Black Kings: aesthetic representation in Carnival in Trinidad and London.

In this article, I present an analysis of different celebratory movements in African-derived Carnivals artfully woven together through the stigma of European colonization and the macabre stamp left on the regions of the world it colonized. The article focuses on two geographical locales: Carnival in Trinidad, a victim of European imperialism, and its relocation in the global city of London, home of one of the major European colonizers. In Carnival, mas (a visual enactment with spectacular costumes) is played (kinesthetically displayed through dance, music, and collective participation). Bands (groups) of masqueraders (dancers in costume) play mas (don a costume to participate in Carnival) with each other on carnival days.

By conjuring up the creative weaving together of these diverse strands of carnival experience, 1 concentrate here on how Carnival is being reinterpreted as a major symbol for Afro-Caribbean (and Asian) peoples to redecipher and reconstruct their fragmented histories, which were effectively eroded through colonization and other problems of belonging encountered in the two metropolises. These degrees of difference manifested in Carnival are examined to draw together a variety of marginal voices spinning out collaged messages--of confrontation, rebellion, protest, and resistance--in two predominant cultural spaces, as these dispossessed individuals continually seek to dismantle and reposition both colonial and neocolonial hierarchies.

The title of this article--"Black Kings"--provided me with a framework to explore aesthetic representation in these African-derived Carnival celebrations through (1) a unique type of spatial ordering engendered by plantation slavery and (2) a dismantling of the colonial standard language code contained in the meaning of the word King. This term is a specific western European configuration. It stands for upper-class norms and values, which automatically put certain structures in place. The King resides in a palace/place/space, a monumental dwelling, which conjures up images of beauty associated with amassed and acquired wealth as well as respectability. This is the Big House--home of the master/colonial overlord--which ritually prioritizes the polarization of colonialism and its accompanying oppressive, authoritarian structures. The Big House conjures up images of fixity, permanence, stasis, and sterility associated with the norms and behavior of the elite class.

In contrast, outside the sacred space of the palace/Big House is the surrounding slave yard, with the plantations, slaves' houses, and masses of enslaved peoples, whose very existence is defined in the so-called economic capital sustenance of the Big House. Here one also finds the King's subjects--these enslaved masses--who have pledged allegiance, obedience, and respect for the King. In addition, this out-of-place space--the margins surrounding the Big House--is an overcrowded space. It is linked to coercion and denigration, and it is flooded with memories of the abysmal darkness of the Middle Passage and its accompanying trauma for the African enslaved.

I have used this dichotomy as a metaphor, first, to reconstruct that spatial division engendered by slavery in the West Indies and elsewhere (in this case, Europe) and its devastating effects on the lives of millions of Africans, and second, to demonstrate how this western European prescribed configuration--translated aesthetically as erasures and borders-can be, and is, used by displaced individuals to deconstruct those very dominant social structures and values. The end result--and the Black Kings I have selected demonstrate this--is a rearrangement, a relocation, of the African estranged peoples in the present, so that their culture in its different forms--thrust into the margins, occupying the out-of-place space outside of the sacred sphere of the Kings' palace--takes center stage over those other forms of prescribed European traditions and customs. Thus, marginal space and, by extension, marginality are transformed and converted into a power space, another type of sacred space to reconstitute and (re)create African denigrated traditions and values. I have presented this process elsewhere: "The black enslaved resist yet rearrange the destructive energies of Western-European culture--be that colonial, post-colonial or even neo-colonial to use that tenuous space in the 'psychological womb'--to make room for the task of embodiment/power/power relations/body politics, (re)creation that is forever dawning, beginning, becoming" (Alleyne-Dettmers 2003, 490).

