities.9 For,
it is within the ﬁamework of these beginnings that the voice of the slaves, and later their
descendants, rewrite their presence in colonial society, moving away ﬁom an ideological .
absence to an engagement in the dialectics of colonial discourse.

Pre-Emancipation Carnival existed only for the French planter classes. From the

period after Christmas to Ash Wednesday, a series of masked balls and musical

 

8 In her essay “Slackness hiding from culture: erotic play in the dancehall,” Jamaican Carolyn Cooper
deﬁnes picong as “that Trinidadian art of wicked wit.” (London: Macmillan, 1993) pg.

9 See John Cowley’s Carnival. Canboulay and Calm: Traditions in the Making Cambridge UP, 1993.
Michaeal Anthony’s Pm of the gm'vals of Trinidad 1839-1989. Port of Spain: Circle, [989, and
Richard Burton’s Mpower, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean. Ithaea: Cornell, 1997.

34

entertainments deﬁned the Carnival Season as a period of license before the fasting of
Lent. During this time, slaves were allowed to give vent to their own culture. Within the
limits of the slave yard, the chantwells (folk singers), and drummers, celebrated this
season though their own masques and drum dances.

Contemporary Trinidadian Carnival begins on Saturday before Lent, and ends on
the eve of Ash Wednesday. On Carinival Saturday, the masquerade bands are made up
of school-age children; their costumes and band themes often produced by schools. From
early in the morning until early evening, the bands compete for best costume. They will
cover approximately thirty miles as they cross the various stages en route—being judged
at each stage. As this is taking place calypsonians vie for the title of King or Queen. The
costumes range ﬁ'om world news to local history, ﬂora, and fauna When “kiddies
carnival” ends, the anticipation builds for Dimanche Gras, “Fat Sunday.” Sunday is
competition day for steelbands (Panorama) and for the kings and queens of the adult
masquerade bands. Scores of steel orchestras vie to win Panorama; their followers
passionate and emotional over the prospects of their chosen steelband to win the
competition. 1° With names like All Stars, Desperadoes, Renegades, Starliﬁ and Invaders
the over two hundred steelbands keep the nation in suspense as they compete ﬁ'om early
evening, to the wee hours of the morning. Invariably, the outcome is a cause for some
controversy—the debates over individual feelings about the judging ﬂow all over Port-of-
Spain and give way somewhat at the advent of the masquing at Jouvert.ll The jouvert
masquerade bands meet at two o’ clock in the morning for food, rum and costuming. It is

during jouvert that the traditional masques, some hailing ﬁom the nineteenth century

 

'0 Families often remain loyal to one band, generation after generation.

35

period just alter Emancipation donrinate Carnival. The devil masque—blue, black and
red—now inspires wonder and nostalgia, instead of fear. The mud (Devil) masque, once
a prominent feature of early Afro-creole carnival is still popular. Other traditional
characters such as the Midnight Robber, Pierrot Grenade and Wild Indian are no longer
as prevalent as they were in the nineteenth and late twentieth century. However, one
feature that seems indestructible is the “ole mas” tradition of using picong to critique
society, and especially, the government through the use of skits. For example, the year
that Princess Diana died, one of the red devil bands dressed as paparazzi and titled their
composition “Paparazzi is Hell.” The main feature of the masquerade was participants
costumed in red tinted mud, horned helmets made from bull horns and chamber pots, and
cameras.

What remains after jouvert is what is known as “fancy mas,” bright colorﬁrl and
usually expensive costumes that serve to elaborate on a main theme. The marching of the
bands continues for two days, culminating in the ﬁnal hurrah of Carnival Tuesday. The
main difference between Carnival in the nineteenth century and its contemporary
manifestation is the solid middle-class backing that is now receives. The festival has
evolved ﬁom a purely French Catholic ritual, to a site of black accommodation and
resistance, and ﬁnally, to a source of national pride sanctioned by the most of the class
structure. This is not to say that it has no detractors—Carnival is annually the target of
hostile censure by a number of religious groups, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim and

r, 12

Hindu—who see the music, costumes, calypsos and “winin as a scourge of society.

 

”“Breakofday.”
12Atypeofdancing,familiareveninnineteenthcenturyaocountsoftheblackunder'class,thatisthe
equivalentofahip—rollinghula.

3.6

The use of picong in the structure of Carnival traditionally gave the black lower
and underclass a means by which a folk practice of layered insult is refashioned to serve
the purpose of subverting, and refashioning, a formerly exclusive European festival.
Through the use of picong, Carnival becomes the site upon which these celebrations
overlap, converge and diverge in a contestational dance becoming the locus where
discourses on the colonies’ race and class conﬂicts are manifested.

This chapter will examine the processes by which picong is used by the peasantry
and underclass to refashion nineteenth-century Trinidadian carnival ﬁ'om an ostensibly
European festival into an expression of Aﬁ'o-Creole folk culture, reﬂecting the material
situation of two cultures’ ideological relationship in the ostensibly new arena in which
they found themselves. By virtue of its existence in a colonial state, with its resounding
clash, overlappings and refashionings of European and Aﬁican cultural elements, the folk
as represented by picong, presents a system of values in which a practice of verbal
swordplay that was a part of rural slave life and ritual becomes the tool of the urban
underclass. Picong receives its contestational signiﬁcation from the community out of
which its revolutionary fashioning takes place, a black urban and rural lower class and
underclass. Carnival becomes an area in which the expression of the folk is made
possible through the physical presence of the marginalized, enabling them to fashion the
performance of picong’s biting wit into a means of challenging colonial discourse. ’3

In W Antonio Benitez-Rojo articulates the complexities of the
Caribbean as rooted in “ﬁagmentation, instability, reciprocal isolation, lack of

historiography, syncretism and cultural heterogeneity”(l). This region’s history creates

 

‘3 See discussion of marginalimtion from the center as formulated by Bill Ashcroﬁ, Gareth Griﬁ‘iths and
Helen Tiﬂlin in The Empr_r_e_' Writg Bag: Theory and Practice in Colonial Literatures.

37

an opportunity for the development of an Antillean poetics grounded in the socio-political
landscapes that are formed out of such a complex of cultural overlappings and
contestations. Local festivals such as Carnival provide a rich site for the political

development of the folk.

WM

Following Mikhail Bahktin’s Rabglg's gd His World, ’4 critical discussions of
carnival have centered around notions of inversion, parody, and the destabilization of the
power of society’s elite in the controlled form of the festival. Bahktin emphasizes the
power of the low culture to challenge normative notions of the positionality of the
marginalized and lower classes:

This experience, opposed to all that was ready-made and completed, to all
Pretense at immutability, sought a dynamic expression; it demanded ever
changing, playﬁll, undeﬁned forms. . . All the symbols of the carnival
idiom are ﬁlled with this pathos of change and renewal, with the sense of
the gay relativity of the prevailing truths and authorities.
We ﬁnd here a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the ‘inside
out...ofthe tumabout. (l l)
Basing his paradigm of the reversal of higher and lower on the customs of medieval
Carnivals, Bakhtin stresses the dynamism of the European Carnivals as the petri dish out

of which the festive play between the culture of the elite classes and the lower or peasant

 

” mwmmehbomeshisnoﬁonofminaMedieval context, Iuseitasa
means to engage in the critical discussions of its importance as a tool for elaborating colonial repression.

38

classes is borne. However, this very focus on the mutability of social norms as part of the
carnival negates the Bakhtinian ideal of static, utopian reversal. I suggest that there are
historical moments in which this mutability does become static: that other carnivals
which have a strong non-Western inﬂuence may eﬁ’ectively ﬁlnction so as to effect an
actual reversal.

Bakhtin found in festivals such as carnival a means to read popular culture for its
revolutionary potential to overturn the normativity of dominant culture. He sought to
present popular festivals as a site for the symbolic overthrow of societal norms, by the
marginal. For this reason, theoretical readings of popular festivals in various parts of the
world have often referred to Bakhtin’s work on Renaissance carnivals in Europe.” In a
Caribbean theoretical context, reading such festivals as tropes for revolutionary
displacement of dominant ideologies has fostered interpretations based on the apparatus
of displacement, refashioning of culture, and the cross-cultural politics of reading
Caribbean identity.

However, Bakhtin’s work on carnival festivals is dependent upon an
understanding of such rituals in a speciﬁcally European context. Hence, its paradigms
must be problematized in order to attempt to theoretically access a Caribbean Carnival
festival. For Richard D.E.Burton, Trinidad Carnival is “less a subversion of high and low
than an attempt by the low to raise, enhance and aestheticize themselves to the level of
the high”(157). In Aﬁ'ﬂgmle; Power, mesitign and Play in the Caribmgn, he

critiques the Bakhtinian approach to Carnival’s impact in social hierarchies as merely

 

‘5 Bakhtin, MM Mauls m his Worlct Popular Culture in Gargantua an Pantagruel Trans Richard M
Berrong Lincolrr U of Nebraska, 1986.

39

symbolic, and claims that it does not enact actual liberation of the marginalized. For
Burton, such a reading would be a rather “utopian” view of carnival:
At the heart of this widely held view is the belief that what happens during
carnival is essentially different from what happens during the rest of the
year, that the three or four days it lasts are a negation in every respect of
the laws and behaviors that hold good for the remaining 360-odd, during
which, it is implied, people live lives of unblemished moderation,
seriousness, and decorum. (156)
For Burton, this question of essential difference around which Bakhtin builds his
argument is expanded to include possibilities of carnival as ofﬁcially sanctioned
performance, and hence not engendering a literal overturning of the status quo. Here, he.
incorporates Terry Eagleton’s analysis of the festival as a socially permitted ﬁ'amework
by saying it is potentially “reinforcing the order it seems to subvert”(156). In assessing
Bakhtin and Eagleton’s positions, Burton arrives at a premise for Trinidad’s carnival that
“incorporates aspects of both the ‘idealist’ interpretation of carnival and its ‘realist’
critique and argues that. . . it both challenges and reinforces the status quo”(157). This
attempt deﬁnes the boundaries of carnival as two oppositional poles of “utopian” and
“realist” «creating a limiting binary in which one is forced to approach the festival ﬁ'om
a necessarily abstract or necessarily historical (with a capital H) paradigm, respectively.
In CW, Edouard Glissant elaborated the problem of History as a “highly
ﬁrnctional fantasy of the West, originating at precisely the time when it alone ‘made’ the
history of the world”(64). This western preoccupation with chronology, for Glissant,

excludes the prospects of a history, which is neither a “schematic chronology” nor a

“nostalgic lament”(64). One may view the two borders of Burton’s carnival binary as
victims of this oversimpliﬁcation.

In his elaboration of the two paradigms, Burton separates Carnival into two
possible forms. The ﬁrst is a ﬁxed concept of revolutionary overturning. It is premised
on the evidence of some invisible historical act in which the change evoked by the
festival must arrive at the end of the chronology of its historical moment to be viewed as
legitimate. His second—or as in this case oppositional twin-is the ‘realist’ interpretation,
that subscribes to the nostalgic imagining of the popular festival as a means to generate
anarchy where it does not exist without the permission of the dominant order. The
dialogic nature of this discussion over the question of agency in carnival reiterates the
oppositional nature of the discourse inherent in the idea of the festival. Burton’s views 3
the dynamic of the festival as a motivation of the “low” to ascend to the level of the
“high.” This position is a further oversimpliﬁcation of the aims of an entire substrata of
nineteenth century Trinidadian society. For the jamettes—the underclass for whom the
critique of social hierarchy did not ﬁt into the accepted and sanctioned form of the
festival—Carnival meant that instead of seeking to simply ascend, one creates a space
inside and outside the form in which virulent social criticisms could take place. I will
discuss those for whom ofﬁcial sanction becomes irrelevant, in both their parodic
performance of otherness, and their intention to enact a dialectic of opposition to
established festival structure and context.16 Butler further elaborates this point in her
essay “Critically Queer” by signaling the indeterminacy of the discursive aspects of the

performative as elements “that do not conclude at the terminus of a given statement or

 

1‘ See the notion of performativity in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (New York: Routledgc, 1999).

_41

utterance, the passing of legislation, the announcement of a birth”(24l). In this
perforrnativity, there exists a dynamic strategy of emergence, a refashioning of a
sanctioned form, which subverts the very notion of sanction. This refashioning opens up
the practice beyond simply the act of subversion within the perforrnative, moving us into
the potentiality to envision multiple readings of said performance:
The reach of. . . signiﬁcability cannot be controlled by the one who utters or
writes, since such productions are not owned by them. They continue to
signify in spite of their authors, and sometimes against their authors’ most
precious intentions. It is one of the ambivalent implications of
decentering. . .to have one’s writing be the site of a necessary and
inevitable expropriation. (1W 241)
It is in the act of destabilizing the center that readings of the center’s purpose become
open to various interpretations—this is why the utOpian views of carnival’ s potentiality
are insufficient. The jamettes or urban underclass, enacted violent struggles with the
police in an effort to move the folk form of picong, or biting wit, into the mainstream of
the festival. Hence, they participated, with or without sanction, in a festival that did not
allow for an unendorsed presence ﬁom the black community. My focus here is on those
periods in Trinidad’s history in which the sanction of the dorrrinant class is overtly and
successﬁrlly subverted by open and armed resistance—the 18508 and 18803. I call
attention to the power and potential of the marginalized to engage the elite and middle
class in a discourse of reﬁrtation by the former and of self-determination by the latter.
Thus, Burton’s notion of the festival as a form that “both challenges and reinforces the

status quo” is useﬁll for reading the dynamic dialectic that exists as part of the festival,

42

but does not quite apply to those periods of Trinidad Carnival history in which the
festival participation results in a direct and unsanctioned attack on the established
structures of social repression (157). In the mid-nineteenth century, former slaves moved
to the city of Port-of-Spain and began to actively participate in the established structure
of the ostensibly European festival. 17 It is at this historical/social moment that the
elements of Afro-creole folk forms were deliberately brought into the ostensible play of
Trinidad’s Carnival. At issue here is the potential for performance to enact a subversion
that is carried into aspects of cultural life in which the notion of performance is ostensibly
absent.

