by Kei Miller
8
OUR WORST BEHAVIOUR
Now everyone jump up and show me
your worst behaviour
Just show me your worst behaviour
Wine up with your worst behaviour
Start the bacchanal!
—Skinny Fabulous
Carnival in Trinidad has a particular and layered history. It is a wild story that involves French planters sailing from the Old World to the New and then from island to island, trying to outrun revolutions—first the one in France, and then the one in Haiti, but no matter how far they ran, a revolution would eventually find them; it involves enslaved people and their emancipation and burning stalks of sugar cane (cannes brülées) held high above their heads; it involves stick fighters and chantwell singers who would evolve into calypsonians and then later into soca artists; it involves riots and a brutal militia and at least one young man dying while two of his friends are taken to hospital.
The history of Jamaica Carnival is much thinner. The event is still seen by many as a poor facsimile of the real thing that takes place in Trinidad and Tobago. History, however, only requires the passing of time, one year stacked upon another, and someone to document it. So then, let this moment be recorded—that in Jamaica, in the Road March of 2013, an incident happened that caused such a scandal across the island that for days people wrote furious letters to the newspapers or called in to one of the island’s daytime radio talk show programmes, each of them—the letter-writers and the callers—frothing over themselves to see who could express the greatest outrage.
Something of the sort had happened before in Trinidad. After Emancipation when the French planters saw black bodies include themselves in what had been their own private revelry, they filled the Port of Spain Gazette with pronouncements of disgust:
“Diabolical!”
“All immorality and no refinement!”
“Wretched buffoonery!”
“An annual abomination!”
Island to island, carnival to carnival, this history has repeated itself. In 2013, Carnival spectators in Jamaica watched in horror as bodies that they would have preferred sidelined, included themselves in the masquerade, and by the inclusion of their spectacular bodies, they changed the meaning of the mas.
The Fete
On sabbatical from the UK-based university where I work, I spend the first half of 2013 back in Jamaica. I have landed a gig as a visiting professor at the university here. It is not onerous work. Once a week I teach a workshop. I spend the rest of the days trying to finish a novel I have been working on. On the weekends I make the most of the Carnival season.
Carnival builds to its crescendo over several weeks. Today, fetes happen in venues across Kingston, but in 2013 they were mainly held in the shadow of the National Stadium at a venue called Mas Camp. You might think of these parties as events that, over the weeks, grow in number and intensity and anticipation. The music from the parties spills out over the city. The parties grow until they can no longer be contained in a single venue and so they spill out onto the road. The road is the ultimate expression of carnival. Revellers enter the road as one might enter a temple—the holy space we have waited on all year.
In February, there are still eight weeks left to wait for the road but Mas Camp is already heaving. It could worry you a little to see the hundreds of cars parked outside the venue knowing that in about four or five hours their drivers will be a little intoxicated. Breathalyser tests had been introduced to the island years before but most have fallen into disuse and are rusting away in some government storeroom. The worst of the drivers will sleep in their vehicles for an hour or so before driving home, but most will simply switch to water in the final hour of the party and dance harder as if to sweat out the alcohol. Walking through the parking lot towards the fete, the cars are making their own music—the expensive models beeping a warning any time someone gets too close to them. This has been one of the most enduring criticisms of Jamaica Carnival, the class lines that it erects, as if what Jamaica has inherited is the elite Carnival of the French planters and not the one that had been transformed after Emancipation.
Inside the venue, I go to the bar first. Apple vodka and Ting. I find my “crew” in the usual spot, a loose arrangement of friends and acquaintances. I raise a cup to them and they slur their greetings. An all-inclusive party, the ground is already littered with cups. Perhaps it is that soca music requires more reckless abandon than the more popular reggae or dancehall events across the island. We dance. The DJ plays the opening strains of one of the hits of the season, Patrice Roberts’s “A Little Wine”:
Everybooodddy! Wine on somebody now!
Take a wine, everybody!
Wine on somebody now.
A little wine never hurt nobody.
For all the wildness of a soca event, patrons are famously obedient to the instructions contained in the songs. Get something and wave! Or Drop on the ground and roll! Or Pick up something, anything, now run with it! So if Patrice Roberts is telling us to dance against somebody now, even with a stranger, that is exactly what we will do. Across the party people are pairing up and sometimes tripling up. I am grabbed from behind by a woman I don’t know, but it is OK; this is soca. We are inside the music. I look behind to see that she is almost as tall as me and wider. She takes a handful of my dreadlocks and pushes my face down towards the floor. My body is a loose puppet as she presses her pelvis into me. This kind of role reversal is possible in a fete—the woman as the more aggressive dance partner. As she dances against me and my face is still pointing towards the ground, I can only see the feet of other patrons as they walk by. One pair of feet stops in front of me. I look up and into the stunned face of a girl no more than eighteen or nineteen. I think I recognise her but I am not sure. She manages to say, “Dr Miller!?”
