Caribbean Language

The Cadence of Rebellion and Healing

December 07 2003
by Ayanna Gillian
Self Empowerment Learning Fraternity, Trinidad and Tobago

The URL of this article is:
www.rootswomen.com/ayanna/articles/07122003.html


One of the Caribbean's most celebrated poets, Kamau Braithwaite, proposed in his work, Development of Creole Society in Jamaica that "it was in language that the slave was perhaps most successfully imprisoned by his master, and it was in his (mis)- use of it that he perhaps most effectively rebelled" As we attempt to examine this emerging creature that is West Indian poetry, we invariably see that it is language that has been the cornerstone of rebellion. The task of identifying a West Indian sensibility or a West Indian voice has often led us into a quagmire of interpretations. How does one determine, in a society as mongrel and newborn as this, a distinctive and clearly identifiable collective voice?

While Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott has been hailed as the truest son of West Indian literature, it has been argued that his voice is perhaps too tame, too ordered, too like the cadence of the European oppressor to be the shining light of the Caribbean voice. It could also be argued that even the 'oppressor' should have a voice; for he too is part of this multi- layered, complex, post-colonial society. However, when it comes to determining a Caribbean literary voice, one that signals the revolutionary, tumultuous, creative force of these islands, it is language to which we must turn.

The poems, "Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry" By Lorna Goodison and "Mabrak" by Bongo Jerry both show how the unique cadence of Caribbean language has been used as a call to revolution and reconciliation. The apocalyptic death knell of a church bell and the healing cleansing waters of Oshun both emblemize the unique nature of Caribbean language as a heart-wrenching cadence of dislocation and displacement alongside the hopeful attempt to create new life and a new history out of the rubble of an all-too-present past.

To begin such an analysis we must attempt a definition of Caribbean language. Is there any such thing at all? Is it static, limited to folk dialect, defined simply by geography, race and history? Or is it something more dynamic, an attempt, as Carter so eloquently put it, an attempt

"...to shape this passion...
in solid fire"?

While the ability of dialect to express the complex emotions and subtleties of poetry had been routinely questioned, it was only after the 1970's, with the upheaval of Black Power and the bitterness of deferred post-independence dreams that an idea of what constitutes Caribbean language began to emerge. It was then that the concept of 'orality' in poetry began to be given credence, and Brathwaite's concept of nation language began to be explored. For Brathwaite, the 'shape of this passion' in the Anglophone Caribbean was not so much English itself but language; not just the broken English of the slaves and their descendants but the rhythm, cadence and sensibility particular to the region. It was the mode of expression, the turn of phrase, the colour of metaphor; it was a prism of English and the submerged ancestral languages of Africa, a sound that attempted to define the historical, cultural and linguistic space of the Caribbean. It is this particular concept of nation language that we see employed by these poets with the central purpose of revolution, affirmation and healing.

From an examination of Brathwaite's work, Chamberlain asserts that "a truly West Indian literature must represent the central heritage of slavery shared by black West Indians, not because everyone who matters in the West Indies was black, but because blackness as an image of slavery defined the dispossession and exploitation which to anyone looking around the West Indies was clearly not over." Nowhere is this sensibility more eloquently and powerfully displayed than in the Jamaican dub poetry, especially 'dreadtalk' poetry that arose alongside the popularization of the Rastafarian Movement.

The poem "Mabrak" by Bongo Jerry, named for a Rastafarian word that means 'black lightning', is stamped with a distinctive call for West Indian and African liberation. When examining the linguistic characteristics of West Indian poetry, particularly oral or performance poetry, it is impossible to separate language from rhythm. The spirit of the reggae/dub culture that emerged in Jamaica in the 1960's infuses the poem with a heavy drumbeat that underlies the narrative voice, while the echoes of horns and synthesizers punctuate the breaks in its voice line. Even with the limitations of reading, we can still hear this influence throughout the line structure.

"Mabrak:
NEWSFLASH!
'Babylon plans crash'
Thunder interrupt their programme to announce
BLACK ELECTRIC STORM
IS HERE"

There is a measured inevitability about this prouncement, given certainty by the all-powerful, apocalyptic image of lightning. While the poem is not written strictly in the broken dialect, as are the works of Louise Bennett, the language is undeniably West Indian and undeniably revolutionary in its form and content. What poet Eric Roach in 1971 saw in Bongo Jerry's work as the frenzied, savage, atavistic reversion to a dark African past, was a brooding melancholy that would come to symbolize the almost mythologized idea of the Rastafarian. It is the inner cry of hardship and despair and the desire for righteous vengeance, a sense of dread that is constantly on the brink of explosion.

