In de Mas Camp. Trinidad (TT)
Trinidad, Chase Village.
Dust, heat, the smell of burned spices transported by the breeze crossing the iron bars of the fences. The sun light blinds les details of fabrics that are attentively assembled by our hands. Glued shining iridescent plastic pearls, knitting needles pointed in dry pieces of hot glue. The folding glimmer of plastic sheets, piume di struzzo colorate in purple; loud music that does not quite succeed in covering the laugh of children and adults. Dogs barking in the back yard. The scent of food, slight pepper on pieces of chicken wings and rice, lettuce leaves, channa and aguita en botelletas.
My doctoral fieldwork and ethnographic participant observation (Tedlock 1991; Guber 2001) took place in “Chase Village” carnival mas camp between 2014-2015, on the island of Trinidad in the Caribbean. A mas camp is a space where carnival costumes are designed and created; it is both a working place and a social place that ephemerally exists following carnival’s yearly repetition. It follows the secular ritual of carnival, in its repetition and circularity of chunks of time, as saecularis evokes in its literal Latin etymology. Here I am in the town of Chase Village,[1] a small commercial hamlet located in the west-center of the island in a suburban area of mixed classes and ethnicities, mostly of East Indian and African descent.
[1]https://earth.google.com/web/search/Chase+Village/@10.46742935,-61.4160204,22.60286117a,2318.73615193d,35y,0h,45t,0r/data=CncaTRJHCiQweDhjMzVmOWUyZWJiODM0N2I6MHg4NGI5ZDE3ZTU3YWQ4ZDYZWW7E7pbvJEAh-u3rwDm1TsAqDUNoYXNlIFZpbGxhZ2UYAiABIiYKJAn6oohgQwclQBHuk21xB-YkQBlZCvk9lLFOwCH0eIfju75OwCgC
I met Danzo Balroop, a carnival masman.[2] in 2013 when I was in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. After having assiduously visited one carnival band, photographing his creation of big costumes[3]for Caribana, he invited me to travel with his three children to create carnival costumes for a small festival in the nearby city of Kitchener, Ontario.
[2] The chief of the cost’umes designers.
[3] Big costumes are one category pf carnival costumes worn by the Queens and Kings of each carnival band. They are usually of large sizes and open their band’s parade during Carnival Monday and Carnival Tuesday.
With traces of glue between my fingers due to the frenetic rush of creating the costumes to be ready on time for the festival, my fieldwork-notes started to take an embodied shape as a friend, and a collaborator, in the global Caribbean carnival environment. In that same year, a few months later, I reached him and his children on the island of Trinidad to collaborate with his own band in the “Mecca” of West Indian carnivals (Mason 1998).
Decentralized from the consumerism of the diasporic touristic attention of the capital, Port of Spain, where the mas camp lost its physical space, becoming instead a temporary imported industrial hall, he created a carnival medium-sized family band, in collaboration with his sister Indra Charles, who is a permanent resident of the country.
The mas camp seasonally occupied the house’s front porch, which is also the location of the family’s spice business.
The masman arrives in Trinidad around six months before the carnival starts, after the carnival season in Canada has finished. The entire family participates as much as they can, accommodating their regular jobs and activities. Someone joined gluing pailettes in the nighttime after they return from their regular employment, others decided to take a leave and help fulltime in the management of the operation. Others were cooking food for the workers.
Mas camp production is specialized, with two different targets: first, big costumes for the professional competition in the capital, and second “low cost” versions of small costumes “bikini and beads”[4] for the regional carnival competitions in two cities nearby the mascamp.
[4] Two pieces small carnival Costumes are informally defined as “Bikini and Beads” simply because they consist in looking like two pieces swimsuit with beads and feathers.
There are two categories of workers: for the small costumes they are flat rate “volunteers,” unskilled workers who, without fixed schedules, were participating in the assembly of the costumes’ various parts. Most are women, young mothers with irregular jobs, usually with low incomes, were coming whenever they could with their very young children; others are unemployed men, who randomly “passed by” the mas camp and stay for the day to round up their incomes, helping in exchange of a meal, or sometimes just passing the time to “evade” their often-unprivileged neighborhoods.
Sometimes the workers even buy one of those bikinis they created; but other times I saw the Masman improvising with the left over material right before the carnival parade, assembling costumes with a few feathers and shining plastic buttons to give them the possibility of partaking in carnival independently of their own economic situation.
