These are not petty distinctions. This is not mere fussing over semantics to hold on to names that are fast slipping from Virgin Islands usage. As a researcher, educator, and practitioner in Cultural Studies, I say without apology that we are disrespectful to dismiss as quibbling or out-of-touch any Virgin Islanders' claim to the ancestral or folk language that expresses their own sense of heritage and cultural identity.
That being said, we have to be honest in acknowledging that decades of increasing and collective switching from the folk usage (Festival, Rise n Shine) to the popular usage (J'ouvert, Carnival) without national intervention, have taken strong hold. That is how culture rolls. To blame immigrants and visitors for the change, is totally reductive.
Blame the void in our cultural development for the lack of sustained institutional plans, policies, and programmes to educate, communicate, and effect the rooting and establishment of the names we want to use for identifying our Emancipation celebrations.
Let us examine the difference between festival and carnival. I grew up knowing August Monday holiday but it was as an adult living here in the Virgin Islands that I understood it was about the celebration of Emancipation. It was named a festival likely based on the connotation of religious feast days or holidays, like Harvest/Thanksgiving. The derivation is not surprising since the Church of England/Anglicans and the Methodist/ Wesleyans in the Virgin Islands initiated the holiday. The early association of Virgin Islands Festival with the Coronation also served to keep it within the realm of a sacred, courtly celebration.
What few of us appreciate is that the Carnival holidays in the colonies that were largely Roman Catholic, were also sanctioned by the church, which in Roman tradition was a secular celebration preceeding the Lenten holy days of abstinence beginning with Ash Wednesday. Thus the two prior days of Mas(querade) and indulgence known popularly as Lundi Gras (fat Monday) and Mardi Gras( Fat Tuesday).
With the growth of the Tourism Industry, and its hedonism and music festival niches, each destination is vying to outdo the other with expensive musical line-ups and mass Carnival productions superceding traditional festival parades and pageants. In Antigua, for instance, as well as Toronto with a large Caribbean population, the two events have merged with the meaning of Emancipation disappearing into the spectacle and bachannalia of the Carnival genre.
Several Caribbean destinations have even removed their carnival extravaganzas from pre-Lent to save their tourist industry from being squashed by Trinidad's massive productions.
Like our Virgin islands, Nevis has retained the word Festival but refers to their celebration as Culturama to keep the focus on the island's culture and heritage, but even so, the influx of carnivalesque elements like J'ouvert and Rio styled 'feathers and flesh' imported costumes pose a challenge in minimising the spirit of Emancpation.
.The Virgin Islands has had a longer tradition of celebrating Emancipation/August Monday than many Caribbean nations. Yet, we have not made nearly enough strides in re-examining and reconstructing a unique Virgin Islands rennaissance celebration, one that focuses on its distinctive emancipatory character outside of staging another carnival.
Over the past 3- 30 years, more Caribbean nations are consciously celebrating Emancipation as separate from Carnival. This has allowed for focus on the possibilities of our African ancestry, our story, heritage and culture, through public and private sponsorship of diverse creative artforms and intellectual expressions including lectures, conversations, symposia, film productions, exhibitions, theatre, poetry, drumming and dance rituals, culinary and agrucultural fairs, organized calypso competitions and watersports.
I want for the 70th for us to tap into the brilliant but often neglected creative resources we have among us. Let us put aside our insecurities and presumptions to come together as of right now to start planning a real fungi kind of Emancipation festival for 2024.
We have work to do. Now. We cannot expect people to just revert to the original word signifiers for our major Emancipation celebrations just so. Cultural change does not just happen so!
I keep hearing the banal phrase about culture evolving as if culture is some object that we let do what it wants to do, go where it wants to go. No. The responsibility is on us to do more than talk by activating cultural formation - create, recreate, construct, deconstruct, stimulate, nurture, interrogate, promote, circulate - do what we must to achieve the cultural outcome we imagine. Come on BeVI, we must rise to the occasion if we want to shine.
Dr. Patricia Turnbull