Language, Race and the Global Jamaican [1st ed.] 9783030457471, 9783030457488

Citation preview

Language, Race and the Global Jamaican Hubert Devonish Karen Carpenter

Language, Race and the Global Jamaican

Hubert Devonish • Karen Carpenter

Language, Race and the Global Jamaican

Hubert Devonish Department of Language Linguistics & Philosophy University of the West Indies Mona, Jamaica

Karen Carpenter Caribbean Sexuality Research Group Kingston, Jamaica

ISBN 978-3-030-45747-1    ISBN 978-3-030-45748-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45748-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

The manuscript had been completed and we were doing a due diligence search for any recent work in our area of interest. Out popped a November 13, 2019, New York Times review of a just published book by Jamaican Harvard-based sociologist and historian, Orlando Patterson, Jamaica: A Small Nation with an Outsize Global Influence. We weren’t the only people obsessed with the question of the reasons for the unexpectedly powerful influence of Jamaica around the globe. We weren’t either the only people seeking for answers in history and the relationship between Barbados and Jamaica. From the review, we gathered that the book expressed admiration for the people of Jamaica, their cultural and sporting achievements. It sought to address the question of why, in spite of the great achievements of Jamaica and Jamaicans, at the level of economics and criminal violence, it has done so badly since independence. The comparison was with Barbados which, from similar beginnings as a British former sugar colony, has a per capita GDP which is double that of Jamaica and very much lower levels of violence. This approach to the Jamaica phenomenon is one of ‘Why in spite of…?’ There is an alternative approach to the same issue and potentially a more optimistic approach to the issue of Jamaica’s outsized global influence. This can be seen in an August 5, 2012, article by Tom Horan in the UK Guardian newspaper in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Jamaican independence. Here, Jamaica is compared with many other countries similar in area and in population and the question asked is, ‘Why have these nations not produced a culture that transformed the way the v

vi 

PREFACE

entire world makes and listens to music? … Why are their dialects not the lingua franca of an entire generation of young people?’ Horan’s article makes historical connections. There are the tremendous riches produced by Jamaica in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from sugar produced by the labour of enslaved Africans. His article links this with the massive wealth generated by a descendant of the slave owning group, Chris Blackwell, through his company, Island Records, from the marketing and sale of cultural products generated by the descendants of enslaved Jamaicans, most famously Bob Marley. A focus, as in the Guardian article, on the economic value of Jamaican language, music and culture, opens up a different question, that of ‘How to?’ This is what drives us as authors who live in Jamaica and who have lived through many of the developments which have given Jamaica its global impact. Faced with the scourge of economic inequality, widespread poverty and criminal violence in Jamaica, our interest is in how the global influence and economic value of Jamaica’s language and cultural products can be used to create an economically prosperous, socially just and peaceful society. To answer ‘How to do this?’, however, first we have to answer, ‘How the situation came to be?’ The present work tries to answer this baseline question with a view to making the answer to the ‘How to?’ easier to arrive at. Mona, Jamaica Kingston, Jamaica

Hubert Devonish Karen Carpenter

Contents

1 Jamaica to the World  1 The ‘One Love Moment’   1 The Problem and the Solution   3 The Nomination Document   5 The ‘One Love’ Whitewash   8 The Silencing of Language   9 Language  12 The Premise  13 References  14 2 Once Upon an Island … 15 The Journey  15 The Bitter Taste of Sugar  16 Making Bitter-Sweet Languages  19 Of Routes and Roots: When, Where and How?  20 Searching for the Original Language Community  20 Providence Island: In the Beginning  21 Language Journeys  21 Travelling the Barbados Route  25 The Routes Travelled  30 The Roots That Travelled  30 Once upon an Island: Race Was Invented  32 And So Too Was ‘Language’  36

vii

viii 

Contents

A Community Was Made (Reconstructing the ­Proto-­ Language Community)  37 And Their Words Told Their Story  38 The Global Jamaican Is Born and International Black Identity Constructed  39 Going Global/Tu di Worl…  42 … on Wings of Sweet Song  44 References  45 3 The Languages in Conflict 49 Only One Side Shoots in This Language War  49 In the Beginning … a Portrait in Black, White and Brown  51 What the ‘Chateratti’ Are Saying  54 Introducing the ‘Chateratti’  54 The Language Opinions of the ‘Chateratti’  55 Wa di Masiv a Se (What the Majority Are Saying)  60 Introducing the ‘Massiv’  60 What and How the ‘Masiv’ Think They Speak  63 How the ‘Masiv’ Actually Speak  66 How Did the Language Situation Come to Be?  67 The Price of Language and Gender  69 The News Media and the Massiv  73 References  76 4 Through Children’s Eyes: Where Nation, State, Race, Colour and Language Meet 77 Race and the Jamaican Nation(s): ‘Out of Many’ or ‘92% Black’ or …?  78 Language and the Jamaican Nation(s)  80 Out of the Mouths of Babes and Sucklings: The People’s Construct of the Jamaican Nation  83 Who Is a ‘Beautiful’ Jamaican Versus ‘Average’ Jamaican?  84 Adolescent Stereotypes  84 Who Can Be Jamaican? Child Versus Traditional Stereotypes  86 What Does a Jamaican Look Like: Twelve-Year-Olds  87

 Contents 

ix

Young Children and Stereotypes  88 Who Looks Like Me, Who Speaks What and Who Speaks Like Me?  89 Who Looks Like Me?  89 Who Speaks What Language?  90 Who Speaks Like Me  91 The Children’s Composite Stereotype of the Jamaican  91 Race, Colour, Socio-economic and Linguistic Stereotyping  93 Through Foreign Eyes and Ears: Stereotypes of the Jamaican Nation  95 Through Local Eyes and Mouths: Stereotypes of the Jamaican Nation  98 The Nation Represented in the Cinematic National Anthem 100 References 105 5 Jamaica Here, Jamaica Everywhere107 Small but Strong: ‘Likl Bot Talawa’ 107 Exodus: Movement of Jamaican People 108 ‘Let My People Go (… at a Price)’ 108 The Former Enslavers: Taking Compensation Money and Running 109 The Former Enslaved: Taking Labour and Running 110 Race, Global Capitalism, and Being Here and Everywhere 113 References 115 References117 Index

125

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Ingredient X (Smith 2015) + 2 Table 4.1 Jamaican national identity ethnic categories

32 87

xi

CHAPTER 1

Jamaica to the World

Abstract  It is the thirteenth session of the UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The inscription of the Reggae Music of Jamaica on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Heritage of Mankind creates a clear and identifiable link between Jamaica, on the one hand, and Reggae Music which it created, on the other. The Jamaican manoeuvre functions as a means of blocking appropriation and ensuring that all makers of reggae music function as imitators of Jamaican genres or adopters/ adapters of the genre, but never as owners or originators of the music. This attempt by the Jamaican state to get a birth certificate and declaration of paternity for reggae is very well thought through. Keywords  Reggae music • UNESCO • Intangible heritage • Jamaican state

The ‘One Love Moment’ ‘Zambia, Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Colombia, Armenia, Palestine, Kuwait, China, Mauritius, Azerbaijan, Cameroons and Lebanon,’ intones the chairman, H.E. Mr. Prithvirajsing Roopun. At the end of the list of states voting in favour. Then he says, ‘I declare decision 13.COM.10b.18 duly adopted.’ The overhead screen on to which the text of the proposal before the com-

© The Author(s) 2020 H. Devonish, K. Carpenter, Language, Race and the Global Jamaican, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45748-8_1

1

2 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

mittee is being projected changes. We now see added next to the heading ‘Draft decision’, in bold red letters as if sub-titling his voice, ‘adopted…’ (UNESCO 2018)

It is the thirteenth session of the UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This is Port-Louis, the capital of the Republic of Mauritius, and it is November 19, 2019. The decision concerns Nomination File No. 01398, for the inscription of ‘The Reggae Music of Jamaica’ on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, under the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The Chairman then adds the following, ‘For the information of members, we will give the floor to Jamaica and thereafter we will hear, at the request of Jamaica, some music, and just after the speech of Jamaica and the music you are going to hear, I am proposing to suspend the sitting for fifteen minutes for (a) reason I believe is apparent to everybody’. We hear brief laughter. Jamaica, seated next to Belgium, and in front of Cabo Verde, Germany and Cambodia, expresses thanks for the tremendous support received from state parties for the inscription of the Reggae Music of Jamaica. Cuba and Palestine receive special thanks for their ‘open and gracious support’. Jamaica declares, ‘Reggae is no longer only ours. The world has taken it as their own’; it notes that the intangible cultural heritage is of extreme significance to a country’s identity. Then, with perhaps characteristic effrontery, Jamaica indicates that it is of the view that the presence of the Reggae Music of Jamaica on that list will add even more visibility to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and intangible cultural heritage as a whole. The implication of Jamaica’s statement is clear. Inscribing the Reggae Music of Jamaica on the list benefits the list. The list needs the Reggae Music of Jamaica more than the music needs the list. Who, after all, had ever heard of the other cultural forms inscribed on the list along with reggae in November 2018 practices such as Bobbin Lace Weaving of Slovenia, the Festivity of Las Parrandas in the centre of Cuba, or the Tamboradas Drum-Playing Rituals of Spain? Jamaica goes on to reiterate its deepest appreciation for the overwhelming love it has received for reggae music, a testament, it suggests, to the global impact of the music. Jamaica ends with the words of the reggae icon, Bob Marley, ‘One love, one heart, let’s get together and feel alright’. Jamaica now invites the nations of the world to sing this song with it. The musical introduction to Bob Marley’s ‘One Love’ plays. Jamaica had

1  JAMAICA TO THE WORLD 

3

spoken against the backdrop of a large black banner, about four metres square, consisting of a map of Africa outlined in red, green and gold, crowned by the name, Bob Marley, in the same colours, and with a representation of Bob Marley’s face superimposed on the map. It is against this background that Jamaica stands and sings. As the representations of the nations of the world at the UNESCO meeting join Jamaica in song, a single flag of Jamaica, less than half a metre in length, comes into play, dwarfed by the much larger Africa-Marley banner backdrop. This is perhaps a fitting image, Jamaica tiny against the big music it has produced. The camera gives us a close-up of the singing, smiling, dancing group of diplomatic representatives clustered around Jamaica, phones raised to capture footage of the happening. ‘One Love’ is on its last chorus. The Chairman, H.E. Mr Prithvirajsing Roopun, who also happens to be the Minister of Arts and Culture of Mauritius, has pushed his way through the musical huddle that is Jamaica. This is his time and he seizes it. With one arm around his sister Minister of Culture, the Hon. Olivia ‘Babsy’ Grange of Jamaica, and the other arm imperiously clearing a space in the crowd, he dances and sings ‘Let’s get together and feel alright’, while proudly posing with Jamaica for the happy throng of photographers, amateur and professional. The reason for him granting the fifteen-minute adjournment at the end of the presentation by Jamaica is indeed apparent to everybody.

The Problem and the Solution When Jamaica spoke, embedded in the text of its speech was the problem which inscription on the list was supposed to solve. Jamaica made the declaration that ‘Reggae is no longer only ours. The world has taken it as their own’. According to Jamaica, ‘The music has also spawned a number of large reggae festivals across the globe, notably the Rototom Music Festival in Spain, attracting upwards of over a hundred thousand music lovers and academics each year’. When heard alongside a subsequent statement by Jamaica that the intangible cultural heritage is of extreme significance to a country’s identity, we get it. If reggae has been so successful as a musical genre that it has become absorbed into world culture, its link with Jamaica is merely of historical interest. It would not serve to define the Jamaican identity. The inscription of the Reggae Music of Jamaica on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Heritage of Mankind creates, with the support of the states that are members of UNESCO, a clear and identifiable link between Jamaica, on the one hand, and Reggae

4 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

Music which it created, on the other. The Jamaican manoeuvre functions as a means of blocking appropriation and ensuring that all makers of reggae music function as imitators of Jamaican genres or adopters/adapters of the genre, but never as owners or originators of the music. This attempt by the Jamaican state to get a birth certificate and declaration of paternity for reggae is very well thought through. It is a way of achieving, for a cultural practice what international law and Jamaican legislation does for goods, by means of geographical indications which are protected as intellectual property via agencies such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Geographical indications do not currently apply to cultural practices hence the UNESCO listing acts as a backdoor approach to achieving the same end, in the case of the cultural practice and product that is reggae music. Jamaica was being somewhat creative, to put it mildly, in its use of the inscription on the Representative List to solve the problem. How creative can be seen by the Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, specifically Article 16 governing the Representative List, which states as follows: In order to ensure better visibility of the intangible cultural heritage and awareness of its significance, and to encourage dialogue which respects cultural diversity, the Committee, upon the proposal of the States Parties concerned, shall establish, keep up to date and publish a Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. (Article 16, Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage 2003, https://ich. unesco.org/en/convention#art16)

The irony is that, by the very account given by Jamaica in the acceptance speech, reggae is already highly visible and extremely well known across the globe. That is the basis for the remark made by Jamaica that the inscription of the Reggae of Jamaica would enhance the profile of the list. How then did Jamaica pull off the feat of creatively manipulating the list, with the collusion of the state parties to the convention, to gild the lily? This gilding took place in full view of the international news media which dutifully covered the inscription and the following outpouring of ‘One Love’ as a significant news event. To answer the question of how it happened we must begin with the submission documentation in support of the nomination for the inscription of the Reggae Music of Jamaica on to the UNESCO Representative List.

1  JAMAICA TO THE WORLD 

5

The Nomination Document One has to understand the analysis of the nomination document submitted by the Jamaican state to the UNESCO committee in a particular context. The Minister of Culture, Senator Olivia Grange, is reported by the Jamaica Information Services (February 16, 2018) (https://jis.gov.jm/ reggae-music-jamaicas-valuable-export-grange-tells-unesco-creative-cities-music-meeting/) to have said, with reference to economic statistics, that reggae was Jamaica’s most valuable export. The focus of the nomination document was on origins. ‘Reggae music is a contributing factor to the very identity of the Jamaican people and of their ethos. Reggae is Jamaica, just as Jamaica is Reggae. The prevailing iconography of Jamaica as an “irie [cool]” place with a calm, fun-loving, and embracing people’ (p. 5). The claim is made that reggae music is a ‘Jamaican invention’. In addition, there is the declaration that ‘Reggae’s origin and authenticity are inextricably rooted in Jamaica’, a statement made in the accompanying documentation consisting of a standard form letter signed by heads of major Jamaican organizations in support of the application to UNESCO. The certificate of birth, and hence nationality, which the application for listing seems to be aimed at, is reinforced by claims that reggae is ‘indigenous’ to Jamaica, is a Jamaican ‘invention’, originated in Kingston, specifically West Kingston, and areas of the city described as ‘innercity’. The goal of the nomination for inclusion on the list of the Reggae Music of Jamaica is explicitly found in the document submitted by the Jamaican state. Listing would ‘help to identify and reinforce the point of origin of the element’. The justification for seeking a ‘birth certificate’ and ratification of ‘nationality’ for reggae via the UNESCO listing process is made using an intriguing argument. ‘Formally identifying the genre as one created in the unique Jamaican cultural space is a critical component in the safeguarding process’. The ‘safeguarding’ of a musical genre seems odd for a musical form that is known, enjoyed and performed ‘worldwide’, notably as the document states, from ‘Australia’s “Reggae in the Desert” to Japan’s “Reggae Japansplash” to Spain’s “Rototom Sunsplash”, to Zimbabwe’s “Harare Reggae Festival”’. The only explanation is that the need for this ‘safeguarding’ constitutes a fig leaf for including the Reggae Music of Jamaica in a list of cultural practices deemed to be in danger of disappearing. Clearly the branding intent of the nomination can be seen in the explicit statement in the document that there would be

6 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

funding through ‘the Tourism Enhancement Fund to promote the element worldwide to enhance “Brand Jamaica”’ (p. 6). The originators of the Reggae Music of Jamaica are described in the nomination document as belonging to ‘a population of mainly African descent … who historically were uprooted and brought to the New World’ who gave the music its ‘predominantly overt African influences’. This African descended population passed over to reggae influences from the music of ‘African-derived folk forms e.g. Maroon, Kumina, Revival’. An additional profile of the originators is given in the nomination document when it asserts that they belonged to ‘marginalized under-represented groups’. The music, it is claimed, has provided expression to ‘the oppressed, marginalised, the thankful and the hopeful’. Thus, the Reggae Music of Jamaica has functioned as ‘a voice for maligned groups, the unemployed and at risk groups and provided a vehicle for social commentary and expression where no other outlet existed or was afforded’. Against the background of the above, however, a radically different representation of reggae and, by extension, Jamaica also appears in the nomination document. This can be seen in the following quote from the nomination form: Reggae music is the creative product of a small Caribbean island and the descendants of several European, African (enslaved and free), Asian (indentured labourers) and Arabian groups who inhabit it.

Interestingly here, the previously mentioned ‘predominantly African’ influence is demoted to second mention. In addition, it is now shown to us not as a single source of influence but as a multiple set of African influences, equal to and alongside multiple ‘European’, ‘Asian’ and ‘Arabian’ ones. The music, according to this representation, has now evolved out of ‘the creative expressions of many peoples and groups with a history of colonial occupation’. In addition, ‘The diversity in the Jamaican culture has created an eclectic mix that has spawned this authentic music’. One is left to wonder about the logical connection between cultural diversity, eclectic mixing and ‘authentic’ as opposed to ‘inauthentic’ music. Within the strand of presentation, the music is described as ‘the creative product of multi-ethnic and multi-racial peoples’ and ‘of a multi-ethnic and multi-­ racial society’.

1  JAMAICA TO THE WORLD 

7

When treating the socio-economic class associations of the music, ground shifting in the document is sometimes justified on the ground of changes over different historical time periods. Thus, we read that While Reggae music, in its embryonic state was the voice of the marginalised, found in innercity communities in Kingston, the music is now played and embraced by a wide cross section of members of the society, including various ethnic, religious, racial groups and genders.

Two interpretations are possible here. Marginalization and innercity communities are features of times past. Alternatively, the music is no longer the voice and expression of these groups of people and their concerns for social and economic justice. Whatever the interpretation intended, the application declares that reggae music in Jamaica provided a critical method of release that was and continues to have a strong cathartic and therapeutic value … These basic social functions have not changed and the music continues to act as a voice for all, including the under-represented.