Bakhtin portrayed the European carnival as a joyous celebration of the body’s
materiality and as a reﬂection of the overt hostility to accepted social hierarchy. These
elements exist in post-emancipation nineteenth century Trinidadian canrival to the degree
that the sexualized dancing and singing were seen as an afﬁ’ont to the mores of the
Emopean planter class. However, the inclusion of a peasant culture heavily inﬂuenced
by an Aﬁican past did more than symbolically enact the overthrowing of the dominant
planter class, it also exposed the contradictions inherent in planter masques such as the
negue jardin(ﬁeld slave).18 In addition, it did assert black resistance—by way of the
unsanctioned presence, of the black body, its enforced negation made possible by
colonial discourse with its notions of absence of the black history and of the black body.
Therefore, it was not a matter of simple anarchy, or the inversion of higher and lower, but

the penetration of a naturalized European body by one foreign to it-_—an African

 

‘7 John Cowley’s WM: Transitiom in the Making cites the 1850s as the ﬁrst

majoratternptedsuppressionofthefestival.
’8Oneofthemostpopulmmasquesofﬂreplamq-classwasthatofthemaleﬁeldslaveandAfro-creole
female.

43

foreignness both sanctioned so as to create the slave and simultaneously negated by the
cultural overlapping that was part of the slave experience. The very presence of a
congregation of blacks in the streets during Carnival threatened received ideas of social
order premised upon the absence of the black body in social discourse. Michael
Anthony’s history of the festival, Pagade of the Cm’vals of Trinidad 1839-1989, deﬁnes
the mid-century period of the festival aﬁer emancipation as being “like a war

declar ”(8). 19 The official response-violent suppression and repressive legislation--
attests to that fact. Within the context of the festival’s nineteenth century origins,
Trinidad Carnival became the arena in which the historically marginalized slaves and
their descendants use picongesque performance to reach beyond Bakhtin’s binary of high
and low culture, and provided opportunities for a dynamic articulation of both the '
political realities of the colonial existence and the Africanized resistance to the
multifaceted controls over the slave body.

As a reﬂection of peasant culture, the folk exists as the liminal space under, and
within, the radar of the mainstream. It signiﬁes upon the dominant discourse of national
politics. It ﬁgures as the langue and parole of the people as posited by Glissant.20 The
songs, rituals, and performances are the languchwhat amounts to a set of signs that
provide a context for an underclass to penetrate the discourse that marginalizes them.
The parole exists in the individual element of picong taken from the folk rituals such as
the chantwell song, the masque of the midnight robber, and later, the calypso. From its
inception in nineteenth century Trinidad, Carnival articulated the voice of the folk—the

parole of the disenfranchised could be heard. From this standpoint, the very vehicle of

 

‘9 He is quoting historian Andrew Pearse,
2° Glissant, Edouard Caribbean DiscourseTrans J. Michael Dash. Charlottewille: U r of Virginia, 1992.

44

Carnival performance became a picongesque ritual in which the dominant order was
displaced. The adoption of the form of the festival of the French planter-class whose
culture and mores were ostensibly projected as the national langue, created a refashioning

that subverted the enforced absence, materially and culturally, of the marginalized.

The festival can thus be viewed as a journey to a site of resistance, and a removal
ﬁ'om a site of silence. In Victor Turner’ 521 notion of this liminal space of absence one
sees this idea of removal elaborated:

[It is a]Time and place of withdrawal ﬁom normal modes of social action,

it can be seen as potentially a period of scrutiny of the central values and

axioms of the culture in which it occurs. (167)
This anthropological reading falls in line with the Bakhtinian perception of European
carnival, because it invokes the idea of reevaluation of normative societal structures, the
dynamism of its process, and suggests that any reversal achieved in this conﬂict is
effectively a part of a Historically-speciﬁc time with no opportunity of mutability.
Turner develops the work of Arnold Van Gennep on the analysis of the liminal process,
elaborating a notion of liminality “as both phase and state,” and dividing types of these
rituals into those which produce “status elevation” and “status reversal”( 167). The ﬁrst
describes the means by which a participant’s status in society is irrevocably heightened;

the latter a sanctioned reversal of societal status that is allowed only as part of a ritual

 

2‘ See “Humility and Hierarchy: The Liminality of Status Elevation and Reversal” The Ritual w:
W Chicago: Aldine, 1969.

45

celebration such as carnival. Neither of these readings takes into account an additional
element of revolutionary, successful and subversive overturning of societal structures.
For Turner, “the liminality of the weak represents (merely) a fantasy of structural
superiority"(168).

Similarly, for Edouard Glissant, the notion of liminality becomes refashioned to
describe tranversality, the presence, of an indeterminacy, an aspect of behavior beneath
the normative processes of (H)istory and other aspects of the dominant discourse where
“multiple converging paths exist.”(66). These convergences are a meeting of collective
Caribbean history:

The implosion of Caribbean history (of the converging histories of our
peoples) relieves us of the linear, hierarchical vision of a single History
that would run its unique course. It is not this History that has roared
around the edge of the Caribbean, but actually a question of the
subterranean convergence of our histories. . .this expression can only evoke
all those Aﬁicans weighed down with ball chain and thrown overboard
whenever a slave ship was pursued by enemy vessels and felt too weak to
put up a ﬁght. They sawed in the depths the seeds of an invisible
presence. Wﬁéﬂ

Through this transversal space, Glissant’s notion of presence, turns on the idea of a site
from which one may explore the elements of a consciousness outside that of the ﬁxedness
of Western-imposed hegemony. This site of exploration is limitless in scope, embracing
both the past and the present in a dialectic that neither excludes the fact of an Aﬁican

past, nor its present diasporic variability.

Thus, although the form of carnival in Trinidad was sanctioned by a society ruled by a
European elite, its appropriation by the black’underclass becomes infused with the folk
aesthetic in a parodic and open critique—that which is similar but overtly and mockingly
subversive. For the former slaves, these elements become but the smallest means of
entering the dialogue on normative colonial politics.

For the English and French elite, the greatest threatto their centralized societal
status was to be found in the afﬁrmation of agency as projected in the black underclass’s’
non-slave status because it represented the potential for unsanctioned action. The black
presence in the pre-Lenten festival of Carnival is seen as a manifestation of this fear.

Before the mid-century period, during slavery, the participation of this group was
limited to separate gatherings of drum dances and private celebrations and fetes, with
some masking in the streets in the early years after emancipation arrived in 1834. By the
1850s a large population of he blacks had moved into the city of Port-of-Spain and
taken up residence in barrack-style housing. The proximity of these groups to the
European population made for tense interactions during the carnival festivities. Aﬁer
slavery more overt participation by blacks was evident in the festival, and this became a
source of some concern for the dominant classes; so much so, that by the late 18403 this
period would seem a major example of the black desire for societal transgression. For in
the late 18403, a series of repressive legislative measures were passed that attempted to
. circumscribe the participation of the jamettes in Carnival.22 John Cowley notes that at this

time the standard of ofﬁcial harassment escalated with a new severity:

 

’2 See Andrew Pearse’s “Carnival in Nineteenth Century Trinidad” in Trindad Carnival. Paria: Arima,
1988. '

47

Consolidation of Police laws in 1849 restated restriction on dancing and
playing music at speciﬁc times and appearing masqued in the streets of
towns. A clause not in previous Police Ordinances concerned the singing
- of profane or obscene songs or ballads. These were now perceived as a
threat.(§;_ar_nr;val 50)
The layers of meaning in the perception of a “threat” reﬂect the potentiality of normative
displacement inherent in the refashioning of the festival. For the planter class, this
perceived danger includes not simply those elements of society for whom pre-
emancipation participation was primarily distinct and removed from the arena of Spanish
and French creole balls and masking celebrations—but also the underclass’ appropriation
of carnival as cultural site to reﬂect their presence in colonial discourse. Instead, the
rumblings of European creole discontent were also directed at the very structure of
performance through which blacks negotiated their participation. According to Anthony,
after slavery the elite attacked the attendance of blacks in the festival by focusing on the
“barbarity” of the spectacle-as juxtaposed with its pro-emancipation European-centered
manifestations:
What came in its place were scathing remarks about the Carnival and a
call for the Government to ban it altogether. Almost all the editors
regarded it [Carnival] as a period of barbarism and license, as uncivilized,
and as an abomination. The white element appeared to withdraw
completely ﬁom what before was their chief annual ,merriment, and the

days of disguised balls with courtly dances, of the carriages rolling with

48

their masked occupants from estate to estate and ﬁ'om great house to great

house, seemed gone forever. (6)
This retreat signaled two things: First, it marks carnival in the mid-18403 as a site upon
which battle lines were ﬁrst drawn in the contest over cultural ownership of the festival.
Secondly, it problematizes the notion that the presence of people of Aﬁican descent
operated in the festival solely through the sanction of the white elite. The withdrawal the
upper segment of the population points to a reality in which the center is destabilized, and
competing discourses take a prominent role in a public arena. The projection of
“abomination” onto the festival by white Creoles constitutes misrecognition of a cultural
space—in that carnival appears to have been eclipsed by the blackness tainting the
European purity of the festival. This misrecognition is a direct result of the foreignness
of the spectacle—ﬁom the viewpoint of the elite. In effect, the celebration now had a
different cast, one that boded ill for the integrity of the original European elements. The
source of the strangeness of the new Carnival for its elite celebrants is located in the aﬁ'o-
folk elements that were brought into the public festival by the jamettes. This is both a
destabilization—ﬁom center to margin—of the festival’s European form, and a
reinscription of the imposed absence by the black masses. Hence, it invokes the elements
of “interrogation and subversion of imperial cultural formations.”(Ashcroﬂ, 11) The
most obvious of these formations is the idea of the Aﬁican as uncivilized and savage—as
other than the norm. The melding and overlapping of African culture in the colonial
space with elements of European culture constitutes, for the ruling classes, a
contamination of their civilization, which calls into question the very idea of what is

meant by civilization. For the people at the summit of Trinidadian society, it is deﬁned as

49

that which is not Aﬁican or Other. Hence, when the slaves moved their celebrations
from the yards and rural communities to the streets of towns, Aﬁicauor what was
perceived as Aﬁica—became overt rather covert. According to Kim Johnson, “carnival in
Trinidad, like similar festivals throughout the Caribbean, had become a focal point for the
elaboration of African cultural retentions in music, dance, costume and ritual, and a
celebration of freedom”(11ﬁdad_€a_n_iivﬂ, xiv). This tension had been earlier remarked
upon on August 14, 1840 in W in a letter ﬁ'om W.H. Bumley, Agent
for the Council of Trinidad. He advises that the ending of slavery has caused difﬁculties
in the relationship between former slaves and their masters:

The master and the labourer were formerly in juxtaposition, administering,

without the necessity of intermediate aid, directly to the wants of each other.

Emancipation has severed the tie which bound them—has removed them apart,

and left a void space between which must be ﬁlled up by a middle class.

WNO- 274: V. 3) .
This marginalization of former slaves exists also in the underpinnings of control of the
black body that had been absolute during slavery. By the late 1840s, the dominant class’s
desire for an afﬁrmation of control over the former slave population has shifted towards
legislative repression Hence, the ﬁeedom which emancipation ostensibly guaranteed is
encroached upon by ordinances, such as those of 1848, which become a means to deny
blacks a visible existence outside their former status.

The masquing, which formed the most contested part of the festival, becomes one
of the most useful ways to delve into the competing discourses of identity. Because the

jamette class participates without an overt welcome by the upper classes, their action

50

becomes a rebuttal of the dominant colonial discourse. Because this element of society is
changing the nature of its presence in the sphere of the public space—from absence to
presence—they become recognized, albeit negatively, as the presence of a dissenting
voice exploding into the communal discourse.

The celebration of carnival. in Trinidad began with the ending of the Christmas
season and culminated on the eve of Ash Wednesday. Before 1846, Christmas was the
start of the Martial Law period in which whites and free colored were required to muster
for service in the Militia. This was due to the fact that the courts were closed during the
season and as such, military law became the order of the day. According to Andrew
Pearse, “the Christmas season came to be a time at which the whole status system was
given outward expression through the vehicle of the Militia. . .business was at a standstill
and the occasion became one not only for serious military duties, but also for balls, and a
variety of other amusements”(11). Hence, symbolically the “outward expression” of
military might during a time in which the lower orders of society were given a measure of
license is also a means to reiterate a readiness on the part of the dominant class to crush
any overt expressions of hostility ﬁ'om the lower(l 1). As a result, this period of the year
became the occasion for symbolic airings of class tensions, culminating in spectacles of
confrontation in the celebration of Carnival.23

This presence becomes dialogic in nature because it brings into question the very
nature of the festival as a purely European cultural production. As with Bahktin’s notion
of dialogism, it questions the perception of a single-voiced utterance as an unmediated

force for ordering. For Bakhtin, discourse does not exist in isolation, but points to an

 

23 Militia Law is suspended after 1845.
51

awareness of a second voice existing within its utterance: “the word does not exist in a
‘ neutral and impersonal language. . .but rather it exist in other people’s mouths, in other
people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take
the word, and make it one’s own”(;lga_b§1ai_s 294). The single voice of the colonial elite’s
festival is contested by the margins' appropriations, reversals and refashionings. Yet, it
deviates ﬁ'om Baktinian dialogism in that the dominant order’s voice is unaware of the
contesting presence of the margin’s voice within its utterance. Hence, although the
jamettes usurp the basic form of the festival, they introduce elements that make carnival
anew—something that is not pure in the sensibility of the dominant class.
In the Port-of-Spain Gazette of Febnlary 11, 1858 a writer laments that the
sanctions against “masquing” at Carnival was little heeded by the lower order of the
society:
It was thought that the deprivation of the annual two days of license would
be much felt by the natives of the place. Still, when it was remembered
that the prohibition was caused by, and directed against the most dissolute
and reckless vagabonds who had nothing to lose, and every chance of
gaining something in any possible “scrimmage” at the expense of others
and the facility with which a row may be got up, it might have been
anticipated that its enforcement would be a matter beyond the power of the
ordinary police forcem No. 13, V. roociii)

