The Imperative of “Human Happiness”

None more aptly describes a TransAmerican art and Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic than Trinidadian journalist, Marxist, and Black feminist Claudia Jones (1915-1964) whose life and work traversed the Caribbean, the United States, and Great Britain in London’s Notting Hill Carnival. Jones organized the first Notting Hill Carnival on January 30, 1959, at the St. Pancras Town Hall in Notting Hill, London, England, in response to the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, which was a series of racial attacks on West Indians from August 29 to September 5, 1958. After the wave of West Indians, called the “Windrush generation” arrived in Tilbury Docks, England on board their namesake ship, the Empire Windrush on June 22, 1948, West Indians experienced racial tensions and attacks in the first decade of rebuilding Great Britain after World War II, culminating in the 1958 Notting Hill race riots. Jones said, “We need something to get the taste of [the] Notting Hill [race riots] out of our mouths” (Younge 2019). Carole Boyce Davies notes that Jones wanted to create “a culture of human happiness over the ignorance and pain of racism, and indeed that it was a people’s culture that provided them with the basis for acquiring their freedom” (2008: 174). Jones used “human happiness” as an imperative in a Trinidad-style carnival, which was a mandate and urgent act of collective joy and liberation, generated from West Indian culture. Jones activated a Trinidad-style carnival that emerged from the liberatory spirit of Emancipation Day festivals on August 1, 1838, in Trinidad and Tobago when freed Africans celebrated Cannes Brûlées or Canboulay (burnt cane) and J’overt or Jouvay (daybreak). Canboulay commemorated the final burning of sugar cane during enslavement (Elder 2004:49; Martin 2004: 285). Jouvay celebrated the first day of freedom on August 1, 1838, when enslaved Africans waited all night until daybreak, shouting in jubilation, “j’overt! j’overt! j’overt!” through the streets at the first light of dawn on the first day of freedom (Lovelace 2004: 187). In the 1840s, the British colonial administration moved emancipation festivals to the pre-Lenten carnival season that morphed into today’s Trinidad Carnival, distinguished by Canboulay, Jouvay, and happiness to excess. Jones harnessed the jubilation of these events in an audacious resolve for human happiness, launching the Trinidad-style Notting Hill Carnival in January 1959, the epitome of a Caribbean Diaspora aesthetic.