Rubadiri Victor

PART ONE

It is difficult to explain to any young person what the Carnival of 30 years ago was like in terms of vitality, participation, creativity and scale.

I normally explain it to people like this, "It used to take you two hours to walk from Independence Square to Queen Street, Port of Spain."

That’s just two blocks. People were packed so tightly together for acres and acres, but also because you had to constantly stop to take in the riotous spectacles coming at you from every angle – costumed and human.

Now, Port of Spain on Carnival Monday and Tuesday is a ghost town. It is not just that the festival has migrated "uptown" to Woodbrook. Nowhere in Trinidad has anything remotely resembling the crowds of the past.

For many people in the know, the beginning of Carnival used to be Pan-Roun-d-Neck prelims in downtown Port of Spain. Months before Carnival.

That moment marked the coming of King Carnival. The city would be transformed almost instantly.

One moment, Port of Spain was a normal working city and then – in the twinkling of an eye in the twilight hour – it would become a sea of mostly "black bodies" as the whole of East PoS (and communities from all over the country) descended on the city. It was the same thickness as the then Carnival crowds – but without the costume spectacle.

Here the "spectacle" was sonic. The city became a womb of steel. A kingdom of steelband.

I say this to point out a very important fact that working-class "black people" were the main mass participants in the Carnival – as producers and consumers.

The people of East PoS, their artisan skill, entrepreneurial activity and imaginative power transformed Carnival. They powered and defined it during its foundational modern and golden era – from the moment of the Canboulay Riots in 1881 for one hundred years to the 1980s. One hundred years of transformation.

They were also the ones in their migrations, who took the Carnival to all corners of the globe. They midwived into existence the holy trinity of Pan, Mas and Calypso.

There is one Brazil, Venice and New Orleans carnival, but there are over 300 Trinidad-style Carnivals globally.

Most of these carnivals are in ex-colonial power metropoles where the sight of four "black people" liming together on a street corner is cause for police action – in Carnival, there are hundreds of thousands of "black bodies" and the authorities can’t do anything about it. That is the power of the TT vibe – and the Caribbean sensibility – when it flexes itself with confidence.

Carnival is TT’s most successful export. The two largest street festivals in the Western world are TT-style Carnivals – London Nottinghill and Brooklyn’s Labour Day – at their height had four million people take to those streets.

The 300-plus TT-Carnivals earn over $15 billion annually – hardly any of that redounds back to the East Port of Spain communities that generated that intellectual property.

Carnival regularly earns $1.1 billion in foreign exchange for TT and at its peak last year ea