Presumably, having received catharsis and therapy from the music, the ‘marginalized’ have been turned into a much milder ‘under-represented’ and can still find, in the music, a medium to voice their much alleviated pain and anguish. Now that, in the words of Bob Marley, music has hit and little pain is being felt, these ‘under-represented’ can, as a result of ‘therapeutic value of Reggae music’, live what the nomination document describes as ‘[t]he prevailing iconography of Jamaica as an “Irie” place with a calm, fun-loving, and embracing people’, in a country that has had high ‘past positions on the Happiness Index’. This ‘One Love’ Jamaica created by this version of reggae and Jamaican society is presented in the documentation with reference to ethnicities listed as ‘Europeans’, ‘Africans’, ‘Asians’ and ‘Arabians’, the application states, and These seemingly disparate groups live and co-exist in harmony, a harmony personified by the unique Reggae rhythm. The integration of these groups further resulted in an integrated culture, exemplified in the Jamaican national motto “Out of many, One people”.

8 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

The ‘One Love’ Whitewash The choice of Bob Marley’s ‘One Love’ to mark the accession of the Reggae Music of Jamaica to the UNESCO List of Masterpieces of the Intangible Heritage of Mankind, rather than his ‘Get Up, Stand Up’ or ‘Rebel Music’, is predictable. It flows naturally from the ‘One Love’/‘Out of Many, One’ strand of the narrative contained in the nomination document. With reference to the competing ‘resistance to oppression’ strand, how can these two, seemingly contradictory strands, be contained in the international representation of Jamaica by the Jamaican state? As it turns out, this is done quite easily. The ‘One Love’ or ‘Out of Many, One’ strand is one which applies to Jamaica and which presents the country to the world as a ‘mecca’, a word used in the document, for all things reggae, loving and peaceful. The ‘Rebel Music’ or the ‘Get Up Stand Up for Your Rights’ components of the projected Jamaican identity apply to Jamaica in the past, during slavery and colonialism, with Jamaica and Jamaicans heroically in the vanguard of the struggle. Now that peace, love and harmony reign in the homeland in ‘Mecca’, the ‘War’ is now against the ‘unhappy regimes that hold our brothers’ overseas in bondage and oppression. ‘Bak a yaad’, at home, the Jamaican lives in an egalitarian and non-racist paradise at home wreathed in soporific ganja smoke. Abroad, outside the Wakanda that is Jamaica, the ‘To the World’ Jamaican fights fiercely and heroically against racism, colonialism, oppression and injustice that plagues the world outside of the homeland. An important weapon in this fight is the ‘Rebel Music’, that is, reggae music. This creative restructuring of the face of Jamaica to the world by the Jamaican state is not a one-off in the nomination document. We can see a repeat in the (mis)representation of the role of marijuana within Jamaica, a key element in the ‘high’ ground which Jamaica seeks to occupy in the global popular imagination. The nomination document states, ‘Peter Tosh in his song “Legalize It” championed the campaign to legalize the smoking of marijuana, considered by Rastafarians as a sacrament, at a time when it was illegal in Jamaica’. Any reasonable reading of the preceding would suggest, given the use of ‘was’ in the statement, that the use of marijuana is no longer illegal. We can fact check the legal status of marijuana in Jamaica. The Jamaican Information Service, the official information service of the Jamaican state, has a post on its official website about the Dangerous Drugs (Amendment) Act of 2015 as it concerns marijuana, usually referred to as ganja in

1  JAMAICA TO THE WORLD 

9

Jamaica. ‘Possession of 2 ounces or less of ganja is no longer an offence for which one can be arrested, charged and tried in court, and it will not result in a criminal record’. However, we are told, ‘The police may issue a ticket to a person in possession of 2 ounces or less of ganja, similar to a traffic ticket, and the person would have 30 days to pay the sum of J$500 (US$4.00) at any Tax Office’. The statement continues, ‘It remains a criminal offence to be in possession of over 2 ounces of ganja, and offenders can be arrested, charged, tried in court and, if found guilty, sentenced to a fine or to imprisonment or both. The conviction would also be recorded on that person’s criminal record’ (Jamaica Information Service 2019, https://jis.gov.jm/features/dangerous-drugs-act-facts/). The fact is that, even for the possession of two ounces or less of marijuana, one can still be issued a ticket by the police, requiring the payment of a fine speaks for itself. Jamaica’s self-presentation to the world at the UNESCO committee meeting has, to put it euphemistically, been less than frank. This lack of frankness has been systematic and covers issues of social disadvantage, oppression, racism, classism and, as we have now seen, the legal status of ganja (marijuana). The overall effect is to make the Jamaican state, in the treatment of its citizens, seem less repressive and discriminatory than it might otherwise be perceived to be. The Jamaican state, via its nomination form, decided on the colour of the wash it was going to use to develop the photographic film of Jamaica that would be shown to the world. And the colour of that wash was white.

The Silencing of Language In the age of image manipulation, even more important than what is seen in a projected image is what has been airbrushed into invisibility. Absent from the nomination form submitted to the UNESCO subcommittee is any reference to language. In relation to issues of race, colour and class, the state applies some contradictory image enhancement, nevertheless, the issues are there for all to see. What then are we to make of the elephant in the room, the absence of any sight, or more appropriately, sound of language in the nomination document? The nomination document covers in some detail musical form, performing skills and recording technology. Easily over 95% of Jamaican reggae music involves singing. Therefore, lyrics in one of the two main languages used in Jamaica, the Jamaican language (aka Patwa, Jamaican Creole, etc.) and English, are ever present. The work of Devonish and

10 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

Jones (2017) suggests that at present, 63.4% of the lyrics of Jamaican reggae songs and genres, such as dance hall, are performed in the Jamaican language, with the remainder being performed in English. The official language of Jamaica is English, inherited from the former colonial power, Britain. The elite and educated use this language in official, public and formal situations. Informal situations for this class and most emphatically for other classes typically involve the use of the Jamaican language, often labelled ‘Patois/Patwa’ or Jamaican Creole. Jamaican music and the Jamaican language have mutually reinforced each other as part of a process of global expansion of Jamaican cultural influence. Dennis Howard, a musicologist, writes in the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper just three days after the UNESCO inscription of the Reggae Music of Jamaica. He argues that in spite of opinions to the contrary, one of the main exports of Jamaica has been its culture in all its marketable forms. He goes on to make the following claim, ‘A big part of what has made our cultural artefact so marketable is our language, i.e., Jamaican Patois, or Creole. Jamaican Patois, our mother tongue, is expressed through our music; dramatic presentations, including films and plays; food; fashion; and distinctive personality’ (Howard 2018). The UNESCO application is able to proclaim in poetic style that ‘Reggae music has provided the soundtrack to the lyrics of the oppressed, marginalised, the thankful and the hopeful’. The ‘marginalized’ and the ‘oppressed’ in Jamaica do not suffer and express their pain in English but in their native language, Jamaican. Moreover, the international appeal of the music is closely linked to the language. Thus, a search of the website of the Jamaica Gleaner, the national newspaper of record in Jamaica, using the search terms ‘jamaica, music, patois’ comes up with 174 items, the top 5 of which provide us the following quotes from Begum X and Delhi Sultanate, lead singers with Ska Avengers, an Indian band playing Jamaican style music. They refer to their singers performing a version of Jamaican artiste Jah Cure’s Divide and Rule; played with the bassist and drummer of the Ska Vengers and a group of Afghan musicians in Afghanistan. I’m proud of how it came out, “Delhi Sultanate said.” The first part is in English and Patois and the second one is in Hindustani (another name for Hindi language) and Persian. (Amitabh Sharma, Jamaica Gleaner, 3.8.2014, http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20140803/ent/ent3.html)

From Cali P, a Guadeloupean and Swiss reggae performer

1  JAMAICA TO THE WORLD 

11

Having grown up with reggae music, Cali P revealed that when he started writing his lyrics they came naturally in English and Patois (Delahaye, Jordaine, Jamaica Gleaner 26.3.2013, http://jamaica-gleaner.com/ gleaner/20130326/ent/ent3.html)

From a US public relations consultant who had never visited Jamaica: One day, the conversation turned to Jamaican Patois, and both of these co-­ workers were stunned when I asked them what “Forward and Fiaca, menacle and den gosaca” meant. They were then shocked when I started singing the lyrics to some songs on the album like Sweet and Dandy. (John Horn, Jamaica Gleaner, 27.4.2016, http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/commentary/20160427/easier-they-come)

The omission of any reference to the language of the music in the UNESCO nomination document is interesting for another reason, an economic one. Senator Olivia Grange, Minister of Culture, is reported as saying that the IMF’s World Economic Outlook GDP Estimate for Jamaica was US$14.6 billion for 2018. Of this, according to her, the creative industries represented 5% or US$730 million. The statement also indicates that music production represents close to 2% of GDP. This is as part of a speech in which she claims that ‘music is Jamaica’s most valued yet undervalued export’ (https://jis.gov.jm/reggae-music-jamaicas-valuableexport-grange-tells-unesco-creative-cities-music-meeting/). Using the minister’s figures, 2% of Jamaica’s GDP would be US$292 million. Let us assume that half the economic value of the music is in the lyrics, given that nearly all reggae and other Jamaican popular music forms are sung. In such a case, the lyrics could be estimated to have a value of US$146 million. Being conservative and assuming that rather than the 63.4% mentioned by Devonish and Jones (2017) referred to above, just half of those lyrics were in the Jamaican language, the value of the language within popular music is US$73 million per annum, 0.5% of GDP. It is interesting, therefore, that, in a claim for UNESCO listing for the Reggae Music of Jamaica, no mention is made of the linguistic element. This is against the backdrop that the language of the lyrics, in addition to the musical beat, being the distinguishing marks of Jamaican popular music on the global market. Of all the symbolic systems by which the Jamaican state governs on behalf of the owners of capital, the most important and powerful is that of

12 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

language. As a result, it is possible to discuss, in an international projection of Jamaica, issues of race and class, however muted, but not those of language. The acknowledgement of the language issue potentially opens up a challenge to all the other symbolic systems and could threaten the very survival of the state. Concessions on language potentially give the mass of the population a voice, and it is this voice which could spread ideas which dismantle all the other symbolic systems in the minds of the population. An opening position in relation to the rest of this book, therefore, is that while racism, colourism and classism are critical elements in the defining of the Jamaican, both global and local, languageism is arguably the most critical. It is an ‘ism’ whose name the state dare not even speak. Consideration of this ‘ism’ will, therefore, lead our examination of the concept of the Global Jamaican. Language Language represents a confluence of the issues surrounding race, colour and class. Language, or specifically skills in the English Language, becomes the means by which those who are lacking in the privileges conferred by race, colour and class can nevertheless enjoy socio-economic mobility. This they achieve by becoming officers of the state or members of the professions, teachers, lawyers, doctors, engineers and administrative officers of a state for which English is the sole official language. It is this Jamaican state which made the representation to UNESCO for the inscription of the Reggae Music of Jamaica. There is a reason for the absence of reference to language, and specifically the Jamaican language, in the UNESCO Reggae inscription nomination document submitted by the Jamaican state. It is a natural outcome of the language ideologies at home. Ironically, the Ministry of Culture in Jamaica, which submitted the document to UNESCO on behalf of Jamaica, is the government entity most vigorously engaged in the promotion of the language within the country. However, this is within the framework of ‘culture’, notably the Jamaican Cultural Development Commission (JCDC) sponsored literary and performing competitions, and the most recent, 2018, official recognition of a national icon, Louise Bennett Coverley, in the form of a statue. She is nationally recognized as the pioneer in the production of literature in the Jamaican language over several decades and as an oral performer of her poetry and prose written in the language.

1  JAMAICA TO THE WORLD 

13

The starkest case of the Ministry of Culture engagement in the culture wars on the side of the Jamaican language occurred in a remark made by the Minister of State in the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, Mr Alando Terrelonge as reported in the national newspaper, the Jamaica Gleaner, on May 14, 2018. He was commenting on public remarks made by Joel Zwick, a Hollywood director, that Jamaican film-­ makers should create films in English rather than Jamaican, and specifically the remark that ‘Jamaica should not be producing foreign language films in an English-speaking country’: the ‘foreign language’ here is intended to refer to Jamaican, foreign to Zwick and US audiences. The Minister of State is reported to have described Zwick’s remarks as ‘myopic’ and ‘colonial’; Terrelonge goes on to say, Why would we consider to tell our stories in any other form but our native tongue? When Latin America, the Chinese, the French, and African film-­makers produce their films, they have no reservations if the world can’t understand what they’re saying  – and then they use subtitles or voice-overs. Their film industries are multibillion-dollar industries. (Jamaica Gleaner, 14.5.2018, http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/ entertainment/20180514/gatffest-jamaican-patois-vs-queens-english)

The Premise There is conflict between the image of Jamaica which the Jamaican state presents to the world and that which it upholds internally within Jamaica. More problematically, both of these images clash with the image of self and country which the mass of individual Jamaicans have. What Jamaica is and who Jamaicans are, are highly contested questions. Three of the most important areas of clash involve race, class and language. The nomination document issued by the cultural officials of the Jamaican state and the singing of ‘One Love’ at the UNESCO meeting in Mauritius represents the Jamaica of the state and not the populace to the world. It whitewashes the critical issues of race, class and language to the world. At home in Jamaica, the power of those who control and manage the state, relative to the power of the mass of the population, has shifted in the years since independence in 1962. The global influence and economic importance of the cultural products and image projected to the world by the ‘oppressed’, ‘dispossessed’ and ‘marginalized’ of Jamaica have had a feedback effect. These all possess three overlapping features. The cultural

14 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

products are black or African Jamaican in influence. They are linked to the dispossessed classes. Finally, they are typically expressed in the Jamaican language of the dispossessed classes rather than in English, the official language of the Jamaican state. No longer can those classes be treated as if they were not important or did not exist. Yet, to fully yield to popular pressure would destroy the post-colonial state as it is currently constituted. The governors and the governed coexist in ongoing unease. In dispute is the issue of which Jamaican, and on whose behalf the state functions. This book looks at the emerging popular consensus around who the typical or true Jamaican is. The stakes are great because of the high profile of the Jamaican state and individual Jamaicans around the world. The unintended consequence of globalization is that the identity crisis of the governed in post-colonial states, and more recently in the former colonizing ‘developed’ states as well, is now global. The issues of race, class and language coexist across the states of the world in the conflict over definition of identity. It is against this background that the drama of the conflict around self-definition is being played out by Jamaicans in full view of international popular culture. In this work, we explore the drama of this conflict. We also seek to understand why it is that Jamaica, with its cultural products, rooted as they are around conflicts about race, class and language, has managed to capture the global centre stage.

References Devonish, H., & Jones, B. (2017). Jamaica: A State of Language, Music and Crisis of Nation. Inna Jamaican Stylee, 13(1), 118–130. Howard, D. (2018). Jamaican Language Anchoring Cultural Exports. The Jamaica Gleaner. Retrieved from http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/focus/20181202/ dennis-howard-jamaican-language-anchoring-cultural-exports Jamaica Information Service. (2018). Reggae Music Jamaica’s Most Valuable Export  – Grange Tells UNESCO Creative Cities of Music Meeting. Retrieved from https://jis.gov.jm/reggae-music-jamaicas-valuable-export-grange-tellsunesco-creative-cities-music-meeting/ Jamaica Information Service. (2019). Jamaican Coat of Arms. Retrieved from https://jis.gov.jm/information/symbols/jamaican-coat-of-arms/ UNESCO. (2018). Thirteenth session of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (13.COM). Port Louis, Republic of Mauritius. November 26 - December 1, 2018. https://www.unescoichcap.org/overview-of-13th-session-of-the-igc-for-the-safeguarding-of-ich/

CHAPTER 2

Once Upon an Island …

Abstract  We hope, in this chapter, to take you on a journey to find the answer to the question that puzzles us and lots of others. How can one explain the disproportionate global influence of Jamaica, a country of 4244 square miles, an annual per capita income of less than US$10,000 and a population of about 3 million people? The journey takes us back through time to the seventeenth century, when sugar cultivation and manufacture arrive in the British possessions in the Caribbean. Sugar cane cultivation needs labour and enslaved Africans are imported to do the work on the sugar plantations. The British sugar plantation slave colony model is developed and spread across the Caribbean to Jamaica and from Jamaica to other locations around the Atlantic World. Keywords  Global influence • Jamaica • Sugar plantations • Seventeenth century

The Journey We hope, in this chapter, to take you on a journey to find the answer to the question that puzzles us and lots of others. How can one explain the disproportionate global influence of Jamaica, a country of 4244 square miles, an annual per capita income of less than US$10,000 and a

© The Author(s) 2020 H. Devonish, K. Carpenter, Language, Race and the Global Jamaican, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45748-8_2

15

16 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

population of about 3 million people? The journey takes us back through time to the seventeenth century, when sugar cultivation and manufacture arrive in the British possessions in the Caribbean. Sugar cane cultivation needs labour and enslaved Africans are imported to do the work on the sugar plantations. The British sugar plantation slave colony model is developed and spread across the Caribbean to Jamaica and from Jamaica to other locations around the Atlantic World. The colonists, who travel as part of colonial expansion travel with their property, enslaved Africans. To keep these human beings and their descendants for all generations to come as slaves, there has to be justification. We examine this justification, race, and how this comes to be invented in Jamaica. Traveling as well is the new culture and language which has grown up as a result of this Anglo-West African contact. We apply language reconstruction techniques to the related language forms across the Anglo-Atlantic area to take us back to the source Anglo-West African community from which sprung the Atlantic economic system in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Through the discovery of this root, we trace how Jamaican culture has grown and the routes by which it has reached out across the world.

