by Joe Fortin
Every Thursday there is something going on in San Nicolas, Aruba. Maybe for some
it is a celebration of life, while for others it refers to a feast of forgetting
sorrow. But what is this Carubbian Festival really?
First some facts. During this celebration there are several
entertainment shows, music bands and local people selling food, snacks and
cakes. This party is an invention in order to give this ‘ghost town’ an
economic boost, because since the closure of the oil refinery there is almost
no commercial activity in this town also known by the local population as Chocolate
City. How different it was between the 1950’s-1980’s. San Nicolas was a real
cosmopolitan city with different shops, bars and dancing halls. Because of its multi-ethnic
population, San Nicolas was a real creole Caribbean town where you could hear
different languages from all over the world and taste a variety of foods and
drinks that the English West Indians brought with them. Nowadays the main
street is almost desolated. However, you can still find some shops and bars and
taste the wealth of an opulence past. During the daytime you can find groups of
local men sitting and chatting in front of The White Star bar and some
‘chollers’ (addicts) looking for a car to wash for money; at night the
prostitutes take over the street, while looking bored and void at possible
clients.
Tourists can buy tickets to assist the Carubbian Festival. This
includes transport in air-conditioned luxury busses, seats during the shows and
masks so that they can participate in the festivities. When they arrive at the
festival plaza, near the barbed wired fences of the abandoned refinery, which
during the day, is a desolated parking lot, they are guided to their seats enclosed
in a barricaded terrain. On the plaza there is a podium with musical
instruments, a lot of movement, and people going up and running down from the
stage. This is only a prelude that foretells that something is going to happen
soon. On the main street, near the parking lot, local people are gathering in
small groups, chitchatting and laughing feverishly. They are well dressed and
perfumed and ready for the evening. Small merchants and people with local
stores ‘shap’ are installing their food and their handicraft on small tables. Stiltwalkers
from The Party Animals are
entertaining people, while greeting and waving to their acquaintances and
making publicity for the popcorn machine.
Meanwhile, the show-master is announcing the local stars that are
going to entertain the crowd. There is a variety of steel drums, traditional
Aruban music and dance, like the well-known ‘ribbon dance’ (baile di cinta) on
Caribbean mazurka or polka. There is a limbo dancer that brings us back in time
with his hypnotizing dance of fire and several other typical Carubbian
entertainments.
After these performances, some tourists are invited on stage in order to
participate in a dance competition. At this point the locals are gathering and
getting closer to the stage. On stage a local couple gives a demonstration on how
to dance merengue, salsa, caiso or calypso, and afterwards, it is the turn of
the visitors to try to make the same movements with their hips and shoulders. The
show-master gives them instructions on how to move the hips and incidentally advises
them on how to improve their amorous life. However, their movements are always too
late or too soon. The witty, sharp and hilarious remarks of the show-master are
cruel but never offensive. We can consider this festival as a mise en abyme, an infinite reproduction
of an image. The visitors who paid money to watch a show, become part of the
show. Some of them become performers on stage, while the rest, sitting and
watching the show, are part of the festival as well. They are sitting on the
plaza and are being watched by local people. Between the local people, you can
find other tourists, looking at the locals, gazing at the tourists, watching
the show.
Now it is the turn of all the invitees to participate in the local
tradition of self-exposure in a street parade. The tourists get off their seats
while walking in groups in the direction of the brass-band music coming from
the main street. The locals, on the other side, are forming lines on the
sidewalks to watch the upcoming parade. As the brass band is getting closer you
can see a group of locals dressed in carnival costumes dancing to the rhythm of
Caribbean sounds. Behind this group, you can see the tourists, some of them
dancing, others trying in vain to swing, but most of them just walking like they
have been zombified. Some of them wear their masks, which were included in the
evening package; others are holding it in their hands, somewhat clumsy and
waving to the gazing public, which now are the locals.
