Traditionally, major festivals have been mediums for bringing about change. The same is true today. Festivals allow people to not only speak about daily living but also to give voice to their inner griefs, resentments and joys. Today like in times past festivals carried peace and conflict. The masks and the songs can teach or curse while also highlighting issues to which authorities must respond or change.
During Transatlantic Slavery the “carne-vale” (carne for flesh and vale for bye) festival signified for our European Christian enslavers a period of lascivious partying (‘jamming and wining’) in a jamboree of sexual excess as they bid good bye to the flesh in preparation for the restrictions of the Lenten period.
In the early post-emancipation period, our African and Kalinago ancestors used the festival complex not only to celebrate liberation from the inhumanity of chattel slavery and white supremacy; but also, to reconstruct and reassemble the remnants of their religious, spiritual and cultural history to ensure their survival and future resistance.
In my view, Dominica’s attempts to progress in the recent past are characterized by a lack of clarity of purpose and direction; somewhere, we seemed to have lost our moorings. I think that this lack of clarity with regards to the PURPOSE and FUNCTION of the “Real Mas” in contemporary Dominica, partly explains why our carnival continues to be bedeviled by the same yearly conflicts and challenges.
There seems to be a sort of schizophrenia, fluctuating between a ‘Mas’ of spectacle with a presumed economic benefit versus an unconscious connection to unknown and current realities. These realities include the ugly and painful memories of enslavement, persistent psychological abuses, psychiatric pathologies, religious and political persecution and the naked exploitation of national patrimony and labor for the profit of an elite few.
This article is copyright © 2019 DOM767
