Latest / Corie Sheppard Podcast / Attillah Springer | The True Origins of Carnival | Canboulay Ritual & Ancestral Resistance

Transcript

Attillah Springer | The True Origins of Carnival | Canboulay Ritual & Ancestral Resistance · Corie Sheppard Podcast

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:02
  Corie: That's why you call people who actually read.
• 0:04
  Corie: If I don't have audiobooks, I'm in some trouble at all.
• 0:07
  unknown: Wow.
• 0:07
  Corie: I'm in some trouble.
• 0:08
  Corie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 0:09
  Corie: Reading and reading is fundamental.
• 0:11
  Corie: It's fundamentally difficult for you.
• 0:13
  Corie: I read for so long.
• 0:16
  Corie: I have um people been complaining and saying we don't introduce the guests, right?
• 0:20
  Corie: So I have a written introduction here.
• 0:22
  Corie: Welcome to the Cory Sheppel Podcast.
• 0:23
  Corie: Welcome back to everybody who's been listening.
• 0:25
  Corie: Welcome to all listeners.
• 0:26
  Corie: You tell me how I do, right?
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 0:28
  Corie: Today I have with me Attila Springer, creative strategist, cultural consultant, producer, researcher, and storyteller.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:35
  Corie: Are we looking good?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:36
  Corie: I get a direct from your website.
• 0:37
  Corie: We know why you introduced somebody.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, hello.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: Hello.
• 0:43
  Corie: This is a conversation I've been looking forward to for some time.
• 0:46
  Corie: Yeah.
• 0:47
  Corie: Yeah, David and these folks book people months and months and months in advance.
• 0:50
  Corie: Keep coming here and say, but when we're talking to Attila.
• 0:53
  Corie: So we have plenty of things to talk.
• 0:55
  Corie: So much.
• 0:55
  Corie: So much, so much.
• 0:56
  Corie: And I get instructions.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 0:58
  Corie: From Marcia Messiah.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:00
  Corie: She said, from the time she sees the second guest, she said, go and get Attila now for all this nonsense.
• 1:04
  Corie: You should be talking about Carnival and Carnival and Carnival.
• 1:07
  Corie: She said, Go and get Attila to set you straight.
• 1:08
  Corie: So we'll do that.
• 1:09
  Corie: How everything?
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_03: I'm good.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_03: I'm good.
• 1:12
  Corie: You feeling good?
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's my season.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_03: It's the most wonderful time.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_03: People talk about the most wonderful time is Christmas.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_03: It is.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_03: It is.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_03: It is.
• 1:22
  Corie: No, no.
• 1:23
  Corie: The Christmas carnaval and Christmas now becoming one in this country.
• 1:26
  Corie: You know what I mean?
• 1:27
  Corie: It's a blurry line as a paranderous myself.
• 1:29
  Corie: I like my parang season and them kind of thing.
• 1:31
  Corie: But no, from boxing they kick in.
• 1:33
  Corie: If that is some releases.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there's there's I personally love that transitory period, you know.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: Like the sky is this kind of fresh, fresh, new blue.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_03: When rainy season now finishes, and place kind of cool still.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_03: The place kind of cool still.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_03: It's a little bit quiet.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_03: You now sat to hear a little steel band around your community practicing.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: Um, yeah, there's something beautiful about that little quiet time right before.
• 2:06
  Corie: It's a tight time now.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_03: It's a really, really tight time now.
• 2:09
  Corie: Like, even um, as you say, steel bands practicing and fet starting and stuff, there was a time where you were introduced to the music of Carnival through those things.
• 2:17
  Corie: It was the steel band and the music that you might hear in a fet of the bands.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:21
  Corie: But now the radio and the streaming providers and think people know all the music before they go any fest.
• 2:26
  Corie: Like the first week of the year, for the first time in a long time, I went to a fet on New Year's Day.
• 2:31
  Corie: And I find, you know, it's a big difference for me.
• 2:34
  Corie: I usually just try to push my fete and close to Carnival as possible for budgetary reasons and so on, you know.
• 2:40
  Corie: But I was excited to see how much people whose fetals youth they know all these songs by the time they come to the fetus, a little bit of a departure from what we know.
• 2:48
  Corie: Yeah, but these fet is why Marshall tells me to bring it here because all the song of Fet Promoters and Fet Promoters and Marshall said that is not Carnaval.
• 2:54
  Corie: So I come here for a specific reason, and I'm excited to talk about the Campbell Riots reenactment.
• 3:00
  Corie: Yeah, I want to tell you 2025 is the first year I went there.
• 3:04
  Corie: First year I came in person.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_03: I forgive you.
• 3:06
  Corie: I know.
• 3:07
  Corie: I was hoping we started there.
• 3:08
  Corie: You see what drinks is do this?
• 3:11
  Corie: Ask mommy for my forgiveness too, ask everybody.
• 3:14
  Corie: But it was my first time there.
• 3:16
  Corie: It is special.
• 3:17
  Corie: I think we all know it.
• 3:19
  Corie: How we treat it is might might might be different.
• 3:22
  Corie: We'll talk about that.
• 3:23
  Corie: But maybe I can tell you my experience with and what stood out to me the most.
• 3:26
  Corie: First, I reached late, I couldn't see nothing.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 3:28
  Corie: It was real, real people.
• 3:29
  Corie: And I tell myself earlier because I reached out four past four.
• 3:33
  Corie: I say I decided that's my kind of time very late.
• 3:35
  Corie: What's the time to really reach?
• 3:36
  Corie: Was it time to reach to get six?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_03: If you don't reach at two, you're not going to get two.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 3:41
  Corie: Oh, wow.
• 3:41
  Corie: And what what time you start?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_03: We start at four.
• 3:44
  Corie: Oh, wow.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_03: So um, and this is something that has been developing over years.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_03: What we found is that people are arriving earlier and earlier and earlier, right?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_03: Because there is a desire to be at this candulating.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_03: So we have people who reach early because they just come in from a fet and they don't want to go home because they know they will fall asleep, right?
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_03: So they have those first grapple people who reach who are the fetters, right?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_03: They these the and you see them there, they're bepping on themselves like for two hours in the in the sands, and then you have like school students.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_03: So we've had groups of school students who come from as far as San Fernando.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_03: What they do is they sleep in the school the night before, and then their teacher hires a maxi and brings them up the road.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: So they reach there like 2 a.m.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: Our cast call time is midnight.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's one o'clock.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_03: We try to make it midnight because now, because of different security issues and that kind of thing, our call time is a little bit earlier.
• 4:53
  Corie: I see.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_03: But when we reach there for our call time, there are people there already.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: There are people there who's sitting down watching, you know.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: There's also this kind of energy that exists in the space.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_03: It's very, very ancestral, it's very spiritual.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_03: Constantly, we have situations where there are people in spirit possession, there are people manifesting ancestors, all sorts of things are going on in the space.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_03: The other thing that I'm looking for is a dog, right?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a dog that you know it's not the same dog.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_03: But dog is symbolic of the Orisha Ogun, and Ogun is the owner of the road.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_03: And so anytime we are in Piccadilly, there's always this dog does pass through.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, you can say that you can say that Trenal have plenty dogs.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_03: You can say that, you can say that, you can say that Trenal have plenty straight dogs, but there is this thing that happens where like a dog will always pass through and just be checking out the scene and then go he way.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_03: Parts of the ritual, and so that's also part of the ritual.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, so so you have these couple hours of quiet, and then it's getting louder and louder and louder, and people are coming, and you know, people are calling you on the phone.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_03: I can't find nowhere to park.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_03: And can I can I get in at this time?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_03: And and you know, like this year I had to have a very stern conversation with the head of security for the president.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um, because we told them, please get there at midnight to do your security sweep.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_03: They reached their half-fast two and then buffet me up because it have people there.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, ma'am, this is why we told you come at midnight to do your security sweep.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_03: I cannot now put out all these people.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_03: So that you can do a security sweep.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_03: You know, Camboule belongs to the communities of East Port of Spain and it belongs to the people of Trinidad and Tobago.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_03: And so there is a way that the people take ownership of that morning, even to the point where we have, you know, had to put in certain security measures because we have situations where, like in the first few years, people used to come and get involved in the fight.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_03: But they want to be part of it.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so it's like people come into pell cuff at my dancers and thing.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, um, so please, I beg.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_03: This is a student.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um this is, you know, we we worked on choreographing this.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_03: So please, although you might think that this belongs to you, please do not come and beat my actors and my performers.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_03: Please, I beg.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 7:43
  Corie: When you talk about governance, I had a experience watching a man with a board there.
• 7:47
  Corie: See, yeah, we had a brand newly minted prime minister at the time, and he came and called board dance.
• 7:51
  Corie: You didn't look the most comfortable.
• 7:52
  Corie: I will say that, right?
• 7:53
  Corie: Maybe you shouldn't say that.
• 7:54
  Corie: Like, you didn't look the most comfortable with the board and them kind of thing.
• 7:57
  Corie: Maybe it's a workout.
• 7:58
  Corie: But I'll tell you something about something, the parking.
• 8:00
  Corie: Like I remember getting there, and I the parking is when I realized, okay, something wrong.
• 8:04
  Corie: I late.
• 8:05
  Corie: Because I had to park probably by All-Star's Panyard, and I was lucky because somebody was leaving.
• 8:09
  Corie: Right.
• 8:10
  Corie: And I get a park a squeezing, and I came down.
• 8:12
  Corie: But that was the first thing that struck me.
• 8:13
  Corie: That there's a there's an energy to it.
• 8:15
  Corie: I like the way you put it.
• 8:16
  Corie: It you feel it, visceral.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 8:18
  Corie: And um for me, and the the debate Marsha and I always have having a discussion about is the business side of Carnival and why why all industries are not treated like industries, and why people who invest in it seem to think it's a a hustle for some.
• 8:33
  Corie: They make a quick money and they leave, or it's just a party.
• 8:36
  Corie: Because I I feel as a boy who grew up in St.
• 8:38
  Corie: James, I know what Juvem Morning is feel like.
• 8:40
  Corie: I know what it's tastes like.
• 8:41
  Corie: It's different.
• 8:42
  Corie: It's kind of I I don't know if I can describe it.
• 8:44
  Corie: But I got that sense when I got there by you the morning because it is typically a place in Trinidad where you stop 10 people and you ask nine of them to go and line the nine saying nah that's not a place I'm gonna line.
• 8:54
  Corie: I might be one of the nine.
• 8:56
  Corie: So when I walk in around there and I see the community and I see what it felt like, and I see how much shops open selling food and how much young boys tracking young girls and things.
• 9:04
  Corie: I start to feel so at home.
• 9:06
  Corie: It sort of feels like what St.
• 9:08
  Corie: James used to be.
• 9:09
  Corie: Yeah, and I wonder, I wonder for you, that sense of community before we get to the the the act itself, that sense of community is something that you'll focus on fostering and building 100%.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, community is what makes Kambule Kambala, right?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um and there are different notions of community that exist within that, right?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_03: So we have the community of our family, right?
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_03: So um Ida Cater, who produces Kamblay, is a family company, starting with my mother, Miss Entu, who wrote the play in around 2004.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, my sister is the choreographer.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and then we have people who are part of my mom's theatric community, right?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_03: So her theater community.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so you had people like the late great Noel Blandin, who was part of the production.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_03: And even before then, there was a theater community who was involved in Kambouley, and that theater community was led by John Cupid, um, Norvan Fullerton, and Tony Hall.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_03: They were the ones who sort of pioneered the Kamboule reenactment as a thing.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_03: And so we built on that community that emerged and began to work with different community best village groups.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_03: Then students started to come into the production, right?
