~ by Shobha Gallagher
(This article was originally published in The Big World online magazine)
Certain carnival dances said to come from the days of slavery engage our raw, carnal side...
The sound of tin drums and muffled shrieks wafted from the top of the steep winding road. What seemed like undulating blue flames emerged from the womb of darkness — and from the parchment of history.
We were in the mountain village of Paramin, north of Trinadad’s capital, Port of Spain. Paramin’s 4,000 or so inhabitants have Spanish roots, and speak a patois dialect based on French.
The waiting crowd gathered on the slope and the village square parted to make way for the Paramin Blue Devils, who swirled, leapt and shrieked, jabbing the air with pitchforks, machetes, long sticks and other farm tools. They opened their mouths wide, exposing their crimson red tongues.
Four young boys and a plump adult, swishing a kind of long-grass contraption, swarmed toward us, with rhythmic shrieks that kept beat with the biscuit tin-drums, or pans, as they were called, and the plastic whistles of their strange orchestra.
Humouring them by shaking my hips to the music, and waving my hands gleefully, did not help. The shrieks became louder, and the young ones sprang against the fence like spider-gremlins and slithered up, jabbing their fingers at us. Another scampered from the side and danced before us, a frenzied zombie. He too jabbed his finger. Now what were we being accused of? It struck me then that this jabbing in the air meant they wanted Trinidadian dollars from us.
I cursed myself for leaving behind my wallet of foreign currency in the hotel. I lowered my camera, and gazed with unfazed sphinx-like steadiness at the gyrating beings in front of me. It worked. They retreated, leaving fragments of a blue-rimmed surreal behind. For they were not really in pantomime — but in true character that resonated through the ages and the drumbeats of the past.
There is in each of us a mystic fascination for the raw, primal carnal energy and its mesmeric tribal rhythm and dance. It takes us in its flood, and swells your soul with an ancient call. The whole expression of the parade is rooted in a culture based primarily on oral history and tradition. The blue devils are a form of “jab-jab” as they are called, and are part of the pre-Lenten rituals and festivity.
That very morning, close to sunrise, I had experienced the j’ouvert, or opening day, of the pre-Lenten Carnival, in Port of Spain. Participants caked with mud, ash, black grease paint or ghostly white colors had paraded down the main streets, dancing or wining (a very suggestive dance in which two people or more gyrate together back-to-back, or front-to-back, swivelling and grinding their hips). Their attires were a mishmash of flaming coloured wigs, strange headgear and the masks of devils or beasts.
The widely-held belief here is that the jab dance dates back to the days of slavery. In the 1770s, the French overlords celebrated Carnival with flamboyant masks and costumes, as a last fling before the penitence and abstinence of Lent. The slaves held separate dances in their yards and barracks.
With the abolition of slavery in 1838, there was an unleashing of the pagan Carnival celebrations, with wild dances, grease paint and grotesque masks out on the streets, accompanied by loud drumbeats that sent the alarmed gentry fleeing behind closed doors.
Attempts to abolish by force behaviour that, in those times, was considered outrageous and obnoxious, only led to rioting. Opposition burst the floodgates of its turbulent expression.
Heady over their freedom, the natives of Paramin reputedly mimicked their former masters by painting themselves in exaggerated shades of blue, made from laundry bluing tablets ground and mixed with water.
In Paramin, it is customary for the blue devils to dance on Carnival Monday, a February or March evening. On my night there, we flowed with the stream of people.
I was mesmerized by one of the main figures, a king devil who opened and closed his gigantic white-and-blue splotched dragon wings. His assistant restrained him with a rope, as he swirled and yawed at the crowd, the pupils of his eyes glinting. On the rim, a very young masked devil poked a puppy with his trident, sending it yelping to safety.
The children watched this drama with unperturbed interest. One toddler jabbed his finger right back at a devil who wore a scary beast mask, with horns and a mane. Amazingly, the beast slithered away like a wounded repentant snake.
One costumed devil especially caught my attention, because he was so different from the rest. His tragicomic mask was topped with a mop of flaming orange curly wig and a bulbous red rubber nose. He beseeched onlookers for dollars, his sad, entreating visage with its silent plea hard to resist. When he was honoured with the booty, he turned up the corners of his mouth with his fingers into a winsome smile. He was by far the tamer version of the retinue from the netherworld.
Most of the others were either bald, or wearing wispy silver-white or multicoloured woolly wigs. These strange and gruesome creatures either dribbled foaming beer down their throats, necks and chests, confronted the crowd with mock savagery or swivelled on the wet ground, while the rest danced in short steps legs wide apart.
All of a sudden a lithe young devil with red wings pranced into view and jabbed a finger at me. I indicated I had no money. To my blushing embarrassment he bent backwards in slow motion with the beat and began to suggestively move his fingers in circles on his bare body while flicking his tongue. I turned towards a local girl smiled at me and said, “He will go away ... he won’t stay.”
But the creature before me spread his legs wide, bent further backward and placed his hand flirtatiously behind his head. “He wants you to photograph,” the girl said helpfully. I readily flooded him with a torrent of flashes from my camera as the grotesque model proffered several poses and best angles. He finally and thankfully oozed away towards another victim, tilting his head — a precursor to another brazen drama of foreplay.
I realized that what I thought was a long stick one of the blue devils was swinging was actually a phallus symbol. A pretty teenaged girl ran away giggling, as he brandished and prodded it playfully towards her. No room for prudishness here. I was awed by the raw sexuality displayed - in front of the very young, the pubescent and the very old.
Yet, after my initial shock, I realized that the show was not downright sexual. An unwritten code of conduct kept the participants from crossing the boundaries.
I surged through the crowd towards the spot where the spectators were being entertained by the gremlins from hell, who were raking the money with pitchforks. By now some of them were rolling on the ground their bodies in contortions, to the hypnotic beat of the tin drums.
Though the whole performance seemed raucous, raw-edged and ribald, it had embedded in it hours of firing the tin drums to tune the beats. Many hours spent on creating the characters they represented, practicing the dance that had to keep in step with the pan drums, grinding the tablets of bluing agent to make the paint, rubbing baby oil before the colour is applied so that it stays on the skin.
As one of the representatives in the documentary film, “Jab-The Blue Devils of Paramin” states, ”My father used to tell me that as long as you put that blue on your skin and you hear a pan, you just totally different…”
Some of the blue had smeared on my arm and elbow … and with it I carried the beat of the pan, the infectious dance of the Paramin devils. And I realized that I had been more than a spectator.