Declining Plan B As An Act of Faith

May 15, 2020 by Leave a Comment

In a few months, it will be ten years since I moved to Atlanta to start a new chapter in life. Given this, I have been thinking about the next ten years and what I ought to leave behind.

Reflecting took me back to a moment in October 2015 when I was attending a gathering of my Ph.D. cohort at our advisor’s home. I remember being nervous about speaking to one faculty member in particular because of his intense personality, yet I found myself standing with him talking about alternative academic (Alt Ac) careers. I wanted to know his thoughts on Alt Ac, a term bandied about a lot in the first few weeks of the Ph.D. program as a vocational direction. I was also curious about how I might spin my first vocation as a journalist in case this whole Ph.D. thing didn’t work out. I remember his energy and his words to me and my colleagues that evening as if it were yesterday. He said–and I’m paraphrasing because this was nearly five years ago,

“There is no plan B, you don’t do PhD work because you want to do alternative academic work, you do this work so that you achieve plan A, otherwise you may as well leave now.”

I remember being shocked at his words but also feeling like it’s just what a white male would say. A white male graduated with high honors, and thereafter landed a teaching position and then a tenure-track position and is currently a full professor. This was all within his first 10 years of holding a PhD. Given this, his dictating what we ought to desire as new PhD students seemed easier said than done. I also couldn’t help but wonder if my path was so assured as a young Black woman scholar. Thinking this way lead me to hold onto my identity as a journalist by hanging on to any opportunity I had to capitalize on that identity and turn it into work. That is why, for the better part of the last five years, and actually for the previous ten, I stayed working in the realm of journalism. Whether it was writing bit pieces, managing editorial websites for publishing companies and people, being an editor for online journals, and the list runs on. I kept myself glued to my first vocation. Yet, this also meant that my loyalties were divided between where I’ve been and where I was headed. It was the difference between resting in the comfort of what I’d known for nearly 20 years or accepting the challenge of a new realm. Recently all of this came to a head for me.

With this being the penultimate year of my Ph.D. work, I’ve had to become more precise about the return on investment that I desire. Thus, while working, writing, applying for fellowships, and living, I’ve had to think about what I want my life to look like in the decades to follow. This has become particularly important as many people ask me, “What do you want to do when you graduate?” Unequivocally I say I want to become a tenure-track professor so that I can teach, write, and speak about ethics, religion, and women, gender, and sexuality at a university or seminary. Yet what I practice is not always what I preach as I continue to hedge my bets by holding on to Plan B.

For the past few months, holding on to Plan B has looked like holding on to my position at the library like a security blanket, all the while knowing, “Everything I can do is not everything I should do.” I told my advisor this last year when she and I were strategizing about my final years in the program. I remember sitting in her office wrestling with the opportunities before me but articulating rather clearly that just because I can do something doesn’t mean I should do it. Sure, I am good at what I do in non-academic areas, but it does not mean that every opportunity presented to me to work in those areas is an expedient opportunity. This is particularly important when I reflect on the precarity of time, and how I indicate to myself and the universe what is important by what I spend the most time doing. If I am dedicating more energy to everything but the pursuit of this Ph.D., how am I sowing into the future I say I desire? Indeed some of this work is necessary because bills don’t get paid by chasing dreams. Yet, if I am not being clear about what it is I want, searching for opportunities to singlemindedly pursue it, and having faith in the pursuit, I cannot and should not expect for it to fully manifest. (Read “fully manifest” carefully, which means I could manifest something, but will it be what I know I am worth?) 

So I’ve had to make a choice–and it’s not lost to me that God gives me choices time and time again. As I shared with a friend recently, “I am never forsaken,” it can be probably be argued that many of us are not forsaken; we just choose our comfort over the challenge to rise to the occasion for which God put us on this earth to meet. But that’s another post for another day. Nevertheless, similar to the choice I had to make ten years ago to leave NY and move to Atlanta to start seminary for God knows what, I have chosen to stop hedging my bets on this old life and start betting on this new life.

