Carnival: A Mass Plays Mas’  [Caldwell Taylor]

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Link to part 1

THE JAB JAB AND COMIC LICENCES ?

[Part 2 of 2]

Grenada Jab Jab

“The molasses Negro [Negre Molassi] wears nothing. His whole body and face is smeared with an atrocious mixture of soot and molasses” 

– Lafacdio Hearn, after viewing Martinique’s 1887 Carnival. See Hearn’s “Two Years in the French West Indies” published in 1890.

Jab in Haiti

“A band of bare-chested horned men whose bodies are covered with sugar-cane syrup mixed with soot and charbon [charcoal] In Haiti these Carnival characters are called lanceurs de cord”.

The Lanceurs de Cord characters of Haiti blacken their body as much as possible

– Novelist Edwidge Dandicat in “After the Dance: A Walk Through the Carnival of Jacmel”

Frenchman Xavier Marmier [1808-1892] saw the Carnival in Cuba, where blacks smeared the bodies with tar to mark the January 6 Carnival- the Dia de Reyes(Day of Kings).

See Marmier’s Lettres sur l’ Amerique.

IS True :The Jab Jab [Diable Diable] is the major figure of scatology in the Grenadian Carnival .

It is well worth noting that once upon a time the Catholic church granted what it called “comic licenses” . These licenses excused risque and obscene interludes in the course of the celebration of the Mass. The Church’s risa pasquale  – the so-called “Easter laugh”, was a sexually suggestive act which gave a profane colour to the sacred event.

About the sacred-profane dichotomy poet W. H. Auden [1907-1973] wrote:

“The value of a profane thing lies in what it usefully does, the value of a sacred thing is what it is”.

“Of course a sacred thing may also have a function but that not its primary role”, responds Joyce Carol Oates.

Pieter Bruegel [c.1525-1569] brought the sacred and profane to a face-off in a painting entitled The Battle Between Carnival and Lent.
A panel from Bruegel’s “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent”, 1559.

A panel from Bruegel’s “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent”, 1559

There was also a time in Trinidad when the Carnival “opened” before the altar of the Port-of -Spain Catholic cathedral. Starting in the 1920s , and continuing until the 1950s the Roman Catholic Les Amantes de Jesu Society [ Lovers of Jesus] “gave” the grandest of the pre-carnival balls.

Carnival and Religion make an odd couple: Both seek the extinction of alienation and estrangement ; they both wage real and fanciful wars:he Veillee Croix aka vecco] is the outstanding symbol of Heraclitus’ miracle of the unity of opposites.

Veillee croix = cross wake/ cross vigil.

[End of part 2]

(c) Caldwell Taylor

Caldwell Taylor is  writer and cultural commentator. The former teacher and diplomat is a graduate of Windsor Law School .