3/5/2003.
The 'lil house, liming with Alesia, Peter and 3Canal
Woodbrook , Trinidad and Tobago.

Their dutty mas’ is about a concept, a feeling, an artform that’s neither controlled nor contrived. They walk in their paint, horns around their necks, greeting supporters and setting things up. The Laventille riddem section begins to play, bodies drenched in paint start to move. 3 Canal is on the truck, mic in hands, it’s 4 am, it’s j’ouvert (jouvay). You hear Militant start to sing “You make my passion”, it’s rum on the rocks, rum and coke, hot rum, white rum, dark rum, stranger’s rum, you’re chipping, you’re wining on the ground, you’re painting lookers on. The sun is rising, it has risen, it’s 10 am, you see your Hungarian lawyer sitting on the truck, a midget is on the mic, you’re still chipping, you’re jumping, you’re singing with the band “Talk yuh talk, you bloody deceiver..you bloody oppressor.” As Wendell says, “j’ouvert is political. You can’t do jouvay.com and not get involved.”

Jouvay.com: So when did you guys start?

Wendell Manwarren: 1994. Well, 10 years ago we presented our first jouvay band. And seven years ago we recorded our first song and made our first video.

J: Where did you guys meet? How did it all start?

W: Right here at the ‘lil house.

Roger Roberts: This was sort of the melting pot where all of the ideas would distill and literally cook-up, in the kitchen actually.

W: Those days we were very, very involved in Minshall’s Callaloo company. So this was like a stopping point for most people who were involved in the Calalloo company. John Isaacs was around and Steve Ouditt lived just up the street (Steve Ouditt, Roger Roberts and Wendell Manwarren founded 3Canal. Roberts, Manwarren, Stanton Kewley and John Isaacs started the Rapso group in 1997). Everyday we’d eat and have coffee and read the papers and talk about political issues and what not and about our work as artists. And we decided to get involved with the jouvay because we thought it was the one arena where we could make a statement through performance and in a visual way.

J: Was that Blue?

W: Nah that was before Blue, with something called Jocks-Tuh-Pose.

W: That was the idea at the time. We were never selling a costume, just a concept. The concept was just getting right back to the elemental vibe of what jouvay was which was to take off your regular civilian clothes and put some kind of pigment on your skin and just connect to that vibe. It was encouraging people to just get back to that natural state as much as possible.

J: You guys tried that outside of Trinidad?

R: Yeah, London, Jamaica, New York.

J: You did Jamaica for carnival? A Jouvay?

W: Blue, the year blue as a matter of fact. It was interesting. Except it was funny when you going down the road all covered in blue and you look around and you see people stopping for gas going about their business as normal because it was just a couple blocks of the city involved in it. That’s the big difference between Trinidad and anywhere else when it comes to carnival. We invest a lot of energy in Trinidad carnival. So to attempt to do it outside of Trinidad sometimes it’s a bit of hard work, but once you get into it you get into it.

J: It’s growing and marketing the whole culture.

W: Beyond marketing for me, it’s incredible when I see Labour Day and Nottinghill and I see millions of people on the street from a festival that started here. Without any kind of official plan a few expatriates, wherever they settled, were able to spread this vibe. So obviously something is going on there. We just recognize that we are part of something much bigger, much deeper and something much more fundamental.

J: It’s amazing because there’s so much culture here that you don’t get to see.

W: There are many aspects to the carnival. I was involved in mas’ since I was a teenager so I never developed a party or fete habit. Where some people they fete and they fete hard. So you choose a field and you follow that. The carnival is a very unwieldy beast and you can’t really cover all aspects of it. That’s why it was hard for us coming into the jouvay and making a song and then realized we had to choose at some point about where to invest our energy. To bring a mas’ and service a hit song are two huge, incredible demands.

R: There was a time when we were also making Minshall’s band happen. Not much energy left for anything.

J: What did you do with Minshall?

W & R: Everything. Roger was production manager. I was creative director, worked on the special sections, associate artistic director.

W: We were involved with him since we were teenagers and that is a long time now. Literally walked in off the street because there was a sign that said help wanted and that was a Saturday and we did not leave till late Sunday when the costume was done. They say mas’ is a jumbie. It just gets inside your blood. It don’t make sense. I remember working at the bank in those days and falling asleep on the job and you send me home and I would go the mas’ camp and be revived until the next morning and go back to the bank and fall asleep.

J: That’s how I feel now. I am all energy with jouvay.com, put me in front of a class and I am terrible.

