backstory
Carnival is love Trinidad and Tobago’s 2021 Carnival — the physical festival, as managed by various official authorities, manifested in concerts, performances, competitions, and the Monday and Tuesday street parade — is yet another casualty of COVID-19. Social distancing can’t realistically happen in a fete, a calypso tent, a mas camp, or a panyard, where proximity to others, whether friends or strangers, is the whole point. But even if there’s no Road March or Carnival King or Queen or Band of the Year, that indefinable thing people call the spirit of Carnival — a mix-up of tradition and originality, ritual and rebellion, the sacred and the profane, and a powerful emotion that can only be called love — can’t be suppressed. It’s as urgent and willful as ever in our hopes for the future, and our memories of Carnivals past. Carnival is a million love stories. Here are three of them 28
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