Partying begins towards sundown. The streets become much more crowded and rather than costumes recalling various unconscious mythos the attire is of young people in search. When evening turns to night the music begins. The contests for Kanaval song of the year have been going on for many decades. Rivalry between bands, with political overtones and topics, are an old tradition in Haiti.

The most popular song on the street this year was by King Posse, Oui kanaval la, se sa so wey.... So many people would sing this song that I began to break out in spontaneous song myself, not following the words but approximating the sound. My favorite song of the year is by my favorite Haitian band, Boukman Eksperians. It is a hook song rather than a meringue/compas style. It's sort of like a Voudou/LA melding. This is appropriate as the guitarist is a big fan of Jimmy Hendrix. The hook goes Preval tafia, Preval tafia, repeated in a hypnotic drive. This means, the president (Preval) is drunk on rum, or is a drunk.

At Kanaval the bands do not share a stage. This was a totally new experience for me. Each band carries its own stage with it! The floats have transmogrified into complete portable electified stages. Stacks of Peavy amps, twenty feet high and thirty feet wide, overwhelm the tractor-trailer rigs which carry them. There seem to be scores of different rigs like this, one for each of the competing bands.

By the time the bands start tens of thousands of people are already filling the streets. Then the band trucks come and take up two-thirds of the road. I only have one useable picture of this, at the left below. You can see that the PA stacks have dozens of people dancing and waving flags upon the top. Each band has a flag of their own as well. The trucks move forward ten or twenty feet at a time, with designated crowd spreaders in front of and around the trailer to prevent anyone from getting crushed when the rig lurches forward.

They do their best to prevent this, but this year the Olaffson float, with RAM playing, went out of control and five or six people were crushed and died. What was the story? These things are difficult to learn the truth of in Haiti. The newspapers are extremely ideological and pedantic, with villians everywhere. This makes actual reporting difficult. Of course, I don't speak French either, not making it any easier. The driver lost control somehow, perhaps there was a mechanical failure, perhaps a nefarious plot of some sort. One of the dead was the founder of a security guard company, a returning emigre, who worked with the Olafsson crew. This makes plots either absurd or very likely, depending on your viewpoint.

I was the only blan, the only foreigner in the street with the crowds. The stands lining the road had plenty of visitors of various ethnic extraction but down on the street, struggling to stay six inches away from the band floats was where I wanted to be for my first kanaval. I felt much safer on the street in Port au Prince than I would have in such a situation in Chicago, for instance.

I almost forgot. Jeff and Andre and friend above are the folks with whom I went downtown on Mardi Gros. I lost track of them shortly after sundown. Shortly after loaning Jeff twenty haitian dollars, now that I think of it. I'll never get that back.

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created: 22 October 1998