Dancin' in the Streets

Ooof - obviously I'm still working on the 'post every day while I am in Suriname' but you'd probably get bored of me anyway (yeah, its all your fault). ANYWAY, it's been a very interesting couple of days watching Carifesta get itself off the ground; this is a huge festival taking place in many, many venues both in/around Paramaribo and in districts quite far from the city with artists and performers coming in from 30 countries around the world.
On Friday I walked into what I'll call downtown Paramaribo (the historic district; geographically this is a big city in part because there are few tall buildings so it spreads out across a very wide area) along a different route and headed back to Fort Zeelandia to check out the museum. It was closing shortly but the very nice guard told me to go ahead in and take a look without paying and in wandering around I bumped into a wonderful gallery director from Miami (Rosie Gorden-Wallace from the Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator) who was setting up an exhibition in collaboration with the small national art school that is housed on the grounds of the fort. We chatted and exchanged contact info and then she asked the dreaded question - 'do you have a ticket for the opening ceremonies ?" which of course I did not and she said that they had announced the need for tickets that morning but by the time she had checked they were already gone. Hmmm. Well, we shall see about that. So I headed towards the Carifesta Office to learn more but on the street ran slap into Kennedy 'Boots' Samuel who is the artistic director for the St. Lucia delegation and while he didn't know anything about the tickets either we found a restaurant where we could get a terrific vegetarian lunch (ginger fried rice and three different kinds of cooked green vegetables plus the always-included condiments of sweet pickles and screaming hot peppers). It was fascinating to hear some behind-the-scenes stories of administering a monster event like this one, and on his advice after lunch I continued my quest for a ticket by hiking to a hotel I saw on my walk this morning that housed the media center where I talked to a really really nice lady who at that moment could neither get me a press badge nor a ticket but said that if I just go down to the event site and wait I should be able to get in. Down there I went, followed a few more empty ticket leads, talked to several security guards who all said that you had to have a ticket to get in, reconnoitered the site some more, and ended up with a small crowd of people at a sort of side entrance. This is where the St. Anthony moment comes in - have I spoken already about my mother's absolute faith in St. Anthony for solving problems and finding things ? Well, St. Anthony was about my only hope at that point and I am forever grateful that once again he came through. You see, there were some rather vocal ladies at this particular gate who were quite vexed that they could not go in so they importuned the security guy in fairly forceful terms and before you know it my small crowd was headed into the stadium with me in their midst trying to look inconspicuous and we all found seats just as the announcer announced that the gates would be open soon.

The setting in Independence Square directly in front of the Presidential Palace was fabulously impressive, and over the next hour and a half the stadium filled and the delegations from various countries filed in and with remarkably few delays the opening ceremonies slowly but surely got rolling in an atmosphere of flat-out Caribbean-style celebration, speakers booming well-known dance music and most people bouncing around and waving Carifesta flags. Great atmosphere, great energy, beautiful people, gorgeous place.

The program for the evening - quite a long one, with the initial wait I was there for more than five hours - was an interesting combination of performances, speeches, and absolutely spectacular digital projections on the facade of the palace starting rather oddly with about 45 minutes of military and police bands at times accompanied even more oddly by dancing women in traditional dress. The various country delegations from Antigua to Venezuela (including India, China, and Indonesia, diaspora countries of origin for Suriname) were introduced and their flags presented, and there were quite good speeches by the Minister of Education and Community Development, the Secretary General of Caricom (the regional organization for economic integration), and the President of Suriname, all of which emphasized the (potential) transformative power of the arts to 'unite and excite' the Caribbean and the world. There was an extended performance by 342 Surinamese children of all ages, very colorful; a mindboggling display of kung fu acrobatics by the Shaolin Monks from China; and an elaborate full-length production for the final hour that included theater, dance, song, and a cast of hundreds following a central narrative exploring a very diverse range of contemporary issues - tradition and change, environmental impacts, sustainable tourism, and the leadership potential for the arts. It was interesting, if a bit hard to follow at times. But I do have to say that the digital projection and laser light show was so cool that it may have stolen the show.