I did not just take ten years out of my life to be on the proverbial backside of the mountain to go back to doing the same thing. Indeed, being a journalist is who I was for some time and much of my life will be guided by those impulses–because there is always room for fair and balanced reporting, in-depth coverage, fact-checking, and good writing that everyone can read. All of those things are important to me as ways of life and I carry them with me into the academy. But what I am no longer holding onto tightly is the idea that if all else fails I’m going to fall back into the field of journalism. Instead, in the middle of a pandemic that is wreaking havoc on the academy and creating uncertainty for near-future PhDs, I’m leaning into what I want and what I’ve been working toward all along. I’m thinking about the words of that faculty member who told me in 2015 that there is no Plan B, there’s only Plan A, and he was right. There is only a Plan A, and I’m encouraging myself to believe that I can achieve the Plan A by dint of my hard work over the last decade, my gifts, and by hoping against hope that the future I want is the future I will have.

In many ways, I’m returning to the type of person I was ten years ago before I was in the throes of graduate school theological education. I was hopeful and willing to trust God with what I cannot see and that hope and trust moved me to Atlanta for ten years and set me on this incredible journey. I feel that God is again asking me to hope and dream audaciously and trust the process, but this time around to lean singularly on the last thing I was told to do. So here I am, entering the final lap of this pursuit toward a Ph.D., having decided to step away from my work in the library, having accepted the fellowship that aligns with my future goals, and that allows me the opportunity to work on this dissertation singlemindedly. I am entering the next ten years focused on the one thing I want. I am giving this work time to speak to me by only listening to it. Finally, and most importantly, I am trusting the process and trusting God in the process.

Filed Under: Blog, Life, Reflection

Redirecting the Orgiastic Ethos of Christmas

December 7, 2019 by Leave a Comment
During the first two days of Advent I heard people use erotic language to describe the capitalistic ethos of the Christmas season. In the first Sunday of Advent mass the priest referred to the constant announcement of Black Friday deals and sales as “orgiastic,” and on NPR the next morning they referred to the season as an “orgy of consumption.” I’m struck by this language particularly because yesterday’s second reading also traffics in some erotic language. Everyone’s problematic fave Paul tells us to stay alert throw off the work of darkness and put on the armor of light, conducting ourselves as if we were in the light not in orgies and drunkenness, promiscuity and lust, or rivalry and jealousy. He concludes the passage by heeding us to not make provisions for the flesh but for the Lord Jesus Christ.
While this passage was being read in mass, I noticed a few members of the choir chuckle when they heard orgy and I saw a few people throughout the parish squirm at the sound of promiscuity, lust, and flesh. I was even shook for a moment until I realized that being shook by those words is old hat. It’s old hat because we hear “orgies,” “promiscuity,” “lust,” and “flesh” and go straight to our bodies and sex, and while we are not far from not needing to be concerned about our bodies, sex, and flesh in the world, it’s above us in this season because there is honestly a bigger fish to fry.
What the priest tried to get us to understand in the homily and what came back around to me via NPR’s utilization of this erotic language to describe the season is that our desires are being corrupted by the enterprise of capitalism which convinces us that extreme consumption through the guise of giving gifts to our loved ones is how we spread good cheer and tidings of comfort and joy. If the copious advertising and marketing of Christmas does any work, it is to constantly whet our appetites for more by selling it to us for less which makes us want it more and buy more. It is orgiastic indeed because, as a recent article pointed out, clenching the deal is a state of mind, it makes us feel good. It is affective, engendering a positive feeling close to an oxytocin release.
Thus it is no wonder we cannot part from all this season has become for us. We are now affectively conditioned to consume and without that consumption, we may feel nothing at all which means, capitalism has sufficiently done its job and is a hell of a drug.
So where does all of this leave us?
To do as the first day of Advent readings directed us, stay alert and walk in the light of the Lord. Being able to name how we’ve been taken by the spirit of capitalism–as we do every season–will allow us to properly discern our place in this season. I do not want to suggest that the gift-giving element of this season is wrong, but I do want to encourage us to interrogate how we consume toward the gift-giving end of this season, being careful to put Caesar in his place and bring Christ and the ethos of goodwill to all humans to its proper place. In this way, we can find more ways to put people at the center of our holiday practices–as Jesus put people at the center of all his praxis–and in this way we do not so much look for gifts for them but we look for ways to be a gift to people through our presence in their lives. Maybe in this way we can derive orgiastic pleasure not from bestowing gifts but by availing ourselves one to another and experiencing the true power of the erotic where it is, as Audre Lorde says, a “critical element in dismantling the social and political hierarchy situated in a white patriarchal power structure that reproduces the erotic as pornographic.” After, it is those same white patriarchal power structures that have shaped this entire economic system down to the capitalistic Christmas enterprise we are currently beholden to. Lest you think I escalated this out of nowhere...
Filed Under: Blog, Culture, Life, Reflection