Thus, interstitial space becomes the site to render colonial space ambiguous through its disruption of the dominant, colonial social order and its repressive hegemonic structures. Previous scholarship interpreted this dichotomy especially for Carnival (and other rituals of reversal festivals) as "inversion," or "the world turned upside down," and postulated that power groups must allow this to happen to prevent insurrection and revolution from subordinate groups (Babcock 1978; Manning 1983; Bakhtin 1984; Abrahams 1987). While there is some truth in interpreting Carnival as a mechanism of social control, this view does not present the entire spectrum for Carnival. These perspectives actually neglect Carnival's social history and, as such, express a functionalist bias by reducing Carnival and other ritual forms of celebration to a "genetically programmed function" (Scott 1990, 178). The problem with this perspective, according to Scott, is that it "ascribes a unique agency to elites.... which allow subordinate groups to play at rebellion, lest they resort to the real thing" (178).

I believe that it is more effective to acknowledge Carnival's historical origins, to see Carnival as a ritual site that can and does facilitate a unique forum to dissect the social order and to carve out a public power space for political yet cultural expression of dissident groups. In this way, such groups confront the powerful and thus achieve a sense of autonomy and empowerment for themselves.

My position itself is thus politically situated--a site of confrontation, even contestation, inextricably linked to processes of communication and a lack of communication. The power of this metaphor, as I see it, lies in its appropriation of the dominant European discourse, to disempower the powerful through its imaginative re-evocation of power for the powerless hence, my title Black Kings.

On the macro level, I present a new mode of reading Trinidadian Carnival and its diasporic relocations (in this case, at Notting Hill, London). I see Carnival as a highly politicized device to decenter oppressive colonial structures, to move toward the (re)construction of destroyed communities through aesthetic representation and creativity as expressed in its diverse celebratory forms.

My analyses and interpretation in this undertaking are influenced by my ten years of research on Trinidadian Carnival from the outside as a professional anthropologist and by my active and continual participation in Trinidadian and Notting Hill Carnival from the inside as a native masquerader (participant dancer in costume). My ongoing research trips to Trinidad and Notting Hill, London, since 1989 have also enhanced my interpretation, as have the political, postcolonial discourse, aesthetics, and history that I received from Trinidadian informants and other scholars. The devil iconography described here comes from a recollection of my Catholic education in the West Indies at a convent school and memories of young girls and nuns praying for all the sins that would be committed at Carnival time and all the devils that would be let loose from Hell during the Carnival season. My intellectual, anthropological orientation is owed to Victor Turner, and the school of symbolic anthropologists, who provided the concepts of liminality and "twixt and between spaces," which have later been interpreted as the crossroads (Babcock 1978) and the marketplace (Abrahams 1987; (1) Jonas 1990). I have developed this further to refer to interstitial space, what I see as an emergence from the "psychological womb"--innovating on Wilson Harris's (1981) perceptions of the tenuous sacred space in the psyche of the colonial victim that confronts the trauma and turns it back outside through celebration. This creates an anchor for a history marked by dislocation and a present that is still complicated by continued race and class inequalities.

Helen Tiffin's (1987) concept of "canonical counter-discourse," a process of deconstructing Western systems of significance and signification authorized through canonical texts, has also influenced my interpretation. Although her argument refers to dismantling scribal representations of imperial hegemony, I see this counterpart very clearly in masquerading (originally from French le masque, meaning a covering for the face, creolized to refer to parading in public in a costume that provides a form of disguise and a sense of anonymity). I have transferred the concept of canonical counter-discourse to the realm of aesthetic representation in mas (in costume) that is played in Carnival. This I perceive as one of the most powerful modes of criticizing and demystifying imperialism through a politicized use of the body and its embodiment in the entire network that constitutes aesthetic representation.

Finally, James Scott's (1990) theory of the "hidden transcript" has been very useful to me. Scott emphasizes "arts of political disguise" to demonstrate how subordinate groups use other forms of expression--whether verbal or nonverbal texts, rap, graffiti, euphemisms, trickster tales, or rituals of celebration such as Carnival--as "hidden transcripts" to play out marginalization in public spaces or sites, thereby re-creating and developing a new status and another sense of power for themselves. Scott defines the "hidden transcript" as the "privileged site for nonhegemonic contrapuntal, dissident, subversive discourse" (25), or the way social forms of subordination are played out in public.