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_03: So we had lots of students from the Department for Creative and Festival Arts coming into the production.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_03: We had um visiting students from Pacific Lutheran University and um from Hartford, Connecticut.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_03: So there was, they they're like all of these levels of community.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_03: Then you have the drummers, then you have the stick fighters, then you have the um, you know, the dancers, and then you have also the people who are actually in the physical community.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_03: So the woman who owned the snack it and the people who own the um the little shop on the corner there, when we turn up for our side visit, they're like, hey, Rich Pan, nice to see you all, you know.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_03: Um a couple years ago during COVID, we actually did a short film which was shot on um Kwame Ture Street, that's what I'm gonna call it.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um and um yeah, and I mean, you know, this was during COVID, and I remember there was a point at which there were hundreds of people on the road, and I was, you know, my Bamsi was winking a little bit because I was like, if the police pass here now, but in a way, I couldn't keep those people away from what we were doing because we were talking about their story, we were talking about their great-grandmother's story, you know.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so this idea of community is at once a small thing and at once a very big thing.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um and and those notions of community get played with in the production because the production happens, so the play happens in a barqueard the night before um Juve morning.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_03: And it's basically all these people in a yard trying to figure out if they actually going to go and fight so-called captain Baker.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_03: Because you know, actually, he wasn't really a captain.
• 12:29
  Corie: So he just called himself captain baker.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_03: He re just called himself captain, right?
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_03: He was actually a lieutenant.
• 12:34
  Corie: I see.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_03: And he, you know, I mean, this is this is the kind of thing that you find out if you read the history texts that are there, right?
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_03: So, so understanding that um, you know, the story is not really about Baker, the story is about the people who made up those communities who decided one day, listen, this is a risk, but we have to fight for what is ours.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_03: We have to fight that we have nothing.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_03: We have this nothing.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_03: You cannot take away the nothing that we don't have, right?
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: We have nothing to lose.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_03: And this is in fact a love way that sung in the anything, what you have, what we have to lose, what we have to lose in this battle, what we have to lose in this battle, tell Baker he ass in trouble, right?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_03: There is a way that this this idea that we have nothing but each other, we have nothing but ourselves as a creative entity, um, your body as a site of freedom, right?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_03: All of those things are important when you talk about community.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, you know, of course.
• 13:38
  Corie: It reminds me of there was COVID, is a good example of it where you saw the carnival being the first thing that they say that closed is not going to happen.
• 13:46
  Corie: And I always remember Umari Ashby, um, who's a real juvenile man.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 13:53
  Corie: And he's saying, Well, you can't stop that, you know.
• 13:55
  Corie: So when you say body has freedom, I do remember him posting his in the middle of the savannah during COVID, completely muddung me.
• 14:01
  Corie: Because you say, My ancestors is my ancestors, and this had to be done.
• 14:06
  Corie: And my tradition is my tradition, yeah, and it had to be done.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 14:09
  Corie: So the site, the importance of the site of where you have the the rants on the money.
• 14:14
  Corie: You want to speak to that in terms of why you do it with it.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_03: So so actually the there the site of the actual confrontation that happened was the corner of um Duke and George Street, just outside All-Stars Panyard.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_03: And that was where the original um reenactment was begun, right?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but then we outgrew the space.
• 14:39
  Corie: Evidently.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_03: We outgrew the space, and so there was a need for us to find somewhere that was also within the East Port of Spain area, and so the Piccadilly Greens was was sort of um decided as a space by the National Carnival Commission that would be big enough to absorb the crowd that would come.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_03: That happened around 2010 or so.
• 15:02
  Corie: What was the first year that it was done in this format?
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_03: So um the first year that the Camberley reenactment was done, it was actually in the 80s, and it was done by John Cupid.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: And the music was scored by the late Lancelot Lane.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_03: I see.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_03: And they actually did it as part of an emancipation celebration that was organized in point 14.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_03: So this would have been actually before there was a national emancipation celebration.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm talking about there's there's like a 30-year history of uh Camboule reenactment.
• 15:39
  Corie: Once you say it's just 40, no, yeah, it's a new age.
• 15:44
  Corie: It's 40 years now.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_03: Nonsense, nonsense, uh-huh.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_03: So so then after that, um, you know, John Cupid was a researcher with the National Carnival Commission, and he under his guidance, there was introduced these multiple regional carnivals.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_03: And so the as a regional carnival celebration for Port of Spain, this Camboule reenactment was introduced probably around um late 90s, 2000.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I've been digging through the records to find out the exact year, but it I can't find it anywhere.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so my mom was a member of the regional carnival committee at that time, and she was like, but something missing from this story because essentially what would happen is that um Captain Baker would come in, the people would fight, the governor would give a speech saying, nah, nah, nah, nah, it's okay, it's okay.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_03: You know, no, we didn't really mean to interfere with your thing, right?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_03: And Miss Enchu's concern always was, but what about the people who were involved in the fight?
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_03: What made them do this?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_03: And so she wrote this one act play, and it's actually based on the research of um the great Calypsonian and historian um Hollis shocked us Liverpool.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_03: Man himself, um, one of my lecturers, and you know, the the this book that he has written, and I brought it today so that you can see how much piece of paper I have in there.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_03: I was saying, let me point right there.
• 17:22
  Corie: When I have a book, the book looks brand new.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's a serious, it's a serious tone, and I would suggest that anybody who really wants to find out what carnival meant, and especially, you know, we have this rhetoric that carnival was introduced by the French and all the Africans were doing was mocking their masters.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_03: And actually, it's a lot more nuanced and a lot more um intricate and a lot more um yeah, it's a lot more complex than that.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, the French brought a version of Carnival, but that that was a space where Africans were not allowed, um, unless you were a hired musician, right?
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and one of the things that Hollis talks about is the fact that, you know, even within the the balls that the um the upper classes had, they had started to pull from the African drumms, the African musical forms, and they were pulling in ex-enslaved or freedmen or runaways to sing in their balls because they understood that listen, our our thing need a little it need a little shadow benny, it needed a little pimental, right?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_03: So they started they started a cultural right now.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: The Africans are doing their thing on the road.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_03: Now, are people going to come with nothing?
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_03: We were told that Africans came with nothing, but what about genetic memory?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_03: What about what you know in your blood?
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_03: And when you know, when people start to remember what is in their blood and what the masking that they brought with them was for, then you start to see the things that we now consider traditional masks.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_03: But all those traditional mass forms come from other more ancient forms.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_03: So the jab has uh uh a more ancient African form, the the the Piero has a more ancient African form, especially the the version that we have here, which is the multicolored um lapering, right?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_03: The multi-layered kind of version, which is an ancestral masquerade.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_03: You know, a lot of the masquerades that um that were part of the African experience here came out of their genetic memory and came out of you know certain needs that you had in terms of your veneration of your ancestors, your spiritual connection to the space that you are in, your connection spiritually and otherwise to the animals and plants that are in the space.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_03: So there are multiple ways that the African masquerades took on different forms.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_03: And so it was not about mocking, because then when you also look at African masquerade traditions, you will see that for a lot of them, satire was built into the mass, yeah, right?
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_03: And so so it wasn't that they were mocking their masses, they were just using the form to do what it had always done, which is to say the people in authority need to have their their ways, their ways shifted every now and again, and reminded that they are not above the law, and the law is the mass, right?
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_03: The law is the mass, right?
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_03: So even look at something like the baby doll.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_03: Baby doll is a statement on sexual violence that was happening in communities, right?
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_03: So you have a situation where you have plenty of young girls, plenty young black girls in communities who working in somebody's house in Sinclair, of course, taken advantage of, right?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_03: And then when they have this child, who's gonna take care of this?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_03: Who's gonna take care of this red child in an area that is predominantly African?
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_03: How does that, how, how does that change the dynamics of the relationships between the men and the woman?
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, like we always want to say, yeah, well, all these women was who's, right?
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_03: But I mean, really and truly, what does agency mean in a society like ours when you don't have any agency?
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_03: You don't even have ownership of your body, no bargaining power or anything, yeah.
• 22:00
  Corie: It's funny when you talk about ancestral memory.
• 22:02
  Corie: It's important for me to say as well that when you say the way we were told these stories, I was told this story in New Tong Boys.
• 22:08
  Corie: When you say told, it is a formal system that teaches us some of these things.
• 22:12
  Corie: Where they say the French come and we masquerade and we mock and we mimic and we and I like the fact that it said as if we didn't come with anything because that is also taught.
• 22:20
  Corie: Yeah.
• 22:20
  Corie: And I asked Etienne, I had Etienne here at the end uh first episode this year was Etienne.
• 22:25
  Corie: And funny, I was just asking him, like, when you start to play music, boy.
• 22:28
  Corie: And he went immediately to ancestors.
• 22:31
  Corie: He's like, Well, I don't know, he say he says ancestral memories are thing.
• 22:35
  Corie: And he said, Your father is playing music.
• 22:37
  Corie: He's saying you play music.
• 22:38
  Corie: I don't think that those things are by chance.
• 22:40
  Corie: It's not.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_03: It's not.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_03: And I mean, you know, like if I tell you a story about my family, you know, my father was born in Grenada, right?
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: His grandmother was a um she was a follower of Gavi.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_03: She went and helped build the Panama Canal.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_03: She was a Gavi.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_03: She was able to save her money to think, ting, ting, ting, ting.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_03: But one year my father came back with a document from um the archives in Grenada.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_03: And it was of all the people who had been hanged during Fedon's Rebellion, right?
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_03: Which was in 1795.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_03: And half of the people had our last name.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_03: And so when I think about things like that, I think about the continuity of rebellion and resistance within families.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I think about I think about my my great-grandfather vanquished.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_03: I think about my my great-grandmother, who Louisa Murray, who was a who was a um a Gaviite.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_03: I think about the fact that I inherited a certain way of seeing the world and a certain sense of justice.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, my father spent nine months on Nelson Island for um sedition during 1970.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_03: That's just a reality of what I grew up having an understanding of.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_03: There was a point at which the um the authorities, you know, they they they they basically put them in the death row ward, um the death row part of the prison prison.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_03: Because mostly they didn't want them to interact with the rest of the prison population and radicalize them.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_03: So we have a situation where, you know, poets, I mean, my father was a poet.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_03: Poets are a danger politically to the society.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_03: Pan men are danger politically to the society.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_03: You know, mass women are danger politically to the society.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_03: And what does that tell you?
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_03: It tells you that ultimately the artist is the person who is practicing the highest and purest form of political engagement.
• 24:48
  Corie: Yeah, it's one of those things I saw you in an interview recently.
• 24:51
  Corie: I want to say Suniti Murad, right?
• 24:53
  Corie: I hope I have that right.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_03: It was an interview with um for Boca Slitfest or something like that.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 25:00
  Corie: And um you you were talking about revolution never stopping.
• 25:04
  Corie: You spoke on that as a point.
• 25:06
  Corie: I thought I thought it was a profound thing to say.
• 25:10
  Corie: Because we we we well, me, I quantify revolution as saying, okay, 1970 was this almost as that was before I born.
• 25:17
  Corie: So I see it as a year or a moment.
• 25:19
  Corie: If you could talk a little bit about that, or what you meant when you say revolution is something that that always happened.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_03: Because it is.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, uh, so I was I will say what I say every year to our cast when we begin to practice for Kamboule.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: I say two things about time and about revolution, revolution, right?
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_03: Time for African in African cosmology and philosophy is not a line, right?
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_03: Time is a spiral, and so we're constantly possibly facing the same time all the time, right?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_03: So this is where reenactments are important because you are constantly going back to where ancestors were and wondering what it was like for them and how if what I'm doing in this precise moment is going to have an impact on who is gonna come after me, right?
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_03: So that's one thing about time being like this.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_03: The second thing is that Camboulet riot in 1881 was one moment in a movement that began way before emancipation, you know, and it began way before Trinidad, and it began way before Grenada, it began actually in Haiti, it began in um in all the uprisings led by indigenous people who are fighting for sovereignty, who are fighting for you know, smallpox-free blankets, right?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_03: As soon as you have a situation where somebody's way of life is being threatened, you have resistance to it.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_03: And this constantly is taking place in the world.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_03: There is, you know, and we um, you know, when you scrape back all the things that existence is about, right?