So You Wanna Go to Trinidad Carnival? Pro-Tips for Carnival Virgins

March 14, 2019 by 1 Comment

It has been a week since I came back from Trinidad Carnival and since that time I have been hit with a barrage of questions about how I did it, how much it cost, and how I managed to get the costume–among other things. So I decided to compile my responses to those questions. This is the account of someone who managed to plan and execute the trip of a lifetime twice and now I want to share some of my tips. So here goes…

Tip #1: Get Your Money Up!!!

Trinidad Carnival is not cheap–there are other inexpensive Carnivals that you can check out such as Cropover, Jamaica, Caribana, Miami…But Trinidad is where you want to set your sights to experience one of the original Carnivals. Yet, the “greatest show on earth”–after Brazil–is an enterprise of globalization and because of that, as its popularity increases among foreigners, so do the prices. It is not lost on me how this manages to isolate some Trinidadians from the festivities (so much so that banks in Trinidad create loans that citizens can take out for Carnival) but that is another post for another time. In general, Trinidad Carnival is not cheap so whether you are playing backline or frontline, staying at the Hyatt, Hilton, or a bed and breakfast, going to Machel Mondays, Soca Monarch, a fete a day or two, be prepared to shell down your shekels. In the spirit of full disclosure, my first trip was about $5000 which is on the high-end of the Carnival budget because I treated is as if I may never go again. I had a frontline costume (more on this later); I purchased Monday Wear from a local designer; I had my makeup professionally done for Carnival Tuesday; I went to roughly one fete a day (and there are no “Ladies free before” parties during Carnival); I stayed at the Hyatt, one of the most expensive hotels Trinidad; I secured a driver, and the flight was not cheap.

So, when you factor in all of those costs (and that doesn’t even include the cooldown trip some people take to Tobago) you are looking at about $5000 give or take. You can cut costs by lodging at a bed and breakfast or an AirBnB with a few friends–my cousin, who goes every year, told me he and his friends pay about $65USD/day for a bed and breakfast. You can also cut cost by doing a backline costume which usually doesn’t exceed $800USD–or by doing no costume, by attending one fete a day or a fete every other day, and maybe by arriving on Saturday before Carnival–but keep in mind that the later you arrive other things will be thrown into turmoil such as costume pickup or you’ll pay a lot more for the plane ticket to fly in at the height of festivities. If you get nothing else from this post, get the fact that you need to get your money up and get it up early. In Carnival you must count the costs because this is not your average vacation. In many ways, you must pay to play. So a quick breakdown of costs would look a little something like this:

Airfare: $700-1200 (this will depend on where you are flying from and how early you buy your ticket. It can be more of less than this range. Flights from Florida and NY tend to be direct and are a little cheaper than flights from elsewhere such as Atlanta.)

Lodging: A hotel such as the Hyatt is approximately $500 USD per night during Carnival week and most people stay on average 6 nights. $500 x 6 = $3000 before hotel taxes and fees. So if you are splitting this with someone expect to pay $1500+. As I said earlier, you can cut costs by staying in a bed and breakfast or AirBnB. Consider the fact that during this week, you won’t get much sleep and your hotel will essentially be for naps and changing clothes, so think about how much you want to pay for that and govern yourself accordingly.

Fetes: There are all-inclusive fetes which are usually over $100 USD, with some topping $180. Non-all inclusive fetes are under that but really, you’ll want to go to mostly all-inclusive fetes because they minimize the number of times you have to reach in your pocket once you touch down.

Costumes: I’ll talk more about this later but just for primer’s sake, a woman’s costume can run anywhere from $700-$1600.

Transportation: Life is easier if you hire a driver during your time in Trinidad and a driver for a week who will take you to and from all the fetes and to the road on Monday and Tuesday will probably run you about $150 USD per person.