The Bitter Taste of Sugar The cultivation of sugar cane for the manufacture of sugar is extremely labour intensive. This labour involves both the creation and maintenance of irrigation systems and the actual planting, maintenance and reaping of the crop. It has, therefore, not surprisingly had a long association with slavery. The sugar plantations of Southern Iraq during the Abbasid caliphate in the ninth century were powered by slave labour from eastern Africa. Work gangs on these plantations could number between 500 and 5000. They eventually revolted in what has become known as the Zanj Rebellion in the year 869 CE. The enslaved Zanj rebel numbers were so great that they were able to seize and hold large areas of Southern Iraq for fourteen years before the revolt was put down (Amin 1973; Chami 2002). Let us fast forward to the 1640s in Dutch occupied Brazil. Numerous Portuguese and Spanish people of Jewish origin, both those who remained Jews and those who converted to Christianity under duress, had fled from the Inquisition and sought refuge in Pernambuco, Brazil. There they were heavily involved in the booming sugar industry, as planters, traders, financiers and innovators. Satisfying the huge appetite for labour for the

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

17

plantations came in the form of enslaved people bought and transported to Brazil from Africa by the Dutch West India Company. At the point where the Portuguese reconquered Brazil from the Dutch around 1654, the Jews found themselves having to flee again. Among the places to which they fled were the English occupied territories in and around the Caribbean. These included Suriname, Barbados and, when it came under English control in 1656, Jamaica. They brought with them the knowledge associated with sugar production and a willingness to encourage the planters in the English controlled territories to switch to sugar. The incoming Jews, among other roles, acted as advisors to planters shifting to sugar production and as links to the Dutch West India Company that dominated the supply of enslaved people from Africa to the European colonies in the Americas (Sheridan 1974). Emblematic of this transfer of business connections, capital, know-how and technology to the English controlled territories of the Caribbean is the warrant for a grant to Francis, Lord Willoughby. The warrant for the grant was given by a Jewish man, aptly named Raphael David de Mercado (sometimes spelt ‘de Mercato’, literally meaning ‘of the market’). He originally came from Recife in the former Dutch occupied Brazil. In a document dated January 2, 1664, it states, ‘Warrant for a grant to Francis, Lord Willoughby of Parham and Lawrence Hyde, second son of the Lord Chancellor, for 21 years, of the sole making and framing of sugar mills, after a new manner invented by David de Mercado’ (Arbell 2002, p. 195). Earlier, on June 22, 1663, de Mercado had already signed an agreement granting these same parties, for fourteen years, the sole use of the sugar mill designed by Mr de Mercado. This agreement covered Barbados and the Caribbean islands, the territory over which Lord Willoughby had been designated Lord Proprietor. This agreement also allowed the contracting parties to hire Mr de Mercado and anyone else they might think fit to operate the sugar mill. This technology and machinery were capital for sugar production, as were plantation animals and enslaved Africans. Enslaved people were simultaneously labour, capital and a traded commodity (Sheridan 1974, p. 104). The foundation role played by African enslaved labour, first in Brazil and then beyond, in the emerging Atlantic economy of the seventeenth century going forward can be seen in the observation that it was through the development of the early sugar industry, effectively pioneered on Brazilian sugar plantations, that African slave labour emerged.

18 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

Later it was transferred north, to the Caribbean islands (again for sugar cultivation). Then African slavery slipped further north to the tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake and, later still, to the rice plantations of the Carolinas. (Walvin 2007)

The modern industrialized world, as we know it, was formed in a small number of islands and territories around the Caribbean Sea. It was here that the model of the sugar plantation and, more importantly even, the plantation colony was developed and perfected. It is here, rather than in Europe, that a large labour force was first used for the manufacture of a mass consumer product. The time was the middle of the seventeenth century, the product was sugar and the location was the numerous agro-­ industrial operations known as sugar plantations. The labour force was made up of millions of enslaved Africans and sometimes enslaved indigenous people. Given its engagement in large-scale industrial production at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, this workforce has been described as a proto-proletariat (Craton 1992). In control were European colonial enslavers of English, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Danish origin. These European controlled sugar plantation colonies in and around the Caribbean were the prototypes of the European-based large-scale manufacturing operations which were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. The Caribbean sugar plantations were also the main sources of capital used to finance the Industrial Revolution in the ‘mother’ countries in Europe, as suggested in the classic works on Caribbean history, C.L.R.  James’ 1938 book Black Jacobins and Eric Williams’ 1944, Capitalism and Slavery. The British, as both leaders in the development of the sugar plantation colony model and the Industrial Revolution, were at the centre of this process. Jamaica, as its largest sugar plantation colony, both in area and in population, was at the centre of this centre. A typical seventeenth-century British planation operation in the Caribbean with 100 enslaved people required a great deal of equipment. There would be up to two sugar mills for squeezing juice from the sugar cane that had been harvested. Then, there was the boiling house to turn cane juice into sugar crystals by evaporation, the curing house designed to drain the molasses and dry the sugar, the distillery for converting molasses to rum and the storehouse for the barrels of sugar awaiting shipping to England (Dunn 1972, pp. 189–190). European expansion into the Indian and Pacific Oceans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used the Caribbean as its model for establishing plantation colonies in these new

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

19

regions of conquest. With this came the movement of people and language forms, originally from the Caribbean and Atlantic, into the new regions of European dominance, the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The resulting Creole languages of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific have many features in common with those of the Atlantic, a likely result of transfer from the Caribbean/Atlantic cradle of an emerging globalization.

Making Bitter-Sweet Languages Within this ‘New World’, the point where the three continents of Africa, the Americas and Europe collided, old identities, and with them, the languages expressing those identities, died. Languages such as Kaliphuna, Guanahátabey and Ciguayo are no longer spoken in those regions, gone with the genocidal colonial winds which blew their speakers into extinction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. New bitter-sweet languages emerged, sweet from sugar, and made bitter by the blood and sweat of enslaved African labour which produced it. Scholars refer to these new languages as Creole languages, languages created in the colonial situation mainly out of contact between speakers of European languages and of West African languages. Typically, these languages have vocabulary which is, in the main, from a European language such as English, French, Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch. The original pronunciations are, however, significantly modified under the influence of the West African languages of the slaves, who created them. In their syntactic structure, these languages have a form all their own, which they have in common, regardless of the European language from which they derive their vocabulary. Take the following examples, all of which say the same thing, ‘I am going’. In each case, the first word in the sentence means ‘“I”/first-person singular’, the second means ‘action is continuous’ and the third means ‘go’. French-lexicon Creole (Martinique, Guadeloupe, St Lucia, Dominica)  Mwen ka alé Papiamentu [Spanish/Portuguese Creole] (Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao)  mi ta bai English-lexicon Creole (Jamaica, Antigua, St Vincent, Guyana)  mi a go None of the European languages from which the above Creole languages derive their vocabulary has a structure like this for such a sentence. The similarity across these Caribbean Creole languages appears to have

20 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

nothing to do with the structure of the European languages from which they derive their vocabularies. Where the similarities come from, whether as a result of transmission from West African languages, or from a universal simplification process which occurs during language contact, or some other source, has been the subject of many a dissertation and academic treatise. What is clear, however, is that the Creole languages of the Caribbean, and by extension the Atlantic area, inclusive of Guyana, French Guiana and Suriname in South America, Georgia and South Carolina in North America, Sierra Leone and Nigeria in West Africa, belong to a family of related languages. They express a set of related identities created by the collision of the three continents in the general area of the Caribbean. For a time, this area was the hub of the world economic production and of its industrial development. Within all of this is the subgroup of Atlantic Creole languages that derive their vocabularies from English. These are linked specifically to British colonialism and enslavement, which is itself at the core of the broader European global colonial expansionist project. Given Jamaica’s special historical role in this project, the English-lexicon Creoles deserve particular attention. They share a special set of vocabulary items that are NOT of English origin but are rather from a range of West and Central African languages and from Portuguese. These items, in addition to other shared linguistic features, make the case for a single community of origin for specifically the Atlantic English-lexicon Creole languages.

Of Routes and Roots: When, Where and How? Searching for the Original Language Community We are interested in the roots of the Jamaican language, a critical part of the global reach of the country. Jamaican, also known in the literature as Jamaican Creole, is one of the Atlantic English-lexicon Creoles. We suggest, based on linguistic and other cultural evidence, that there was an original community from which all the Atlantic English-lexicon Creole speaking communities spring. If so, we have to go and find it. This community would have been born, based on the history of the use of African enslaved labour in the Caribbean, no later than the middle of the seventeenth century.

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

21

Providence Island: In the Beginning The British Atlantic World quickly developed into a single, seamlessly integrated agro-industrial and commercial system. It is with this understanding that we begin the search for a single, original source community at the root of the Atlantic English-lexicon Creole family tree. In permanent British settlements in South America, the Caribbean, Central America and the southern part of North America, West and Central Africans were present in small numbers from the earliest times. The chronology of these settlements was St Kitts in 1624, Barbados in 1627, Nevis in 1628, Providence Island in 1630, Antigua in 1632, Bahamas in 1648, Suriname in 1651, Jamaica in 1655, South Carolina in 1670, Belize in Central America in 1670s, Essequibo and Demerara in an area now part of Guyana in 1740s, St Vincent in 1763 and Tobago in 1765. This, however, is only part of the story. The other and more important part of the story involves an answer to the following question. In which one of these settlements did the number of West and Central Africans grow to the kind of proportions capable of a self-sustaining group identity and language that expresses that identity, separate and distinct from English?

Language Journeys We adopt here a simple, some may say simplistic, version of the theory of ‘acts of identity’ as presented in Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985). Every successful act of language communication between two people involves them making some kind of social identification with the other. The next component of such a successful act is that they have common or shared language behaviour. If they do not, but they are in the kind of constant contact with each other that produces the need to communicate, A will learn B’s language, B will learn A’s language or they will form a new language for communicating with each other, using features from languages A and B. In order for B to learn A’s language it would involve, for the purposes of their communication, B agreeing to become somewhat a member of A’s community. The converse would happen if A learns B’s language. The creation of a new A/B language would occur if the interactions between A and B are so regular and intense that A and B start to think of themselves as more closely linked to each other than the previous combinations. It demonstrates a vital necessity and common survival urgency that unites A and B as well as the members of their respective

22 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

communities. The ‘act of identity’ approach privileges the sense of identity, of belonging, over lack of similarity in linguistic systems in explaining the development of new languages in contact situations. This is clearly demonstrated in work by Smith (1987) where new languages developed, for example, São Tomé Portuguese-lexicon Creole and Angolares—a Creole language of maroon, runaway formerly enslaved, people in an island off the coast of West Africa. In both these cases, at the point where these languages were formed, people had access to a common language for communication. They, nevertheless, proceeded to develop new languages. The argument Smith (1987) makes is that what drove the development of new languages was the development of a new ethnicity, for which a new language is required as a separate act of identity. The profile of the ‘root’ speech community for Atlantic English-lexicon Creoles is one in which English is available and accessible as a language to at least some people. However, this community has to contain large enough numbers of originally non-speakers of English, with ethnicities that are not English, but with a reduced desire or possibility to retain their old ethnicities. English overseas settlements in the Atlantic area, either in West Africa or in the Americas, fit this broad description. The non-speakers of English here were typically enslaved people from West and Central Africa, though in some cases, indigenous people of the Americas were also involved. There is nothing which stipulates that the magic percentage figure for the enslaved Africans of 10% or 20% or 30% of the total population in English settlements would trigger the formation of an Atlantic English-­ lexicon Creole. We have no way of looking back and identifying the precise triggering factors in each or any of these early English settlements in the Atlantic. We will, however, adopt a rough rule of thumb that suggests that when the numbers of enslaved people of African origin reach 50% of the total population, the critical mass necessary for the development of a new identity, culture and language can be assumed to have existed. The first British settlement in which this critical mass was achieved was that of Providence Island off the Caribbean Coast of Central America. It was settled in 1630 by colonists sent out by the Providence Island Company, a company owned by English Puritan investors. As a colony established with the aim of producing tropical agricultural commodities, the expected source of labour was indentured servants recruited from the British Isles. However, the supplies from this source lagged way behind the demand for labour. As a consequence, the settlers began buying

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

23

enslaved Africans from Dutch slave traders operating in the area of Central America (Kupperman 1995). The influx of African enslaved people was so great that, by the mid-­1630s, there was a vigorous debate among the enslavers about the moral and safety implications of such a large number of African enslaved people in the colony. In spite of this, however, the large-scale importation of African slaves supplied by the Dutch continued. In 1640, one Spanish estimate was that there were 1600 West African slaves in Providence Island. When the Spanish captured the island in 1641, they took prisoner 350 English British inhabitants and 381 West African slaves. The Spanish military commander, surprised at the small number of West African slaves, was informed, however, that the number of Africans had recently been reduced out of fear of an imminent Spanish attack. These slaves had been sent to Bermuda and St Kitts (Kupperman 1995). What had actually happened was that, ever since an earlier Spanish attack in 1640, the settlers had feared a capture of the island by the Spanish. They had, therefore, taken steps to export their property in the form of African slaves to other British possessions in the Americas for safe-­ keeping. Some went to Bermuda, others to Massachusetts, and to St Kitts. Unlike in Providence Island, elsewhere in the Caribbean, the event which triggers off the mass importation of West African slaves is the introduction of sugar cane as a plantation crop. Sugar became the dominant crop in St Kitts only around the 1660s. Thus, St Kitts only reaches the point where enslaved Africans outnumbered Europeans in the 1680s (Kupperman 1995). The enslaved Africans from Providence Island and their descendants were, therefore, very much in place in St Kitts to linguistically acculturate the mass imported enslaved West and Central Africans who arrived later. There is other evidence showing the influence of Providence Island experience within the broader British Atlantic colonial project. In late 1640, before the final Spanish attack, Colonel Philip Bell, a former governor of Bermuda and former governor of Providence Island, was granted a licence to lead 140 colonists to St Lucia. Following an unsuccessful effort at settling St Lucia, Bell and his followers ended up in Barbados. There, in June 1641, Bell was appointed governor of Barbados (Schomburgk 1971; Kupperman 1995; Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh 1972). No specific mention is made of any enslaved Africans imported from Providence Island into Barbados by Bell. However, Bell had imported enslaved people that he owned in Bermuda into Providence at the very start of its

24 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

settlement. In Providence Island, he was identified as a great supporter of the importation of enslaved people, doing so even in defiance of quotas and limits imposed by the Providence Island Company in London (Kupperman 1995). There was, in addition, the general trend to evacuate enslaved Africans from Providence Island towards the end of the English occupation there. That Bell owned enslaved people in Providence represented wealth, some of these would, therefore, have accompanied Bell to Barbados. Bell timed his arrival in Barbados perfectly. He was leaving the first British colony (Providence Island) to have an enslaved African majority, to become governor of the next British possession in line to have such a majority. The year 1641 was the beginning of the introduction of sugar cane as a plantation crop replacing tobacco in Barbados. During the term of Bell’s governorship of Barbados, from 1641–50, sugar production became the dominant economic activity in Barbados. Associated with this was the large-scale importation of West African slave labour. Given his own position and status, Bell and his followers from Providence Island, and those West African slaves who would have come with him, would have been at the essential to the economic and social life in the emerging sugar plantation society of Barbados at that time. This central role is reinforced by the fact that, in 1644, Bell, in his private capacity, was one of a pioneering group of planters involved in the earliest importation of slaves for developing sugar as a plantation crop (Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh 1972). It is from St Kitts and Barbados, both with significant early linguistic and cultural input from Providence Island, that all of the other British colonies in the Caribbean were settled. What the evidence suggests is that the Africans from Providence Island played a critical and central role in the development of Anglo-Atlantic Creoles. They arrived in Barbados and St Kitts with a hybrid Anglo-West African language and culture which emerged on the island of Providence from which they came. This gives them historically a pivotal role in the development of Anglo-West African language and culture in the region. They were in place in these two colonies before the large-scale importation of West Africans began in these societies. This put them, historically, in a unique position of influence within emerging Atlantic culture and language. The subsequent waves of enslaved people imported from West and Central Africa, triggered by the introduction of sugar production, arrived in Barbados and St Kitts to a cultural and linguistic situation, the broad outlines of which were already established. The mould for an Anglo-Afro-Atlantic identity and associated

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

25

language had already, in large measure, been formed in Providence Island. Linguistic reconstruction work such as that of Smith (1987, p. 105) concludes that the process of formation of what we, slightly modifying his label, might call the ‘Proto-Atlantic Enslaved Community Language’ or PAECL occurred rapidly in the seventeenth century. This, according to him, was created once and only once in the history of Atlantic English-­ lexicon Creoles and corresponds with the language story which we are about to tell. In our story, the PAECL began in Providence Island. How this language of people enslaved by the English spread may be seen through the journey of particular speech forms. Among them is the form /da/ in front of a verb to signal that the action is continuous. A typical sentence with such a marker would be /mi da waak/ ‘I am walking’. The marker /da/ begins its journey with many other PAECL forms, one of them being / unu/ ‘you (plural)’. They come from very different backgrounds. The former is from a rural background in South-East England, in and around Somerset. The latter comes from West Africa, specifically Igbo, a language spoken in what is now southern Nigeria. They start out on a journey in the 1640s with many other words and features of PAECL in the mouths of enslaved Africans as they are moved from one territory to the other in the Atlantic area. The PAECL group of language features travelled with its enslaved African users from Providence Island to Barbados and St Kitts. Travelling the Barbados Route In 1650, Francis Lord Willoughby, newly appointed governor of the British possessions in the Caribbean, sent an expedition from Barbados to Suriname with a view to founding a colony there. Beckles (1989) refers to sources which state that in the period up to 1662, about 2400 freemen and freeholders had migrated from Barbados to Suriname. Many settlers also came from the Leeward Islands (Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh 1972). The period of settler migration to Suriname was occurring at a time when the number of West African and West Central African enslaved people was rising steeply, particularly in Barbados, as sugar developed as a plantation crop. Many of these settlers, travelled with their enslaved labourers, thereby establishing a new plantation society. Travelling from Barbados was a form of PAECL originating in Providence Island, along with the range of features associated with it, notably /wi/ and /unu/ for first- and second-person pronouns. In

