The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic means that Carnival activities have been scaled back this year, but Carnival lovers who are also enthusiasts for stories and poems can still find inspiration and entertainment via the Bocas Lit Fest’s online Carnival Capsule 2022, launching on Carnival Friday, 25 February, and presented in partnership with the Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and the Arts.
This specially curated selection of videos, audio recordings, and texts is available on demand at the Bocas Lit Fest website. It includes recorded events from past editions of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, short films from the celebrated Banyan Archive, downloadable poems and stories from the rich catalogue of Peepal Tree Press, and a selection of Carnival-related features from the archives of Caribbean Beat magazine. The contents are available on demand, free to all.
From the beginning, the Bocas Lit Fest has highlighted T&T’s Carnival heritage at its annual festival and in other events and programmes — from performances by calypsonians, musicians, and traditional masqueraders, to showcases for Carnival-related books and fiction and poems inspired by its traditions.
As viewers explore the Carnival Capsule, they’ll find readings of specially commissioned poems and stories inspired by traditional characters like the Midnight Robber and Bookman, by authors such as Forward Prize winner Vahni Capildeo, Kevin Jared Hosein, and the late Colin Robinson. There’s also a performance from the 2018 NGC Bocas Lit Fest of excerpts from writer and musician Anthony Joseph’s novel Kitch, a fictionalised biography of the great calypsonian Lord Kitchener, accompanied by music and song. Viewers interested in Carnival history can listen in on a conversation with veteran Black Indian performers Anderson Patrick and Darlington Henry, speaking to photographer Maria Nunes at the 2016 NGC Bocas Lit Fest. They can also browse through galleries of photographs from the popular Ole Mas competition which has been a fixture of the literary festival in recent years.
The Carnival Capsule also includes three short films aimed at young viewers, drawn from the Banyan Productions archive, and a virtual anthology of poems, stories, and essays by writers such as Jennifer Rahim, Gordon Rohlehr, Vladimir Lucien, and Shivanee Ramlochan, excerpted from books published by Peepal Tree Press. The Carnival Capsule is rounded off by a selection of features from the archives of Caribbean Beat, the inflight magazine of Caribbean Airlines, which has covered Carnival traditions and innovations for thirty years.