Whose special interest?

Watching the television interviews with Kenny De Silva and Keith Diaz this week reminded me of Rudder. Suddenly, I understood his lack of enthusiasm, almost boredom with the topic.

One editorial correctly referred to this latest flare-up over payments to Pan Trinbago and other issues, as disturbing and questioned “that for all the millions of taxpayers’ dollars allocated to the special interest groups every year via the NCC, mounting debts and financial shortfalls are a recurring theme…” The term ‘special interest’ is what bothered me in this whole debate.

For me, this is really the crux of the problem not just with our Festival, but with pretty much every cultural venture. In whose interests do the ‘special interests’ function? There are those who would say that it is their own narrow agendas that they serve. Undoubtedly, the special interests would counter that they work for the advancement of our mas, calypso and pan.

Yet, it remains a matter of great confusion to me that we still have no museum of Carnival Arts, no pan theatre and nowhere that any time I feel like it, I can go to hear a recording of the first calypso vocal from 1914, enter a replica of the 1921 Railway Douglas tent, hear one of the original pan tuners talking about his craft or see a photo of ‘Lady Trinidad’, our first female calypsonian from 1935.

Will future generations be able to listen to Senor Gomez and learn wire-bending from watching his technique? The reason most likely can be found in the tragedy that the special interests do not have an understanding of the complexity of our Carnival, and its primeval effect on us all. Invariably, issues of money, power and management come to the fore, almost completely silencing emphasis on how our Festival can positively impact curricula, criminal behaviour, and issues of identity.

The characters in Earl Lovelace’s ‘Dragon can’t Dance’ still represent that complexity; they exist on many levels, and mirror the ability of Carnival to pull you into its spell, even as it simultaneously exposes your masks. The Queen, the Bad John and of course, the Dragon – they all live out their internal frustrations, insecurities and ambitions through the Carnival. In turn, Carnival impacts their relationships with each other, and in many ways determines the paths they take.

This week, again I felt acutely how we continue to misunderstand this element of our culture. The special interests have missed the fact that Carnival was also a form of cultural resistance to ethnic oppression, of expressing warriorhood through the stick-fighting and even the steelband wars. So the pan yards and Gayelles are not able to serve as structured ‘rites of passage’ for young men into man hood and the traditional mas still fights for its space.

Aldrick and the others in ‘Dragon’ are confused and alienated by the changes in Carnival, as the rawness and rebelliousness are infiltrated by “beads and feathers and rhinestones”. I’m not sure which is more stark. The fact that Lovelace’s messages are still so relevant, or that the special interests are still allowed to wreak havoc with our Carnival, or that David Rudder’s reaction to the debate back then, really captures how ludicrous it all still is today.

D a r a Healy is a perform a n c e a r t i s t a n d f o u n d - er of the N G O , the Indigenous Creative Arts Network – ICAN