Historian and cultural thinker Dr. Anthea Octave has offered a compelling re-examination of Saint Lucia’s Carnival history and cultural significance, urging audiences to move beyond surface-level understandings of the annual festivity. Her lecture, delivered during a recent cultural symposium, explored Carnival as a layered phenomenonsimultaneously artistic, political, economic, and spiritual.
“Contemporary Carnivals are layered terrains,” said Dr. Octave, “shaped by history, politics, performance, and play. On the road you can feel its heartbeat, a living mosaic of rhythms, energies, and interactions that have the capacity to preserve cultural memory, generate economic activity, resist dominant narratives, and accommodate the tourist gaze.”
She described culture itself as dynamic and omnidirectional: “Culture moves in all directions at once. It carries the sediments of the past, the urgencies of the present, and the dreams of the future.”
Dr. Octave began her address by tracing Carnival’s evolution in the Caribbean. She noted its colonial origins in French Roman Catholic festivities, which were later reshaped by the cultural practices of enslaved Africans. “The colonial festivity began with masquerade balls and elite gatherings, exclusive formal affairs,” she explained. “Over time, however, Carnival was profoundly transformed by the cultural practices of the enslaved Africans and their descendants.”
“Denied access to time and space within the dominant order, Afro-Caribbean communities asserted their presence,” she continued. “Following emancipation, they laid claim to the public day allowed for carnival, filling them with rituals of resistance, memory, and reinvention.”
A central theme in her presentation was a critique of the commonly accepted origin date of Saint Lucian Carnival: 1947, when a small group reportedly paraded through Castries in ragged clothes and makeshift instruments.
“That origin story never sat well with me,” Dr. Octave admitted. “Because it is well documented that carnivals are linked to masquerade energies. So what occurred in 1947 must have deeper ties in a specific Lucian masquerade psyche.” She emphasised that the spontaneous emergence was likely influenced by broader socio-political shifts. “It is not coincidental that this emergence is located in the aftermath of World War II,” she said. “So what was going on in that moment in time? What was the pressure valve that demanded loosening or release for which people took to the streets?”
She also called attention to the symbolic endpoint of that parade: “The fact that the parade ended at the home of Derek and Roddy Walcott suggests that the celebration naturally gravitated towards spaces associated with artistic and intellectual activity. This indicated the community’s intuitive understanding of carnival as cultural expression rather than mere entertainment.”
Urging further academic inquiry, she stated, “The specific moment of that spontaneous emergence has room for deeper research. Undeniably, that moment of rupture and claiming space allowed the Lucians in that space and time to be; in ways that only taking to the streets in community could express. But who were they, and what were they responding to?”
She challenged the audience to reframe Carnival not as borrowed festivity but as a cultural eruption grounded in community, resistance, and reclamation of space. “We must situate our understanding of our cultural practices within their specific historical and social context,” she said, “and thereby truly begin to plumb its meanings to the society of its emergence as well as make meaning of that which continues to resonate and find voice generations later.”
Dr. Octave concluded with a reflection on the importance of cultural memory: “The value of memory is not mainly to store information, is to consciously process it for advancement, future reference, and planning. We must never forget that colonised peoples were targeted in multiplex ways. The destruction of the memory of those who were captured and enslaved is a legacy that we live with.”
