Masqueraders of Vulgar Fraction's "Kongo Déy” gather in Port of Spain, Trinidad on Carnival Tuesday (March 4), with lead designer Robert Young, center-left, in all green. (Courtesy of Maria Nunes)
With flowy skirts and pants made of shredded banana trees, simple cotton cloths tied around their faces as masks, and cardboard cutouts of computer chips hanging around their necks, Vulgar Fraction, a “misfit” band (group) of masqueraders, stands out among the river of mass-produced bejeweled bikinis, shorts, and feathers that has become the dominant image of Trinidad and Tobago’s contemporary Carnival celebrations.
Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, enslaved African populations, first excluded from the pre-Lenten festivities of French plantation owners and then forced by British colonizers to suppress gatherings with song and drums, defied attempts at cultural marginalization by harnessing music, dance, and costumes to mock their oppressors and reclaim space for communal celebration.
For Robert Young, lead costume designer of mas band Vulgar Fraction, political resistance is at the core of the costumes he presents each year. This history of protest is far from the minds of many tourists and locals alike, for whom “playing mas”—i.e. participating in the Carnival “masquerade”—represents two days of non-stop partying alongside trucks serving bottomless alcohol and a never-ending loop of the year’s most popular soca songs. For Robert Young, lead costume designer of mas band Vulgar Fraction, political resistance is at the core of the costumes he presents each year.
Young, the son of labor union organizers, said it was natural for him to incorporate the social consciousness of his household into his work as an artist. In this conversation, Young explains how Vulgar Fraction resists the hyper-commercialization of modern-day Carnival celebrations in Trinidad and Tobago and why mas is an ideal art form to engage critically with local and global political concerns. “Kongo Déy,” the theme of Vulgar Fraction’s costumes for the 2025 Carnival parade, critiques the silent exploitation of the Congo region, whose minerals sustain the electronics industry.
We talked over the phone just a week before Vulgar Fraction was set to hit the road in Young’s costumes.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Khalea Robertson: Can you tell me a little bit about your entry into mas making?
Robert Young: Sometime in the late 1970s, I made a mask at school, came home, and put it on. People got petrified by it because I lived in a village. So that made me do that regularly, even outside of Carnival. As a 14-year-old boy, I wanted to get attention and terrify people.
The first time I played J’ouvert (a pre-dawn Carnival celebration involving mud and paint) was in 1981 in Port of Spain, and I made my own mask. From then, I only played in Peter Minshall’s band. (Author’s note: Peter Minshall is a legendary Carnival artist in Trinidad and Tobago, revered for his technical innovations in costume design and the sociopolitical commentary in his mas presentations.) I played in the last part of his trilogy, “Lords of Light and Princes of Darkness.” I played in the Princes of Darkness and I worked on making that costume. Also, the year before it, I worked on [Minshall’s presentation] “Callaloo.” I worked on the Adoration of Madam Hiroshima (a large, mushroom cloud-shaped costume for the band’s “queen” that symbolized humans’ penchant for destruction). That was the first time I worked on making mas in a big way.
KR: How did these experiences shape your decision to form Vulgar Fraction? What inspired the political ethos of the project?
RY: Vulgar Fraction got named somewhere in the late 1990s. I like to engage with people. There was a year—I think it was around the time of the Iraq War—I made a little manifesto with information about the war. There were two or four or six people with me, but then we came to 12.
I used to call the band an independent band of independent players or mas makers. You could be your own band in the band. So Vulgar Fraction was a collection of these misfits… all artists. And we basically walked around because we didn't have music.
The year they found the bones of the Indigenous people and the artifacts in the Red House grounds [while renovating Trinidad and Tobago’s parliament building] I said, “shit, boy, this is fucked up…They will build a house of government on top of an Indigenous sacred ground?”
My grandfather told me we had Indigenous blood when I met him. So Vulgar Fraction’s presentation in 2014 was called “Black I,” and I am the Black Indian.
Vulgar Fraction's 2024 presentation, "Isabày: Bear With-ness," which aimed to display solidarity with Palestine. Two "moko jumbies" (stilt walkers) are seated while two regular masqueraders and a member of the public walk by. (Khalea Robertson)
KR: We see segregation very literally during the Carnival parades, with bands cordoned off from the rest of the public with ropes held by security guards. How do you get around that?