I have applied Scott's thesis specifically to aesthetic representation in Carnival. I argue that, through the medium of forms of resistance against the established order (in the case of Carnival), disguise, and by consequence anonymity facilitated through playing mas (donning a costume to participate in Carnival) and its embodiment through dance (what Western eyes have interpreted as lascivious dance), a social site or another power space is created. In this interstitial space, subordinate, marginalized groups can and do make marginalization privileged and public. In this way, they can look fearlessly into "the teeth of power" (Scott 1990, xiii) and disrupt the dominant social order and its repressive, hegemonic structures. The veiled messages presented in this interstitial space confirm yet dismantle the "public transcript." For my purposes, the prevailing public view of the King's power is confirmed, but simultaneously, the participants--the Black Kings--deconstruct that very power, thereby empowering and providing a new sense of autonomy for themselves.

What I have chosen to compare relates to a recelebration of black African culture and its empowerment through Carnival--destroyed/blackened through white colonial domination, yet paradoxically enlightened, (re)created and (re)visioned by innovation on the various historical legacies (African, Asian, European, Hispanic) in the inextinguishable fires of black resistance, the black in Black Kings. For Trinidadian Carnival, I will look at the celebration of Jour Ouvert (open day), the actual start of the carnival celebrations, whose origins date back to the first Emancipation Carnival of 1838, when the slaves were freed. Not surprisingly, the celebration of Jour Ouvert was rejected by the upper planter class as the "noise and disorder" of the freed, black slaves. The Jour Ouvert celebration is a conscious progression away from a structured, French-European celebratory world into an asymmetrical, enigmatic world--a ritually created safe place of disorientation and marginality. As such, the margins of the King's palace, the Big House, are transformed into "the liminal zone" (Turner 1967, 1974a, 1974b), the threshold, the "twixt and between worlds," from which the creative world of black African-Trinidadians/Caribbeans metamorphose.

With respect to Notting Hill Carnival, celebrated on the last Monday in August, another problematic is at work. This Carnival was transported to the global center, London, by hordes of Trinidadian and other Caribbean peoples who came to London seeking better economic conditions. Home, or the quest for home in London, led to rejection by the so-called mother country, marginalization, and an uneasy consciousness of one's colonial status when these Trinidadians (and others) found themselves confronted with a European civilization that, at home in the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, they were taught to call their own. Carnival loses its status as a celebration of national culture.

Black Kings, as I present them, deliberately cross borders, moving between different celebratory carnival movements, ethnicities, genders, and geographical spaces to challenge given boundary demarcations and to dismantle certain Western fixities such as resistance and incorporation. The first set of Black Kings to be considered is the celebration of Jour Ouvert in Trinidad and Tobago.

The Dawning of Trinidadian Carnival: Jour Ouvert Portrayed

Jour Ouvert (hereafter called Jouvay, the Creole version used in contemporary Carnival) signals the dawning or the opening and is the official start of the celebration of Carnival in Trinidad. The essence of the Jouvay celebration lies in the spontaneous collective performances of the Trinidadian populace. These can be divided into three parts:

1. The performances of the ole mas characters, a collection of motley costumes and rags from previous carnivals, with a highly creative verbal statement, depicted on a placard carried by each participant; (2)

2. The performances of the ole time characters (traditional carnival characters); and

3. The Jouvay Carnival Bands.

To describe all the features of Jouvay is beyond the scope of this article. I shall highlight one of the ole time characters--the Jouvay devils--and describe the Jouvay mud bands and their accompanying Jouvay masqueraders, divided into sections led by a King to provide a flavor for what happens at the start of Jouvay and its significance. (3)