26 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

Suriname, innovation affects the travelling forms. This time /da/, the continuous verb marker, is the one affected. The influence is from /de ~ re/ (Schacter 1968), the continuous verb marker in Akan, one of the very prominent West African languages among the enslaved population. The original PAECL /da/ is replaced by /de/ and its modern descendent, /e/. The innovating feature, just discussed, currently exists in modern Sranan, the English-lexicon Creole of Suriname, alongside the whole range of original PAECL travelling forms. These include /wi/ and /unu/ use for first- and second-person plural pronoun. With reference to these last two, we can conclude that, unlike in Essequibo and Demerara, the influence of speakers of Leeward Islands varieties of PAECL mid-­ seventeenth-­century Suriname, with their /awi/ and /ayu/, must have been marginal relative to that of Barbados where the original PAECL / wi/ and /unu/ had been maintained. Jamaica was the next area of British colonial expansion in the Caribbean. The origins of this expansion lie both in Barbados and the Leeward Islands. Jamaica was captured by the British in 1655, by a force of 7000. A portion, varying in estimates from 1851 to 4120, consisted of forces recruited from Barbados. Another portion, made up of 1000 men, was raised from St Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985). A settlement consisting of 1600 people from Nevis, led by the governor of Nevis, was established in the area around Port Morant in 1656 (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985). In 1661, 200 or 300 men and women sailed from Barbados with the incoming governor of Jamaica, Lord Windsor (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985). In 1664 the Barbadian planter, Sir Thomas Modyford, was appointed as governor, bringing with him 987 white settlers from Barbados to Jamaica. This population increased by 600 more white settlers from Montserrat in 1666, with the capture of the Leeward Islands by the French (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985). In many though not all of the cases of movement of Europeans from the eastern Caribbean to Jamaica, one can presume that these persons travelled with whatever enslaved people they owned. These were, after all, their working capital which would help them establish themselves as settlers in their new place of residence. Barbados, of all of these territories, was the one with the largest enslaved population during the mid-­ seventeenth century, as well as the one with the highest ratio of Africans to Europeans. Thus, assuming that an equal number of European settlers came from Barbados and from the Leeward Islands, the number of enslaved Africans accompanying their European enslavers is likely to have been greater for those coming from Barbados than for those coming from

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

27

the Leewards. The evidence from modern Jamaican is that there is no presence of /awi/ and /ayu/ as first- and second-person plural pronouns. Jamaica is strictly the domain of /wi/ and /unu/ for these language functions. Barbadian influence seems to have prevailed over that from the Leeward Islands. From 1667 onward, with the Dutch taking possession of Suriname from the British, there began a process of migration from Suriname to Jamaica. In 1671, two ships arrived in Jamaica from Suriname carrying 517 persons. Then, in 1675, 1231 persons from Suriname arrived in Jamaica. On the HMS Hercules and his majesty’s hired ship, the America, 169 are listed as ‘Christians’ and 830 as ‘slaves’. There were, on his majesty’s hired ship, the Henry and Sarah, 81 people listed as ‘Christian’, 31 listed as ‘Indian’ and 120 as ‘negroes’ (Calendar of State Papers, 3 September, 1675, pp.  271–293). The group of settlers who arrived in 1675 Jamaica established themselves in what came to be known as Suriname Quarters in southwestern Jamaica in coastal St Elizabeth where an earlier settlement of refugees from Suriname had already been established (Bilby 1983 fn32; Lalla and D’Costa 1990). With the approximately 980 enslaved Africans who arrived in Jamaica in 1675, as well as those who had arrived earlier, came /wi/ and /unu/ as first- and second-person plural pronouns. This would have aligned their speech behaviour with the speech forms imported directly from Barbados. However, in the marking of verbs as continuous, the original Barbados / da/ form would be in competition with the innovated form, /de/, imported from Suriname. That competition was resolved regionally. A study of the dialect geography of Jamaica shows that the use of /de/ to mark a verb as continuous is a characteristic mainly of speech in western Jamaica, notably in the parishes of St Elizabeth, Hanover, St James, Trelawny, Clarendon and the western portion of St Ann. The Suriname influence seems clear here. It has produced the widespread use of /de/ as the continuous marker for verbs in the part of the island where people who had been enslaved in Suriname were most heavily concentrated in the late seventeenth century. The forms /wi/ and /unu/ for first- and second-person plural pronouns travelled on from Jamaica to Central America, in particular Belize. It would seem that this onward journey began in western Jamaica since the form used in Belize and elsewhere in Central America to mark a verb as continuous is /de/ rather than /da/. This is consistent with the fact that British colonial expansion into Central America from the late

28 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

seventeenth century onward occurred from Jamaica. African enslaved labour was introduced by the English into the area that is now Belize via Jamaica (Holm 1983, p. 31). Sierra Leone is another place to which PAECL or one of its descendants travelled. In Krio, the English-lexicon Creole of Sierra Leone, we find / wi/ and /unu/ for the first- and second-person plural pronouns and / de/ used to mark verbs as continuous. The coastal Krio speaking communities of Sierra Leone, in large measure, owe their origins to Jamaica. In 1796, Maroons, Africans who had run away from enslavement into the interior of Jamaica and who had signed a peace treaty with the British in 1739 and 1740, came into conflict with the British colonial authorities with whom they coexisted. There was an uprising by the Maroons of Trelawny in western Jamaica. As a consequence of this rebellion, the Trelawny Maroons were expelled from Jamaica, first to Nova Scotia in Canada. In 1800, they were shipped off from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone where they became a central element in the formation and development of Krio society. The fact that the Suriname innovation, /de/ in the role of marking verbs as continuous, has travelled to Sierra Leone is unsurprising. We know that these expelled Maroons came from a parish in western Jamaica, Trelawny (Campbell 1990), where /de/ as the continuous verb marker is predominant. Sierra Leone was the base, during the nineteenth century, of the British expansion into southern Nigeria, with speakers of Krio constituting the core of that expansion. Not surprisingly, Nigerian Pidgin English, which evolves as an offshoot of Krio, has /wi/ and /unu/ for the first- and second-person plural pronouns and /de/ to mark the verb as continuative. Related varieties, such as Ghanaian Pidgin English and Cameroon Pidgin English follow suit. A look at the language of Southern Antigua, locally referred to as ‘Round South’ gives a unique twist to the journey of our original PAECL forms. In the area designated ‘Round South’, that is, the villages of Jennings, Bolans, Crabbe Hill, Johnson’s Point, Urlings and Old Road, the form /de/ is used to mark verbs as continuous. This distinguishes the speech of this area from that of the rest of Antigua in which /da/ or its descendant /a/ are the forms used for this function. However, in spite of the /de/ peculiarity of ‘Round South’, one does not find the /wi/ and / unu/ forms for the first- and second-person plural pronouns but /awi/ and /ayu/ like the rest of Antigua and the Leeward Islands generally. How to explain /de/, the product of a Suriname linguistic innovation,

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

29

minus its travelling companions, /wi/ and /unu/ for the first- and second-person plural pronouns? Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh (1972, p. 200) note, with reference to Suriname, that, subsequent to the Treaty of Breda in 1667, ‘ex-Barbadians and other Englishmen with their slaves and movable goods, emigrated to resume an insular existence in Antigua and Jamaica’. Sheridan (1974) is more specific, listing the planter families, the Willoughbys, the Martins and the Byams as immigrants to Antigua from Suriname in the period around 1667. In the mid-eighteenth century, there is, according to Sheridan (1974), a Col Samuel Martin, of ‘Greencastle’ estate, who was the eldest son and heir of Major Samuel Martin, a prominent planter who came to Antigua from Suriname some time before 1680. An eighteenth-­ century Eman Bowen map of Antigua shows plantations with the names, Byam and Col. Martin, in precisely the southwestern corner of Antigua which identifies as the area in which the features typical of Southern Antiguan were in use. Moreover, the estate designated as belonging to a Col. Martin is located in the eighteenth-­century map very close to a hill which appears in modern maps as Green Castle Hill. This hill is, in turn, quite close to the villages of Jennings and Bolans, both identified by Farquhar as communities associated with Southern Antiguan. Both Southern Antiguan and western Jamaican are regional and restricted varieties, under pressure from a more geographically widespread competing variety. The difference is that the former has operated under the influence of a variety, with an /awi/ and /ayu/ personal pronoun system typical of the rest of Antigua, St Kitts and the broader Leewards Islands. This resulted in the /awi/ and /ayu/ system supplanting the travelling companions from Suriname, the /wi/ and /unu/ forms for the first- and second-person plural pronouns. In our study of the journey of the original PAECL forms, what remains is the evidence found in Gullah, an Anglo-West African variety spoken on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, and Bahamian. From 1664 onward, South Carolina was colonized mainly from Barbados (Wood 1974, pp. 14–28). Georgia was, in its turn, settled from South Carolina (Smith 1987). Then, during the revolution in the North American colonies belonging to Britain, there was a massive importation into the Bahamas of slaves from the southern USA, in particular from South Carolina and Georgia. These belonged to slave owners who had remained loyal to the British, who were fleeing after the defeat of the British on the

30 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

mainland, and who had been attracted to the Bahamas by the prospect of substantial grants of land. The incoming slaves ended up substantially outnumbering the people of West African origin already in the Bahamas (Peggs 1955). These all brought with them from Barbados /wi/ and / unu/ for the first- and second-person plural pronouns and /da/ or its descendant, /a/, as the continuative verb marker.

The Routes Travelled The route travelled in this section covers Providence Island, off the coast of Nicaragua in Central America, a territorial possession of Colombia in South America. Another location is Belize in Central America. In South America, we visited Suriname, and Essequibo and Demerara, now part of Guyana. In the Caribbean, we covered the Greater Antilles, notably Jamaica and the Bahamas. Our journey took us also to the Leeward Islands, in particular St Kitts and Antigua, as well as St Vincent and Tobago in the Windward Islands. In North America, we covered South Carolina and Georgia in the USA. We also took in Nova Scotia in Canada. On the coast of West Africa, our trip took us first to Sierra Leone. It also included the Gold Coast which is modern-day Ghana, southern Nigeria and the Cameroons. The Roots That Travelled So far, we have covered just some of the main routes taken by what we have called, slightly altering Smith (2015), the Proto-Atlantic Enslaved Community Language (PAECL). We have focused so far on the fate of particular sets of PAECL forms. The first involved /wi/ and /unu/ as first- and second-person plural pronouns and their later competitors, / awi/ and /ayu/. The second was that of /da/ and its descendent /a/ and their rival, /de/, in the role of marking verbs as continuative. This presumes the existence of a PAECL from which all English-lexicon Atlantic Creoles descended. The evidence used by Smith (1987) for the existence of a single PAECL is that of a heterogeneous set of words of origin in West and Central African languages. The shared items, which Smith (1987) and we ourselves argue, constitute a shared proto-lexicon and have a particular distribution. They occur

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

31

even in those Atlantic English-lexicon Creole languages which, since their inception, have no recorded history of contact with each other. The presence of these words across these languages cannot, therefore, be explained as having been the result of borrowed from each other in the period after the language formation. At the same time, it is exceedingly unlikely that each of these twenty-eight items were separately borrowed from ten African languages and from Portuguese by over two dozen Atlantic English-lexicon Creoles. The only likely explanation is that they were inherited from a single common ancestor language which had absorbed these words into its vocabulary. The reconstruction answers the question of what this community was like. Its historical location has variously been suggested as the slave fort of Koromantin, in what is modern-­day Ghana, or variously, the Caribbean islands of Providence (Providencia), Barbados or St Kitts (Devonish & Jones 2002; Smith 1987). As is clear from the preceding discussion, we have opted for a Providence Island origin. What follows is the list of words used in the reconstruction. They are Ingredient X, the label used by Smith (1987) to describe a pool of words of West and West Central African origin, shared by a large number of the more than two dozen Atlantic English-lexicon Creole languages. Even though Smith’s list is twenty-eight in number, we include, for simplicity, only the twenty-six that have been reported to exist in the Jamaican language. These items come from the following West and Central African languages: Igbo, Kru, Ewe, Ga, E, Ijo, Twi, Kimbundu, Kikongo, Mende, Wolof, Efik, Yoruba—twelve in all. Many of the items on this list may have come from two or more languages. Focusing, however, on those which can be attributed to just one language, the most influential are Kikongo with four items attributed exclusively to it, and Twi also with four. There is Efik with three, Kimbundu with two, and Igbo, Ewe, Yoruba, Mende and Wolof, one each respectively. We add, for purposes of our own reconstruction of PAECL, the two words of Portuguese origin identified in the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Languages (APICS 2013) as having a similarly wide distribution across these languages. These two words also appear in the Jamaican language. Together, the twenty-six items from Ingredient X of Smith (2015) along with the two items of Portuguese origin constitute a proto-lexicon for Jamaican and related languages (Table 2.1).

32 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

Table 2.1  Ingredient X (Smith 1987) + 2 Akra ‘bean cake’ Aki ‘ackee’ Anansi ‘spider’ Bakra ‘white man’ Boma ‘boa’ Bomba ‘vulva’ Bubu ‘monster’ Jaga-jaga ‘untidy’ Jombi ‘ghost’ (a)dopi ‘evil ghost’ Dukunu ‘dumpling

Fom ‘strike’ Fufu ‘a staple food’ Gub-gub ‘peanut’ Variant Kangki Kata ‘head pad’ Kokobe ‘leprosy’ Kongosa ‘gossip’ Mumu ‘deaf, dumb’ Nyamisi ‘yam’ Nyam ‘eat’ Obia ‘magic’ Okra ‘okra’

Pinda ‘peanut’ Potopoto ‘wet mud’ Shaka ‘rattle’ Suoso ‘only’ Unu ‘you (pl)’ Wari ‘board game’ Pikni ‘child’ Sabi ‘know’ +

Once upon an Island: Race Was Invented In 1492, Christian Spain succeeded in expelling, with the fall of Granada, the centuries-long African Muslim presence on its territory. That was also the year in which Spain proceeded, via the voyages of Columbus, to expand its territorial control to the Americas. Combined with the expanding Portuguese presence in Africa, the stage was set for a Christian Iberian domination of the Atlantic World, consisting of Western Europe, Africa and the Americas. This was a situation in which the ‘us’ were Christian and the ‘them’ were non-Christian. By the mid-seventeenth century, the European perspective on itself versus the ‘other’ had gelled. This can be seen in the 1675 records of the three ships bringing English refugees from the former English colony of Suriname to Jamaica which had been captured from the Spanish. The records of the HMS Hercules list the passengers on the ship as ‘Christians’ or ‘slaves’. The ‘Christians’ are listed by name, as in the following example: ‘George Gordon, and George Gordon, junr., and Mary Hawkins, Christians, with 26 slaves’ (Calendar of State Papers, Vol. 9, 22nd September, 1975, pp.  271–293). The final count of passengers on this ship is given in the records as ‘Total, 53 Christians and 449 slaves’. This is the same pattern of reporting followed by the second ship, his majesty’s hired ship, the America. The third ship, his majesty’s hired ship, the Henry and Sarah, however, breaks the pattern. A typical name entry in the passenger list reads as follows: ‘Will. Heath, wife, 3 children, and 2 little negroes, with 4 negroes and 3 Indians’. The fact that ‘3 children’ and ‘2 little negroes’ are listed separately does suggest that those listed as

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

33

children are not ‘negroes’, little or big. That Will Heath, wife and children are actually deemed to be white can be seen in the item giving the total. It reads, ‘Total 81 Christians, 31 Indians, and 120 negroes’. We can extrapolate that what ‘slaves’ masks in the previous entries for the first two ships are ‘Indians’, presumably indigenous people from Suriname, and ‘negroes’, people or their descendants whose lot is synonymous with being enslaved. The Taylor (1687) transcribed Laws of Jamaica can shed much light on the emerging late seventeenth-century classification of human beings in the Atlantic World and, in particular, the English dominated Atlantic World. It most certainly helps us with understanding the world from the perspective of the English who are disembarking with human cargo fetched from a former colony, Suriname, to its newly founded and developing plantation colony in Jamaica. From the ships’ records discussed above, the disembarking ‘Indians’ and ‘negroes’ are by definition ‘slaves’. This is supported by the Taylor (1687) transcribed law XXIII which declares that all such Negroa and Indian slaves which are bought and sold hither from Africa, or any part of Assia or America, shall never have the benefit of freedom all their days, but be slaves to their master or his assignees, they and their children, and soe to succseeding ages for ever, to be sold att his pleasure as free goods to any man, or else set att liberty by their master’s pleasure. (Taylor 1687 in Buisseret 2008, p. 287)

Their status is confirmed by the fact that in laws XXXVIII and XXXIX which cover seizure of property in situations where a debt is owed by a landowner, items of property which can be seized in order to settle the debt are listed as ‘Negroes, catell and other goods’ (p. 292). Thus, ‘Christians’, by contrast to those designated ‘Negroes’ and ‘Indians’, are excluded from the ‘slave’ category and are, therefore, ‘non-­ slaves’. There are, however, two categories of ‘non-slaves’. The first is that group referred to in the laws as ‘servants’. In XXII, the phrase ‘English servants’ appears. That this term might be a synonym for ‘Christian servant’ is suggested by the phrases ‘English or Christian servants’ in XXXI. Alternatively, as in XXXII, it might be used as a near-synonym as in ‘English and other Christian servants’. The term ‘Christian’ is used even more frequently than ‘English’ with ‘servant’. All of this suggests that the meaning of ‘servant’ in these laws might be linked to the meanings of ‘English’ and ‘Christian’. In this context, ‘servant’ is used to mean

34 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

‘person’, redundantly English or Christian, who has lost the right to ownership of their own labour since the money value of that labour is pledged to satisfy a financial debt. Once such debts are satisfied by the labour of the debtor, the debtor reverts to being a non-servant person. ‘English’ and ‘Christians’, but not ‘Negroes’ and ‘Indians’, are considered by these laws to have an inherent right to their own labour and, as a consequence, to control over their own physical bodies with which they perform that labour. The designation ‘persons’ appears in clauses from I–V in relation to rights and responsibilities of such human beings. These ‘persons’ are specifically identified in XXII as ‘gentlemen, merchants, planters and other inhabitants of His Majesty’s island of Jamaica’. The law identifies the obligations of such ‘persons’ in relation to the other two groups, the ‘English servants’ and the ‘Negroa slaves’. These gentlemen, merchants, planters and other inhabitants were required, by this law, to ‘keep, have and maintaine one English servant in his house or plantation for every nine Negroa slaves that he hath, that soe the island may be strengthened thereby’ (Taylor 1687, in Buisseret 2008, p. 286). The strengthening referred to here is one related to security from any prospective uprising by enslaved people. The ‘English’ or ‘Christian’ servants were, according to assumption behind this legislation, expected to side with the ‘persons’ rather than the enslaved people in the event of an uprising by the latter. This was a reasonable expectation since the former had only temporarily lost control of their own labour and would, on the expiry of their period of servitude, accord to law, assume ‘all Christian benefits of the law’ and ‘all Christian liberty’, inclusive of the right to own others. On becoming free, such individuals had a right, under law XXVIII to a grant of 50 acres of land. Consistent with this interpretation of what it is to be a ‘Christian’ within the framework of the law in late seventeenth-century Jamaica, Jews do not have ‘all Christian liberties’. Jews are, by law L (Taylor 1687, p.  294), expressly prohibited from owning land. One group in this divide consists of ‘such Negroa and Indian slaves which are bought and sold hither from Africa, or any part of Assia or America’ along with their descendants, condemned to be enslaved in perpetuity. There are, on the other hand, the Christians. The presumption is that the people brought from Africa, Asia and America are not Christians. With the default meaning of ‘Christian’ being to have the freedom to own one’s own labour, the labour of others and land, law XXXIV quoted below is quite the anomaly. It states,