The workers’ daily activity was multitasked, alternating between bouts of intense work and periods of liming[5]a specificTrinidadian practice of sociality that keeps tripping the plantation capitalism laborarl posture (Best 1968, 2001 and Williams 1994).
[5] Liming is a Trinbagonian term that indicates an action of hanging out in groups, philosophizing, socializing, joking, and sometimes dancing with the music. Winer, Lise, 2009. Dictionary of the English Creole of Trinidad and Tobago. Montreal: McGill Queen's University Press. p 532. For its social role against colonial plantation economic system used by art groups, please see: https://fairemondes.com/maica-gugolati-a-con-versation-between-alice-yard-and-beta-local/?fbclid=IwAR2Ydzu2G63d9dl6Xh2VSE6qzl99NdiZrAxcfxGORTj0hwtz5vwbp6OvWzI#maicafrancais
Danzo’s children come out with mischievous smiles. Laughs and little screams. One hides somethings in his arms. He found his father’s family photos. Some of the images are glued together from the tropical humidity and temperature; others have faded and lost their color due to the blinding light of the sun. Forcing a break to the work routine of costume creation, they play with the photos leaving them on one of the working tables. They joyfully “pushed” their aunt Marisa, a nurse in her regular life, to talk about family stories of people they might have never met, of roads and carnival practices that no longer existed, laughing at obsolete fashion of family members they have never met.
Here is Marisa in the dusty roads of the old time in Carapichaima[6] in her childhood.
[6]https://earth.google.com/web/search/Carapichaima/@10.48173485,-61.4387227,12.79234467a,11429.54473862d,35y,0h,45t,0r/data=CncaTRJHCiUweDhjMzVmMGEwMDZhZGIzNjU6MHg4ODg3NDY5NzIwMGQ3Y2EyGSm-kMSB9iRAIfzNeucGuE7AKgxDYXJhcGljaGFpbWEYAiABIiYKJAnxOyoHVNQ7QBHzOyoHVNQ7wBmstrKJzFNDQCEh_R772fdRwCgC
Capital’s pitfall; creative frenzies.
The construction of the Big Costumes heats up under the sun of the dry season. These are the costumes built by the second category of workers of the mas camp: professional designers and skilled workers, who move internationally from one Caribbean carnival to another to construct them. The skilled workers labor with only minimal supervision and instruction from the masman. They are hired for the entire carnival season and often are related to the masman, bandleader, Big-costume performers, or investors. They are expert bricoleurs and are often trained carpenters or civil engineers, usually completing specific tasks.
Cutting, gluing, molding the materials; soldering.
Cutting, gluing, molding the materials; soldering.
Cutting, gluing, molding the materials; soldering.
Until very recently, there is no institutionalized training to become a masman. It always has been a family or community practice passed from generation to generation.
My role in the workshop changed and was “upgraded” based on my day-to-day gained expertise. Marisa and I were the only women who ended up working on both small and big costumes.
Invention, improvisation, and usage of recycled material.
Papier maché, wire bending.
Stapler, scissors and different techniques of coloring with spray paint are part of the construction process. At the end, the final shaping of the plastic details completes the assembly.
Each costume must be unique and is made in secret, far from competitors’ prying gaze.
It’s the Carnival Jumbie that fluctuates following the fresh night breeze and tickles the sequins of the costumes. A jumbie, in one of its plural local definitions, refers to the presence of a spirit that beguiles or tricks humans in the terrestrial world. In the mas camps it is evoked as the expression of the creative tension generated by shared and feverish synergy of working together for carnival.
Carnival Tuesday.
Nighttime, back to the mas camp after the Carnival Tuesday’s parade.
Como es para every carnival season, in its secularity, circular temporal caducità and repetition, here we are
Resting
after a dizzy highly skilled improvised mannerism.
Resting in-between leftover pieces of costumes that chaotically were occupying the entire surface of the front porch, the house, the kitchen, the stairs.
Reposando.
Stillness and sudden silence were replenishing the house and our minds.
We occupiamo a space that requests to Pause in its lethargic Cyclical season, waiting for a next year’s encuentro by the Carnival Jumbie.
With Ustedes
This visual essay is dedicated to Danzo Balroop and his family.
