Sonja Dumas
THE fountain in the middle of Woodford Square, now somewhat dilapidated, sits quietly as people walk past it. According to its plaque, it was “Presented to the Borough of Port of Spain by Gregor Turnbull Esquire of Glasgow, AD1866,” which makes it 159 years old. Whenever I’m in the square, I’m always fascinated by the fact that the fountain would have silently witnessed what we term “Jamette Carnival.”
I would call Jamette Carnival the mother of J’Ouvert and a major catalyst of the Carnival we know today. It is a confluence of energies rooted in resistance and celebratory practices emerging from Canboulay.
That word likely comes from the French words for “burnt cane” – cannes brûlées – creolised by West African pronunciation. Fires sometimes broke out in the canefields (often mysteriously, to be sure) and the Africans from various plantations would take torches to go to the burning site to address the crisis.
In the post-Emancipation period, they took the culture of these flambeaux, or burning torches, as a highly visual symbol of their freedom.
Some Canboulay iterations later, Jamette Carnival emerged. This is where the essence of African-Caribbean festival expression as we know it seeped deeply into the imagination of the wider population, which had previously expressed Carnival mainly as a series of balls at the mansions of plantation owners.
After 1838, the immediate post-emancipation period, there was the rise of West and Central African culture in Port of Spain, where the African people, many relegated to impoverished communal living spaces called barrack yards in the less developed, easternmost section of the city, expressed their resistance, resilience and resourcefulness out of the belly of their new circumstances.
Imagine, in 1866, and years after, that the Woodford Square fountain was privy to stick-fighting and drum rhythms and people processing through the streets, many of whom playfully portrayed grotesque characters – often caricatures of the ruling European classes.
These characters fuelled the classic objectives of the carnivalesque – a temporary inversion of social norms and an upending of a system that had brutalised so many. Imagine the colonial authorities attempting on occasion to enact ordinances to quell the drumming and the gathering of people, because this non-European version of Carnival was just too offensive. Imagine the Canboulay Riots of 1881, where Africans fought the colonial authorities for the right to express themselves in Carnival – and won.
So while the Jamette Carnival was a moment of ease and celebration, its underlying root was one of the resilience of a people. It was never just a street party – it was a sociopolitical statement. And the best of J’Ouvert of today seeks to keep that fire burning.
[caption id="attachment_1133633" align="alignnone" width="684"] Sonja Dumas -[/caption]
Many years ago, a friend described J’Ouvert as the moment when “everyone becomes more beautiful.”
How is this possible when the grotesque is so present? When
