SKIPPING CARNIVAL

Then there’s the additional incentive of the parade falling on the last bank holiday for the year until Christmas, an idea I still find hard to get accustomed to. I mean, what sort of country runs out of public holidays by the eight month of the year? It is also probably one of, if not the last days of the year when one is willing to leave one’s house and spend the whole day outdoors, autumn approaching faster than a spranger outside a Frederick Street ATM on a Friday night.

It is supposedly the biggest street party in Europe, with over two million people expected to be there this year, gorging themselves on both flesh and food. So why, instead of shaking myself through the streets of London, am I sitting here in bed wearing an oversized Vancouver t-shirt with coconut bake crumbs on the sheet next to me, writing this column?

Well, part of the reason is the constantly schizophrenic, manic depressive mood swings that pass for English weather up here. The sun is shining now as I write this at lunchtime, but this morning when I opened one eye and peeped over the cover, it was torrential, bucket a drop rainfall that made me wish my flat had a galvanise roof. Nothing is sweeter than being home when rain is falling on a galvanise roof, unless it is rain falling on a galvanise roof when you’re in bed and your belly is satisfied and your bladder’s behaving so you don’t have to get up for anything. Alas, galvanise seems to be going the way of asbestos so I had to make do with the fact that the clouds in the sky had rendered the room cold and grey, which is to say, pretty much the way it always is 95 percent of the time anyway.

But the main reason why I decided to stay in home shuffling about instead of joining the unwashed and the unloved as a friend of mine says, has to do with an article I’d read during the week.

It was a pull out guide to the Notting hill Carnival that claimed to be a necessary and knowledgeable guide. It contained the history of the parade and a list of all the bands, music systems, parties etc that would be happening over the weekend. Trinidad is mentioned just once.

Once, and it’s in a quote from one of the committee members who was allowed one sentence in the entire multi-page pullout. In that one sentence she manages to mention that the carnival is based on Trinidad Carnival, that the island is the inventor of the steel pan and the originator of calypso and soca. It is a “don’t even pause to take a breath or else they’ll think you’ve finished and move on and talk to someone else and you’d have missed your chance to actually let them know about the country whose culture we’re supposed to be celebrating” sentence.

Apart from this one quote — and I can’t find the guide to even credit the woman — nothing else is said about Trinidad and Tobago, the country that, I’ve always been led to believe, was the progenitor of the festival and an example of our culture being present worldwide. I don’t know if social studies classes still teach this but I can say with conviction that this is hogwash. Notting hill carnival has finished the evolution it began a number of years ago and has become just another vehicle for the perpetuation of Jamaican culture. Every party, every sound system listed as a necessary experience for the weekend is either Jamaican or of Jamaican origin. Newspaper and TV reporters speak of it being the ultimate opportunity to listen to reggae and experience the island’s culture.

A top ten sound system list included only one DJ that didn’t play dub. He played hip hop. One reporter offered the theory that soca wasn’t popular because it still struggled with the Harry Belafonte in a frilly shirt image. Which tells you how bad things are since one, calypso isn’t soca and two, Belafonte sang traditional Jamaican folk songs, and not calypso.

So it’s bad enough that the average person automatically assumes you to be Jamaican up here once you say you are from the Caribbean, offensive to one’s sense of national and personal pride. But it is worse to go to an event hoping to experience a bit of home and be bombarded with misinformation and cultural piracy that you already tire of dealing with on a daily basis, not forgetting the groping and manhandling experienced when I’d gone last year.

So I decided to stay at home and listen to my Great Calypsos Volume One, blasting Shorty’s Endless Vibrations and Felix Caesar’s I Music, content that nobody will be trying to convince me that it’s actually reggae and that Jamaicans invented it.

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