Makeup: If you want your makeup professionally done, there are many makeup artists who fly into Trinidad for the occasion. Expect to pay about $125 for an appointment.

Incidentals: After you’ve taken care of all of these costs over the course of your planning, you’ll find that there’s not much you’ll need money for when you are in Trinidad. But, this does not preclude you from walking with money for other incidentals. I recommend you have about $500 USD with you for the week. You’ll spend less than that for sure, but have it just in case.

Tip #2: Get Your Planning Skills Up

Executing a good Carnival experience necessitates getting your logistical intelligence quotient up. I am not the best planner but when it came to this trip I managed to have my ducks in a row thanks to a few good friends and a good concierge service–concierge services, for a fee, help you get tickets to fetes, get your costume, secure ground transportation, and lodging, etc. If you are seriously considering going to Carnival you should not only be saving your money but plan to start paying on things around July/August when bands launch their themes and costumes. So about the costumes…

The costumes that you see during Carnival season are the creation of designers in a “masquerade band” or “mas band” for short. They are not costumes you commission someone to make for you. You DO NOT order costumes off of Etsy or Party City. You DO NOT look at a band’s costume and design your own–that is disrespectful to designers and it is the preference that, if you see a costume and want a modification, you discuss that with the band or the designer and they will try to make arrangements for modifications. Your costume is created by a designer who designs for a band and you pick and purchase it through a band and that is what you play mas in. Playing mas has a rich history, one that situates it as a practice of resistance for enslaved persons whose masters were having lavish masquerades that the enslaved couldn’t participate in, thus they created their own celebration called Canboulay. Canboulay experienced several transitions including when it was celebrated, and part of those traditions included the timing of Carnival as many of us now know it falls right before Lent. Playing mas has experienced an evolution with costumes that have gone from stock characters to “Pretty Mas” where intricately bedazzled costumes now mark the occasion.

There are over a dozen masquerade bands in Trinidad with new ones popping up every year. This means everyone should be able to get in where they fit in. In July/August, these bands begin to “launch” their costumes for Carnival based on a theme. Each band may have up to 12 different costumes (sections) and about two variations on those 12 which is called frontline and backline. A frontline costume is usually the more ornate of the costumes in a band section because it is decked out with feathers and large feather backpacks, jewels, sequins, wire bras, etc. Thus the frontline will run you at least $900 USD. The backline costume is less ornate but equally beautiful and usually caps at about $800 USD. If you are playing with an all-inclusive band, that +/-$800 is not only paying for your costume but your unlimited drinks, food, DJs, and other amenities while you are on the road on Carnival Monday and Tuesday. Some bands have what they call “midline” costumes which offers you a little bit of the glitz of frontline without the high price tag.

In order to register, some bands require you to contact a “committee member” to secure a spot in the band. For those initiated into Greek organizations and secret societies, this may remind you of your intake process and it may cause you no worries. Actually, who am I kidding, the committee process for Carnival is daunting regardless of your previous experience with Greek organizations or secret societies. The committee member is the gatekeeper who stands between you and the costume of your dreams and they may ask for your measurements, pictures, your social media profile or your unborn child (just kidding) in order to grant you entry. And, if I am fully transparent, some of this process is discouraging as some bands have a history of privileging the aesthetics of lighter skin and smaller bodies, particularly in promotional materials for their costumes. So know that Carnival is not an apolitical space and you will have to choose your battles. But do not be dismayed, there are sometimes ways around the committee member process if you use a concierge service who happens to have a relationship with the band you are interested in and the costume you are interested in (this is “if,” keeping in mind that utilizing a concierge service does not guarantee you your choice of any costume.) I was fortunate to get my foot in the door with a new band, ROGUE, which is a partnership between large band Tribe and large event producer Caesar’s Army. I highly commend them to any newbies on the road for 2020 for their great customer service, their beautiful costumes and their non-stop pump on Carnival Monday and Tuesday. ROGUE has plenty vibes. Whatever you do, by July/August, be ready to send emails to committee members or customer service people and be ready to ante-up! Registration for costumes is about a quarter of the costume cost upfront and then you can pay on it up until your arrival.