Jouvay begins in darkness and rightly so, since Jouvay dates back to the first Emancipation Carnival, which developed in the interstices of French-European, upper-class Carnival. Jouvay comes from the slave yard, behind the King's palace. In the darkness, the audience's first experience, shapes and forms--bands of masqueraders portraying black and blue devils, imps, dragons, and others--are moving and dancing to a cacophonous musical din. By the time the sun comes up, the parade has already reached its climax, representing and reverberating with the inner pulse of the society--its feelings, its discontent, and its pain. Jouvay's dynamic symbolism rests in this literal opening up of what was suppressed through slavery to allow it to resurface in the black fires of resistance. As such, in Jouvay, black West Indians move into their own open day, their rebirth. They can resurrect their buried African ancestral heritage, thereby creating new openings for themselves and a renewed sense of black consciousness. Like a chrysalis, Jouvay emerges, moving out of itself and making room for other masks to reconstitute the destroyed fragments of an African past to reinstate them in the carnival present. One might then ask: What are these character portrayals? What messages do they convey? I begin with the Jouvay devils.

In the wee hours of Carnival Monday morning--just around 2:00 A.M.--the Devils--Jab (French, Le diable, meaning devil) Molassi or Molasses Devils--come out on the streets. Jouvay, the Carnival's first movement, has just begun. The devils' entire bodies, including their faces and hair, are smeared with molasses, mud, tar, or grease, in colors ranging from blue, black, red, and brown to intensify their ugliness (Fig. 1). The costume is minimal: body-fitting shorts, smeared black, with a wiry tail and a brush of hemp attached to the end. They dance with overtly sexual pelvic gyrations. As part of the devils' entourage, their band of followers generally carry the sticky substance around in a chamber pot, threatening to daub and dirty other masqueraders and bystanders if they refuse to pay some type of money to send the evil characters back to hell. The followers beat out a monotonous din on empty oil drums or biscuit tins (see Fig. 2), which is constantly punctuated by the shrill blowing of whistles and whistle-like screams as they incessantly chant, "Pay de Devil, Jab! Jab!"

This type of mas is loaded with multiple signifiers, some of which I highlight here. The icon of the devil originated in the European medieval miracle plays, where death and the devil formed a part of man's everyday existence. It is also linked to French Roman Catholic ethics signifying Western concepts of good and evil. It is claimed that the devil and his horde of fallen angels roam the earth on the two days of Carnival before the beginning of the Catholic season of Lent to test the virtues of the faithful (Procope 1988). In every form that has appeared (except for the Jab Jabs or Coolie devils, another type of devil mas not discussed here), almost all the features of the mas relate to this Eurocentric interpretation of ugliness and the Western dichotomy of good and evil. The devil is associated with high-class theater inside upper-class theater houses--the King's palace, if you like. Most literary scholarship has described this devil form in Euro-American terms, tracing the origins of the devil mas to the religious prejudices of the Protestant English press reports on post-emancipation carnival. The British opinion was that Carnival was "savage," "demonic," and "devilish." According to Andrew Pearse (1988), the black masqueraders were stigmatized as "Children of the Devil," and attempts were made to outlaw their Carnival practices on the grounds of the worthlessness of the indigenous culture. The British press claimed that the blacks responded by producing characters from hell in their attempts to topple the white superstructure. In the first instance, Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago begins with the devils roaming through the streets--popular theater outside of the realm of respectability. This beginning provides them with their dynamic power, as they actually attack the bystanders and make them pay money to get rid of them. Political aggression within the sanctioned play frame of Carnival is directed at the dominant power figures, in the very counterattack that they are made to pay to not be dirtied further with mud, tar, or grease. There is a political type of electricity here as society's underdogs--the evil, black devils--can confront publicly the teeth of power through ritual mockery and thereby empower themselves. Second, the devil is black, and that blackness in Western terms is associated with evil. The public transcript of evil is confirmed.

