While growing up in Trinidad, Annaise’s longing to be a visual artist is influenced by the vibrant river scenes in her village, as well as the iridescent swirling colors she finds in the Jouvert streets of San Fernando during the Carnival season. Her relationships and her experiences open her eyes to the fierce and vulnerable edges of life and beauty in the Caribbean.
As an adult Annaise goes to New York and begins to perceive a contradiction between the world of gallery art in Manhattan and the world of Caribbean art that she finds in Brooklyn. A visit with relatives in Toronto unearths old family secrets, hidden hostilities, and gives her a new understanding of immigrant family relations as well as art.
Annaise goes to Trinidad to reconnect with her mother, and there she gains deeper insights into Indo-Caribbean culture through the feminine energies and rhythms that surround her and inspire her art. She returns to New York where she finds love and kinship in the Caribbean and African-American communities in Brooklyn, and she discovers the path that she must follow in order to create the jouvert arts of the street and the earth.
I met Black Maharajin on one of those blue Trinidadian nights
during the Carnival season; an auspicious night for me since it was the
first time my mother let me go to the mas camp at night with my father.
This was my father’s secret life, an old house on Irving Street in San
Fernando turned into a mas camp, away from the scrutiny of our village,
away from our respectable Presbyterian life. My mother never went to
the mas camp. “I didn’t grow up going to no mas camp at night,” she said,
furiously cutting patterns on our living room table when my father, last
minute as usual and less talented than my mother, brought the patterns
home for her to cut. “Is not a place for young ladies,” she told me. And
then she boofed me. “I don’t know why you always keep begging me to
go after I tell you no, is not a place for you.”
But we wore her down, my father and I, and one Friday night
before Carnival my father took me to his mas camp. I was nine
years old. Luckily my father was busy so I could wander about by
myself, maneuvering through the people who had gathered inside
the mas camp and outside on the pavement. Inside, there were men
and women cutting fabric, sewing, and gluing glitter and feathers
to costumes. There were also people liming and drinking, giving
advice to the mas-people, and pronouncing over the fate of the mas:
whether the band would be put together in time for Carnival, or if it
would buss as usual. Outside was also crowded, and that was where
I first saw Black Maharajin, standing in a makeshift wooden booth,
frying phoulouries and accras and f loats in big iron pots. She had
a serious face, and she seemed contented. I saw that despite the
new streetlights she had surrounded her booth with f lambeaux, and
the orange f lares created a romantic street ambience that attracted
everyone. She managed to see me through the people surrounding
her, and she knew, somehow, that I was Larry’s daughter, and that my
name was Annaise. She motioned me inside her booth and pointed
to a small bench.
“Come, Annaise. Sit here. Eat anything you want.”
I trusted her immediately, walked straight into her booth, and
sat down.
“This is the most exciting night of my whole life,” I said to her.
She laughed. “Don’t worry, you will have plenty more. And don’t
be wanting everything too-too quick, eh. What don’t meet you don’t
pass you.”
This night stays with me, especially those moments sitting inside
that space that Black Maharajin had created for her art, her cooking.
Her makeshift wooden shed would soon become just another deserted
street stand after the Carnival season, and would probably be taken over
by another vendor, or simply broken down. Now, in my thirties, I have
come to understand that for us from the Caribbean, the space to create,
to make art and mas, is like the booth I sat in that night, an extremely
fragile space. It is a space that must be protected fiercely; a space that
must always be fought for. But I did not know this when I met Black
Maharajin, not that night and not three days later on that early Monday
morning when my parents took me, nine years old, into the Jouvert
streets of San Fernando, into a sea of dancing people and iridescent
swirling colors.