Stick Fights and Ritual Confrontations
Central to the festival
for Wosir, was a symbolic battle between the two opposing forces. This battle
took the form of a ritual warrior dance using cudgels. It was the original
stick fight. The Greek historian, Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century B.C.E.,
reports that he was told that sometimes the play acting got so real that people
would end up with a bus’ head.
What goes on in the
gayelle of our Trinidad and Tobago tradition is really a ritual dance, a
theatrical performance reenacting the original cosmic confrontation, the
creative confrontation, the cosmic clash between the Ying and the Yang. It is
out of this basic clash that creation takes place. The ancient Africans taught
all mankind the fundamental law of the universe. The stick fight is a
reenactment of this basic law. The bull fight is another form of this
reenactment.
All of the Carnivals in
the Americas have a confrontation at their center. In the Carnival of
Barranquilla, Colombia, the confrontation between the various groups takes the
form of a make-belief battle. In our Carnival, there are many kinds of ritual
confrontations which take the form of a dance. The dragon dance is one of these
and represents the clash of good versus evil. The many devil characters, the
jab-jabs [diable-diable], play out
other representations of the clash between good and evil.
TO BE CONTINUED
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