The writer, referring to that class which have “nothing to lose,” anticipates the coming

clashes which will reinforce the fears of whites that a group of blacks, loosely organized

against authority, will become a force through which racial and class antagonisms are

52.

made visible in their performance of carnival. Although the English see the presence of
blacks in Carnival as an attack on White culture, the elite classes of French and Spanish,
for whom carnival was a cultural tradition, are brought into a clash with the English elite
through the festival’s symbolism as cultural artifact. The pressure to circumscribe the
festival by the English colonial government, and English Protestants, is therefore viewed
by the French and Spanish as a way for the English to impose their traditions. Hence, the
writer’s claim that the need for suppression is made necessary solely by the presence of
“vagabonds” whose purpose is a ‘scrimmage’ with the authorities, redraws the social
lines of demarcation. By creating this delineation of responsibility for the attendance of
the unsanctioned masses in a public space, the writer can assume a co-recognition of
purpose between the white Protestant and catholic elite groups, while keeping the margin
at bay. This uneasy alliance between the upper classes is a result of the taking of the
island by the English in 1797. Worried that Trinidad was potentially a place in which the
sentiments of the French Revolution were gaining a foothold, the English captured the
island and sought to make it a political and social reﬂection of Englishness. The French
and Spanish residents chafed under their style of governance and carnival became an
arena in which the conﬂict manifested itself. The jamettes - or black underclass - and the
Free Colored and Indians occupied the bottom of the social hierarchy—the latter keeping
aloof from society through cultural custom and government enforcement. But, prior to
the island’s capture by the British, the Free Colored had attained a measure of rights
under Spanish Law. The group, made up of “colored and black slave-owning planters,
traders, artisans and petty cultivators,(. . .)were similar in language, customs and dress to

the French” ( Pearse, 9). Within this black and colored class hierarchy, recognition by

53

the Spanish authorities as a legal class gave them a certain position in society—one that
became severely restricted in the decades following the institution of British government.
In addition to this, blacks ﬁom the British West Indies came to the island and created
further cultural overlappings and contestations through their English speech and through
various adopted customs. Hence, the conﬂict over the festival elaborates not a simple
binary of margin versus center, but several contested centers, in alliance with and
opposed to each other—and opposed to the various margins. This structure creates a ,
shitting dialectic in which the various social groups articulate syncretic, oppositional and
converging deﬁnitions of social inscriptions.
On February 11, 1858, the black-owned Trinidﬂ Sentinel highlighted these

antagonisms by taking issue with the government’s repression of people of color:

For ourselves we have heard and read much of the tumults and

conﬂagrations in other lands—the results of oppression and inﬁingements

of the subject, the people of this country have been suffering materially

from class legislation and misrule; and, to their honor have but on one

occasion, have they shown anything like resistance.(Vol. 111, No. 5)
The writer illustrates his position by negating earlier attacks on black activity in the
public sphere and instead pointing to the example of the October riots of 1849 as an
expression of colonial “misrule.”

Because a few ignorant, unarmed men and women threw a few stones,

government got alarmed, showed their weakness, abrogated the obnoxious

clause, and, horrible to relate, resorted to bloodshed.(Stan@d No. 5 Vol.

111)

54

Referencing the debacle of the October riots, the writer articulates the polyphonic nature
of utterance in the contest over jamette presence. As a writer for more liberal SM
he is aﬂiliated with the non-white element of society, and uses this alliance to critique the
underpinnings of the official response to the attack as an attempt at racial repression.
However, the nature of his social position as a newspaper writer negates a racially
essentialist reading of his purpose. His inscription of the rioters as “ignorant” reveals his
own negation of their class as aligned with his own. He makes a delineation of his
allegiance to the rioters—in concert with politically—yet with the intention of keeping
them at a distance from his class’ center.

His account of the Carnival festival of that year serves the same purpose, to
distinguish the voice of his own class from that of the jamettes—with whom he shares a
racial/political resistance to the colonial order, but not a social allegiance:

On Sunday night last, at a very late hour the Police Force were put in
requisition so as to prevent any person wearing a mask. . . nor did any
attempt to do so—but because some of them put on fancy dresses,
Policemen. . .were seen in almost every direction of the town making
arrests, dragging respectable people of colour, who were not engaged in
the mirth and jollity of the rabble, to the Station.( Mine! Vol. 111, No. 5) j
The ideological distinction articulated by the black-owned 5mm] between the classes
of participants that is at the heart of its depiction illustrates the conﬂicting and dynamic
voices that exist within the black classes. The rabble-read here as the jamette class--is
made separate and distinct ﬁ'om the colored classes who also participate in the festival.

And, for The Sentinel, the line that creates this distinction is one of aspiration revealed in

55

performance. The members of the colored class, in their desire for a recognition that, for
them, denotes respectability, wear “fancy dress” costumes and reﬁain from the “mirth
and jollity of the rabble” in an attempt to align themselves with the normative social
standards of behavior. In the public sphere of the festival, these normative standards are
representative ideologies of the colonial elite. Orderliness in manner and structure of
performance is, for them, a hallmark of European and upper class sensibility. Hence, the
use of the word “rabble” suggests an unruly, uncontained and mutable nature—all
elements of white fears of open and revolutionary resistance by the black underclass——
and references the anxiety of the colored class that they could be tarred by the same
brush.

Too often the participation of the black underclass in carnival created a reference _
to their inscription as an other and they both celebrated and attacked that inscription. The
Canboulay procession that opened carnival was of particular offense to the upper classes
as it made a picongesque connection with slavery. With lit torches, participants paraded
through the streets on Sunday night and sang to the accompaniment of what was seen as
crude instruments, including the chac-chac and drum. The Canboulay ritual recalled the
pre-emancipation cannes brulees process in which a ﬁre on a sugar plantation would be
cause for slaves to be rallied by their masters and put to work processing the cane before
the crop would be lost. As part of the reenactment of the process, maskers dressed in
rags and clmins and promenaded while one of their number made a show of urging them
forward with a whip. In the mid-century, this reference to slavery made, for the colonial

elite, a bitingly uneasy reminder of the not-so—distant past.

56

The potential for the realization of rebellion in the class below the line of
respectable society becomes a part of the picongesque aspect of performance
participation by the jamettes:

On Tuesday the people continued to amuse themselves, when a large band
of them were assailed by a detachment of the Police: a pitched battle
ensued, the Police were routed, wounded and disgraced, so much so, that
on their return to the station, not a man would venture out. Government
must have been alarmed for a detachment of the 41‘ Welsh Regiment was
marched into town, and quartered at the Police Station. . .. We conceive
that the people have a prescriptive right to amuse themselves on this
occasion: it is of a date anterior to the cession of the Island to Great
Britain. (Sentinel Vol. III, No.5)
It is interesting to note that the effort to depict the difference between the respectable
citizens of color who were taken into custody on Carnival Monday has been replaced, in
content, by a group much more hostile to authority and more willing to make a spectacle
of their resistance. The Port of Spain Gazette, which functioned as a voice of white
Protestant authority, condemned this editorial. It saw the maskers as a lawless horde
enacting an idolatrous sentiment that they associated with Catholicismuyet, in an effort
to negate the level of subversive power displayed by the jamettes, the paper failed to give
any detailed description of the incident that would embarrass the police authorities:
It had been perceived long ago that though with their fondness for mirth
and display, the people of the island enjoyed the time and partook of its

recreation, yet the parts of it which gave so great umbrage to the

57

respectable, and in which the offenses against the laws generally
prevailed, was entirely conﬁned to the unsettled and temporary items of
our population. . .It was remembered that the prohibition was caused by
and directed against the most dissolute and reckless vagabonds who had
nothing to lose, and every chance of gaining something in any possible
‘scrimmage’ at the expense of others, and the facility with which a row
may be got up, it might have been anticipated that its enforcement would
be a matter beyond the power of the ordinary police force.(G_a&t§
2/1 8/5 8)
Defending the intervention of the military, the Gazette operates as a particularly English
voice—one that ﬁnds Carnival to be a suspiciously pagan spectacle. Its portrayal of the E
rioters as the indigent and unsettled members of society anticipates the resistance against
anti-masking ordinances that elite Spanish and French Creoles might have against this
attack on their cultural institution. Thus, in appeasement of the Spanish and French
Creoles, the writer reiterates dominant order’s inscription of the jamettes as an untenuous
mass of anti-elite, and particularly anti-English, hostility. Making the project of
respectability a normative aspect of the social structure, the writer seeks to identify
resistance of the jamettes as the contamination of that project. The instability of the
population, the subversive presence in an ostensibly creole festival, and the Aﬁicanness
that they brought to the celebration was anathema to both the colonialist project of

civilization and the agenda of making the island more British in culture.

58

The Trinidad Sentinel reinforces this cultural aspect of the battle over the festival
by challenging the racism subsumed within the Gazette’s assumed single-voiced
utterance of the clash between the maskers and the police:

There is no denying it—for any coloured or black man with a grain of self-
respect will say the same, that prejudice of colour is more rampant now
than ten years ago, and that if it increase in the same ratio, it will be
. impossible to say what may be its ultimate effects. 'Tis time to stop it .
then—‘tis time to check a Press such as the (Me, which fans the ﬂame
of discord—and ‘tis time also that everyone in the community should
know that the black and coloured races desire simply to be let alone. As a
race they ask no favors. They simply demand the same rights and
privileges which are accorded to any other race of her Majesty’s subjects.
(3/4/58)
This picongesque critique of the underpinnings of the Me’s socio-political agenda is
a detour from the class-centered discourse of earlier Smdel writings. It articulates a
common ground of race repression inherent in the colonial discourse as a basis upon
which rests the erected ediﬁce of the politics of repression. This attention to foundations
invokes an important aspect of picong—the dismantling of layers of assumptions by
attacking both origins and levels of ideas simultaneously—in much the same way that
jamette performance critiques both culture and history. Yet, in the issue of “respect” to
which the writer connects the argument, there still exists an appeal for participation in the
very hierarchy out of which the repression comes. This call for respect, directed at the

center, ﬁ'om a member of a marginalized group still invokes the center’s preeminence-a

59

departure ﬁom the unifying project of the writer’s utterance. But, the call to be ‘let
alone,’ to ‘ask no favors’ and to ‘demand equal rights’ presupposes a dominant dialectic
that seeks to deny the vernacular African foundation of the colored and black community,
while using it as the basis for social and political negation.

Jamette resistance, being more perforrnative in displacing the dominant order’s
imposed inscriptions of marginality, is enacted through the dynamic invocation and
subversion of those readings. Their ability to point to the fears of whites that a “savage”
and militant hostility lay at the core of black consciousness, is perhaps the most powerful
aspect of their picongesque attack on the dominant colonial order:

On Monday morning at an early hour, Policemen were seen about town
preventing people from enjoying themselves. . . a policeman who had the ’
temerity to attack another party (of maskers), was beaten. . .Later in the
day about 25 policemen had the hardihood to venture, in what is
commonly known as the “French Streets” and interfere with the people of
that locality, but the treatment they received caused them to make an
inglorious retreat. (Sminel No.13, V 4 3/ 10/59)
The French Streets, a neighborhood in Port-of-Spain, are at this time the provenance of a
large population of blacks with afro-creole (French) cultural beliefs. The “temerity” of
the symbol of colonial authority to attack the jamettes within that cultural/racial space
suggests of the circumscribed role of the black threat in the colonial order. The rebuttal,
open and militant counter-force, refashions—for the elite-the public space of the French
Streets into an overt symbol of hostile others. This nrilitancy, but one layer of

contestation, is carried ﬁrrther by the commentary of the Sentinel:

The sobriquet “picnic governor” will now have to give place to the less
euphonious, and, perhaps, not less appropriate one Robert the Insane. We
of course would not call any man coward of madman—the better way
would be, according to Junius, ‘to strive to prove him so.’ Now we are
perfectly satisﬁed that none but a coward would expect his subordinates to
execute an order which he himself has not the moral nor physical courage
to carry out. Who but a madman would put in a belligerent attitude about
80 armed policemen, and a host of rigid disciplinarians in arms, against a
loyal and unarmed people? (Smtdml No. 13, V. 4, 3/ 10/59)
The Sentinel’s charge that the practice of colonial repression is “cowardly” creates a
foundation for the biting wit that is the hallmark of picong. Displacing the pretense of
benevolent authority which is part and parcel of colonial discourse, the Sentinel points to
the governmental hypocrisy by detailing successive slippages in the naming of the
governor, colony’ s symbol of authority. These movements create a critique of colonial
authority, removing its normative assumptions and replacing it in the realm of the
abnormality. This, in effect, re-deﬁnes characterizations of the denizens of the “French
Streets” as a social contaminant and points to an inherent contamination of government
that is the colonial order.

In its sympathies with the British governmental authority, The Gazette distances
itself from the Catholics with whom the festival had resonated since its earliest
celebration on the island.

At ﬁrst it was stated that no interference with the mummers would be

made—that they were to be allowed the full license they claimed; then the

61

orders given to the Police were far from exact—not to say intentionally
equivocal—then the assistance of the Military was obtained in an irregular
and inefﬁcient fashion. The consequence were as might have been
expected. . .another example of the authorities patiently submitting to be
set at deﬁance.(§gz_ette 3/19/59)
The clash between the police and the denizens of the “French Streets,” re-enacts
the colonizer/colonized conﬂict:
Such was the state of the town that another detachment of soldiers was
sent for, and soon after marched into town, and like ﬁends commenced an
attack on the people of Corbeau Town, who, to their praise be it said,
drove the heroes of Sebastopol like chaﬁ‘ before the wind. The people
notwithstanding, congregated in large numbers, and had their pleasure
without further molestation.(§_mt_idel 3/10/59)
The predominantly black residents of Corbeau Town24—in their hostile response to the
soldiers’ interference, elicit from the writer a contrast between the colonial nrilitary
inscription of ‘hero’ -with the jamettes’ heroic response to repression. The designation
of ‘hero’ presupposes an opponent that is its other—its enemy, and as such, a site of
bodily inscription for the colonial authority to perform its response to fears of a black
revolt. Like the heroes of Sebastopol, the military assumes its normative role as protector
of the Empire and, as such, must answer this threat of blackness in all its Western
colonial readings; savage, ruthless, uncivilized and uncontrollable. Their inability to
successfully answer this threat calls into question the very nature of Empire and its

supposed unchallenged preeminence.