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_03: As human beings, what are the things that we need?
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_03: We need food, we need shelter, we need, you know, some kind of medicine, and we need something that convinces us that our existence is not completely futile, right?
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: And meaningless, right?
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_03: So what are the things that come out of that?
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_03: Community comes out of that, rituals come out of that, festivals come out of that, you know.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_03: But then somebody comes along one day and says that um, you know, when you call your ancestors in this particular way, that's actually evil, right?
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_03: And never mind, I in my church am doing an ancestral ritual every week.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_03: Little seasons that by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of somebody who has been dead for 2,000 years.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_03: Never mind, you are doing your own ancestral ritual.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_03: This ancestral ritual over here, wrong, right?
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm going to basically kill you for doing your ancestral ritual like that.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_03: But what are you supposed to do?
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_03: I suppose to death?
• 28:33
  Corie: Yeah, you're supposed to do theirs.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_03: No, I'm not doing it.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not doing it.
• 28:39
  Corie: And when you say it wrong, or they were killed for it is outlawed in many, many pla in many places and spaces.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_03: But the first obia legislation that that emerged in the Caribbean was in the 1760s in Jamaica in response to Taki's rebellion.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_03: Because they understood that Obia was a way that people would organize themselves and organize their science and organize their healing and organize the invisibility portion and all of that so that they would be able to fight against enslavement.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_03: You know, um, C.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_03: LR James, when he talks about in Black Jacobins, he talks about voodoo being the medium of conspiracy.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody, you know, everybody talks about Haitian Revolution, but we're afraid to talk about voodoo and the fact that, you know, it was a spiritual system that made a way for them to see their way to freedom.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, that's one of the things that we also focus on in Kambulet.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_03: We say that our spirituality is important to us.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_03: Again, you know, that's a very um dangerous thing to do in a society like ours, where African spirituality is still seen as of the devil, um, black magic.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you hear so many negative things from people who look like us.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_03: Of course, of course.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_03: About their own ancestral spiritual practices.
• 30:09
  Corie: It's something you said before, like so much of it is is is taught.
• 30:13
  Corie: I want to say indoctrinated, but it's systematic or systemic.
• 30:17
  Corie: Like when I St.
• 30:18
  Corie: James is a place where I started understand ritual fast.
• 30:22
  Corie: The things that I was drawn to as a child.
• 30:26
  Corie: And I'm not I now, we, all of us as little children, was religious festivals.
• 30:30
  Corie: To tell you the truth, when I grew up, me know it's religious festivals.
• 30:33
  Corie: Because who say the huse yard, it's our mandate wrong, so it's about Catholic church, so it's about Baptist Yard Hill.
• 30:39
  Corie: And one thing I show about is anybody who fasts is have a feast to follow.
• 30:42
  Corie: It doesn't matter what religion it is, them fellas and them go and share food.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_03: But but you know, at c at core, again, what is civilization about?
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_03: It is about feeding people, it is about sheltering people, it is about it, it is about core needs.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_03: I grew up in an Orisha yard in on the line in Maribella, yeah, Orisha Melvina Rodney.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, there were times the listen, when you have a feast, you're feeding a whole community.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_03: Again, we come back to the community question, right?
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: You feed an entire community.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_03: That is why you kill an animal, you kill several animals.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_03: It's not that the the sacrifice is that you are signaling to the universe that the energy that you have is to share with your community, and anything that you give to the universe positively will come back to you positively.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there's there's a saying in in Ifa Urisha tradition that says, what you do that is good is for you.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_03: What you do that is bad is also for you.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_03: And so this understanding that if you do good, it will come, it will always come back to you is central to um our understanding of community.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, at its core, we just want people to feel safe enough that they could have enjoyment.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_03: And this is really the core of Carnival, that I create enough safety in my community that no matter what else going on, I could express joy at just the fact of being alive.
• 32:24
  Corie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 32:25
  Corie: And it's important.
• 32:26
  Corie: So even when you say, and I was really encouraged by the amount of youth, I don't watch your screen now.
• 32:30
  Corie: Okay, I see this thing itself, huh?
• 32:32
  Corie: But just the amount of youth in the community who are outside, just being the youths, they're just having a good time.
• 32:37
  Corie: And you can see there's something they look forward to every year.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, because I mean, what else is going on in their community that's positive?
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's that the rest of the society actually sanctions, that the rest of the society, and I mean, you know, let's think about it.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_03: Those communities of East Port of Spain that we label hotspots, etc., etc., they are where the majority of our creative potential has come from, you know, and it has taken us so long to actually be able to recognize that, you know, pan is amazing.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, pan is a wonder, you know.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_03: And what why why did it take so long?
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_03: Because it's little black boys who do it.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's little black boys who do it.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_03: And we will never, never, never, never give credit where credit is due.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_03: You know?
• 33:33
  Corie: Yeah, something is a constant struggle and a constant fight.
• 33:35
  Corie: Like late last year, we started to see changes and we know government change, and it's starting to see even changes and what would be sponsored versus what not sponsored and where money is going where pan concerned.
• 33:45
  Corie: And it's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about as well, because you you talk about heritage economics.
• 33:51
  Corie: I think I never heard about before you spoke about it, right?
• 33:54
  Corie: And I don't know if I had this right and it's why I was talking about all the time, why wrong?
• 33:58
  Corie: So we're gonna clarify that today, right?
• 34:00
  Corie: I have a fundamental issue with the way carnival is treated as a business.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_03: But it's not a business.
• 34:08
  Corie: Well, let me let me let me say why before I get to not being a business, right?
• 34:13
  Corie: The business aspect of it being so there's a few commercial parts of carnival.
• 34:17
  Corie: Let's say a fit.
• 34:18
  Corie: Because a man could take a thousand dollars, invest in that, and turn it into$1,500, which is an important part of any society for me.
• 34:24
  Corie: And there's this discussion that Jamaica Carnival and this one carnival and who carnival go and take over Trenda and Tobago Carnival.
• 34:31
  Corie: My my simple answer to everybody is that that will never happen.
• 34:35
  Corie: You are part of the reason that I answer confidently that that will never happen.
• 34:39
  Corie: And after talking to you the first time, I say, alright, now I'll frighten.
• 34:43
  Corie: A little more frightened than I was before.
• 34:45
  Corie: Because of course I don't understand the the the mechanics that happen behind the scenes.
• 34:50
  Corie: Uh, and what the the reason I say you is because I've been to like Miami carnival.
• 34:55
  Corie: I don't even like going carnival abroad.
• 34:57
  Corie: I I could only survive one carnival a year, so I just go this one and I done.
• 35:02
  Corie: But what you feel when you come come uh to the reenactment, or what you feel when you go a fet, or what you feel when you go to Calypso Tens, or you go and you want to NCC events.
• 35:12
  Corie: I I don't feel that in Miami.
• 35:14
  Corie: I cast it.
• 35:15
  Corie: Well, exactly.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, like it's really funny that you know they're saying Trinidad's shopkeeper is king, right?
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um, that's one.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: You put that aside, right?
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, and we boast, you know, there are there are a hundred and something carnivals, Trinidad-style carnivals all over the world.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and there's only one Brazil-style carnival that you have to go to Brazil for.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_03: You know why?
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_03: Because Brazil is the only place energetically where you will get the carnival that you're looking for.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_03: You have to go, either you go to Rio or you go to Bahia or you go to, you know, and and and in those regional spaces, they all have a very specific character.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_03: You don't see people doing Brazil-style carnivals all over the place.
• 36:05
  Corie: Exported for that.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_03: No, it's not exported, but you know what's exported?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_03: I remember a couple of years ago I was in Berlin, right?
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_03: I just happened to be in Berlin for um their carnival.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_03: They they have a carnival of cultures, right?
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a little parade that happens in the middle of Berlin.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, cool.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_03: They have what do they have?
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_03: They have like um, you know, there's there's a strong carnival tradition in north north um northwest Germany.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_03: So they have like like the kind of big puppets and the the kind of mechanical ting ting ting.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_03: So they have that, right?
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's part of their culture, right?
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_03: Then they have um schools and groups from different parts of the world represented through migrants, right?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_03: So you have like a crew from um Bolivia, you have a crew from Peru, you have a couple samba schools, right?
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_03: And then, so I'm like excitedly looking for the Trine's, right?
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_03: Then, like I'm standing up on this corner and I'm hearing, like from three blocks down, a man screaming on a uh truck, talking about, yes, I was the first man to play soccer in Berlin.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_03: Who remembers that?
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, brother man, I do not care about that.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_03: Where is the representation of what Trinidad and Tobago has given the world?
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_03: But but we have created this soulless commercial model which can be replicated all over the place.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_03: And what happens when you do it like that is that you lose part of why it's significant, right?
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_03: So if you think about Notting Hill Carnival, for example, Notting Hill Carnival is the biggest street festival in Europe.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, millions of people, millions, like two million people gather in this small community for a two-day celebration.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_03: But you could stand up on a corner in Notting Hill Carnival and not see a mass band for like at least an hour, right?
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_03: There's there's there's space for everything, there's space for there's space for um, you know, and I grew up in London in the 90s, so I love a little rave culture.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_03: I love my little drum and bass, right?
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm I'm there, I'm there with the Abba Shanti and the and the Jashaka, I'm 100% down with that.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_03: That's my that's my growing up culture.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_03: But if it's carnival, I want to see mass.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_03: I want to hear pan and I want to hear a little bit of soccer.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_03: But those elements, because they are so highly commercialized, don't have the space.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_03: And and because for a steel band in London, finding a space of practice where you're not going to be pushed out because you're making noise becomes part of the challenge of you know, replicating your culture.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_03: So here we have a challenge where now everybody is going somewhere else to experience a Trinidad-style carnival.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_03: It's cheaper to go to Miami than it is to come to Trinidad.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_03: Jamaica Room.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_03: It's cheaper to come to go to Jamaica than it is to but what you get in Jamaica is not going to be what you get here.
• 39:26
  Corie: Yeah, that's why I feel like it's never to go.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, when we talk about the business of Carnival, it's actually not about how many bands you have on the road.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_03: It is about how many flights you have coming into the country.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_03: It's about how many hotel rooms that you have, it's about how many um, you know, how many maxis that have to chip people around.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_03: A complete economy.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it is a complete structure that needs to exist.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_03: There are elements within there that also need to be buoyed up and supported, because if they are not, then your carnival has no essential meaning.
• 40:07
  Corie: So that's where your mind has changed my mind.
• 40:08
  Corie: And almost the first couple sentences we talk about, that's where I started getting a little bit worried.
• 40:13
  Corie: Because where you say is absolutely the way I see it, I do not think Trinidad's carnival, even if you use it for a branding thing like it have a Trinidad carnival all over the world or whatever you want to say.
• 40:23
  Corie: The the reasons you point in all these reasons I feel it can't be replicated.
• 40:26
  Corie: Because what you will get is it can't.
• 40:29
  Corie: It cannot, and it should not.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_03: It should not, it should be that everybody has to make a pilgrimage to Trinidad.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_03: The soil important the soil is important for the colour.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_03: So they can't how they go export that you cannot replicate that feeling of walking east into the sunrise, you can't replicate Laparoo Cemetery.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_03: You know that Juve morning is always in a new moon, right?
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_03: There's never a full moon for Juve.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_03: It's a new moon, it has something that's magical about that.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: There's something also, you know, like when you talk about the direction that the parade goes in, it follows a particular um cycle that is that is part of Congolese spirituality.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, there's certain things about the space that make it really, really important.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, one of the things that I was talking about when we were talking sometime, I was saying, you know, I'm not gonna go to Greece to check out the latest Alan Ciaga um you know, shop.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I'm not gonna go to Rome to look at it, you know.