W: It’s where your passion is. Passion will always feed you if you follow it. The mas’ was our form of our pursuit for a long time and the music came out of that. We are not soca artistes like Machel and those guys. We are much more versatile and varied and we engage the carnival from a different perspective which is a jouvay.

Alesia Ferguson: Did you see the guy with the helmet and the tree and the phone and everybody had to take a talk on the phone?

R: Yes, he took my googles. He said “I need this, I need this. This is part of the ensemble.” Part of the power is disguising yourself so nobody knows who you are. It’s about hiding your identity and becoming something else.

A: I heard she was on the floor, her head was on the ground wining.

J: I met some wild guys.

W: It’s amazing the kinds of connections you make in that space. You’ll probably never see them again until next jouvay.

Peter Balogh: I don’t think you can capture jouvay.

W: You never can.

P: Talking about it seems almost lowly.

W: That’s because you’ve had the experience. Don’t preempt it for those who haven’t because at the end of the day, it is an experience. It’s not a philosophy or a theory.

P: It’s almost a collective means of enabling personal transformation.

W: Write that down. It’s a ritual that depends on the energy of the participants to take it to a level where everybody is transformed and has another experience because everybody grants themselves that right to cross that line. It is a very ancient ritual that we still embrace today. It’s about the inversion of reality. We take off our clothes and smear ourselves. For the rest of the year you are not going to take off your clothes and put nastiness on your body and walk down the road and wine on your head and jump with strange men. It requires taking a certain amount of risk. There is that dark, scary element to it. It is a literal journey from darkness into light.

P: I think that also involves loss of ego in some ways.

W: It’s bigger than yourself, allowing yourself to indulge in the flesh. To be nasty.

R: Yeah, the nastier you get it is the more real experience you have, the better experiences.

W: I’ve always invested alot of energy in the jouvay and of course bringing it is different from just being a participant, but there was one year in particular when I just let go and had no recollection of what was and had to hear afterwards what I said and what I did and where I was found. Sometimes you just have to let yourself go there even if it is to wonder what you said and did. Then people come and thank you. The most humbling part is that people are so grateful for creating that space for them to have this experience. And though we start out by saying that this is the last jouvay band there is a part of you that says, what you going to do boy when next year come around. Like you are a servant.

J: It’s so funny, we were at this party and a popular designer asked who we were jumping with for jouvay and we said 3Canal. He was like, “No, you should go with Mudders. We’re in Maraval.”

W: Well, you see one of the reasons we brought a jouvay band was a response to that, the gentrification and prettyfication of it. The attempt to sort of cut de balls off of it. It is a ritual of the street and of the people. It is a low down nasty thing.

R: Any attempt to make it pretty is no longer jouvay. You’re trying to bring Tuesday mas’ into jouvay which is what was happening at the time. We were just trying to bring it back to what it is about. It’s about people just expressing themselves as nastily as they can. If everything were to be beautiful and pretty then there’s no perspective by which to look at it. It is important that jouvay remains primal and rooted.

W: We try our best to maintain that. By the same token we make music and we use the sound system. Even with using the sound system, you also recognize that the sound for jouvay is different from the sound for a fete or soca monarch or whatever. So we took pains to try and craft a kind of sound and rhythm for the street that will reinforce that experience and this year I was very pleased with what the DJs were able to do to create that vibe.

J: I think that the music this year was nice and slow though.

W: It was in a groove. But if the DJs are on their ego and just like their name as a sound boy and not taking cognizance of the space that you are in you, they will fuck it up.

P: When you started the whole Andre Tanker groove last night, that brought it real and the energy started to take off.

R: Sayamanda. (read Andre Tanker tribute by Keith Smith of Trinidad Express)

J: You don’t act anymore? I told you that I saw you in Boston.

P: He teaches acting.

R: You were in Boston too for Joker of Seville? You saw that? (summer of 1994 at the Huntington Theater)

J: I went to both shows, Joker of Seville and Dream on Monkey Mountain (by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott).

W: After that I did Ti Jean And His Brothers and I haven’t acted since. That was a couple years ago. For me it’s just another transition. I enjoy what I do in terms of performance now as part of 3Canal and making the videos. I really enjoy working with the younger ones and helping to direct and helping them to develop their skills as performers.

J: That’s so cool.

