Carnaval: The Cynical, The Crusty, The Curious

After a few naps and a nice, brutal sugar detox, I am proud to report that I have survived my first ever Caribbean Carnival season, unscathed enough to tell the tale.

If you have experienced Carnival where you live, or maybe have just watched The Hunchback of Notre Dame, you probably know that the Mardi Gras season is traditionally a time to not only cut loose, but to reverse social hierarchies, mock those in power, and defy cultural taboos. I looked forward to witnessing the myriad of ways Martinicans would protest their conditions, which, in case you are a new reader, I complain about a lot.

This year's biggest theme, both in songs at private soirées and on bradjacks, junker cars with special permits to be painted for parades, was the TCSP, the long-promised but still not existent bus line. (Seriously, the roads and bus stops are built, they just can't settle on financial questions long enough to actually get the thing going.)

Point of Obama reference unclear

Paper-maché minister who won't
fund bus line completion

The political is always my favorite.

A Purge-themed bradjack, featured a castrated Trump.

However, plenty of appearances were simply dedicated to doing what is normally taboo, be it dressing sluttily, in the case of almost everyone of any age there, or doing drag, was were the majority of the men there each day (not just Monday, Mariage burlesque).

While I absolutely encourage defying social standards and questioning oppressive social constraints, by all means festively, I will say that some of the demonstrations were a little lost on me. I get it, dressing up skinny women like the fake "traditional" creole woman on the label of the rum brand who sponsored your float is a part of the deal, and maybe even dancing in skirts made of McDonald's cups, if that's who sponsored you. But some of it was just ... gross. If this were a society where men had to walk about in suits all day, I'd get why men would want to come to Carnival half-naked with nasty, sexual jokes written on their bodies. But they don't. They walk around half naked here all the time, sexual harassing women every day of the year, then show up at Carnival to make us look at junk we don't want to see. If this was a Puritanical society that repressed all sex, I'd get wanting to be gaudy with representations of it. Instead, the media is drenched in hyper-sexualized images of women, and people just painted more of them on their bradjacks. And made a Peppa Pig-themed bradjack with a pig eating out a blond sex doll. I don't know, I just don't get it.

A final intriguing thought: this experience really made me appreciate how U.S.-centric the idea of cultural appropriation is. When some of my students came to the school carnival party dressed as Indian and Egyptian princesses, I cringed. And plenty of paraders wore what I would call Native-American-esque headresses. But this is a creole society, where almost everyone lays claim, both biologically and culturally, to both Indian and indigenous roots, inside of a larger anti-black global culture in which in the past black people have hailed back to African Egyptian history as a way of reclaiming their identity. For them, all of those symbols are a part of who they are, regardless of how indigenous peoples, Indians in diaspora, and present-day Egyptians and other Arabs may face discrimination, inside and outside of Martinique.

Tricky, hairy, uncomfortable, but true. Just like most of the Carnival get-ups I saw.