Worth a thousand words

The quote goes that “A picture is worth a thousand words”, and let me assure you that if I did not previously understand why so many heated words were exchanged about Carnival, after seeing all the pictures in our daily newspapers in the days following Carnival celebrations, now I certainly do.
During all those weeks leading up to the two big days, the papers were full to the brim of people condemning our national festival. The people giving the heaviest criticisms were mainly those religious leaders granted a column in the national papers, but there were also many letters to the editor complaining about the moral decline of Carnival, about the so-called debauchery, lechery and immoral behaviour of mas players.
Debauchery, lechery and immoral behaviour?

I must have played in the wrong band! I couldn’t understand what everyone was complaining about – where exactly was all this debauchery happening? Indeed, for the two days that I played mas, I kept looking around hoping to catch a glimpse of the Carnival-orgy everyone had been talking about, but I did not see a single indecent incident — not a single 11-year-old girl getting AIDS from some big hard-back man (as if that wasn’t already a daily occurrence!), not a single couple groping each other behind a tree, not even a single bare breast! It was tamer than the famed Superbowl half-time show or a video on BET. In fact, hardly any of the women that I saw were in thongs, and a lot of mas players were quite covered up, looking very proper and respectable. My Carnival was no more indecent than a day on Maracas Bay. Then, the next day, I opened up the papers and it looked like all hell had broken loose. Every single newspaper had full-page, full-colour pictures of Carnival in all its glory – and mas players in all their… er… skin? Taking the Carnival honour for Most Photographed Masquerader went to that extremely well-defined and muscular woman who chose to wear a white thong, a “nipple pasty” with a light wisp of white body paint on her breasts, appearing in all of the papers on both front page and back. I remember a picture of a very slim young woman wearing short pants and two black nipple-pastys standing right by a policeman. They also had pictures of some women in white costumes with thin strips of cloth to hold in their breasts, bouncing across the stage, popping right out of their costumes. They hardly showed any pictures of all the bareback men in speedoes… but of course it’s quite acceptable for a man to parade around almost naked… right?

Anyway, after going through the papers, I figured out fast why people have such a problem with Carnival.  But while the religious figures and conservatives keep shaking their righteous fingers at Carnival they forget one thing – that the media, naturally, is always on the lookout for the most wild, raucous, sensational pictures, so that people like you and me will call each other and say, “Aye, yuh see de topless gyul on page five?”
I was told by someone working the Grand Stand on Carnival Tuesday that everything was tame until one of Legends’ sections came to cross the stage – and suddenly the photographers flooded the stage to snap furiously away at those brave few who looked like they stepped out of one of those Girls Gone Wild videos. And of course, those are the pictures starring in all the papers. I’m no good at Math, but I was thinking to myself that if there are maybe 30,000 women who play mas in costume, my estimate would be that out of that sizeable figure, maybe only 50 women would ever dare to spray paint their breasts and parade in the streets in a thong. I myself did not play with Legends, and thus saw no semi-nudity during Carnival, but I also highly doubt that Pastor Clive Dottin, Satnarayan Maharaj, Pastor Winston Cuffie and all the other religious columnists were out there in the streets looking to see for themselves just how “indecent” Carnival truly was. Many people were quite upset at the Carnival coverage, particularly by the newspapers, because it was so one-sided. It seems as though the photographers – or perhaps the newspaper editors – only chose to publish pictures of the vast minority of women who did in fact don nipple stickers and wear thongs. Look back through the papers and you will notice that all the newspaper pictures are the same, are of the same handful of women, and mostly from the same section that was particularly skimpy. I still stand by the belief that Carnival is not the work of the devil that religious figures and the ultra-conservative make it out to be. The problem is these people who lambaste Carnival conveniently ignore the fact that the media is first and foremost a business enterprise, and pictures of nipple-stickers sell a hell of a lot of papers. However, if any of these finger-pointers had come with me to jump up for Carnival, all they would have seen were a bunch of people chipping down the road quite peacefully to “Soca Train.”

A picture is worth a thousand words, and thousands of words have been written both in defence and in critique of Carnival. The handful of women who bared their breasts for Carnival – while in a way I admire their courage – are making a bad name for all of us, particularly us female mas players who take offence to being lambasted unfairly. Our Carnival is unique, we are not trying to complete with Rio de Janeiro or Mardi Gras (which I’ve heard can’t compete with Trini Carnival anyways) but any foreigner watching the coverage of Carnival would get the impression that the majority of the women out there are half naked in thongs and body paint, which is not the case at all. And this is not the dominant imagery that we want during the Carnival season. 
Trinis, for all their wildness, are conservative creatures. Last year I don’t remember seeing the kinds of pictures we saw this year in the papers. This year showed the advent of a new type of Carnival in terms of costuming – or lack of, as the case may be – but it makes me wonder… what will next year be like? How many years before the nipple-stickers are perfectly acceptable, or even the norm? How much will they dare to bare? How far will we push the limits? And what responsibility, if any, should the media take for the images they project to the rest of the world?