Once again, the “Pardy” songs of the Car­ni­val are gen­er­at­ing ex­cite­ment in the pre-Car­ni­val ac­tiv­i­ties, with the young peo­ple and their en­er­gy on dis­play. The na­tion is sure­ly build­ing to its an­nu­al re­lease from the hor­rors of the present.

Iron­i­cal­ly though, this sea­son of fete­ing; mas-play­ing; the cre­ation of mu­sic; the en­er­gy of the steel­band play­ers; mu­sic arrangers who dig deep in­side to ex­press them­selves; the cos­tume de­sign­ers; and let us be frank, the dis­play of pelvic gy­rat­ing ca­pac­i­ty, re­leas­es an en­er­gy and cre­ativ­i­ty for which the na­tion has be­come both fa­mous and in­fa­mous.

It’s a pe­ri­od of the sa­cred and the pro­fane. For those who think in strong lan­guage, “it’s an abom­i­na­tion of wom­an­hood,” as the dis­tin­guished Mol­ly Ahye, the Or­isha Priest­ess, dancer-chore­o­g­ra­ph­er, put in­to his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al per­spec­tive those as­pects of the cul­ture which we ar­gue about every year.

“In an­tiq­ui­ty he (Bac­chus, the Ro­man God of wine, fer­til­i­ty and fes­tiv­i­ty) freed the women wher­ev­er he went, to at least as­sert them­selves at that time of the year and so are able to for­get their woes and their prob­lems dur­ing that pe­ri­od of time and they come out there and they cel­e­brate their fe­male­ness,” Dr Ahye was quot­ed by jour­nal­ist Deb­o­rah John as say­ing.

What­ev­er our in­di­vid­ual po­si­tions on such mat­ters, what has been at­test­ed to through re­search is that Car­ni­val cel­e­bra­tions—as de­pict­ed in steel­band, ca­lyp­so and so­ca mu­sic and the col­lege fetes, which make mil­lions for those leg­endary learn­ing in­sti­tu­tions, from which have emerged over the decades many of the best and most dis­ci­plined pro­fes­sion­al tal­ents of Trinidad and To­ba­go - have be­come a prof­itable in­dus­try.

Those who make that point al­so grieve the fact that we put those tal­ents on ice un­til prepa­ra­tion starts for the next Car­ni­val sea­son. What a pity! The trick is to find the sources of the cre­ative en­er­gy and put them to work for us.

As part of that ef­fort must be the abil­i­ty of all in the so­ci­ety—gov­ern­ment, peo­ple, pri­vate en­tre­pre­neur­ship, the cul­ture in­dus­try, the man pick­ing up bot­tles on Mon­day and Tues­day - to ef­fec­tive­ly utilise and ex­pand the $600 mil­lion, a fig­ure giv­en re­cent­ly by the Min­is­ter of Cul­ture Ran­dall Mitchell, gen­er­at­ed by Car­ni­val ac­tiv­i­ties.

To do so will take the fes­ti­val in­to the realm of a big gen­er­a­tor of eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty that the whole na­tion can ben­e­fit from, even the ac­tiv­i­ties of those who take long trips to the beach­es away from what they con­ceive of as the un­god­ly; as in­deed, in so do­ing they al­so cre­ate jobs and utilise re­sources to sus­tain the thou­sands of cit­i­zens who live in those vil­lages near our shore­lines.

What is cer­tain is that all in the na­tion, at in­sti­tu­tion­al, com­mer­cial, man­u­fac­tur­ing in­dus­try lev­els and on a per­son­al ba­sis, whether or not they sub­scribe to the Car­ni­val eth­ic of rev­el­ry and the works of the flesh, even­tu­al­ly ben­e­fit from Car­ni­val and its imps.