• 41:39
  Corie: When I go there, I want to see what I'm have.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_03: I want to see what they have.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_03: I want to see what they have.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_03: I want to see a 2,000-year-old thing.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_03: The the difference is, yes, we have petroglyphs, yes, we have we have we have things that are ancient here.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_03: We have Banuari Man, we have things that are ancient here that speak to our presence here for a long time, but we also have our bodies within which our energy and spirit lives, and it is deeply connected to the land, it is deeply connected to how our ancestors got here, forced and free.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_03: It is deeply connected to the fact that after emancipation, between 1841 and 1861, 6,000 Yoruba people came here.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_03: It is connected to that.
• 42:25
  Corie: So then why people have this fear that somehow one of these foreign carnivals could take over what Trinidad Carnival looks like?
• 42:32
  Corie: Because I I number one, I don't feel it, it's not there.
• 42:36
  Corie: And that's why I keep saying it cannot happen.
• 42:38
  Corie: The only way it could happen is if we buy in 100% to this completely commercial model and we make carnival about fat and pretty much, whatever those elements are, and all of a sudden we bereft of the steel pan or the well, you see, this is why Jammits have to mind the business.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, like I I remember a few years ago, I I you know I used to write a column for the guardian, and I remember I I got into this cycle of complaint.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, oh, the mask and the thing, and you know, it's easy to get there, you know, and blah blah blah.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_03: And then one day I was just like a tela hush yik and do your work.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_03: Do your work, focus on what you know and focus on what you could do, right?
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_03: And that was when I shifted my focus completely and I started to focus on creating with my family company a language for how we talk about Kambouley.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_03: A language for how we engage with Kambouli.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_03: When we start our rehearsal process, we sit in the reasoning.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_03: I'm showing, you know, we're talking about the laws, we're talking about the Bastardity Act that the Catholic Church didn't want to enforce because they didn't want to take responsibility, they didn't want them and their parishioners to have to take responsibility for any little half white children that were being born because.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_03: of their indiscretions.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_03: We talk about the Contagion Act, which was an act that was passed by the British colonies um making it so that any any woman could be accused of prostitution and arrested and taken to the hospital to be checked for venereal disease.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_03: This was introduced by the British military all over the place.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_03: We talk about the Peace Preservation Act in 1833, which banned noise making and which was the you know which set the precedent for the um for the emergence of the steel pan which was already kind of bubbling right we talk about the you know there's so many things that were introduced as laws that were about really restricting the existence of African people well black and brown bodies because what you find is that as soon as the the indentured Indians come in as well they sort of they start to introduce legislation.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_03: So you know it's like okay in 18 in 1881 Baker came for the Camboule in Port of Spain in 1884 he came back for the Camboule in San Fernando and a boy died a boy lost his life later on that same year he read the riot act in Bali Dantola in in San Fernando where the the the the numbers are disputed but people lost their lives in the Jose in the jihadie massacre right now think about the fact that we are in a state now where we say well the law is illaw but the law is also an ass.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_03: And we have to understand that there was a point at which it was legal in this society for people to own people and then that became illegal.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_03: But you know what the people who were owning people they didn't have a switch that went off in their head that said that these people had a right to be free.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_03: In 1888 a switch didn't go off in their head right and they and they sudden they suddenly realized oh these are human beings you know the in it people always the other thing that people talk about is the fact that yeah well it had slavery in Africa and thing thing but there was a law that was passed in the in the um in the 16th century in Barbados that actually made a human being something called chattel which is not quite human right and so chattel slavery was a creation of the transatlantic slave trade right and so how do you get from a point where you believe that people are not really human so that you can own them like a piece of property and then like the year a year later or a few months later you believe that this person is fully human.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_03: And anything that they're doing they're singing this song they they they making mass they worshiping you supposed to believe that they are they are worshiping in a way that is so when you read the papers of the time you see words like vile savage barbaric obscene you know all of these words that speak to the fact that you know who were the eyes that were looking at these people who was writing the articles you know it's an important thing to add to diology I try to always keep at the forefront of my mind just a weird ancestral memory them have it too.
• 47:36
  Corie: So there's this discussion that people have now I hear it in the states a lot more than anywhere else surprisingly where you have white Americans who say well I didn't own slaves I that was my I shouldn't bear the burden of that but this is a it's a dangerous discussion.
• 47:51
  Corie: I have a question for you in terms of the what you said into uh when you're in your planning phases I know you said you you you talk to the children of the schools that come to be a part of it this is information that you would talk to them about these things and and how interested are they like children?
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_03: You know we had a situation um last year where you know we were talking we were just having a conversation about you know various things and actually some of the young people got really angry because they were like why why didn't I learn this in school?
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_03: Why am I not learning this history?
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_03: You know um Dr.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_03: Liverpool talks about the fact that when he was he was an excellent history student when he was at St.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_03: Mary's they took away the history option to do history and when he went and he asked his dean why can't you do history?
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_03: And the dean told him history is for big people right because when you started dig at actually what our history is when you start to realize that there are huge companies in Trinidad that exist to this day that we shop in on a daily basis who got reparations for the loss of their enslaved peoples need the the documents are there.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_03: But there is deliberate there's deliberate not education of our people so because we feel that if if people know and understand what happened in their history then you know it's like um you know they'll do like Bomali say I feel like bombing a church now that I know the preacher is lying.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah you know um but if you don't tell them what do they have you know and so Miss Entu always talks about um you have a history to claim and to reclaim and you know it's understanding the fullness of your history understanding that you you do not begin and end with enslavement understanding that you know there is so much more to us than what we are given you know and for a lot of the a lot of the um the the speaking masquerades if you think about it the speaking masquerades will about eloquence will about you know knowing your story think about a midnight rubber you know a midnight rubber is somebody who is a grio who knows the history of a people but if if the society telling you you're bad and you're wrong and you're evil the story that you're going to give is a bombastic story of your evil right right but when you you know like when you hear praise songs to Ogun for example they have that same format they they say you know ogun came down from um from Orun and he was very dreaded he took he took five days to do this he you know ogun is not smiling he you know when he comes down he wants a bathing blood he don't want he has water home but he goes and bathe in blood right he he's the richest man in heaven but he wearing palm front right so there is this there is that same you know um poetry that exists within the the languages and the you know the idioms that we lost that we still hear in our language today I remember going to Nigeria and feeling like I could speak Yoruba because I understood so much subtext.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_03: I understood tone I understoody language right I listened so much I felt the same way when I was in India as well I felt like I I was with my people I felt like you know there was something there that was connected to me and so I want to say to to Trini's you know just just dig down into who you are you know find these stories and the other thing that happens is that you know we say to young people all right okay so what is your family story?
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_03: Go and find out what your family story is and you know you know like maybe about half the time a little more than half the time a young person will come back to us and say um Miss you know um I went and I asked my my mother and she said that mom my I had a great uncle who used to play stick and um you know and it's like all of a sudden they have this rich history and there's an unfortunate thing that happens in our in our families because there's so much trauma in many of our families we don't tell these stories right I I was very fortunate that I get every single story right I get plenty stories I get plenty plenty plenty stories and because I because I came from a line of storytellers you know there was this thing about constantly telling the story over and over again and I realized that that is something that a lot of families don't have they don't have that thing about constantly telling the story and reminding you yeah your grandfather name was Vanquish you know and you know it it's like where is that information it's just yeah it could be fitting the thing is like I'm so sorry to go back to Etienne all the time but he said something else that shake me the remind me of what he's saying here because I've been complaining a lot every time I talk to musicians I say boy the teaching school with this recorder kind of thing and it's like the kind of colonial way of teaching music where you had a learner according to Pelham you had to learn a quaver or then there's something along the line they changed from a quaver to a quote so no it's hard to learn for me and I wonder if we we can't formalize the educational system that we have in the Panyard where people learn learn by a certain amount of road learn by paying attention the discipline that comes with it and his response was that well it's kind of formalized these because I guess a part of my mind is that it has to be in his school system.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_03: So even when you talk I wonder my first thing is be change your syllabus and change the curriculum yeah but I mean you know this is what Lloyd best talked about he didn't talk about school in pan he talk about he didn't talk about pan in school he talked about school in pan there's a difference in the understanding right because when you go into a pan yard you learn a lot about community it's like it's like any yard right and this is where I want to go back to you know when we when we talked about the business of Carnival you know I prefer to talk about the economics of Carnival because then you bring in different theoretical positions right like theories of value right theories of market theories of um you know what is what is production you know when you when you look at those things you will begin to value things differently right so the yard as a space of value you know we we have not even begun to to think about that and and talk about that yard is true and you know I mean I learned this from the Orisha yard I learned this from the pan yard and you know I learned this from my my great grandfather yard and of course right community you know it's it's it's it's a commune it's you know and this is the other thing we're constantly looking outside of the systems that we have in order to make a system that makes sense for us but and I'm saying that we already have the system we already have these systems and you know it's like I I wanted to mention the thing that you know we talk a lot about the spirits of carnival we everybody have a song about the jumbie and you know the spirit calling me and this and that and the next and we we we leave it at that right it's a surface conversation but you know heritage is the intangible heritage is actually the place where the jumbe is acknowledged because everybody who is practicing some sort of tradition has rituals that go with it.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_03: So like stick fighters they are practicing they are they have a 40 days um fasting you know I know stick fighters who don't eat meat they um they they they practice um semen retention you know it's like there there are multiple things that people are doing their fasting is actually going on before carnival before carnival and before Ash Wednesday right so their 40 days is is is an observation that understands that what they are engaging in is a ritual and an acknowledgement of the jumbi that we all singing about and talking about and experience everywhere right everywhere is experiencing even in the commercial bands even in the soccer fest everybody is experiencing the jumbi but it's only in the heritage spaces that the jumbi is acknowledged now where is the place where is the budget line item for jumbi that's very greatest things I hear so you can't put jumbi on an excel spreadsheet they ain't gonna prove it they they will just laugh at you right they will laugh at you so now I had a I have to come up with all the anancy ways to make sure that I I I I get my jumby in I get my jumbi in because the jumbi is there but it's the reason why again you could have I I try to avoid calling ban name and thing right so let me say Corey's ban is the reason why you could have what you have here and you could carry it anywhere you want you could carry it wherever and partners whoever in Jamaica or wherever but that feel is not it's not it's a yeah but also you know if a if if a system is replicable then it could be duplicated and and made better based on the resources that I have this fragrance right and so in an open market if you have an open market and and you know this product that I have here is you know I could reach 2000 people but then somebody else who bigger see that I do in this product in this particular way and I'm very open about it because you know it's successful.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's successful and you know I'm making lots of money from doing this particular thing.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 58:00
  Corie: Procter Gamble take it and do it.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah Proctor Gamble take it and do it.
