On Junkanoo (15 January 2004)

Well, it’s official. Junkanoo is not a cultural event. It’s a sport. Complete with winners and losers, gamblers and fixers, points and penalties and appeals.

Think about it. In all the debate that we hear about Junkanoo every year, how much do we hear about the event itself? About the innovations in the art, the changes in the music, the use of colour, the presentation of the performances?

The answer: virtually nothing.

What we hear instead are insults to the judges, to the committee, to the Ministry, to the winning groups, to the losing groups, and to anyone who ventures to say anything remotely sensible about the whole. All that matters to the group, the press, the public, is who won and lost the parade. A sport, plain and simple, in which the referees are perpetually suspect and the umpires always under siege. Somebody get rob; somebody do the robbing. But we rarely hear anything about the art of Junkanoo.

It doesn’t honestly matter whether the cultural side of the event — the self-expression, the getting of “me”, the celebration of the art of being Bahamian — has grown or shrunk; all that matters is who won the parade. The Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture has asked the question: what price culture? and our answer, if Junkanoo is anything to go by, is nothing at all.

Because it’s not the culture that we care about.

Let me explain why I say this. Last year I taught a course on judging for people who wanted to get involved in the judging of Junkanoo. It was a course asked for by the Junkanoo Leaders Association, and was drafted by COB’s School of English Studies at the leaders’ request. It was administered by the School of Continuing Education at COB, and was monitored by the Junkanoo groups’ representatives on the National Junkanoo Committee. What was different about the course was that it took the approach that Junkanoo is like any other art form, and may be judged by universal standards that may be applied to art, music and performance across the board, and it sought to teach the judges criteria for assessing those elements that would permit the development of their objectivity rather than their application of personal taste. What was fascinating about the reaction to that approach was that some Junkanoo practitioners objected. They claimed, you see, that Junkanoo aesthetics are unique, alone in the world, and cannot be judged by universal cultural standards.

Not a cultural event, then. A sport.

Because music, art, dance, theatre, sculpture — all the things that are brought together in this one street festival, Junkanoo — do have universal applications, core elements that identify them as music, art, dance, theatre and sculpture everywhere that human beings live. This is the heart of anthropology: the idea that despite our infinite variations, human beings are fundamentally similar, and that at some point there is a common link between people of all nations, colours, creeds and backgrounds. Often that commonality is expressed in the universal languages of the arts. We may have to learn different vocabularies, different grammars, but the fundamental impulse is the same.

Not so, apparently, in Junkanoo.

During the course, for example, I learned that Junkanoo music cannot be judged according to universal musical rules. Junkanoo music is different from any other music in the world, and only Junkanoo musicians can judge it. Fair enough, then; so much for my father’s use of classical musical technique to transcribe Junkanoo rhythms. No need for musicians trained to hear and identify polyrhythms, melodic integrity, interesting use of harmony; anyone truly attuned to Junkanoo can tell whether something is good.

I also learned that Junkanoo art is so unique that only a Junkanoo artist can truly judge it. The aesthetic principles learned by studying fine art, whether that art be the use of colour and light, the use of shape and texture or anything else, are by the way; Junkanoo is a spirit, and follows rules of its own.

In fact, everything I learned when conducting the course, and everything I have observed since then, have led me to this one inevitable conclusion: Junkanoo is a sport.

It’s the only thing that helps explain to me why it is so basically different from every other cultural expression in the world. You see, to believe that there can be a cultural expression that is unique every way is to believe that the people who create this thing are fundamentally different from all other human beings on the planet. Of course, this is not what we believe; and so Junkanoo cannot be a cultural expression after all.

It must be a sport.

Sports, you see, have their own rules, and one sport is not like the other. It’s the rules that make the sport, not the techniques and skills and self-expression of the athletes. Junkanoo and Carnival may be similar, but they are not the same, and cannot be considered as such; they are as different as rugby and American football, as baseball and cricket. A golfer can’t play basketball. A carnival artist can’t do Junkanoo.

There are two more things that clinch the deal for me. The first is that other cultural practitioners in the country, those who are not part of the Junkanoo playoffs, have apparently decided that Junkanoo is no longer theirs; from Pat Rahming’s essays in the 1990s to Track Road Theatre’s New Year’s Day street performance, other cultural practitioners have concluded that Junkanoo (as a cultural expression) has died.

The second is that our government funds the thing. And that, as they say, is conclusive. Our country has spent virtually nothing in the thirty years of its independence on culture; but it spends millions of dollars on sports.

So it’s official then.

Let the games begin.