Wirebender Michael Douglas has avidly participated in Carnival since 1956, when he was just ten years old. Now 76, he keeps a logbook documenting the mas he’s played over the past 66 years.
But in recent years, Douglas has feared TT is on the brink of cultural erasure with the modernisation of mas-making.
For this reason, he has been advocating for greater stakeholder collaboration to ensure that traditional mas-making and cultural practices are preserved.
He told Sunday Newsday, “It have to be a collaboration between the government and the people.
“You have the people who have the skills, but who running the country? Who in charge of tourism?
"They supposed to be able to come together with the people who have the art. You have to let some situation arise where we could come together and push it (the culture), so that people who come in the country could go to a place like a museum and see our mas.”
Leader of the San Fernando-based small mas band Pan Mas Traditions Fancy Sailors, Douglas doesn’t like discarding costumes and keeps some of his most prized ones – a six-foot-tall dame Lorraine, a car-shaped headpiece and a horse – on display at his Cipero Street mas camp.
He wants to create a museum and is searching for donors to make the dream a reality.
For Douglas, Carnival and the creative people associated with the festivities have come too long a way, and fought too hard for it not to be duly recognised and their work properly preserved.
Douglas complained, “TT’s system has a tendency to discard our history, especially our traditional history, which is our creative history. Some of the people to blame for that is the media and radio stations.
[caption id="attachment_943158" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Michael Douglas talks about his hope for the future of wirebending in making costumes. - PHOTO BY MARVIN HAMILTON[/caption]
“As a youthman growing up in the ‘50s, I remembered going to school at age ten-11. I used to have to be running home on an evening to listen to a programme called Rollin' Home for 30 mins and in that 30 minutes you listening to calypso.
“But hear what happens: up come Lent and for 40 days, our culture was buried. For 40 days we couldn't hear our own calypso, but you hearing every other music…it was so for a very long time.”
It’s why even there was no Carnival in 2021, and only a “Taste of Carnival” this year – owing to the covid19 pandemic – Douglas is doing his best to keep the Carnival spirit alive.
Accustomed to living in his mas camp in the weeks leading up to Carnival, Douglas and his partner Janice Linda Richards – who is also an member of the band – spent Carnival Monday and Tuesday in 2021 at the mas camp.
While this year’s Taste of Carnival wasn’t the whole meal, it was enough to satisfy Douglas’s appetite.
“Once we not out on the road with the DJs and steelband, that’s 99 per cent of the mas missing.
“But I personally support (it), because I am a culture person. The Carnival people – the costume-makers, the steelband men, the arrangers, the caly
