VMBS puts a lien on love

Carolyn Cooper, Contributor

The Victoria Mutual Building Society (VMBS) has long acknowledged the fact that marriage is good for mortgages. This year, the company celebrates the 25th staging of the popular Marriage and the Family Series, which is always held in June, the traditional month of weddings and connubial bliss. All kinds of practical advice on building relationships, and, of course, buying houses is given free of cost.

To mark the silver jubilee of the annual series, there's been a special promotion billed as 'The Royal Victorian Affair'. Not quite William and Kate's, but still. Couples were invited to submit a 25-line essay outlining why they should win the prize. Much easier than getting a mortgage, I suppose. The couple who won the competition will have a grand wedding and reception in Emancipation Park today, compliments of VMBS.

I certainly hope the ceremony will not be taking place anywhere near the so-called Emancipation monument. That would definitely 'put a blight' on the affair. First of all, nakedness isn't automatically erotic. Then there's not a sign of communication between the man and the woman. They are completely passive. And there's no child to symbolise the future of emancipated Jamaica. Those hulking figures, trapped in a basin of water, definitely cannot cross the flood waters of marriage.

Incidentally, all those people who are laughing at Mr Clifton Brown for allegedly twanging on national television and saying "nobody canna cross it" (i.e. the Yallahs River), should listen again to the video. He clearly said 'cannat'. The substitution of 'a' for 'o' is a standard feature of the pronunciation of some English words by speakers of Jamaican. So Mr Brown also passionately declared: "We lack away in the wilderness." A lovely bilingual pun on 'lock' and 'lack'.

Instead of turning Mr Brown's self-confident speech into a big joke, we should be focusing on his quite legitimate complaints about the poor infrastructure that plagues St Thomas. And as for the mockery of his statement that "the bus can swim", this is just a classic example of mental slavery. We constantly equate intelligence with competence in English. But, ironically, in this instance, English and Jamaican are quite similar in the use of figures of speech. If time can fly, why can't buses swim? Mr Brown's vivid metaphor could pass for poetry in any language.

True Confessions

I must confess that several years ago, I found myself speaking quite fraudulently in public on a subject I knew very little about. I had been inveigled into giving a talk in the VMBS series on the topic, 'How to Keep the Marriage Talking'. At the time, I had no personal experience of marriage, though I had, indeed, observed the trials, tribulations and triumphs of many of my friends.

The rather persistent gentleman who talked me into giving the talk could not reasonably have been accused of holding me down and taking away my consent. I have never laid eyes on him; the seduction was purely telephonic. As a big woman, I couldn't blame anybody but myself for the seemingly compromising position in which I'd found myself. Having carelessly left myself open to persuasion, I was entirely responsible for the predicament I'd got myself into.

I was reassured to discover that the Christian marriage counsellor who chaired the second half of the evening's proceedings had, herself, never married. Three couples she had counselled shared their 'True Confessions'. Perhaps, in these affairs of the heart, the less actual experience you have, the more efficiently you can give level-headed advice. Naturally, I ended up talking about talking, rather than marriage. Pure talk. It was the only decent thing to do.

Biting Conversations

There is an innocent-sounding turn of phrase that some Jamaican women like to use to describe their male sexual partner to whom they are not legally married: 'the gentleman I am talking to': The sex act as conversation; intercourse as sex talk. Both intercourse and conversation - like sex - are words of Latin origin. One of the original meanings of conversation is the action of living together. In 16th-century English, conversation meant sexual intimacy. So I speculate that this is the origin of our Jamaican expression, the gentleman I am talking to.

Like conversation, intercourse can mean both the sex act itself, and, more generally, interaction between parties, particularly verbal interaction. 'Intercourse' comes from two Latin words 'inter' and 'currere' - 'inter' meaning 'between' and 'currere' to 'flow.' All kinds of currents, like swollen rivers that only buses can swim across!

One of the joys of teaching English in Jamaica is the stories you hear from your students. In a class on bilingualism, I was told of a married couple who had a truly remarkable problem with conversation. Out of the blue, the wife insisted that, for the sake of the children's education, she and her husband were going to operate a monolingual household.

She passed a law: the only language to be spoken in the house was English. No Jamaican, no Patwa, no dialect - whatever you call our mother tongue. After a week of silent suffering, the husband finally exploded: "Me kyaan talk di way me waan talk inna fi mi owna yaad? Dis a dyam foolishness." All of this wrapped in lots of cloth. Needless to say, that marriage did not keep on talking. The couple divorced.

Our wannabe English lady should have remembered the Jamaican proverb that warns: 'marriage have teeth and bite hot'. You had better be careful about how you talk to your partner, especially in certain delicate positions. Or you might get rather badly bitten. It's all a question of how you bow, as in defer, to your partner's wishes.

Carolyn Cooper is a professor of literary and cultural studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona. Visit her bilingual blog at http://carolynjoycooper.wordpress.com/. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and karokupa@gmail.com.