W: Alot of what we do has a kind of homegrown energy and vibe about it, but with a level of slickness because we have learnt alot over the years especially working with Minshall, working with Walcott, working with people on that level about production values and about the level of finish and a level of integrity and that’s something that we try to interject in all that we do. Especially from the thought process, from the concept because I think everything starts from the intent. That’s where we started from with the jouvay. I think it is very very important when you are dealing with a tradition to appreciate the depths of that tradition. Even if you don’t know all of it you have to be very humble about it and open yourself to what has come before you. Fortunately for me I had a father who regaled me with stories of carnival and was very involved in carnival. That respect for it was inherently there and everybody that was a part of the group had some kind of a depth of experience with carnival. It would just tapping on that and bringing it to the fore. Is a serious thing.

J: You have to educate us.

W: Indeed. It’s part of the mission. It ain’t no foo foo thing. We flowed along some good streams and picked up and learnt from a lot of very crucial people. That’s how we learn here because we don’t have no academy of the mas’ or academy of the music. You just learn from doing, like Andre Tanker. We were involved with Andre Tanker long before we even dreamed to write or make a song. From doing musical theater and singing his material and he playing live and he coaching you as a youth. So when it came time to record a song together it was a natural fit. One of the things that I am proud of is we have introduced alot of people to the depths of the jouvay thing. Alot of young people have said that the first time they appreciated anything more about what the jouvay might have been was through contact with us.

J: And the rapso too.

W: Yeah, certainly with fellas like Brother Resistance we had good good examples to follow. Resistance is a true hero. He is a walking hero. He’s one of the humblest men. You could pass him straight and overlook him. He’s an awesome, powerful man who has represented not just the sound, but the philosophy of rapso almost single handedly for the longest time. He was also big enough to embrace all of the youngsters to the form and not say it has to sound like this or that. Give respect where respect is due. So many of the people who are doing genuine work; they are unsung, they are not celebrated, they are not hype. That’s one of the contentions that we have in this present form now where so much hype is celebrated over substance, where so much folly is promoted over intelligence. Where so many people who run things are quite content to dumb dumb the whole thing so that they benefit and the whole form suffers. So that is why we think we have a mission. And for right or wrong, part of that mission, as Stanton always says, “Is to educate and to entertain.”

J: And the Trinity? Totally not rapso. Lovely album.

W: No, it is. Just another dimension. Trinidad music is focused on for a period of the year, which is the festival period and the themes explored in the festival are very limited themes; they generally about freeing up, wining up, who you want to jam or something like that. One of the things we recognize is that as a people we have to allow ourselves much more breath and depth of expression. What about that aspect of us that is more contemplative or introspective or feeling to celebrate just being alive or in love or whatever?

R: No, I think that we do feel it as a people. Part of the problem is the particular program that is being run by the radio station which dictates what people hear. We played the Trinity album one day at the camp and one of the girls said, “That’s all yuh? I never heard this song on the radio.” She was remarking how much she liked the music, but she never heard it. In a sense, there is that breath of expression, but it’s not being allowed space to breathe.

W: We do jouvay and we very strong about that. Jouvay is jouvay, but beyond jouvay you think is every minute of the day I want to turn the world upside down? There is so much more to who we are than just jouvay day and a wine wine wine. So the Trinity was an attempt to touch on some of those issues.

A: What was the Trinity about?

R: Peace, Love and Possibility. Emergency which talks about the time that live in in the world, and it seems as if everything is on the edge.

W: Where is the love. I look around the world and it’s really hard to love sometimes. What a feeling I am feeling tonight. Just get up smoke some hard weed and have a good time. Actually when you came in that video that was showing was the Electronic Press Kit (EPK) for the Trinity album which was done for Europe by East West.

J: So, how did you all like San Francisco?

W: San Francisco was wonderful. San Francisco was one of the places I really really felt I could spend some time. It had that kind of European feel. It did not feel as though you were in this mega city.

R: It’s humane.

J: How did the Reggae on River happen?

W: Through the tenacity and pushing of Annemarie Stephens. We have to give her credit for that. It was not something that came up overnight it was something that had been discussed time and again. Machel had been and came back and confirmed what a good experience it was, Resistance had been and came back and confirmed. So we were just kind of biding our time. Our time came around and it was a good experience.

J: Back to the theater. What kind of stuff do you do here?