62

Chapter Three:
Descendants of a Sharp-Tongues! Dialectic: Calypso and the Chantwell

Work on calypso has centered on its development as a part of Trinidad’s national
culture. For my purposes, calypso becomes more than simply entertainment, but a form
of subversion of the colonial order. In its role as art, cultural artifact and political tool, it
shares some very important critical and satirical tools with picong. The reason being that
calypso owes its bite to the folk form. The contemporary social commentary calypso,
whose purpose is to speak to the people’s concerns about government and social
problems, shares a tradition with earlier forms of critique, such as the cariso and the
[away—two categories of song that also utilized picong’s biting wit.

Approaches to studying calypso range from examining its West African roots, to
situating it in a framework of colonial resistance, to concentrating on its development as a
New World microcosm. My purpose here is to locate calypso’s place in Trinidad’s Afro-
Creole folk-genre of picong—to see how calypso adopts the folk to make it an integral
variation of its production of social criticism.

Keith Warner’s The Trinidad leypee, articulates the term calypso as a product of

a potentially multi-faceted origin:

 

Meaning “crow” in French—it is used colloquially to designate vultures
63

a) The Carib word “carieto,” meaning a joyous song, which itself evolved

into “cariso”;

b) The French patois creations “carrousseaux” from the archaic French

“cailisseau ”,” an apparent attempt to give a French form to a term

transmitted orally probably “kaiso,” of which this form would be an

acceptable rendition in writing;

c) The Spanish word “caliso,” a term also used for a tropical song in

St. Lucia;

(1) “careso,” a topical song ﬁom the Virgin Islands;

e) The West Aﬁican (Hausa) “kaiso,” itself a corruption of “kaito,” an

expression of approval and encouragement similar to “bravo.”(8)
What is remarkable about readings of the term is the connection to music and to the term
“kaito!” which, points to a relationship with picong—in the public nature of the form and
its interactive structure. Borne out of related oral tradition, picong and calypso both have
a similarity with at least one role in West Aﬁican griottage—biting critical humor
addressed to an audience in song format. This emphasis on orality connects Aﬁican
wordsmithing with a genre of criticism that produces in Afro-Trinidadian folk culture the
ritual of picong In a New World context, this oral art becomes part of a larger re-
fashioning 0f orality. In W Thomas Hale
notes that the notion of the griot has transcended Africa “into the Caribbean and the
United States, taking on extremely positive connotations for those who see the
professional as a link to their ancestors”(15). Hale also points out that among the many

social ﬁrnctions that are performed by griots in parts of West Aﬁica are:

Recounting history, providing advice, serving as spokesperson,
representing a ruler as a diplomat, mediating conﬂicts, interpreting the
words of others into different languages, playing music, composing songs
and tunes, teaching students, exhorting participants in wars and sports,
reporting news. . .contributing to important life ceremonies, and praise-
singing. (19)
In particular, it is in its role as social commentator that calypso makes potent use of
picong. The overlapping considerations of “recounting history”, speaking for a group
and rallying contestants are the social sites upon which the use of picong is inscribed in
this New World incarnation. Another link in the oral chain is the practice of ritualizing
the performance of biting wit in the vehicle of song.(l9). According to Rohlehr, the
performance of ‘blame’ has been found in folksongs throughout the Caribbean, and as a
result, has become a part of the calypso tradition:
Aﬁican music often served the purpose of social control, and the roots of
the political calypso in Trinidad probably lie in the Aﬁican custom of
permitting criticism of one’s leaders at speciﬁc times, in particular
contexts, through the media of song and story. The leaders of society
recognized the value of such satirical songs in which the ordinary person
was given was given the privilege of unburdening his mind while the
impact of his protest was neutralized by the controlled context within
which criticism was permissible. (2)
In eighteenth century Trinidad, picong stretched beyond the arena of black social rituals,

such as drum dances, and came to inﬂuence such spectacles as chantwell singing.

65

According to scholars,” these contests of song, sometimes instigated by slave owners,
were marked by the extemporaneous and pre-composed abuse of a subject. The most
famous chantwell, or singer of carisos, was Gros Jean, a slave whose master Pierre
Begorrat utilized the picongesque aspect of the cariso to deride his neighbors and
enemies. Hence, it is in this period that the upper class acknowledged the social
usefulness of picong. What is ironic in this instance is the ignorance of picong’s
potentiality as a political tool of the black lower and underclass to problematize the
colonial system.

The essence of picong is its dialectical rhetoric. It is dialectical in its production
of the cultural contestations between Trinidad’s various colonial elite and its aﬁ'o-creole
other (rather than in the idea of progress that is part of the Hegelian notion of dialectics.)
Calypso is picong, not simply in its use as social criticism, but because of its very
existence in the cauldron of cultural overlappings and contestations of the colonial
period; it is a projection of the politics of colonial placement and replacement.

The aspect of picong that is at work here is the voicing of social criticism in the
structure of the rhetoric of picong. This choice to assume the use of a folk practice to
effectively challenge the power structure ﬁrnctions as a sharply pointed attack on the very
use of the normative European hierarchical social structure. Abandoning the
conventional means of criticism, the jamettes and the rest of the African community
chose to bring the practice into the center so that the audience of the elite would
recognize the practice as one foreign to their traditions. For the elite, the perception of

the margin addressing the center using a structure and rhetoric of criticism that is

 

25Secalsottndtewl>ettrsc's“CarnivalinNineteenthCeuturyTrinidad,”Paria;Atima, 1988. Gordon
Rohlehr’s ' in Pre-I Trini

66

unfamiliar to their own is that of a multi-layered negation of the center’s authority. It is
' this layering aspect of picong that is part of Trinidad’s Aﬁ'o-Creole rural oral tradition; it
addresses the past, present and future in a single breath—all the while cutting through the
assumptions of the elite—slicing from top to bottom. In bringing a cultural artifact
whose function is to publicly expose the transgressions of an individual to bear on the
ideologies of a group, the black use of picong is re-imagined to explore a meta-narrative
of social forms of criticism through which the colonial elite ﬂame their world.
Disenfranchised from the recognized forms of administrative regress, the black lower and
underclass’ use of picong in song introduces its own rhetorical critique. Its presence in
Carnival points to its beginnings in the environment of chattel slavery, suggesting its
presence during a period in which blacks were assumed to have no legitimized voice for ”
criticism. The advent of this form of abuse into social arenas of the dominant culture
signals, to the social and administrative elite, a subversive presence within their midst—
one that has the potential to, and eventually does weigh in on the subject of cultural and
social marginalization. James Millette’s WW reveals
the heteroglossic nature of nineteenth-century Trinidad, illuminating the socio-cultural
realities of the colonial state:
The society was not so much foreign, as French, both with respect to its ﬁne
coloured and white communities. In 1802, apart from the Indians and the slaves,
numbering 1166 and 19,709 respectively, there were 5275 free coloured and 2261
whites. Of the whites 663 were British, 505 were Spanish and 1093 were French.

(105)

67

Despite the capitulation of the island to the British in 1783, the overwhelming colonial
cultural inﬂuence was French. Thus, the dominant language of the slaves was a patois of
French and African languages. As a result, the singing of cariso took place in French.

So, chantwells sang their “New World” folk into existence by lacing picong into the
fabric of the cariso—for themselves and the dominant French planter class. For this elite,
picong would be seen as taint on the ﬁlture prospects for social debate, and as a result,
created the potentiality for the margin to assume a larger presence in the center’s ﬁrture
ideological discussions.

From the rural environs of the plantations, the practice of piconguthe tradition of
songs and speeches of combat—came into the town of Portoof-Spain. From the black
underclass and up through the hierarchy of the marginalized, it worked its way into the .
gaze of the center.

In Roger D. Abrahams’ We examines the
place of oral performance in the Anglophone Caribbean and notes that there is a prestige
in the mastery of various forms of oratory. Although his focus centers on the islands of
St. Kitts, Nevis, Tobago and St. Vincent, his work points out that the perceived
importance of wordsmithing appears to be a characteristic of communities all over the
Aﬁican Diaspora, including Aﬁ'o-American communities:

(He) observed a number of traditional performances and began to perceive
a pattern of traits in the roles played by the performer, his relations to his
material and his audience, and in the audience’s attitude toward the
performer and his enactment. This pattern centered upon the acclaim

given to those individuals who were good at using words—individuals

68

(he) came to call ‘men-of-words’ . . . It became clear that that these
performances almost always arose in contests with other men-of-words,
and that such contests were a community-accepted manner of establishing
and maintaining a public (or street) reputation. (2).

Similarly, in his essay on halo “The Ewe Tradition of Songs of Abuse,” Koﬁ
Anyidoho points out that the practice of verbal swordplay is an important part of West
African culture, is sometimes utilized to address perceived infractions. He notes that, .
“the case of halo tells us that it is even more signiﬁcant that the tradition. . .(of abuse)
prescribes the need for insult as a legitimate reaction to an individual’s disregard of
society’s norms”(19). This suggests that picong’s traditional format is one refashioned
from the cultural retentions of Trinidad’s slave community—who were predominantly of _
West Aﬁican descent.

One must go beyond the notion of calypso as simple representation of this
conﬂict; picong politicizes calypso—ﬁrst, by pointing to the folk elements of which it is
partly fashioned—and by extension, politicizing the use of the folk as a transforming
force in national popular culture. It creates the calypsonian as part “New World” griot
and part contemporary chantwell.

In this chapter I examine the calypsonian as a descendant of the chantwell, and
explore the politics of both singing forms as a refashioning of the trope of the West
Aﬁican praisesinger. Research in the ﬁeld of Caribbean folksongs and calypso has made
strong connections to West African forms. Gordon Rohlehr makes this link to Aﬁican
roots a marker of a socially controlling project:

Aﬁican music often served the purpose of social control, and the roots of the

69

Political calypso in Trinidad probably lie in the Aﬁican custom of permitting
criticism of one’s leaders at speciﬁc times, in particular contexts, and through the
media of song and story. (W 2)
My work proceeds ﬁom this potential connection by examining the ﬁgure of the
West Aﬁican griot and the similarity between his/her role as social commentator and the
refashioning of that aspect of groittage through the figures of the chantwell and the
calypsonian. According to Hale, although there is a great variety in the profession of
griottage in West Africa, that it is “anchored in verbal art, service to noble families, and
the symbiotic relationship of word and music”(§a'q_te 14). I see the wordsmithing and
social commentary of Trinidadian calypsonians, regardless of ethnicity, as descendants of
the griot/chantwell-who inverts the social order by singing the material and ideological '
lives of the marginalized. This creates for the social commentary calypso a theoretical
link to the subversive axis upon which it operates a perspective that I ﬁnd to be
particularly useful for examining the contestation between the classes and against the
government. Similarly, Bakhtin saw this contest between groups as it is fought in
language:
Like the living concrete environment in the consciousness of the verbal
artist lives—is never unitary. It is unitary only as an abstract grammatical
system of normative forms, taken in isolation from the concrete,
ideological conceptualizations that ﬁll it, and in isolation from the
uninterrupted process of historical becoming that is a characteristic of all
living language. . . although it is unitary not only in its shared, abstract,

linguistic markers bit also in its forms for conceptualizing these abstract

70

markers, is itself stratiﬁed and heteroglot in its aspect as an expressive

system, that is in the forms that carry meanings. (Dimmee 288)
For critics of calypso, such as Gordon Rohlehr”5 and Richard Burton, the calypsonian is a
part of the diasporic trickster tradition. He is a “man-of -words” who “like Anancy, must
use all his resources of verbal trickery to mock the powerful while entertaining and,
above all, impressing both them and the powerless with his prowess as performer, mime,
and master of words”Burton, 188). This view links the calypso to the tradition of picong,
as well as the tradition of the griot. Because early calypsonians were of Aﬁican and
Creole heritage, the later developments in the form which included people from
hithertofore underrepresented groups such as the East- Indian community produce a
dialectical opportunity to examine howthe form is refashioned to signify a dynamic

change ﬁom the solely Afro-Creole folk form to a diverse national product.

Gangstas!

In the history of calypso, the name Gros Jean has become synonymous with the
earliest practitioners of the art. A slave to Pierre Beggorat, his skill in singing carisos
was such that his owner made him master of kaiso. According to Mitto Sampson, Gros
Jean’s talent as a chantwell lay in his ability to compose extemporaneous songs whose
picongesque qualities lacerated his master’s opponents:

Legend has it that Begorrat. . .would adjourn with favourite slaves and
guests on occasions and indulge in a variety of entertainments. The court

was attended by Aﬁican slave singers of “Cariso” or “Caiso”, which were

71

usually sung extemporare and were of a ﬂattering nature, or satirical or
directed against unpopular neighbours or members of the plantation
community, or else they were ‘Mepris’, a term given to a war of insults
between two or more expert singers. (Pearse 147)
Thus, a practice borne out of the traditions of the slave community comes to be utilized
by slave masters to attack their enemies. One wonders whether the master/patron’s act of
calling forthe performance of the mepris did not signify a fascination/repulsion of the
potentiality of the ritual to be turned on the patron himself. This idea was not lost on
Begorrat, for as well as he is known for his patronage of Gros Jean and others, he is also
known for his cruelty. According to historian John Cowley:
His attitude symptonrised a singular love-hate relationship between slave V
and master. He sustained particular black chantwells, or lead singers, for
their skills in spontaneous composition, but was instrumental in meting
out macabre punishments to slaves who were believed to have
MEWS-W1 (Wm 15)
I see the act of performing the song as a subversion of the imposed silence that was a part
of the slave’s lot in early nineteenth century Trinidad. .The fact that chantwells could
gain renown within the plantation community for the mastery of song composition—a
renown that reached beyond the folk practices of the slaves to the master’s realm—
destabilizing the very notion of an absence of agency.
Because of the large inﬂux of French planters from neighboring islands, the early
social framework of Trinidad evinced a heavily Franco-Aﬁican inﬂuence, this being the

result of the 1783 Cedula of Popluation which encouraged immigration to the island.

