Carnaval

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Feb 26th "Dimanche Gras"


This is Dimanche Gras. Not Mardi Gras. As if Fat Tuesday wasn’t enough, a Fat Sunday is called for.

We’re all in line, each one of us in our positions. We begin by facing one way down the road towards the boulevard headed towards “centre ville.” Then he decides to turn around the other way. Only, after repositioning ourselves, I hear the distant tattoo of another approaching group. They appear at the end of the street, their sound now emitting directly from the blood red capes they are wearing. They slowly approach us and stop right before us, facing us like a tribe about to partake in combat. We remain facing them. They continue playing. It seems like a Guadeloupian West Side Story, but I haven’t found the love affair involved. They definitely outnumber us, their red faces, no their incarnidine flesh glaring at us. I wonder what will resolve this face-off.
I look around me and see our stoic painted visages, stiff like the wooden masks of the past, sunken eyes and bulging lips. No reason to smile. This is a rite, a sacred summoning to partake in the march of man. Not a parade, a march. Not a procession, a drive. A statement, not a display.

Elektrik begins a chant. He’s donning a straw mask tilted up on his head like a welder. His voice is firm and vocal chords raspy.
“Madame, prété mi prété mi...” he calls in musical notes, keeping quarter time with his drumsticks. “Prété mwen loto aw la!”
We respond in Creole unison: “Prété mi, prété mi!”
Then again, his call: “Prété mwen loto aw la!”
Then, on the beat, an explosion of drumsticks.
I concentrate on the cadence, keeping time with my bending knees. First the sixteenth rhythm, then the , then the , then the triplet third. I repeat the series knowing I can modify it any way along the way.
I turn to our supposed adversary. Ahead of the other tambou-chants, the tambou-parlants, the conch blowers, the dancers, and the flag bearer beginning to step ahead, the sea of red continues to impede our path. The steps forward trickle back to where I am and my left foot falls ahead to the downbeat, my right one in its syncopated wake. The movement had been set in unstoppable motion, the heart in tune to its pulse, pursuing the red barracade ahead.
The others are after all amicable Carnival musicians like us. They acknowledge our approach, but save their action until we’re right at their threshold. Then as our advance meets their stance, they begin to part to the curbside, yielding like waves withdrawing from a boat’s hull. In no time, I’m consumed in their crimson stares panning past in tacit respect of the occasion. Each face is a message conveyed in slow motion, the countenance constant, but the shape and makeup varying. It’s as if all the variety of the human genome has been stroked with a united coat of red paint, and is now serving as a mental backdrop to the tunnel-trance we are now entering.
We debouch from the ruddy mass and troop through the streets known as “quartier de l’assainissement.” (Some bureaucrat had once had the gall to call this a neighborhood of “purification” or “healing,” as if there were something impure about the way of life being led here, as if it were the inhabitants’ fault.) The mechanic shops and closed doors open at our passage. Pedestrians stop and turn to behold our passage. Our march is steady and resolute as we approach a mass of people up ahead.
It’s the Boulevard Légitimus, a divided avenue down which the most of the groups are marching. We turn right, on our side of the median, and are immediately consumed in a crowd of faces. Those waiting have heard us and turn to acknowledge our passage. There are men and women, teenagers and children, all nodding their heads to our beat. In the mass of local African Guadeloupians, the periodic white, Indian, or Asian faces stick out. Finally on this planet, I’m a minority. I’m the one who sticks out in this place. Yet, as my eye scans the expressions of the on-lookers, I see no sign of contempt or ridicule or surprise. I get the feeling that the Carnival is a celebration for all people.
We continue to the roundabout, at which I expect we’ll turn around and defile down through the crowds. Not so. We turn left and proceed along another four-lane avenue keeping our pace. Some two hundred meters further we come to another intersection where a line of people with their backs to us is standing. We march straight towards the crowd, members of which begin to turn around and look at us. I begin to realize that we are not in fact following a preplanned itinerary. It is all ad-lib, totally in contrast to the style of procession that I am used to back home.
There we pause. The drummers in front turn around to us. I turn to the side, facing in to an imaginary nucleus of source. We all have formed a circle, ever constant in our changing rhythms. Our regards shift from one to the next within the group, like multitudinous beams of light in the fabric of vision, all communicating through us the essence of unity. Then, Eddy raises a fist, echoing the defiant Fela Kuti. The signal is given, to which the tambou-bass beaters perform a drumfill, compacting several deep beats into a measure and rising to the plenary blow at which we all announce the end of rhythm and the onset of silence.
But here there is no quiet. The group ahead of us, hidden behind the masses lined up along the road is in the groove of their performance. Through the individuals I descry madras dancers and bandana drummers. My ears pick up a keyboard, Hammond B3 style, notes cascading down the scale to the rhythm. I push my way through the spectators to the roadside. They notice me but don’t mind. For a moment, I have become a spectator myself, watching with fascination the revelry before me.
The others have disbanded for a moment, taking a necessary rest for the hours ahead of us. My eyes notice a nondescript four-storey blockhaus running along the street. Its inhabitants have vacated their dwelling and lined the balconies at each level. They seem like prisoners emancipated from the mundane structure for a brief moment.