W: I work with a group called Liliput theater. They celebrated their 20th anniversary a couple years ago. It’s one of those groups that alot of young people who are now active theater participants have passed through at some stage in their life. I got involved through John Isaacs, one of the original members of 3Canal who has since passed on. It’s once a week and it follows the school calendar so every Saturday we meet and initially the first term is just prepping, working with all the new members. The second term takes you into the Christmas carnival period where they start exploring the whole concept of carnival and preparing a mas’. Out of that mas’ experience we create a production that they mount in May/June and so it goes.

J: Is there a lot of government support for theater?

W: Not at all. We have no concept of grants and funding and that sort of thing in these parts. If you are interested in doing any kind of theatrical production you go out there and beg for a ‘lil donation. Nobody sees it as a viable enterprise per say, to invest in.

R: Very little corporate support. They will always give with strings attached. They don’t realize that just being involved in making something happen that will involve young people and putting them on the right part or at least direct their creative energies..that that in itself is alot that they get out of it. To put something back into the community from where they make all of their profits. They don’t see it that way.

J: How about for the carnival itself? For jouvay?

W: Well, the government puts money into the festival through the organizing bodies. It’s a clearly well established fact that the amount of money that’s put in is never even near enough. It certainly is not comparable to the amount of money generated from the festival. I think every year we have a situation where there are a bunch of mas’ men and pan men quibbling over pennies at the end of the day when you consider that a steelpan has 100 –120 players who drill day and night for weeks on end to play a song that at the end of the day they each end up with $200 TT in their pocket.

A: Did you hear that it was one of the best years? The hotels and everywhere booked out.

P: This year? Really? It seemed almost a low turn out.

J: It was the head of the Hilton who said his hotel had sold out of the high end rooms for 8 days straight.

W: It was a low turn out for all of the people who could not travel from Mova and Laventille to come into town. Which is another phenomena of this contemporary carnival where it’s being appropriated more and more by one sector of the community and another sector is being marginalized more and more from it or responding to it in a completely dysfunctional way. That’s where you get back to that serious aspect of what the carnival shows you about who you are. It is the phenomena of the all inclusive which now extends to the street.

P: All inclusive, secluded, safe.

R: It’s all exclusive really.

W: Juxtaposed (jocks-tuh-pose-d) with the fact that the musicians are playing for the downtown masses in the fetes but when it comes to the streets I am not allowed to cross that line because I have not paid the couple thousand dollars for the privilege.

A: I was thinking that too that many can’t afford to pay for the costumes and then they have the police on the horses whipping the spectators back and it ended stepping on Maya’s toe.

R: Dem horses have been there for years.

W: That’s because of the whole heightened sense of security this year. Maybe he was just over reacting. Understand as well that carnival is about anarchy.

R: Carnival is rebellion.

P: Control and non control. Safety and non safety.

W: The police in the past have done exceptionally well. They have a very stand offish attitude.

P: This year I particularly appreciated the extra police presence. This jouvay and this carnival was not as down and crazy, but at the same time I think I felt safer.

W: That’s you, but I am going to say something right now that might sound downright rude, but at the end of the day when the people that live here have to be blocked off from the streets so that people like you can feel safer, something is wrong.

P: You’re right. On the other hand I would say what are you doing with your cutlass?

W: He’s doing with his cutlass, he is playing his mas’. It’s a distorted mas’. He is playing the mas’ of the dispossessed or the voiceless. He uses his opportunity to get his comeuppance. With all due respects the carnival is not staged by us for anybody else but us.

A: Carnival is about money for Trinidad.

R: Well, no.

W: That is for some people. This is where we will engage in the fight to the death for the spirit and soul of the thing. It’s bigger than everybody. Poison, NCC, NCBA, 3CANAL, the carnival is and always will be bigger. The carnival is always about what is happening at the time. That’s why we say people need to look at the carnival and if you like what you see from it or don’t like what you see from it then you can draw certain conclusions about the state of space you are in and by extension the state of the world. It’s a ritual, but there are no rules written down anywhere that it has to be this way or that way.

P: That’s what it is. It’s a recipe for individual transformation and societal connection in the same dynamic.

J: It’s still kind of odd that you have this societal connection for a few hours and the next day there’s a total disconnect with the people you just jumped with.

W: That’s why we created the whole jocks-tuh pose from the very beginning. The whole concept of juxtapsotion is like ideas that don’t necessarily marry, but they do because they exist side by side. They don’t necessarily make sense on the surface, but you can’t deny it because it is what it is.

