CARIFESTA IX 2006.

The people of the Caribbean region share a common history: one that is marked by a resistance struggle that has not only opposed, even defied, the dehumanising systems of enslavement, indenture and colonialism but that has mandated us to realise a more fruitful way of human relating than that instituted and cultivated by those systems. Our arts have been in the forefront of both the resistance to the imposed order and the envisioning of a new human world.

Any new vision of CARIFESTA must see it as a festival that (1) showcases Caribbean art and culture (2) gives impetus for development of the arts (3) facilitate and encourage artistic and intellectual exchanges within the region, as well as (4) benefit countries in the region in relation to trade and tourism.

CARIFESTA seizes the opportunity to establish balance in the arts of the region, between the intellectual/imaginative /contemplative and the purely entertaining, and to reclaim, from what we may describe as the culture of bacchanal, arts which have been very much part of the resistance paradigm on which Caribbean civilization has been seeking to establish itself and which provides the only basis on which Caribbean society can lay claim to an independent and unique culture.

CARIFESTA is aware that the idea of resistance as delinquency, developed in colonialism and embedded in its systems of education, justice, rewards and punishment, has never completely left our thinking and that all of what we now term folk arts and religion - Orisha, Shouters, dance, songs, the drum, steelband and the people who have created and maintained them - have been forced to establish their validity in opposition to official society’s opprobrium. This denial of status has made it easy for us to mistakenly interpret forms as well as people developed in these circumstances as part of a bacchanal culture.

Today we applaud the increasing efforts of artists and intellectuals to understand and value these forms, developed in the struggle for personhood, and to position them as part of the true heritage of all Caribbean people.

Against this background, CARIFESTA seeks to give unconditional acceptance of our people and to honour and celebrate the monumental contribution they have made in art and culture

It seeks also to make us more urgently aware that our experience and genius require that we enter the world not as spectators but as active participants in the contest of ideas that is deciding our present well being and the future of the world.

For More Photos on the Parade and villages see TriniView.com