• 58:04
  Corie: You know where I say it's a lot in the digital spaces um was it fine there was this video platform I hope I have it right then fellas come up with something innovative and then fellas offer them a bunch of money they say no we've why then they just make a version of it.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_03: Even Instagram stories now took over something else and I mean essentially this is what you're seeing in the commercial carnival you're seeing people replicating the same model over and over again when there are multiple commercial blind spots that exist within the carnival um and that should be explored that should be looked into you know and I'm not just talking about lashes and and and you know um makeup I'm special model trucks that's not not that's not all that's not just what I'm talking about.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_03: There's you know I'm not gonna say nothing else because that's my left the left of time gamble come and take the left and gamble come and take my thing.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_03: But I mean you know we have so much that we could be doing with our carnival that ensures that carniv the carnival in Trinidad remains the center that we say that it is and that we say that it we want it to be but actually what we're doing is that we are shipping it off shipping it off shipping it off shipping it off and not protecting the fact that there is something about this land that that makes Carnival special in this lands private sector investors people who just have a fet would you say that in in as as a to talk about them as a group or your experience with it do they acknowledge that do people who was a Fed promoter.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_03: No I don't have any interaction with them or no it's not that I secluded myself I I um you know actually to be fair um there's one private sector organization mass organization that I have a really good relationship with and that's Lost Tribe because and and I want to big up Valmickey for understanding um and I think that that's because of his spiritual understanding of of what you know so a couple of years ago when they had their um their um launch of Carnival and it was on Arapisa Avenue and they asked us to come and take part in that and you know I rocked back and I was like hmm and you know a lot of people around us are like of course everybody watching to see what's the next move now the thing is we don't do anything without asking the permission of our ancestors right so I went I went by my Baba Lao that's what I did and I talked I talked to my jumbie.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_03: The jumbies say go through and if I get permission from my jumbie to go through with something I go in through right and there is a way that um you know we have spaces where people are very nervous because certain things are on the fringe on the periphery and not getting the access that they need people are dying with information and you know there is no way of transferring that information to masses of young people who would really like to have the information and one of the things that I will always support Miss and to in is the fact that she just wants people to have the information.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_03: And so you know so us getting an opportunity to go and do that little three minute excerpt of Kambouley as part of this um this parade that happened it was amazing.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_03: And you know um so many people came up and said I've never seen this before because actually Piccadilly greens could only hold a thousand people or two thousand people if so much.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_03: So it means that it's only so many people could see it at any given time right so what do you do in a situation like that?
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_03: You have to reach into spaces where you're not preaching to the converted you're not preaching to the people who know and understand.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_03: You're reaching out to the people who don't have the information so that they get a little pinch and they get a little touch and that they know that it's a possibility this is a possibility so you know aside from that I don't really have a lot of interaction with with um with the people in that space and I think that that's that's unfortunate because I feel like there is a way that that there could be a mutual exchange of ideas of knowledge of information and of resources that would make sure that everything gets sustained because if you don't have people in town then you don't really have carnival people have stopped coming to Carnival in town and that's because there is nothing in town for them to see except for 10 000 Bamsi shaking which is good that I don't know but I mean the Bamsi and Punky sling.
• 1:03:15
  Corie: I mean what is that about nobody is this right and let me tell you why I asked because it's like um two things that I always like to right without without point lisa or the the infrastructure that spends in points of pill I see what you doing and many other people in this space as the infrastructure of what carnival has to be you cannot leave that on one firm because if somebody had to come and build that they cannot have a carnival it cannot have mass it can't have much except they can have a commercial carnival let me put it like that it can't it can't sell a costume if the infrastructure isn't built.
• 1:03:48
  Corie: So the infrastructure in the sometimes some people might see it as the building of the North Stanley building the stage I feel like the the characters as part of the infrastructure the Campbell rats the pand those things I am not sure that you want to leave those things to chance and when I say chance I mean business.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_03: But you see unfortunately you know um somebody asked me um recently so how are they making out you know because you know well money's going down I was like yeah but we never used to get any money anyway.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_03: So so we used to really community a lot.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_03: So you don't get government funding or anything we get you know okay so I have to say that we believe that carnival emerges fully formed right and you know when there's a competition when there's an event it just it just magically appears right but in order for us to have a performance on Carnival Friday morning it's months of preparation it is spiritual preparation it is physical preparation it is making of costumes it is drums it is stick you somebody had to go in the bush and cut the pue you know all of those things need to happen right somebody had to sit down with the script and say all right how we how we we we we changing it how we making it responsive to what's going on in the society now somebody had to learn these songs somebody had to practice these songs all of these things so when you get a uh a payment at the end of carnival or whenever they decide to give you the money yeah anyway whenever they you know so whenever you get the money right this is months of investment of time of resources on your hand on your part that you are putting into maintaining a community maintaining a yard maintaining all the systems that make sure that the yarding yourself you know and maintaining yourself you know and so it is extremely difficult there's no reason I mean you know to be honest if if it wasn't for Cambole I probably would not be An entry in a dad.
• 1:06:00
  Corie: Yeah, so they see this is where I get frightened.
• 1:06:03
  Corie: This is where my fear comes in.
• 1:06:05
  Corie: Because if we allow that to happen, we have an exportable carnival that we're going to lose.
• 1:06:11
  Corie: I hope I'm never alive to see it, but we we will lose it because we think the infrastructure is just.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_03: But that's my and I see so many things that are done so amateurishly, they're done on the surface level, they're done in a way that does not, you know, give respect to where it's due.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_01: Of course.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_03: Because people come to Kamboule and they feel, yeah, yeah, well, you know, they're just they're just they're just dancing, right?
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_03: They don't know how much obey we just do to make sure that people can actually get through the production without going into possession, right?
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_03: We you know much times real, so a lot of stuff because people catch power.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_03: These are the things that we we need, and I mean, it is because we have these systems in place.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, understand, you know, it's the same thing.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, when you read about Wole Shoenka, Wole Shenka is he is like one of the first African novelists to win a Nobel Prize.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_03: Woolish enka putting on a play in Germany somewhere, and nothing going right, nothing going right, nothing going right.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_03: And Boley, who's a Yoruba man, he knows that he had to go and do his thing for Ishu so that his production will go well.
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_03: It has certain things that we know that other people wouldn't know because they don't have the information, they don't have the technology, they don't have the indigenous traditional knowledge.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a reason why all of these things existed within secret societies.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_03: Jamadi Az was a secret society.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_03: There wasn't on the papers every day.
• 1:08:32
  SPEAKER_03: There was nobody who was defending them.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_03: People were saying what they wanted about it, and they were like, yeah, only talk now.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_03: We will do at the end of the day, we will do what we have to do, which is defend our culture.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_03: Because we understand what it means to us.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_03: But if there aren't enough people who understand what it means to us, and I mean, you know, I want to talk about the cultural illiteracy that exists within, you know, corporate Trinidad and Tobago.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's something I talk about a lot.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you have people who, you know, they just don't know.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_03: They just don't know.
• 1:09:03
  SPEAKER_03: They just don't know.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know, I I once had a job, I once had a job uh in a in a different incarnation of the Ministry of Culture.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_03: And I remember being in a in a meeting and somebody saying something, something negroes.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_03: And I started screaming, and I flung myself on the ground and I said, Don't you stop?
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_03: And everybody in the in the meeting was like, What is wrong with this girl?
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_03: What is warm to she?
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_03: But they but it you know, sometimes that's what you need, but Trinidad is not a space where disruptors are rewarded.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, disruptors are punished, yeah, okay.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_03: And if we look at the rest of the world, you know, we'll see that you know, the people who think outside the box are the ones who are successful, yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you know, so my partner is German, and we do a lot of work around design thinking and systems thinking.
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, for him, coming to live in Trinidad and understanding the seal pan as the ultimate, you know, manifestation of design thinking, right?
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_03: It it was it was really important for him to so now he has a completely different language for systems thinking and design thinking and design futures that is embedded in the cultural source of Trinidad, right?
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_03: And there are people who live in right here in Trinidad who will bring in somebody from England, right?
• 1:10:46
  Corie: And pay them.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_03: And pay them lots of money to apply uh uh uh uh a model that's not for us, that we are just gonna wriggle out because and when you wriggle out, they'll pay somebody else to come back and pay somebody else to come back and do the same thing.
• 1:11:04
  Corie: I hear like huh, yeah, there's no problem if we allow you to leave that that is so if you if you allow people like yourself to to to seek seek seek happiness elsewhere, you're gonna end up with that kind of alliance talking about that could easily ship out of the.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, also we we get what we deserve and what we ask for.
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_03: That's true.
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_03: And some of us, some of us want the shininess, some of us want a whole rope, some of us want to, some of us want to to be in a fed that have VIP, V VIP, multi multi-vip.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_03: We like that.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_03: We like seeing it.
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_03: My belief is that that's true.
• 1:11:41
  Corie: I like it.
• 1:11:42
  Corie: But the truth is, I don't think it could hold up without everything else that happens.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_03: Everything has to fall apart.
• 1:11:49
  Corie: Let's wait, well, everything has to fall apart.
• 1:11:52
  Corie: Like I see industry set up, for instance.
• 1:11:54
  Corie: One of the things that I was looking at, and I was telling Masha this as well.
• 1:11:57
  Corie: I remember going to San Francisco and doing an Alcatraz tour.
• 1:12:01
  Corie: They abandoned the prison and you went to the tour.
• 1:12:04
  Corie: It's something else to see.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:12:05
  Corie: But when I understood what their how they treat their parks and their preservatories, I wonder if it's a system like that we can't work.
• 1:12:13
  Corie: Because every corporation that operates in San Francisco, which would have included Silicon Valley, you have a you have a we are Green Fund and Business Levy and them things.
• 1:12:20
  Corie: They have a levy that they pay to maintain what San Francisco's traditional spaces or heritage spaces look like.
• 1:12:26
  Corie: But I don't know if if something like that could work here, because I can have a fet and have all them VIP you're talking about if the core of Carnival not happening.
• 1:12:34
  Corie: And I wonder if it's not to do it like that.
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um I I was talking to one of my one of my elders the other day, Royal Gibbons.
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, we were talking about this whole idea of sponsorship, right?
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, it's like I I do pitch decks, and you know, like they're they're like, you know, international level pitch decks.
• 1:12:57
  SPEAKER_03: But from the time somebody sees Cambouley on it, is that they fling it to the side.
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_03: They don't even want to, they don't even want to hear that.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_03: They don't want to hear nothing about heritage because heritage is not sexy, heritage is not something that you could go in with three of your friends and flams.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_03: It's unfortunately that's the reality.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_03: And so what we need is uh I go back to the question of literacy, cultural literacy.
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_03: We don't have a lot of cultural literacy built into our corporate social responsibility.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_03: And without that, then we cannot have something that is holistic.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_03: We cannot have something that, you know, gives space and value to all the various different parts.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_03: And that also suggests to me that the people who are making decisions don't see themselves as part of any other community aside from the imaginary world that is created in a fit.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 1:13:54
  SPEAKER_03: And that that to me is uh is uh um is very um unfortunate because you know culture is the thing there's this movement now that says that culture is the other SDG, the other sustainable development goal.
• 1:14:13
  SPEAKER_03: And you have multiple organizations spending millions of dollars on teaching us about climate justice and teaching us about governance and teaching us, and I all I had to do is make uh uh uh an old mass man.
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_03: I could teach you all them things, but you don't want to give me the money to do that, right?
• 1:14:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you don't want to give me the money because I am not I'm not in that box that you created.
• 1:14:35
  SPEAKER_03: And what I would like for us to understand is that culture is the thing that makes everything work in this society, right?
• 1:14:45
  Corie: I feel like it's so far from that if you're gonna get it in this lifetime, right?
• 1:14:48
  Corie: I you know what I believe?
• 1:14:49
  Corie: I don't know.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_03: I believe, I believe that what we need to do is create different kinds of communities, right?
• 1:14:57
  SPEAKER_03: That are outside of capitalist expectations, you know.
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, all stars is a cooperative that we need to be studying.
• 1:15:06
  SPEAKER_03: How does how has all stars been able to sustain themselves for, you know, we have the models there, we have the models there, and most of them are in the steel man wool.
• 1:15:15
  SPEAKER_03: Why is it that we are not studying the models that we have and they all come out of yards, right?
• 1:15:21
  SPEAKER_03: How do we sustain those models that could create economic independence and sustainability for people in communities?
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_03: Because at the end of the day, yeah, it's all well and good for central government to give you uh$200,000 to do a two-week project and then they take a box and move on to the next thing.
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_03: What happens when the project is finished and the children's problems are still there?
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it is gonna take generations of healing work, it's gonna take generations of restorative justice, it's gonna take generations.
• 1:16:03
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know, we have five minutes.