R: For those two days everybody is on a heightened expression of who we are as a people for the whole time. That energy is just concentrated in those two days in terms of portrayals, in terms of music, in terms of all of the contests and competitions and it all comes through in those two days very heightened. There’s an incredible amount of exchange of human energy, sensually in terms of unspoken dialogue. There are lots of transactions that take place between people. And then after Ash Wednesday it ends. It’s not that the reality ends it’s just a whole other way we express it for the rest of the year. At that point in time we find a different way of dealing with each other.

A: The group that you guys play mas’ with. Minshall? How much does it cost?

R: 800 or 900 TT. That’s about half of what the average costume costs and the costume has about twice the amount of material and effort gone into the mas’.

J: Our costume was about $1600 TT.

A: Can you do something to get more people involved in the band?

P: 3Canal is 100 TT and they are the guerilla mas’.

W: This is where I think the government is failing. The government ought not to be organizing competitions and things like that. The government should be facilitating the development of artists and bands. So if I come from a particular community and I want to make a statement and want to bring a ‘mas I should be able to tap into an agency and get a certain amount of funding to facilitate that. Right now it’s big businesss, it’s mega business. We’re talking millions and millions of dollars. Check out the economies, the bikinis that cost a couple US dollars and you turn around and sell it for 20 times. Then you have a heap of sponsors come in and sponsor your bar and what not because it’s no big issue for you to put their name all over the thing because you’re not making any artistic statement. You’re not using the time to make any kind of a statement which is what it’s about because it’s a space where I could get up and make any statement. I could make a statement about the impending war in the world, I could make a statement about my wife who horning me. I could make a statement about my dog who likes to shit on the front step everyday. You could make a statement on whatever level you want to make a statement, but when you present Fleurs de Passion and most people can only tell you what the color of the section is….

R: I ask somebody yesterday what section they played in and they said red. Come on man you playing mas’ and playing a mas’ is about a portrayal of something.

P: A portrayal of what Roger? I thought it was about 500 wines a minute.

R: At the end of the day when Mr. Headley walks to the bank. 10,000 people in a band and the average price is $1500 TT, you work that out.

W: These guys don’t have to buss they brain to figure out what the theme is or how it will be interpreted next year. It’s the same interpretation. You just choose which color you want to wear. It’s a mindless aesthetic. There’s no concept.

P: Don’t forget carnival is woman and Poison has tons of women.

W: If you want that aspect you got to Poison, but as Minshall says in the Greek carnival in dionysian days women would strip their clothes off and fuck with any man they could get their hands on, and really do things that only women can do so the women just really flirting with being women in that scenario. You can’t deny what is, but you also can’t deny what could be or what is being pushed aside or the impact of certain things.

P: I think you’re also talking about the loss of theater.

R: It’s about playing a mas’.

W: I am talking about the society. Something is gone from the imagination of a certain sector of society. The whole concept of playing a mas’ is not about theater. Theater is to use a western term and it does not apply. That same act of transformation that you talk about whether it is a blue devil or night robber or baby doll or a girl in a bikini. Whatever it is you are playing that mas’, you are playing that for that moment. You are the epitome of that and nothing but that. It does not matter who you are or what you do. It does not matter what letters you have behind your name or don’t have behind your name, everybody is everybody for that moment under the pigment. And I understand that too because you play mas’ with your social grouping. That’s the reality of it and we have to accept it. You play mas’ with the people you feel comfortable and safe with. You are not supposed to feel bad because you played mas’ with Poison.

A: We did jouvay with you guys though.

W: Balance eh?

J: The imbalance to me comes from the fact that the carnival is dominated by the much larger bands that are catering to non Trinidadians.

A: Even the police’s attitude when his horse stepped on her foot, he was dismissing Maya until he found out that she lives in California. Then he started to treat us better and started to record her information.

W: That’s one of the fundamental things that went wrong because the carnival body saw it as their mandate to sell carnival as this tourist experience. I think that is when the whole thing went completely crazy. Because the fundamental thing is it is a festival and it is a time that we engage in. By all means everybody is welcome to join in, but is not for you. We’re not putting on a show for you. We’re not going to change jouvay for you to make it palatable, otherwise we’d be denying you the fucking experience. Everywhere you turn on carnival day there are places to eat and drink. So why do I need to…

R: have a bar in there and a waiter serving me drinks.

J: He (Peter) had his own drink cart and we sure loved him for that

R: I always prefer to support some local rather than go in this all inclusive thing.

P: But you guys have always been into tapping into the vibe.

W: Everything connects. The sponsors are intimately involved in who plays in what fete and who plays on what radio and everything is connected.