 

2‘ See interview with Rohlehr
72

During this time, the slaves of these immigrants had societies in which ritual singing,
drumming and performance served simultaneously the purposes of a connection to Aﬁica
and a projection of their material existence in the “New World.” Chantwells such as
Gros Jean, Soso, Papa Cochon, Oﬁrba and Possum become the antecedents of the
calypsonian through their connection of the marginalized world of the slave societies to
the public forum of singing for the center.

With the advent of Emancipation in 1834, Chantwells became well known as the
lead singers of the underclass groups of stickﬁghters and their supporters. Designated by
society as jamettes—those beyond the realm of respectability—their purpose was to
exhort their members in battle against rival bands, picongesque compositions against
authority, and singing praises of the bravery and prowess of its members. Their battle
cries of “bois” (wood) were meant to acknowledge and conﬂate the perceptions of
physical battle and verbal combat. Rohlehr conﬂates the advent of the popularity of these
stickﬁghting, or calinda, bands with the social conguence of the various elements of
ethnic and racial groupings:

In the confused post-Emancipation period, the problems of identity and
status must have been acute. How was stmus to be determined in a society
where groups of Yorubas, say, fresh ﬁom Aﬁica as indentured workers, or
taken oﬁ’ slave ships. Were living alongside creolized Blacks of French,
English or Spanish background, East Indian indentured workers and a
dozen or more ﬁ'agmented ethnic groups, all experiencing severe problems
of language in their relation to the power structure? Clearly in that melee,

the man who was recognized as a possessor of the word and as a

73

spokesman for the group occupied a position of supreme importance.

Such a man would have been the chantwell of the Calinda bands.

(W2 52)
What is interesting about the presence of the calinda bands is the transference of locus for
the performance of picong ﬁ'om slave entertainments and social gatherings to the
patronage system, and ﬁnally into the unsanctioned public sphere of carnival. It is in this
new arena of performance that the process of mariginalization is made advantageous to
the jamettes. In effect, it brings visceral hostility and subversive nature of picong into the
mainstream arena-revealing the dialogic nature of the patronage system.” Free now to
direct their attacks against the very pillars of colonial society—and its attendant tools of
governmental repression, chantwells infused their every vocal performance with the ’
shadow of the drum dances and slave rituals out of which their satirical use of wit is
drawn. This signiﬁed upon the material circumstances upon which the folk form is
fashioned. Although the calinda is not a song or dance form isolated to Trinidad,28 its

inseperability from the jamette stickﬁghting bands added to its infamy.
Transference
One of the most well-known picong song-smiths is Slinger Francisco, known by

the moniker “The Mighty Sparrow.” In 1998, he released “Doh Touch Meh President.”

The song, in response to hearings on the impeachment of American President William

 

27 Iamreadingthisasdialogicintthakhtinianscmc—anawarcnesssofthcdoublc—voiccdnesscxisting
in eachuttcrancc, andthc jamettes’ conversam interaction withthc privileged utterance.

2‘ Soc Gordon Rohlehr’s and ' In Prc cc Trini Port of Spaim University of
the West Indies, 1990.

74

Jefferson Clinton, combined the vitriol of impugning the authoritative premise of the
investigations with the wicked humor of nineteenth century jamette rhetoric. Within the
context of the song is the suggestion that a white man whose cabinet placements and
policies were seen to give blacks—and other minorities-an unprecedented amount of
access to the highest office in United States government was inherently unsuited for his
ofﬁcial position. Sparrow’s winking salute to Clinton adopted the nose-thumbing of
chantwells to the normative American hegemony—and it is also suggested—hypocritical
stance of the iconization of the American Presidency with tones of an innate morality:

Sexual McCarthyism/ Ken Starr inquisition

Showed a young innocent White House intern

Not realizing Monica/ was a manipulator

When she exposed all her thongs without concern. (19-24)
The multilevel aspect of his attack in linking the hysteria of the Red Scare of 19503
Americanwith a corresponding note of defensiveness against a nonexistent threat-is part
and parcel of the picongesque. It creates a metanarrative about the proceedings that
invokes the milieu of a period in American history for which the country has since
acknowledged its wrongheadedness. In effect, Sparrow suggests a foresight that future
revisitations of the current political and judicial situation will yield the same result.

This is the historical crossroads of picong—pointing to both the past and future
simultaneously, commentating on the diverse meeting sites within which there are
overlappings and conﬂations. He delineates his attack, moving back and forth between
the individual and the general, between speciﬁc personages and overall intent. Hi3

invocation of the disreputability of the nineteenth century underclass by linking Monica’s

75

supporters to the aura of violence and prostitution that was a part of the jamette makeup,
saying Monica was, “headed by Greenberg and Linda/ And she jamette mama,”
suggesting the mother’s collusion in her daughter’s prostitution, and her own status as
madam. Attacks on background and origin are one of the foundations of picong because
it presents history in an oral context—as communal, knownuand its knowledge as
reciprocal. In addition, in the rhetoric of a voice of the geographical margin criticizing
the center, Sparrow revisits his own historical role as a descendant of the chantwell.

In the famous picong duel of 195 7, The Lord Melody and Sparrow reenact the
venom of the famous chantwell duels of the nineteenth century. Turning on the combat
tactics of the bois men, they perform a form of extemporaneous, verbal hand to hand
conﬂict. The insults invoke in each combatant’s arsenal of personal and social critique, ’
the layering of personal and familial history:

Sparrow: Well Melody, come close to mail will tell you plain and
candidly
Don’t stop in the back and smile/Because you have a face like a crocodile
Melody: Sparrow you shouldn’t tell me that at all/I mind you when you
was small
Many of the nights I use mash you head/In crossing to go to your mother’s
(extemporaneous scatting and humming). (1-8).
In this 20"I Century duel, one can see in the directness and license of the insults-the
attraction/repulsion that picong of the nineteenth century held for the anco/ Spanish

creole elite—hence the patronage of planters such as Begorrat. The suggestion is that

76

such duels between social equals such as slaves displayed a verbal violence that could
' easily be turned against the master.

Sparrow’s introduction, claiming to speak “plainly and candidly,” recalls the
rhetoric of truth-speaking, of laying a foundation in which the speaker claims veracity as
part of the ritual of the verbal duel is standard fare in the practice of picong. The phrase
“sans humanite” (without humanity) has been a standard part of the Trinidadian oral
tradition in the singing of the kaiso. It purports the singers fault in their rendition of the
depictions they sing in which people may ﬁnd themselves characterized. It gives a
license to the performer to tell the truth, as they see ﬁt, without the censure of the
audience or subject of the song. This part of Trinidad’s oral tradition is part and parcel of
the truth-telling vocation of the picongesque. In rituals of jesting, it is picong’s own --
herald—the case for veracity being the anticipation of a negation of the niceties of verbal
conﬂict in the pursuit of supposed “truths.” When attacking the political establishment,
picong ﬁrnctions as a truth Yet when in play, it utilizes the format of the truth-telling of
social and authoritative critiques to mimic and use as referent the “truth” of the
statements about to be made.

The reputation of the calypsonian as a “saga boy” or ladies man has traditionally
been a part of the folkloric myth-making, associated with the gifts of oratory, satire and
social commentary. The reference to Melody’s ugliness pokes ﬁrn at this image and
“unmakes” his personal mythology. In response, Melody’s recounting of his earlier
relationship with Sparrow—supposedly “minding him when he was small” is a

declaration of his elder status—like that of a father, or more scandalously, lover to

77

Sparrow’s mother. In theory, Melody is suggesting that his opponent’s mother is a
woman of questionable judgment if she formed romantic attachment to a calypsonian.

The mood of the song becomes more bitingly humorous as the opponents verbally
circle each other in combat:

Sparrow: I know you think you looking sweet/You posing here in your

own false teeth

13 a lucky thing your uncle kick out/F or you to get the false teeth to put in

your mouth

Melody: That is all you can say/In every angle and every way

But the way how you watching at me/I go bust a right hook in your belly
Again, the response is a foundational one; Sparrow attacks Melody’s age and possible .
decrepitude. The use of the image of false teeth points to decay and suggests that Melody
is already past his prime, and therefore, is not a ﬁtting challenger for his younger
opponent. Not only is he old, according to Sparrow, but he is also so socially low that he
would wear a dead man’s castoffs. The threatening reply that this engenders in Melody
reiterates the chantwell’s role as instigator of physical combat and references its powerful
nature, both as a ritual of insult, and a tool of verbal warfare.

While the face-to-face duel takes for granted the participation and laughter of the
audience and calls for listeners to make a judgment about the winner’s skill in humor, wit
and extemporaneous composition, the song with an individual as its subject puts picong
in the position of relating a personal account. Sparrow’s 1959 calypso, “Teresa,” tells the
tale of a manipulative woman who uses the singer as her dupe:

You worse than a dog, Teresa/Girl, you break my heart

78

This morning you take my dollar/Now you playing smart

This morning you come we talk we business quiet and soft

Every time I come you making excuses and trying to put it oﬁ‘. (1-6)
The faithless or manipulative woman is a popular theme in calypso, and part and parcel
of the male-dominated nature of both the genre of music and the society.29 The
introduction of song provides an assessment of Teresa’s character. Henceforth, it will
seem to be a foregone conclusion. What is left to the commentator is to present the
evidence of the subject’s treachery. By linking the image of “business” with that of
secrecy, the 3inger~allows his audience to make conclusions about the nature of a
transaction between a man and woman conducted under such circumstances. The
suggestion that intimacy is being bought reinforces his earlier designation of the woman
by linking her behavior with that of a prostitute. However, since the arrangement was not
concluded satisfactorily, it is obvious that Teresa is not. Thus, one gets the idea that she
is really a manipulator. Teresa’s protestation, “Sparrow let me go/boy don’t hold me
so/my mother go know,” give more currency to the idea that she is using dissembling
tactics to get money, while keeping her aspiring lover at a distance (7-9). The singer then
reinforces his evidence by saying:

Never me again, Teresa, to give you a cent/I rather to give a beggar up on

the pavement

I try all my best but girl I know and I see/You will never never love

anybody...(13-l6)
Comparing the lover, from whom he is becoming estranged, to a beggar, calls into

question the caste status to which he believes her behavior belongs. This attack on the

79

social aspect of a person’s actions becomes, in picong, one of the outer layers of the
critique. Since an individual’s movements in society are a part of his/her identity, a
criticism of those very movements are a more indirect commentary the public’s
perception of his/her character.

Because the assessment comes in the form of a personal account, the provision of
evidence in aligns support for the discernment of the listener. Yet, part of the nature of
that support is trickery—the calypsonian as trickster ﬁgure sometimes draws the
audience’s sympathy in order to reverse his course, making both him/herself and the
listeners the object of the joke:

Don’t make so much noise, Teresa, darling have a care

There is nothing irregular going on in here

This morning you take my dollar to buy tickets for the show

Now I come to take you out to the theatre you bluntly reﬁrse to go. (18-21)
Thus it is learned that the attack on Teresa was the unwarranted result of an act of
kindness. The listener has been the dupe of the singer and of his/her own imagination.
The placating phrase “don’t make so much noise. . .darlin ” hilariously presents the '
image of a wronged woman responding with a stream of verbal abuse to rival the picong
of the singer. The fact that the purpose of the request for money was to pay for a treat
for the lovers negates the former impression so venomously articulated by the teller of the
tale. Teresa’s anger and reﬁlsal to go on the outing effectively creates a reversal of the
subjects positions-one in which the singer plays the fool and is now himself not worthy of
Teresa’s affection. Adding to this, the revelation that the “currency” in question, a mere

dollar, has been the cause of such a vicious reproach, reveals the aspiring lover as a

 

29'I'hehaschangedovertimeandmanymorefemalesingersnowgivetitfortaat.
' 80

miserly fraud. The humor of the situation lies in Teresa’s imagined, and unrecounted,
reply. One envisions a spirited and violent verbal attack and is allowed to share in the
newly gained humility of the taleteller. This form of entertainment recreates for listeners
the proximity and commonality of minute community dramas. It reinforces the idea of
the connectedness of experience and the shared responses imbedded in cultural forms.
The link between the wordsmithing insults of the chantwell and the calypsonian
lies in the potentiality of their tools. Contests of abuse, drawn ﬁ'om West Aﬁica and
remade in a site of diasporic dynamism create both rituals of diversion and of political
reading. According to Gordon Rohlehr, this tradition “transformed itself. . .diffused
itself. . .disguised itself, allowing for the singer to assume the roles of “provocateur,

3’30

commentator and trickster. The chantwell’s skill in exhorting listeners to combat
reaches beyond to suggest a similar political usage. Hence, the history of more than
attempt by the authorities to ban certain songs and to try to circumscribe the public
spaces in which these songs could be performed. The calypsonian as the melodic and
compositional offspring of the chantwell inherits the genre both as communion with the

past oral tradition, and a3 a retention of that potentiality.

81

Chapter Four
Wordsmith: The Folk as Literary Trope

This chapter focuses on the ways in which picong, an oral element of Aﬁ'o-creole
folk culture is used by Trinidadian writers to signify upon dominant discourses by
referencing the language of the folk. In addition, it examines the orality of several
Caribbean texts and the manner in which Trinidadian authors also reference the folk as a
means of articulating a Caribbean aesthetic.

I examine early work by two Trinidadian authors, Chalkdust’s “Brain Drain,
Merle Hodges’ Criek Qeeek Menkey and Earl Lovelace’s W to
demonstrate how the picaresque use of the folk becomes a formula for situating a literary
work in a context that speciﬁcally references lower class cultural traditions as source of
critique of the Trinidadian mainstream. Although picong is seen as a part of the Afro-
creole folk tradition of Trinidad, its critique is by no means dissimilar to other cultural
forms used to demonstrate wordsnrithing. Each of the above works suggest that the
concept has entered the popular discourse, so that—the twentieth century—it is not a

speciﬁcally afro-creole possession, but Trinidadian. Each author invokes picong as a

 

3° Perdorlal interview. 1998.
I 82

signiﬁcant characteristic of the communal existence of lower-class and/or rural village
life. In addition the authors use the register of the folk to critique the circumstances of
class and societal politics.