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

35

Further, that all such Indian and Negroa slaves which are lawfully baptized by a Christian minister, after they are grown to manhood and past age, shall then from the time of their baptism and reception into the Christian church faithfull serve their masters as slaves for the space of seven years and noe longer, which being expired they shall be made free denizeen of the island, and enjoy all Christian liberty as aforementioned. (Taylor 1687, p. 287)

The above, if it had been implemented, would have rendered the system of slavery being developed in the British controlled Atlantic obsolete before it even properly developed. There would have been mass conversion to Christianity and, in seven years, any enslaved person involved in such conversion would have become free. The fact that the system of slavery continued to be reinforced and entrenched suggests that the provisions of law XXXIV could not have been implemented. Further, in 1696, this theoretical escape route from enslavement was blocked by legislation which declared that no slave could become free by virtue of having converted to Christianity (Smith 1987). The separation between being a Christian and being free is, with that law, even further emphasized by a requirement in that same law for owners of enslaved people to provide access to religious instruction such that enslaved people could come to be baptized as Christians. With this and similar legislation being enacted across the English Atlantic World, ‘Christian’ owners of enslaved people could not use the fig leaf of religious difference to justify enslavement. They had granted themselves the right to enslave Africans and other non-white people irrespective of if the enslaved people were Christian or not. The line between ‘Negroa’ and ‘Indian’ enslaved people, on the one hand, and Christians, on the other, had been redrawn. With the implementation of this and similar laws around the English controlled Atlantic World, enslavement was no longer a characteristic associated with non-Christians or heathens. It was now a feature associated with their ‘negro-ness’ or ‘indian-ness’. A ‘person’ was someone who was neither ‘negro’ nor ‘indian’. It is by this means that the category ‘white’ was born as a distinguishing category from the other two categories. Through this distinction, race had just been invented. This was the ‘bakra’ of Ingredient X. During the late seventeenth century, by which time England is becoming a major rival of Spain and Portugal in the Atlantic World, the ideological justification for European overseas expansion was changing. The European powers found themselves with vast territories in the Americas

36 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

which had been depopulated by conquest and which, by the seventeenth century, presented prime prospects for plantation agriculture in tropical products. There was a massive labour shortage in these colonies which could not easily be filled by European labour. Africa presented a rich source of enslaved labour, cheap because it was labour which was captured in perpetuity, across generations as yet unborn. To justify this, one had to abandon Christianity as the basis for enslavement. The option chosen was the inherent inferiority of those enslaved. The driver for that change was the economics, and in particular the labour-intensive demands of sugar cane plantation agriculture, historically a trigger for enslavement and forced labour. This we saw with reference to much earlier sugar production and slavery in the ninth century in Iraq. And So Too Was ‘Language’ As Illich (1981) points out in 1492, the same year that the adventurer, Christopher Columbus, approached King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, for support in a voyage of exploration, another eventful approach was made. This time, it was from Antonio Nebrija, for support in the construction of a standard variety of Spanish, via the writing of a grammar of that language. Nebrija’s argument was that, with the products of the newly developed printing press rife in the form of books and pamphlets, their majesties had no way of controlling what their subjects read and who read. A standard variety of Spanish, Castilian, would regulate the language, be the medium of publishing and printing, and ensure that only those with the requisite exposure to formal education and indoctrination could be trusted with the wealth of knowledge available through reading print. The additional argument was that their majesties needed a variety of language through which they could impose their rule on the heathen populations that were about to be conquered. The creation of a standard language went hand in hand with the project of colonial expansion. This pattern was replicated with English and the era of English colonial expansion. The translation of the Bible into English, known as the King James Version or KJV, is typically credited with creating a literary and standard variety of English. This was a Bible translation project under royal sponsorship, involving forty-seven translators. The Archbishop of Canterbury oversaw the process and established doctrinal guidelines within which the translators had to work. This was a project of the state which resulted in a literary work which has functioned as a model for the

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

37

use of English ever since. The King James (KJV) translation has remained the most widely accepted version of the Bible in English from the seventeenth to twenty-first century. Armed with an emerging standard language and the ‘truth’, in the form of the Bible translated into that standard language, Christian England was linguistically and ideologically well prepared for the foundation of its Caribbean colonies during the 1620s going forward. It is against this background that we can understand the remark of Taylor (1687) with reference to adult enslaved Africans in Jamaica at that time that ‘all sone learn to spake broaken English’ (Taylor 274). The concept of ‘broken English’ is only possible if there is a notion of ‘unbroken’ or ‘whole’ English, and this is only possible if the notion of a standard or correct English had by that time taken firm hold on the minds of the English colonizer. The standardizing activity associated with the translation of the KJV had indeed done its work. The ‘broken English’ is not viewed as having any identity of its own except being a damaged version of an original language. That what was spoken by the African and African descended population of Jamaica in Taylor’s time was still regarded as ‘English’ can be seen by his further remark that ‘as for all their children born here, they learn not only their mother tung, but to spake English also’ (Taylor 1687, p. 274). ‘English’ is here being contrasted with the African languages spoken by their parents who had been transported from Africa. English is treated as the language of the country and the one that all inhabitants would come to speak. This provides a critical background for what has happened in relation to language perceptions and conceptions over the following centuries in Jamaica. A Community Was Made (Reconstructing the Proto-Language Community) What follows in the next is a creative application of a technique employed in paleo-linguistics, using what is referred to as a proto-lexicon to reconstruct aspects of the life of a language community that has long disappeared. This proto-lexicon is put together by taking languages which are thought to be related to each other and comparing them. Those words which are shown by linguistic principles to be related to each other are presumed to have been passed on to these daughter languages by some shared parent language from which they split, often many millennia ago. Thus, English ‘mother’, French ‘mère’, Latin ‘mater’ and Farsi ‘modar’

38 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

might all be reconstructed as originating in Proto-Indo-European ∗méHtēr ‘mother’. This is the method which has been used to reconstruct proto-languages as diverse as Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Bantu and Proto-Khoe-Khoe. More controversial have been the efforts to use this reconstructed lexicon to say something about the proto-communities within which these reconstructed languages were spoken. One such inference, using the example of ‘mother’ is that in these societies, there was a role akin to that played by female biological parents in many modern societies. Similar inferences have been made to propose knowledge of cattle in the Proto-­ Bantu speech community based on a reconstructed word for ‘cow’ (Ehret and Posnansky 1982a, p. 61) and in the Proto-Khwe-Khwe community (Ehret and Posnansky 1982b, p. 163). Criticism of the results produced by this kind of method involves the absence of corroborating evidence in support of these proto-community reconstructions. In addition, it is often argued that the original meaning of the shared words has shifted so greatly as to render the reconstructions useless. Given the extremely long time-spans involved, several millennia in the case of proto-Indo-European, these criticisms do stand. However, in the case of the Atlantic English-lexicon Creole languages, people movements are well documented. In addition, with a time-lapse less than 400 years, it is much easier to reconstruct the meanings of words in the original parent languages and link them to meanings which are easily accessible to modern understandings. And Their Words Told Their Story It is against this background that we understand the words of the old woman who proclaimed, ‘The words of our ancestors tell us who we are, so let those words speak. So, once upon an island, or, as some claim, in a fort on the Atlantic, there lived us. In those days, we were just people. There were, of course, others, outsiders, whom we called using the word bakra ‘white or European’. Our community came from almost everywhere in West and Central Africa. We were Igbo, Kru, Ewe, Ga, E.  Ijo, Twi, Kimbundu, Kikongo, Mende, Wolof, Efik and Yoruba. The first bakra who came into our world were Portuguese men and then later on English men. They were in control. They could hit or fom but we could not hit them back, on pain of death.

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

39

There was much that we needed to know (sabi) about their world, the one into which they enslaved us and put us to work for them. We needed this to pass on to the pikni (children) in the community, some of whom had bakra fathers. We women were central to a society with a preponderance of males, the word bomba ‘vulva’ indicating the importance of our sexuality and reproductive ability. There were aki trees growing in or near our community. Close by, there was a particular species of snake, the boa, which we called boma. We planted crops in wet earth, poto-poto. Among the crops cultivated were the African groundnut, gob-gob, the peanut originating in the Americas, pinda, and the African okra and yam, nyamisi. This last was made ready to eat, nyam, by cooking, pounded and served as a dish called fufu. Other dishes included akra, a bean cake and dukunu made from corn, corn also originating in the Americas. Agricultural produce and other heavy loads were carried by us on the head covered by a head pad, a kata. We believed in ancestors coming back as spirits, jombi, and feared evil spirits, dopi, and monsters, bubu. People could be protected or harmed by way of supernatural practices, obia. There were regular occasions on which we would gather and one person would speak to us, saying I will tell all of you unu a story. This involved tales about a trickster spider, anansi, as the main character. We used to entertain ourselves playing a board game we called wari that required players to move around stones or marbles on a board with holes. We had music which was performed with the aid of instruments such as the rattle, the shaka. Some members of the community were deaf-mutes, mumu, or suffered from leprosy, kokobe. Our society placed a high value on order, rejecting disorder, jaga-jaga. We were always concerned about hardship brought on by scarcity when there were just limited, soso, quantities of that which was desirable. Very common among us was gossip, kongosa. Group conflicts originating in limited resources and gossip might end in conflict involving one individual feeling the need to hit, fom, another.

The Global Jamaican Is Born and International Black Identity Constructed The voyages of Columbus initiated what has come to be called the Columbian exchange. Afro-Eurasia was put in touch with the Americas. There was biological transfer, at the level of bacteria and viruses, from

40 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

Afro-Eurasia to the Americas. In addition, there was biological exchange, in the form of plants and food crops. The transfer of food crops such as the potato, cassava and corn had far-reaching effects on life and society in Afro-Eurasia. More importantly for our story is the transfer to the Americas of the Afro-Eurasian crop, the sugar cane, to the Americas. The transfers to the Americas, however, took place in the context of a general depopulation caused by the European invasion, as a result of either violence from the invader or diseases they brought that the local population had no resistance to. In addition, however, as Amin (1973) notes, this introduction was accompanied by an organization of the spaces previously occupied by the conquered, to produce commodities for export to colonizing Europe. Given the shortage of labour, both in the Americas and in Europe, West and West Central Africa became the easiest and nearest source of labour. This is the context in which the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade emerged. It was, however, part of a triangular trade in which manufactured goods from Europe were shipped southwards from Europe to West and West Central Africa and used as trading items in exchange for enslaved Africans. These were then shipped westward in millions across the Atlantic to the Americas. In turn, these ships collected agricultural products produced on the very plantations manned by enslaved Africans and transported them north-eastward back across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, completing the triangle. The triangular trade just described was a clockwise movement involving tens of thousands of voyages over the four centuries during which it lasted. Some 10 million Africans were transported as part of this trade. Along with their multiple million offspring born into up to four centuries of enslavement in the Americas, they provided the heart muscle for this pulsing clockwise circular movement of ships, goods, people and capital. Amin (1973) proposes that the trigger for the development of capitalism was the European conquest of the Americas during the sixteenth century. He argues that European colonization did not simply involve the collection of products which the conquered societies could offer. Rather, the process involved the organization of these societies to produce goods which could be exported for sale in Europe. The effect was, he argues, that massive amount of consumer goods created by this trade triggered a demand, among the feudal landowning class, for money with which to buy these goods. This forced them to modernize and make more efficient their system of extracting surplus from those who occupied the land. This included driving surplus labour off the land and collecting rent in money

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

41

rather than in kind. This allowed the landowners themselves to become capitalist landowners, as well as some of the newly liberated peasants to acquire land and themselves to become capitalist landowners in their own right. The labour that was freed from feudal ties to the land, then either became wage labourers on capitalist run farms or sold their labour in urban areas to emerging industrial enterprises (Amin 1973). This is a minimalist version of the more assertive claim by Eric Williams that sugar producing Caribbean slave societies were the source of the development of industrial capitalism in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Williams 1944). The historical focal point of the contact between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas was the Caribbean. The European power which emerged to dominate that contact situation from the seventeenth century onward was Britain. The driver of the system of trade and colonization was the plantation slave colony. Barbados, according to Beckles (2016), was the model for the plantation slave colony, the prototype of which is based on sugar cultivation and processing, and which becomes exported to the other British controlled areas of the Americas. This was a model which he suggests was belatedly copied by its European colonizing competitors, the Dutch, the French and the Spanish. The surplus generated by the British-­ owned sugar plantations in the Americas and the demand for industrial machinery on colonial sugar plantations were an integral part of the Industrial Revolution in Europe. Britain was the country in which the Industrial Revolution first took off in the eighteenth century. It remained at the centre of the industrial world until the second half of the twentieth century. It has been argued by James (1989) that African and African descended people on these sugar plantations in the Americas were the vanguard of the industrial proletariat. He further suggested that slave rebellions in the colonies represented the first organized proletarian resistance to industrial capitalism. Whatever the final expert position on this might be, there is no dispute about the centrality of plantation slave societies in the Americas to the Atlantic maritime trading system which developed, for transporting both enslaved people and their produce, sugar and other commodities, to their various markets on the three continents surrounding the Atlantic. There is no disputing either that it was this Atlantic maritime trading system so developed that, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, expanded to include the Indian Ocean and then the Pacific in a global maritime trading system which has largely survived to the present day. Cheshire (2012)

42 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

provides composite voyage visualization maps of British shipping voyages for the period from 1750 to 1800. By this time, Britain had emerged as the dominant global maritime trading power. The Atlantic area shows the greatest concentration of voyages but one can see the spread from that concentration to Southern Africa, the Indian Ocean and to the Pacific. These historical trade routes provide the pathways along which the roots of the current globalized Jamaican music and culture grow.

Going Global/Tu di Worl… The Atlantic economy was at the heart of the global trading system as it developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jamaica was, from the point of view of the size of its labour force and the wealth it generated, the largest of the British sugar-based plantation possessions that drove that economy. The Industrial Revolution was entrenching Western Europe, and in particular Britain where it started, as the centre of the world trading system. Jamaica’s link to Britain as part of this trading system gave it an indirect zone of influence which was global. Other factors help to make Jamaica a global influencer. These include the involvement of Jamaicans in the digging of the Panama Canal. This was the quintessential globalization project of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, joining the Atlantic to the Pacific and radically shortening trips between the two oceans. There was, in addition, Jamaican migration to the Anglo-Saxon industrial metropolises of London and Birmingham in the UK during the 1940s to 1960s and earlier, in the 1920s, to New York. With reference to the 1920s in New York, C.L.R. James (1989) very elegantly sums up the contribution of the Jamaican, Marcus Garvey, to the Caribbean, Africa and the world. From his base in Harlem, New  York, Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) mobilized millions of black people across the USA, the Caribbean and Latin America and Africa itself. In a period of total European colonization of Africa, ‘Garvey advocated the return of Africa to the Africans and people of African descent’. James (1989, p. 397) refers to the impact that Garvey had on the leaders of what, in the 1950s and onward, became the African independence movement, in particular Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya. With reference to Garvey, James (1989, p. 396) declares, ‘When you bear in mind the slenderness of his resources, the vast material sources and the pervading social conceptions which automatically

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

43

sought to destroy him, his achievement remains one of the propagandistic miracles of this century’ (James 1989). Racism and languageism were originally developed in the colonizing of the Caribbean and the Americas. Racism and languageism have, however, long since gone global. This is a consequence of the colonization of the globe undertaken by the European powers such as the British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and the Danes. This process spread well beyond the Atlantic to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and to nearly all of Africa and most of Asia. Caribbean developed responses to these ‘isms’ are, therefore, also of global interest. The ‘glory’ days of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Caribbean are long gone. The area is no longer the centre of the world. That centre has shifted, over the centuries to the Pacific. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Caribbean and surrounding territories became less and less economically important to the European colonizing powers. Eventually, during the last decades of the twentieth century, Britain granted political independence to the vast majority of its colonies in the region. Jamaica is the former British possession in the Caribbean with the largest population. It has emerged as a global superpower in the area of cultural and linguistic influence. At an impressionistic level, this can be seen in the CNN July 12, 2017, ranking of Jamaicans as the third ‘coolest nationality’ in the world, with ‘an accent the envy of the English-speaking world’. Based on more empirical data, we see that Jamaica is ranked at No. 2 in a 2014 study of up-and-coming artistes among the then-top 10,000 songs online globally. This report comments on this ranking by stating that this research confirms the truth of ‘the legend of Jamaica … exerting disproportionate musical influence over the world’. The question, then, is one of why an island state of less than 11,000 square kilometres with a population of less than 3 million could exercise the level of linguistic and cultural influence that it has? Many answers to the above question have been offered. We would suggest one here. Jamaica is a country in a region where the modern economy, complete with industrialization and global trade, was born in the seventeenth century. It is now projecting globally the language and culture born of this special set of historical circumstances. In the twenty-first century, countries and societies operating within the framework of an advanced version of that very same globalization are quickly and easily

