Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean

ISBN-13: 9780822368700

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Duke University Press

Publication Date: 06-07-2018

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.67(d)

Lyndon K. Gill is Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

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CHAPTER 1

Inheriting the Mask

A History of Parody in Trinidad's Carnival

Attention to same-sex desire in the Caribbean region — but especially in Trinidad — is haunted by a titillating fascination with Carnival. By no means unique to the Caribbean region, this fetishization of Carnival as the principal site of sexual possibility tends to foreclose — even in polite conversation — any other possibilities for an engagement with same-sex-desiring communities in T&T. Surely there is ethnographic research to be done about the various kinds of sexual fantasies enlivened by Trinidad's Carnival, but this is not that study. Instead, this particular engagement with Carnival foregrounds the artistry of design and performance in order to catch a glimpse of the epistemic possibilities imaginable in Carnival fantasy. By focusing briefly upon the history of racial play within the centuries-long tradition of the Trinidad Carnival, this chapter first sets the stage for an introduction to lauded mas man Peter Minshall. A retrospective of the life and work of this white gay Caribbean artist provides the context for the following chapter, which focuses in on Minshall's 2006 Carnival band, The Sacred Heart, which many prematurely presumed might be his last. This first chapter pair explores the lens the erotic provides for seeing the layered flesh of the political-sensual-spiritual in the performance history of Carnival spectacle as well as within the particular performance through which Minshall hopes to offer the nation symbolic salvation. By bringing this new erotic into view, Minshall's mas also gives first flesh to my epistemological intervention, challenging it to accommodate a specifically situated stage. Carnival provides this stage — at once literal and symbolic. So, although I may be approaching from an unanticipated angle, I admit that the following analysis is indeed — in its way — about desire in the Trinidad Carnival. Please allow me to reset the scene for you.

In Trinidad, Carnival is a season. Annually, the festivities begin with elaborate band launches as early as June and come to an end by Ash Wednesday (the Roman Catholic day of repentance). The word "carnival" likely originated in the Latin carnem levare, which became the Italian carne levare or carnevale and the French carnaval (Francophone Catholics are believed to have introduced the celebration to Trinidad). Literally meaning the raising, removal, or putting away of the flesh (as food), "carnival" most often refers to the season of revelry immediately preceding the Lenten fast, during which the consumption of meat is traditionally prohibited for Catholics. Gluttonous indulgence in the flesh (as food and as a synecdoche for corporeal excess) serves to prepare the devout to do without in preparation for Easter, the celebration of Jesus Christ's resurrection. Trinidad's Carnival reaches its climax on the day just before the symbolic mourning of Ash Wednesday; however, during the long sultry dance up to Carnival Tuesday's Parade of the Bands, the sheer quantity of fêtes, concerts, and other Carnival-related events is easily overwhelming, even for the born-and-bred Trinidadian. Still, Trinidad's adaptation of this Catholicized "pagan" rite — in various different incarnations, most certainly — has been celebrated on the island for at least the past two hundred years.

A Brief History of the Trinidad Carnival

Although the earliest Spanish settlers most likely introduced pre-Lenten festivities to the island, there is scant documentation of an annual Carnival celebration in Trinidad before the influx of French-speaking Creoles in 1783 (E. Hill 1972, 6; Cowley 1996, 11). Already a syncretic European ritual — the result of Roman Catholicism having been forced to assimilate pre-Christian rites that were too deeply rooted to be excised — preemancipation Carnival in Trinidad was reserved for the Creole upper class, who combined British and French celebratory traditions in their revelry (Campbell 1988, 8). Traditionally, this season of events would have included indoor masked balls, fêtes champêtres (pastoral or outdoor festivals), house-to-house visiting, hunting parties, street promenading, small musical bands, and practical jokes (Riggio 1998, 12–13; Brereton [1975] 2004, 53; Franco 2007, 28, 44). Although the influential minority white and mixed-raced participants summarily excluded the sizeable population of free black people from participating in these activities, these freed Africans were at least allowed to don masques in public during this period — a privilege altogether denied the enslaved people of the island (Campbell 1988, 8).

However, this prohibition did not prevent the enslaved from forming their own social societies from as early as the beginnings of the nineteenth century in Trinidad. Common throughout the island and ostensibly for the purpose of dancing and "innocent amusement," these organizations were generally known as convois (convoys) and later adopted the name regiments (Cowley 1996, 13) — both terms whispering rather loudly and audaciously about the other purpose some of these bands served. Frequently, these societies proved to be organizing nodes not only for revelry but also for revolt of various kinds and degrees of severity, especially during celebratory seasons such as Christmas and Carnival, when the social authorities would be engrossed in merriment (Campbell 1988, 3).