This chapter seeks to make the connection between the impulse of contestation
evident in a marginalized discourse like the folk, and the writer as a practitioner of the
sharp-tongued dialectic evidenced by picong.

One of the factors inﬂuencing the passage of picong ﬁom the plantations and
small rural communities of nineteenth century Trinidad is the presence of two groups of
Aﬁicans who had never been slaves. According to Maureen Warner-Lewis’s ﬁligree}
mm indentured servitude provided a signiﬁcant pool of labor in the years after
1808. As the British began to phase out the slave trade in its colonies, they began to
harass the slave traders of other countries, especially the Portuguese. The most common
method of harassment utilized by the British was to capture foreign slavers and discharge
the captured Aﬁicans in British colonies. Thus, a population that had not been creolized
like the Trinidadian-bom Aﬁicans, entered the milieu of the colonial society dominated
by a French, Spanish, and British elite. According to Warner Lewis:

For the Aﬁican immigrant was a liberated slave who had in fact
undergone sudden capture, forced marches, imprisonment in barracoons,
sale, and transhipment His grant of ﬁeedom on recapture by His
Majesty’s Navy must have rendered his position confusing — in indeed he
did understand that he was free. This was not because of stupidity on his
part, but because of language difﬁculties, the youth of many a recaptive,

the unfamiliarity of the system into which he had suddenly been thrust, the

83

undoubted element of coercion oﬁen involved in the treatment of liberated
Africans, and the arbitrary nature of his disposal in the Caribbean. All
these must have seemed like strange interludes to which his personal
destiny had committed him and over which he could exercise little control.
(8)
This discrepancy in experience between recaptured Aﬁicans, ostensibly free upon
release, creates a subculture within the populations of Africans, both enslaved and free,
resulting in an African cultural injection into the Afro-creole culture of the enslaved.

The importance of this exchange ensured that multiple cultural formations
coming from the homeland of the slaves and free Africans combined with the creolized
European cultural productions to form new traditions as well as maintain practices and
ideologies of the slaves’ mother culture. Due to dominance of western cultures, to
both creolized and ﬁrst generation, Africans retained certain aspects of their cultures as a
means to hold on to their identity. In addition, African cultural elements provided a
means of surviving the experience of colonial repression and the active hostility against
their cultural retentions that operated within the dominant social ideology.

For this population of Africans, the folk functioned as part of a self-actualization.
Products of a cultural base in which the oral tradition dominated, they replaced their
traditions, in the process reinventing the milieu in which these cultural products could be
encountered. For Gordon Rohlehr:

The oral tradition has always been concerned with matters of energy, its
containment in the shaped process of ritual enactment and catharsis. Any

aesthetic based on the oral tradition seeks naturally to address itself to

84

these considerations: energy, containment and catharsis. So the oral
tradition , far ﬁ'om being a static folk inheritance, is proving to be the
vital and adaptable source of new exploration. (“The Problem of the
Problem of Form” 5)
This suggests that the dynamic process of telling one’s story is intimately wound up in a
ritual process that inﬂuenced both the oral and written processes of tale telling. Within
the context of this project, one ﬁnds that the written, when accessing the “folk,” can
replicate aspects of its rhetoric, style and ritualistic practices.
The movement of ritual enactment is towards climax and catharsis in
which celebrants become possessed and their normal everyday
personalities are displaced by a force of extraordinary inner energy. The -
capacity for movement beyond and beneath the threshold of ordinary
surface experience, persists even in Caribbean cities, as well as in areas of
the metropole. . . Black musics of the New World, too, have constantly
celebrated and reenacted on both the sacred and the secular planes, a
capacity for movement beyond.(“The Problem of the Problem of form” 6)
Looking at the enactment of ritual in the sacred and its transference to the secular,
Rohlehr’s words point to a desire, for some writers, to a “movement beyon ” the plane of
the written and into the oral. What this “capacity for moving beyond” points to is the
ability for Caribbean writers to access the folk both in its spiritualistic and practical uses,
often converging the two, in acknowledgement of the folk’s ability to inﬂuence varying

spheres of life.

85

Festivals such as Carnival, though ostensibly European became imbued with the
folk practices of the various groups who participated in its days of license and reversal.
This became evident in the fact that much of the practice of verbal combat was a
signiﬁcant part of the enactment of carnival for the black participants, most especially the
black underclass(or jamettes). Of the various aspects of Aﬁo-creole folk traditions, the
aspect of verbal combat, known as picong, is one of the inheritances that came to
inﬂuence the literary products of the land in which these folk essences were re-
fashioned.31 As black writers sought to bring oral culture into their work, they borrowed
from the folk to reproduce it, and themselves, through these cultural inﬂuences.

As elements of this cultural production, novels became a means by which picong
could be brought to bear on the structural and thematic elements ofa literary work. This '
oral/literary continuum, as extrapolated by Gordon Rohlehr, suggests poles of interiority
and exteriority. The interior space being one of psychic attachment, or inﬂuence by the
folk, in the work of a writer. The exterior space becomes those conventions, within a
colonial society, that determine normativity in all aspects of public space, including that
of the writer’s work.

It has long been established that a writer in a colonial context has to penetrate the
layers of ideologies that circumscribe his/her place in that society in order to articulate a '
speciﬁc presence in the colonial hierarchy:

One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over language.
The imperial education system installs a standard version of the

metropolitan language as the norm, and marginalizes all variants a3

 

See Maureen Warner-Lewis’ gm ’3 Other Sm: The African dynamic in Trinidad Culture. The
Majority Press; Dover, 1991.

86

impurities. . .Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical
structure of power is perpetuated and the medium through which
conception of ‘truth,’ ‘order,’ and ‘reality’ become established.(1_he
Empire Writes Beck 7)
This emphasis on language provides a means of reinforcing the colonialist socio-political
project in which the culture of the colonial subject is forced to enter the dialogue on
existence, and the meaning of existence, ﬁom within the colonial dialogue. As a writer
in this environment, the act of writing proceeds from a necessary re-imagining of the
constructs of truth, order and reality.

What the folk does in this context, is provide not simply an opposition to the
narrow constraints of these colonial impositions, but also to expand and simultaneously '
displace the concepts.

One of the questions inherent in the exploration of the folk inheritances, such as
picong, is in its birthplace in the lowest order of colonial society. Considering the
disenfranchisement of the underclass, rural and lower classes, how can one intellectually
provide for its inﬂuence on a product like Carnival that is viewed by the elite as their
own? Writing has been a means by which colonial masters have traditionally viewed
themselves as superior to their subjects. It has been inscribed by the dominant culture as
a benediction given to the colonial subject as a legacy from the colonial patron, and
therefore, a form of expression that does not sit easily in the hands of a people for whom
its structure and European referent is not “native.” Thus, the colonial writer sought to
use his/her pen to answer the fallacy of this ideology as well as express a reality that

displaces these structural, thematic and political forms of literary negation. “The

87

energizing feature of this displacement is its capacity to interrogate and subvert the
‘ imperial cultural formations”CEmpi_re_11).

One of the concerns of colonial writers and theorists has been to problematize the
use of originary or foundational strategies in elucidating the place and purpose of literary
products. In his MW, Edouard Glissant turns away from the “longing for
pure origins and inviolable systems” in the work of some caribbean writers and seeks
instead an articulation of the dynamism that characterizes Caribbean history and
identity(xii). I proceed from this strategy, in invoking the folk’s inﬂuence on literature as
one aspect of this creative and creating process. Because picong comes from the spoken
and is incorporated into literature, the very manner in which it wraps itself around text
and context is useﬁll in bringing the margin into the center. In addition, due to its
intimacy with the writer and his/her reality, it simultaneously invokes the collectivity of
an oral tradition while revealing the individual’s connection to the historical32 and
personal experience.

Scholars of orality and oral tradition have ranged in approach ﬁom agendas- of-
rescue and reinforcement to agendas of negation and subsuming. In an Aﬁican Diasporic
context, the former seeks to unearth and explain the relevance of oral tradition—in an
environment in which it has been inscribed as the tool of the illiterate and
disenfranchised. The latter seeks to relegate the importance of oral tradition to that which
is inherently inferior in comparison to that which is written. As a result of this, one sees a
new form of old-colonial negations that saw the written as the only legitimate sign of

presence in the master dialogue of nation-building.

 

’2 Here I use Glissant’s notion of history as opposed to History—the former personal, the latter
chronological

88

In his Caribbean Discourse, Edouard Glissant the dangers of a static approach to
the folk:
...The only way, to my mind, of maintaining a place for writing (if this
can be done)-—that is, to remove it ﬁom being an estoric practice or a
banal reserve of information—would be to nourish it with the oral. (101)
In their essay “Telling stories in the Era of Global Communication: Black Writing—
Oraliture,” Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio” posit that:
Texts of oral literature have the potential to get free of their immediate
Context and live a life of their own. They continue to be telling,
signiﬁcant, capable of hospitality and listening, even when their original
context has been strongly modiﬁed or no longer exists and they are re-
evoked and developed in contexts completely different ﬁ'om the
original... .(102)
In the dynamism of travel between the oral and the written, Petrilli and Ponzio echo one
of the views of oraliture. In their work, they align themselves with the notion of Julius
Lester, who removes any hint of the subversiveness of a folk character such as Brer
Rabbit-in The Tales of Uncle Remus—saying, the “Lester is right when he exonerates
Brer Rabbit from functions of ideological or political order(the sly rabbit reduced to the
status of symbol or sublimation of black resistance to slavery on plantations, etc.)”(103).
Hence, they add their voices to the grounding-work of an aggressive oversimpliﬁcation
of the role of tropic ﬁgures in storytelling, negating any revolutionary role, and hence any
thought of textually revolutionary role of revolution in the teller. However, they fall into

the trap of assigning some role to such characters in maintaining the general order of

89

discourse, when in fact their main business is the pleasure of telling a good story. Their
suggestion that stories can not be a form of cultural survival used to effect social change
is currently rife in academia—suggesting that oral tales are static in their usage when
transferred to print. This tendency of some critics to downplay folklore as a convenient
means of inﬂating the importance of the mediocrities of non-Western literary products
can be worked in ways that appear to support or patronize the folk, while containing and
negating its current inﬂuence. Using the text of Antillean theater, Glissant addresses the
adverse political nuances that simplify the folk, through a false patronage, into an artifact
with little contemporary inﬂuence:
Thus we have the ofﬁcial defense of folklore. It seemed shrewder to
neutralize it while giving it apparent support than to suppress it. It
becomes cloying, silly, too much. The elite, which has never assisted in
the positive evolution of folklore, will assist in paralyzing it.(_Dl§_e_Qu;$
208)
Hence, the elite controls the expression and its venue, thus making it a mockery of itself.
The oral/written continuum, often troped in Caribbean literature, is a fact of societies
whose lower classes lived its rhetorics in order to give voiced meaning to their world—in
an environment in which literature is reiﬁed. Hence, it’s presence as an inﬂuence on the
Caribbean writer has become almost cliched.
With all its obvious advantages, writing particularly when enhanced by the
application of printing technology, came to be perceived by speakers as the primary form

of language. It was a short step ﬁ'om this to the conclusion that only those forms of

speech which can and do appear in writing and print, are true languages.(Cooper,
Devonish, 61)

Literature utilizing the oral tradition becomes the bastard child of Western Literature’s
prejudice against the viability of writing ﬁ'om a perceived non-elite source. The writing-
in of the processes of oral tradition, from the return gaze of the Aﬁican Diaspora, also
suffers from the ideologies that created Antillean orature, in its New World context, as a
negation of the quality of Caribbean oral literature.

While the debate to name the oral/literary continuum has produced oral literature,
oraliture, and ﬁnally orature, in her essay, The Oral Tradition in the African Diaspora,
Maureen Warner-Lewis articulates this divide:

Orality transmutes into orature, oracy or oral literature when either
unconsciously or deliberately couched in esthetic form rather than when
deployed in perfunctory manner or primarily for content
transmission. . .However, if the concept of “literature” is not indivisibly
language inscription, and its esthetic function foregrounded, then et
equates “verbal m.”(lheﬁmbﬁds¢hﬂmfrk_fri§snsn_d§mbhsﬂ
Litmus: 117)
Since aspects of oral tradition can be found in various texts, it is important to deﬁne my
terms when one considers what constitutes an example of orature. For my purposes, I
ﬁnd the term orature to signify upon the processes of oral tradition by invoking its
rhetoric, cadences and performative potentiality. The oral traditioncan be said to point to
itself in a written text—referencing its usage and the occasion of that usage—creating

itself in the process of the telling. Thus, everything produced in the Aﬁican Diaspora

91

cannot simply be inscribed as oral, but instead, works that use it as a referent become the
site upon which orality, and the collective consciousness that is inherent in traditions of
orality, ﬁgure as orature.

Picong, as it is performed, both in literature—and in its literal construction—
presumes a knowledge of the personal and collective history of the opponent. The use of
this rhetoric appropriates the role of coMunity historian—while the humor of the
technique signiﬁes upon the skill of the narrator as humorist and wordsmith. The ability
to ostensibly assume a link between the family history and the general history of the
opponent, lays a groundwork for a layered critique that is both indirect and direct in its
approach. Its most powerﬁrl weapon is the circuitous way in which it draws conclusions
about the personal, class and communal nature of the opponent. In the strategy of
providing entertainment, the speaker deﬁnes his/her deductions by giving a varied
account of the “evidence” that “supports” his/her argument. When used in a realistic or
generalized political context, it assumes no boundaries of engagement—linking the
behavior, manners, morality and, of course, origin of the opponent as a deviation from,
and fabrication of, his/her “official story.

In the poem “Brain Drain,” by the Mighty Chalkdust nee Hollis Liverpool, the
author subverts the notion of the emigration of educated professionals as a form of
cultural dispossession. This became a cause for political concern as waves of
schoolteachers, doctors, nurses and other professionals emigrated ﬁ'om Trinidad and the
rest of the Caribbean during the 19603. The assumption that the absence of a signiﬁcant

element of the professional middle class would leave the country in a state of cultural and

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professional turmoil, reiﬁes the notions of legitimized presence in a colonial/post-
colonial33 context.
Chalkdust’s contests the underpinnings of the belief that intelligence is marked

only by professional training and education:

Just because some'teachers go away

To improve their status and their pay,

Many people calling this thing Brain Drain,

But I say they should be shame.