Now I remember. She is one of my new workshop students at the university. She giggles and walks away as if she has discovered one of my dirty secrets. I am only a little embarrassed. The message contained and repeated in almost every soca song is clear: Show me your worst behaviour! Get on bad! My pride is in the “Lost and Found”! Misbehave!
The criticism of Jamaica Carnival as an exclusive event is fair, but on those Friday nights at Mas Camp, it was impossible not to see the opposite as well—a kind of inclusiveness. Here was a music that refused to judge its patrons, that asked everyone, regardless of talent, to dance and be involved. It was nothing like reggae or dancehall. And here were DJs who did not shout over the microphone, as they did in dancehall, telling you all the reasons why you might not belong. Hand in de air if you love God! the dancehall DJ will shout, and you must put your hand in the air, even if you are an atheist. Hand in de air if you never borrow gyal clothes! And all women must immediately throw their hands in the air to prove their financial independence. They are wearing their own clothes. Nothing has been borrowed. Hand in de air if you never dash weh nuh belly! Another instruction directed to women who must again throw their hands in the air to prove their virtue, that they have never had an abortion. Hand in de air if yu love woman! We bu’N out all battyman! This one for the men who must now lift their hands to declare their masculinity and their straightness.
All of this was absent from soca music, and this is what was brewing in Jamaica Carnival’s 2013 season—a kind of inclusion that had once seemed impossible in Jamaica. What is simmering underneath the music is a distinctly queer possibility.
Beach J’Ouvert
It is only a week away now. As if to give the city a break, a chance to recuperate before the big road event next Sunday, the parties have migrated from Kingston to the north coast of the island. We are at James Bond Beach, named so because in the hills above here, the novelist Ian Fleming once came every winter to write another of his famous spy novels. His villa, Goldeneye, is one of the many that has been booked solid for the weekend as carnival revellers swarm the resort
towns of Ocho Rios and Oracabessa.
Beach J’Ouvert starts early. The gates open at midday and not long after the party is already loud and full of laughter as if it has been going on for hours. The DJ is playing Fay-Ann Lyons’s “Miss Behave”. In the song she recalls Carnival the year before in which she had behaved badly. The new year finds her in a repentant mood. She sings how ashamed she is of the excesses to which she had given over. Restraint will be her goal this year. I will behave this year! I will behave this year! she sings over and over as if trying to convince herself. Her failing resolve is the whole energy of the song, and the crowd listening is happily failing with her.
I won’t get mad, I won’t get crazy,
I won’t get mad, I won’t get crazy,
I won’t get mad, I won’t get crazy . . .
UNTIL I HEAR DEM SAAYYY . . .
And now the song has reached its climax; everyone waits on the instruction. And she gives it:
Drop on the ground and roll!
Drop on the ground and roll!
The instruction is metaphorical—it imagines a woman lowering her knees (dropping on the ground) and gyrating her buttocks (rolling)—but everyone takes its first and most literal meaning. We drop ourselves in the sand or on the slightly muddy terrain of the grounds and roll about as if we have either found or lost religion. It carries on like this for hours. In between songs we dip into the blue waters of the Caribbean Sea to cool off. As sunset approaches, the water turns from blue to gold and I remember how this part of the island got its name—Oracabessa, from the Spanish, oro cabeza, golden head.
It is now 7 p.m. The party is in its last hours and it is time for the paint to come out. This is a J’Ouvert tradition. You must come prepared to get dirty. It is almost impossible to escape a J’Ouvert party without being splattered with paint and powder and mud, a kind of anointing. For protection, some of the women put shower caps they have brought over their hairdos. Buckets of red and green paint are passed around and before long it is being splattered all about. The paint splashing releases a new energy, a renewed sense of abandon. The DJ is playing a new song. I do not remember what song it is, but I remember what he shouts into the microphone: “People, this is the point in the party where anything goes!”
I wonder if I have heard him right. I wonder if I am too tipsy to understand his meaning. I look around me and my vision blurs a little. Everyone looks a little bit like everyone else. It isn’t the alcohol. Under the dual covering of dusk and paint, gender has become ambiguous. Here it is—the queer possibility. This is what I see: a man a few yards in front of me makes his whole torso fall like the woman had forced me to do in Mas Camp weeks ago. He does it on his own though, head touching toes, and he starts to gyrate. Another man notices, approaches him from behind and starts to dance against him. The first man looks up. He squints, and for all of half a second he seems surprised. It is only for half of a second. He shrugs. This is Carnival. This is soca. This is a place for misbehaviour. He pushes himself against the dance partner. I had never seen this in Jamaica before—not in public. The erotic dancing between two men turns into a line of three, and then four, and then five—a conga line of sorts. I cannot help but feel a little afraid for them—the public display of it all. This is Jamaica, I want to say, but nothing happens. No one seems to care at all. I smile and raise my cup of apple vodka and Ting to the sky, toasting this island that has begun to change right in front of my eyes.
Later that night, back at the villa where I am staying for the night, I call a friend and narrate the evening to him. I think that he will be as pleased as I am—that he will comment on the way that Jamaica is slowly changing, making space for his own body—his own desire. I am mistaken. He sucks his teeth indignantly. You see, that is the problem with soca! he declares. It just bring out the worst in us! That could never happen in dancehall!
