Caribbean Beat — March/April 2018 (#150)

word of mouth
Dispatches from our correspondents around the Caribbean and further afield
A unity of
colour
At Guyana’s Phagwah
celebrations, Subraj Singh
notes how the festival’s
many colours blend into a
single, unifying shade
amanda richards
Providence Stadium, orginally built for
cricket, has long been acclimatised to
parties, concerts, and other non-sporting
events. Today it is the host for the biggest Phagwah
celebration in Guyana. Phagwah (or Holi), the Hindu
festival of colours, came to Guyana from India in the
nineteenth century, when immigrants were shipped
to Britain’s West Indian colonies to replace newly
freed Africans as plantation labour. This history is
immediate in my mind as I join the squeeze of people
entering the wet, colourful, powder-clouded space,
which holds an overpowering, invisible thing in the
air — I get a strong whiff of unity from it, but that
can’t be right — binding everyone to everyone else.
It begins at the gate. In the multi-hued world
that Phagwah brings, colour-blindness — the good
kind — can be seen in all its kaleidoscopic glory.
I see a small black boy with a yellow water-gun
playfully squirting “stainer” at a troop of smiling,
fair-skinned Indian girls in front of me, their white
pants and white tops purpling from the liquid.
I see groups of friends from a variety of racial
backgrounds, wrapping each other in hugs and
cascading piles of powder — green, red, white,
yellow — the colours of the Guyanese flag. Some
white tourists with bra straps showing through wet
t-shirts grin as strangers daub crimson and pink
powder on their faces, granting them acceptance in
the form of iridescent pigment. I see a mixed-race
friend and her black boyfriend — “Happy Holi, you
guys!” — and they both powder my dark skin, my
cheeks, my beard, my hair, with a green that now,
in retrospect, I regard as the exact shade of envy. I
watch them walk away, pressed to each other.
I watch the people, dancing to Bollywood
music, throwing powder on their family and
friends and others they do not know, with blue and
orange and scarlet pluming from their hair, with
pink-stained teeth, with drops of water flying from
writhing bodies, with all of their faces covered in
the same multitude of colours — blending to create
the same shade of black. I marvel at how they all
look like each other in the shade of Phagwah.
I wait inside the stadium. I finally see him enter
the gate. His shirt is clean, bright white. “I want
you to be the first to colour me,” he says, and
when he is close enough I pull him into a hug. I
can smell the scent of him under the musky, holy
smell of Phagwah powder. My hands linger on his
hips for longer than usual, because the hundreds of
people flocking the stadium on this one day only
have eyes for their loved ones — eyes for joy and
happiness and togetherness, or eyes blinded with
colour that they hurriedly rush to the waterpipes
to wash out. After I paint his face pink, we walk
around, happily pushed against each other by the
crowd of colourful people who help to paint us in
their shade of black.
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