It’s an odd image. Men wearing blond and pink wigs, fur coats, miniskirts and fishnets chat joyfully while pushing old-fashioned strollers full of beer. And they are not just a couple of lunatics. No, the city of Aalst is full of men dressed as women. Even little boys play basketball with skirts on. At the same time, an endless parade of colourful dancers flows through the city. And every bar in town is packed, playing its music so loud that you’d think it’s 2 AM in a nightclub and not an afternoon. Welcome to the Aalst carnival.
Apparently, the medieval traditions are going strong in this little orderly country where people are usually quiet and polite. Hard to believe that the same people can turn into such wild party animals.
If you think about carnivals, your thoughts probably sail towards Brazil where half-naked beauties dance to never-ending samba rhythms. Or maybe you think about Venice, the party on the canals and its fantastic masks. Who would have thought that the carnival culture here in Belgium can be just as crazy?
So if you ever happen to visit Belgium during the carnival period (February and March) make sure to pop in one of the most famous ones: Aalst in the Flemish part of Belgium, or Binche in Wallonia.
Will the carnival be cancelled?
When we left the house this stormy morning, my expectations were not super high. The biggest cause of worry was the storm. In February it looked like not a week could pass without a storm: Ciara, Dennis, Ellen and Francis kept us looking out of our windows, admiring flying plastic bags. Trash usually covered the streets and a traffic sign here or there had fallen over. Nothing too bad, but not recommended to go out at that time.
We spent our morning eating breakfast and listening to the news. Will they cancel the Aalst carnival this year? One by one, the smaller towns announced that they were not going risk the wellbeing of hundreds of people and they postponed their event.
There were two kinds of thoughts in my head. On one hand, I wanted to see the carnival. I had never seen one. On the other hand, the weather outside looked lousy. It was one of those grey Sundays on which I’d prefer just to stay in all day doing nothing and hoping Monday will never come. The sky was grey, it was raining, and the occasional wind bent the trees in people’s yards.
On top of the weather worries, my expectations were low. I imagined the Aalst carnival to be a family event, a bunch of children in costumes running around and catching candies. Nothing like Hunter S. Thompson described in his The Rum Diary – ecstatic drinking and dancing on the streets, somewhere on St. Thomas Island in the middle of the Caribbean sea.
They didn’t cancel the Aalst carnival, so we went in spite of the weather. As always, the strength of the wind made us speechless. It was even a bit scary. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone? Maybe the other towns were right, cancelling their carnivals? Even whilst buying the train ticket, we were not completely convinced that it was a good idea.
In the end, we still stepped on the train, because who knows where would we be next year at the same time? And in the light of the current corona crisis, we probably did the right thing. There is no point to postpone anything — we just don’t know what tomorrow will bring.
Every new station brought more costumed people on the train, fairies, men dressed as women, women with wigs and funny hats. At one point I just had to ask it: “Tom, shouldn’t we wear costumes too?” But Tom only shook his head saying it’s not his thing.
Aalst, the city with no charm
We had been in Aalst before as part of our GR5A hike from Antwerp to the coast and back. It is not the kind of town you’d fall in love with at first sight. Quite the opposite. It’s the kind of town where you step in the bar, and everyone looks at you. Like these places have never seen an unfamiliar face. Quite intimidating! On our second visit, we passed by on Saturday morning when families made walks and half-full beer glasses sat on top of the public toilets. But the grey city has his charm as well. For example, stepping in a local cathedral you can admire one of Rubens’ paintings. Not bad, is it?
This time around Aalst was a bit busier than usual. Girls dressed in matching costumes searched their places in the parade, and even some audience had gathered despite the terrible weather.
Political correctness out of the window
The start of the Aalst carnival reminded me of an old, not well-oiled machine that people tried to get running. It was slow. The people in the audience jumped from one leg to another because of the cold. Children in the parade were wrapped in transparent raincoats, and the corners of their mouths were down. They didn’t look happy to be there.
The parade itself didn’t differ from any other parade, though the big papier-mâché faces made it interesting. The participants made fun of everything and not only orthodox jews like the media likes to emphasise. They also mocked the catholic church, UNESCO, the coronavirus, the royal family and an ex-mayor famous for having sex on top of a tower somewhere in Spain.
