[lg policy] blog: Linguistic Preserves or How to Use Language to be Powerful

Fri Dec 24 16:08:15 UTC 2010

Linguistic Preserves or How to Use Language to be Powerful

Okay. So I am always having this problem. It has to do with how much
we use language to isolate people rather than bring them together, to
construct divisions among groups rather than promote community, to
confuse rather than clarify – all in the interests of power. This is
something complicated enough to merit yet another book, for many books
have been written about it, I'm sure. But I don't have the time, nor
in all likelihood the competence, to write any such book. So I will
try to tell a story, my story, instead.

Years ago, when New World, a sort of unstructured radical movement
that arose in and around UWI, Mona, Jamaica, in the seventies, began
to publish New World Quarterly, in an earnest effort to persuade the
editors to make the writing in the journal available to anybody who
could read, I found myself at Lloyd Best's house on the UWI Mona
campus, attempting to 'translate' the academic-speak of one article
into plain English. I can recall vividly tackling a footnote that
referred to an observation by Alister McIntyre about the ingenuity of
peasant farmers in the Caribbean who rotated crops on their small
acreages so as to get the best yields, despite constraints of size.

Nothing ever came of the initiative to simplify, of course. New World
spoke its erudite way to its untimely end.

The truth is that the powerful reserve languages to and for
themselves. If you don't believe me, try getting an explanation of
what happened to make the world economy collapse. Financial
operatives, in plain speak (PS after this – BS is Bull Speak), those
who run things in the money world, keep their affairs to themselves.
It is, in BS, obfuscation twice over, or, in PS, secrets on top of
secrets. Those money folks are as often as not up to no good, and
where regulators insist on transparency (BS for keeping things out in
the open and above board), a good way to hide them anyway is to talk
about them using names and terms ordinary people cannot understand:
sub-prime mortgages, derivatives, toxic loans, eurozone, etc. etc.

It’s not a habit confined to the worlds of finance, or law, or
medicine, or science. My friend Jennifer broke my heart when she told
me she had tried to read but couldn't understand Walcott's poetry. I
love Walcott, and Brathwaite, and Brodber, and Brand, and Wilson
Harris. They all take hard reading, sometimes, as do heaps of other
writer folks. And that's okay. Writers are free to write as they see
fit.

But writers need also to have vision, to be savvy, to make informed
political choices. And if people read fiction and poetry, story and
song, less and less, even as they listen to popular music more and
more, it may have something to do with the fact of how as well as what
writers have chosen to write about.

It takes me five years or so to produce a book of poetry or fiction,
so I don't have a lot of writing to which to refer as I try to
illustrate this point, but I’ll try nonetheless.

In 1995, Sister Vision Press published de man: a performance poem.
I've talked about it up here before. It's the crucifixion story in
Jamaican Creole. It's been performed many, many times in Canada, the
Caribbean and who knows where else, and it's been taught (as I've
recently discovered) in several universities in the US and Canada.
George Elliott Clarke calls it a 'revolutionary work', though it's
largely been ignored by critics in the Caribbean and doesn't even
figure in Canadian Hugh Hodges’ survey on religion in Jamaican poetry,
Soon Come, published by U. of Virginia Press.

The important point about de man, for this argument, is that it's in
ordinary people's language. Anybody can understand it. I think, at
first half-knowing and then more consciously, I took my cue from that
book about how I would write, probably till Jesus comes. My next book
of poetry, Certifiable (2001), contains many story poems and many
poems in plain Jamaican English, as does The True Blue of Islands
(2005), the poetry collection after that. My first collection of short
fiction, Pink Icing (2006) has many stories seen through the eyes of
children and told in their voices. It too uses Jamaican English. And
the collection of sonnets that I have just completed, never mind that
they are sonnets, is also as plain as can be. You’ve seen a couple of
those sonnets here.

Lest anyone think I am suggesting that plain English or Jamaican
Creole dumbs things down, dilutes them or condemns them not to eschew
(BS for ‘stay clear of’) complexity, I refer them to the writings of
Jean D’Costa and Dennis Craig on creole as a literary medium.

Mark you, I think I can confuse and confound with the best of us. I
love big words, and like every good Jamaican, I thrive on confusion.
But I understand that the Tower of Babel was punishment. That
breakdown in communication is something to be struggled against.

Thus, creole-speaking children, wherever in the world they are, should
learn the standard languages whose lexicons their creoles employ. They
need to be able to make themselves understood outside the small
community of creole-speakers. Dutch and Danish people learn languages
other than their own for exactly the same reason. There are not that
many people who speak Dutch and Danish in the world. If they want to
talk to a wider audience, they need to know other languages.

There are more urgent reasons: not every creole-speaking person hauled
before the law in a foreign country, for example, will get the benefit
of a translator. Jail time because you cannot truly have your day in
court, on account of nobodi kyaan unustan yu, an yu kyaan unerstan dem
is very far from justice done. Similarly, a creole speaker who cannot
fluently describe to, say, a paramedic or an emergency-room doctor
what symptoms she is experiencing might well be at serious risk.

In fact, creole speakers and non-creole speakers should learn Mandarin
and Hakka and Russian and Swahili and Greek and Krio – as many
languages as they can grasp. Look at Eminem and Sinéad O'Connor as
they besi dung into our languages, and take example!

The powerful preserve their power by using language as a tool when
they make language policy as well, as, for example, those persons in
the Caribbean who are versatile in standard and creole languages and
fail to encourage creole speakers to learn standard languages. Indeed,
there should be a requirement that all creole speakers achieve a solid
competence in a standard language since, as I’ve tried to show, it may
prove a matter of life and death. The policymakers are the powerful.
They are equipped. They well know that every new language is an
arsenal. So how come they don’t want everyone to have more linguistic
guns?

When finally we beat our swords into ploughshares, I suspect that
peace will be a great silence in which we listen to the music of
praise and rejoicing and speak not a word. “Peace on earth,” the
angels sang at the baby’s birth. Peace to the benevolent, those of
good will – from the Latin, bene volantem, well-wishing.

Have a Happy Christmas, a Holy Channukah! Learn a new language in 2011!

http://jahworld-pmordecai.blogspot.com/2010/12/linguistic-preserves-or-how-to-use_23.html

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