• 1:16:05
  SPEAKER_03: If you think about the the spans of time, we have five minutes out of uh two-day trauma.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_03: Right now, think about it.
• 1:16:17
  SPEAKER_03: If a child is missing in your community for three days, right?
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_03: The trauma that that causes, not just to the family, but to the community, right?
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_03: And then after that, after the child reach back, if the child reached back, right, what how is the fabric of the family changed?
• 1:16:37
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_03: Somebody in the family might have left.
• 1:16:40
  SPEAKER_03: Some of the somebody in the family might have tripped off.
• 1:16:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:16:45
  SPEAKER_03: Somebody in the family might have taken the guilt on themselves and and ended their lives.
• 1:16:50
  SPEAKER_03: We have so many things that, you know, multiple generations of trauma that we have not dealt with.
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, within our cultural forms, we have an entry point.
• 1:17:05
  SPEAKER_03: Because, you know, just walking up to somebody and saying, Hey, you, you traumatize.
• 1:17:11
  SPEAKER_03: Let me let me talk about it now.
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_03: No, you can't do that.
• 1:17:15
  SPEAKER_03: You can't do that.
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_03: And the other thing that I want to say is that mediocrity is also a trauma response, right?
• 1:17:20
  SPEAKER_03: And we have a lot of mediocrity, that's good day, right?
• 1:17:23
  SPEAKER_03: Good news.
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that the yeah, we could we could make get we could work, right?
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_03: We have this, and you you see that also in our approach to our cultural forms, our cultural icons, and the space that we live in.
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_03: There's no there are no monuments that that speak to us.
• 1:17:40
  SPEAKER_03: You know, every street that is named after a colonizer is ancestral veneration.
• 1:17:45
  SPEAKER_03: You are venerating our ancestor called Picton.
• 1:17:48
  Corie: You can't say that.
• 1:17:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, because you know we have to we have to acknowledge history, but you know what?
• 1:17:56
  SPEAKER_03: I travel in length and breadth of uh Germany, and I have never seen a single monument to Hitler.
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_03: I've seen monuments that acknowledge the fact, and you know, like I was there in November when they um, you know, they mark the first pogrom, which is where you know, like the first set of Jews will pull out of communities.
• 1:18:17
  SPEAKER_03: And you walk along, and it's little things that you don't even you wouldn't notice on a regular day, right?
• 1:18:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's just a little tile on the ground that has the name of the person who was taken from this particular place, and on that day, in um like the end of the day, on that particular date, they have a little candlelight as ancestral veneration, right?
• 1:18:40
  SPEAKER_03: It is venerating somebody who was taken.
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you could be in the forest and you'll see a little bench, and the bench will have a plaque, and it will say, as you sit here and take in the forest, this was this was the viewing point for the train that you surpassed taking people to the um the concentration camp.
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_03: So it's like there are little ways that you can mark memory, not valorized, violent, rapists, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:19:11
  Corie: Psychopaths.
• 1:19:12
  Corie: Yeah, people is people is defending.
• 1:19:14
  Corie: But on the topic of funding, at this point, you still have to go to for corporate funding to get well.
• 1:19:22
  Corie: You're still doing proposals, pitch deck and go on.
• 1:19:24
  Corie: So still at that stage.
• 1:19:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:19:26
  Corie: Yeah.
• 1:19:27
  Corie: So that's where I was surprised, and that's when I started get worried.
• 1:19:29
  Corie: Because I I I don't think that um to support a lot of what you're saying.
• 1:19:34
  Corie: Had I had the keys to society, I would ensure that everybody who benefits from this jumbie pays.
• 1:19:41
  Corie: I I'm not sure how it could work any other way.
• 1:19:44
  Corie: I I I to me is the simplest solution.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_03: They are hardworking members of the society and they are just they are just doing, you know, they are making money honestly.
• 1:19:53
  SPEAKER_03: What's wrong with them?
• 1:19:54
  Corie: And they pay taxes for street lights.
• 1:19:56
  Corie: You understand?
• 1:19:57
  Corie: They pay taxes for traffic lights and for roads and for for they pay taxes for the feds?
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_03: Is there a clicker outside the feds that is monitoring how many people are going into the city?
• 1:20:07
  Corie: I do not know.
• 1:20:08
  Corie: David might know.
• 1:20:09
  Corie: David might know.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_03: That's why I'm telling you, I don't know.
• 1:20:12
  SPEAKER_03: I have no idea.
• 1:20:13
  Corie: Well, you know, you want to take a guess?
• 1:20:14
  Corie: I feel like most of the in the well, should I say that?
• 1:20:18
  Corie: Most industries, the most formalized and the biggest people in the industry is probably doing what they need to do where that is concerned.
• 1:20:24
  Corie: But it's as um, it's very likely that most people are doing that not.
• 1:20:29
  Corie: It's just it's just oh, yeah.
• 1:20:31
  Corie: If you're talking about selling food, the biggest food people in the country probably paying some form of taxes, but the smallest ones, you know what I mean?
• 1:20:37
  Corie: What happened, David?
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_03: What is that's not my cuckoo to turn.
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_03: You see, if I could, if I could put money in the hands of my drummers, I'm happy.
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_03: But it's this thing if I could if I could make sure that the people who are in my community could live from what they do the best, I'm happy for that.
• 1:21:00
  Corie: Yeah, that's what I mean.
• 1:21:01
  Corie: When I say you shouldn't have to worry about that.
• 1:21:03
  SPEAKER_03: If kind of violence is I shouldn't, my Bamsi shouldn't be winking in January.
• 1:21:08
  SPEAKER_03: It's it it, you know, like I shouldn't be, I shouldn't be having to call back people and you know, you know, people passing you straight and like looking the other way when they see you because they don't want to talk to you.
• 1:21:19
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, come the man, we're too big for that now.
• 1:21:21
  Corie: Like I was telling Marshall, not in a society where for most of my I born in 80 and I born into a time where it had negative lists, it's had things that because they understand what protecting local industry is about.
• 1:21:33
  Corie: So I it's strange to me to hear that again.
• 1:21:36
  Corie: My naivety and assumption is that the money could be provided to do this to me, because I can't believe you gotta go to people.
• 1:21:43
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, it's it's it's funny that you should say negative lists and stuff because I mean my dad always used to tell me a story.
• 1:21:50
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, he was living in love until during 1970, and you know, he would in as part of that black power uprising, they were talking about buying local, supporting, um, supporting in um economies with any community, all of those things.
• 1:22:08
  SPEAKER_03: And he he he he told me a story at a time about you know him talking to the fellas on the block about you know buying local and thing, and they were like, you talking about man?
• 1:22:19
  SPEAKER_03: So you're telling me that you want me to celebrate Christmas with Pump City?
• 1:22:23
  Corie: Yeah, much of it.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_03: That was the most insulting thing to them that that they couldn't make the choice to have a special time by being able to buy an apple for their family, right?
• 1:22:38
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, I mean, I've heard different versions of that same story in other parts of the world, you know.
• 1:22:45
  SPEAKER_03: So it's like in Sweden, if you could get a banana, yeah, you could have a good one.
• 1:22:49
  SPEAKER_03: And a particular is like you're inside, right?
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_03: Banana is the most exotic thing that you can get.
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's funny.
• 1:22:57
  Corie: Now you might answer some questions I had in my mind as a child because when apple and grapes had to come back in the country, there was a time before they lifted it, they bring back fruits for Christmas.
• 1:23:05
  Corie: Yes, we drive through tongues to see the apples and grapes.
• 1:23:08
  Corie: Yeah, people are selling apples and grapes on the promenade.
• 1:23:10
  Corie: Well, it wasn't promenade then.
• 1:23:11
  Corie: Charlotte Street.
• 1:23:12
  Corie: Yeah, and Charlotte Street is right.
• 1:23:13
  Corie: We drive through to see that Charlotte.
• 1:23:17
  SPEAKER_04: You know what I mean?
• 1:23:20
  Corie: So listen, I'd ask you.
• 1:23:22
  Corie: So heritage economics, as you were saying, is a real thing.
• 1:23:24
  Corie: The the economics around protecting our heritage and what we have is something that you you spoke about.
• 1:23:30
  Corie: This is what you're talking about here in terms of uh that's what I'm talking about.
• 1:23:34
  SPEAKER_03: I'm talking about intangible heritage, I'm talking about um you know, goods, products, services.
• 1:23:44
  SPEAKER_03: If if that is the neoclassical economic language that you want to use.
• 1:23:48
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, it's because I cannot I cannot define uh a job as a service, that's not what a job is, and a job is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, right?
• 1:24:00
  Corie: A job is for COVID.
• 1:24:04
  SPEAKER_03: A job is not a job is not a pretty thing, a job is a mass of discomfort, right?
• 1:24:11
  SPEAKER_03: So I cannot say that a job is a service or product.
• 1:24:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the language also has to shift and it has to be relevant to what the thing is, right?
• 1:24:23
  SPEAKER_03: And so, you know, when are we going to develop going back again?
• 1:24:28
  SPEAKER_03: When are we going to develop the language to talk about what we have?
• 1:24:32
  Corie: What are we running from?
• 1:24:34
  Corie: Where do you think it is?
• 1:24:35
  SPEAKER_03: Because it's it seems to be societal that we we it's just insecurity, it's just fear of self, it's just you know, it's just that we we we we are so afraid of who we are, you know.
• 1:24:52
  SPEAKER_03: Although when you see who we are, it's so beautiful, it's so beautiful.
• 1:24:57
  SPEAKER_03: There's you know, when you're driving through wood broke and you're seeing somebody they they they're skinning from here, they're teeth skinning from here today, and they're carrying a little piece of their costume underneath their arm.
• 1:25:08
  SPEAKER_03: Listen, tears, you know, tears, just tears, right?
• 1:25:12
  SPEAKER_03: Or you you're you're you're you're you're coming around the savannah and you had to stop because a pan rock rolling very slowly across the road.
• 1:25:21
  SPEAKER_03: Well and that is part of the ritual, but again, where is the language for that within the within what we are creating?
• 1:25:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you know, and it means it means that our academics need to do more theorizing.
• 1:25:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, we have we have um Joanne Tull has spoken extensively about the carnival ecosystem as opposed to the carnival economy.
• 1:25:44
  SPEAKER_03: She talks about an ecosystem, and so when you think about ecosystem, you know, it's much more nuanced, and you can you can see how different things feed on each other.
• 1:25:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, I'm developing a theory of ognomics which centers the spirituality but also centers the the question of reparations and the question of um you know recentering community and all of the principles of ogn, who is the ultimate creative urgency, right?
• 1:26:17
  SPEAKER_03: Ogun is the owner of the road, og is the owner of the steel pan, og is the owner of again that creative urge that we have.
• 1:26:26
  SPEAKER_03: That's just one word that comes out of my spiritual understanding.
• 1:26:32
  SPEAKER_03: You know, in the night when I can't sleep, as we're listening to um, you know, um mythology podcasts, right?
• 1:26:39
  SPEAKER_03: About Zeus and this and that.
• 1:26:41
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, but okay, I tell uh come down, man, do our little Shango podcast.
• 1:26:47
  SPEAKER_03: You need to do it, you need to do it because you know, our mythology also has lots of amazing lessons that we need to be learning and we need to be teaching our people.
• 1:26:56
  SPEAKER_03: Energy is energy anywhere, and certain energies manifest in human beings anywhere.
• 1:27:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, way before we had a language for it, way, way before we had a representation of it, you know, these things, these energies existed, and when we tap into those energies, when we tap into the energy of the road, we are tapping into something that is very ancient and primordial, and that that really ties us to our human experience.
• 1:27:26
  Corie: Yeah, more people need to hear speaking because it's true, because I mean a part of it is and and again, my mind always goes back to how we're gonna get us a new tongue, boys.
• 1:27:35
  Corie: I just go back to my education.
