Monday, February 04, 2008

Calm during Carnaval

I am writing this from our hotel - Hotel Atlantis near Las Terrenas - in the Dominican Republic. We decided our Carnaval experience would be away from Carnaval itself, although we did go to Jacmel last weekend and witnessed a really charming and original Carnaval complete with fire-breathing papier-mache dragons, a tortured Jesus bearing a cross with American, Canadian, and French flags, and these mysterious men - les lancers du cord - who covered themselves in a mixture of cane syrup, soot, and dirt, thus rendering them the blackest black. Actually, here's some more about that from the website of photographer Leah Gordon (http://www.leahgordon.co.uk/), who has been capturing images of Carnaval in Jacmel for 15 years:

Lancers du Cord: We are making a statement about slavery and being freed from slavery. This is a celebration of our independence in 1804. The cords we carry are the cords that were used to bind us. We are always sullen and menacing and we never smile. The blackness of our skin is made with crushed charcoal, pot black, kleren (cane spirit) and cane syrup mixed with a little water in a bucket. Although we know that slaves never wore horns, we wear them to look more menacing as this is about the revolt of the slaves.

The parade was marvelous, but even more marvelous in the staging area where most of the Jacmelian Haitians seemed to be hanging out. Quite frankly, where we were it was a bit of a drunken mosh pit: vendors had been selling pints of rum since the early morning and by mid-afternoon the carnaval spirit was well mixed with other spirits. Sitting up in the balcony overlooking the crowd, we could see the people on the other side of the crash barrier beginning to get crushed by the crowds: at one point, two merging and opposing flows of people began to punch each other in the head. Carnaval spirit? Supposedly in Haiti Carnaval allows an opportunity to become unrestrainedly violent, instead of unrestrainedly bacchanalian, but I guess violence is a part of bacchanalia... Anyways, having been in a similar crowd in Vietnam but on a much larger scale, Carnaval's spirit changed once witnessing the crowds struggling and we wandered back to our hotel.

For Carnaval photos from my Facebook site, visit: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=26752&l=382c7&id=613156291

For the "big" Carnaval -- a 5-day weekend in Haiti -- we decided to go away to the Dominican Republic to rejuvenate and experience something different. We'll stay in PauP next year for the parades, but this year we needed to drive and be free! So, we got into our car way too late Friday afternoon and arrived at the Haitian/Dominican border around 6:45 PM. The road to the border skirted a rather vast and smelly lake, which I can only assume was flood water, that flowed openly into the road at times. We could see lights in the distance and knew we were seeing the DR -- Haiti! Far away, so close! Being here in the DR is maddening because we know we are on the same island, but the realities are so different.

The border was surreal. We were there too late...

More anon.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great write-up, as usual. Lancers du Cord, Jacmelian Haitians, and unrestrained bacchanalians! Oh my!!