According to the Russian theorist Mikhail Bahktin, a specific type of holiday is optional in all historical festivities. The most crucial is an emerging force preserved in it and contributes to the flight from the capture of “official culture,” such as the state, the church, or other suppressive systems. In contrast to this negative culture, “unofficial” or “folk culture of laughter” in Bakhtin’s thinking is a common name for festivities’ positive, creative power (Simmonds, 2019). This force is manifested only in the continuous process of formation and self-change of culture. In other words, the core of folk culture is not so much carnival as a historical fact of festivities but carnivalization as a force in the historical and cultural process.
In “The Dragon Can’t Dance” by Trinidadian author Earl Lovelace, Carnival is important. After the abolition of slavery in 1830, thousands of workers from India began to arrive in Trinidad, as well as immigrants from the poor areas of Spain, Portugal, England, France, and China, who were the leading consolidators of the people known today as the Trinbagonians (Trinidadians). Lovelace’s piece blends the rhythms of steelband and calypso with complex narratives of black power and the political, spiritual, and psychic struggle for decolonization. Initially, the carnival was characteristic of the upper Creole strata of society, but over time it increasingly captured the slums and turned into a tradition of the poor (Simmonds, 2019). Carnival “turns everything on its head” because people ignore their traditional social roles during it. Participants hide their faces behind masks and colorful costumes, whereby the poor and powerful can switch places with the poor and oppressed. The depersonalization of heroes, “hiding of their faces behind masks,” is directly observed in the work of Lovelace. For example, instead of calling the heroes by their names: Aldric, Sylvia, and Cleothilda, he uses their carnival images: “Dragon,” “Princess,” and “Queen of the Band” (Lovelace, 2003).
In “Carnival,” personalities are intertwined; the author demonstrates how the action influenced the characters and also pushes them to look at their relationship with Carnival in a new way. Aldrik’s alter ego, the Dragon, demonstrates his strength and masculinity; he sews this costume every year to show “self that he lived the whole year” (44). Also, he is sure that through the outfit, he keeps in touch with previous generations: “The making of his dragon costume was to him always a new miracle, a new test not only of his skill but of his faith… it was only by faith that he could bring alive from these scraps of cloth and tin that dragon, its mouth breathing fire … It was in this message that he asserted before the world himself. It was through it that he demanded that others see him, recognize his personhood, be warned of his dangerousness.” (35-36).
About Sylvia, Aldric thinks the following: “he knew that she could make him face questions that he had inoculated himself against by not working anywhere, by not being too deeply concerned about anything except his dragon costume that he prepared for his masquerade on Carnival day” (31). Miss Cleothilda is said to have been “proud when it comes to the red dirt and stone that laugh through the bones of these tough people” (Lovelace, 2003). Philo unsuccessfully but tirelessly pursued her for 17 years. At the same time, Clotilda treats people well only during the carnival; once it is over, she will continue to look down on people who are blacker than her.
The problem of social inequality remains relevant in the modern world. Often people cannot defeat him because of fundamentally non-freeway thinking that the established order is the norm. The carnival allows the oppressed segments of the population to look at the course of things from a different angle and admit that they are not obliged to put up with the current situation. Then, taking off the masks, people will start fighting, and the carnival becomes something more than just a carnival.
References
Lovelace, E. (2003). The Dragon Can’t Dance: A Novel (Karen and Michael Braziller Books) (Edition Unstated). Persea.
Simmonds, A. M. (2019). The Complexities of Carnival Identities in Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance. Cankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 13(1), 39-49.