After all, there would be no carnival if it wouldn’t tear down the hierarchy of our society, if it tried to stay politically correct. Carnival is, as Mikhail Bakhtin says in his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, not a real-world, but “the world standing on its head”, an upside-down world. So whoever thinks that we should start to censor jokes, should take a better look at the four categories that describe carnival in Bakhtin’s opinion:
- People are free and familiar with each other, even the ones who don’t communicate in their everyday lives.
- You can be however crazy you like. Whatever is unacceptable in everyday life is fine in the carnival. So go ahead and discover these hidden sides within yourself. There will be, or shouldn’t be any consequences.
- Carnival allows you to connect things that are normally not connected. Sacred and profane, new and old, high and low.
- Carnival for Bakhtin is ungodliness, which means that it’s the time to parody all things sacred.
It’s the one time you can throw the political correctness out of the window, paint your face black, wear a rice farmer hat or jew’s hooked nose, make yourself fat. And it’s fine because everyone knows that it’s a celebration of the diversity of humankind, not an act of hatred. What the media and politicians should understand is that when people are laughing about authority, and things you shouldn’t normally laugh about, this doesn’t mean that people would like to live an endless carnival life because the carnival life is as impotent as an ideology as any official seriousness.
So what kind of humour can you find in Aalst carnival? Here are a few examples. In one group, nuns returned from their mission in Africa. But the nuns had big transparent bellies, and in these bellies, you could see little black children.
Another float depicted Netflix as a religion, which it is, thinking about how religiously we always pay our monthly subscription and bow down to everything they try to show us. Heck, we don’t even have to choose how we would like to be entertained. It’s enough just to open our mouths and Netflix will feed us.
Nightclub with babies and ladies with walkers
When it started to rain, we decided to find a cover. Pretty soon we found ourselves in a dark bar where carnival music broke our eardrums, and the floor bounced under the dancers’ feet. It was just after lunchtime.
The dancers were quite characters. The most colourful of them were two men, one wearing a light pink tutu that went nicely with his hairy legs. The other one had a blond wig, fishnets, and he rolled around with his walker.
Music was so loud that it was impossible to talk. The atmosphere was more like that of a nightclub. When it started to rain heavily, more people found their way into this run down establishment. Families sat down around the bar tables. Next to me sat a young woman with a crying baby. Men, dressed like Rubens painted her husband’s face. The scene in a bar was something I’d never seen before. It honestly felt like all hell had broken loose in this godforsaken town.
The borders were no more
When we walked on a wide road covered with a thick mass of wet confetti, we saw the last act of the show. Or so we thought. A group of cleaners in orange costumes swiped up the road. We sipped our free beers and said goodbye to the carnival.
But apparently, we had counted something wrong. When it got dark, it became evident that the carnival was far from finished. On the contrary. Performers costumes lit up, and even their dance movements had a different energy. Bells rang, music thumped and the lights on the performers’ costumes drew patterns in the night air. Looking at the dancers, you couldn’t meet their eyes. It looked like they were deep in their thoughts, or somewhere very far from here, just as trance dancers. It felt like something else moved them forward. As if they were drunk, or had taken drugs, they were marionettes on someone’s else’s hands. And this strange energy had a funny effect, it felt like it was pulling me along as well.
The whole parade felt like one huge body, made of hundreds of people, moving in synchrony and I’m quite surprised how I didn’t join in. It was like a centrifuge pulling everyone in. Mikhail Bakhtin explains that carnival is not a performance, and it doesn’t differentiate the spectator and a performer. All people taking part in it “live it”. And that was exactly how it felt.
And the party goes on
More and more people appeared on the streets. Walking was not so easy anymore. We often had to step over the people who sat on wet asphalt. Streets were fenced off, so the human crowd flowed like a river, all in one direction. Windows on the streets were open. People were partying in their apartments, while being also part of the celebration in the streets.
Probably that is the charm of a carnival. It is something that you feel in your bones, that forces you to move with it, and feel how you’re part of something bigger.
In the end, we were exhausted. Even though the end, which we thought we saw already hours ago, was nowhere near, we had to separate ourselves from that ever-moving dragon. To turn back to the real world, leaving the people of Aalst to party on for the rest of the remaining four days. After the parade, they’d to go to a bar, then sleep a couple of hours and then it all starts from the beginning.
Tips for visiting Aalst Carnival
- It’s a free event.
- You can wear whatever you wish.
- Nobody is checking your bags. Bring your drinks to spend less. And your food if you’re vegetarian.
- If you need to get away from the crowds, you can visit Stadspark (city park) or nice nature in Osbroek.
- Aalst is 50 minutes train ride away from Brussels.