MAS BAND

Not mass band, not massed bands, but masked bands called MAS.

Mas bands draw a million people to Toronto every summer during the Caribana™ festival, boosting the economy by hundreds of millions of dollars, and boosting summer spirits in the city with their inventive, polychromatic floats and lively dancing. It’s the largest Caribbean festival in the world, based on the original one in Trinidad.

Mas is a Caribbean short form of masquerade. In its widest sense, mas can refer to the carnival or festival itself, then to the procession or parade, and finally, in its most focused meaning, to one of the bands themselves.

Toronto ’s Caribana™ is almost thirty years old and is solely responsible for introducing non-Caribbean Canadians to the joys of mas. A mas band is a group of people who work together to create intricate costumes, floats, and road dances. Some years at Caribana™ more than thirty-five separate mas groups take part in the parade.

Etymology of Masquerade & Mascara & Mask

Masquerade is a word borrowed into standard English from early French, which in turn picked it up from Italian mascherata, itself from an Italian word maschera which is the source of “mask” and “masque.” Music lovers will know Un Ballo in Maschera (Italian ‘A Masked Ball ’) an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. Mascherata came into the early Sicilian dialect of Italian when Sicily was ruled by the Moors who spoke Arabic. One Arabic word for buffoon is máskharat. Its Arabic verbal root is maskara ‘to ridicule, mock’ with interesting related words like the Arabic noun mask ‘transformation, metamorphosis’ and the Arabic adjective mask ‘transformed into an animal.’ The last adjective is also used as a noun in Arabic to mean ‘freak, monster.’ Among other semantic resonances, these meanings all relate to ancient clowning rites. Professional buffoons in every culture dress up, imitate totemic animals, cavort, mock those in power, and often wear heavy comic makeup. When the Arabic word máskharat traveled farther north in Italy, it made a stop in Tuscany where it was used to name a colour, “Tuscan red” which became a favourite hue for darkening the eyelashes. That resulted in our current word for eyelash cosmetic, mascara—not so far away from the antic spirit of Caribbean mas bands brightening a summer day in Toronto, Ontario.