“I Not Going to Work Today”: Carnival Against Caribbean Rulers and Masters
From Jamaican Jonkonnu to Trinidadian Jouvay and the many Caribbean Carnival traditions in between, it is difficult to discern who first said: “Everyone Loves A Parade.” But we would love our road march even more if we came to understand their historical origins and power as a critique of all political authority and domination. What if we could transfer this gathering of forces to another object or purpose?
In this pre-Lenten Carnival season in Trinidad, fête goers have enjoyed the seasonal panoply of soca anthems from mainstays Bunji Garlin, Kes, and Nadia Batson, while beholding the rise of relative newcomers like the Young Kings winner, Mical Teja. Teja has staked his claim as a Groovy Soca champion with calypso-infused riffs on nostalgic diaspora returnees and the proverbial cure for Carnival tabanca. In the Power Soca circuit, it is the Vincentian artiste Problem Child who has held the line with his booming anthem, “Holiday,” that debuted for Vincy Mas nearly half a year ago.
As soon-to-be masqueraders jump up to the words of Problem Child, “I don’t care what nobody say/I not going to work today,” for some this remains less a reality than an aspirational refrain. Indeed, while many are enjoying the reprieve of the Carnival season, others continue to rise early to endure a gridlocked commute and the dregs of waged work for state functionaries or unscrupulous bosses. It would be wrong to regard the crowds echoing Problem Child’s words as merely facetious or playful in their denunciation of waged work. Indeed, this is the tradition of Caribbean autonomy that is not limited to Carnival but is nonetheless preserved in the Carnival rites and anthems of today.
Carnival Remakes the World
Far more than we realize, Caribbean Carnivals distinguished by floats, sound systems, and masqueraders on the road represent a world outlook — a political philosophy for rearranging our post-colonial condition.
We often accept we have been robbed of our names and traditions, when in fact we brought ourselves and our minds to the Americas. We brought our sense of faith, agricultural skills, healing practices, metalworks, music, dance, arts and crafts. Yet behind Carnival, some may be surprised to know, is an original political philosophy. It is an outlook those looking for professional development and social capital in decadent societies will never help us discover.
As Sylvia Wynter explained, in one of her more lucid moments, African Diasporic people were said to be “natives without culture.” Wynter, at the high tide of postcolonial resistance in the 1970s, made certain things plain. Instead of deconstructing traditions into abstractions, she and others helped us place value on ourselves in their philosophical writings on Carnival, Jonkonnu, and Jouvay.
Wynter explains the African as “native without culture” justified the disparity in the labor values of blacks and whites, and the conquering of African Diaspora labor. This reasoning lingers on in our search for reparations not the rejection of wage labor and capital relations and the burning down of Babylon’s property relations not suitable for humanity.
Whether articulated by Haiti’s Jean Price-Mars, Trinidad’s C.L.R. James and Earl Lovelace, or Jamaica’s Sylvia Wynter, Trinidad’s Carnival and Jamaica’s Jonkunnu are concurrent spirits. It is a social motion, not merely a cultural motion, that reveals a powerful political heritage. Not support for the electoral parties or parliaments of dunces, it harkens back to a time when society was arranged differently. In this heritage is a half-buried collective memory of popular self-organization and popular self-directed liberating activity.
When we peel back the ritual parade marked by bacchanal of drink, song, masks, costumes, and sound systems that share the street, what appears to be a national festival tied to the Catholic or Christian Lenten calendar is revealed to be the vestige of a submerged political organization and moral philosophy.
When those who commune with African spirits are often reduced to ceremonial functionaries in official Carnival or Jokunnu processions, the significance of those in grass skirts and peculiar masks can become lost. However, in rural graveyards, there are secret societies that initiate rites of passage for rebel slaves communing with ancestral spirits. Here African cosmologies and language are present, not attached to a middle-class cultural nationalism affirming the Caribbean police state, but where ordinary Caribbean people arrive on their own authority.
