Carolyn Cooper | Gleaner promoting literacy in fi wi language

“Mi haffi come out fi look something fi eat.” Two Sundays ago, that was the headline of the number two story in The Gleaner’s top 10. It was a heartbreaking report by Sashana Small on young boys hustling as windscreen wipers. Some of them are on the street as late as 1:00 a.m., trying to scrape together enough money to survive.

Sanjay Green (not his real name) admitted that his road work affects his attendance at school: “Mi come out ya Friday morning when mi nah go school.” Even when he does go to school the negative effects of his late nights are obvious: “Sometimes mi wah sleep. Sometimes mi all sleep out di whole class.” The primary language of the article was English. But the boys’ stories were documented in their own eloquent words in the Jamaican language. The Gleaner gave voice and visibility to marginalised youth.

My column that week, “Mi lose offa Lisa Hanna”, was also one of the top10 stories. It was written mostly in the Jamaican language. I suppose Hanna’s name attracted attention. But the rest of the headline made it clear that the language was not English. All the same, enough readers clicked on the column to push it into the top 10. It was at the very bottom of the list. But that didn’t matter. It was there. Quite a victory for the language!

(W)UMAN TONGUE)

In the 1990s, I wrote a bilingual column for The Jamaica Observer: one week in English, the other in Jamaican. I called it (W)uman Tong(ue). I suffered so much abuse from angry readers. They resented the high profile I was giving the Jamaican language, which they had been taught to despise. A classic example is Sean Reid whose letter to the editor was published in 1995 with this headline, “Utter Rubbish, Dr Cooper”. Reid dissed his own language:

“It grieves me to take up this newspaper and see the writing of Dr Carolyn Cooper. It leaves me to ask the question, is Dr Carolyn Cooper trying to spoil the beautiful English language which we Jamaicans are trying to catch up with?

The reason why we speak patois is because our forefathers had problems communicating with their slave masters.

Now that is behind us – and we are moving to a frontier where English is the key language, why then should we go backwards?”

Despite all the negativity, I persisted in celebrating the creativity of our African ancestors who fashioned a new hybrid language in Jamaica. They transformed the vocabulary of English to suit the sounds and grammar of their original languages. And they kept some of their own words. Far from being backward, these forward-thinking Africans adapted to the circumstances in which they found themselves.

After writing for The Observer for almost five years, I fell out with the opinion editor. It was not over my use of the Jamaican language. It was partisan politics. That’s another story. It’s on my blog, in three parts. Here’s the first:

https://carolynjoycooper.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/perkins-seaga-and-the-...

CHAVEZ DUPPY DREAM SISTA P

In 2009, I was invited to write a column for The Sunday Gleaner. It was assumed that the language would be exclusively English. It did not occur to me, or the opinion editor, that I would want to write in Jamaican as well. The language kept creeping into the columns. But it was dismissed as inappropriate for the op-ed page. After much negotiating, I was permitted to write one column per month in Jamaican.

My first column in the language was, “Chávez duppy dream Sista P”, published on March 17, 2013. There was a barrage of hostile comments on the website. The first was, “total waste of precious gleaner space”. The next was, “have no idea what she saying, patois is easier to talk than read. waste of time”. Then, there was, “English, please! I am 100% Jamaican and i cannot read this.” This was followed by, “I haven’t a clue what she is trying to say....”

In response to that self-satisfied admission, there came a voice of sanity:

“Well, it is one of 2 things: You are either not as literate as you think you are, or you are lying. Something tells me you wouldn’t be so proudly ignorant if the language was one of those spoken by the ‘superior’ peoples some worship, though. On the off chance that you are somewhat illiterate, she is making some points that you clearly agree with: The NHT money shouldn’t be touched and the delegation to the Chavez funeral was too large.”

JAMAICAN LANGUAGE UNIT

Over the decade of writing the monthly column, there have been substantial advancements in public perception of the Jamaican language. This is due largely to the work of the Jamaican Language Unit (JLU), which was established at The University of the West Indies, Mona in 2002 under the visionary leadership of Professor Hubert Devonish.

The JLU has published a book, Writing Jamaican the Jamaican Way/Ou fi Rait Jamiekan, which outlines the Cassidy-JLU writing system, which I call prapa-prapa. The Unit occasionally runs free workshops for teaching the writing system to the public. Dr Joseph Farquharson, who now heads the JLU, is advancing the mission of language education.

Social media have also played a major role in raising the profile of the Jamaican language. All those memes and Tik-Tok videos! Legacy media, like The Gleaner, have to catch up. And if we want boys like Sanjay to stay awake in school, we must ensure that they’re not hungry. And we must take their language seriously in the classroom.

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