!HalleluliaH! : excursions into a third space : Carnival Messiah as an instrument of postcolonial liberation

Trinidad has a long history of applying the linguistic formulation of 'double entendre' as a mode of misinformation that permeates every aspect of its culture. Double entendre here forms an agent of secrecy and camouflage, reversal and subversion, and ensures that 'nothing is ever as it seems'. It is not just a witty, mischievous past-time, but is endemic to the very workings of that society, a status quo that has been born out of a long history of suppression. Even though my theatrical production Carnival Messiah makes no direct reference to the institution of slavery or the British parliamentary abolition act of 1807, its every step is rooted in the emancipation of slaves in order to comprehensively reflect the entire the cultural history of Trinidad and Tobago from that date. Carnival Messiah symbolically depicts the emergence of the cultural history of Trinidad and Tobago through its use of carnival masquerade as a multi- dimensional metaphor which embodies the historical experiences of African holocaust, sixteenth-century European expansionism, and nineteenth-century Asian indentureship. Attached to these experiences are the consequent appropriation of those multiple and shifting identities within one space, which in Carnival Messiah are harnessed and transformed to re-present an established western narrative within a new and distinctly re-imagined Caribbean cultural identity.