NEW YORK NEW YORK: NCF looking for Labour Day push

By Tony Best | Fri, September 03, 2010 - 12:05 AM

What dazzles may even force you to jump up in the street, or even encourage you to pretend you are a flamingo, a peacock, or even a flying fish in full flight?

While most Bajans at home or even in New York would say Crop-Over, Caribbean immigrants across the United States are likely to point to the annual West Indian American Day Carnival.

Ken Knight, chairman of the National Cultural Foundation, organisers of Crop-Over, is combing both the Barbados festival and the Brooklyn extravaganza.

“We just had a highly successful Crop-Over that attracted Barbadians from across the Diaspora, but we are going to be represented at the West Indian carnival with a band on Eastern Parkway on Labour Day Monday,” Knight said.

“We see the carnival in New York as an excellent marketing tool for Crop-Over. It’s part of a marketing strategy to make Crop-Over more international. With so many costume bands, revellers, spectators and others in Brooklyn for the celebration, we believe it’s important to have a presence at the parade.”

Ocean of colour

As many as two million souls are expected to enjoy the ocean of colour, music, revelry, food and fun of carnival that are essential components of what is North America’s largest street celebration.

The festival, whose origins can be traced to the 16th and 17th centuries, an era of brutal slavery, man’s inhumanity to both men and women who endured the Middle Passage, is going to transform the tree-lined boulevard that’s Eastern Parkway into a virtual Caribbean cultural centre for a day.

“I wouldn’t miss it,” said Denis Walcott, New York’s City’s long-serving deputy mayor for education and the grandson of Bajans.

“I plan to accompany the mayor [Michael Bloomberg] and others at the start of the parade of bands and enjoy the cultural extravaganza that brings together people from all over the country, from the Caribbean, Canada and elsewhere to our city. Just hearing the steel pans and being in the crowd are things that you can’t help but take full advantage of.”

Walcott, who was in Barbados last year, staying in the Gap, is a soft-spoken but determined voice for the poor and says the Brooklyn carnival, its sights, sounds and aroma stir a longing.

“I am a third generation person from the Caribbean,” he added. “And the carnival always makes me long for Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean, wishing that I had living relatives down there that would enable me to take advantage of the opportunities to spend time with individuals there [Barbados], a connection by blood. It’s always a longing, my native land and what it would have been like growing up there.”

Actually, his paternal grandparents were Bajans while his maternal grandfather traced his roots to St Croix in the United States Virgin Islands.

Of course, carnival and Crop-Over aren’t the answers to everything that ails us.

For instance, they aren’t helping the unemployed to find full-time jobs; aren’t curbing the seemingly rampaging flood of chronic non-communicable diseases in Brooklyn, Barbados, St Lucia, Jamaica and elsewhere; and they aren’t forcing banks to renegotiate the terms of mortgages, especially in New York where tens of thousands of foreclosures are a fact of life in the five boroughs.

But then, the magic of Crop-Over, Carnival, Junkanoo or Rara was never intended to be all things to all people and to solve every problem.

A Caribbean theologian and author, who helped to train hundreds of Anglican priests at Barbados’ Codrington College and Howard University in Washington, the Rev. Kortright Davis, in a description of the festivals spoke of the major social process of “soul purging” for the people, “the time when the lighter side of life takes over, when the rites of reversal become powerful statements of the other side of human life.”

Some stark realities hit us when we reflect on the magnetic pulling power of carnival in New York, a point often made by the late United States Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm the first woman elected to the House of Representatives.

The daughter of a Bajan just couldn’t understand how Caribbean immigrants with their energy and creativity couldn’t transfer those powerful factors into a cohesive social and economic strategy that would put power and influence into the hands of elected officials.

After all, if West Indians were able to put millions on the Parkway once a year, why couldn’t they become a recognised political force and in the process emerge as an influential group.

Whatever the cause, this much we know, West Indians have crafted and nurtured a spectacle that 60 years ago in Harlem found comfort in a small hall in Manhattan but has grown to be the greatest ethnic festival in the United States.

That’s what New York City plans to celebrate this weekend.