44 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

responsive to a language and culture produced by globalization at the point of its birth. … on Wings of Sweet Song Projecting a newly emerging, late twentieth-century Jamaican national identity took the form of combining language and music with sound production and recording technology. English, the ex-colonial language and existing official language, as well as Jamaican (Creole) aka ‘Jamaican Patwa/Patois’, were, from the start, languages of Jamaican popular music. In the early 1960s, at the time when Jamaica gained independence from Britain, the USA Rhythm and Blues influence on Jamaican popular music made English the dominant language of that music. Jamaican tended to only be used in the few musical pieces which were either folksongs or contained folk themes and expressions. Reggae music, from its emergence in the late 1960s, conformed to this pattern. The Bob Marley ‘Dem Belly Full’, a 1974 piece, represents, however, a cautious modification to the English-only model, with the chorus in Jamaican Creole offering commentary in the form of folk wisdom in the ‘folk’ language, Jamaican. Meanwhile, the verse, in English, carries the content of the song, observing the effects of the rising cost of living, stating that whilst the existing situation was one of ‘the rich must live, the poor must die’ and that ‘the weak must get strong’. By the 1980s, a new genre of Jamaican music emerged, that of Dancehall, within which spoken rather than sung language was dominant. The time was right to move beyond the cautious introduction of Jamaican via the chorus as in the Bob Marley example above. With Jamaican rather than English as the main language of spoken interaction in Jamaica, it was Jamaican which came to dominate the Dancehall musical genre. It is by this route that the Jamaican language has become the main language of artistic public usage, providing a focus for the rising national consciousness since the 1962 independence from Britain. The recording and associated technologies perform, for emerging Jamaican national consciousness, the same role the printing press did for the emergence of vernacular languages like English, French and Spanish in the late fifteenth century, and the nation-states which came to be defined by the literature printed in these national vernaculars. Recorded Jamaican popular music, from Millie Small, through Marley to Shabba Ranks, Vybz Kartel and Chronixx, represents a body of orally produced artistic language, an orature, elevating

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

45

the national language and cementing national consciousness among the people of the Jamaican nation-state. International systems are based on states organized around the sense of nation, produced by the technologies of writing and print, applied to national languages. This is a system which, up to the second decade of the twenty-first century, has been centred on the countries of northern Europe and North America. At the periphery are the ex-colonial countries of the so-called developing world among which the countries of the Caribbean can be counted. These states, just like Jamaica, tend to function in the languages of the former colonial power, excluding for the most part, the mainly oral languages of the majorities of their populations. The Jamaican struggle for their own, largely unwritten language, to represent an alternative, mass-based national identity, within an official language framework dominated by English, has resonance around the world. This is true for the populations of ex-colonial countries going through similar processes to that of Jamaica and for the marginalized linguistic, cultural and ethnic minorities in the countries of Europe and North America. The former trade routes and exchanges once dominated by Great Britain have been prepared over four centuries of colonization, for the infusion of the Jamaican language, music and culture. It is against this background, on wings of song, albeit with some digital assistance, that Jamaica has been able to globalize the bitter-sweet experience of a local language struggle. This is a fight to ensure that the national identity embodied by the Jamaican state is the one associated with mass language of the descendants of African slaves, Jamaican (Creole/Patwa), rather than the elite ex-colonial language, English. We get a taste of this clash in the chorus of the same Bob Marley song quoted above. It includes two Jamaican Creole language proverbs highlighting the paradox of Rien a faal bot di doti tof ‘It is raining, but the ground is hard’, and Pat a bwail bot di fuud no nof ‘The pot is boiling but there is little food’. One of the bitter-sweetest languages of the Caribbean, Jamaican (Creole/Patwa), has gone global, proclaiming itself and its associated national identity ‘Tu di Worl!’

References Amin, S. (1973, 1976). Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism. Sussex: The Harvester Press Limited Publisher, Hassocks.

46 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

Arbell, M. (2002). The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean: The Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Settlements in the Caribbean and the Guianas. Jerusalem: Anchor Academic Publications. Beckles, H. (1989). Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Women in Barbados. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Beckles, H. (2016). The First Black Slave Society: Britain’s Barbados, 1636–1876. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Bilby, K. (1983). How the “Older Heads” Talk: A Jamaican Maroon Spirit Possession Language and Its Relationship to the Creoles of Suriname and Sierra Leone. New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 57(1/2), 37–88. Bridenbaugh, C., & Bridenbaugh, R. (1972). No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624–90 (The Beginnings of the American People, Vol. 2, 1st ed.). Oxford University Press. Buisseret, T. (1687, 2008). Jamaica in 1687: The Taylor Manuscript at the National Library of Jamaica. Kingston: National Library of Jamaica. Campbell, M.  C. (1990). The Maroons of Jamaica 1655–1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal. New Jersey: Africa World Press. Chami, F. A. (2002). East Africa and the Middle East Relationship from the First Millennium B.C. to the 15th Century A.D. Journal des Africanistes, 72(2), 21–37. Cheshire, J. (2012). 18th Century British Shipping Routes Visualised Using Modern Mapping Technologies. https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/ apr/13/shipping-routes-history-map Craton, M. (1992). The Transition from Slavery to Free Wage Labour in the Caribbean, 1780–1890: A Survey with Particular Reference to Recent Scholarship. Slavery & Abolition, 13(2), 37–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01440399208575065. Devonish, H., & Jones, B. (2002). Talking Rhythm Stressing Tone: The Role of Prominence in Anglo-West African Creole Languages (Caribbean Language Series). Kingston: Arawak Publications. Dunn, R. S. (1972). Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. North Carolina: Omohundro Institute of Early American History & University of North Carolina Press. Ehret, C., & Posnansky, M. (1982a). Linguistic Inferences: Early Bantu History. In C. Ehret & M. Posnansky (Eds.), The Archaelogical and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ehret, C., & Posnansky, M. (1982b). Spread of Food Production to Southern Africa. In C. Ehret & M. Posnansky (Eds.), The Archaelogical and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History (pp. 158—181). Berkeley: University of California Press.

2  ONCE UPON AN ISLAND 

47

Holm, J. (1983). An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Illich, I. (1981). Shadow Work. London: Marion Boyars Publishers. James, C.  L. R. (1989). The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage. Kupperman, K.  O. (1995). Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lalla, B., & D’Costa, J. (1990). Language in Exile (Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole: Caribbean Archaeology and Ethnohistory). Alabama: University of Alabama Press. Le Page, R. B., & Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985). Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peggs, A. D. (1955). A Short History of The Bahamas. London: The Deans Peggs Research Fund/Imperial College. Schacter, P.  V. F. (1968). A Phonology of Akan: Akuapem, Asante and Fante. California: UCLA, Press. Schomburgk, R. H. (1971). The History of Barbados: Comprising a Geographical and Statistical Description of the Island, a Sketch of the Historical Events Since the Settlement, and an Account of Its Geology and Natural Productions. Hove: Psychology Press. Sheridan, R. B. (1974). Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775. Kingston/Barbados/Trinidad: Canoe Press. Smith, N. (1987). The Genesis of Creole Languages of Surinam. Doctoral Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam. Retrieved from https://www.worldcat.org/title/genesis-of-the-creole-languages-of-surinam/oclc/36118094 Walvin, J. (2007). A Short History of Slavery. London: Penguin, UK. Williams, E. (1944). Capitalism and Slavery (1st ed.). North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Languages in Conflict

Abstract  To understand Jamaica’s linguistic place in the world, we need to go back to the beginning of Jamaica as an independent state in 1962. M.G. Smith, a pre-eminent ‘Brown’ Jamaican social anthropologist of the mid- to late twentieth century carries out his scholarly work using the sociological theory of the plural society (J.S. Furnivall in Smith, The British Journal of Sociology, 12, 249–262, 1961). Smith builds his career on the notion of the plural society which emphasizes the dominance of colonially imposed divisions among colonized peoples who coexist in the same society. Smith (The British Journal of Sociology, 12, 1961, p.  165) presents Jamaica as consisting of three ‘social sections’. He uses colours, ‘white’, ‘brown’ and ‘black’, as descriptors for these groups on the ground that they accurately describe ‘the racial majority and cultural ancestry of each section’ (Smith, The British Journal of Sociology, 12, 1961, pp. 163–164). Keywords  Social sections • Plural society • White • Brown • Black

Only One Side Shoots in This Language War In 2011, during a period of heavy rains, a member of the rural community of Robert’s Field gives an interview with a television reporter which is broadcast on national television multiple times. The background was a dramatic scene of a river in full spate and a community cut off by raging waters. A Mr Clifton Brown, dressed in a white safety helmet and blue © The Author(s) 2020 H. Devonish, K. Carpenter, Language, Race and the Global Jamaican, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45748-8_3

49

50 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

coveralls with galoshes, is recounting his own efforts to save people and help them get safely across the torrent. What attracts the attention of educated Jamaicans who, by virtue of their education, have control of Standard Jamaican English are the attempts of Mr Brown to speak English. Television interviewees who hold on, in interviews with the media, to their normal, everyday Jamaican language vernacular speech are very common. This is so common that it has become acceptable. However, what for the educated group is unforgivable is someone who tries to shift their speech ‘upwards’ but not to the ‘official’ language of Standard Jamaican English, but to something ‘foreign’. Mr Brown is committing the unpardonable sin of ‘twanging’. The local educated middle class feel misrepresented. They have been by-passed as models of correct English in preference to a foreign target. On the other hand, Mr Brown, aware that he is being interviewed in front of television cameras, reaches for the form of speech that he associates with television. He appears not to be well educated and is clearly not a speaker of Standard Jamaican English. However, he seems to have watched lots of television from the USA. He uses language features for his on-the-spot interview which are as different from any speech form normally used by Jamaicans as possible. This takes the form of US-influenced phonology. The nationalist local educated class labels this kind of speech ‘twanging’. Mr Brown’s efforts at using what he thought were the appropriate speech forms for a television audience had the educated classes of Jamaica in stitches. He does not speak their language, Standard Jamaican English, which they consider the appropriate speech variety in that situation. His failed effort at a form of English associated with the USA is, for them, a subject of vengeful mirth. Mr Brown’s speech presents an opportunity to simultaneously punish him for his lack of education and for his failure to use them, the local educated elite, as his model of linguistic rectitude. Mr Clifton Brown becomes an overnight celebrity. He is rechristened ‘Cliff Twang Brown’ and becomes known by the words of that first interview, ‘Nobody canna cross it’. The recording of his words uttered at the on-the-spot interview are put onto a rhythm track and, via digital manipulation, turned into a song. In October 2019, the YouTube video had 7.1 million views. What the educated elite do is to laugh at Mr Brown in front of his face even while giving him an opportunity to earn money and be ‘famous’. Yet, a dispassionate view of his interview involves him passionately affirming the seriousness of the situation in his community with the absence of a bridge over the river and the danger it poses to women and

3  THE LANGUAGES IN CONFLICT 

51

children when the river is in spate. In due course, he is invited to the national Television Jamaica (TVJ) studio for an interview on its morning magazine show, Smile Jamaica. While Mr Brown is talking about the danger of the flooded river in his community, he is deliberately set up by a question from one of the interviewers, Neville Bell, to utter the famous ‘Nobody canna cross it’ sentence. At that point, Bell himself and his co-­ host, Simon Crosskill, are besides themselves with laughter. Bell bends over in mirth. Meanwhile, Mr Brown is speaking earnestly, with a puzzled look on his face. The puzzlement is shared by the general viewing audience. Most of the population are not fluent speakers of Standard Jamaican English. To the extent that they realize that Mr Brown is attempting to use a US-influenced speech variety, many would consider that normal. They too do not use Standard Jamaican English. They too have varieties of speech associated with the USA as the most regular form of English they come across on television. They may be being laughed at on national television, but they too do not get the joke. In the aftermath of the interview, there is an outburst of criticism of the behaviour of the Smile Jamaica programme hosts. Bell is forced by public opinion to apologize. In all this, however, a large sector of the population being laughed at envy Mr Brown for his overnight fame and the money earning possibilities this has opened for him. The derision of the educated Standard Jamaican English speakers is but to them as wind. It does not have the effect of cowing them or embarrassing them. It makes them ask themselves, however, ‘What is wrong with educated speakers of English? What is wrong with “Brown” people?’ In the Beginning … a Portrait in Black, White and Brown To understand Jamaica’s linguistic place in the world, we need to go back to the beginning of Jamaica as an independent state in 1962. A snapshot of that situation, albeit in the form of a grainy photo taken with an old-­ fashioned camera, can be seen in a contemporary description of the language situation in the decade prior to independence. The source is M.G. Smith, a pre-eminent ‘Brown’ Jamaican social anthropologist of the mid- to late twentieth century. He carries out his scholarly work using the sociological theory of the plural society. This was originally developed by J.S. Furnivall to describe societies of the colonial Far East in the period prior to World War II (Smith 1961). Smith builds his career on this approach of which he became a foremost proponent. The notion of the

52 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

plural society emphasizes the dominance of colonially imposed divisions among colonized peoples who coexist in the same society. In so doing, it deemphasizes the possibilities of the oppressed, uniting to overthrow their oppressors, in the Marxist revolutionary tradition. The theory is, therefore, framed in terms of labelled ‘social sections’ rather than ‘social classes’. Robert A.  Hill in an interview with Annie Paul (2013), refers to M.G.  Smith’s background in intelligence within the Canadian armed forces during World War II. Hill goes on to suggest that M.G. Smith continues in intelligence officer mode beyond his time in the armed forces. According to Hill, Smith does political intelligence in the guise of academic research during the 1950s and 1960s and later on during the 1970s, at the behest of heads of government of Jamaica in those periods. This was part of ‘the development of a system of political intelligence under local control’ with a Jamaican ‘independent political judgment on intelligence matters’. Hill also argues that Smith plays a critical role in ‘the transition in the security apparatus during the process of decolonization’. M.G. Smith, as a social theorist, focuses on the danger, a single large mass of oppressed people, sharing one language and culture, as in the case of Jamaica, presents to social order (Smith 1961, p. 206). It is against this background that we should read Smith’s (1961, pp.  164–175) work on the plural framework of Jamaican society, a study identified by Hill as one of five studies done by Smith as part of the ‘change-over in the local intelligence-­ assessment process’ (Hill in Paul 2013). Smith (1961, p. 165) presents Jamaica as consisting of three ‘social sections’. He uses colours, ‘white’, ‘brown’ and ‘black’, as descriptors for these groups on the ground that they accurately describe ‘the racial majority and cultural ancestry of each section’ (Smith 1961, pp. 163–164). At the top of the society is the ‘white section’ manifesting what he refers to as the culture of ‘mid-twentieth century West European’ society. This group is socially dominant, but numerically the smallest and is made up for the most part of ‘persons reared abroad from early childhood’ (p. 163). ‘The Black or lowest section’, he suggests, may have consisted of 80% of the population. They practice ‘a folk culture’ that has many characteristics reminiscent of African societies and Caribbean slave societies. The ‘social section’ in-between the top and the bottom, he describes as the ‘Brown intermediate section’. He suggests that ‘culturally and biologically’ this ‘social section’ is the most variable. Its cultural practices, he proposes, are a mix of those associated with the bottom group and with the top group, along with a few practices peculiar to itself. The ‘white top section’ as

3  THE LANGUAGES IN CONFLICT 

53

described by Smith (1961, pp.  164–169) is a property-owning group, earning income from their ownership of large-scale agricultural operations, commercial operations, factories, and so on. Occupationally, these exercise managerial authority over workers in private and corporate business operations, or in the upper echelons of government administration, or carry out professional practices alone or in partnerships. This section is made up of, according to Smith, entrepreneurs and landed proprietors for whom university education is affordable for those family members who need it and of university educated people in the ‘higher’ (1961, p. 165) professions such as medicine and law. The ‘Brown intermediate section’, according to Smith (1961, pp. 165–166), get their formal education via secondary schools in Jamaica, with secondary school graduates finding clerical employment in government and business. In addition to clerical employment, members of this group function as small businessmen, farmers, contractors and in the ‘lower’ professions such as teaching. The ‘Black lowest section’ is educated to the maximum of elementary school, with some having little or no formal education at all. They, owning no property, end up in manual labour in both rural and urban situations. These jobs pay the lowest wages. Smith (1961, p.  167) gives as the reason for this the fact that the economic system places value on quantum of formal education, with financial rewards linked to the education level attained. Thus, the ‘Black lowest section’ earns the least, the ‘Brown intermediate section’ more, and the ‘white top section’ the most. He notes that access to education is used to maintain the status quo and the relative social and economic standing of the three groups. The Black and white snapshot provided by Smith has language in the picture. We are told that in Jamaica, a ‘complete linguistic dichotomy’ does not exist. However, he refers to personal communication from the linguist, Robert Le Page, which suggests that the middle- and upper-class Jamaicans do not understand the meanings of 30% of the words in common use among the speakers of what he calls ‘the folk dialect’ (1961, p.  172). Smith uses this to argue that he would be surprised if those Jamaicans who habitually speak ‘the folk dialect’ understand 70% of the words regularly used by those who do not habitually speak it. He concludes that the bilingualism existing in Jamaica is characteristic of cultural hybridism. In his view, the ‘Brown intermediate section’ is the group most prone to linguistically hybrid behaviour. He describes the situation as involving the small ‘top white section’ speaking and understanding English

54 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

but not ‘the folk dialect’. The large ‘Black lowest section’ fully speaks and understands ‘the folk dialect’ but not English. As for the ‘Brown intermediate section’, they are described as ‘employing either linguistic form according to the occasion’ (Smith 1961, p. 172). Within the frame of the snapshot taken by Smith, language is included as part of the series of socio-cultural factors which pose a national security threat to a newly independent Jamaican state.

What the ‘Chateratti’ Are Saying Introducing the ‘Chateratti’ Let us fast forward to Jamaica at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. In spite of becoming a politically independent state in 1962, Jamaica remains dependent and economically deprived. It is riven with increasing socio-economic inequality, in spite of egalitarian socio-­ political movements and upheavals over the decades. Inequality has survived, following the broad outlines of that which existed at the time of independence, albeit somewhat modified in tone and complexion. At the international level, it is a third world ‘developing’ nation within an international economic system dominated by the USA and Europe, even as these compete with China and to a lesser extent India as ‘emerging’ nations. More importantly, ideologically and geographically, Jamaica is located within the zone of influence of the still dominant world power, the USA. The Jamaican state continues to function in the interest of global capital, dominated by North America and Europe, and a small group of local capitalists, pretty much as described by Smith (1961) for Jamaica at the time of independence. The continued presumption is that these capital investments will serve the long-term economic interests of the mass of the population, Smith’s ‘lowest Black section’. The Jamaican state is governed by an educated elite with ideas about language, nation and state dominated by a British colonial past and a US and Western European world view. Those who manage and administer the state, as distinct from the owning classes, are the historically ‘intermediate Brown’ group. However, with almost universal access to secondary education, albeit of widely varying quality, this middling group has vastly expanded. It has also darkened in complexion. An increased number of people from the ‘Black lowest section’ have been recruited into the intermediate group courtesy of socially widened educational opportunities.