Pro-tip: Pay off your costume before you touchdown in Trinidad, it makes picking it up easier.

As you can see, procuring a costume alone is quite the event so you definitely need the virtue of patience and a bit of perseverance to get what you want for Carnival. Planning for this is key as is planning for every other dimension of your trip. If you are looking at doing Carnival in 2020, some hotels are taking reservations now and will be taking deposits (it all kinda goes back to getting that money up EARLY). Caribbean Airlines have released flights and others will soon, so set your FareHopper or other notification systems up to watch fares and try not to buy your plane ticket any later than August. As for the acquisition of fete tickets, that happens later in the year so you have time. In the meantime…

Camboulay-2018-11.jpg

Tip #2.5: Know the History and the Culture

I alluded to this a bit in tip #2 and it really should be tip #1, but I hope you’ll understand the gravity of this regardless of where it falls. Many people see pictures of the women and men in costumes or of the dancing and immediately say they want to go to Carnival. Such responses strike me as reductionist as people are only responding to the most salacious part of the experience. Don’t get me wrong, there is immense beauty and sensuality in Carnival to be seen and experienced, yet that is only part of the entire experience. To experience Carnival and love it is to love the history and culture that it springs from. A history steeped in the lives and experiences of African and Caribbean people. It is to be intrigued by more than a glitzy costume and sexy whine, but to be interested in and passionate about the history of a practice that stems from our ancestors crafting practices of liberation in the midst of oppression. It is to feel the spirit of the music from steelpans to soca–this is key especially for Black Americans because there is no “American” music played during Carnival, so if you don’t love soca, calypso, chutney, steelpan, this won’t be for you. It is to savor the flavor and fragrance of Trinidad and Tobago’s food. It is to see the actual melting pot of cultures and ethnicities on an island where many are blended together. It is to immerse yourself in a culture beyond what is promoted.

Tip #3: Get Your Weight Up…Or Off…Or Maintain

There are, of course, obvious reasons that one goes hard in the gym before Carnival and that is to fit perfectly into your costume. Whether you are playing frontline, midline, or backline, you want to look YOUR best in the costume on Monday and Tuesday because those are the two days where you will wear the least amount of clothes alongside thousands of other people wearing the least amount of clothes. Carnival is not a time to be bashful or insecure about your body, it’s a time to celebrate it and have great confidence in it and all that it does for you not just for the time that you are in Trinidad but all year around. Thus, it behooves you to start your workout plan and diet early so that you can pace yourself and get the results you want. But, more than getting to some goal weight and muscle mass, you want to exercise regularly ahead of Carnival because you NEED to build stamina and endurance in general.

Carnival is a marathon, not a sprint. It is non-stop action from the moment you land. If you are about that life you’ll probably have a fete or concert or two a day from the day you land until when you leave. You need endurance for that. You’ll clock less than 6 hours a sleep a night–and that’s generous. Carnival is seriously not for the faint of heart or the unfit–do not read unfit as anything other than not physically fit. You’ll mostly survive on naps and water alone and maybe a double here and there–your eating will get random during your Carnival trip because when choosing between eating and sleeping, you will want the sleep. For example…

On my first Carnival Friday, the day after my friend and I landed, we went to a party that night and then had to do a ticket pickup for a fete. Given all of that, we got back to the hotel at about 10:30PM and needed to wake up at 12:30 for a 1:00am shuttle to a fete in the bushes (Caesar’s Army’s AM BUSH). While my friend retired to the room to nap–and you must be honest about your body’s capacity to push through on little sleep or its need for sleep–I ate dinner because I knew I wouldn’t see food for roughly another eight hours and I needed sustenance if I was about to be partying from the wee hours of the morning until sunrise. I got back to the room at midnight with enough time to casually prepare for the fete which meant cutting up some old jeans into shorts, cutting my t-shirt into something relatively decent and cute, and waterproofing all my belongings (a necessity for any fete or J’ouvert which involves paint, mud, powder, chocolate, and water). And that was just year one, year two was even more intense with going to the same fete, being stuck in traffic for two hours, they taking a 30-minute nap to head to AM BUSH. So, if you follow, there is very little sleep. I was up from about 9am on Friday straight through to about 10pm on Saturday (with the exception of an hour nap between AM BUSH and Soca Brainwash). I survived because I prepared well beforehand with lots of exercise, rest, wheatgrass shots, etc. You need to be healthy to enjoy Carnival, not just for yourself but for your friends, which brings me to my last point.

