The Carnival unity in diversity must go on

As a young man growing up in the country and of East Indian stock, I was made to see Carnival in terms of “we” and “they,” we as spectators and they as the creators and participants, often harbouring thoughts about us being “spiritual,” Shivratri being the festival celebrated in Hindu communities like mine during Carnival, and they being of the “devil,” a misconception arising out of my boyish response to “pay the devil” syndrome.

Not that I was any ardent advocate of this kind of dichotomised thinking.

Carnival Tuesday for me was more being the willing victim of owners of cinemas in San Fernando who shortchanged avid customers like myself by “cutting” shows to increase the number shown and so maximise attendance and profit.

But when I became a man I put away such childish thinking. Carnival took on a different picture with my acquired sense of being a Trinidadian away from the ethno-religious considerations of my early childhood.

I was now seeing Carnival as a mark of our unique creativity as one people, pretty as a rainbow, with a diversity not despite of, but because of our difference, of which the mas of Lionel Jagessar and Ivan Kalicharan in San Fernando and of Brian MacFarlane and Peter Minshall in Port-of- Spain, inter alia, is ample illustration.

But of late that oneness as a people, that unity in diversity, has taken on added significance in a world filled with so much ethnic strife, blood and violence.

I watched the parade of bands on TV, filled, among others, with so many beautiful women, some petite and polished, delicate and genteel in their “wining,” and others big and buxom, almost raucous and blithe in their gyrations, all beautiful in their own way, seemingly in a trance-like ethereal state, as it was all total enjoyment with no threat to their safety.

And I couldn’t help but think of another woman far away in Europe or the Middle East or other, equally beautiful, but covertly so, and also in a trancelike state, but not out of sheer bliss as ours, but out of a sense of divine mission to make the ultimate sacrifice in stealing the dream of innocents in a crowded train or bus or market place.

Which is why, for all its shortcomings and with all our problems as a people, Carnival must continue to be what it is — a moment of human camaraderie at its finest in this world here and now, even as others, for achieving just the opposite, see their salvation only in the next.

Dr Errol Benjamin ebenjami522@hotmail.

com