In Trinidad’s mountain village of Paramin, north of the capital city, Port-of-Spain, it is customary for the Blue Devils to dance on Carnival Monday, a February or March evening. The whole expression of the parade is rooted in a culture based primarily on oral history and tradition. The blue devils are a form of “jab-jab,” as they are called, and are part of Trinidad’s pre-Lenten rituals and festivity.
The Different Faces of the Blue Devils
On this Carnival evening, the Paramin Blue Devils swirl and shriek, jabbing the air with pitchforks, machetes, long sticks and other farm tools. They opened their mouths wide, exposing their crimson red tongues. Four young boys and a plump adult, swishing a kind of long-grass contraption, let out rhythmic high-pitched sounds that kept in beat with the biscuit tin-drums, or pans, as they were called, and the plastic whistles of their strange orchestra.
A king devil opened and closed his gigantic white-and-blue splotched dragon wings. His assistant restrained him with a rope, as he swirled and yawed at the crowd, the pupils of his eyes glinting. The shrieks became louder, and the young ones sprang against the fence like spider-gremlins and slithered up, jabbing their fingers. Another scampered from the side and danced like a frenzied zombie. He too jabbed his finger. This jabbing meant that they wanted their booty of Trinidadian dollars.
The children watched this drama with unperturbed interest. One toddler jabbed his finger right back at a blue devil who wore a scary beast mask, with horns and a mane. Amazingly, the beast slithered away like a wounded repentant snake. One of the devils was different from the rest. His tragicomic mask was decorated with a bulbous red rubber nose and drooping mouth. He entreated onlookers for dollars, his sad visage with its silent plea hard to resist. When he was honored with the booty, he turned up the corners of his mouth with his fingers into a winsome smile. He was by far the tamer version of the retinue from the netherworld.
Most of the others were either bald or wearing wispy silver-white or multicolored woolly wigs. These strange and gruesome creatures either dribbled foaming beer down their throats, necks and chests, confronted the crowd with mock savagery or swivelled on the wet ground, while the rest danced in short steps legs wide apart.
A lithe young devil with red wings pranced into view and jabbed a finger at the crowd. He bent backwards in slow motion with the beat and began to suggestively move his fingers in circles on his bare body while flicking his tongue. He finally oozed away towards another victim, tilting his head. A pretty teenage girl ran away giggling, as one of blue devils brandished and prodded a long phallus symbol playfully towards her. There was no room for prudishness here. Raw sexuality was displayed in front of the very young, the pubescent and the very old. Yet, the show was not downright sexual. An unwritten code of conduct kept the participants from crossing the boundaries.
The History of Slavery
The widely-held belief here is that the jab dance dates back to the days of slavery. During colonial times in the 1700s, the French masters celebrated Carnival with flamboyant masks and costumes as a last fling before the penitence and abstinence of Lent. The slaves held separate dances in their yards and barracks. With the abolition of slavery and freedom in 1838, there was an unleashing of the pagan Carnival celebrations, with wild dances, grease paint and grotesque masks out on the streets, accompanied by loud drumbeats that sent the alarmed gentry fleeing behind closed doors. Attempts to crush by force what was considered outrageous and obnoxious, only led to rioting.
The Rationale Behind the Blue Colour
The blue of the Paramin Devils is also reportedly the influence of the carnival culture of Europeans who once colonized Trinidad. Flush with the headiness of freedom, the natives of Paramin mimicked their one-time white rulers with exaggerated shades of this glossy color that they made from ordinary laundry bluing tablets ground and mixed with water.
Though the whole performance seemed raucous, raw-edged and ribald, it had embedded in it hours of firing the tin drums to tune the right notes, hours spent on creating the characters they represented, practicing the dance that had to keep in step with the pan drums, grinding the tablets of bluing agent to make the paint, rubbing baby oil before the color is applied so that it stays on the skin. As one of the persons in the documentary film “Jab! The Blue Devils of Paramin” states, “My father used to tell me that as long as you put that blue on your skin and you hear a pan, you just totally different.”
Shobha Gallagher - Shobha Gallagher is a Freelance Writer (travel, features, scripts, plays). She is also a photographer and video filmmaker. Her goal has ...
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