Tip #4: Get Your Squad Up

You know how they say it’s not about where you are but who you are with? Well, Carnival is equal parts where you are and who you are with. It not only matters that the friends in tow love soca as much as you do or love the idea of being a sleep-deprived soca disciple decked out in feathers and jewels as much as you do, but also that you share similar dispositions about travel and experiencing Carnival together. After all, this is a person, if you choose to share lodging with them, who will see you at your best and your worst and your lowest. They’ll be the ones to hold your hair while you puke from drinking Puncheon, or the one who will wake you up from a nap in the middle of a fete, or the one who will have to help you wash paint off your back, or the one to whine up on you when they sense your energies are getting too low, or the one who can read your energy so well that they know when to leave you alone, or the one who will allow you to put a scarf on the door because you decided to get your groove back, or the one who will help you get into your costume on Tuesday. I promise I list those as general situations and not specific examples of anything that happened on my trip, my travel companion can attest to that. Nevertheless, going to Carnival with the right friends is important. They need to be people you trust, people who you know are responsible and people who are fun and not flakes. Not every person who will express interest in going to Carnival is the right person to go with. Carnival is a for serious inquiries only, so pick reliable, ready friends–that’s financially, physically, mentally, and soca-cally.

Carnival is guaranteed to be the best time of your life if you save and budget well, plan well, exercise well and stay healthy, and travel with the right friends. You can find out more information about specifics parts of planning on the sites below but know that the four things outlined here are integral to even pull this off at all.

For more information on Carnival check out:

A Masqueraders Perspective on the Carnival Experience (Global Carnivalist offer the most comprehensive information on all the Carnivals across the world, you will want to bookmark and follow her on all mediums.)

Guide to Trinidad Carnival Bands (Global Carnivalist’s guide to the Trinidad Carnival bands)

Up Close at Trinidad’s Carnival (An oldie but goodie by Barbara Ehrenreich’s. It documents her experience at Carnival which is well worth reading. This is a good outsider’s perspective.)

Carnival 101 with Fodor’s Travel (This article offers a broad swath of events one can attend during Trinidad Carnival from Panorama to the Canboulay Riot reenactments.)

And of course, feel free to leave your questions and comments below or, if you know me in real life, you can reach out. 🙂

PS: Start planning NOW!

Filed Under: Blog, Culture, Life, Women Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Trinidad Carnival: My Eden

February 28, 2019 by Leave a Comment

At this moment, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world, myself included, are traveling to Trinidad for Carnival, the season of fetes, masquerading, and feasting that precedes Ash Wednesday. To the liturgically inclined, Carnival, like Mardi Gras, marks the end of Ordinary Time and the beginning of a period of solemnity. But for an increasing many, Trinidad Carnival just marks the beginning of a global season where at least once a month, every month until October, there is an opportunity to “Free Up Yourself.” Even after the Soca Monarch is crowned, the lights on the stage go dim, the feathers and jewels are swept off the street, and everyone sobers up from the various Carnivals around the world, there is still a flurry of activity going forth to plan next year’s Carnival. Much like God, Carnival is always working.

In 2016 I attended my first Carnival in Miami and became a convert. I became a Carnivalist and soca disciple who didn’t know what I thought fun was before I played mas. Prior to attending Miami Carnival, I watched family and friends fete for hours, days, a week even, and then I experienced it–on a smaller scale–for myself. From that moment on I fervently held on to my last memories of a Carnival experience while I counted down the days until my next. And now, here I am, on my way to my second Trinidad Carnival aka “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Given this,  I wanted to take this time to reflect on what it is that makes Carnival so compelling to me and why I am going to Trinidad again. There are some who have misconceptions about Carnival, presuming that with the (increasingly) tiny costumes and scantily clad people, the sometimes suggestive music, the copious alcohol, and what seems like an entire ethos of debauchery, that those of us who attend are going there to be promiscuous and reckless. While that may be some people’s aim, the majority of us go for a completely different reason. I go because Carnival is a religious experience, an Eden even, where the mind, body, and soul are without shame.