However, blackness has another relevance for the Jouvay devils. Although they share the Western devil's blackness, their reenactment of this devil form is their conscious retranslation of generations of brutal suffering into the opening or dawning of a common cultural voice. This blackness encapsulates the torn African spirit inside turned back outside, not as shame but as triumphant celebration. Jouvay devils thus create the spirit of the mas, as opposed to Carnival and pretty masquerade. They do not put on a mas, but the mas comes out from inside, the spirit that transforms the black smeared body into a site of protest to retrace the erasure of origins in a colonial past. In this ritual straddling of boundaries--the African broken world of darkness and the new carnival presence--African creation begins again, with blackness becoming a part of a new identity, a positive vision of black selfhood. The Jouvay black devils are all-encompassing when directed at the collective black experience. The Jouvay devil form thus becomes a symbol of black history, since playing the devil stylizes the ambiguities and self-conflicts associated with the blacks' quest for selfhood, manifested in their need to redefine not only themselves but also their sense of home in an environment in which the intimate structures were alien to them. Jouvay devil mas is a political call to black awareness.

Another important feature is the music associated with Jouvay devils. Generally, it is a cacaphonic symphony played on drums of discarded biscuit tins and oil drums. Again, this type of music--noise to Western ears--represents the peoples' creative response to the fragmentation of their cultural reality. Although economic and political oppression may have annihilated the sacred drums of the African heritage, the industrial waste of Western-defined postcolonial society engenders new drums, new celebratory forms, to reshape the unrecorded ancestral past. Thus, although the Jouvay world may appear to be disoriented and shapeless, outside and on the fringes of acceptable society, it produces a new world that has survived, flourished, and even transcended the oppressive boundaries of the King's monumental palace inside, to make black innovation possible.

Jouvay masqueraders do not wear pretty costumes, instead, the body itself is ritually transformed into the artistic medium to displace conventional artistic structures. Jouvay masqueraders smear their bodies with mud to make a variety of statements--political, ritual, cultural, and aesthetic. Each band, however, is led by a Black King, generally an elaboration on the band's theme.

Mud is an important feature of the mas, intensifying the masqueraders' ugliness. Through de-costuming not dressing up--the body, the actual smearing of the body is also highly politicized. First, the mud of Jouvay is considered as dirt, and Jouvay itself has been stigmatized by western European civilization as dutty mas (ugly, dirty masquerade). However, the mud/dirt of Jouvay paradoxically becomes the life-giving power, a ritual cleansing, almost like medicine for the destroyed symbols of the African tribe. Mud is a dominant source of power because it provides the medium for spiritual genesis, a ritual return to origins, giving back creative energy, while simultaneously infusing the participants with a new sense of knowledge and the freedom that knowledge brings from the enslaving structures of deprivation, discontinuity, and loss: the King's palace, the colonial overlords, the Big House. Mud, together with the gesture of smearing bystanders with mud as the Jouvay mud masqueraders go by, designates the paradoxical life-giving power embedded in what those in power define as dirty and as waste. Jouvay mud masquerades play on the cleanliness of the powerful, yet they reconstruct that very cleanliness to create another power space for themselves.

Jouvay participants feel that Jouvay must happen; they must de-costume to allow the mas--the ugliness, the cracks, the malaise of the society, the actual spirit inside--to manifest itself ritually. The body is stripped of its civilizing veneer--its clothes--to manifest the hidden spirit. Jouvay is a ritual determination to reveal the crushed, fragmented spirit, to make room for light and the task of (re)creation that is forever only beginning. It is no small wonder that the Jouvay celebration is the beginning, the dawning, and the first movement in the series of events that constitute the celebration of Carnival.

Canboulay! Out of the Fire Comes Dance of the Cloth

With the next Black King, the geographical locale has changed to Notting Hill Carnival in London. As already pointed out, with the change of geographical locale, the parameters change. Caribbean migrants reconfronted with the legacies of colonialism find themselves doubly marginalized and displaced, on the fringes of British mainstream society in a world where agency is continually denied. The question then is: What happens to these migrants when they are rejected in their so-called mother country?