Road March
It is finally here. From around ten in the morning until six in the evening, the Carnival parade will wind its way through the streets of New Kingston. It starts on Knutsford Boulevard, then Trafalgar Road passing the British High Commission, then Hope Road passing Devon House and the Bob Marley Museum and back. Two sets of people have come out for the event—the participants, all decked out and who leave in their wake bits of feathers and sequins that have fallen from the costumes; as well, there are the spectators who line each side of the streets who have just come out to watch. Between the revellers and the spectators is a line of security who have formed themselves like a chain gang, long metres of rope held in their hands to maintain the separation. In Trinidad where this practice developed, a few carnival bands have held out and refuse to march with this kind of security. The separating rope, they argue, is too powerful a symbol of other divisions. It is against everything that Carnival means. They say, if a man from the crowd catch the spirit and feel to dance, then let him dance, because that is holy. They say, if a man feel a vibe to march with you for a mile then let him march with you for a mile, because that is brotherhood. Some say, the road belongs to no one; others say, it belongs to everyone. They are saying the same things.
What happened in Jamaica in 2013 is this: a few boys of disrepute (to put it plainly, they were transgendered) were lured in by the music. They rose out of the gullies in which they had been forced to live and they danced behind the music trucks, a little further back from the band as if they were its glamorous tail. Look closely; you should recognise some of these boys. O’Neil and Saville are amongst them. They are the same ones from the harbour—the Gully Queens. They had already gained a reputation in Kingston. They were prostitutes; they bleached their skins; they squatted in abandoned houses in nice neighbourhoods. In the nice neighbourhoods, they did not keep quiet. They had arguments and the sound travelled over fences and into the living rooms of the well-to-do. They stole items of clothing from off the line after the maids had put them out to dry. At first, Missus had even accused the maids despite tearful protestations. The truth made no sense—not at first. The items that were stolen were skirts and little dresses and lace panties. They could not imagine men stealing such things. These were the boys who came out on Sunday to play mas.
“Diabolical!”
“All immorality and no refinement!”
“Wretched buffoonery!”
Whenever I apply a soundtrack to this moment, I play “Behaving The Worst” by Skinny Fabulous:
Out of all ah mi friend dem,
I cause the most problem!
I come to start the bacchanal!
That is ahistorical; Skinny’s anthem, this championing of outrageous behaviour, would actually be released six months later, in time for the 2014 season. Still, I bring it forward the way the boys brought their bodies forward and offered them to the mas.
Some spectators were visibly upset. They muttered amongst themselves. They spat on the ground. Then, a few decided to make their objections known more forcefully. The Gully Queens were only dancing but suddenly stones were being thrown at them. It surprises me even now that they did not flinch at the attack. They had already learned the lesson; there is only one way to deal with a bully even if, sometimes, that bully feels like an entire island. You must stand your ground. Well, they did more than just stand. They took up the stones that had landed at their feet and hurled them back into the crowd. They hurled them with as much conviction and as much defiance as they could summon, and a whole new bacchanal began.
People were shouting. People were scattering in all directions. I do not know how the Gully Queens escaped, only that they did. Perhaps they were as good at fighting as they were at fleeing, and they knew instinctively when to do what. One woman had to be carried off to the hospital for stitches; one of the flung stones had opened up her forehead. It was for the sake of this woman that all the furious letters were sent in to the newspapers and all the angry calls made to the radio stations. Imagine that! The poor woman didn’t do anyt
hing! Was just out to enjoy a peaceful Sunday and look how she end up with a buss-up head, all because of those perverts!
I learned a new word in the hullabaloo: obstreperous—resisting control or restraint in a difficult manner; unruly; noisy, clamorous, or boisterous; bad behaving. On a Jamaica Gleaner online forum, one brave respondent going against the crowd dared to express sympathy for the Gully Queens and what had driven them to defend themselves. He was promptly dismissed by another respondent:
You have not seen the way these men act. It’s beyond outrageous. They taunt the crowd. Some take off their clothes and make lewd, suggestive and VERY unwanted gestures. I can’t even express the scene I saw when I was out on Saturday night. And they just LOVE an audience. It’s pure performance, so I can just imagine how they behaved on Sunday! Their obstreperous actions go way beyond demanding rights and equality.
The Gully Queens had behaved no more outrageously than we had at Beach J’Ouvert the week before. They had not even danced against each other. They did not need to. The offence they caused was in their own bodies. It was the way they walked in their bodies, and the way they danced in their bodies. And also, it was because they were poor.
We had all behaved our worst that day. The boys had. And the spectators had. And even the revellers had, for we simply marched onwards, along the sequin-strewn road, ignoring the fracas behind us as if nothing would spoil our fun. And also, we behaved at our worst in the days that followed when no word of empathy towards the boys would be tolerated, as if we were not allowed to understand them, let alone love them, let alone lift the rope that tried to separate us and invite them into the mas.