3  THE LANGUAGES IN CONFLICT 

55

Statistically, however, the intermediate group is still ‘Browner’ in complexion than the ‘Black lowest section’. With English the sole official language and the almost exclusive official medium of education, competence in English is a gate pass for entry into the category of those who administer, manage and direct the functioning of the state. This educated middle class, this chattering class, the ‘chateratti’, have language at the core of the functions they perform as a class, running of the state machinery. Not surprisingly, they have very strong views, as a class, about the issue of language and language use. The Language Opinions of the ‘Chateratti’ The mass media in Jamaica, notably radio, television and newspapers, over the last three decades at least, has been the arena for the ‘chateratti’ and their views on what has come to be labelled the ‘Patwa-English Debate’. The educated elite, the chattering classes or ‘chateratti’ whose views dominate the traditional mass media, have treated this topic as a form of blood sport, as a target for literate and literary jibe. For the media houses themselves, anxious for readership, listenership and viewership, stirring up the debate and provoking vituperation has been a tried and proven method for generating revenues. Any stick can be used to push the fire. It could be the Ebonics Debate in the USA in the 1990s. This involved the controversial proposal during the 1990s, made to the Oakland Board of Education in California, to formally use African-American Vernacular English as part of the education of African-American children for which it was responsible. The discussion quickly swings to the role of ‘Patwa/Patois’ in education in Jamaica and the broadcast and print media are set alight. Or it could be the announcement by the Bible Society of the West Indies of a grant it received to translate the New Testament of the Bible into Jamaican. Or, again, it could be reports about the running of a Bilingual Education Project involving the formal use of English and Jamaican in instruction and literacy in primary schools. Any excuse is used to stir up the embers and have the fires blazing again. We have to understand the position of the ‘chateratti’ in this debate. The main language of the mass media is English, and the sole official language of the Jamaican state is also English. The discourse on language which one comes across in the mass media comes from a very unrepresentative position in the language situation. We are getting the view from the vantage point of the population with high levels of competence in English and with privileged access to the mass media and

56 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

the various domains of the state. The opinions expressed frequently pretend to be derived from some kind of objective knowledge of language and of the world, frequently couched in the expressions such as ‘English is the global language of science, international commerce and trade and we cannot afford to isolate ourselves’. The status of the educated elite in Jamaica is in large measure determined by their competence in English. English is the sole official language of Jamaica. Those who know English have privileged access to the Jamaican state and its services. Those who do not have such competence have language facing them as a barrier to such access. In Jamaica, competence in English is, for most people, acquired through instruction in and exposure to the language within the formal education system. English is the sole language one is taught to read and write in. It is also the primary official medium of instruction, with Jamaican reserved for oral use as ‘a bridge to English’ up to the fourth year of primary education. It is against this background that we should understand the views about language that are very common among members of this educated elite. For most members of the educated elite in Jamaica, language behaviour is characterized by what Ferguson (1959) labels as diglossia. They will use Jamaican Creole, the language which most people learn as the home language or mother tongue, in private and informal situations, such as among friends, and in the making of jokes. It is only the very small minority of the economic elite, who own the means of production, that learn English as their home language and use it in all domains, except when interacting with the general public. In public formal situations and with strangers, however, English is the language the educated elite would use and expect to be used. This is the epitome of diglossic language behaviour. This is not new. We have already seen the ‘Brown intermediate section’ at the time just prior to independence described as ‘employing either linguistic form according to the occasion’ (Smith 1961, p. 172). All of the preceding corresponds to the pattern of reported behaviour unearthed by the Jamaican Language Attitude Survey of 2005 discussed later in this chapter. In Jamaica, only the educated elite have the privilege of being able to perform linguistically in this manner. For the uneducated or those with limited education, the capacity to use and cope with English in public formal situations is limited. This is because of the link between education and access to competence in English. The data produced from the Jamaican Language Competence Survey of 2006 supports this. It follows that people who do not have the linguistic ability to be diglossic and

3  THE LANGUAGES IN CONFLICT 

57

to use English in more public formal contexts mark themselves off as uneducated. This sets them up for linguistic discrimination as will be illustrated in our discussion of the language discrimination research carried out by Kadian Walters (2017). The language ideology of the ‘chateratti’ has taken a Cinderella attitude to monolingual speakers of Jamaican. These monolinguals are embarrassing step-children who just won’t go away and won’t confine themselves to the servants’ quarters. To police them and keep them in their places, and to justify discrimination against them, language ideology steps in. This ideology is supported by a number of myths. Below are listed some of these as identified by Christie (2003), presenting in her role as linguist commenting on these myths in a work written to debunk them. 1. “The label Creole is used in an attempt to lend academic weight to Jamaican Patois” 2. “Jamaican Creole is not a language” 3. “Jamaican Creole is a dialect of English and is therefore inferior to the associated standard language [English]” 4. “Jamaican Creole has no grammar/Jamaican Creole is broken English/Jamaican Creole is bad grammar/Linguists are trying to impose grammar to Jamaican Creole” 5. “There are no books written in Jamaican Creole” 6. “Jamaican Creole has no standard form” 7. “Jamaican Creole is not spoken outside of Jamaica” 8. “Jamaican Creole is a reminder of our dark and shameful past when our ancestors were backward and illiterate” 9. “Creole is a hybrid of English, Spanish and African Languages” 10. “Abstract thought is not possible in Jamaican Creole” (Christie 2003, pp. 24–29) Of the ten items in the list, six represent explicitly negative statements containing either ‘no’ or ‘not’. Combined with implicitly negative terms, ‘dialect’, ‘inferior’, ‘broken’, ‘bad’, ‘dark’, ‘shameful’, ‘backward’, ‘illiterate’ and ‘hybrid’, as well as the suggestion of lack of ‘academic weight’, all the statements suggest the absence of positive characteristics. Once the above ideas are current in the society, they guide everyday language attitudes. The traditional expression in Jamaican society of these ways of thinking can be seen from the 1950s, in the decade before independence. This was an education system designed for, as Le Page (1998, p.  59)

58 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

describes it, ‘the eradication of local vernaculars’, and ‘lifting people out of poverty and ignorance’ by ‘getting rid of the language associated with poverty and ignorance’. He remarks that back then, a pass in the Cambridge Overseas Certificate of Education English Language examination could lead to a job as a policeman or civil servant or to a place in college to train to be a teacher. There is then the sardonic addition that, because it was in the 1950s, one had to have an additional qualification to get a job in the bank, light skin. Le Page (1998, p. 59) continues by commenting that of most Jamaicans ‘Unfortunately, nearly all had dark skins and nearly all failed or could not take the examination’, and, therefore, ‘they mostly stayed poor’. Le Page (1998, p. 59) goes on to point to what he calls ‘the classic mistake to confuse symptoms of social and economic inequality with the causes’, and to teachers ‘whose training taught them that the symptoms were causes to be expunged’. The educated middle classes in twenty-first-century Jamaica, and their spokespersons in the form of the ‘chateratti’ who dominate in the mass media, are the product of this very selective process in pre-independence Jamaica. They, therefore, carry within them the same understanding of linguistic and social reality as existed back in the 1950s among the ‘Brown intermediate section’ of Smith (1961). In twenty-first-century Jamaica, things have changed even as they have remained the same. Courtesy of a level of democratization coming out of political independence in 1962 and social and political pressure from the mass of the population, being certified as having a command of English is much more widespread than before. So, too is access to jobs in the professions and to high socio-economic status across race and colour boundaries. All of these have taken place even as language, race and colour remain critical to socio-economic mobility within Jamaican society. Focusing as we are in this chapter on language, we need to develop a clear picture of how the existing educated middle-class elite proceed to implement in practice their ideas about language. The ‘chateratti’ exercise their language power through the operations of the state and its junior members, the customer service representative (CSR). The CSR is the gatekeeper to the state and its services. It is through these individuals that citizens gain access to services provided by the state. The question arises as to how a state employing English as its only official language manages to cope with the range of language competences of its citizens. In particular, how would

3  THE LANGUAGES IN CONFLICT 

59

it deal with a citizen who either is monolingual in Jamaican Creole or has Jamaican Creole as their dominant language and has very limited competence in English? This is particularly important given the Jamaican Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms (Constitutional Amendment) Act, 2011, and, in particular, the Chapter III, 13) provision of ‘the right to equitable and humane treatment by any public authority in the exercise of any function’. The work of Kadian Walters (2016) involves a matched guise test in which the same callers, one male and one female, called a number of public agency CSRs twice, on two separate days. The first call was made using English and the other using Jamaican. The callers report that they received the service they called about and were treated courteously in 100% of the calls made in English, whereas in the Jamaican language calls, there is a 40% reporting of receiving the service but being treated discourteously. There are a range of strategies employed by the CSR for signalling to the Jamaican language caller that inappropriate language is being used. A typical technique is for the CSR, who would as required have answered the phone in English, to make a disaffiliative code switch into Jamaican, the language of the caller. This kind of switch, as opposed to one intended to create communication and solidarity, is one which in tone and voice the CSRs pitch, is mimicking and mocking. The tone is supposed to indicate to the caller that they should switch to English, the expected language of the interaction. Alternatively, the caller having spoken in Jamaican is greeted with a response from the CSR in the form of ‘Pardon me?’ or ‘Excuse me?’ These are both expressions used in English when one has not heard or understood what the speaker has said. The message here is that, given the official nature of the communication, the caller has arguably not yet spoken. The CSR response is to prompt the caller to use English, the only language recognized and accepted for use in this official domain. Both the mocking repetition and the pretence at not having heard are responses employed by teachers prompting pupils to give an appropriate response in a classroom situation. The CSRs, in their lowly role as mere gatekeepers of the state, are the ones tasked with performing the combined role of teacher and police. As teacher, they prompt appropriate behaviour through either mockery or pretence at not having heard. As police, they administer punishment by way of the embarrassment created when they use Jamaican to mock or mimic a caller using the inappropriate language.

60 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

Wa di Masiv a Se (What the Majority Are Saying) Introducing the ‘Massiv’ There is a set of discourses on language which compete with those of the ‘chateratti’. These involve the views of the ‘masiv’. The word ‘masiv’ is a Jamaican language portmanteau word which combines ‘masses’ and ‘massive’ and is used to refer to large groups of people. It is the same ‘masiv’ that the then President of the USA, Barack Obama, on an official visit to Jamaica, reached out to at the start of his speech on April 8, 2015. A 2016 press retrospective on the Obama visit states the following: “Greetings, massive! Wah gwaan, Jamaica?” may be the most memorable words spoken by Barack Obama during his visit to Jamaica in April of last year. The use of Jamaican creole by a United States president was indeed seen as a high point for Jamaica. (Jamaica Gleaner, 6th April, 2016)

The opening line of his address was, ‘Griitinz, Masiv!’, anglicized in the print news media to ‘Greetings, Massive!’. What is interesting is what followed—‘Wa a gwaan, Jamieka!’ translatable as ‘How are you, Jamaica?’ The speech writers and cultural consultants behind the text of his speech had created, in the second of the two opening sentences, an echo of the first. A key part of this echo was that the ‘masiv’ in the first sentence gets realized in the second as ‘Jamieka’. The ordinary people of the country, the ‘masiv’, were being treated as synonymous with the state, ‘Jamieka’, by the visiting head of state of the country which dominates the politics, economy and thinking of the educated classes which govern Jamaica. This was taking place in the context of an official speech which was, for nearly all of the rest of it, in English, in keeping with the linguistic norms of Jamaica. The context of that speech was a Town Hall meeting for young leaders held at The University of the West Indies and addressed by Obama. Soon after, in giving thanks to his hosts, The University of the West Indies, he says, ‘Big op, YuuWii’—‘A big cheer for UWI’. This is followed by a seeming off-the-cuff remark as he fishes into his jacket for a handkerchief, ‘I’ve been making myself at home here’, presumably referring to his use of the Jamaican language. The overall use of Jamaican by this high-status visitor juxtaposed the ‘masiv’ with ‘Jamieka’ and ‘making self at home’ with the official discourse of involving the ‘educated elite’, ‘the Jamaican state’ and ‘formality’. What then about the views of this ‘masiv’ that the

3  THE LANGUAGES IN CONFLICT 

61

distinguished visitor from overseas seems to take so seriously? Well, ask any Jamaican on the proverbial Jamaican Urban Transport Corporation (JUTC) bus from Kingston to Spanish Town, about the attitudes of their neighbours, employers, or the mass media, to language in Jamaica and one will get an earful. The ideas held by these people in the street are based entirely on the data of everyday experience and beliefs about language which have been handed down. These views are arrived at and held without the benefit of any ‘scientific’ data collection methods. This body of opinion is well established but frequently ignored or misinterpreted by those with higher status and greater power within the society. The best way to learn of the language attitudes, beliefs and practices of the ‘masiv’ is to go to them. They were surveyed twice, in 2005 and 2014, to find out about these. The two surveys, referred to as Language Attitude Surveys (LAS 2005, 2014) were conducted by the Jamaican Language Unit, at The University of the West Indies, Mona. The 2005 and 2014 LAS surveys were each conducted across western, central and eastern Jamaica and included representative samples of 1000 men and women between the ages of eighteen and eighty years. Survey forms were prepared in both English and Jamaican, the latter using the Cassidy-JLU writing system (JLU 2009). The interviewers were trained in survey techniques and in the delivery of the survey questions in both languages and were instructed to use the language the respondents used with them. Questions ranged from respondents’ personal use of language, their views of Jamaican as a language, government and educational use, as well as respondents’ attitudes to stereotypes of each language group. Finally, the population was asked whether they felt Jamaican should be made an official language alongside English. Analysis of the data includes crosstabulations of some demographic items such as gender, region and age with responses on the key areas of the survey. The intent was to determine attitudes to language and beliefs about language use across the entire population, by region, urban and rural, socio-economic status, age and gender. Informants in the Language Attitude Survey of 2005 were given a definition of what a language is as follows, ‘A language is a form of speech, which can be used to communicate anything people want it to’. They were then asked whether they thought that Jamaican was a language or not. Of those asked, 79.5% declare that it is indeed a language. This contrasts with the most common position among members of the ‘chateratti’ that Jamaican is not a language, and has no characteristics which would allow it to be considered as such. A more in-depth look at the data gives us some

62 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

additional information. We seem to be faced with a shift over time in the direction of a more positive attitude to Jamaican. This is captured by the fact that whilst among the oldest age group, fifty-one plus, only 73.2% declare Jamaican to be a language, both the eighteen to thirty and thirty-­ one to fifty age groups do so at 82.6%. This difference is meaningful. The results suggest that attitudes are getting more positive with the passing of time and the arrival of new generations. Informants were given a scenario in which there are two kinds of schools, one in which children are taught literacy in English only and another in which literacy is taught in both languages. The question then asked was, ‘Which school do you think would be better for a Jamaican child’. Results show that the overwhelming majority, 71.1%, of the sample think that a school where children are taught to read and write in English and Jamaican would be better than an English only school (LAS 2004, p. 32), with the younger groups, 75.1% favourable versus the 63% for the older group. Again, we see a pattern which appears to suggest that, over time and across the generations, the tide is turning in favour of a more positive attitude to Jamaican. On the question of parliament granting official status to Jamaican alongside English, 68.5% support such a proposal. A similar pattern as seen above in relation to age shows up, with the youngest group showing the most positive attitudes. For the oldest group, there is 68.8% agreement, for the group in the middle, 64.8% and for the youngest group, 72.1% agreement, an increase in positive attitudes of the youngest group relative to the older ones. We see, in the results just outlined, a coherent body of opinion about the status of Jamaican. It is one which radically contrasts with the views of the educated elite, the ‘chateratti’. The ‘masiv’ are firmly on the side of the ‘languagehood’ of Jamaican. Flowing naturally from this are their attitudes to the role of the Jamaican language in the state. The ‘masiv’, particularly the younger ones, favour its use as a language of literacy in the school system where the skills necessary to ensure the running of the state are taught and learnt. In addition, they approve of a formal role for it as an official language within the machinery of state. As for the consistently relatively less favourable attitudes to Jamaican among the older informants, we are merely witnessing a trend over time towards the advance of positive attitudes to Jamaican and a retreat of negative ones.

3  THE LANGUAGES IN CONFLICT 

63

What and How the ‘Masiv’ Think They Speak The Language Attitude Survey also covered Jamaicans’ opinions of what languages they speak and in what context. It is, of course, important to distinguish between someone’s declared notion of what they do and what they actually do. For now, we will examine what they think they do. What, firstly, are their ideas of what language(s) they speak and to whom? Overall, respondents describe themselves as speaking both English and Jamaican (78%—2005, 80%—2014). The youngest cohort (eighteen- to thirty-­ year-­olds) are most likely to present themselves as speaking both languages, whilst the oldest group (fifty- to eighty-plus-year-olds) are most likely to report themselves as speaking either English only. There is very little overall percentage difference between the 2005 and 2014 surveys. Fifty-seven per cent (57.1%) say they speak English to strangers and co-­workers only. The number claiming to speak English to everyone is 26.2%. Thus, the total claimed usage for English with strangers and co-­ workers is 83%. By contrast, 62.9% declare for Jamaican with family and friends and 28.5% for use with everyone. Thus, the total claimed usage for Jamaican with family and friends is 91.4%. We have a mirror image effect here. English is the preferred language for use with strangers and co-­ workers, and Jamaican with family and friends. The percentages of respondents claiming to buck this trend are just 7.9% for English with family and friends, and 3.2% for Jamaican with strangers and co-workers. An interpretation of the preceding is that a majority of the respondents are reporting diglossic bilingual behaviour. The diglossic label describes speakers using each of the two language varieties at their disposal in a complementary fashion. One language variety in a diglossia is usually reserved for public and formal discourse, exemplified in the LAS by ‘with strangers and co-­ workers’. The other language variety is typically employed for private and informal domains, in the LAS, ‘with family and friends’. From the LAS results, English is the preferred language for use with strangers and co-­ workers and Jamaican with friends and family. This means that the majority of respondents to the survey are declaring themselves to be using the two languages in a diglossic manner. Pure bilingualism, by contrast with diglossia involves the use of the two languages controlled by speakers in identical contexts and for the same communicative purposes. We can examine the statistics for evidence of this. There are similarly small portions of the population who reported speaking either English to everyone (26%) or Jamaican (29%) to everyone.