Indeed, we should recall that the Kambule so-called “riots” of 1881 in Trinidad erupted as a protest against police and colonial authorities. Brilliantly re-enacted each Carnival season in a script written by Eintou Pearl Springer, Kambule should not simply be remembered as the foundation of the Carnival of today. Instead, it should be a reminder to us all that the genesis of Carnival is in revolt. In the 19th Century, free Africans refused the arbitrary limits on their expression and political authority — the banning of drums and martial arts, especially — by marching in the road against the British Empire and its police garrisons in the Caribbean. Carnival is where this tradition survives, but also where it is imprisoned and relegated to a brief moment in the pre-Lenten calendar.
The early Sylvia Wynter suggested a modern political ideology of Black liberation that is rooted in genuine African culture cannot be commodified and will appeal beyond secular Enlightenment reason, leaning toward the African Diaspora cosmological worldview. The fact is her insights, even her apparent references to the need to abolish state power, have run their course. Tragically, they have become cultural decorations for people who theorize and arrange not a new society, but ambiguous chatter for endowed university chairs and an imperial cultural apparatus.
We should question, as a prelude to action, whether the Caribbean has a native heritage without culture that has been minimized. As we gather on the road, we should talk with our neighbors about bringing it to fruition in our visions of modern politics. This means not all Caribbean people are beautiful. The rulers and bosses who degrade us must be discredited and meet their demise. Annually when we are on march, power should be on our minds. When we mobilize ourselves on our own authority, what police or army can contain us? What power can we devise when we refuse to go to work today, tomorrow, or thereafter? What new society might we build?
De-stooling Power
Wynter says the African Diaspora can no longer see itself epistemically as an “outsider” or “minority” and achieve liberation. The search for identity cannot be “creole” in the hybrid Afro-Saxon sense that declares the presence of Black rulers and bosses as the embodiment of freedom. It must be Kreyol in the sensibility of the Haitian peasant, the maroons of Jamaica, Dominica, and Guyana, as archives of African culture, that is the true identity for the self-emancipation of Caribbean labour.
Those who examine the pre-colonial cultures of West Africa and Central Africa see a pattern. Of course, contemporary Black capitalists like to point to great empires and kings of the past so they can build them on our backs anew. But when we look closer at the common cultural reasoning of warriors on parade in Akan cultures (and especially the Asafo), we don’t see merely chiefs above society. For the Ashanti, the Asantehene is known to parade with brightly colored umbrellas alongside the golden stool on which no one can sit. The Asafo and other warrior associations or companies, who are known for parading with brightly colored flags, had a special political role in society. Their flags are now commented on by keepers of art and culture. But again, those who wish to powerfully re-arrange society have not discovered the social and political relations implied.
But Caribbean Carnivals are more than an aesthetic carbon copy or cultural survival of West African ceremonial forms. It contains within it a theory of political authority and popular democratic power. When leaders in these West African societies betrayed the masses, it was the responsibility of the masses to instantly recall them. As Caribbean people, we know our aspiring capitalist rulers do not leave simply because we hold them in contempt or locate them as objects of parody. A great social motion — direct action on parade — is required.
We, too, can de-stool our modern post-colonial political chiefs. We can both remove them from their seats of power and remove the shit talkers and charlatans from our midst. Not by elections, but by direct action. This we can achieve through a great strike, one that begins with the mantra — “I not going to work today” — and takes the form of a creative masquerade. When our mas camps, pan yards, and roads are turned into democratic assemblies for the organization of a new society, our insurgent tradition of Jonkonnu, Jouvay, and Carnival will return again.
We can set a precedent of grassroots politics taking over Caribbean society. Emancipatory politics does not require us to transfer our self-organized energies to another activity than Carnival. It requires us to remove the arbitrary limits placed on our expression of the political philosophy Carnival beholds. We can restore Carnival’s hidden meanings rooted in our heritage where ordinary people held the reins and directly governed. If out of our past, we only removed those who ruled when they were abusive and authoritarian, we can now renew our societies with a political philosophy and world outlook that was not meant to be a mere cultural decoration on decadent society. But was intended to ensure its ethics and beauty. We may truly behold the beauty of our direct self-governing capacity when we refuse work to head out on the road today.