To examine Notting Hill Carnival and its attendant problems, I have chosen another Black King--the Gayelle or stick-fighting yard. This was a King's portrayal from the band South Connectons and their theme, Canboulay! Out of the Fire Comes Dance of the Cloth. This presentation relates to a warrior tradition that originated in Trinidadian Carnival outside the canons of upper-class norms and values. With a black warrior king celebrating in the home of European colonization, Carnival has assumed another guise, that is, a foreground to disrupt a politics of identity based on the easy equation of colonizer and colonized, exploiter and exploited. In Trinidadian Carnival, the Gayelle evolved from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century jamette (from French, la diametre, meaning below the diameter of social respectability) yard bands following the emancipation of the slaves. It originally referred to the yard where bands of prostitute women and low-class black men went around together during the year, singing, dancing, and fighting with sticks, another custom adopted from the militia of the pre-emancipation era when personal scores were settled with the sword (Hill 1972).

In Notting Hill, however, the Gayelle, manifested in the Black King's costume of Canboulay, assumes another set of meanings so that carnival camouflage and impersonation reveal another set of truths. According to Ray Mahabir (2000), the designer of Canboulay! Out of the Fires Comes Dance of the Cloth, the Gayelle is carnival cartography of the historical and political relocation of the third world peoples in the European diaspora and a call for agency for the predicament of these peoples in this Eurocentric world. To clarify the role that the Gayelle actually plays in this performance, it is important to describe briefly the story line for the theme Canboulay! Out of the Fire Comes Dance of the Cloth.

In nineteenth-century Trinidad, Canboulay (derived from French Cannes Brulees, "burning canes") was the public celebration of the slaves who turned out en masse from neighboring plantations to assist in putting out cane fires. When cane was burned, the slaves had to cut and grind it immediately, before the juice turned sour. The slaves were herded together by the sound of horns, shells, and the cracking of whips, and they carried lighted torches as they walked in procession to the burning plantations. When the work was completed, they returned home in small groups, singing along the way. This was a very important occasion because it was the only time that slaves from different plantations were assembled.

With emancipation on August 1, 1838, the slaves took to the streets and celebrated their newly acquired freedom by re-enacting Canboulay, transforming it into an anniversary symbol of resistance and emancipation. Eventually, the celebrations moved to the days preceding Ash Wednesday, and at this stage, Jour Overt, an emancipation celebration, was born.

At Notting Hill, the carnival theme Canboulay! Out of the Fire Comes Dance of the Cloth appropriated this historical celebration and transformed it into a story about new beginnings. According to the designer, "the action of the burning cane was a symbol for the end of the old work cycle and the beginning of a new one" (Mahabir 2000). Capitalizing on this notion of beginnings, he divided the story line into two parts. The first part addressed negation and destruction, represented in a burning cane fire that got out of hand and burned down the village. The only sign that was left of the village was an old trunk with a few pieces of cloth. Children choreographed this part of the mas, with sections depicting reptiles, mice, the sugar cane, villagers, and rhythm makers from among the village folk (see Figs. 3 and 4).

[FIGURES 3-4 OMITTED]

At the center of the performance is a battle between Good (Mama La Term, mother of the Earth and Queen of the band) and Evil (the Blue Devil, of Trinidadian Jouvay--here, a creature of destruction). The king of the band analyzed here--the Gayelle--represents the traditional stick-fighting yard, where stick fights take place in the stick-fighting ring. After the fire, the Gayelle is responsible for calling the people back together, and the people are once more reunited. From then onward, the people begin to dance because they each receive a piece of cloth. Their dancing conjures up all the different ethnicities on the island of Trinidad and Tobago, depicting in the second half of the band affirmation, reconstruction, and a celebration of new life through dance.

