'Nah vote again!'

Carolyn Cooper, Contributor

For the last couple of weeks, The Gleaner has been running a provocative campaign. Readers have been asked to explain why they don't plan to vote. As if that is anybody's business but their own. In any case, the editors could have saved a lot of column inches by simply listening to the inflammatory song, Nah Vote Again, composed by Anthony B, one of the most fiery of our 'fire-bun' Rastafari DJs. It appears on his 1997 CD, Universal Struggle.

This is how Anthony B states his case:

See it ya now

Everything crash

Wha gone bad a morning

Can't come good a evening

Dat's why

We nah vote again

All dem a enumerate

Nah participate

Only ting we get from election

A death an problem

Deriding the acronyms of the three political parties, Anthony B shows how the 'system' betrays those who are tricked into voting:

Dem tell yu vote fi all di PNP

We find out dat a Pain, Needs an Poverty

Dem tell yu fi vote fi all di JLP

Dat a Juicing di Life of di ghetto Pikni

NDM seh yu fi come vote fi D

Yu no see a New Destruction for you an Me

Dem a try burst Jamaicans inna three

Me a unite dem fi face God Almighty

So we nah vote again

'Mi no talk like foreigner'

Anthony B gives a wicked account of party politics in a brilliant interview with the Jamaican anthropologist David Scott, published in the journal, Small Axe. No political scientist I know could give a better analysis of electioneering in Jamaica:

"Dem just come together, who inna di same circle, keep dem big party, and laugh about wa a gwaan. Dem is not about we. Di only time yu see dem dong inna di ghetto is now. Yu start see dem inna dis ya season now 'cause election a come. Yu never see dem weh day [in the recent past].

"An none of dem no live ya. Dem live inna dis island and dis island, an dem carry di whole a dem money gone bank up deh so. An mi an yu have fi bank ya so. An when yu no bank inna fi yu country, yu no put no investment inna yu country. If yu a tek your country money somewhere, yu no di govament. Most a di govament money inna Cayman; it deh inna ya so an' ya so. None of it no deh inna Jamaica a invest."

In the song Nah Vote Again, Anthony B makes another profound declaration: 'Talk like Miss Lou, mi no talk like foreigner.' He fully understands the relationship between language and national identity. It was the Barbadian historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite who coined the phrase 'nation language' to define the Creole languages that have emerged in the Caribbean.

Professor Brathwaite wrote a little book, History of the Voice, which was published in 1984. It was dedicated to Mikey Smith, one of Jamaica's most talented poets who was stoned to death in Stony Hill. Mikey's most famous poem is Me Cyaan Believe It, in which he bawls out on behalf of all sufferers, especially women who have to bear the 'belly pain' of sexual exploitation:

Doris a modder of four

Get a wuk as a domestic

Boss man move een

An bap si kaisico she pregnant again

Bap si kaisico she pregnant again

An me cyaan believe it

Me seh me cyaan believe it.

Dreaming of a white Christmas

In History of the Voice, Professor Brathwaite explores the ways in which our educational system in the Caribbean was designed to make us forget our African heritage, particularly the languages that were brought over in the heads of our ancestors: "What our educational system did was to recognise and maintain the language of the conquistador - the language of the planter, the language of the official, the language of the Anglican preacher.

"It insisted that not only would English be spoken in the Anglophone Caribbean, but the educational system would carry the contours of an English heritage. Hence ... Shakespeare, George Eliot, Jane Austen - British literature and literary forms, the models which had very little to do, really, with the environment and the reality of non-Europe - were dominant in the Caribbean educational system ... .

"And in terms of what we write, our perceptual models, we are more conscious (in terms of sensibility) of the falling snow, for instance ... than of the force of the hurricanes which take place every year."

Brathwaite is quite right. Christmas is coming and many of us are going to be buying Christmas cards with snow on Christmas trees. And we're going to be 'dreaming of a white Christmas'. So let's not pretend that all of this colonial brainwashing is history. Some of us still haven't come to terms with the fact that Patwa is our 'mother' tongue and English is our 'stepmother' language.

Then I got a good joke from a man who emailed me about the column, 'Governor general gives throne speech in Patois': "I am extremely disappointed in you when you wrote that 'there's no Jamaican I know who makes love in English. In the height (or depth) of passion, no self-respecting yardie is going to moan and groan in English'. OK, so far so good. What I was expecting to hear from you (as an experienced person in this area) are some of the types of sounds that are made by people making love. Hard-core stuff. That's my disappointment. Can we, your loyal readers, expect it? LOL. Have a wonderful day."

My response: "DWL. How about 'woi, woi, woi' for starters?" He sent back a lovely answer: "I almost died laughing. You will kill me, I need not hear anymore. (Although). You've shut me (to hell) up. Period." If only some of our noisy politicians would follow suit.

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.