Ancestral Voices

Abstract

This article presents one case study of contemporary Carnival as played out on the streets of Notting Hill, London. Its major focus is the carnival performance context and the genre of Carnival. This refers to Caribbean peoples' aesthetic cultural representations: masquerade themes that are played (manifested and enacted in) mas (unscripted dramatic costuming) at carnival time. It is the first phase1 of an ongoing study that examines the processes by which the Afro-Caribbean diasporic community, dispossessed by European colonization, continually seeks to forge its own voice - its national and even other identities - through its multi-faceted carnival festival. From these themes it becomes evident that the resources used by the mas people (creative artists) to create carnival designs (artistic depictions) are continual evocations of multiple-cultural configurations left by various ancestors both of the colonizer and of the colonized. These ancestral voices run the gamut from Amerindian myths to European, African and Asian cultural influences. The case study demonstrates that the ancestral past is neither static nor forgotten. Instead these cultural vestiges - ancestral voices - are regenerated and re-inscribed into the productive creation of new accounts and new myths. The new voices appear not only with other meanings and other values but also in another language, representative of Afro-Caribbean diasporic peoples' ongoing quest for a national identity. Any understanding of Trinidadian Carnival and its extension, Notting Hill Carnival, has to be understood against that backdrop process of re creating, re-defining, re-evaluating, changing but continually becoming what I have called meta-masking - in this paper and elsewhere (Alleyne-Dettmers, 1993: 5) - as the culture matures and grows. In addition, this article shows how colonization affected the perceptions of the colonized subject and suggests that there is a continual highly successful negotiation of ethnic diversity in society, with Carnival providing the forum to recognize that ethnic diversity. Paradoxically, however, an agenda of unity is pursued.