Hiding rebellious organizing in plain sight, these societies adapted the hierarchical structure of the European aristocracy and its attendant military for social structures also informed by familiar West African models of royal hierarchy; black kings and queens reigned over a family of fictive royal kin that extended as far as lesser nobility, all ostensibly presiding over an equally elaborate military hierarchy often appointed with flags and uniforms that the European colonial military had cast off (Campbell 1988, 3; Cowley 1996, 13–14). It is important to emphasize that this satirical play was not simply a mask for rebellion but also a symbolic enactment of the very challenge to authority that might ultimately culminate in a revolt of the enslaved. Here the mask and that which it attempts to hide share a single purpose, though it is approached on the surface with the ideological weaponry of mockery; beneath the mask, these enslaved people were preparing other, more tangible weapons. Postemancipation, this tradition of playful parody perfected in symbolic warfare would continue through to its performative formalization with the artillery band of 1834; this legacy dances right into the present century, followed by a long march of military and naval masquerades, which have become characteristic of Trinidad-style Carnival (E. Hill 1972, 14).

If Trinidad's white elite — whose prized militia was often the subject of farce grandly orchestrated by the enslaved (Cowley 1996, 27) — could not always appreciate the subject matter that the enslaved chose for pointed jest, they did share with them a penchant for parody. Perhaps it was this taste for mockery, most piquantly evidenced in their elaborate cannes brûlées–inspired enactments, that permitted the ruling elite to entertain humor at their own expense. From the French for "burnt canes," cannes brûlées in its earliest usage referred to both a phase in the sugarcane crop cycle and a narrowly averted plantation catastrophe. After the sugarcane harvest, the remaining stubs of this tropical grass would be burned in order to fertilize the soil for the next planting season and to guard against infestation by rodents or other crop pests; in the instance that crop infestation did occur prior to the harvest, fire would have been used to purge the vermin, resulting in an emergency harvest (Cowley 1996, 20). A spontaneous wildfire (a common enough occurrence during the parched-earth dry season) or a strategically planned conflagration — a form of surreptitious rebellion ignited by the enslaved — would also have required an emergency harvest.

Faced with an extremely time-sensitive challenge — a race against gluttonous flames to save the sweet cane before it began to ferment and sour in the heat — plantation owners would welcome bands of enslaved field hands (nègres jardins in French Creole, from the French nègre de jardin, "field slave") sent from neighboring estates; each band worked under the whip of its own slave driver, carried torches (flambeaux) for nighttime illumination, and moved in time with the pulsing rhythms of its drums and waves of chants used to maintain the pace of work (Cowley 1996, 20). Forced to cut and grind sugarcane night and day, these bands of enslaved laborers not only salvaged the season's crop but also provided a form of perverse entertainment for the unnerved planters, stimulated by the event despite haunting suspicions about machete-wielding, torch-bearing, chant-singing bands of the enslaved surrounded by their burning livelihood. For centuries, Carnival parody has been one of the principal means by which such social anxieties are performatively addressed; just as the enslaved used satire to strip naked the social hierarchy, the plantocracy used their position at the top of that hierarchy to ape those at the very bottom. In Trinidad's preemancipation Carnival, the island's French Creole elites enacted elaborate parodies of cannes brûlées; these planter aristocrats costumed themselves as tattered approximations of nègres jardins, toted lit flambeaux, and danced farcical versions of dances performed by the enslaved — the belair,bamboula,ghouba, and kalinda — in public street processions to the rhythms of "African" drumming and under the orders of whip-wielding, jestful slave drivers (E. Hill 1972, 11; Cowley 1996, 21; Riggio 1998, 13).

After emancipation and in commemoration of the end of apprenticeship on August 1, 1838, formerly enslaved peoples would annually perform their own reenactments of the cannes brûlées on the first day of August in symbolic defiance of the plantocratic parody, reappropriating this plantation event as part of a celebratory ritual. Symbolizing the burning spirit of resistance that could not be extinguished across generations of enslavement, the ceremonial Canboulay (a creolized rebaptism of the original French) extended over three days and nights, beginning with a spiritual ritual by torchlight during the predawn hours of August 1 (E. Hill 1972, 31; Elder 1998, 38; Cowley 1996, 33). At once a ceremony, a celebration, and a performative means by which to undermine the plantocracy's pointed parody — symbolically stoking their suspicion that the enslaved had intentionally lit cane fires as an act of revolt and were thus thoroughly enjoying the long last laugh — the Canboulay would be significantly shortened to a predawn rite and adopted as the opening ritual of Carnival before the close of the nineteenth century. Carnival scholars have not been able to determine the precise means by which Canboulay became Carnival's initiating rite. However, attention to the tradition of symbolic inversion and racial role reversal during the pre- and postemancipation Carnival season in Trinidad provides insight into the function of this repeatedly overwritten reenactment of forced plantation labor, an aristocratic mockery of it, rebellious resistance to that labor, and a commemoration of freedom from it. Canboulay is perhaps an appropriate beginning for Carnival because it is pregnant with the racial plays that have always characterized the season in Trinidad.

