J'ouvert in Brooklyn Carnival: Revitalizing Steel Pan and Ole Mas Traditions

Abstract

J'ouvert in Brooklyn Carnival: Revitalizing Steel Pan and Ole Mas Traditions) The rumble of distant drums rolls across Prospect Park, breaking the pre-dawn tranquility that envelopes central Brooklyn on Labor Day morning. My watch says 4 a.m.-the J'Ouvert celebration must be underway. Quietly slipping out of my apartment into the cool of the night, I note the irony of being late for Carnival, an event that by nature defies time. Still, I quicken my pace, cutting across the park, drawn towards the percussive din and faint strains of steel pan. Emerging near the zoo entrance on Flatbush Avenue, I come face to face with a group of devils. Cheap plastic horns adorn heads smeared in red paint and faces powdered with white talcum. The ghoulish revelers have surrounded the Pantonics steel orchestra, a band of fifty steel pan players and percussionists mounted on two-story moveable racks. The devils, along with hundreds of less elaborately clad partygoers, are `jumping and wining to the Pantonic's rendition of the popular calypso My House. The band and dancers pulse as one, inching down the road toward Empire Boulevard, then bumping up against the Adlib Steelband and merging into a mile-long sea of humanity. The scene turns surreal as I pass a huge bank of temporary lights that cut through the thick predawn mist, illuminating the fervent crowd and the scores of police who line the street and look on with great disinterest. For the next two hours I ease my way toward the front of the parade, passing a dozen steel bands and thousands of merrymakers, some dressed as devils, ghosts, witches, African warriors and unruly slaves, others in old rags smeared with grease, mud, and paint. Many of the partygoers, dressed in plain street clothes, simply line along the sides, sipping beers and sodas, enjoying the steelband music and ole mas costumes, and dodging overzealous devils who occasionally sling mud or paint into the crowd. As the nighttime slips into dawn, the J'Ouvert procession lurches down Nostrand Avenue, past Gloria's Roti Shop and Alan's Caribbean Bakery, and finally begins to wind down. I catch my breath, and like thousands of other participants, wonder if I will have the energy to make it up to Eastern Parkway later that afternoon for the main Carnival event. For more than a century J'Ouvert2 break of day processions have marked the opening of Carnival in Trinidad. Held in the predawn hours of Carnival Monday, J'Ouvert evolved from 19th century Canboulay festivals-nighttime celebrations where ex-slaves gathered to masquerade, sing, and dance in commemoration of their emancipation.3 When the tradition was incorporated into Trinidad's pre-Lenten Carnival, J'Ouvert became an arena for African-derived percussion, witty satire singing, sardonic costuming, and, more recently, lively steelband music (Hill 1972: 84-99; Stuempfle 1995: 203-204). In contrast to the bright, fancy pageantry of Monday and Tuesday afternoon Carnival, Jouvert's gruesome devils and mud-covered revelers personify what folklorist Stephen Stuempfle has called the underworld dimension of Carnival..grim and sinister characters, dirty and coarse costumes, and aggressive verbal and physical action (Stuempfle 1995: 204). Historically, J'Ouvert's demonic and satirical masquerading, coupled with dense percussion and steel pan music, manifest Carnival's deepest challenge to order and authority, and for Trinidadian novelist Earl Lovelace, the essence of the Emancipation spirit (Lovelace 1998: 54). In Brooklyn, home to the largest West Indian community outside the Caribbean and host to a Labor Day Carnival that draws close to two million participants each year, J'Ouvert is a relatively new phenomenon. Over the past decade Brooklyn's J'Ouvert has grown from small groups of Dimanche Gras (Fat Sunday) revelers to a massive predawn celebration attracting nearly 100,000 steelband and old mas enthusiasts. This inquiry will trace the emergence of Brooklyn's J'Ouvert festival in the larger context of New York Carnival, and consider the event's role in the revitalization of older Carnival traditions in Brooklyn's Trinidad-American community. …