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The Year People Needed Carnival the Most, It Was Canceled
Loyal enthusiasts on what they missed in a year they needed Carnival the most.
Booming music. Glittering costumes. And perhaps even more important: the feeling of being free.
After a year of racial reckonings, the celebration of Carnival which provides a much-needed release for many revelers from London to New York to Toronto and beyond was canceled.
“The loss of Carnival goes beyond costumes, music, liming [socializing] and physical contact,” said Ingrid Persaud, a Trinidad and Tobago-born writer who lives in Britain.
Would-be Carnival attendees said they missed the exuberance, the roti and pepper pot, singing along with others on the road and the very act of gathering.
Design by Ingrid Frahm
Carnival, Crop Over and the West Indian Day Parades of the Caribbean Diaspora have always been sites of release and exuberance. This year, with so many celebrations cancelled or delayed and so many unable to travel and join in, Caribbean and Caribbean American writers reflect on the many meanings and experiences of Carnival.
My first February in America was endured. It seemed unnecessarily spiteful that the coldest month in New York coincided with Carnival season back in Trinidad. My gut-wrenching homesickness mocked by deceptively bright freezing days, banks of hardened black snow, and foreign leafless trees. How could this same planet also house a warm emerald island in the Caribbean Sea that was in the lead-up to the most frenzied party in the world? I was miserable.
Design by Ingrid Frahm
Carnival, Crop Over and the West Indian Day Parades of the Caribbean Diaspora have always been sites of release and exuberance. This year, with so many celebrations cancelled or delayed and so many unable to travel and join in, Caribbean and Caribbean American writers reflect on the many meanings and experiences of Carnival.
I almost forgot that I turn 40 in December. But then, my friends started posting on the Internet about their own big birthdays, and pretty soon, I realized that I wouldn’t get out of this year alive without making a plan to celebrate, or at least without commencing a midlife crisis, or both. The midlife crisis is still up for debate, but it seems pretty clear now that my plans to celebrate my 40th at 2021 Crop Over in Barbados are a wrap. Beyond my own personal disappointment, there is also a collective lament something fundamental has been lost in the erasures of these opportunities to express our cultural heritage, and, more generall
Design by Ingrid Frahm
Carnival, Crop Over and the West Indian Day Parades of the Caribbean Diaspora have always been sites of release and exuberance. This year, with so many celebrations cancelled or delayed and so many unable to travel and join in, Caribbean and Caribbean American writers reflect on the many meanings and experiences of Carnival.
“You moving to VI North!” This is what my uncle said to me when I announced that I was moving to Atlanta. It’s what everyone was saying to me.
“Eat at St. Thomas Bakery in Stone Mountain.”
“I’ll be there for a wedding in Buckhead.”