Moving

Philip provides immersive context to the origins of the Caribana festival in Toronto as descendent from the Trinidad Carnival. The author finds it more effective to articulate its significance to the Caribbean community in the Caribbean demotic of English, a language that links, as she quotes from Drewal, ‘the dynamics of speech and the dynamics of action,’ and termed by Philip as “kinopoesis” (or kinetic poetry). (130-1) This use of the language, along with the repetition of words “moving moving and moving,” pulls the reader into the symbolic narrative of Totoben and Maisie, who fluidly “cross” through multiple generations; Philip identifies the specific struggles that black men and women face from generation to generation, and how Carnival provides the expressive catalyst for each generation to regain a sense of physical, cultural, and spiritual freedom.

Philip’s recurrent use of “crossroads” recalls a number of concepts we’ve come across in class. “At the crossroads! what you hearing is the sound of Africa cutting loose and moving across the Atlantic to surface again and again in the music of the boys from behind the bridge striking fear in the hearts of whites and middle-class black people… pants tearing as they climbing walls and fleeing the sound of Africa turning and turning around and across the Atlantic.” This invokes Gilroy’s chronotype of the ship and the waters of the Atlantic as a “bridge” between diasporic cultures. “The crossroads! Where the world of the living bucking up the world of the spirit and filling up with the what could be happening in every meeting.” (134) In my mind, I imagine this as a spiritual interstitial continuum, operating as connection or communication between the living who have taken the street and the lives of those who came before.