Representing the uneasy embrace of tradition in Trinidad and the Caribbean at large, Kevin Adonis Browne’s latest book, HIGH MAS: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture, explores Caribbean identity through stunning photography, incisive criticism, and stirring personal narrative.
Beginning with memoir, and moving progressively toward a more extensive treatment of Caribbean identity as a complex performance—as Mas—the book responds to the myths of being and belonging that persist in the region and probes the multiple dimensions of vernacular experience and their complementary cultural expressions.
According to Browne,“Mas performance is an exquisite refusal to fully submit to the lingering traumas of slavery, the tyrannies of colonialism, and the myths of independence”.
Taking a sophisticated and unapologetically subjective Caribbean point of view, Browne, who is also the author of Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean, delves into Mas—a key feature of Trinidad performance—as an emancipatory practice.
Troubling the borders that persist between performer and audience, embodiment and spirituality, culture and self-consciousness, Browne explores how performers are or wish to be perceived, along with how, as photographer, he is implicated in that dynamic. The resulting interplay encourages an informed, nuanced approach to the imaging of contemporary Caribbeanness.
The 120 photographs and five essays included in HIGH MAS immerse the viewer in Carnival experience as never before.
The first series, “Seeing Blue,” features Blue Devils from the village of Paramin, whose performances signify an important revision of the post-emancipation tradition of Jab Molassie (Molasses Devil) in Trinidad.
Browne first photographed the 2001 Jab Molassie Performance Group in 2014 and subsequently donated a collection of framed photographs to the Paramin Community.
The book’s second series, “La Femme des Revenants,” chronicles the debut performance of Tracey Sankar-Charleau’s La Diablesse, which reintroduced the “Caribbean femme fatale” to a new audience.
The third series, “MokoJumbies of the South,” looks at Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales, a pair of stilt-walkers from the performance group Touch de Sky from San Fernando. “Jouvay Reprised,” the fourth series, follows the political activist group JouvayAyiti performing a Mas in the streets of Port of Spain.
Dionne Brand, former poet laureate of Canada and native Trinidadian, lauds HIGH MAS as “a one of a kind work that understands fundamentally all that is at stake when people make Mas–the embrace of their fierce unexpurgated beauty.
“The writing, and by that I mean both text and image, is as liquid as Mas itself catching the exquisite balancing of life here, life after, and life before which is ‘being’ in Mas…
“Browne shows us everything about the permeable, uncanny habitations of these figures of Mas in his lucid images.
“This book is wise and field changing.”
HIGH MAS has been available on Amazon.com and other online bookstores since October 15, 2018.
Kevin Adonis Browne is currently based in Trinidad, where he works at the University of the West Indies-St. Augustine. He is also the co-founder of the Caribbean Memory Project. Learn more about his work in visual and cultural rhetorics, archiving, and memory at http://drbrowne.me.