Female woman

March 03, 2004

There is this opening couplet in an Aldwyn Roberts's calypso, a thesis statement if you wish, that goes like this: "Dis amount ah female woman whey borning here every day, it go have ah bacchanal, yuh hear what I say."

I have often wondered about Kitchener's choice of terminology in these opening lines of "Twenty To One." Why "female woman?"

The man, we all know, never, never, utilised lines of varying lengths, his lines were always exact and his metre always pure perfection. But the use of, say, "female children" would not have altered anything. Why did he insist on the bizarre conception of "female woman?"

If he insisted on that then there had to be a purpose. There was popular view then that the female/male ratio in T&T had gone awry: 20 to one. The census did not provide figures to support this, but it was the popular perception.

Kitchener's expressed satirical concern was that if in fact this was so then men were at risk, since the feminine desires of women could not be satiated and women go "wrench we hand."

The women who were never, ever, overwhelmed by their natural desires, who maintained control at all times, did not present a problem, but women, the "female women," or women in general at certain moments, might.

Or Kitchener may have been making a simple distinction between what he then considered to be normal and what was abnormal.

"Female woman" may have been his view of a normal woman as opposed to women who were not by nature so predisposed. And, of course, Eric Williams had to be blamed. For what? The answer matters not.

Looking at the big Carnival bands, one could not help but recall those lines of the famed Grandmaster. They already done "wrench we hand."

Carnival has moved on from the sacredness of artistic portrayal to the wanton display of flesh and there is no art outside of the basic female form. The catalyst for that transformation of the Carnival was commercialisation.

What art could there be in the minds of, say, the organisers of the band Poison? They have the mechanism to put 15,000 people on the road at an average cost a costume of $1,600, which grosses for them $24,000,000.

If each costume cost them around $900, the 18 music trucks cost an average of $30,000, and we add the cost of the wee-wee truck, administrative costs and incidentals, we are certain that the organisers would have made somewhere in the vicinity of $8-10 million before tax for the year's work. Not a bad proposition at all.

What could you tell such people about the purity and sacredness of the Carnival arts?

In the course of all this the "female woman" with her hour-glass figure is exploited to the hilt, she is the one who makes the commercialisation all the more possible.

She spends her hard-earned money in exchange for the self-gratification and the short-lived, mental, stress-relieving pleasures of crossing the big stage.

Such heavily centralised commercialisation was not possible when by far the majority of mas players were men.

Men took pictures from the mas camp and made their costumes at home. Every drawing-room became a small camp, and the joy was creating something literally out of nothing.

In most cases added research was done on the subject matter, resulting in embellishment of what the organisers originally presented. The competition "to come good" was not limited to band versus band, but extended to section versus section and even between individuals within a section.

Most bandleaders would be pleasantly surprised and astonished at the eventual outcome on the day.

That Carnival which we once knew is gone forever. It will never return.

The Carnival of today is certainly not for prudes nor those amongst us who continue to live by the mores of Victorian morality.

Nakedness sells. That is the bottom-line, and for a long time again we will be bombarded with panties and beads.

This year we saw the introduction of painted breasts instead of bras, and for sure there will be an explosion of this in 2005 as the younger women compete to establish who amongst them can be the more daring.

Probably the only way to stop the trend would be for a band of "male men" to come into Port-of-Spain, naked, with "painted-penises."

Want to bet then that all and sundry will run and bawl. Maybe then we will come to comprehend the subtle message of Minshall's "Sacred and Profane."