There are a variety of religious experiences if religion is defined as a cultural set of beliefs and practices that people gather around. If part of this is the gathering of persons inspired to give focused attention, adoration, and commitment to a subject or object, then Carnival is it. Or maybe Soca is the religion and Carnival is the church. Either way, year over year people take a pilgrimage to Trinidad and other Carnival locations, spending months in physical and financial preparation, to come together and be swept up in the spirit of Soca–and some liquid spirits–and all that comes with it: ecstatic dancing, laughing, singing, bonding, and a celebration of life. In all of this, there is a great sense of unity among those gathered and a unifying power in the individual.

This unity has historical significance as the origins of the practice of participating in Carnival is one in which enslaved people celebrated apart from their oppressors–who were having masquerade balls of their own–and donned character and caricature costumes that represented important figures in African and Caribbean culture. These figures ranged from devils and mammies to tricksters and were a site of resistance and spiritual performance. These practices still exist today but on a slightly smaller scale as Carnival has experienced the boom of globalization which has made it so that pretty masquerading has eclipsed the traditional. Pretty mas has its detractors and one can surely write a think-piece about all the problems inherent in the concept, but I find promise in the pretty masquerade as it is a special site of resistance for women, especially Afro-Caribbean women who sometimes exist in spaces that do not affirm or proclaim our beauty. In Carnival, the pretty masquerader proclaims and flaunts her beauty and embodies the saying, “Carnival is woman.” I would go so far as to say that the practice of playing mas in Carnival can share affinity with doing womanist work as it is woman loving her body, music, dance, love, roundness, other women and men both sexually and non-sexually, etc.

So, one of the parts of the Carnival experience is “playing mas,” otherwise known as masquerading–this could involve joining a traditional band with the aforementioned characters or joining a pretty mas band. Every year, a masquerade band has a theme and costumes designed by local and international designers connected to that theme. Note: You are not commissioning a random person to make your mas costume, you buy it through the band and your costume is distributed in the region where the Carnival is held–that means that my Trinidad Carnival costume is in Trinidad, not something that is shipped to me in Atlanta that I then have to figure out how to get down to Trinidad and back again. In Miami I played with Generation X whose theme for 2016 was Erotica, and I played in the Bondage section. If you know my research you know that I considered it Kismet that my first time playing mas was with a band whose theme for the year was Erotica. The costume consisted of a lot of black, chains, and restraint-like accessories, yet I was anything but restrained or in bondage. I was free, the freest I’d been in my life because I was in a place where I was at one with my body.

Carnival is not only the place to dash weh your inhibitions but to dash weh your insecurities about your body because it is truly a place where all (bodies) are welcome. Playing mas in Carnival is an experience of becoming one with your body in private to be at one with it in public. I find this significant as someone raised in and a current adherent to a Christian tradition that makes the body a problematic. My comfort with my body has come in waves and it has taken me nearly a decade to embrace my body as a woman, fully sacred, and fully good. Carnival felt like a culmination of this work and attending a Carnival annually or bi-annually is an opportunity to celebrate bodies, particularly in the womanist way of celebrating roundness. For me, adorning my body with nothing other than a bra made of wire, a strip that covers my nipples, and a tiny bikini bottom is a step to my liberation. When I put on my costume and look at myself, it is like seeing myself for the first time. Everything looks new and incredible to me. Finally, my body is enslaved to no one and no thing, it is liberated and it dances among other liberated bodies. Thus for me to spend nearly a week in various level of undress is not something to be ashamed of–that is why I post and speak fairly openly about it because I want to decrease the judgment and shame that is sometimes implied and put upon women in particular for enjoying this exhibition of our fearfully and wonderfully made bodies. We came into this world naked–and by that I not only refer to our natural birth but the divine birth through which we knew no shame and our bodies were good.

