The Dragon Can't Dance

4 ideas

1. Aldrick's dragon and the jeep rebellion

   Aldrick Prospect, an unemployed man on Calvary Hill in Port of Spain, spends each year sewing an elaborate dragon costume and dances it at Carnival as a menacing warning of the poor's rage. After Carnival is taken over by sponsors and his friend Fisheye's steelband is tamed, Aldrick, Fisheye and a few others commandeer a police jeep, hold two policemen hostage, and drive through the city broadcasting revolutionary slogans, then surrender with no plan and no following.

2. Ritual defiance can replace real change

   A yearly performance of rebellion, like dancing the dragon, gives the powerless a real sense of dignity and threat, but it also releases that anger in a sanctioned form. The ritual keeps the hierarchy in place because the rage is spent in costume and then set aside until next year. When the performer finally tries to act outside the ritual, he finds he has practised the gesture of revolt without building any means of carrying it out.

3. Sponsorship domesticates a culture of defiance

   When companies fund steelbands and Carnival bands, they supply uniforms, names and money, and in return they require respectable behaviour. The bands' warrior identity, including their street fights and territorial pride, gets turned into brand-safe entertainment. Individuals are bought the same way. The calypsonian Philo wins success with commercial songs and moves up and out of the yard. Co-optation works by rewarding the loss of edge, so nobody has to suppress it by force.

4. Belonging as being seen, not tolerated

   Pariag, an Indian migrant from the countryside, lives on the mostly Afro-Trinidadian hill for years and is never openly attacked. Still, he is never acknowledged as a person with a self, and when he buys a bicycle to sell channa, his neighbours smash it. Read through him, exclusion lies mostly in the refusal to recognise someone's ambitions and inner life, and less in active hostility. A community can protect its own members' dignity while denying the same visibility to the outsider living among them.

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