CARNIVAL, COUPS, AND CORONAVIRUS CHAPTER 1
CARNIVAL 2020: SOCIAL (AND PERSONAL) TRANSFORMATION
17/03/20 - 20/03/20
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| Afropunk Bissau 2021? |
I had never experienced carnival in Guinea-Bissau before. Only coming back for holidays meant that I was never here for the heat and for the week-long celebration and so I was keen to immerse myself fully.
My parents always said that carnival today wasn’t what it used to be. I heard stories of their childhoods where nturudu[1] entered into homes and hid, provoked, amused and performed their culture. Lately, carnival has become more about drinking than it was about our cultural heritage. But with a government that I had faith in whose motto for this year’s carnival was strengthening national identity and social transformation, I was looking forward to being around at a time where we were trying to bring back all the good parts of the celebration.
Despite that, it took me a long time to go outside. I’m not really a fan of large crowds and getting to work and back had already been more hectic than usual since the streets were flooded with people. So, I spent the first few days holed up at home, avoiding the city. My first contact with carnival was at the preliminary competition in Bissau. The regions had been competing amongst themselves for the opportunity to participate in the finals taking place in Bissau. So, it was Bissau’s turn, as an autonomous sector to have its prelims.
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| Nturudu (center) at the preliminaries |
I didn’t expect to feel as overwhelmed as I did during the parade. Watching the teams dance to traditional drums and representing the diverse ethnic groups of Guinea-Bissau I was feeling both a sense of discovery, but also intense loss. I felt the way I had been perceived all along, like an outsider looking in; someone who would never really be in the know and despite the fact that I was at home, that I am Guinean, that I am Pepel, I realized that I couldn’t fully identify with those titles the same way someone who was raised in the culture would.
That day, I made sure to document all of it, to ask questions – a lot of questions – and somewhere inside of me I made the decision to introduce my hypothetical children to all of it at a young age so that they would have access to it in a way that I didn’t. Of course, that would all depend on the national context at the time, and in a lot of ways the national context today is the same as back when I had left when I was 1 but that I will save that for a later section…
I was vaguely familiar with some of the performances that I had seen and with others, like the Kumpo[2] mask, they were not comparable to anything that I had known before. Every team had a group of young girls performing the Bijugu monarchy, where they recited and lamented their country whose trajectory had deviated so far from Amílcar’s vision. I don’t remember which team won from the Bissau autonomous sector but I had certainly remember the goose bumps tightening my skin and the lump in my throat that showed me that even with all my time away, I was united with my people in my love for the country and my desire to reverse its misfortune.
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My second contact with carnival was two days later, and the experience came as if to make up for the sadness that had overwhelmed me at the parade. That day I had come into town to do some work after leaving the office. I wanted to go home early, but I must have been caught up in all the things I needed to do and by the time I was finished, cars were restricted to allow the public to take up the space it needed. So, I walked three and a half kilometres home that evening.
Looking back I can see all the ways that I looked like an outsider, I was in work clothes and not dressed in a pano di pinti[3] or other traditional wear; I had my phone camera out, taking snapshots like the observer that I was, and I found myself speaking Portuguese sometimes, and I think I was subconsciously trying to justify my outsider/observer status i.e. how can I appear less Guinean in order to feel less ashamed about not knowing how to perform “Guineanness”?
At the time though, I was in awe at all the beautiful people and colors, at the joy of the country, at the ways that I now knew the country people could organize and manifest.
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| May we always belly laugh together as children do |
This walk home was also an exercise in getting out of my comfort zone, and it is true what they say about the magic that exists beyond it. On a different day, I might have walked home without speaking to anybody, but I was a different version of myself then, a bolder version, and this version got some shots of people looking incredible who had clearly come to step on all our necks!
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| When I asked if I could take a picture, they responded 'Claro' |
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| The most beautiful pano di pinti |
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| Squad goals |
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| Kampuni |
The peace I had felt on this walk home is indescribable. Alone in the middle of a crowd, documenting and observing, I am grateful that I took this moment for myself to get through what I was feeling and decide to settle on joy at the rediscovery instead of sadness at the loss. So I decided that on the last day of carnival, when we would attend the final parade, that I would be a part of it, and that is what I did.
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