According to Wikipedia and other sources, carnival is a festive season that occurs
immediately before the Christian season of Lent.
The main
events typically occur during February. Carnival typically involves public celebration and/or parade combining some elements of a circus, masks and public street party. People wear masks during many such celebrations, an
overturning of life's normal things. The celebrations have long been associated
with heavy alcohol consumption
Some of
the best-known traditions, including carnival parades and masquerade
balls, were first recorded in medieval
Italy. The carnival
of Venice was, for a
long time, the most famous carnival (although Napoleon abolished it in 1797 and only in 1959
was the tradition restored).
From Italy, Carnival traditions spread to Spain,
Portugal and France and from France to New France in North America. From Spain and
Portugal it spread with colonization to the Caribbean and Latin
America. In the early 19th century in the German Rhineland and Southern Netherlands, the weakened medieval tradition also revived.
In Rhineland in 1823, the first modern Carnival parade
took place in Cologne, Germany. The
upper Rhineland is mostly Protestant, as is most of Northern Germany and
Northern Europe. Carneval, (Fasching or Fastnacht in Germany) mixed pagan
traditions with Christian traditions. Pre-Lenten celebrations featured parades,
costumes and masks to endure Lent's withdrawal from worldly pleasures.
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Mending
You did not tell me
we had ended.
Her photograph
on your desk
told me I was old news
replaced by older news
new again.
I am the discarded slice
in your sandwich.
Well, I “playing mas.”
I steep myself
in the carnival rush,
dancing non-stop
in crushing crowds
to the pling-pang,
pling-a-ling
of steel pans and
mega-phoned calypsos
booming from food stands.
This is bacchanal.
Each night there is
a new friend to jam
and wind-up with
in a rum-punched throng,
in a steel-band jump-up.
*bacchanal-
The Bacchanalia were Roman festivals of Bacchus, the Greco-Roman god of wine,
freedom, intoxication and ecstasy.
*play
mass- to take part in a carnival masquerade.
© 29.06.2014 Althea Romeo-Mark
good photography for all those who do not partake in masquerades etc. I like the poem at the end, and I agree with what you're saying at the beginning. Poetry is really seeing the world in unusual ways. Thanks for the read.
ReplyDeleteIrène (posted in Irène Kaesermann's behalf)