Ian McDonald, Contributor
Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Minister, Senator Delano Franklyn, gets chummy with Jamaica's Ambassador of Culture, Louise Bennett-Coverley, in Toronto, Canada, last week. - CONTRIBUTED
IN CARIBBEAN literature there has always been a vigorous strain of oral composition existing alongside the written tradition. Think of the slave and indenture songs of sorrow and survival, folk tales, the Anansi stories, calypsos and road marches, reggae lyrics, and the more recent dub and performance poetry.
Such as these have always fertilised the more artful but often more effete written tradition. It is only fairly recently that the oral tradition has been given the sort of recognition due to it in literary studies and anthologies. The Mighty Sparrow, Bob Marley, Paul Keens-Douglas and Guyana's own John Agard, Marc Matthews and Ken Corsbie, all now performing overseas with notable success, at their best are poets as well as performers and must take their place in the literary pantheon.
But no one West Indian has done more to dissolve the prejudice against dialect, 'nation-language', the vernacular way of expressing things, than Louise Bennett of Jamaica. When she was a girl, in love with reading and bewitched by poetry, a teacher gave her a copy of Claude McKay's Constabulary Ballads. This helped to influence her, but nothing like so much as the vigorous folk culture she found all around her every day.
She began to perform in dialect in 1938 at the age of 19 and The Gleaner began to publish her verse in 1943. After that, Louise Bennett soon became celebrated and loved throughout the West Indies, and well beyond, as a serious folklorist, a dialect performer and a poet. She did more than anyone to promote respect for ordinary people and their usually unwritten and often unrecorded culture. As a poet she is hard to surpass in the comic-satiric verse style and she has remained an immensely influential voice among the generations both of poets who use dialect and those who use standard English.
Anyone who is interested in West Indian literature should at least have a copy of Louise Bennett's Selected Poems, edited and introduced by Mervyn Morris, published originally by Sangster's Book Stores. From this delicious collection I transcribe a poem in which Louise Bennett captures an element that has eternal relevance for people in poor countries.
DUTTY TOUGH
Sun a shine but tings
no bright;
Doah pot a bwile, bickle
no nuff;
River flood but water scarce,
yaw;
Rain a fall but dutty tough.
Tings so bad dat
nowadays when
Yuh ask smaddy how dem do
Dem fraid yuh teck it tell
dem back,
So dem no answer yuh.
No care omuch we dah work fa
Hard-time still eena we shut;
We dah fight, Hard-time a
beat we,
Dem might raise we wages, but
One poun gawn awn pon
we pay, an
We no feel no merriment
For 10 poun gawn awn pon
we food
An 10 poun pon we rent!
Saltfish gawn up, mackerel
gawn up,
Pork en beef gawn up
same way,
An when rice and butter ready
Dem just go pon holiday!
Claht, boot, pin an needle
gawn up
Ice, bread, taxes, water-rate
Kersene ile, gasolene,
gawn up;
An de poun devaluate.
De price of bread gawn up
so high;
Dat we haffi agree
Fi cut we yeye pon bred
and all
Tun dumplin refugee!
An all dem marga smaddy weh
Dah gwan like fat is sin,
All dem-deh weh dah fas
wid me,
Ah lef dem to dumplin!
Sun a shine an pot a bwile, but
Things no bright, bickle
no nuff.
Rain a fall, river dah flood, but
Water scarce and dutty tough.
The power of 'nation-language is part of our heritage. So, too, is the English language in all its glory. Here is what Vic Reid, the Jamaican novelist and teacher, himself a great supporter of folklore and folk expression, had to say at the Second Conference of West Indian Literature at Mona in May 1982, when he exhorted those present never to forego the extraordinary benefit we enjoy in our possession of the English language:
"In our search for the tap root, let us not sever the nourishing laterals.
... We who talk, and talk quite sensibly too, of working and playing and trading with the world, must be able to com-municate with the world. We are heirs to a heritage bought by our blood, sweat and tears. We are heirs to the English language. A good bit of luck. It's the closest approximation to an inter-national tongue that has ever existed. Millions in the world would give anything to be able to speak it. Maybe it is the only plus salvaged from savage slavery, much of whose residual we had to be quit of: but desuetude here is self-defeating."
Ian McDonald is a contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.
