by Tony Fraser
Tony Fraser in Port of Spain reflects on how Trinidad cuts its Carnival cloth to suit the recessionary times.
The global headlines highlighted more banking crises, neighbouring Venezuela on the verge of economic collapse and continuing oil price declines.
So how did oil-rich Trinidad mark Carnival 2016?
As the song goes: “Don’t stop the Carnival”...
As could be expected and in typical Trini style, there were recession fetes and costumes. Just when you thought the bikinis could not get smaller, they did, to save cloth and expense in these recessionary times.
But the recession triggered by the precipitous fall in the international prices of gas, oil and a range of petrochemical products also had an impact on imagination and creativity in the Carnival arts: calypso, mas [masquerade] costuming and steelband music.
Lower levels of prize money for the creators of the Carnival were necessitated by the shrinking of government grants to the National Carnival Commission (NCC).
However, there can never be a recession in bacchanal and Kahng, defined in the Creole dictionary of T&T (Cote’ ci Cote’ la) as shoo shoo and commesse; if you don’t get it, forget it, stick with bacchanal and confusion for the definition.
Sadly, the Carnival ended in the killing (still unclear why and by whom) of a Japanese pan player, Asami Nagakiya.
But as Trinis are wont to do, instead of focusing on who committed this appalling crime against a woman who had been coming here over the last five years because she loved the pan and the culture, they shifted their attention to a rather foolish and badly timed statement by the Mayor of the capital city, Raymond Tim Kee.
He sought to hold up the tablets of the Commandments to scantily clad women, telling them that they contribute to their exploitation by what they wear, or don’t wear, and how they wine on Carnival days.
“Pastor” Tim Kee has since resigned his mayoral office, so perhaps the onus will now be on finding the perpetrator/s and saving the Trini image from sliding further into disrepute.
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