Well-known designer and author Patrick Roberts, 65, hopes to publish a book about aspects of Carnival to leave a legacy.
But he has also been doing that through his popular medium band, Image Nation. He designed the band’s 2024 presentation, Jouvay – the Ballet of Life. He said it was not European-style ballet, but the "ballet" seen on Trinidad and Tobago’s streets every year in the movement of Carnival characters like the Bat.
He has been designing for the past 44 years and is also the author of Iron Love: A book of Desperadoes Steel Orchestra.
He will publish another manuscript in November called Jouvay, written while he worked on Image Nation’s 2024 designs. Roberts also said he would shortly publish Iron Love Forever, a fictional story about a pan side set in the 1960s.
He was born, raised and still lives at Laventille Road, Port of Spain, and has seen some of the evolution of mas.
[caption id="attachment_1030897" align="alignnone" width="684"] A design from Patrick Roberts' Jouvay. -[/caption]
His first memories of mas are entwined with Desperadoes.
“I was born very close to Desperadoes Steel Orchestra. Pan and mas were synonymous then. As a boy my earliest memories are of Desperadoes and mas in the 1950s.”
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As he grew, he would go to the band’s evening practice sessions. Learning the Panorama tune was a little laborious, but he “found joy looking at the masmaking.”
Each night, Roberts saw “definite progress” in the costume’s development and it would then disappear, “only to reappear on Carnival day.”
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Roberts went to Queen’s Royal College, where he studied art at O and A-levels and then went on to the John Donaldson Technical Institute (now part of the University of Trinidad and Tobago). In 1977, he became an apprentice in the Zodiac mas camp, where his main tutor was the late Alwin Chow Lin On.
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He was still at the technical institute in 1979 when he was asked to design Oaksville, which was then the largest J’Ouvert band coming out of Belmont. The band’s leader was Ralph Hoyte, who used the band’s costumes to make “pointed political statements” on domestic and world events like apartheid in South Africa, Roberts said.
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His elder brother Kenneth Roberts was also a masmaker for Desperadoes, and would work on the costumes at their home. Roberts was usually sent to bed while his brother worked on them, but would get up early to look at the costumes and see what had been done.
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His father was a dockworker and later manager of the bar at the Seamen and Waterfront Workers Trade Union (SWWTU) Hall on Wrightson Road, Port of Spain. Sparrow had his tent there.
So as a boy, Roberts was immersed in pan, calypso a