 And when it was all over and Carifesta officially launched and the streets flooded with a bajillion people there was a perfectly extraordinary fireworks display that went on so long that I finally had to start my walk back to the hotel with the lights booming and blasting behind me. Wow.

Got back to the hotel and a very welcome shower around 11:30pm, but bounced right back up yesterday morning because - big surprise - I had been able to find a tour guide to take me to see potters. There were a few predictable delays which gave me time to go and get a SIM card for my phone (absolutely essential to have a phone here so you can call for taxis) and visit the one big art gallery in town (and in the country) but I eventually hooked up with Jurgen John and his wonderful lady friend Candy who had borrowed her sister's car and decided to come along for the trip since she had never been out where we were going. Jurgen hadn't had his breakfast yet so once we got completely out of town we stopped at a roadside restaurant that caters to tour groups and I got to taste the very delicious Surinamese fast food called 'bakabana' - deep fried sweet plantains with a slighty peppery peanut sauce, absolutely gorgeous.

The area where we were headed is home to the huge bauxite mines - bauxite is the ore from which aluminum is derived - and associated with the bauxite is a considerable layer of clay; I had heard about this previously from Dennis Bell in Barbados. Now the reason I found Jurgen and booked this trip is because of those pots I saw in the lobby of my hotel and subsequently in many other locations, thick unglazed vessels and garden ware that had clearly been hand built and traditionally fired - i.e. with wood in the open. I was told initially that these pots were made by the Trio tribe, but once I met Alfons and Melissa Sjinga I found out that they are in fact Galibi (Carib) and had moved to that area decades before. Alfons' mother is quite famous, and of course she was not there because she is demonstrating and selling her pots at Carifesta, at the Traditional Folk Village site where I am headed this morning.

Happily, Alfons drive up while we were there, and both he and his wife Melissa gave us a brief demonstration and answered my many questions about process and family history. The family village is only about 20 people, the workshop is definitely set up for tourist visits, and it was absolutely fascinating. They use this unique method of wedging into the rather awful clay (not very plastic, lots of rocks and sand and roots) large amounts of crushed charcoal from the bark of a very specific tree and for those of you who know about ceramics it works kind of like paper clay - they can build very large pots that dry incredibly quickly and fire without cracking. Fascinating.

 And for me and my methods-based pottery research I was even more fascinated to see that just like every other Amerindian potter I have seen they coil build the pots in single circuits - add one complete coil, blend in, add the next. This is fundamentally different from the West African methods used in St. Lucia and elsewhere in the Caribbean in which soft coils are continuously added and blended until the form is finished. Very cool (at least to me).

 The gender status of Alfons is also really interesting - historically, Galibi potters are all women, as are most traditional potters around the world, at least those who work with coilbuilding and open firing. Alfons grew up in a pottery-making household, and when his sister was not interested he took it up himself and has made a point of marketing to hotels and tourists. He also makes figurative sculpture, unusual in this vessel-based tradition, and entirely unique to his skill set. Once complete and dry, the pots are burnished with stones, fired with wood in a two-stage process that preheats the clay before running the temperature up quickly to about 900 degrees F, and then finally treated with an organic varnish made from a red tree bark. What Alfons is particularly known for are the very large decorative and garden pots, like the one below which has been painted black after firing.
Note on terminology: 'Carib' is the common name this tribe is generally known by; it dates back to the first contacts with Spanish explorer-conquerors, and is the basis for the name of the region and the sea. However, it is a word that the Spanish bastardized from the original, and is connected to their perceptions of the local populations of the Caribbean as cannibals. Hence, the correct terms of Galibi or Kalinago are now generally used to name what have been called the 'Carib' Indians.

After coming back to Paramaribo I spent the rest of the day and evening checking out the setup at the Grand Cultural marketplace, the Carifesta venue for visual art, crafts, and food (culinary arts). As it was  all in the process of being set up and thus understandably a bit discombobulated I shall reserve my comments for the next installment. Today I'm headed over to the Traditional Folk Village across the river where I hope to meet Alfons' charismatic mother, then back to the Grand Cultural Marketplace, and then hopefully to the dance performances this evening. The real challenge for me at Carifesta (and for any other foreign visitor) is getting around from venue to venue. Wish me luck.