Contributed Articles
Independence Day Carnival: A Meeting with Popular Culture
By Tsige Hailemichael
Jul 1, 2008, 11:10am

This is the 3rd time that Carnival unrolls its surprises down the streets of Asmara. This year also, on two consecutive days, May 21st and 22nd 2008, the annual celebrations of Independence Day took, among other festivities, the form of a street carnival, which is becoming a ritual in itself.

During Carnival, participants step outside their usual modes of social interaction and self-representation to enter a world in suspension, a temporary space, where the streets are turned into a stage and participants become “actors” leading the spectators into a temporary suspension of ordinary life that gives way to popular culture through laughter and sociability while also giving birth to popular art forms that reflect the knowledge, preoccupations and hopes of a society at large.

This is where we come together. The same is true of course of the yearly events that are associated with national holidays such as Martyrs’ Day, which also involves the people in a street procession around the symbolic light of a burning flame, as well as many other celebrations, religious or secular, and particularly those related to the liberation of individual towns and of course the summer Festival at Expo. But what is peculiar to Carnival is that it opens the doors to interesting means of expression which give the local communities an opportunity to put forward what they feel is representative of modern day Eritrea and of themselves.

The Carnival progresses in a slow procession of decorated floats representing various businesses, organizations, neighborhood associations and people walking or dancing incarnating various aspects of Eritrean culture. All this is done in an atmosphere proper to most carnivals with colorful staging enhanced by music and dance.

There is always so much to see but what is most interesting is the choices that are made as to what should be represented and what each social entity or group feels best represent them: An identity is shaped not with business cards or family affiliations but through the elements that one heralds as its own: a historical snapshot, rituals of daily life, emblematic gestures, words and images…

Other than the reflection it invites on how the society views itself, one important role that Carnival may play is in the preservation of the community through the valorization of its own heritage and the creation of new symbols. Getting the community together to bring forward matters of knowledge and knowledge of material objects, held not just as a symbols of ancestral craftsmanship in their ritual places but in their role as objects of culture, is a way of continually fashioning one’s own identity by enriching the set of elements used to identify it.

Interestingly enough, presentation and representation in the theatre of Carnival takes us back to the original meaning of what we are given to see, even if it is up to us to make the effort of understanding the references which are only hinted at, one is left with the satisfaction of recognizing or the need to inquire as to the meaning of what is presented. What are the periods of history that people feel is a point of identification for them? Which aspect of their heritage do they choose to preserve and why? Which of their achievements are they proud of?

Through Carnival, a popular culture has found a means of expression worth looking at closely and reviewing. Although each float or sequence is isolated from the others by a vacant space, there is overall a kind of narrative that can be derived from the total amount of presentations. For example, an ordinary truck is transformed into a train (remnants of a colonial past that is still a subject of reflection). Another truck becomes the giant effigy of a warring enemy in the form of a half-snake, half-chameleon man. Eritrean Airlines presents a replica of its plane handmade and drawn in a naïve style. Erisoc brings out an actual line of production for the stoves it manufactures. Dolce Vita, a new enterprise, uses a double-decker bus that was used to shuttle the factory’s workers, and now uses its windows to exhibit new merchandise…

What are the objects and the subjects that we choose to represent us? And how do we, in turn, represent them? Participants, together with individual artists and craftsmen, have made choices that reveal a great deal about the society as a whole. Some floats have people playing roles, which may be a schematic reenactment of an easily recognizable point of history, some have just people playing themselves (workers in uniform…). Marriage rituals, traditional dances and attires, indigenous habitats are presented in a way that shows one aspect to represent the whole. The neighborhood called Arbaete Asmara, (Four Asmara, in translation), chose a hut to symbolize the historic nature of its location in relation to one aspect of tradition, which is the habitat.

Undoubtedly, there is a need to document this captivating event and its yearly renewal. Looking back at what has been harvested in the process may enrich the creative imagination of all participants in such a way that artists and writers can capture the evolution of the images through which the society views itself. Carnival may be a temporary suspension of ordinary norms, but it certainly deserves to be looked at closely as it may very well give birth to the popular arts of modern Eritrea.

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