Sitting in their air-conditioned busses, satisfied and exhausted and
somewhat surprised by an evening outside their confident and comfortable hotels
and restaurants, the visitors are ready to return to their luxurious life. However,
this is not the end of the fete… Now the locals are taking over the plaza,
while the bands keep playing their music; people are dancing, children playing
and scabbed mongrels sniffing and looking for some leftovers. Will the tourist
ever know that when they left, the feast just started for the locals?
Now the meta-text. Interesting about this Carubbian bash is that it
inverts the traditional standards and values. Generally it is the tourist that
gazes at the local, ‘exotising’ him. The local becomes an object of fetish for
the visitor, because he is strange, ‘other’, has another modus in quotidian
life. As a passenger you can feel free to observe the other at ease. But now,
at the Carubbian Festival, the tourist is the exotic one and he is being fetishized
as the other. The local is free to look shameless at the tourist and laugh at
him. At the same time, the local forms a mirror for the tourist, so he can look
at his own image. Just like in the mirror-stage of Lacan, first he does not
recognize himself. He thinks that his reflection is another person, the other.
But then, he recognizes himself in the reflection and becomes aware that he is the other. But this reflection is
fragmented, so it creates a partial double of himself. The tourist becomes the
local: their separated life now comes very close to each other.
The Carubbian Festival creates another reality, an illusion, and a
simulacrum of the Aruban reality. According to Baudrillard, simulacrum is a
construction of a world that seems like ours but in reality doesn’t exist. Simulacra are
copies that depict things that either had no reality to begin with, or that no
longer have an original.
This bash is a simulacrum because it is a creation of a reality that at first
did not exist. The shows and carnival parade are being organized firstly to
give the ‘ghost town’ San Nicolas a boost (commercial invention) and secondly
to give the tourist alternative entertainment (festivity invention). On the
other side, this festival is also a simulation: it looks like something known,
but it isn’t. It is a simulation of the carnival parade in February, but now in
another setting as an invention for every Tuesday evening. It depicts real life
during a weekly celebration. It is an intertextual reference to the ‘real’ carnival
celebration, because it creates an allusion that seems like carnival, but in a
totally different frame. On the other side, we can say that this festival is
also metafiction, because it refers to itself as a fictional construction that
is aware of its functionality. The audience (local and tourist), the show-master,
the participants and the musicians all know that they are part of a constructed
illusion.
Besides, we can say that the festival is an inversion of the reality.
According to Bakhtin ‘[i]n carnival, laughter and excess push aside the
seriousness and the hierarchies of "official" life. […] In Bakhtin's
work, the image of reversal symbolizes his intellectual ideal of rethinking:
finding multiple levels of meaning in words, images, and tone.’
But the Carubbian Festival is an inversion of an inversion, a double-inversion.
Now the local is playing the tourist who is looking at the tourist masqueraded (literally
and figuratively) as the local. In this
setting, even the prostitutes and the chollers can be seen as part of the show;
they are no longer considered as aberrant as they contribute to the inversion
of the inversion of the reality.
The Carubbian Festival is a neo-baroque construction: it is an artificial
reality and everybody is aware of this counterfeit. But on the other hand it is
a space where you can be yourself by acting like the ‘other.’ The festival is a
fiction that proposes a hyper reality: a reality that is even more real than
daily life.
References:
Bakhtin, Mikhail.Rabelais and his World. Cambridge Massachusets: The
M.I.T. Press, 1968.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and
Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and otherness. A Philosophical reading of Lacan. Cambridge/ London: The Mitt Press, 2007.
Sarduy, Severo. Barroco. Buenos Aires: Editorial
Sudamerica, 1974.
---. “Copy/Simulacrum”. In: Written on a Body. Lumen Books, New
York, 1989.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of
Self-conscious Fiction. Methuen, 1984.
Živković, Milica. “The Double as the ‘Unseen’ of culture: toward a
definition of doppelganger.”
Facta Universitaties (121-128). Vol. 2– No
7, 2000.
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