There is a constant inversion of language and imagery, very much in keeping with DJ dub culture and Rastafari language tradition. The coining of terms to invert traditional connotations created a sort of inner dialect within the wider context of Jamaican Creole, and in many ways, almost came to redefine it. These inversions served the purpose of exposing colonial and ruling class hypocrisy and trickery. A classic examples of this is the use of the words "fair to fine", the all too familiar weather report, to describe "(WHITE)". Another is describing the "straitening of the tongue" by the authoritarian dominance of 'English' as Babel-land tower, a combination of the Biblical myth to explain the differentiation of languages and the Rastafarian ideology of the West as a modern-day Babylon. This acrobatic nature of language, an almost a calypso-like double entendre, subverts traditional expression and asserts the right of the African in the West Indies to create his own modes of expression.

Jamaican oral poet Mutabaruka expressed in his piece 'Revolutionary Words' that many poets who claimed to speak of revolution had become soft and indulgent.

"revolutionary words
'ave become entertainment
revolutionaries...babblin out angry words
about
changes we need
de system greed
while they take it for a joke..."

Chamberlin extends these sentiments by suggesting that perhaps indulgent sympathy with the idea of revolution allows art to slip into the melodrama of nostalgia, but cannot truly effect change in the society. What then is the dividing line between 'art' and 'action'? In an attempt to give legitimacy to the use of the West Indian voice to convey the subtlety of art, have these revolutionary poets simply gone the way of art for art's sake, rather than providing real life solutions to the problems of the people that they seek to inspire to revolution? Mutabaruka sees little hope in these 'revolutionary words':

"revolutionaries
'ave all gone to the art centers to watch
the sufferin of the people
bein dramatized by the oppressors
in their revolutionary words..."

However, what oral poets seek to do by making art out of ordinary, common language, is to legitimize what had been denied and to affirm identity in the face of rootlesness. When Bongo Jerry inverts the imagery of white as light and makes blackness the illuminating and destructive force of lightning, he evokes the Biblical idea of the Word which brings creation and declares that it is in from blackness that creation sprung. It is through Mabrak that vengeance will come and a new world order will be established. Through the legitimization of " BLACK SPEECH" the world will be created anew. It is in this apocalyptic dawn of a new world order, “The coming of light to the black world" that we will be able to illuminate a way foward.

The Black Power Movement of the 1960's that spread in various forms throughout the Anglophone Caribbean figures prominently in this poem. While many African people in the Caribbean were removing their external symbols of Eurocentricity and donning symbols of Afrocentricity, Bongo Jerry makes it clear that,

" MABRAK is righting the wrongs and brain-whitening – HOW? Not just by washing out the straightening and wearing dashiki t'ing:
MOSTOFTHESTRAIGHTENINGISINTHETONGUE"

While Mutabaruka seeks a more concrete road map for revolution Bongo Jerry asserts that before we can embark on a new beginning we must learn to first speak in our own tongues. Mabrak affirms that it is only in a revolution of language, where we abandon foreign education and foreign doctrines and make way for the apocalyptic end to 'Babylon system' that we can be assured that

"...somewhere under ITYOPIA rainbow,
AFRICA WAITING FOR I"

Lorna Goodison's poem Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry seems to be at the other end of the continuum. Her work has often straddled the line between oral performance poetry and a more traditional, internal musing, independent of the energy of an audience to give it life. However, her style does borrow from both traditions and seamlessly incorporates the subversive elements of Caribbean language with European poetic influences, namely the Romantic William Wordsworth, whose reverence for landscape Goodison shares. Her piece "Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry" represents a shift from the absolutism of the intensely political and revolutionary poetry of her earlier collection, Tamarind Season, to a more measured healing message of memory and reconciliation.

One of the first things that one notices is that the language structure is in the very 'standard English' that many of her fellow Jamaican oral poets such as Mutabrauka, Mikey Smith and Kamau Braithwaite have abandoned. However, central to the poem is this very idea of language, the language of Miss Mirry, and the conflict between the sensibility of this 'ill tempered' woman who knows every cure for every illness, and the English who sought to mould her into something alien, forcing her to,

"twist (ed) her surname Henry into Endry in her railing against the graceless state of her days".

Unlike Bongo Jerry who calls for revolution and an apocalyptic vengeance to be visited upon the oppressor, Goodison's tone is musing and reflective seeking to bring about healing and reconciliation.

