Caribbean Beat — January/February 2017 (#143)

TeamDWP Studios By Dwayne Watkins
odd Dame Lorraine, a mas played by a man wearing a woman’s
dress, obscenely padded in a slave’s parody of the European
masters’ wives. You’ll find the tradition of old mas, where
ordinary folks compete to stage elaborate puns to accuse priest
and politician alike, or just to make a good bad joke. Imagine a
man with a chamber pot in one hand and a sign in the other, and
the sign reads “Po’ me one.”
Increasingly you’ll find abstractions: Mud Mas, Red Devils,
Yellow Devils, Cocoa Devils, and so on, bands of mas players
in no real costume but simple t-shirts and shorts splattered in
whatever unguent it is they are “playing” this year.
J’Ouvert is the beating heart of Carnival because of the
anonymity the darkness lends. In this darkness is the ability to
be anyone or no one.
When the sun comes creeping up over Laventille to wash the
city in gold, we are renewed. We stumble home, hose ourselves
off, rest muscles sore from chipping for miles in the morning
dew. Carnival has begun. A few hours later we will be back,
chipping again in the hot sun, dutifully wearing our brilliant,
happy daytime costumes. A smear of black engine oil behind one
ear is the only sign that we had ever been anything else.
But though J’Ouvert is fleeting, it may well stay with you.
Remember the tall man in the old lady’s wig and night? Reader,
I married him.
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