The Rooms Within: "All the Dead, All the Living"

For the first in this poem annotation series, I turn to my own work, on Jouvay itself. Come lewwe play a mas.

Here is the poem I never imagined as part of Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting. How fiercely elated I am that it chose to be here, to reside in me.

My First Jouvay, taken by Marielle Forbes.

This year’s Jouvay happened at dawn, after covid-stricken years of going without on the streets of Trinidad and Tobago. As I explained, when I wrote about the making of “All the Dead, All the Living” for the Poetry School, there is no *explaining* the mas. You must surrender yourself to it, foreigner or local, and part of that submission should make room for the fact that the mas, its ritual and revelry, will unhouse you from your previously-understood moorings of yourself, of yourself in the particular place of Trinidad and/or Tobago, of yourself as a human body carrying a unique pulse.

This is the first time I have taken anyone through the internal anatomy of any of my poems in such a public-facing way, and I do it now with “All the Dead, All the Living” because I believe in the pulse of Jouvay. I have been taught, late into my own life, that you cannot predict what facing the dawn covered in clay, paint and powder will do to you. How difficult it is for so many to fathom that dancing in the same streets where drive-by shootings, school pickups, road accidents, and bumper-to-bumper traffic occur: how this can be transformational. It can be celebration turned up to a frequency only those willing to surrender themselves can hear. At Jouvay, it is good to be a grateful beast. To be reminded that that creature, wild and animate, is always you.

The struggle between my two dominant Englishes - the King’s, and Trinidad’s - marked much of my conscious desires towards writing, and doing it ‘well’. When I won a national secondary school competition at Sixth Form, a word slipped in that was used entirely at odds with its actual meaning, inserted unselfconsciously because I felt I believed in the elegance of it, and somehow that elegance would see me through. Though I’ve stopped being ashamed of that error, it catches my tongue on the periphery of memory, a crooked golden tooth, both proud of its superiority and misguided in its placement. I have since wanted to fill the mouths of my poems with teeth I chose honestly: parts of speech that tasted like myself, like home, like good work without g(u)ilt. This poem announced its need: that it needed to be a part of my first book, that I needed to write as honestly about Jouvay as I could. That would not happen in the English we’d had rapped into our knuckles and incised into our last names. It was not consciously a decolonial act, if I am honest with you: it was, however, a desperate one: an exhorting to myself over and over, you have to say it right.

The loss of Carnival during Covid was about so much more than the lost chance to wine and get on bad in the road for two days. The pulse of Jouvay understands why this revelry is called bad, called disruptive, called wayward and dutty and stink. The pulse of Jouvay makes room even for disbelievers, for naysayers, for all those who deride in public that which they flee to confession for, in private, crying into their lashed hands. I think of Jouvay as the reclaiming of the whip, the seizing of that instrument of torture, to instead curl an arc of triumph into the air, overhead, when the sky is dawning to the sight of thousands of us, sweaty and slick and satisfied and free, curse the slavemasters, so ferociously free that a whip can mean freedom, too.

Wherever you are, I want for you such freedom. I want the pulse that echoes in your breastbone and tailbone to feel good to you. If it comes from Jouvay, then you will find so many others to fall in step with you on the road, the very road we kill and fight and quarrel upon, the road that for two blissful days becomes something beyond our laws, our archaic legislations. “All the Dead, all the Living” is about that. It is about staying and fighting your fucking hardest to be free in a world devoted, so many other days and ways, to whipping you into shape, form, and fine English. Eschew that, and wear your own glorious finery. From the bones of your ancestors, with the pulse of your people, you make it yourself.