In the character of Miss Mirry we see the embodiment of reconciliation, not between the oppressed and the oppressor, but the recognition of a collective history which was more that just one long dreary road of hatred, but one infused with strength, resilience and wisdom. The poem opens with:

"Turn thanks to Miss Mirry
ill-tempered domestic helper who hated me.
She said that she had passed through hell bareheaded
and that a whitening ash from hell's furnace
had sifted down upon her and that was why she gray early"

This image of Miss Mirry is rooted in Caribbean iconography: the gray-haired crotchety woman, a fount of wisdom and history who figures prominently in much of Goodison's poetry. We see that while the English of the narrator may be 'standard,' the language which emerges is that of Miss Mirry, what Brathwaite describes as rooted in Caribbean sensibility. As Goodison pays homage to a domestic helper who states that she is from "Ullava" and calls

"Barbara, Baba; my Father, Tata; who desiled her mind That I was boofuttoo, a baffan and too rampify",

what emerges is the reverence with which the poet treats the character of Miss Mirry, a remaining link with folk culture,indigenous language, and a collective painful history of dislocation, and counter rebellion:

"She was the repository of 400 years of resentment for being uprooted and transplanted, condemned to being a stranger on this side of a world where most words would not obey her tongue"

Just as Bongo Jerry sees that 'most of the straightening is in the tongue', Miss Mirry chose the twisting of language as her form of rebellion, and affirmation as she

"stabbed at English
...abandoned it in favour of a long kiss teeth..."

Serafín Roldán Santiago in his study of Turn Thanks, the collection from which this poem is taken, looks at the theme of cleansing and rebirth in Goodison's treatment of the female principle. Here Miss Mirry looms as the healing Goddess Icon. Her washing of clothes in the washtub, bathing the character of the child in her care and returning to the bush for healing herbs imbues her with ritualistic powers of creation and renewal. Santiago suggests that "Miss Mirry is also a temple worker using her knowledge, which has been laughed at and ridiculed by high society and called "superstition," to cure her people from the scourges of diseases and sickness. ...Water here takes on not only a cleansing function, but a healing one. Water is elemental, vital. It is also a transporter from this life to the next: the river, the ocean that one must cross over at death"

As she gives the
"...calming bath...
which quelled effectively
the red itching measles...
...speak singing in a language
familiar to her tongue"

Miss Mirry becomes not only the symbol of the author's reconciliation with a painful historical past but also the embodiment of our collective rebirth as a people, uprooted and scattered in the Diaspora. It is Miss Mirry's refusal to negate her self and her language, her intent to pass on her indigenous knowledge to the child who remembers her, that begins the healing. Here the rebellion has borne fruit and we can look forward, giving

"Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry
African bush healing woman."

Derek Walcott once stated in response to Naipaul's assertion that nothing will ever be created in the West Indies, that "Nothing will always be created in the West Indies for quite a long time, because whatever will come out of there is like nothing that one has ever seen before" The legacy of West Indian poets of the 1960's and 1970's, steeped in what Martin Carter calls "The Nigger Yard', has given us a way to stride forward, armed with our own language. The uncertain landscape of our region has gifted us with a tongue of rebellion and affirmation, and thus it is in language that we choose to strike a blow against empire and look inward for healing. The revolution assumes many faces: the erudite scholar who uses the traditions of the oppressor to strike a blow against the system from within; the apocalyptic, righteous dread-fire of the Rastafarian dub poet, assured of Babylon's destruction, and the healing reconciliation of Miss Mirry, a tribute to endurance. As Carter mused whether

"The strange combustion of my days
The tension of the world inside of me
And the strength of my heart were enough",

this 'nation language' poetry attempts to do just that; to give form to this elusive West Indian sensibility, to make art out of what had been reviled and dismissed and to dramatize the energy of rhythm, sound, pain, hope and renewal which has given us voice.


Bibliography:

Agard, John, Weblines, Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Bloodaxe Books, 2000

Braithwaite, Edward Kamau, History of the Voice. The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry, New Beacon Books, London, Port of Spain, 1995

Braithwaite, Ramchand, Salkey, Savacou Caribbean Artist Movement, Kingston , March 1971

Brown Stewart, Morris Mervyn, Rohleur, Voiceprint: An anthology of Oral and Related Poetry From The Caribbean (Burnt Mill, Harlow, Essex, England: Longman, 1989)

Chamberlin, Edward, Come Back to Me My Language, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2000

Goodison, Lorna, Turn Thanks, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, c1999

Goodison, Lorna, Guinea Woman: New and Selected Poems, Manchester: Carcanet, 2000

Mutabaruka, "Revolutionary Words" Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, ed Paula Burnett

Rohlehr, Gordon, "The Problem of the Problem of Form" The Shape of that Hurt and Other Essays, Longman Trinidad Ltd, Port of Spain, 1992

Rohlehr, Gordon, West Indian Poetry: Some Problems of Assessment, St. Augustine : U.W.I., 1971

Santiago Serafín Roldán, The Koshering Process: Images of Redemption and Reconciliation in Lorna Goodison's Turn Thanks

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