We decide to move. Reconvening, Elecktrik commences another chant, this time, “bonjou pè... bonjou pè rotario...”
The rhythm kicks in like it never left us and we’re spinning like an old vinyl in the groove. The only question of where to go is soon resolved: Eddy nods ahead and the banner-bearing leaders plow simply through the two lines of spectators, cutting a perpendicular path onto a road headed towards the center of town.
I realize I’ve never been in this area of town before, not that a tourist would find anything of interest in these environs, not that Pointe-à-Pitre is a tourist town anyway, not that tourists should even be coming here in the first place. I see a couple of tourists standing out among the locals on the streetside and wonder what they came here for. Of course, one asks the question of whether I’d consider myself a tourist or not. I suppose there are merits to seeing a foreign place. We have all felt the epiphany of introductory travel, the fascination of simply seeing new places. I’d say my hope is not to tour the place like a museum, but to live through the place as a seasoned traveler should. Indeed, marching down the boulevard with these unfamiliar friends, I felt a sense of purpose to the whole trip, as if I had finally achieved the essence of the human dialogue known as travel. I was here learning and then communicating their words, their customs, their lifestyle, and their experience on their terms, if only for a few days. Granted, I was far from embodying their ethos, but nonetheless had suddenly and suprisingly, via Avery’s grace, felt like an accepted part of their community. Such is the goal of every traveler out there in the world: to attain a taste of “home” in an unfamiliar place.
We charge down a side street where no one is waiting. Here, we are far from the gentrified thoroughfares of the metropolitan grid. In fact, I realize that a cemetery is rising out of the cityscape to my left. The various mausoleums, crucifixes and tombstones hide the hillside. It is as if we have intentionally passed by in sacred homage to the dead, offering a rhythmic elegy or musical epitaph to their existence.
Rounding a corner, we file under a block of flats and come to a stop within the heart of several H.L.M.’s, Habitations à Loyer Modéré or low-rent housing blocks. These have become such an indelible feature of the French landscape that there should be an analysis of their bleak architecture in the front of those green Michelin guides that herald the beauties and wonders of France. What locals also call the “cités” have become the eyesore and bane of the French project on the whole.
We’ve paused here seemingly amidst these empty back alleys to bring the Carnival celebration to them. As before, we form a circle and beat away on our goatskins as loud as possible, letting the tattoo echo through the bland concrete mass of the global French suburb, adding to the graffitti already donning the empty white walls. We’re beating hard on the drums as if were standing before Jericho. It’s like we’re trying to destroy something that some inane people built for the sole purpose of destroying or defacing. Hence, the grafitti. Hence, the noise.
Next to us a couple of old men seated in a plastic chair cafe are drinking the local “ti punch” rum shot with lime, unbothered by the pother before them. In fact, they begin to nod their head in response and affirmation! A few stick their heads out over the long, lonesome balconies of this arena of poverty and acknowledge our presence. It is a sign of life amongst the suburban cells of hegemony, conflict and inequality.
We take ten.
Then, we lift off. Drumming away around the corner, we near the main boulevard where the eyes and lenses leer the passers-by. As before, we have to march through a line of spectators to get into the actual “parade route.” Having now butted our way in, we slowly follow other groups ahead of us. The throng increases as we near a section of the route that bows out like the colonnade before the Vatican. In this sort of arena, we’re greeted with blindling spotlights and cameramen at either side, their large empty lenses staring at us. Our beats are the same as before, nothing has changed. I suppose we’re on television somewhere in the world, our images being transmitted to who knows who. They’re probably sitting there, a world away, wondering who we are, or what we did to become marchers in a Carnival. At least I remember watching the TV, wondering how those people got there.
We clear what seems like some sort of passport control and stride down the main shopping street of Rue Frébault. Here the spectators crowd the thin sidewalks in front of the stores and respond choreographically to our passage. I feel like I’m in a wave of rhythm arousing by-standers from their tombs of rest. By now dusk has fallen and I’ve been going for more than two hours. My limbs are numb, but still nimble enough to maintain the essential rhythms. At the end of the street, we convene in a circle and take another needed break.
While sitting in a nearby bar, drinking water, we watch the groups behind us file past. There are larger groups with more elaborate costumes than ours. No matter, because Nanm’ is a few years in the making, a nascent vision that will grow eventually to the size of famous groups like Akiyo.

main square


Afterthought:
It’s been a penetrating evening of rhythm, moves, images, trance and an exploration of the soul. The Guadeloupe carnival is a catharsis of sorts, one in which the pulse fixates your mind on your soul’s heartbeat to the phantasmagoria of blank white tourist faces, girating hips, throbbing torsos, identity-altering disguises, the mausoleums and crucifixes of the cemetery, the empty back alleys in the projects, the swarming lights and cameras of the main televised square, the masses lining the roadside and the global black night.

The greater spectacle at hand: the transformation of the night into an Afro-Carib ethos.



Feb 28th
Mardi Gras


March 1st
Ste Anne
Watch
Mercredi Gras
Haitian band concert
Accident scene

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