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One thing that Caribbean writers are beginning to use more and more
is their own individual nation language. Although English is the official
national language of many islands in the Caribbean, the people who live in the Caribbean
speak in something other than the standard norm. While many may refer to this
"other" language as simple dialect, people from the islands view their language
as something much more unique.
Kamau Brathwaite, during his speech on the development of nation
language in Anglophone Caribbean poetry, says:
"We in the Caribbean have a [. . .] kind of plurality: we
have English, which is the imposed language on much of the archipelago. It is an
imperial language, as are French, Dutch and Spanish. We also have what we call
creole English, which is a mixture of English and an adaptation that English took in the
new environment of the Caribbean when it became mixed with the other imported
languages. We have also what is called nation language, which is the kind of
English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English
now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in"
(5-6).
"Ashanti, Congo, Yoruba, all that mighty coast of western
Africa was imported into the Caribbean. And we had the arrival in our area of a new
language structure. It consisted of many languages but basically they had a common
semantic and stylistic form. What these languages had to do, however, was to
submerge themselves, because officially the conquering peoples -- the Spaniards, the
English, the French, and the Dutch -- insisted that the language of public discourse and
conversation, of obedience, command and conception should be English, French, Spanish, or
Dutch. They did not wish to hear people speaking Ashanti or any of these Congolese
languages. Its status became one of inferiority. Similarly, its speakers were
slaves. They were conceived of as inferiors -- non-human, in fact. But this
very submergence served an interesting interculturative purpose, because although people
continued to speak English as it was spoken in Elizabethan times and on through the
Romantic and Victorian ages, that English was, nonetheless, still being influenced by the
underground language, the submerged language that the slaves had brought. And that
underground language was constantly transforming itself into new forms. It was
moving from a purely African form to a form which was African but which was adapted to the
new environment and adapted to the cultural imperative of the European languages.
And it was influencing the way in which the English, French, Dutch, and Spaniards spoke
their own languages. So there was a very complex process taking place, which is now
beginning to surface in our literature" (7-8).
Brathwaite proceeds to talk about the colonial education system in
the Caribbean and how it persists in teaching children about the history of the colonizers
in that standardized language. "People were forced to learn things which had no
relevance to themselves. Paradoxically, in the Caribbean (as in many other 'cultural
disaster' areas), the people educated in this system came to know more, even today, about
English kings and queens than they do about our own national heroes, our own slave rebels,
the people who helped to build and to destroy our society. We are more excited by
their literary models, by the concept of, say, Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood than we are
by Nanny of the Maroons, a name some of us didn't even know until a few years ago.
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. In other words, we haven't got the
syllables, the syllabic intelligence, to describe the hurricane, which is our own
experience, whereas we can describe the imported alien experience of the snowfall"
(8-9).
He equates snowfall with the oppression of the colonial system, an
oppression which furthers itself through the use of iambic pentameter. That
particular rhythm is one of the oppressor, is one that has been used to keep down the true
culture of the Caribbean. It perpetuates the snowfall rather than the hurricane.
Nation language, on the other hand, seems to be the Caribbean's
saving grace. It "largely ignores the pentameter" (13). Brathwaite
defines nation language more specifically as "the language which is influenced very
strongly by the African model, the African aspect of our New World/Caribbean
heritage. English it may be in terms of some of its lexical features. But in
its contours, its rhythm and timber, its sound explosions, it is not English, even though
the words, as you hear them, might be English to a greater or lesser degree"
(13). Brathwaite alludes to nation language as a form of revolution.
Brathwaite talks about how another author, Edouard Glissant (from
Martinique) defines nation language. "[I]t is the language of enslaved
persons. For him, nation language is a strategy: the slave is forced to use a
certain kind of language in order to disguise himself, to disguise his personality and to
retain his culture. And he defines that language as 'forced poetics' because it is a
kind of prison language" (16).
In breaking away from the rigid iambic pentameter, Brathwaite looks
to how calypso (or kaiso) uses nation language. He shows that the kaiso employs
dactyls rather than iambs, and also that calypso often involves call and response.
During the speech, he played a tape recording of the Mighty Sparrow's "Ten to One is
Murder":
About ten in de night on de fifth of October
Ten to One is Murder!
Way down Henry Street, up by H. G. M. Walker
Ten to One is Murder!
Well de leader of de gang was a hot like a pepperrr
Ten to One is Murder!
An every man in de gang had a white-handle razorrr
Ten to One is Murder!
They say ah push a gal from Grenada
Ten to One is Murder! . . . (26)
The sounds in kaisos are very different from something found in a
"standard English" poem constrained by iambic pentameter. Another way that
Caribbean writing breaks away from the strictness of iambic pentameter (which is not how
people speak naturally) is through the use of conversation.
Ultimately, nation language is one method that people from the
Caribbean use to reclaim (or to form) their individual identity as a people. Their
identity has been influenced by colonial, European powers, by native Amerindian culture,
by the imported culture of the African slaves. But their own culture and identity is
separate from all of these influences; it is something unique to the Caribbean. Just
as the islands threw off the shackles of slavery and colonialism, now they throw off the
shackles of history to assert their true identity.
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