Carolyn Cooper | Paying lip service to Louise Bennett-Coverley

On September 7, 2018, a statue of Louise Bennett-Coverley was unveiled in Gordon Town Square. It was a grand occasion. Many speeches were made in honour of the distinguished cultural activist, popularly known by her stage name, ‘Miss Lou’. Her work as poet, researcher, actor, teacher, radio and television personality and language rights advocate was celebrated.

According to an article posted on the Jamaica Information Service website on September 9, 2018, Prime Minister Andrew Holness made this declaration at the unveiling: “What Miss Lou did, is that she was the first Jamaican to bring our language on the world stage.” This statement is not quite accurate. It all depends on what Holness meant by “the world stage”.

In 1945, Louise Bennett went to England on a British Council scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Later that year, she was invited to host ‘Caribbean Carnival’. That was a radio programme broadcast on the BBC Overseas Service, which was originally named the BBC Empire Service. Its audience was English speakers across the Empire. Louise Bennett colonised the BBC in reverse by using the Jamaican language on her show.

But before Louise Bennett, there was Claude McKay. In 1912, his books of poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads were published simultaneously in Kingston and London. They were written in the Jamaican language. In addition, Una Marson’s play, Pocomania, was first staged at the Ward Theatre in 1938 and also performed in Lagos, Nigeria. Marson included characters who spoke Jamaican. Some of her poems were also written in Jamaican. There were even earlier books which reproduced our language, several of them published in London. The Jamaican linguists Jean D’Costa and Barbara Lalla compiled extracts from many of these in Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the 18th and 19th Centuries.

One of my favourite characters from that collection is Old John. He issues this challenge: “I don’t know much ‘bout book, but I tell you what me fren, I is a man wid a terrible long head, I can tell you, and de man dat want fe mek me a fool, mek him come.” Old John appears in Henry G. Murray’s Manners and Customs of the Country a Generation Ago: Tom Kittle’s Wake, published in Kingston in 1877. The length of Old John’s head signifies his mental sharpness and excellent memory.

NOTHING BUT ‘BAD ENGLISH’

Andrew Holness is quite right to acknowledge that the Jamaican language is, in fact, a language. So many fanatics still stubbornly refuse to dignify the language with that name. They dismiss it as the non-language of uneducated Jamaicans, like Old John, who are presumed to be intellectually inferior because they do not speak English. The Jamaican language is discounted as nothing but ‘bad English,’ unworthy of serious attention.

In an interview with Don Bucknor that was broadcast on JBC in October 1976, Louise Bennett-Coverley challenged that perception: “When I was a child nearly everything about us was bad, you know; they would tell yuh seh yuh have bad hair, that black people bad ... and that the language yuh talk was bad. And I know that a lot of the people I knew were not bad at all, they were nice people and they talked this language ...”

It is not enough for politicians like Andrew Holness to pay lip service to Louise Bennett-Coverley for “bring[ing] our language on the world stage”. The Jamaican language must be brought into the primary school curriculum in Jamaica. Children whose first and only language is Jamaican are at a grave disadvantage in school if the only medium of instruction is English. Bilingual education is essential for these students if they are to excel.

Neither the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) nor the People’s National Party (PNP) has managed to establish a policy for bilingual primary education. In 2007, Andrew Holness became minister of education. During his tenure, the Jamaican Language Unit (JLU) at The University of the West Indies, Mona, headed by Professor Hubert Devonish, was invited to give a report to a senior policy group, chaired by the minister, on the successful bilingual education project that had been completed.

Professor Devonish proposed that the experimental programme be scaled up to cover a larger number of schools, with the goal of national implementation. The recommendation was rejected. The JLU gave all the teaching materials and associated research findings to the ministry for review. Almost a decade and a half later, nothing has come of this excellent work. Are both political parties unconcerned about the fact that so many students leave secondary school with limited competence in English?

Recently, the PNP announced their commitment to educating children in their first language. Apparently, they are now prepared to do what they failed to accomplish in their four straight terms in office from 1989 to 2007. In June, Dr Angela Brown Burke declared in her contribution to the Sectoral Debate in Parliament, “We fully support the official position of UNESCO, since 1953, that children should be educated in the language of the home, their native language.” Is this pure talk?

GOOGLE DOODLE OF MISS LOU

To mark Louise Bennett-Coverley’s birthday on September 7, Google put her on the international stage with a clever doodle illustrated by Jamaican artist Robyn Smith. It evoked her ‘Ring Ding’ TV programme. Here’s the link to the doodle: https://www.google.com/doodles/louise-miss-lou-bennett-coverleys-103rd-b...

Thanks to Fabian Coverley, I got in touch with a Google spokesperson who told me how the doodle came about: “The idea to celebrate Miss Lou with a Google Doodle came from a Jamaican Googler during our annual Doodle idea submission period. While there are many considerations, overall the Doodle selection process aims to celebrate a diverse mix of topics that reflect Google’s personality, teach people something new, and most importantly, are meaningful to local culture.”

One of the most meaningful aspects of Louise Bennett-Coverley’s prolific career was her validation of fi wi language. On Saturday, October 15, the inaugural Louise Bennett-Coverley festival will be held in Gordon Town at the square renamed in her honour. Music, dance, poetry, storytelling and drama will take centre stage. There will be a couple of speeches by politicians. Hopefully, it won’t be all lip service!

Carolyn Cooper, PhD, is a teacher of English language and literature and a specialist on culture and development. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and karokupa@gmail.com.