fabricflowers

It's only October, but the newspapers have been full of band launchings for Carnival 2013. So maybe this is a good time to look at a new book on the history of Carnival in Trinidad. It's by Irwin Ottley and has the intriguing title Battle Dress and Fancy Dress An Inquiry into the Origins of the Customs and Traditions of the T&T Carnival.

In this well researched and strikingly illustrated book, Ottley asks whether modern Carnival — that is, the Carnival which emerged between the 1830s and the 1940s/50s — really had its origins in the French traditions of pre-Lenten celebrations.

There's no doubt that French settlers did bring these traditions to Trinidad in the late 1700s. We know that elite parties and costume balls, and house to house visits by groups in fancy dress, were held here in the period before Ash Wednesday. These took place in the early 1800s and up to the time of Emancipation (1834).

But Ottley thinks that these events were probably of little interest or appeal to the enslaved Africans, the majority of the population. For them, the annual celebrations that mattered were held in the period between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day.

All over the Caribbean, this was the period when the enslaved were given a few days off work and when they were allowed to blow off steam, as it were, in noisy public celebrations, dances and costumed parades or marches. Trinidad and Tobago was no exception.