“I’m gonna go get a Jamaican patty!”
Annoyingly, it’s cold and rainy this August. My tassled crop top is soaked with rainwater, my hair is out, and the air is saturated with weed and sweat. Lily Allen is on stage, but we can’t hear her because the rain blew out the sound system. My white friends walk over to the food stall. I hadn’t known or realised that patties were Jamaican at all — the only place I’d ever eaten them was at Nanny’s house.
Founded in 1966, Notting Hill Carnival is an annual event that graces August bank holiday weekend, on the streets of west London, of all places. The way I see it now, when I was a child, Carnival was a chance to interact with my culture — it was something I went to on the weekend that I wouldn’t bother explaining on the Tuesday when I came back to my majority-white school. From what I remember, it was about blackness: we’d wear red, green and black bandanas and whistles, and eat the food we usually only saw at home on the table.
But my impression of Carnival is also scattered; I was too young to think much about racial dynamics when I used to go, and I stopped going for most of my teen years — it wasn’t on my radar: house parties were. I was 19 when my white friends started asking if I wanted to come along to Carnival. I was confused. When did it become cool? Or did white people always go? As a result of this, my image of Carnival is that it’s seen the effects of gentrification, and perhaps its cultural counterpart: appropriation. But I’m not sure, because I my attendance hasn’t been consistent, and my memories of the event from childhood are hazy. I asked my mother to gauge what she thought.
The first thing I was interested in was whether Carnival was an event she saw as an intrinsic part of our culture, something she had ownership over, or whether it had actually always been an event highly attended by white people. Why did she take me? Was it just a fun day out, or was it about culture and history?
“This is what we do. I wanted my children to see what we do.” Mum is staunch in her tone. She told me that her mother had taken her every year without fail, and all of her West Indian friends would go too. It was a predominantly black-attended event. “My English friends didn’t go. They would have no interest in it. Whatsoever.”
My Nanny, my mum’s mum, wanted my mum to see what happens in the West Indies. Mum keeps saying “what we do”, and I think that’s vital — it touches on a concern of so many immigrant families. How do you raise your child with a sense of their background and culture in a majority-white society? This way, at least, something is annually scheduled in.
The sound of steel pans is nostalgic for me. My mum says that her next door neighbour growing up on Brooke Road, in Clapton, was the only steel pan producer in the UK. We always had kids’ steel pans knocking around the house, with the notes painted on them in primary colours. An important part of Carnival for Nanny was giving my mum an opportunity to listen to them. That characteristic was the most memorable part of Carnival in Antigua — my mum tells me there was a carnival on every island, which I never knew. At Carnival in the UK, there are warehouses that you can go into and watch dancers perform to calypso music. “But in the West Indies, they’re football stadiums,” Mum explained. It’s an event on a different scale.
The houses in Notting Hill are tall and white, with pillars. Mum says that back in the ’70s she’d wander down the side roads and sometimes the homes, which would house up to six or seven working-class black families, would open their doors and the kids and parents would come down and sit on the steps. “I felt really privileged, because after a day of walking around, if we were feeling tired, we could just go upstairs to mum’s friends’.”
Carnival was one of the only places mum could hear her music. “The only other place I could hear it was David Rodigan, between 12:00 and 15:00 on a Sunday.” She recites this like it’s imprinted on her brain. If they were going out, her friends and family would try to get home for that time so they could hear it.
But for one weekend, on the streets, you could hear reggae, dub, soul, lovers rock. Mum says there weren’t even clubs you could go to to hear “black music”; it was still the days of blues parties, which were essentially parties where Caribbean people would host their own informal, illegal, club nights in their living rooms or basements. So Carnival was very special for her — the freedom of being able to dance around in the streets, seeing and buying Caribbean food.
Last summer I decided not to go. In the middle of a bout of anxiety, I had a weird feeling something bad was going to happen. It turned out that acid was in fact thrown on five people in a crowd, and reported on widely. There’s coverage like this every year, although I’m unsure of whether, in reality, violence is widespread or at levels that are to be expected at any big event or festival. It’s no secret that people use drugs there, but it’s also no secret that people use them at Glastonbury. But the demographic is different, so the way we report on it and talk about it is different too.
Riots started happening at Carnival in the ’70s. “I think that must’ve been ’79,” my mum recalls.“I remember walking down Ladbroke Grove with my mum, and seeing the big bags of bottles that people had laid down, so that when the police — [she says in a West Indian accent] Babylon — came down the street, people could get them and throw them at them. They were upset about the way that things were being cordoned off.” Now Carnival is riddled with more bureaucracy and organisation: it has permits, barriers, and designated routes.
Violence at Carnival is often discussed as if it’s something inherent to Caribbean people, or black people, but the way Mum relays people’s reactions to it, it sounds as if it was symptomatic of the structures, and climate, of the UK. The older people, first generation immigrants, stopped going. She puts on my Nanny’s thick Antiguan accent: “Mi cyaan ron [I can’t run]. Mi not going dose kinda places — you don’t get dat in the West Indies.” This year, for the first time, there will be metal detectors, with the aim of curbing knife crime.
Attending Carnival, it’s important to think about how it’s changing, and how we participate in those changes. Post-Windrush scandal, it’s a sacred space. I’m cautious of the images we’ve seen of older Caribbean people on the news since the scandal broke, who have won the sympathy of a large part of the general public — elderly people with gentle West Indian accents addressing the camera from cosy living rooms with net curtains. But Caribbean boys are still largely negatively portrayed in the media around Carnival weekend, and I’d argue more so than young white boys. A focus on violence is fuelled by racism, and it’s important to be conscious of who we collectively allow to have fun without criticism, and whose fun we demonise.
At its heart, it’s a weekend where we as Caribbean people get to be ourselves and embrace our history. Historically our culture and heritage has been scrambled for, erased, controlled, and regulated, but this weekend we get to reclaim and showcase it.
Mum thinks that Nanny described it best. “It’s jussa joyful time.”
This year’s Notting Hill Carnival runs from August 26th-27th.