When it pours, Rikki reigns Saturday, February 26 2011
TRINIDAD EXPRESS - By Lennox Grant - The placard cheque he accepted, four feet wide by three, was topped with the national crest, and letterheaded with the Ministry of the Arts and Multiculturalism. On the placard, his name and $2 million, in letters and figures, were inscribed in dot-matrix lettering.
That's T&T show business today. Unrecognisably evolved from the 1960s, when reporters Keith Smith and Chester Morong invented the beat they called "showbiz".
On the heads of Carnival "monarchs", officials then placed the graven image of a crown, worked in bronze or brass. Almost never was seen a head more Indian than the Mighty Dougla's, wearing any such monarch's crown. The monarchs got money too, but the crown mattered more.
By February 19, when Rikki Jai climbed out of a white papier mache bottle to sing "White Oak and Water", chutney soca had emerged as a department of Carnival identified with Indians. In that day's Express, a White Oak Rum ad waved the flag: "Good luck, Rikki. Mash up Chutney Soca Monarch like WO!...When it pours, you reign." For a song that endorses a brand, and a performance backed by the maker, Rikki reigns.
He's reigning like the People's Partnership, against a rolling thunder of assorted vituperations posted, among other places, on the online Jahaji Bhai, Bahen exchange. Imprecations vented by Indian nationalists, and by others ideologically and religiously opposed to rum and to Carnival, constitute a new testament about Indians in T&T.
Behold, then, the surprising doctrine that Indians are overwhelmed by an endemic contagion of "rum culture". I had never regarded the Indian community, in so many ways a national success story, as one bedevilled by the cane-based spirit once called "kill-devil".
In the Smith-Morong days, the Carnival system had already evolved beyond the Peter Samuel days in the 1950s. At Marine Square, one Carnival Tuesday, his small band was judged winner.
The prize was a gold cup. What's the second prize, he asked. It was a case of rum. "Put us second," he told the officials, who obliged. The bandleader of the year shouldered his case of booze and returned to the streets, to play more mas.
Having played a mas, and won the "crown", the band of the late Peter Samuel didn't aspire to secure returns on their "investment" any more liquid than "the spirit of Trinidad" in a bottle. That "spirit of Trinidad" used to be the tagline for the Vat 19 Rum brand.
Rum, as promotional theme and fuel for festivity, has demonstrably remained a constant in Carnival. Rum advertising, year-round, has a long history. Vidia Naipaul, who left Trinidad in 1950, later recalled from his boy days the plain-speaking copy for the Fernandes products: "If you don't drink rum that is your business; if you do drink rum that is our business."
"The ancient calypso lavway, "Rum, Glorious Rum," probably never celebrated a comfortably reigning status for the local spirit "made from Caroni cane". Rum is still defending its market share against imported liquors.
Cane no longer grows in Caroni. Angostura, still the rum maker, going with the flow, itself sells imported whiskies, wines, gins, vodkas…alongside its own product.
Rum, then, must be a generic shorthand for liquor. I confidently suppose that, on Chutney Soca Monarch night, more imported liquors were consumed in Skinner Park than were the Angostura brands.
Long before any government gave seven-figure purses to encourage and salute the efforts of participants in any local music, song, or mas competition, local liquor companies were supporting steelbands, combos, orchestras and various festivals.
For my taste, the output is inevitably uneven. From some expressions, I avert my eyes, or switch the dial, but never find the heart to execrate as evil whatever I dislike.
Local liquor companies, like all private business, going after profit-making sales, have paid consistent supportive attention. The people now engaging anger in overdrive against the "glamourising" of rum in song are yet to cite evidence such as, in the UK, of a rise in liquor-related liver disease.
Full disclosure: I drink rum, "responsibly", as the White Oak ad urges, though more Guyanese and Barbadian brands, now competitive in price and quality with spirits formerly "made from Caroni cane". In the Chutney Soca Monarch 2011 fallout, however, my apprehension in writing this is that of a rum-drinking creole cockroach in a dry Indian fowl party.
