Iron Love I - Mas & Iron
Navigating by sound, soaring without sight, bats like hummingbirds, are pollinators too, they just do their work at night. They help fertilize the flowers to fruit, so we are fed by more than the beauty our eyes consume. But tonight jagga-bat is inside, fabricating wings for my first flight.
Atop my father’s iron keep, we sat for nights at his desk, resurrecting cityscapes with silver drops of solder slipping off hot iron, breaking from a reel coiled into submission. Teardrops of molten metal, mend paths of connection, as wires meet circuit boards to bring power back to amplifiers to be put to the test at the upcoming Carnival celebrations.
The coloured wires once managed by those giant nimble fingers are fed by his time and patience. Now grown into macajuels for cables, they curl around his curving shoulders, dragging toward an iron chariot in the distance. Entangled but rooted in the mangrove of cables atop the music truck, he slips away westward, along with the last light of the setting sun, toward a tomorrow I am not yet ready for.
Tears slip down my cheek, as he leaves for work and I remain in the iron keep. Who am I when I play myself? Girls speak the answers through their dolls, and my barbies are made from scraps of bundled iron. Moko’s on metal stilts, trod through city scapes on a stage made from electronics designed for broadcasting, in the shells of broken television sets. No housekeeping needed, no home making intended, my dolls are a procession of giants walking through the city on their way home.
But what is the point of playing pretend when there is a carnival happening for you to play yuhself? I plunge into a sea of “could be's'' staring at my reflection on irreparable TV screens. Who could I be from these scraps of broken technology? Answers flood in across the unplugged screen.The images flicker, fade and reframe my face, like changing channels, switching stories, but always, the main character remains the same. I begin the dive to find the me that flies, choosing from one of my reflections on the everchanging slide.
I get to work building a costume for my escape. My heart speaks through my hands and I join the other ironworkers in a frenzy of work that is play. Musicians, stage fabricators and mas men alike, the core of their tools are made of metal of some type. My wings fashioned from sugared thumbs covered in crystallized crumbs from mummy’s coated coconut chips, smell like blood after handling all this iron in order to make it. I am reminded of the sacrifices of ancestors at the root of this living ritual. I take my lessons from the lands that made steelpan and processed scrap iron just as they extracted the sweetness from bundles of cane on the plantations. The ritual is a technology, used to make melody and weaponry alike. The iron speaks to me, it tells me what is my mask, what I must set free in these streets tonight. Tonight I skipped the pollinating for play and soar into town to commemorate freedom with mas. I set my sights on the Jouvay stage, to be reborn in the reaching light, as the sun rises on this Monday morning, in all its might.