RY: We don't understand the class warfare that happens there. Because you spend the money and you get to wine and jam in the creature comforts of the wealthy. A friend of mine is massaging people on Carnival day. There are places you could go to on Carnival day and swim in a swimming pool, get a massage, lie down and rest, and get your makeup redone. What the fuck?
KR: How do you find masqueraders for your band, given that so many mas bands these days offer luxury packages of unlimited drinks, meals, private security, and even massages?
RY: We’re going to get people to fall in. I don’t know how many people are playing this year yet. But people are going to get here by Saturday. And by Sunday. And by Monday. And sometimes Tuesday morning. That's how it is.
Carnival happens when people say, “leh we do a band.” (“let’s make costumes together”). But it then became that bands have to be like Nike, like a brand. But there were many small bands all over Port of Spain. Those things have become less and less common here. That's the kind of thing that is driving me. How could I make something that is alternative?
The mas I do is all the things I do before the band is on the road. Like, I’m going to interview [cultural historian] Maureen Warner-Lewis. That is a mas we’re going to play. Because this business about [what’s going on in] the Congo, I’m trying to figure it out myself. The reason why I had all the researchers give their input was because I'm lazy, I didn't do research before. So I'm getting the research presented to me and to the public too at the same time. Because it's hidden in plain sight, it's invisible.
KR: Let’s continue on that topic. How did you land on the concept of Vulgar Fraction’s 2025 theme “Kongo Déy”? And what goes into creating the costumes for it?
RY: I found out that one-third of the enslaved people that came into the Americas were from [the historical Kingdom of] Kongo. So it's just the speculation of this “Congo-ness” and why it's invisible to me. The Haitian Revolution only happened because of Kongo people going into Haiti, because they understood warfare. They were able to help the people who were enslaved longer than they were.
All the attributes of working-class people, of Blackness, all the tropes of Caribbean culture, of Black people in the Caribbean, are Congo traits, are Congo ways of being.All the attributes of working-class people, of Blackness, all the tropes of Caribbean culture, of Black people in the Caribbean, are Congo traits, are Congo ways of being. I am my own person, I will drink when I want. If I’m going out my door and I feel I should stay home, I'll go back and stay home, because I answer to myself. That was all ways of resistance.
I don't know what the costume is going to look like [on the day of the parade]. I pull all the components together and then the accident of Carnival happens. The costumes that are offered are my iterations of it, but each player has to interpret the costume themselves. I will provide you components like a jumper, paint, materials for a flag. The mask is what we will make. If there’s a skirt, we provide the skirt. Then you see what you do with that.
[The original idea was] “Cobalt Red” as the name of the presentation. It was going to be blood-red, cobalt blue, and mud as the colors, with the banana leaves and with components of computer parts. Then I said, “Congo day, one day Congo will have their day.” But “day” could be D-E-Y. Congo is there. It's over there and it's here in my phone. It's in my battery. It's in my blood. It's in my food and my wine and spaces that I don't know. It's invisible, but ever present all through the Americas.
KR: Why do you see Carnival as the appropriate space to have these political conversations?
RY: Carnival is always political. Carnival is one of the few spaces where you can do something.
When I did the band “NUFF” (an homage to the National Union of Freedom Fighters, a Black Power guerilla group in Trinidad during the 1970s), I was afraid to do it because NUFF was people picking up guns against the state. I could’ve lost my U.S. visa, all kinds of things for that, but Carnival gives the permission to do that in a kind of “Oh, that’s just Black people playing [around].”
That is why when we did the theme “Isabày: Bear With-ness” [to raise awareness of the war on Gaza] and groups asked us after, “Could you come and protest in front of the U.S. embassy?” I said no. We did our thing in Carnival, that is what we do. We ain’t doing nothing else.
Wendell Manwarren [of the rapso group 3Canal] says to me, “Robert, this band needs to be 100 people.” I can’t do the marketing for that and I’m not interested. Capitalism requires brightness and a certain kind of bigness. And I’m deliberately small. And a certain level of chaos is injected deliberately, because it's me and because I can't do it differently.
Khalea Robertson is a journalist and researcher from Trinidad and Tobago. She specializes in topics of migration and diaspora—particularly from and within the Caribbean and Latin America—but is generally interested in human stories that examine the realities of class, race, and gender inequalities, wherever they may be.