The entire story takes place in the dark of midnight, with the burning cane fires lighting up the first half of the band. When the conflict takes place in the ring, the Gayelle appears. The Gayelle is literally a black King in that his entire costume is black, encapsulating the darkness of night, when stick fighting generally takes place (see Fig. 5). The Gayelle's costume is a half-circle, which symbolizes the actual stick-fighting ring, or gayelle, where the fights took place, the other half of the circle being filled with back-up singers and stick fighters' followers. The costume makes a complete circle when viewed from both sides, and the Gayelle actually dances in a way that creates a circle that blocks off the rest of the band. When he turns, it is as if a curtain comes up--the blackness of night--from which the color spills over into light, dance, rebirth, and celebration of new life. All the other sections of the band dance through the Gayelle's costume, creating the dance of the cloth--the change over from midnight and dark night to daylight--as the Gayelle vanishes from view.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

By reenacting slavery in the Carnival present of Eurocentric England, the Gayelle's circle and his circular dance dramatize the persistence of colonialism in the so-called postcolonial world by giving culture back to the dispossessed--drum, song, and slave dance--which colonialism denied and still continues to deny. He thus transforms slave absence, and by extension migrant absence in London, into an identifiable presence. In this way, the Gayelle, and by implication the Canboulay theme, was an attempt to renegotiate Trinidadian/Caribbean identity for those on the margins of an oppressive society. The Gayelle's circle was a reinterpretation of repression and destruction creating the moment of transformation from disenfranchisement to reunification and (re)construction. In this sense, the Gayelle provided collective hope and empowerment for the estranged Caribbean migrants in the British metropolis.

I have tried to demonstrate here how Carnival is used as a highly politicized device to decenter oppressive colonial structures, to move toward the (re)construction of destroyed communities through aesthetic creativity. In this way, through the use of mas and the actual playing of the mas, Carnival is a celebration with a hidden transcript, one that provides autonomy and empowerment not only for black dispossessed peoples of the African-Caribbean diaspora but also for the dispossessed all over the globe. Carnival is a ritual journey of reversal--a going back into the fires of colonial damnation to be reborn in the same light of its Jouvay celebration to (re)creation and new life. Therein lies its special power.

(1.) Abrahams (1987, 177) describes the importance of another view of festivals, as more emphasis is placed on what happens in the marketplace: "But as societies become tied to the marketplace as well as the temple and other holy places, the two tend to become disassociated. 'High' seriousness becomes the special responsibility of the priest. 'Low' play and the carnivalesque spirit is put in the hands of the strange ones, the free spirits, or those commonly excluded from the center of ceremonial life. In such a society, play is carried out in defiance as well as renewal."

(2.) The ole mas characters are not discussed here because they no longer appear in contemporary Jouvay.

(3.) Masqueraders are generally participants in costume. In Jouvay, however, they strip away the costume and smear their bodies with mud, tar, or grease.

The author sincerely thanks Ray Mahabir, designer of the mas Canboulay! Out of the Fire Comes Dance of the Cloth, for all his time spent in long interviews to describe the significance of this particular theme and his agenda for the Carnival forum at Notting Hill, London.

REFERENCES

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Alleyne-Dettmers, Patricia Tamara. 2003. Afro-Caribbean celebratory traditions: Women and power relations in the celebration of Carnival. Rituelle Welten 12, nos. 1-2:488 507.

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--. 1974a. Dramas, fields, metaphors: Symbolic action in human society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

--. 1974b. Liminal to liminoid, in play, flow and ritual: An essay in comparative symbology. In The anthropological study of human play, edited by Edward Norbeck and John Buettner-Janusch, 53-92. Rice University Studies no. 60. Houston, Tex.: William Marsh Rice University.

Trinidadian-born, PATRICIA TAMARA ALLEYNE-DETTMERS was educated in Trinidad, the United States, and the Federal Republic of Germany. She is a professionally trained linguistic anthropologist who has studied and researched Trinidadian Carnival and Carnival in Britain. Currently, she teaches in the department of Sociology at the University of Hamburg, Germany.