They ain’t see Horace James and Errol John

Teaching drums to foreign sons,

They would never see our best footballer

In the states as professionals. (1-8)
Countering the perception that markers of middle class professionalism—in this instance
teachers and nurses—are the only authentic evidence of mastering a craft. He sets in
opposition teachers and artists whose specializations do not ﬁgure as products of the
imperial center. Pointing to the folk, he determines that the mark of the professional
extends beyond positions for whom one’s mastery is affirmed in the colonial/post-
colonial infrastructure. His contrast of the manner in which the dominant elements of
society dismiss folk culture, as irrelevant to both mainstream and marginalized discourses
of achievement, situates the teacher of the folk and the local athlete as artists of equal
stature to their conventional counterparts. Naming the skill and renown of the football

star, and the impetus to preservation of the fold as part of the cultural/professional wealth

 

33 For my purposes in this chapter, the terms post-colonial! colonial are symtoms of a period in which
“Independence” was still new. Trinidad became sovereign in 1962.

93

of the nation, he seeks to combat the colonial project of negation imbedded in the
discourse. Hence, he overturns the notion ‘Brain Drain,’ revealing it to be another aspect
of the hegemonic assumptions that permeate the classes of society. The ideologies that
underpin imposed notions of civilization reﬂect Western cultural impositions borne out of
the colonial process:

And when foreign artistes come

They does get lump sum,

While calypsonians must sing for rum;

And when steelbandsmen teach outsiders

To tune pan for kisses and favours—

All that is what I call Brain Drain. (1 1-16)
Continuing to layer his critique of ideologies that made the migration of the
“professional” class, he savages the normative paradigms that create the calypsonian’s
craft as negligible in comparison to the work of “foreign artistes.” Chalkdust’s words do
not create a simple dichotomy between convention and the folk. Instead, he contests the
reiﬁcation of symbols of an external culture as a construction of meaning and purpose. A
consequence of this is that the products of the local socio-historical environment that do
not mimic the conventions of the master are created as an absence:

And we does use we Drain to make we mas:

Tourist come click-click in photograph—

All we mas pictures in America. . .(36-8)

Our culture fruits are draining away,

And we ain’t doing nothing to make them stay!

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Tobago goat race, crab race, bongo, limbo

And stickﬁghting draining out slow.

0 yes we, we are living on yankee sad songs like bugs,

While we parang and folk songs going to dogs.

That is what I call Brain Drain!(40—6)
Re-placing the center’s construction of education he situates the folk alongside
conventional mainstream education, setting the stage for dialectical dance in which,
though the boundaries are not absolute, the socio-cultural hierarchy is destabilized. Each
of the reinscptions operates to afﬁrm the place of the folk as an alternate discourse that
should be reiﬁed alongside the stereotypical “professions.” The author tropes the folk
through the invocation of the rural and non-mainstream entertainment’s of the “crab

9, ‘6

race,” bongo, parang” and “folk song”(42, 45). Each of these enjoyments was enjoyed
by the communities for whom the folk is not simply an aspect of education but of life-
aﬁirmation and self-making ritual.

Playing on the word “Drain,” he dismantles the idea that the artists and teachers
of folk culture are the dregs of the professional class—those that remain after the plug
has been pulled. In effect, he makes discrete the contributions to collective learning tht
not only create the culture of the folk, but to allow it to remember itself. Questioning an
educational cannon in which local folk culture is erased, while received colonial forms
are made normative, he utilizes the layering technique of picong.

Chalkdust’s purpose is to articulate not only strategies of critique in which the

margin may displace the center, but to appropriate for the folk the signiﬁcation of

authority and presence in a system which seeks to ﬁrst deny, then destroy its relevance.

95

Similarly, in Merle Hodges’ Crick Crack Menkey invokes the destabilizing
potentiality of the folk by referencing an old ritual of afro-creole storytelling—the
reciprocal introduction:

Traditional storyteller: “Crick crack.”

Audience: “Monkey brake he back, on a rotten pomerack.”

The title of Hodges novel, in its literal context, suggests the role of the storyteller in the
act of initiating a storytelling session. In the welcoming “crick crack,” the reader/listener
is given an elliptical space in which to enter into a reciprocal storytelling relationship
with the author/storyteller. This liminal reciprocal space is then re-created as overt and
brings into relief the formalities of the tale-telling.

Hodge’s Tantie"4 reﬂects in her characterization the elements of the folk in lower -
middle class life. Her ﬁcelle, Aunt Beatrice, represents-through her title-the
assimilationist project of middle class ambitions in a colonial enterprise. Tantie, the
word associated with lower class, and by referent, folk culture becomes a resistant thread
in the narrative of the story.

These two characters act as forces which create in the main character, Tee, an .
interplay of dialectical opposition between what is considered “proper” by the dominant
discourse and that which is inscribed as negligible or “improper.” In a colonial context,
Auntie Beatrice-ﬁrst introduced to the reader as pessessing a “voice like high heels and
stockings,”—becomes the inscribed as the voice of the dominant culture.(2) The
narrator, Tee delineates their opposing subject positions through the, behavioral traits of

each woman’s class. While “Tantie’s company was loud and hilarious and the

 

3" The term used commonly by working class people of afro-creole cultural inﬂuence to designate the
anglicized “Aunt”

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intermittent squawk and ﬂurry made me think of the fowl-run when something fell into
the midst of the fat hens”(4). The boisterous atmosphere in Tantie’s household is in
direct contrast to the quiet superiority of Aunt Beatrice. She does not engage in the
exuberant behavior of Tantie, instead when arming herself for a conﬁontation with her
sister-in-law, she inscribes herself with the trappings of the colonial administration—the
law. When she arrives to take the narrator Tee and her brother Toddan, she arrives with a
policewoman. “Aunt Beatrice appeared one day stepping up the path in the shadow of a
round bosomed, round-bottomed policewoman,” (31). In the bare-footed, comforting
informality of Tantie’s world, Tee ﬁnds that the symbols of middle class inﬂuence is
closely linked to a personal investment in the imperial cultures’ ideologies, in which the
culture of the colonial “elite” supersedes that of the colonial subject. This is not to say
that there are no overlappings between the colonial subject and the metropolitan or
localized administration. Firstly, the class positions and their markers are emblematic of
the cultural impositions of the metropole; they reﬂect ideologies about language, social
placement, and decorum. Aunt Beatrice’s mode of dress in visits to her sister-in-law’s
house makes for a dialectical signiﬁcation of class politics ; the desire for respectability
within the colonial structure. Tantie also negotiates the sites of her subjectivity; her
position within the lower middle, or lower class, her status as nonconforrnist to the
restrained demeanor of a respectable woman. This allows for Tantie’s emotive potential
to be inscribed as high—begging the question: How is she displace the authority of Aunt
Beatrice’s ally, the police officer? Tantie uses the reputation she has earned in her

community—that of a skilled and fearsome in her use of picong.

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The realization of this comes in part ﬁ'om within her own family. Mikey,
unemployed and part of a group of disenﬁ'anchised young, warns the warns Tee and her
brother Toddan not to mention the visits he makes to his friends because of “what would
befall us at his hands if we breathed a word to Tantie for he wasn’t having that settin’-
hen takin a turn in his arse”(6). The description of Tantie as a setting-hen serves as a
referent to the ﬁerce protectiveness—and defensiveness—of caretaker’s role. However,
the emphasis is placed most strongly on her verbal weaponry. Taking a turn in
someone’s ass is analogous to the searing effect of Tantie’s picong.

When Tantie was thwarted the neighbours for six houses on every side of
us were generally aware of this fact. ...yu t’ink blasted saga-clothes an’
t’eater does grow on tree? An’ before yu look to help out yu mother and _.
she forty-nine chirren no yu prefer siddong on yu arse wid them long
wut’less young men down at that bridge... .And as was not uncommon,
Mikey in the long run left the house to the accompaniment of ﬂying
objects. . .(5)
Tantie’ 3 performance, as described by the narrator, are a testament to the humor and
hostility of picong. It critiques the provenance and respectability of Mikey’s upbringing.
However, it is directly linked to his lack of motivation to help his struggling mother—or
himself. In Tarrtie’s world, the values of communal loyalty ﬁgure as highly as her sister-
in-law’s values to the external trappings of success. The fact that Mikey is taken in,
along with Tee and Toddan, into Tantie’s home as her own children demonstrates her
assumption of the non-nuclear family models that are made normative by the dominant

discourse. The notion of extending the bounds of intimacy and kinship to include those

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outside the realm of the nuclear model was inscribed by the black middle classes as a
marker of deviance. It did not mimic the nuclear family structure of the British
administration. This reﬂects their desire to separate themselves ﬁom the margins, and to
enter and be accepted by, the various centers around which the dominant ideologies are
built.

When Aunt Beatrice reads Tantie, she sees only the absence of colonial gentility;
“Look at you, aren’t ﬁt!” Tantie responds, “Monkey can’t see e’ own tail”(2). Using a
folk saying to produce a counter-reading, she points to Aunt Beatrice’s assumptions that
children produced within the marginalized community of the lower classes are, by
deﬁnition, not being “raised.” For Aunt Beatrice, the implications of “raising a child”
produces a slippage in which the manner of a child’s upbringing means, through her
middle-class ambitions, being raised up the social ladder—suggesting that one’s upward
mobility is the signiﬁes” upon one’s worth. The reading of signiﬁcation here invokes
Gates’ notion of signiﬁcation within the context of a tradition “ranging from severe
critique to acknowledgment within a literary tradition.”(§igmﬂing Menkey, xxvii). In
the conversation between the two women, Tantie’s words raise the specter of Beatrice’s
inability to recognize her collusion in the elitism of the social system. In this instance,
the monkey’s nus-recognition of his own reality signiﬁes upon both the inherent
repressiveness of the class system and upon the pressure to negate the folk in order to
acquire a mobility toward the top of the social hierarchy.

The author delineates the world-views of the households of each woman thrOugh

the children’s reaction to each environment. Aunt Beatrice’s home, wealthy in relation to

 

’5 See Henry Louis Gates’ mew-kg, which explores a notion of signiﬁcation in a Black
literary context.

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sister-in-law’s is immaculate. She places great importance on the normative values of the
Western administration under which she lives. It is she who introduces Tee and Toddan
to the concept of their class marginality. She critiques Tantie’ 5 world through the venue
of the children. The children ﬁnd various ways to subvert Aunt Beatrice’s attempts to.
pathologize their upbringing:
Their was a violent ﬁght every morning between Toddan and Eudora, for,
Toddan, whose habitual garb consisted ofa vest, did not take kindly to the
jersey and pants and shoes when he wasn’t going anyplace.(34)

Toddan’s resistance to the imposition of this sartorial class marking overturns this
inscription. His aggressive refusal to pander to his aunt’s class perceptions negates the
self-importance of her household/family. In Aunt Beatrice’s milieu, the idea that one I
should dress up to stay home is part of the construction of material/social success. To
perform this ideology, she utilizes the children’s bodies as sites upon which to contest
their upbringing outside the mainstream of Afro-creole middle class culture. Her silence
and rigorous attention to these ideals bring into relief the dichotomy that she believes is
an inherent aspect of her diﬂ‘erence ﬁ'om her lower class relatives.

Beatrice’s maid Eudora, dark-skinned like Tee, Toddan and the members of
Tantie’s household, provides a referent of imposed marginality that underpins the
colonialist discourse of the house in which she serves. When Eudora’s dialect begins to
begins to inﬁltrate the home, Beatrice’s response is a fury of negation:

Carol threw many a tantrum in the bathroom, screaming at Eudora to
hurry and get the soap of he and Eudora said ‘Awright White-lady, ’ after

which she would sometimes mutter under her breath ‘You damn lil

 

100

redants! ’ Carol enjoyed running all over the house naked with Eudora
shouting after her: ‘Come put-on your frack! The day Carol started calling
her dress ‘frack’ Auntie Beatrice was near hysterical: ‘If you can’t speak
. properly when you speak to these children then don’t bother to say
anything to them at all! It’s not that you never went to school in Grenada!
What class did you go up to? ‘T’ird Standard, Ma’m,’ replied Eudora
without raising her eyes. Well! There you are! Third Standard! That _
means you could very well speak pr0perly if you wanted to! (3)
Her preoccupation with speech as a powerful aspect of social making is. in direct contrast
to Tantie’s acceptance of dialect speech as a means of self-construction outside the
mainstream Beatrice harbors faith in an educational system whose purpose is to erase all
aspects of folk-speech as a civilizing project of the colonial elite. The fact that she sees
education as a means to pathologize the folk reveals—in microcosm—the essentialist
practices of the European-centered discourse within which she lives. Eudora’s
construction of Carol as “White-lady” reinforces—and reverses—Beatrice’s attempts to
repudiate and rise above her blackness. The “White-lady” reference also points to the
glaring difference between Beatrice’s place in society, and the unrealized reality of her
ambitions. Though pale in complexion, her blackness aspires to the erasure—the
transcendence of the situation of her race. This inability to acquire whiteness-in-fact
creates in her the need to achieve a whiteness-by-default, allowing her to construct
mimicry of the world of the European colonial elite—she associates only with wealthy,

fair-skinned blacks like herself.

