Crop Over, Foreday Morning, Grand Kadoo
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| A Grand Kadooment competitor. Click here for the song that I will most associate with Crop Over 2018. |
The first weekend of August is the culminating weekend in a summer-long festival called Crop Over. This is what I understand of it's overall history: Originally called Harvest Home, this event dates back to the height of the sugar cane era in Barbados, the 1640s. Due to the nature of sugar cane processing, harvest time was a complex, grueling and dangerous 24-hour-a-day process lasting a couple months. Celebrating the end of that season with feasting, music, dancing, and competitions became a tradition that continued in various forms until the sugar business died out as the country's primary economy, and ended during World War II. Crop Over was resurrected in 1974 and evolved into a bacchanalian carnival like those of Brazil and Trinidad, and Mardi Gras in New Orleans. It is now produced by the National Cultural Foundation.
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| Crop Over 2018 Calendar |
The first weekend of August is the culminating weekend in the six week festival and consists of four main events: Pic O De Crop Calypso Finals, Foreday Morning, Bridgetown Market, and Grand Kadooment. This essay will focus on Foreday Morning, an overnight street party on parade, involving bands of revellers (each with their own theme), DJs on a truck, rolling rum bars, port-a-john floats, lots of provocative dancing, drinking, singing and bottles of paint in many colors being strewn all over anyone and everyone. It is a total release! The Grand Kadooment, which happens two days later, is like Foreday Morning but is a bit more formal, choreographed. Instead of paint and the thrilling cover of darkness, the same bands wear the elaborate costumes (with LOTS of feathers, beads, sequins, etc.) they've been working on since the year before, and compete for the prize of top band.
Event One: CALYPSO
One of the central threads of the festival is Calypso (sometimes called Kaiso) which is a kind of music originating in Trinidad in which the performer satirizes current political and social issues, events, or people. Nick screened Calypso Dreams, a 2004 documentary about the history of the music, before we attended the Calypso Finals on Friday and I have to say it set the bar pretty high. I enjoyed the show, except for one or two pieces because of their content, but also felt that the performers had departed from the high quality, satirical roots of the Trinidad originals. The songs I heard focused less on clever topical lyrics than on the floor show quality which I thought odd because the most important scoring category was lyrics. My opinion notwithstanding it was plain as day that this competition is important; appreciation and criticism born of familiarity and a responsibility of the performers to their delivery of the social and political matters of the day. There were two women in the finals and eight men. The audience spanned all ages, but more of it was over 30 than not. |
| This year's Pic O De Crop featured a tribute to beloved Bajan Calypso singer Charles "Romeo" Smith, also known as The Love Man, who died in June. |
Event Two: Foreday Morning
As a country now dependent upon tourism for its primary economy, branding an entire summer as one long festival celebrating a break from back-breaking work is smart marketing. What vacationer isn’t looking for that? Conversely, celebrating the end of a season of back-breaking work by working hard for two months accommodating tourists (with high customer service expectations), seems not so much of a break! And yet, since the days of slavery, black people found ways to upend that exploitation and create defiant and self-affirming practices that evolved into traditions like Crop Over.Salt fish is the star ingredient of several dishes sold by Crop Over vendors--either served as fish cakes (hush puppies) or with a side of cou cou (cornmeal and okra porridge)--and has its origins as a “slave food.” Fished from northern Atlantic waters, this cod (gadus morhua) was salted, dried and shipped out by the millions of tons, initially as a fertilizer that shifted to use as a very cheap food source for the enslaved throughout the Caribbean. It had no nutritional value and so left people chronically undernourished. And yet salt fish is an inseparable part of Caribbean culture, showing up in a variety of dishes that reflect the ingenuity and adaptability of enslaved people to blend African traditions with new world conditions. Accompanying cou cou and in fish cakes, salt fish is delicious.
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| Very important float. |
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| Foreday Morning Jumpin! |
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| My very little bit of Foreday Morning revelry. (Rum Punch notwithstanding) |
The Grand Kadooment
In both historical texts and literature, the exploitation of African bodies--for labor and sex--is understood to be of the most obvious evils inflicted upon them and most insidiously interwoven into the psychology of their lives. One can only imagine the impact of living, or of raising each generation of children, within daily acts of tolerating exploitation, resisting it, even participating in it--in ways both premeditated and spontaneous, both straightforwardly in direct response to outright abuses, or strangely, as individual acts of self-reclamation from very specific, less obvious incidents.
These are the thoughts that sprang to mind as I experienced Foreday Morning. There was an intensity in the cover of darkness and I watched people, moving in and out of focus, doing more, revealing more, producing a barely hidden resistance to the status quo just a bit more as the night wore on., cloaked in party time. There was rum, music, rum, dancing, paint, rum, and jamming. Jamming?
Twerking! That’s what we call it in the states! ‘Cause that’s what we think we know. I kept asking what Bajans call the dance move that when paired with a second person becomes publicly simulated sex, and was told “jamming.” The sexual nature of the movement seems to put women’s bodies out there, yet again, for consumption. But from within the spectacle, I began to see how the once-a-year injection by women of their own bodies into this highly choreographed public performance could be experienced as a self-determined assertion of the sexual and maternal power her body does hold in society. A man dances his approach to a woman (from behind) and the woman signals permission or refusal with a simple hand or body gesture and the man proceeds accordingly. Not unlike the courting dances of birds, the male keeps trying until he finds a willing partner. A woman dances her approach to a man (pre-selection) and, well, frankly, I never saw a man refuse.
My body sustains and produces life and without me you do not exist. Without access to me, we do not continue. Without my permission, you break trust with me, with life. Without us, in trust, in collaboration, we are not.
Foreday Morning and The Grand Kadooment are the same kind of event and yet the Kadooment seemed filtered--by sunlight, kith and kin all able to bear witness. Foreday Morning may be a dress rehearsal for the main event, but it feels like the truer expression of freedom--from work, from mores, even perhaps from the historiography and psychology of our neo-colonial present.
These are the thoughts that sprang to mind as I experienced Foreday Morning. There was an intensity in the cover of darkness and I watched people, moving in and out of focus, doing more, revealing more, producing a barely hidden resistance to the status quo just a bit more as the night wore on., cloaked in party time. There was rum, music, rum, dancing, paint, rum, and jamming. Jamming?
Twerking! That’s what we call it in the states! ‘Cause that’s what we think we know. I kept asking what Bajans call the dance move that when paired with a second person becomes publicly simulated sex, and was told “jamming.” The sexual nature of the movement seems to put women’s bodies out there, yet again, for consumption. But from within the spectacle, I began to see how the once-a-year injection by women of their own bodies into this highly choreographed public performance could be experienced as a self-determined assertion of the sexual and maternal power her body does hold in society. A man dances his approach to a woman (from behind) and the woman signals permission or refusal with a simple hand or body gesture and the man proceeds accordingly. Not unlike the courting dances of birds, the male keeps trying until he finds a willing partner. A woman dances her approach to a man (pre-selection) and, well, frankly, I never saw a man refuse.
My body sustains and produces life and without me you do not exist. Without access to me, we do not continue. Without my permission, you break trust with me, with life. Without us, in trust, in collaboration, we are not.
Foreday Morning and The Grand Kadooment are the same kind of event and yet the Kadooment seemed filtered--by sunlight, kith and kin all able to bear witness. Foreday Morning may be a dress rehearsal for the main event, but it feels like the truer expression of freedom--from work, from mores, even perhaps from the historiography and psychology of our neo-colonial present.
