There’s more to Carnival than the ever-popular feathers and beads and failure to preserve and share the historical and cultural context with the masses, will inevitably result in the very essence of the festival being lost.
So says 3Canal vocalist and cultural activist, Wendell Manwarren.
During a recent interview with YCG, he said Carnival and its rituals are critical elements of who we are as a people. He lamented the fact that many people still aren’t fully cognizant of the origin story of the annual festival.

“I will say there are two types of ignorance. There’s classic ignorance, which is you honestly don’t know. And then there’s good old Trini ignorance where you just don’t business and you don’t want to know…Right? I want to challenge that. Yes, it’s hard to find that information. We didn’t write about ourselves, the writing about the carnival and the j’ouvert is from a whole other perspective. And it’s fraught with condemnation, and scorn and you know, negativity.”

He said we are born in it and grow up around it, but sadly, it’s often the case that no one really takes the time to explain the rituals and their meanings.

“I was exposed to j’ouvert at nine years old. I was part of a band called Mary Darceuil which was a J’ouvert institution from Darcueil Lane in Belmont. They used to play like real hardcore J’ouvert but it’s only as big now when we decided to make a J’ouvert intervention at the time because we find the thing was getting pretty corporate, that we had to reverse engineer and say, but if we’re offering this thing to people, it behooves us to understand what this thing is.”

Manwarren said he only fully understood the connection between j’ouvert, emancipation and canboulay, as an adult.
“…all the signifiers of our liberation and how we claimed our freedom into 1834 when the j’ouvert or the carnival itself was claimed by the formerly enslaved Africans it became something else; I only fully grasped all this as an adult. The streets- the road made to walk, that ethos of claiming the streets, that’s when that came into being. That wasn’t part of the mix before. Carnival prior to that was house to house, ball to ball, fete to fete. We’ve always had the Mardi Gras, then came the canboulay and it was always one of contestation, and the powers that be were always trying to quell the spirit of the canboulay- quell the African spirit that gave life to all these expressions to the point where when the Africans claimed the streets, they pulled away. They spent the next 40 to 50 years fighting it down by any means necessary. Literally, they tried to ban it then we had the Canboulay Riots in 1881.”

Subsequent to this, they came up with what Manwarren described as the best way of quelling the expression- instituting competitions.
“Competitions have rules. In 1919 when they put in the rules, no wining, no jamming, no obscenities, no this or that, that’s when they finally got a handle on the festival and it became controllable or tamed.”

Standing firm in their commitment to educating the masses, Manwarren said over the years, 3Canal would include snippets of what they learned in their songs and include the information in their shows.
While acknowledging the difficulty of it, he lamented that not many people are doing this much-needed work. He said in these modern times, if information can’t be sourced on YouTube or similar platforms, the immediate assumption is that it does not exist.
“You have to go out and find it, you have to go and do the research. Fortunately, I had a father who was from Henry Street and would tell me stories. Fortunately, I grew up in Belmont surrounded by Carnival energy from early. Jason Griffith, master Sailor Man was my barber, Ken Morris was just up the road, master copper man. Years later you get to realise that all these things were feeding you and giving you context. We were lucky to work with Minshall from the age of 19, who introduced the idea of mas and art and drawing on tradition and innovating based on tradition. Everything he did was informed by the bat and the sailor and things that we had, he wasn’t trying to make something out of nothing.”
Manwarren said the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago have a responsibility to understand this country’s rich legacy and it’s our job to keep it alive and keep it contemporary.

“Carnival is a contemporary thing. Carnival is not an old folks, nostalgic thing and there’s always that fight between what was, what is and what could possibly be.”

CHANGE NEEDED IN THE COLLECTIVE MINDSET OF CITIZENS
The actor and entertainer said Carnival has lost its essence in many ways because it’s moved away from the idea of free expression which he says has been replaced by the need to have “a transaction with some service provider who will cater to your every need” on the road.

He believes a shift is needed in the mindset of citizens if we are to have any chance at recapturing what’s already been lost.

“For me, these are highly curated Mardi Gras incursions. We’re losing the spirit of the Canboulay, we’re losing that spirit of when my father and them was boys in Belmont at the age of 19 and they decide to play sailor, they just decide to play sailor, right. You don’t need no permission to do that. You don’t need to go and sign up with nobody for a prize to do that.”

In keeping with its mandate to offer an authentic jouvert experience, Manwarren said 3Canal never followed the now common route of signing up with institutions to register the band to be judged for its j’ouvert presentation.

“We’re not looking to be judged. We’re not looking to be constrained. We’re not looking to be contained,” he said.

“The road make the walk on Carnival. The Carnival imagination is the domain of all of us. So if we abdicate that, if we let that go and if you see that the only role for us now is to…I like to say the grandchild of the Midnight Robber is now holding rope and serving drinks and that is crucial. People need to understand that and even if they ain’t doing that they have guns that they playing a mas every day and they killing and shooting one another for what? For a diss in lyrics in songs, you know? So we’ve lost a lot of the human capital that would have been informed the spirit of the Carnival. Thank God for pan! Pan is a saving grace…”

Drawing reference to the recently concluded Junior Panorama, Wanwarren said it’s a reminder that the festival is connected to the young people and they could bring that spirit forward.

He also noted with concern, the apparent monopolisation and possible overcommercialisation of certain elements of Carnival.

“Mas, for me unfortunately, I think we’ve lost the plot and mas has been appropriated by commercial interests who have managed to manage it in such a way that they have a stranglehold on it and a lot of young people now coming up don’t understand that you don’t need to engage in that tranaction to be a part of the festival.”

In the final part of YCG’s sit down with Wendell Manwarren, he makes recommendations for the shifting mindset and recapturing the true essence of Carnival.