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Tantie’s very presence in the imaginations of Tee and Toddan links them to the
milieu of the folk. Tee’s behavior in school marks her as a product of this environment.
When Mr. Brathwaite, who’s “Estate” borders the school, ﬁnds her raiding his tamarind
tree, she defensively uses her skill with picong to halt him in his tracks. Shrieking
“Marche-shoo”(58). “Marche-shoo whitey cockroach, “she effects a double-
displacement, linking whiteness to a species of insect pest while utilizing a phrase,
adopted to dismiss animals(58). “I summoned to my rescue every obscenity I could think
of, and let ﬂy like a machine gun. He stood stock still and his mouth fell open”(53). This
ability to use replicate the whip-like cadence of picong for combat is a reﬂection of
Tantie’s counter-narrative of folk culture. When Tee is sent to the school administration,
her beliefs in the power of her words are reinforced:

I was your Tantie’s teacher you know. . .You know your Tantie used to
cuss down Tom, Dick and Harry too as a schoolgirl. She would have
given the Governor a cussing if he’d looked at her too hard. (59)
The fearlessness of Tantie’s performance of picong re-places the folk from a tool of the
margin to one whose eﬁ‘ectiveness could appropriate the self-security of the center. Thus
she has taught Tee to see the agency inherent in the performance of picong—one that
gives no quarter to class or racial system that inscribes her as extra-politic. The ritual
barges into the central discourse—contesting its preeminence.
The Friday night when we walked into the shop customers moved aside so
that Tantie could march straight up to the counter, and silence fell. This
was due much to the fact that they were familiar with the indiscriminate

nature of Tantie’s wrath was the fact that a lil noise was always welcome

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on a Friday-night-in-the—shop, and a lil noise involving Tantie was sure to

be on of the highest order. (41)
Tantie’s renown bespeaks picong’s importance as not simply verbal warfare but as part of
folk-entertainment. The expectation of a show produces an awareness of the impending
drama. The eagerness for the performance is evident in the way in which the Friday
night crowd separates in order to give the two opponents, Ling the storekeeper and his
customer Tantie, a forum in which to perform. When his son Henry attempts to intervene
in the coming storm, the manner in which she dismisses his authority, and subsequently,
the prestige of a colonialist education—one in which formal learning is akin to social
power:

Well yu could jus’ send. he back, I ain’ come to argue wid a lil chile; go

back an’ do yu home-lesson dou-dou. But only Tantie could conceive of

calling Henry don-don“, for you might just as well walk up and pat the

Judge of the head. (42)
Denigrating Henry’s importance in the discussion between what is seen as elders
reinforces the social hierarchy within Tantie’s world. This world in which children did
not interfere in the business of “adults” was not a part of the mainstream culture. By
calling Henry dou-dou she infantilizes him. Thus, she also dismisses the dominant
discourse that creates his education as an essential aspect social power. Coded within
this exchange, is Tantie’s fear that entering into the colonialist educational system would
render a child into a foregin element re-made in the image of the dominant order. This

hostility to letters reﬂects an fear and opposition to that administrative aspect of society

 

3‘ Dou-dou is a part of afro-creole dialect, literally meaning “sweet-sweet,” that is colloquially similar in
meaningtosweetheart.

103

that makes a negation of folk culture necessary. Ling’s delegation of the responsibilities
of an elder to his son, Henry, ﬁlnctions as proof that the standard education divested
students of their respect for the traditional customs. Under such a system, traditional
behaviors such as conﬂict resolution took place between elders—not in an encounter
between an elder and a child. By giving his son license to deal with Tantie, Ling gives
precedence to education over the structure of village life, and its unspoken rules
regarding the respectﬁll treatment of its older members. Hence, picong speaks in a
broader reference to the importance of folk culture. Its very nature as an
underrepresented emblem of one element of national culture, places it—for the dominant
culture—in a state of absence. For ascendant colored classes, distance from the folk
meant an entree into the hallowed middle class and the rich. It created an ideological
distance from the register of the poor blacks—the vernacular speech that incorporates a
melange of Aﬁ'ican syntax, French-creole, Aﬁican word-stocks. The loss of the
vernacular then becomes an absence from the folk register, and subsequently, it is an
absence from the milieu of an identity framed by a history in which the mainstream did
not dominate.

The conﬂict between the comfort and familiarity of folk culture and the potential
for social advancement tlmt is woven into the performance of mainstream culture
becomes enacted in the struggle to two aunts fought over Tee. Aunt Beatrice, a
worshipper at the temple of complexion hierarchy, knows the importance of light skin
and a lifestyle that is a mimicry of the upper echelon of British-colonial society. It, more
than education and character, is the guaranteed entrée into the preeminence of the

dominant culture. Tantie reads the administrative forces of the government as a threat to

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her world—one in which the folk register is the mainstream, rather than the margin. The
vernacular apects of black culture in Trinidad were embedded in a history of resistance,
accommodation, and survival. Since this process began before the British took the island,
the melding of Aﬁican and French culture became a foundational aspect of black folk
culture. Its inﬂuence continues to this day. Yet, in the early to mid twentieth century, the
adoption of British customs gave blacks a greater chance for advancement than the
maintenance of African and French creole culture. Thus, distance ﬁ'om folk-speech and
folk values is the gauge by which the aunts wage their battle for the identity of Tee.

In Lovelace’s W, the aspects of the folk in Carnival
become a means to evaluate its potential as a force for social change in the early 1960s.
In Lovelace’s treatment the potentiality of the folk, Carnival reﬂects the promise of
revolutionary subversion, yet its realization is blocked by the politics of corporate
patronage and an inability to maintain the performance—and realities—of social reversal
beyond the Carnival season. Lovelace thus complicates notions of the Aﬁo-creole folk as
an effective source of permanent change—and history has been ﬁlled with conﬁrmations
of this view."7 Along with its purported failure to sustain a centralizing prominence in
the mainstream, in this view, folk culture becomes conﬁned to its practitioners, and the
administrative processes of iconization. These processes seek to circumscribe the culture
of the folk in a static tourist-friendly and white-washed cultural form.

Lovelace’s portrays Carnival as the performance of a collective desire for change.
In the giddy atmosphere that pervades the Carnival season, the rhetoric of communal and

political strength seems possible. Thus, this twentieth-century representation of folk

 

’7 Theuprisingsofthejamcttermderclassinthe1840s,1860$and1880seacheventually resultedina
general crackdown and subsequent adoption and oomercialization of the festival by mainstream culture.

105

potential re-presents the poorer environs of Port-of-Spain as a reﬂection of the struggle to
perform the Carnival aesthetics of self-actualization—a feature of the Afro-Trinidadian
relationship with the festival.

From the perspective of Aldrick “the Dragon,” the masquerade constructs him as
an inhabitant of a community for whom the festival is a site for expressing its communal
and individual history. Here, Carnival is a series of moments through which the legacy
of a dynamic past is refashioned to a present physical and psychological utterance. In the
promise of a connection with his personal history, the creation of the costume is also the
speech of the storyteller, preserving and re-inventing the past:

In truth, it was in a spirit of preisthood that Aldrick addressed his work;
for, the making of his dragon costume was to him always a new miracle, a
new test not only of his skill but of his faith: for though he knew exactly
what he had to do, it was only by faith that he could bring alive ﬁ'om these
scraps of cloth and tin that dragon, its mouth breathing ﬁre, its tail
threshing the ground, its nine chains rattling, that would contain the beauty
and threat and terror that was the message he took each year to Port of
Spain. It was in this message that he asserted before the world his self.
(50)
Despite the fact that the aggression and joyful celebration of licence and resistance does
not create a permanent political change, for the residents of the Hill it ﬁgures as a
remembrance of moments in time during which Carnival proposed to be a legitimate
representation of the rhetorics of black resistance. In Aldrick’s experience of the making

of the dragon is the invocation of the Aﬁ'o-Trinidadian oral traditions of Carnival. The

106

sacredness of the event of costume-making is created out of the reverence he feels for the
opportunity that is represented by the creation and performance of the dragon. Although
at the mid-twentieth century the masque was no longer as popular as it had been in the
1920s.38 The chance to articulate, in performance, one aspect of the legacy of creolized
folk culture that is voiced in the collective experience of this Pre-Lenten event, presents
an opportunity to relive history. It also gives the performer a chance to show respect for
his or her past. The priestly dedication with which he attends to the task of preparation
points to the importance of the desire for entry into the a dialogue with the dominant
discourse—one in which functions some elements of perforrnative resistance against the
mainstream construct of Carnival as a senseless, gay, ﬁ'olic.

A masque, popularized in the milieu of early twentieth-century Trinidad Carnival,
it began as a part of Devil-masques. In a dragon band, masqueraders painted red, black—
and in latter years of the twentieth century, blue—performed a representation of the
inhabitants of Hell. One facet of this performance was the aggressive, rippling ﬂuidity of
the Dragon dance. A costumed performance of lunges, spins and rampant hostility, its
shiny scales and rustling fabric—bristled with the anti-establishment nature of the
popular masques of mid-nineteenth century Trinidad. In the milieu of Aldrick’s world,
the dragon masque recalls the picongesque element of the black discourses that
circumscribe Carnival. Its invocation of the darkest elements of Christian mythology
creates a parody of the percieved monstrosity of slaves and their descendants—a satirical

portrayal of the contestation between the imperial project and its object.

 

’8 According to Brine Procope’s history of the dragon band, the 1920s saw a rise and climax in the
performance of this masque.

107

Aldrick’s incarnation—as the dragon costume develops-moves ﬁ'om acolyte, to
priest, to divine realization. His purpose in the making of the masque shows a dedication
to the preservation of a potentiality, yet to be realized, but one tht seems closer in the
moments of social protest that exists in the structure of Carnival. His reading of the
masque is a part of the rhetoric of the folk, the opposition to its place as menial and
extinct form of culture. He is then a storyteller in the oral tradition, who reconstructs his
individual and communal self, and his past, in the act of the telling. His audience—the
next generation of dragons, and the crowds of viewers—are the witnesses to this process
of folk-storytelling:

With the door of his little shack half open, Aldrick work solemnly on his
dragon costume, saying. nothing to Basil, the little boy of about ten who .-
came ﬁom somewhere in the neighbourhood of Alice Street, appeared just
so a year before, in the ragged khaki pants and sleeveless merino that was
his uniform all that year, and stood at the door and gazed in at the dragon
Aldrick was then making, looking from the costume to Aldrick with a
fullness of wonderment, and fascination and awe. . . maintaining that
attitude of reverence throughout, as if he were in the presence of holiness,
until one day Aldrick asked him to run to Miss Cleothilda’s parlour and
buy him a pack of cigarettes; and cemented in that act the boy’s
apprenticeship to dragon making. So the boy was here again this year.
And, working now, he seemed to divine exactly which tool or piece of

material Aldrick needed for his work, and her handed it to him with a

108

ceremonial solemnity as if he, the boy, were an acolyte, and Aldrick a

priest. (49)
Basil’s reverence for the making of the costume, a communal inheritance of lower and
underclass participation in Carnival culture, articulates an aesthetics of revolution. Like
Aldrick, he sees the dragon’s construction as a manifestation of skill and inspiration—a
promising escape from the material realities of poverty and disenfranchisement that
hangs over the residents of the Hill. Thus, in the process of creation, Aldrick re-places
the relevance of this communal folk inﬂuence ﬁ'om ineffectual to acutalization. This
provides a signiﬁcation upon folk culture as a deﬁning element of the incidental
masses—recalling its roots in the collision of cultures that occurred when the elite and the
black underclass encountered each other in the sanctioned and unsanctioned moments of ‘1

the festival.

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Claim

This project seeks to examine the relevance of folk culture in the
Caribbean by studying a feature of non-mainstream oral tradition known as
picong. This verbal warfare has persisted since the pre-Emancipation era in
Trinidadian history. This examination seeks to place itself in opposition to
readings that seek to determine Antillean folk culture as an irrelevancy—an
ineffectual source of self-actualization.

Hence, I examine hegemonic discourses that attempt to inscribe and
subjugate the Other, while glorifying and promoting a dominant discourse of
Westem-centered oral and literary uniformity. This functions as an attempt to give
voice to the uniqueness of Aﬁ'o-Trinidadian folk culture.

Hegemonic discourses—constructs of sameness within the Western
cultural canon—are used to deﬁne cultural products at the center and on the
perimeter of its ascendancy, as lacking in history and identity. Through this view,
the culture of a class that consisted of a social group who were seen ultimately as
chattel, was at best, negligible. After slavery, the rituals and rhetorical structures
were transferred from a rural environment to an urban milieu.

Seeking an understanding of the importance of picong in Afro-Franco
creolized folk culture and its signiﬁcation upon Carnival, and its expanding
inﬂuence on other aspects of Trinidadian culture. Since picong’s movement
from rural enclaves to urban lower and underclass living, served as a crossing

from static to dynamic geographical lines of oral progression, it demonstrates a

110

modernist ﬂexibility. It correlates the experiences of chronological and non-
linear history—making the dynamism of its role politically apparent.

For the colonial elite, the folk exists as a latency—a sign of the black
disenﬁanchised masses, who demographically constitute the culture of the folk—
a cultural feature that is irrelevant to the imperial project. The symbols of folk
culture, interpreted as a way of telling the margin’s story—and thus giving it a
validation unachieved within the dominant ideology.

Picong serves as useful template for reading the ways in which folk
culture is utilized as a means of understanding and creating one’s world. The
rhetorics of survival, resistance and self-actualization are made possible, in part,
by the rituals and traditions of folk culture. Hence, in a colonial context, the
dialectics of this collision of cultures becomes reﬂected in spaces where the voice
of the disenfranchised is heard.

Looking at picong’s place in Trinidadian culture, one ﬁnds that its power is in its

referential relationship to diverse elements of Afro-creole oral tradition. The nlral slave

societies, drum dances, carisos of the chantwells, the reverence for ranconteurship are all

invoked in the performance of picong. The reciprocal nature of this folk form is brought

to bear on the mainstream through the vehicle of Carnival. The Devil bands, Dragon,

Pierrot Grenade, Midnight Robber, Stickflghter and Calypsonian all hearken from within

the environs of an aﬁ'o-creole cultural fashioning. Eric Williams’ “Massa Day Done”

speech reﬂects picong’s reach into the realm of politics, invoking through its use the

specter of those masses who are circumscribed by its inﬂuence. The anti-establishment

nature of each of these folk creations points to a criticism of the Western-centered norms

lll

of social hierarchy that served as the foundation of the colonialist agenda. For
Trinidadian writers Merle Hodge, Earl Lovelace and Hollis LiverpooL the dynamic
features of modernism become enhanced by referencing the register of folk
consciousness. It provides a linkage to the past while reconstituting itself in a
contemporary milieu. It is this self-referential ability that has the potential to create new

cultural products that serve to articulate the socio-historical dynamics of the island.

112

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