• 1:27:36
  Corie: It's always Fatima, Yui, but I think you're right, and that's the systems we have are there, you know, and it's for more of us.
• 1:27:43
  SPEAKER_03: I always talk about so yoga, right?
• 1:27:45
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, when you hear soccer, the first thing that Trinity is doing is go so yeah, right?
• 1:27:49
  SPEAKER_03: And then you put your hands in the air.
• 1:27:51
  SPEAKER_03: You know what you're doing, you're increasing blood flow to your heart.
• 1:27:54
  SPEAKER_03: If you just practice yoga, you know that that's what you're doing.
• 1:27:57
  SPEAKER_03: When you whine, you're opening your sacral chapter.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_03: Which is releasing your inhibitions and your fears and all of that.
• 1:28:03
  SPEAKER_03: And also it does wonders for your knees, right?
• 1:28:06
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know, let's think about it.
• 1:28:08
  SPEAKER_03: Let's think about it on multiple levels and multiple heights.
• 1:28:14
  SPEAKER_03: There's a whole other thing that's going on at carnival time, and that is Shivratri.
• 1:28:19
  SPEAKER_03: And I remember a couple of years ago when Marshall was in India and he was taking part in Shivratri, everybody was shocked because they didn't know that there were people in Trinidad who were going through Shivratri at the same time.
• 1:28:30
  SPEAKER_03: And they, you know, like there were there were years when I had played mass and left tongue and gone to Hindu Pratchara Kendra and spend the whole night in Hindu Pratchara Kendra chanting for Lord Shiva.
• 1:28:44
  SPEAKER_03: That is the nature of the space that we are in.
• 1:28:46
  SPEAKER_03: There's so many things that are overlapping and so many energies that are, and you know, giving space and giving honor and giving respect to those energies is an important part of living in this space.
• 1:29:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:29:03
  SPEAKER_03: You know, and it transcends any party card, any anything.
• 1:29:08
  Corie: Yeah, of course, of course.
• 1:29:09
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's like uh I have too many stories.
• 1:29:12
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's not disappointments with mommy, yeah.
• 1:29:16
  Corie: No, when they go on South Beach and mean see a church camp, I see what kind of carnival is this is not a carnaval at all.
• 1:29:21
  SPEAKER_03: And this is the thing, right?
• 1:29:22
  SPEAKER_03: Church camp.
• 1:29:23
  SPEAKER_03: You know why they had another church camp?
• 1:29:24
  SPEAKER_03: Because the jumbi calling them too.
• 1:29:26
  SPEAKER_03: So they had to go to the next side of the island to avoid the jumbi calling them.
• 1:29:30
  SPEAKER_03: That's why they had to have the church camp.
• 1:29:32
  SPEAKER_03: The jumbi calling them too.
• 1:29:33
  Corie: Oh, wait till loud and clear, loud and clear, loud and clear.
• 1:29:36
  Corie: We had to do the work to change listen though.
• 1:29:37
  Corie: First and foremost, whenever you're ready for the podcast we did, David.
• 1:29:40
  Corie: That had to be done.
• 1:29:41
  Corie: That had to be done.
• 1:29:42
  Corie: That had to be done.
• 1:29:43
  Corie: I think I think we wait to ourselves.
• 1:29:44
  Corie: Yeah.
• 1:29:45
  Corie: And and and two of us will never do justice to some of the things.
• 1:29:48
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I mean, you know, uh within the sick fight community, the majority of those fellas are laborers.
• 1:29:56
  SPEAKER_03: They're taking a calculated risk to enter the ring.
• 1:30:01
  SPEAKER_03: If you get damaged, there's no insurance, right?
• 1:30:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that's a serious thing.
• 1:30:09
  SPEAKER_03: Because if if your hand damage, you can't you can't provide for your family for months at a time.
• 1:30:17
  unknown: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:30:17
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, offering people ten thousand dollars to go into the ring, it's not enough.
• 1:30:23
  SPEAKER_03: It's not enough.
• 1:30:25
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, what are they doing?
• 1:30:26
  SPEAKER_03: What are they doing outside of that?
• 1:30:28
  SPEAKER_03: What are they doing outside of that for the rest of the year?
• 1:30:31
  Corie: Yeah, that's one of the things.
• 1:30:33
  Corie: Like, like you see that for the rest of the year conversation.
• 1:30:35
  Corie: I find that's a well, as we say, a fun is a flaw in the way we approaching this whole thing because the assumption is that you go show up and do that again next year, regardless.
• 1:30:44
  Corie: Yeah, as if you are nothing else.
• 1:30:45
  SPEAKER_03: But I mean, look at look at our dota string, right?
• 1:30:48
  SPEAKER_03: You could go to any community center and they offer in club classes in kickboxing, boxing, um, table tennis, karate, etc.
• 1:31:00
  SPEAKER_03: etc.
• 1:31:00
  SPEAKER_03: etc.
• 1:31:03
  SPEAKER_03: Can you find a single community community center where there are there is uh even in talparo that that is historically recalled as one of the earliest and longest running guiles?
• 1:31:21
  SPEAKER_03: Even in talparo, can you find a sick fighting class in the in the talparo community center?
• 1:31:27
  SPEAKER_03: It have a community center there.
• 1:31:28
  Corie: So let me ask you something.
• 1:31:30
  Corie: We we depending on really the goodwill and the energy of people who just want to carry on tradition.
• 1:31:36
  Corie: We're taking it a chance.
• 1:31:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:31:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and and you see, but you see, the thing is, right?
• 1:31:46
  SPEAKER_03: The people who for many people who are carrying on tradition, it's inherited, right?
• 1:31:55
  SPEAKER_03: They come and they meet their mother, their grandfather, somebody practicing this, and they get ropeing, right?
• 1:32:05
  SPEAKER_03: They get ropeing.
• 1:32:06
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's how it's be.
• 1:32:08
  SPEAKER_03: You know, that's how I remember getting involved in anything, you know.
• 1:32:12
  SPEAKER_03: It was like, yeah, from the time you could walk, these this this is what you're doing.
• 1:32:18
  SPEAKER_03: This is what you this is what you are involved in, right?
• 1:32:21
  SPEAKER_03: And it it's that simple.
• 1:32:23
  SPEAKER_03: You when you're in here on the yard.
• 1:32:25
  Corie: It's not a help out.
• 1:32:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, that's a help out.
• 1:32:27
  SPEAKER_03: You're putting candle in the corners, you're figuring out where's east, west, north, and south.
• 1:32:32
  SPEAKER_03: You you're you're you're organizing the basin for the um for the omero, which is the the the water with the with the bush in it, so that when people come in, they could cleanse, cleanse their energy.
• 1:32:44
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's like you you started you begin to understand the the parts of this machine and how they work together, right?
• 1:32:52
  SPEAKER_03: You understand that there's a language, you understand that this person in the corner here, they're a little bit mad, but they are the best drummer, right?
• 1:33:00
  SPEAKER_03: So just put him in the corner to drum.
• 1:33:02
  Corie: And you're good.
• 1:33:03
  SPEAKER_03: Don't argue with him, don't tell him nothing.
• 1:33:06
  SPEAKER_03: Just give him the drum and let him drum.
• 1:33:09
  SPEAKER_03: Brilliant drummer, not good at anything else, right?
• 1:33:13
  SPEAKER_03: And there are many communities that are like that.
• 1:33:16
  SPEAKER_03: When you look around at them, you will always find, you will always find, and you know, it's like now we're talking about neurodivergence and thing.
• 1:33:23
  SPEAKER_03: But my my whole life was full of neurodivergent people.
• 1:33:26
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, I believe that the neurodivergent people are the normal ones, and the the the normal ones.
• 1:33:32
  SPEAKER_03: The the normal ones are the neurodivergent ones because everybody that I knew was, you know, like my dad used to, you know, like he couldn't hear a steel ban.
• 1:33:43
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it was something that used to like choke somewhere in his soul.
• 1:33:49
  SPEAKER_03: There was something about it that, you know, it made it impossible for him to sleep.
• 1:33:54
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there is a way that uh, you know, these these forms of screaming into the void.
• 1:34:01
  SPEAKER_03: And when I say screaming into the void, I mean like acknowledging the chaos that is existence, right?
• 1:34:07
  SPEAKER_03: You just spinning on a rock in the middle of space, and and at any minute, like uh a meteor could come, an earthquake could come, a storm could come, and you could just be swallowed up and cease to exist.
• 1:34:18
  SPEAKER_03: You know, so many civilized, so much, so much of our civilizational conversation is really around death avoidance, right?
• 1:34:26
  SPEAKER_03: Because nobody ever comes back and say, it actually is not so bad, you know.
• 1:34:30
  Corie: Yeah, I was on the other side.
• 1:34:32
  SPEAKER_03: I was on the other side, and you know, it it it actually come out kind of good, you know.
• 1:34:37
  SPEAKER_03: We nobody nobody has ever actually come back from that, right?
• 1:34:40
  SPEAKER_03: So now we have to create things that make this time have meaning, sure, right?
• 1:34:46
  SPEAKER_03: And for some people that's money.
• 1:34:48
  SPEAKER_03: I can't vex with them.
• 1:34:50
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's that's what their that's what their journey in this existence is.
• 1:34:55
  SPEAKER_03: But my journey in this existence is to make sure that somebody else after me doesn't you know succumb to the chaos, and they could have some joy in their lives from just being here.
• 1:35:08
  Corie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:35:09
  Corie: I'm with you.
• 1:35:10
  Corie: That's something else from your website I want to read before we go in.
• 1:35:13
  Corie: One question for you before we done you say help organizations, institutions, and creatives turn culture into impact through heritage rooted experiences that inspire, empower, and connect.
• 1:35:23
  Corie: Let me thank you for doing that and for doing everything that you're doing before.
• 1:35:26
  Corie: But I wanted to ask for people like me, whose beads and tongues masquerader, and fet all-inclusive fed go and v V IP and so on.
• 1:35:33
  Corie: I had this experience in one of them bands I play with that year.
• 1:35:37
  Corie: Well, we break Charlotte Street, which I I I can't take the stalling on Charlotte Street.
• 1:35:42
  Corie: I'm just go home.
• 1:35:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:35:44
  Corie: And I walk, I just decided I go now.
• 1:35:46
  Corie: I had enough of it.
• 1:35:47
  Corie: That's poison days, huh?
• 1:35:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:35:48
  Corie: And we by the hospital for hours.
• 1:35:50
  Corie: You remember that used to go?
• 1:35:51
  Corie: And I decided I'm gonna go and walk back to St.
• 1:35:54
  Corie: James.
• 1:35:55
  Corie: So I walk up at the Memorial Park and walk about Savannah.
• 1:35:57
  Corie: And I remember seeing a band coming out of Belmont.
• 1:36:01
  Corie: They had bat gorilla.
• 1:36:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:36:03
  Corie: You know what I mean?
• 1:36:03
  Corie: Whip.
• 1:36:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:36:04
  Corie: I couldn't move.
• 1:36:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:36:06
  Corie: I could not move.
• 1:36:07
  Corie: I sam definitely it was almost like that.
• 1:36:09
  Corie: It was a discovery for me that what the hell is this?
• 1:36:12
  Corie: Yeah.
• 1:36:12
  Corie: And then when I'm walking back through St.
• 1:36:14
  Corie: James and a teenager, I hear a band playing some gold sort of classical music.
• 1:36:20
  Corie: And except I want to say a band, must be four or five pan men by a corner, the men playing us again.
• 1:36:25
  Corie: I can't move.
• 1:36:26
  Corie: So I wanted to ask you in terms of if you if you had to talk to somebody as a as a personal uh cultural insights that you might provide to get off of the path of the what we call the commercial parts of carnival and get into the wider carnival and experience it outside of Canberra riots, which I would I would uh reenact.
• 1:36:43
  Corie: I would recommend it to anybody.
