Giving Miss Lou lip service

Carolyn Cooper, Contributor

Last Wednesday was Miss Lou's birthday and the usual platitudes were spouted about her valuable contribution to Jamaican society. I wonder if we really understand just how revolutionary Louise Bennett's vision was. Her advocacy of the Jamaican language challenged popular assumptions about what it meant to be black in colonial Jamaica.

This is how Miss Lou put it in a 1976 television interview: "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 people I know were not bad at all, they were nice people and they talked this language."

In the 1930s when Louise Bennett started writing poetry, black people were supposed to know their place: at the back of the tramcar. It was the assertive voice and expansive body language of a market woman on a tram that inspired Miss Lou's first 'dialect' poem:

Pread out yuhself deh Liza, one

Dress-oman dah look like seh

She see de li space side-a we

And waan foce herself een deh.

This vocal woman simply refuses to make space for someone she sees as an intruder. Spreading out the self is a vivid expression of the survival instincts of many marginalised people in Jamaica. And it is this persistent desire to occupy centre stage and 'tek up space' that Miss Lou celebrates in so many of her poems.

Louise Bennett's confident use of her mother tongue also clashed with conventional wisdom about the purpose of formal education in a British colony. For those lucky enough to get it, education was designed to lead students out of darkness into light. English was, unquestionably, the language of light. 'Dialect' was certainly not a language; using it was a clear sign of the total darkness of its speakers.

In his introduction to Louise Bennett's Selected Poems, Professor Mervyn Morris relates an amusing story. At one of Miss Lou's performances in the 1940s, someone in the audience shouted out, "A dat yuh modder sen yuh a school fa?" School was supposed to cure the disease of bad talking. Notice, though, that the heckler uses the very same language that is being mocked.

English is a second language

Nothing much has changed in half a century. Many of us still think of our mother tongue as an anonymous, despised 'dat'. And Jamaican educators still aren't taking 'dat' seriously enough. The mother tongue of the majority of Jamaicans does not yet take pride of place as a language of instruction in schools. The consequences are disastrous.

The Guyanese linguist, John Rickford, tells an all-too-familiar tale: "Way back in the 1950s, Robert Le Page, a well-known British linguist, after going to Jamaica and noticing the appalling failures in the teaching of English and other subjects in the public schools, proposed that the first year or two should be taught in Creole before standard English is introduced. One reporter in a local newspaper damned it as an insulting idea."

Instead of being insulted by Professor Le Page's perceptive recommendation, we should have taken his advice. The state of English language teaching and learning in Jamaica would have been far different now. After 50 years of using the mother tongue as a language of first instruction in schools, we would have revolutionised the curriculum.

Primary-school students in Jamaica are still not being taught English efficiently, largely because educators refuse to acknowledge the fact that English is not the mother tongue of most Jamaicans. It is a second language. And Jamaican Creole is not 'bad' English. It is a distinct language.

Tertiary-level students need remedial English because they haven't been taught the language properly. Many of them don't know the difference between English and Jamaican grammar. Yes, the Jamaican language has rules of grammar that govern the way in which sentences are constructed. Just listen to a non-native speaker whose command of the language is limited and you will immediately hear the bad grammar.

Racist ideology

Which brings me to David Starkey, the disgraced British historian. In his now-infamous rant, Starkey asserts that "black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican Patois that's been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense of, literally, a foreign country."

It's bad enough when a foreigner claims that your language is 'wholly false'. But when you yourself buy into the racist ideology, that's mental slavery. On that score, I was intrigued by last Monday's Gleaner editorial headlined 'David Starkey and the power of Jamaica'. Misquoting Starkey, the editorial deleted the 'wholly false' reference.

The writer did concede that "language and culture are likely to be the tool of choice of colonisation". But the puzzling editorial did not pay sufficient attention to our own language as a medium of empowerment. It's all very well and good for us to colonise England with our 'wholly false' language. It's even more important to claim our 'true-true' mother tongue at home.

As Miss Lou put it so eloquently: "Like my Aunty Roachy seh, she vex anytime she hear people a come style fi wi Jamaican language as 'corruption' a di English language. Yu ever hear anyting go so? Aunty Roachy seh she no know weh mek dem no call di English language 'corruption' a di Norman French an di Greek an di Latin weh dem seh English 'derived from'. Unu hear di word? English 'derive' but Jamaica 'corrupt'. No, massa, notn no go so. We not 'corrupt' an dem 'derive.' We derive to. Jamaica derive."

High time fi stop gi Miss Lou so-so lip service.

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.