Oil, Carnival, and Calypso In Trinidad
- Nicole Dickinson
- Mar 7, 2021
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 21, 2021
My previous blog post in this series discussed a topic that I learned about through a module at university called Resource Fictions: Oil and Water in the World System. This post covers a topic from the same module: oil and Carnival in Trinidad. I wrote an essay on this, focusing on the calypso as a literary and cultural medium which embodies Trinidad’s national identity. The following is a (slightly edited) extract from the introduction of this essay:
Trinidad is a place of paradox, where the explosive colours and energy of Carnival fuse with socio-political and class-based tensions. These tensions reflect Trinidad’s cultural history, fractured by pressures of colonisation, plantation slavery, and commodity frontiers.
After becoming independent in 1962, Trinidad sought to redefine its national identity as sovereign and independent from colonial influence. However, disillusionment towards independence’s promises culminated in 1970’s “February Revolution”. This protested that Prime Minister Eric Williams’ black-led government, the People’s National Movement (PNM), had “left economic control in the hands of the colonial (European) and neocolonial (North American) capitalist classes” (Samaroo 97). Thus, political tensions in Trinidad stem not only from internal conflict, but also from perceived external control, even post-independence.
This need for a new nationalism occurred parallel to 1973’s oil embargo, in which Arab nations withheld oil from global powers such as the United States to protest these countries’ support of Israel during the Yom Kippur war. As an oil-producing nation, Trinidad capitalised on skyrocketing oil prices, and saw overwhelming inflation; Eric Williams delivered a speech emphasising the new national identity that becoming a significant oil-providing nation could bring.
Trinidad, like many countries whose histories are tarnished by white supremacy, slavery, or colonialism (or all three), has historically battled with its national identity. As a small island nation whose Indigenous population was almost completely wiped out by colonisers, only to be replaced by enslaved West Africans, Trinidad has had a tumultuous history at no fault of its own. After independence, and as it sought to redefine its national identity outside the control of colonial forces, Trinidad became caught in a new type of imperial exploitation: petro-capitalism. The term petro-capitalism refers to a profit-based economy centred around oil extraction.
However, this new burst of inflation saw economic disparity rise. The boom-bust dynamic created by exploitative and exhaustive resource extraction saw national disillusionment about the promised economic and social stability that the era of oil was meant to provide. Commodity culture became even more entwined with Trinidad’s national consciousness, with Prime Minister Eric Williams highlighting Trinidad’s history of exported commodity: “Cocoa the reigning queen, sugar the ex-king, oil the future emperor”. Caribbean resource commodification extends through histories of plantation slavery – which commodified human bodies, cotton, and sugar – to contemporary oil extraction. In emphasising this, Williams foregrounds the conflict of having a national identity defined by exploitative practices.
But alongside exploitation lies celebration: Trinidad’s famous Carnival. Carnival celebrates the happy-go-lucky reputation of Trinidadian culture, and champions the chaotic joy that can (or must) be found within histories of trauma. Not only this, but many of the steel drums used to create the iconic sound of Carnival are made from old kerosene oil drums, making these two aspects of Trinidadian culture inevitably bound together.
Something that encapsulates this tension between the celebration of carnival and the environmental degradation, political conflict and external exploitation that lurks beneath its surface is the calypso. In my essay I go into more detail about the specifics of four different calypsoes released between 1972 and 1983 (which I will link to at the end). These calypsoes trace the history of Trinidad as a newly-independent country whose national identity was being constantly repainted, to one who is disillusioned with the effects of this oil-based national identity and the economic disparity it has created. The calypso most significantly juxtaposes highly politicised lyrics against the upbeat backdrop of a carnivalesque melody and instrumentation.
Black Stalin’s ‘New Portrait of Trinidad’ (1972), for example, uses lyrics such as ‘Now, people clap their hand, people felt so glad / When Sniper paint the “Portrait of Trinidad” / But look around today, your eyes may get sore’ to critique the idealistic ‘painting’ of Trinidad’s identity on the world stage versus the waste and degradation that was the reality for much of the population at this time.
This critique emphasises how Carnival and calypso, as expressions of culture, are bound up with the politics of patriotism and constructed images of nation ‘fed’ to audiences through idealised cultural products. Stalin emphasises this by critiquing this performative, empty re-painting of Trinidad’s identity through the repetition of ‘I’m only painting a new portrait of Trinidad’ as a refrain throughout the song.
Another one of the calypsoes, Brother Valentino’s ‘Dis Place Nice’ (1975), emphasises how the environment of nations like Trinidad bears witness to continued histories of exploitation. Valentino’s upbeat melody jars with his critical tone, in the same way that his lyrics about Trinidad as a place ‘of carefree living’ and ‘of fun loving, spreeing and feting’ juxtapose his critique that ‘For the oppressors and foreign investors / Trinidad is nice, Trinidad is a paradise / Amoco and Shell business did went swell / On your oil them foreign parasites dwell’.
This calypso directly subverts Prime Minister Eric Williams’ utopian framing of Trinidad’s new modernity in the era of oil. The linguistic similarity between ‘parasites’ and ‘paradise’ suggests that capitalist exploitation and idealised images of nationalism are intertwined: Trinidadian cultural expression is entangled with resource exploitation.
The calypso as an art form therefore embodies Trinidad’s paradox but also its success: its ability to critique the system and acknowledge its conflicts while at the same time celebrating the country’s heterogeneous cultural vibrance and resilience in the face of generational trauma and continued imperial exploitation. The calypso can criticise the political establishment and at the same time make you want to dance. Not many art forms, in my opinion, can do this quite so deftly.
This topic lends itself to something close to my heart in terms of my academic interests: how previously-colonised countries reaffirm their own identity and self-determination after independence, but also how they have to navigate the similarly powerful but more veiled neo-colonial forces such as, in this case, resource conflict and exploitation.
Are these narratives now being heard on the world stage? Or are we still living in a world where imperial powers control the narratives about the countries they seek to continue exploiting? How can we give these countries agency within a global narrative that has never sought to champion them? We need to keep raising these stories up and educating ourselves if we are to level the colonial power dynamics still present in the world today.
Calypsoes:
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