• 1:36:44
  Corie: By the time this coming out, we're there, right, David?
• 1:36:46
  Corie: We there?
• 1:36:47
  Corie: But half past four, right?
• 1:36:48
  Corie: Too early.
• 1:36:49
  Corie: We gotta get to that.
• 1:36:51
  Corie: Yeah, we gotta give it a um pass.
• 1:36:54
  SPEAKER_04: We gotta get straight to no comments on that.
• 1:36:59
  Corie: But yeah, what would you recommend that people experience and go to?
• 1:37:04
  SPEAKER_03: I I would say you know, Trinidad is uh Trinidad is a place of access, right?
• 1:37:12
  SPEAKER_03: So if you just take a little drive through Belmont, you'll see places that where mass is making.
• 1:37:20
  SPEAKER_03: And you suddenly have a conversation, hey, hey um afternoon, yeah, yeah, you when are they coming out?
• 1:37:26
  SPEAKER_03: And then next thing you know, you'll have a costume in the band, right?
• 1:37:29
  SPEAKER_03: There's a kind of generosity that exists in those spaces where they want because they're holding on to something that is almost invisible, they want they want visibility, they want recognition.
• 1:37:41
  SPEAKER_03: And so you could you could go anywhere in Belmont and find somewhere that you could play mass, right?
• 1:37:47
  SPEAKER_03: You could or just get information.
• 1:37:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yards are very accessible.
• 1:37:53
  SPEAKER_03: You don't have to find a committee member, you don't have to send a picture yourself, and you don't have to you don't have to give them your Bamsi size.
• 1:38:01
  SPEAKER_03: None of those things you have to do.
• 1:38:03
  SPEAKER_03: You just have to walk and look and find, right?
• 1:38:08
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, walk into any pan yard, walk into any pan yard and say, hey, you know, I am an artist, and you know, I mean, the amount of times I storm all stars on a Tuesday afternoon, I have no plans to pay mass, and then the jumpy just shook me, and I leave my house and I find All-Stars.
• 1:38:28
  SPEAKER_03: All-Stars not on the GPS band locator, they are never there.
• 1:38:32
  SPEAKER_03: But you know what?
• 1:38:33
  SPEAKER_03: All stars is the sweetest band that it have in Port of Spain on a Tuesday afternoon, right?
• 1:38:39
  SPEAKER_03: So, so what I'm saying is that the experiences are there, the experiences are there, yeah, and the people, the people who are holders of these spaces, they want you to come and experience what they have.
• 1:38:53
  Corie: Yeah, the truth is, you know, we've we we you hear people complain about the carnival too expensive, and I keep telling people you could do everything carnival are to offer for free.
• 1:39:01
  SPEAKER_03: But also, we have changed the dynamic from carnival being about community to carnival being about consumption.
• 1:39:10
  SPEAKER_03: And so if you feel that you don't have money to consume, then you feel that there's no space for you in the carnival.
• 1:39:16
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, I I fundamentally reject that.
• 1:39:21
  SPEAKER_03: I fundamentally reject that, you know, there's nothing stopping you from making your own costume, there's nothing stopping you from you and your three friends hiring one of them pirate men who's be selling music things, right?
• 1:39:36
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, and and and paying him at$300 to walk with Olive through the streets and he and you play a mass.
• 1:39:44
  SPEAKER_03: The thing is, people, you know, we have um when talks about we have abdicated our imagination.
• 1:39:53
  SPEAKER_03: We have abdicated our imagination.
• 1:39:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's like we can't see our way to be creative anymore, you know, and to me how?
• 1:40:06
  SPEAKER_03: How are we reduced ourselves to 10,000 birds that cannot fly?
• 1:40:13
  Corie: Yes, how have we done that and the run price at$10,000 apiece, you know what I mean?
• 1:40:20
  SPEAKER_03: It's crazy, it's crazy.
• 1:40:22
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, think about what's going on in the society now.
• 1:40:25
  SPEAKER_03: Think about what was going on in the society in the 1880s.
• 1:40:28
  SPEAKER_03: Mass was being made that commented on what was going on, right?
• 1:40:32
  SPEAKER_03: So when it had a cholera outbreak, the the mass that was being played was Dr.
• 1:40:36
  SPEAKER_03: Nils, right?
• 1:40:38
  SPEAKER_03: When it had when it had um when it had a rise in crimes in part of Spain, police and thief was a big mass, right?
• 1:40:46
  SPEAKER_03: So people were always responding.
• 1:40:48
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm not talking about an old mass competition, I'm talking about people embodying something for two days.
• 1:40:55
  SPEAKER_03: Have we have we gone to the point where we don't want to embody anything anymore?
• 1:40:59
  SPEAKER_03: We don't want to be like uh like a uh like a bigger, more beautiful version of ourselves, just one that ready for the gram.
• 1:41:06
  SPEAKER_03: That's all that's all, and you know what the other thing is when you see when you see people posing for pictures, right then, right?
• 1:41:15
  SPEAKER_03: And all the people in the background looking bored because everybody just waited to take a picture.
• 1:41:20
  SPEAKER_03: So people playing mass for two hours and then getting rid of the backpack and then going and sit down in a in an air conditioned maxi.
• 1:41:27
  SPEAKER_03: No, you're supposed to take sun, and if you cannot take sun, stay home.
• 1:41:33
  SPEAKER_03: And so the costumes are so let's have a conversation about how climate change is gonna change the way that we play mass.
• 1:41:40
  Corie: We ain't having that conversation yet.
• 1:41:42
  SPEAKER_03: We're not we're not having that conversation yet, but it's gonna become a reality, and it's already a reality because I seen some people who are like 10 shades darker and they have a banner on their head like this.
• 1:41:54
  SPEAKER_03: I see a little girl when they take off their costume.
• 1:41:57
  Corie: I see a little girl from England here.
• 1:41:58
  Corie: She she she buzzed you 20 a little bit, and boy, hella she on dead.
• 1:42:03
  Corie: She said it didn't tell me what this was.
• 1:42:04
  Corie: This is crazy, and that she didn't know about the explain.
• 1:42:09
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not even thinking about how to make masks to shade the the the masqueraders.
• 1:42:16
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's like how how is the mask responsive?
• 1:42:19
  SPEAKER_03: If you think about Pan, if you think about um KaiSo a little bit, yeah, uh, and if you think about mass, you know, those were considered the three golden threads of carnival.
• 1:42:30
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:42:30
  SPEAKER_03: And that was that was a random decision that was made by I think Eric Williams back in the establishment of the CDC, right?
• 1:42:39
  SPEAKER_03: Or whatever was the organization that existed before then, right?
• 1:42:45
  SPEAKER_03: So you make this random decision that Pan, mass, and Kaiso is the three things that we and those are the um what you call it, the um the interest groups, the special interest groups, right?
• 1:42:58
  SPEAKER_03: So those three special interest groups that have representation and subvention and those kind of things from the government, right?
• 1:43:05
  SPEAKER_03: But what about theater?
• 1:43:07
  SPEAKER_03: What about feds?
• 1:43:08
  SPEAKER_03: What about stick fights?
• 1:43:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's what about all of those other things that make up carnival that are not necessarily mass, they're not necessarily pan, they're not necessarily kaisu, they include all of them, but where's the place for them?
• 1:43:25
  SPEAKER_03: You know, where's the place for for intangible holders of intangible knowledge?
• 1:43:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:43:32
  SPEAKER_03: Where's the place for, you know, people like um the Alfred family?
• 1:43:38
  SPEAKER_03: And when you go down by them, they do their 40 days um observance, and their whips are made of agave.
• 1:43:49
  SPEAKER_03: But that is a healing plant.
• 1:43:51
  SPEAKER_03: There's a whole other part of the mass that is about the healing plants that go with it.
• 1:43:56
  SPEAKER_03: You know, who's talking to stick fighters about what time of the year you go into the bush to cut pue?
• 1:44:03
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 1:44:04
  SPEAKER_03: How is mountain stick?
• 1:44:06
  SPEAKER_03: All of those things.
• 1:44:07
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, or no, all of those things, you know, I mean I was in Geneva last year and I was um in um I met the the World Intellectual Property Organization now has a fellow on um like traditional knowledge or something like that.
• 1:44:27
  SPEAKER_03: So they have they have these new elements of white um intellectual property that have to do with traditional knowledge, um genetic memory, all of those things.
• 1:44:40
  SPEAKER_03: We are miles away from even acknowledging any of those things.
• 1:44:45
  SPEAKER_03: And by the time we do, a lot of the people who are holders of that knowledge are gonna be gone.
• 1:44:51
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I consider myself to be very fortunate in that, you know, I was as part of that bridge generation, right?
• 1:44:59
  SPEAKER_03: So I remember analog mass, I remember mass that was, I remember, I remember mass that was, you know, I remember Bompat playing mass.
• 1:45:10
  SPEAKER_03: I remember Edgar Wiley.
• 1:45:13
  SPEAKER_03: I remember Matthew Wiley, I remember, you know, I remember lots of people who are just not there anymore, right?
• 1:45:20
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I remember the year when Trick and I play blue, right?
• 1:45:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's like it there were there was there was a way that mass was played pre-digital that doesn't exist anymore.
• 1:45:35
  SPEAKER_03: I'm telling you, it's it's a completely different thing.
• 1:45:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um and the people who remember pre-digital mass and the people who created mass as makers, those people are dying off, and the knowledge of the making is dying off with them.
• 1:45:53
  SPEAKER_03: Now everybody is a consumer and nobody actually knows to make anything anymore.
• 1:45:57
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe that will usher in a different kind of creativity.
• 1:46:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I always ask my artist friends, I was like, Well, it fighting up to be to have a piece in a in a gallery.
• 1:46:07
  SPEAKER_03: We have three galleries in Polish Spain, right?
• 1:46:10
  SPEAKER_03: You're fighting up to have a piece in a gallery, ever thought about doing an exhibition in a pan yard, or you ever thought about making masks?
• 1:46:17
  Corie: Yeah, beyond your own.
• 1:46:18
  SPEAKER_03: Because Carl El was an artist, um George Bailey was an artist, Minchell was an artist.
• 1:46:28
  SPEAKER_03: That was the display, is an artist, right?
• 1:46:32
  SPEAKER_03: You had so many artists who were entering into that space.
• 1:46:36
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, Carnival is our biggest living canvas, yeah, and we're not using it.
• 1:46:41
  Corie: David, we're making our mask, okay, okay?
• 1:46:44
  Corie: That's the solution.
• 1:46:44
  Corie: We're making our mask.
• 1:46:45
  SPEAKER_03: And that's the thing, the mask can be ugly, it could be falling apart, it could be shit, but it's a mask.
• 1:46:50
  SPEAKER_03: It's an opportunity for you to do something that that represents you for sure, for sure, for sure.
• 1:46:57
  SPEAKER_03: You you really represented by a uh a piece of plastic that you that get import from China.
• 1:47:02
  SPEAKER_03: What's that really saying about you?
• 1:47:04
  Corie: Yeah, you gotta make a mess.
• 1:47:06
  Corie: Yeah, so thank you very much.
• 1:47:08
  Corie: This is this was a pleasure.
• 1:47:09
  Corie: It was worth the wait.
• 1:47:10
  Corie: It was worth the wait and half past four, right?
• 1:47:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, step to step to I would say you need to reach there for two.
• 1:47:18
  Corie: How much prados do I need to gain by half four?
• 1:47:21
  Corie: If I come at like five, six Pradosh.
• 1:47:23
  SPEAKER_03: Not even not even Prado gets another half last.
• 1:47:25
  Corie: I know, I saw Nelson street.
• 1:47:28
  Corie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:47:29
  Corie: It's a beautiful thing to see.
• 1:47:31
  Corie: It's a beautiful thing to see all the week because pack up on Nelson Street.
• 1:47:34
  Corie: But thank you very much, thank you, Bob.