Culture Is How We Survive: Omari Ashby on Carnival, Consciousness, and Remembering Who We Are
Across the Caribbean, few cultural expressions provoke as much annual anxiety as Carnival.
Every year without fail the now familiar criticisms and condemnations surface -about excess, disorder, morality, and misplaced priorities. While often presented as practical or civic concerns, these arguments carry a much older weight. They are rooted in a colonial inheritance that has never fully released its grip on Caribbean societies.
From the post-Emancipation period to the present, African-derived cultural expression has repeatedly been treated as something that must be contained, disciplined, or justified.
There’s something about unapologetic blackness – sound, dress, rituals, collective presence – that continues to unsettle European norms of respectability and control. What exists today is not always overt hostility but a residual discomfort that tends to resurface whenever African culture becomes too visible or loud.
Carnival sits at the centre of this tension. Not because it is inherently controversial, but because it embodies African survival. In societies still negotiating the psychological aftermath of colonialism, that kind of expression continues to provoke unease.
Cultural activist and preservationist Omari Ashby has spent years interrogating this contradiction – the simultaneous celebration and suspicion of African culture in the Caribbean. His work insists that debates around Carnival are rarely just about traffic, money, or behaviour. They are about power, legitimacy, and whose expressions of identity are allowed to exist without apology.
To understand Carnival, then, is to confront something deeper than an annual festival. It requires reckoning with how colonial logic persists in Caribbean thinking, how anti-Blackness is normalised through “common sense” critiques, and how culture itself becomes a battleground for self-definition.
It is within this context that Ashby speaks – not simply as a performer or academic, but as a cultural witness, tracing how history lives on in sound, movement, and resistance.
During a recent interview with Your Caribbean Guide, he explained that the process of colonial domination was never accidental or superficial.
Colonial domination, Ashby explained, worked precisely because it went beyond physical control. It was psychological, emotional, and cultural, designed to make people doubt their worth and disconnect from what was theirs. “Colonialism is violence,” he said plainly – not only in the sense of chains and labour, but in the quieter, more enduring work of breaking down a people’s confidence in themselves.
Ashby’s reflections move beyond culture as performance and into the deeper terrain of belief, identity, and unlearning. For him, the most enduring work of colonialism is not what it took from Caribbean people materially, but what it left behind in the mind.
“It took almost 10 years for me to not see the image of Jesus that they gave me, and that was me being conscious. It is so deep in your mind… It is so embedded in you that even when you start to read and get the knowledge and stuff, at your very foundation, when you close your eyes, right? When you think about prayer, when you think about Jesus, when you think about holy thing, it’s still a Western thing coming into you. So it is not an easy thing to undo…”
Even with conscious effort, study, and awareness, the Western image remained embedded. That, he explains, is how deep the conditioning goes – lodged at the foundation, shaping instinct, imagination, and notions of what is sacred.
Undoing that imprint is not simple, nor is it comfortable. Ashby spoke candidly about the emotional toll that accompanies awakening – the anger, grief, and disorientation that surface when people begin to fully grasp the scale of what was lost, distorted, or erased. For some, the weight is too much. He recounted the story of a young man who, overwhelmed by Black consciousness literature, chose to destroy the books rather than continue reading. “He wanted to be put back into the matrix,” Ashby said. Knowing became more frightening than ignorance.
This resistance, he noted, is not weakness. It is the predictable outcome of generations raised within systems designed to detach African people from their own value. To question inherited belief systems – particularly religious ones – can feel like risking everything: community, certainty, even salvation. Ashby spoke from experience. Raised within multiple Christian traditions, he understands the hold they can have, even as one begins to look elsewhere for spiritual grounding.
“You know, there should be no harm in questioning. Look at the things and ask why…? Think about the fact that they took so much from us. Why would they give us this (religion)? Why? … it’s because it’s a form of control.”
That tension extends into how Caribbean societies continue to frame Carnival itself. Too often, Ashby argues, the festival is reduced to its most visible moments – alcohol, revelry, exposed bodies – stripped of context and history. In doing so, critics miss the immense labour, planning, discipline, and creativity that underpin it. Band leaders, designers, musicians, and organisers are often working years in advance. Carnival mentality, he insists, is not laziness – it is foresight, productivity, and sustained effort.