J: It might go back and come around because now that carnival is so commercialized and they’re going to have carnival in Miami and places where it might be easier for people to access. They may produce it and may have the investment to produce the commercial carnival so well that Trinidad carnival might just go back to the roots.

W: Traditional mas’ is on the rise. There are a lot more regional carnivals going on. There’s a much broader carnival that takes place across the country that has more popular expression and input. Not to deny the right of the Poisons or the Harts or whoever because it’s just about balance really.

P: This was the first jouvay that I actually sat on the truck and watched a bit of it and it was cool. Next to what’s his face, the midget?

W: Nicholas. He sings in Maljo tent. You never been to a tent? Tent is whole other vibe.

J: My carnival experience is pure jump up and wuk up. The only thing I went to was soca monarch and realized it was a private competition. I thought the government controlled it. I think the prize they give is pretty significant.

W: As a matter of fact I think it’s better that it’s not government run. At one point the whole idea of competition was introduced to the carnival to make it more controllable. It was out of hand, the fucking white people couldn’t rest, the niggahs was turning the town upside down.

R: They were burning up the town. The carnival came out of the whole Camboulay riots. They tried to ban it and they had riots and the white people got scared. So they introduced the competition with rules so they could control them.

J: I was elated to see Militant on your truck. He is Guyanese you know. Does he work with you guys?

W: His song was recorded but it was not getting any response, any airplay. Our space, the Yard was a place for him to do his thing.

R: Hot and Groovy was a hit in the yard long before it played on the radio. It played in the yard a whole year.

W: That and Jumbie. Many times you’d have a good song around, but because of political affiliation or what camp you are in at the time the song gets absolutely no attention. In spite of that it goes on to become a big success. All of the radio stations had it. And then as if by magic the following year they have a hit.

J: When did you guys start doing the whole AIDS campaign? You had a lot of condoms and a pamphlet on AIDS in the package that we got when we signed up for the band.

W: It’s something that we do. It’s the Jouvay. It’s time to make a statement. A big part of the energy of the jouvay is sexual. A big part of the carnival is sexual energy. So if you try to deny that you might as well stick your head in the stand.

R: It’s funny to see how people respond to those condoms. They start giggling. You have to say, “come on, it’s for your safety. Give it to your son or somebody who is sexually active.” At first they like don’t want anybody to know they are having sex.

W: It was not one of those things where we thought we must do this, it was natural. I remember walking into the camp one day and seeing boxes of condoms. And thinking, aye, this makes sense. Godfrey Seely knew we were having a jouvay band and he was one of the first AIDS advocates in this country and he just seized the opportunity to disseminate as many condoms as he could and of course it had a lot of shock value.

R: People have come to appreciate it now. They look forward to condoms now. We ran out of condoms at one point. The package was not the same without the condoms. I made a joke. I told a young lady that we are having free sampling of condoms in the back rooms because she could not understand the flavored ones. I said, “well come, we having free sampling in the back.”

W: You know these guys who are out in the field are bouncing up a lot of youths who don’t even know how to put on a condom. It might sound jokey, but there are sectors of the population that are not as urbane as we imagine. There are sectors of the population that are very ignorant. It’s a process and it’s just using the opportunity that carnival is to interact with so many people. As we say, we are not being puritanical, It is a time of death, so If you’re going to box, as Stanley says, “box with your gloves.” At least diminish the risk a bit.

J: That’s cool. We want to do something on AIDS in each Caribbean island and in the different states in the US to raise funds for different organizations in each of those islands. I was talking with a woman who works with Red thread, an NGO women’s group in Guyana who said that in Guyana, for example, the public service announcements (PSAs) are so outdated.

W: It’s the same thing here you know. We work with so many groups and we tell them that they are too many of them advocating the same.

R: There’s CARE, FEEL, about six of them.

W: ASPIRE, ASA, and they all have these stupid names too. The names are not user friendly. And we did a T-shirt this year. The Sex Is Safer. ASA wanted to be a part of the jouvay thing and they wanted to make a statement, but we could not even get past the name to try and help them make a statement. It took some convincing to get them to just sort of focus on the statement which was safer sex. Sex is Safer, None Shall Escape.

It was after 1 am, Ash Wednesday just finished and we were particularly grateful to 3Canal for the opportunity to chill for a few hours with them. Much thanks to Peter Balogh for hooking us up.

3CANAL CDs on the web

Rituals Music

J'ouvert 2003 pictures

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