Furthermore, those of us who are part of the diaspora but are chained to the West, benefit from participating in practices that explicitly unlink us from the notion that our bodies are bad or that a naked body equals a corruptible body. At Carnival, bodies are without shame, there is no objectifying gaze save for those who are completely out of their league in understanding what is liberative and sacred about participation in Carnival–I say this as one who believes that an argument forwarding a notion of objectification in this context is one that ignores that the objectifier, i.e. European colonizer, came before objectification. Among the diaspora there is no objectification because we understand our bodies and ourselves not as objects or objectified, we are subjects of our heritage and our liberation. We are free, and as subjects to our heritage we also experience that freedom through music and dance.

I’ve been dancing in some way, shape, or form throughout my life, it is what frees me up to do more and to process a spectrum of emotions that cannot be excised in the mind. Dancing is how I commune with myself, with God, and with the earth. Carnival allows me to commune with those parts all the more because of the Soca music that is integral to the celebration. The waistline is the focal point in much of the dancing done at Carnival and its primary job is to whine–which is why many songs will focus on the whine. While the ability to ability to whine the waistline is woman’s work, men have also become as proficient, providing some healthy competition and a hell of a time. Men and women meet on the road and enjoy a kind of promiscuous dancing, going from one person to the next, usually thanking their partners along the way. Shame is non-existent here because there is a sense that this is what our bodies were made for, to consensually congregate and dance freely. Together on the road, no harm can befall us. We are safe there dancing with one another as freely as we want to and there is nobody or no gaze to disrupt us as the vibrations of the sound system blasting soca moves us.

Being raised in a Jamaican family, I was exposed to all of the genres of Caribbean music but never took a liking to soca, I was a strictly dance hall girl. But after a weekend of living on a soca soundtrack in Miami, I was hooked and couldn’t imagine my life without it.  The pure positivity and vibes of soca music are infectious and seemingly does something to its listener. Whether the song is about giving a man or woman a good whine, celebrating life, or giving praise to God, it imbues the listener with a life force unlike any other genre of music–with the exception of some Gospel music. That life force is a positive productive power best articulated in Benjai’s 2015 hit, “Phenomenal.” In it he says,

Soca does give me meh powers
Turn me into masqueraders
Soca does give meh meh powers
Draw me straight in different colors
Masqueraders, we get powers
Is a wonderful feeling
On Stage together holding me banners With different colors
We crossing the stage

This song asserts soca’s power as a unifying force individually and communally. It gives people powers to come together from all walks of life and celebrate life against all odds. The different colors are a reference to both those of the vibrant costumes, flags, and the people who represent the multitudes of the world. Many gather around the sound of soca and experience themselves in the world as never before because they are reminded of who they are in relation to themselves and in relation to everyone else. Some soca music also manages to situate itself within the Christian tradition through songs that ground a Judeo-Christian conception of God as bestower of blessings, protector, provider, and comforter. This explicit reference to religion aside, soca at its core is about unity and establishing the power of people coming together. This year many of us have the hit “Famalay” by Machel Montano, Bunji Garlin, and Skinny Black to look forward to as we once again affirm our unity as people when we sing,

We doh see skin
We doh see colour
We see strength
We see power
We doh see race
One or di other
Once he is breathing on dis earth he is ma brother

Soca is a great equalizer for the masses that can help us to see one another by collapsing difference for one moment in time and celebrating our common humanity. This is something we are hard pressed to do in many other places, but somehow it works in the context of soca and Carnival.

Soca reminds us that a celebration is always around the corner and the riddim drives us to shake off everything that binds us. The sound calls us to live in the moment, love life, and love one another. This is why I consider myself a soca disciple. I fell in love with soca precisely because the music’s message is so consistently positive and celebratory in a way that one almost can’t account for by words alone. There is metaphysical-level goodness happening in soca that takes me to another level both on the road and in my daily life. Soca is, literally, good for the soul.

In all of this, Carnival strikes me as a religious experience because it gathers every part of the self and penetrates it with generative, positive, productive energy. It does so within the context of a community that gathers for the purpose of imbuing itself with this energy. It takes the body and redeems it, restoring it to a pre-Fall moment where shame is not an issue. It takes the mind and gives it a higher consciousness, bending it toward unity and love as a consistent ethic. It lifts the soul to a higher vibration. It is more than just an opportunity fling it up, it is an opportunity to get free. And so, off I go to my personal Eden to live on top of the world–the Black Church folk will get that. See you all on the flipside.

 

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