Carnival in Grenada!

Yes, I’m breaking chronological order, but better to be posting than not at all…so better late than never!

Carnival in Grenada, or Spicemas,  culminates in a series of festive parades and parties in early August.  Like many Caribbean carnivals, this one actually runs for quite some time with events, concerts, competitions and attractions starting weeks before the costume parades – it actually kicks off on June 1st and runs more than two months.  The final days of the festivities are a Monday and Tuesday which are national holidays and everything is closed.  Some businesses on the parade routes go so far as to board up their windows, just in case.

Some of these competitions are for the best local band (in the traditional sense of ‘music act’) in various categories such as Calypso and Soca.  Soca is the Grenadan version a hybrid of Calypso music and techno dance hip-hop styles.  Other “Bands” are not musical acts at all, but groups of dancers garbed in brightly colored costumes that compete each year for the best band.  Took us a little while to figure out the difference between a “band” and a “Band”.

Each Band comes up with a theme, and the task of the band is how best to represent theme with costumes, pageantry, and dancers.  Some of this year’s themes included “Moods and Attitudes”, “The Reef” (the Band of the Year winner), “Essence of Life” among others.  Some of the groups feature children, all of them feature skimpy outfits, feathers, sparkles and glitter.

Some of the groups have men and women, some are apparently all or mostly all women.  In some cases the grouping of the men and women is thematic, for example the for “Essence of Life” theme the “Affection” dancers were the only group where the men equaled the number of women – the point being that you need both men and women for that part of life.

There are also “Bands” that are associated with villages throughout Grenada; the didn’t seem to participate in the big Pageant Mas competition but they were colorful and in some cases themed as well. They might well be competing, as non-Grenadans at our first Carnival some of the order of events and proceedings were a bit confusing.

The major event we missed (because we slept too late and really regret it) was the J’Ouvert parade early Monday morning.  This is the Jab-Jab or “Devil Mas” band parade, and it runs early in the morning starting before dawn.  The parade participants cover themselves in oil, dark molasses and paint and don fearsome horns and chains and devilish garb.  Apparently it is a raucous and rowdy affair, and much of the paint, molasses and oil that starts on the Jab-Jab bands ends up on the crowds.  Evidence of the J’Ouvert

One of the village bands

parade was clear with splotches of paint and black smears in the streets and sidewalks.

All of these things start on Island Time.  For example a parade might be scheduled to “Start” at 1:00 p.m.  Anyone in the know isn’t going to bother to get on the parade route much before 3:30 because there’s not a thing to see.  Apparently the “Start” time is really the time for the marchers to start showing up at their meeting points and putting on their costumes.  A real Start time for the parade where we were was around 4:00.  And the parades didn’t exactly run with Macy’s Thanksgiving Day precision, they tended more towards fits and starts with long periods of stopping.  We later learned that since we were right around the corner from a judging station the stops in the parade were caused by the Bands performing for the judges.

I don’t know about J’Ouvert, but all of the rest of these parades bring their own sound.  And by sound, I mean SOUND.  Each of the larger bands has a truck which is a mobile speaker platform.  Each has big gas generator run the speaker stacks, you can not hear it.  The volume on all of these is set to eleven and then some.  In my youth I attended a Judas Priest concert and sat on the floor about eleven rows back from the band.  From what I could tell, the noise of these bands was louder.  At least it’s closer, and the inverse square law had your diaphragm rattling in time with the Soca rhythms in a way that one of the louder heavy metal bands in the world could not achieve.  Fortunately we were prepared from attending the Carnivale in St. Martin and brought cotton to stuff in our ears so we were tinnitus free at the end of each day.

Monday starts with J’Ouvert, then proceeds to Pageant Mas – the parade of bands and elaborate costumes.  Monday Night is…Monday Night Mas.  We weren’t sure what this was and thought it was the Parade of Bands (which is actually Tuesday).  This wasn’t supposed to start until eat least 8:30 at night and run from Grand Anse to St. George’s until late in the evening.  When we started hearing on the boat (about half a mile off shore…) we could see thousands of flickering, sparkling lights weaving their way ashore.  We decided that in spite of all being tired we wanted to at least see what it was about.

A music truck approaches in the distance at Monday Night Mas

It turns out it was basically a long, crowded slow moving street dance.  People were almost all wearing things that flashed, glowed or blinked.  And there were LOTS of people, this was the most crowded Carnival event we attended.

Stretched along the parade routes were several of the music trucks, blasting Soca music at skull crushing volumes.  There were DJ’s on the trucks, and some had Soca stars that gave live performances.  Food and rum vendors lined the parade route.  Each music truck was preceded by a small cluster of dancers, and followed by a large swarm of sparkling, dancing revelers.  This was a street ‘Jump Up’ – a party and a revel and it did go into the late hours.  Apparently each of the trucks was also a “band” of some sort though, and there was a judging competition for these as well though we were all a but bedeviled as to what the criteria could be since they seemed to frequently be playing the same music and had no discernible difference between them outside of the DJ patter and which live singers they had on board.

After a while we’d had enough; none of us has developed an affinity for the local music yet and there weren’t any real costumes or pageantry to this affair so we slipped back to the boat by midnight.  Early, by carnival standards.

Tuesday morning the island felt…quiet.  Many of the carnival revelers had been going full steam from the night before J’Ouvert until the end of Monday Night Mas with only a few rests in between.  Everyone needed their beauty sleep before the final events.

The final event was the Parade of the Bands.  After what we learned we realized that this would likely feature most of the same groups we saw during Pageant Mas the day before, but we headed in anyway just to be sure we weren’t missing anything new.  If nothing else I wasn’t too happy with my elevated location for taking pictures on Monday (and Fedex & Coke could send me some product placement money…) and I figured some street level shots would come out better.  It did turn out to be the same bands, but we walked to the judging platform, and there we learned a lot more about what the bands themes meant and how they were expressed.  And the pictures were better from the street.