Seen properly, Carnival becomes a microcosm of what is possible. Ashby pointed to its lessons in national organisation, public safety, and communal responsibility.
“Learning is most important, because you have to understand what everything means in the Carnival. A lot of people do things in the Carnival, and that helps perpetuate it, but understanding what you’re doing will strengthen it. So I often tell people continue to learn, learn about the traditional characters… Learn how they came to be, what they meant, learn how they are being used in the present way…sometimes the only thing you could do is embody, and it is in the embodying, then you understand…They give us a theory that is one way, the other way is to immerse yourself, right? Embody a thing. And then you get a different kind of learning.”
Ashby opined that Carnival Monday and Tuesday are among the safest days of the year, noting also that Ash Wednesday morning, Port of Spain is often at its cleanest. These outcomes do not happen by chance. They are the result of coordination, communication, and collective buy-in – all of which could be studied, replicated, and applied far beyond the festival itself.
He also challenges the persistent narrative that Carnival fosters disorder or disrespect, particularly toward women. In his experience, Carnival spaces often produce the opposite effect: heightened awareness, collective protection, and shared accountability. Moments of violation are treated as aberrations, not norms – swiftly corrected by the community itself. That reality, Ashby argues, deserves far more attention than the caricatures that dominate public debate.
“Without us even trying, one of the safest times of the year is kind of on Monday and Tuesday. Why? Because the effort is put in for security to be tied, for there to have communication between all the branches and national security but I am assuming that they have some kind of command center set up and all these things. I often tell people, if I were in a university, I would send my criminologists, my different people, to study that so that we could probably see how we could extrapolate something from that for wider application…”
Context, he insists, is everything. What is condemned in Carnival is routinely accepted elsewhere. The same clothing worn on a beach provokes outrage on the road. The same collective expression that is celebrated in foreign festivals or more importantly, other local festivals, is pathologised at home. These contradictions reveal not moral concern, but conditioned discomfort – a trained instinct to view African expression through a lens of suspicion.
That discomfort becomes most dangerous when it translates into policy. Ashby is particularly critical of declining support for steelpan and pan sides – institutions he describes as among the most powerful youth-development spaces in the country. Pan yards are not merely rehearsal spaces; they are sites of discipline, mentorship, education, and opportunity. Many encourage academic achievement, entrepreneurship, and professional growth. To defund them, he argues, is to undermine one of the most effective community-building tools Trinidad and Tobago possesses.
“Steelpan could save this country,” Ashby believes – not symbolically, but practically. Crime prevention, youth engagement, education, employment, and national pride all converge there. Yet resistance persists, he believes, precisely because of what pan represents: African ingenuity, born from prohibition, thriving without permission.
At the heart of Ashby’s analysis is a simple but uncomfortable truth. When Caribbean societies attack their own cultural institutions, they are often acting against themselves – willing to dismantle what works in order to distance themselves from strong expressions of Blackness.
Looking ahead, Ashby is clear-eyed but not hopeless. He describes the current moment – locally and globally – as a critical one, marked by renewed colonial thinking and resurgent anti-Black sentiment. His writing, increasingly visible in recent years, is intentional. It is meant as a series of signposts – markers for those willing to pay attention.
“We’re built for hard times,” he said. Caribbean people, descendants of those who survived the Middle Passage, enslavement, and centuries of extraction, are not ordinary. Survival itself is proof of extraordinary strength – mental, physical, and spiritual. The challenge now is remembering that strength, grounding ourselves in it, and refusing to surrender the cultural tools our ancestors left behind.
“…we built for hard times. I often tell people this, we in the Caribbean, we in the what they call the New World, this diaspora, we’re not normal. We would have survived the march down the west coast of Africa. We would have survived the Middle Passage. We would have survived enslavement. We’d have survived in different times, all the different colonial things, and we are still here. It means that we are descendants of the strongest, mentally, strongest, physically and strongest spiritually, of our people. We’re not normal. We have to understand that we’re not normal and dip into that we are the strongest of the strong. So tough times not unusual for us, but we have to be aware, and we have to know who we are to go forward and deal with it. So yeah, we’re in for a ride. But the beauty of it is our ancestors have given us the tools to deal with it.”
Carnival, Ashby insists, is one of those tools. Not entertainment alone, but instruction. Memory. Resistance. A reminder that joy, too, can be an act of defiance – and that freedom, once claimed, must be defended again and again.
