By Yolanda T. Marshall

Are you ready to play mas? This year, I am not a masquerader as usual. While the parade graces the streets of Toronto and my ancestors receive the songs and dances of freedom, I will be at the Harbourfront Centre as a featured artist for ‘Island Soul’, educating children about our Caribbean Carnival. With pleasure, here are a few of my literary recommendations that can educate you, too. Be safe, and in the words of the soca singer Rupee, “Enjoy yourself in de mas!”

The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom

Written by Rinaldo Walcott

“In The Long Emancipation, Rinaldo Walcott posits that Black people globally live in the time of emancipation and that emancipation is not freedom. Taking examples from across the globe, he argues that wherever Black people have been emancipated from slavery and colonization, potential freedom has been thwarted. Walcott names this condition the long emancipation—the ongoing interdiction of potential Black freedom and the continuation of Black nonbeing’s juridical and legislative status. Stating that Black people have yet to experience freedom, Walcott shows that being Black in the world is to exist in the time of emancipation in which Black people must constantly fashion alternate conceptions of freedom and reality through expressive culture.” – Duke University Press Books, 2021.

Carnival Is Woman: Feminism and Performance in Caribbean Mas

Edited by Frances Henry and Dwaine Plaza

“These essays address anthropological and historical facets of women and their practices in the Trinidad Carnival, including an analysis of how women’s costuming and performance have changed. Modern costumes are well within the financial means of most mas players, demonstrating the new power of women who can now afford these outfits. In discussing the commodification and eroticisation of Carnival, the book emphasises the unveiling of the female body and the hip-rolling sexual movements called winin or it. Through display of their bodies, contemporary women in Carnival express a form of female resistance. Intent on enjoying and expressing themselves, they seem invigorated by their place in the economy, as well as their sexuality, defying the moral controls imposed on them. Through an array of methods in qualitative research, including interviews, participant observation, and ethnography, this volume explains the new power of women in the evolution of Carnival mas? in Trinidad amid the wider Caribbean diaspora.”- University Press of Mississippi, 2019.

High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture

Written by Kevin Adonis Browne

“High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture explores Caribbean identity through photography, criticism, and personal narrative. Taking a sophisticated and unapologetically subjective Caribbean point of view, the author delves into Mas, a key feature of Trinidad’s performance as an emancipatory practice. Troubling the borders that persist between performer and audience, embodiment and spirituality, culture and self-consciousness, the book interrogates what audiences understand about the role of the participant-observer in public contexts. Representing the uneasy embrace of tradition in Trinidad and the Caribbean at large, the book probes the multiple dimensions of vernacular experience and their complementary cultural expressions. For Browne, Mas’s performance is an exquisite refusal to fully submit to the lingering traumas of slavery, the tyrannies of colonialism, and the myths of independence.” – University Press of Mississippi, 2018.

The Enlightened Canine

Written by Mr Jose Perez

“When Peregrino and some friends discover a dark, narrow tunnel that serves as a gate to another world, they wish to explore it. At a dangerous crossing called Death’s Path, Peregrino meets the evil spirit that constantly stalks him. Soon, chaos ensues, and he must discover enlightenment himself.” – Independently published, 2024.

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I want to take this moment to offer my deepest condolence and a moment of silence to honour a prominent anti-gun advocate, Louis March.