By the 1860s the character of Carnival would change significantly. The emergence of Jamette or Jamet Carnival during this period would lead to increasing efforts to suppress certain masques deemed obscene according to the imported Victorian moral structures of the middle class and colonial government (Brereton 1979, 152–75; Franco 2007, 29). A creolized form of the French diamètre ("diameter"), the term jamette or jamet referred to someone who existed below the diameter of "decent" society; petty criminals, commercial sex workers, pimps, the chronically unemployed, and various other members of the "social underworld" — including members of Port-of-Spain's nascent working class and newly arrived immigrants from the neighboring islands — were thought to reside on the wrong side of the social divide between respectability and ill repute in part because they all shared the city's crowded slums (Pearse [1956] 1988, 259–61; D. Wood 1968, 245–46; Campbell 1988, 10; Scher 2003, 39; Brereton [1975] 2004, 54). If the middle class — across the color spectrum and including francophone and anglophone alike — found what they perceived to be the unabashed impropriety of Jamette Carnival generally objectionable, they were particularly unnerved and appalled by the sexually explicit play and the transvestitism that were quite common in the final decades of the nineteenth century (Cowley 1996, 73, 128–31; Brereton [1975] 2004, 55–56).

Encouraged by the middle class, the colonial government would take increasingly bolder steps toward suppressing "indecency" in the Carnival, beginning with the Canboulay; however, at each turn bands of masqueraders met the challenge to their festival with aggressive resistance and creative indignation. This pas de deux would eventually culminate in the Canboulay Riots of 1881 and various succeeding conflicts between colonial authorities and Canboulay celebrants, resulting ultimately in the passage of punitive legislation in 1883 and 1884 that effectively banned the Canboulay completely by criminalizing drum playing, stickfighting, and torch bearing — especially in urban areas (E. Hill 1972, 25; Batson and Riggio 2004, 32–33; Brereton [1975] 2004, 60, 63). Between 1896 and 1919, the Carnival itself was effectively purged of its most undesirable elements through bans against what were presumed to be the jamette elements of the festival, including transvestitism and other disparaged masquerades as well as obscenity in speech or action. Determined to tidy up Trinidad's Carnival, but refusing to relinquish this quintessentially Creole fête, the island's elite began to return to the celebrations they had largely stepped away from in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The Victory Carnival of 1919 marked another character change in the long history of Trinidad's Carnival — the island's well-to-do had returned to the ball. Appropriating the festival for burgeoning nationalist purposes, the Creole middle class created "a new public culture that preserved elements of the working-class Carnival dressed in middle-class costume" (Cowley 1996, 132–33; Scher 2003, 50, 52–53).

This middle class tolerance of the Carnival as a celebration of protonational identity would be combined with the very early commercialization of the festival in Trinidad's post–World War II years (E. Hill 1972, 85, 87). If Carnival represented the nation's cultural uniqueness and vibrancy as the colony marched toward Independence in the late 1950s, after Trinidad gained Independence in 1962, Carnival also increasingly represented a source of revenue. By the 1970s, it was this revenue in turn — provided by a new middle and upper class enjoying the wealth of the nation's increasing oil revenues — that ushered in a gilded age of masquerade over which reigned the royalty of masquerade design: George Bailey (who died prematurely on August 14, 1970), Harold Saldenah, Carlisle Chang, and Wayne Berkeley — each artist leaving his imprint on the modern history of Carnival aesthetics. During these boom years, masquerade designers expanded on the increasingly elaborate presentations — enlivened by growing numbers of masqueraders — that many had begun experimenting with as early as the 1950s (Gulick 2016d). Many of these well-educated, middle-class artists used more modern materials and their knowledge of design to set different aesthetic standards for the Carnival genre (Green and Scher 2007, 15). But by the time Peter Minshall entered this lineage of mas designers, the era of epic (historical) pageantry had given way to decorative extravagance, middlebrow fantasy, and escapist bourgeois revelry (Gulick 2016d).

Minshall: The Life and Work of a Mas Man

Peter Minshall himself most succinctly explains how one of the most iconic Trinidadian artists of at least the last five decades comes to be born in Guyana: "I was born on July 16, 1945. The world was at war. So apparently were my parents. On account of their impending divorce, I was ferried to [then] British Guyana in my mother's womb, to be delivered into the world at the Georgetown General Hospital, surrounded by her loving family, soon thereafter to be brought back to Trinidad in her arms. I was the last of four children. The others were all born in Trinidad" (Minshall 2015).

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

A Port of Entry

Fetish and Folklore in a Yearning Region xxi

Introduction A Queer Cartography of Desire 1

Interlude I From Far Afield: A Queer Travelogue (Part I) 19

Chapter 1 Inheriting the Mask: A History 0f Parody in Trinidad's Carnival 31

Chapter 2 Peter Minshall's Sacred Heart and the Erotic Art of Play 51

Interlude II From Far Afield: A Queer Travelogue (Part II) 77

Chapter 3 Echoes of an Utterance: A History of Gender Play in Calypso 87

Chapter 4 Calypso Rose's "Palet" and the Sweet Treat of Erotic Aurality 107

Interlude III From Far Afield: A Queer Travelogue (Part III) 127

Chapter 5 A Generation with AIDS: A History, A Critique 141

Chapter 6 Between Tongue and Teeth: The Friends For Life Chatroom as Erotic Intervention 159

Interlude IV From Far Afield: A Queer Travelogue (Part IV) 187

Conclusion Black Queer Diaspora and Erotic Potentiality 197

Notes 217

Bibliography 243

Index 269