When the holidays roll around, many people experience one of two emotions: excitement or dread. Those falling into the latter camp and hoping to escape the season altogether may want to find themselves at Junkanoo.
The essence of Junkanoo, as Arlene Nash Ferguson — who locals have dubbed the Queen of Junkanoo — explains, “is a spirit that is almost impossible to put into words.” The heartbeat of the parade pulses in Nassau, along the island nation capital’s busy Bay Street to be exact, though it is celebrated across all 16 islands.
A Junkanoo drummer wearing a cardboard decorated colorful headpiece plays a goatskin drum during the parade.“Our drummers have their drums strapped across the shoulder, they’re beating them with their hands and not with sticks. Our bellers are shaking their cowbells and so the music is right there. And when those drums ‘lick off,’ as people would say, when those drums start booming, it is just so difficult to describe,” Nash Ferguson says. “I am 72 years old.
As with many age-old stories documented by colonizers rather than the original people of the land, or those brought in and enslaved, there are gaps to fill in what likely took place. But broadly, according to Nash Ferguson, enslaved Africans were granted three days holiday during Christmas time under British law.
After the music, it’s the costumes that give Junkanoo its essence and reflect its history. And these works of wearable“When [people] come into the shack to get their costumes at the beginning of the season, it struck me that they don’t say, ‘I come to get my costume.’ They say, ‘Man, I come to get me,’ [hence the name of Nash Ferguson’s book and a way for paraders to say they’re coming to reclaim themselves],” Nash Ferguson says.
“When I started, you couldn’t tell the difference between the males’ and the females’ [costumes]. Everybody wore basically the same thing: a [cardboard] pasted pants, shirt, hat and shoulder piece,” she says. “Female costumes have now become more feminine and more delicate. You get to express yourself more correctly when you’re portraying a character.”
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