64 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

While 8.8% and 5.4% respectively, reported speaking English and Jamaican to no one. This means that 20.6% of our respondents claim to use English to everyone and either Jamaican to strangers and co-workers, or to everyone. Similarly, there is 20.2% of the sample who claim to use Jamaican to everyone and English either to family and friends or to everyone. This suggests that a large portion of the population claim to be bilingual to some degree, whether using both languages to everyone or one language predominantly and the other language in some domains. There is an overlapping group of about 20% who claim to use English and Jamaican with everyone. We need at this stage to solve the puzzle presented by the two groups of people, those declaring themselves to be diglossics and the non-­ diglossics, either pure bilinguals or monolinguals. The pure bilinguals are those who declare that they use each of the two languages to anyone. The monolinguals are those who declare that they use one of the languages to no one. Starting with the declared bilinguals, there was a reduction in those claiming to use English across the age groups descending from the oldest group at 31.7% at one extreme to 21.9% for the youngest group at the other end. We see a similar decline for claims to use Jamaican to everyone from 32.8% for the oldest age group to 22.5% for the youngest. This would suggest that the historical drift is away from a pure bilingual use of the two languages, already a minority trend, and towards a diglossic usage which is already the majority one. We can suggest a historical explanation for this. We propose that up until independence in 1962, Jamaica was governed by a cohort of British colonial administrators and along with cultural and religious agents from the metropole functioning to/civilize the colonized. This white dominant colonial class is described by Smith (1961, p. 163), for the period leading up to independence, as consisting primarily of ‘persons reared abroad from early childhood’. ‘Abroad’ here would typically be the UK. These would have been native English speakers who would have used English in all situations. The locals, who were associated with these metropolitan speakers of English, would have learnt English as a second language and assimilated to the practices of the colonizing group by using English in all situations. However, this class would have retained the use of their native language, Jamaican, in their interaction with the monolingual Jamaican speaking mass of the population. This is as noted by Smith (1961, p. 172) in his comment on the behaviour of the ‘Brown intermediate section’ of the Jamaican population. The use of Jamaican by the intermediate class

3  THE LANGUAGES IN CONFLICT 

65

would have had to include the public and formal domains of the state since the mass of the population had little or no knowledge of English. This form of language behaviour was registered in the LAS as using Jamaican to everyone. A local elite of this type would be tending towards language usage which is bilingual in the pure sense of the word, with both languages being used by them in exactly the same functions across the board. This would depend on whether the interaction was with the English monolingual dominant group or the Jamaican monolingual bottom group. With the coming of independence, there is a disappearance of the cohort of metropolitan native speakers of English along with the tendency to use English with everyone, that is, even in private informal situations. Metropolitan speakers of English are replaced by members of the local population who have been favoured by the colonial system. A small local elite had been taught English in formal education provided to only a tiny, privileged sliver of the population. This has prepared them to function in the administrative and other governing roles vacated by agents of the British colonizing power. In the post-independence period, however, the main use for English is as an official language and language of public and formal communication. The elite shares the use of Jamaican with the rest of the population. This serves to consolidate the place of Jamaican as the language of private informal communication across all classes. The number of people who could claim to use English to everyone, including family and friends, therefore, declines with the passing of the decades. This is seen in the age group results just discussed. Another outcome of the end of colonization is a consistent drive to expand the education system, bring more and more people from the poorer and more marginalized sectors of the population into that system. The result has been that over the five-plus decades since independence, the cadre of people with some exposure to and competence in English has rapidly increased. The number of monolingual speakers of Jamaican, those who use Jamaican to everyone, has rapidly declined. This is manifested in the numbers for declared monolinguals, those who claim to use a particular language to no one. There is a decline from 12.7% among the oldest group to 4.2% among the youngest for whom that language is English. For those for whom that language was Jamaican, the drop was from 9.3% among the oldest to 2.4% among the youngest. We can infer from the above figures two things. They support statistics already discussed which suggest that the younger respondents are more likely to declare themselves bilingual. Put another way, they are less likely to declare themselves

66 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

monolingual. Combined with our observation of a drift away from pure bilingual declared usage to a diglossic one, we can conclude that the historical trend is away from both monolingualism among the mass of the population and pure bilingualism among the privileged post-colonial elite towards bilingualism of a diglossic type. The trend just described has to be considered alongside the results previously discussed concerning favourable majority attitudes to Jamaican as an official language alongside English and as a formal medium of instruction and literacy alongside English in the education system. These results may be called aspirational since they point to the fact that the current diglossia will, in due course, be replaced by a situation in which English is used with co-workers and strangers, but Jamaican will also be used in such cases as well. The reduction in the numbers of those who use Jamaican to everyone among the young is, as we have seen, a product of the rapid expansion of the education system. Then, however, will come a reversal of this trend as Jamaican becomes official and a formal language of education. Jamaican will, in those circumstances, become a language for use at work and for dealing with strangers, alongside English.

How the ‘Masiv’ Actually Speak Returning to the LAS results, in the public sphere of formal language use such as government communication, 68% of survey respondents feel that the government would be better able to communicate with the public if they use Jamaican. Sixty-nine per cent of the Jamaican public also want to have schools to teach in both languages and to see the Jamaican language proclaimed an official language alongside English. We have been seeing from the very first of these surveys, the willingness of the Jamaican public to be identified with and by their first language without fear of the social opprobrium which was previously the norm. Although we have concentrated on the LAS 2005 results, these are consistent with the results of the LAS 2014. In comparing the results of the two surveys, we observe little change in the responses on the issues already mentioned. The 2005 survey reveals that 78% of respondents saw Jamaican as a language, compared to 80% of the 2014 survey. Equal portions of the sample say they would prefer a bilingual school (70%—2014, 71%—2005). The same is true of those who think that Jamaican should be made an official language alongside English (69%—2014, 69%—2005). In ten years the Jamaican public has remained consistent in their views to the use of both languages. The

3  THE LANGUAGES IN CONFLICT 

67

positive attitudes in the 2005 survey are no fluke. In fact, there is an increasing evidence in public performances and media output that the use of the Jamaican language in formal, previously English-only situation is becoming more favoured.

How Did the Language Situation Come to Be? Having a higher opinion of one’s abilities than actual performance suggests is quite common and is known as the self-serving bias. Typically, people see themselves in a better light than others view them. In the LAS 2005, 88.9% claim to be able to speak Jamaican and 89.3% say they are able to speak English. Given the positive attitude to being able to speak both languages, Jamaican respondents may have been tempted to over-­ report themselves as being able to speak both languages. To get a fuller picture of the language situation, and people’s language actual language abilities in particular, we can examine the results of the 2006 Jamaica Language Competence Survey (LCS 2006). This was carried out to establish what language varieties people actually can and do use. The researchers create a situation in which interviewers engage with respondents in both languages. This is geared to eliciting natural responses in either Jamaican or English, or both Jamaican and English, in a single speech act. Interviewers are sent out in pairs under the guise of conducting surveys on cell phone choices. One interviewer speaks only in English and the other only in Jamaican. They intercept, based on convenience, shoppers in busy public areas for interviews. Each participant is presented with images of popular cell phones and asked about their opinions of it in either English or Jamaican. A second interviewer interrupts employing the language not in use up to that point and presents additional cell phone choices. Half of the interviews begin in Jamaican and then switch to English, and the other half reverse this sequence. The respondent could either continue in the language they begin the interview in or code switch to the language of the second interviewer who interrupts. In instances where the respondent does not switch codes, interviewers had been instructed to ask the respondent if they were a speaker of the other language, and if so, to say something in that language. Interviewers noted (1) the language in which the interview was initiated, (2) the language of the respondent, (3) the language evidenced after the interruption and (4) the language produced when the informant is prompted and which they may not have used up to that point. In analysing the data from the interviews,

68 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

the evidence from language behaviours evident at these four stages is combined into a single proxy variable, labelled ‘bilingualism’. Informants could be labelled as showing evidence of being able to (1) speak Jamaican, (2) speak English and (3) speak Jamaican and English. The construction of the survey just described presumes the existence of two discrete speech forms, English and Jamaican. In actual speech, interlocutors, particularly those with some degree of education and, therefore, formal and conscious knowledge of English, will produce utterances with a mix of features from the two idealized linguistic systems. The interviewers who have to make judgements about whether a speaker could use English had been trained and were expected to rely on the idealized notions of English as taught to them in school and as expected of them in formal situations. Along similar lines, they are expected to rely on community notions of what is ‘Patwa’ or idealized Jamaican. Since what is Language X and what is Language Y is determined by members of a speech community, it seemed useful to employ community-based judgements to assign speech to one language variety or another. In approaching the results, we need to be aware that the data collection situation had a built-in bias in favour of the use of English. As shown in the LAS, English is the preferred language for use with strangers. The interview situation involved two strangers approaching a shopper. Thus, even for those parts of the interview conducted by the interviewers in Jamaican, there is still an aspect of the sociolinguistic culture which would make some respondents uncomfortable answering in Jamaican. This would have reduced the likelihood of them doing so. This reluctance would actually be emphasized at the point in the interview where, not having used it hitherto, they are explicitly asked to speak it. The interview situation, therefore, favours the use of English and disfavours the use of Jamaican. It means that we can take the actual use of English in the interview as a pretty good proxy for the number of people who actually can use it. However, the numbers showing no evidence of being able to use Jamaican in the interview situation is an underestimate of the number who have actual competence in the language. In the Language Competence Survey, 37% demonstrate the ability to use Jamaican only, one-fifth (20%) demonstrate the ability to use English only, and 46% the competence to use both languages. In light of the above caveat concerning the interpretation of the data, we can accept as evidence of language competence this figure of 37% for ability to only use Jamaican. However, we have to presume that the figure of 20% for those who can use

3  THE LANGUAGES IN CONFLICT 

69

English only, that is, have no competence in Jamaican, is a gross overestimate. This means, as well, that the figure of 47% as an estimate of the percentage of bilinguals is an underestimate. However, the combined figure for speakers of Jamaican and bilinguals is an estimated total of 67, somewhat short of the 78% in the LAS (2005, 2014) who claim to be bilingual. From the above, it is clear that the data from the LCS is most reliable in relation to arriving at estimates of the percentage of the population with some demonstrated competence in English. Again, if we use a similar combining of the English only and bilingual percentages we see a rise of those with English language competence from a low of 59.7% in the oldest age group (51–80+) and to 70.3% in the youngest age group (18–30). Perhaps most intriguing and informative are the percentages across occupational groups. These range from service professionals and self-employed at 78.4%, through clerical and sales at 75.7% and farmers and skilled craftsmen at 58.5%, to unskilled/housewife at 48.3%. Once we remember that engagement in the formal education system is the main source of exposure to and competence in English, these percentages make complete sense. Since the first group largely is made up of professions such as lawyer, doctor, teacher, accountant, and the like, typically requiring tertiary level education, it is not surprising that they show the highest levels of demonstrated competence in English. The next group, that of clerks and sales people, requiring at least secondary school education, comes second in the ranking for demonstrated English competence, followed by the group that includes skilled craftsmen who very often themselves have post-secondary vocational training. Then, finally, are the housewives and unskilled with no obvious requirement to belong to this category. The Price of Language and Gender Let us make an oversimple, mischievous but illustrative use of the statistics presented at the end of the previous section. This is with a view to arriving at an understanding of the operations of the Jamaican language situation. The just discussed LCS ‘seventy-eight percenter’ group of upper professionals, the ‘chateratti’, use those on the periphery of their group, the ‘seventy-five percenter’ clerks and sales people, as gatekeepers to lock out the ‘massiv’ in the form of the ‘fifty-eight percenter’ farmers and skilled crafts people, and the ‘forty-eight percenter’ unskilled and housewives. The question then would be, how does the system work? A possible answer

70 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

is provided in the work around language ideology in Jamaica being carried out by Kedisha Williams and the notion of the ‘price’ a speaker has to pay for using a particular language variety. The concept emerges out of her observation that, in the LAS, males almost always show higher positive attitudes to Jamaican than females. Williams conducted focus groups with a view to doing a qualitative check on the quantitative data in the LAS, and she discovered that the very men who declare positive attitudes to the Jamaican language are the ones who are negative to women who speak Jamaican. What has emerged from her work is that the two languages in wide use in Jamaica have become gendered. Thus, even though English is the language of public formal communication, a man who breaks that rule and uses Jamaican does not suffer the same level of social opprobrium a woman would receive in the same situation for speaking in the same way. There is an expectation that, in the kinds of public and formal situations requiring English, women will have the linguistic skills to conform to expectation. Given the long history of men being given less access to educational opportunities than women, the society has much lower expectations of men. It has reached a point where, for many, the ability of a man to use English is associated with him being effeminate or a homosexual. Thus, the price the woman has to pay for using Jamaican in a context which would typically require English is much higher than that which a man would pay. Thus, when it is necessary to interact in public and formal situations, men have it easier than women. Men pay a smaller price if they do not have competence in English, the language considered appropriate for that situation. The image of masculinity endorsed by the Jamaican population in earlier studies showed that both children and adults within the culture had very fixed ideas of what constitutes masculine and feminine traits, which is consistent with the gendered language stereotypes. Jamaican men were described as ‘coarse, reckless, aggressive, lazy, tough, arrogant, stern, disorderly, robust, rigid, autocratic, courageous and hard-­ headed’. While Jamaican women were described by the population as embodying the traits of ‘complaining, fussy, sexy, emotional, worrying, affectionate, sensitive, soft-hearted, sophisticated, fearful, excitable, warm and cautious’ (Walters and Carpenter 2017, p. 20). The conclusion from the Williams (forthcoming) work is that attitudes to language are determined by the price we have to pay for using or not using a particular language variety. If we pay a relatively low price for using it in a particular situation, we will report positive attitudes to the language variety. This is so even when we exact a high price from a member of a

3  THE LANGUAGES IN CONFLICT 

71

different social group or gender for doing the same thing. Once language attitude can be measured and determined by the opportunity cost (price paid), we have an easy way of understanding the Jamaican language situation and where it is headed. We need to find the trigger which set in motion the process of the continuing rise in the status of the Jamaican language. In addition to the opportunity cost of not conforming to linguistic expectation, there is also an opportunity for being able to conform and use the required language variety. The thrust of the argument is that language communication imposes a cost on the speaker in terms of mental and social energy. There is the issue of the content of the message, the need to organize the words so that it can be understood by the person being addressed and then there is the need to produce the socially appropriate linguistic forms and structures to convey this message. Private informal situations, operating among family and friends, provide, in the course of a lifetime, a lot more opportunity in the form of exposure and practice to master the linguistic structures of the language variety appropriate to those situations. Public formal situations, at the other extreme, are much rarer situations for most people in any society. It therefore requires more mental effort to produce the linguistic structures appropriate for those situations. Formal education is intended to help to create familiarity with the language variety of the official, out-of-home, ‘interacting with strangers’ and the state operates in this formal variety. Control of the official language of the state provides access. Linguistic expectations, however, ration that access based on how much capital has been invested by the individual, via formal education, in gaining access to the appropriate language. The ‘chateratti’s main source of privilege is their control of the state and their ability to control the dispensing of the services of that state. We might, therefore, want to adjust our initial statement. The main capital which the ‘chateratti’ own is language. If the services of the state are dispensed equitably and fairly, the ‘chateratti’ would have little or no power. The only factors at play would be the availability of those services and the demand for them. However, since the functioning of the state relies on the use of language, and access to its services is typically via language use as well, power can grow out the barrel of a gun called language. Those who have invested in education, and as a consequence have a command of English, can get access. Those who have not will have to pay a price in other ways. They may pay by not adequately benefiting from the service

72 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

because it is provided in a language they do not understand well. Alternatively, as observed in the Kadian Walters (2017) research on language discrimination, they may be made to pay via emotional abuse meted out by the gatekeepers to the state. The almost pathological resistance of the ‘chateratti’ to a change in the linguistic status quo, to grant Jamaican official status alongside English, is rooted in a resistance to the loss of their linguistic capital. In post-independence Jamaica, the drive to bring the benefits of independence to the ‘masiv’ has resulted in a rapid expansion of the state, and in particular its education system. Given the relatively small number of people with competence in English, the state could not, in the post-­ independence period, recruit enough teachers and other linguistic role models with the appropriate levels of control of English, to produce the technical experts and functionaries it required. It, therefore, has had to lower its linguistic expectations of those whom it would recruit as functionaries and teachers. In the case of the teachers, these tend to reproduce in their pupils and students, the reduced levels of English language competence the state has been forced to accept. This creates a cycle of what the ‘chateratti’ decry as a massive fall in the standard of English used in the media, by public officials and by teachers themselves. That decline in English language standards takes another form. Many of those carrying out the gatekeeping function, notably Customer Service Representatives (CSRs), have only a limited control of English themselves. The gatekeeper develops blurred vision and cannot distinguish between who should enter and who should not. In some cases, the gatekeeper acts out of sympathy for those whom they should be excluding. In addition, using Jamaican allows the CSRs the relief of operating in a language variety that is native to them, rather than one requiring a great deal of mental effort. So, the CSRs open the gates without imposing an entry fee. This is what happens with the 60% of calls in Jamaica in the Walters (2017) language discrimination study, which received efficient and courteous service. We would suggest that it is this failure to punish, or more properly inability to punish, that has resulted in the steep rise in the status of the Jamaican language in the over five decades since independence. When there is a reduction in price one will pay for using a language variety, in this case Jamaican, in a public formal communication situation, the status of that language variety rises. For men, the price of using Jamaican in public formal situations is reduced relative to what it was previously and to that which women

3  THE LANGUAGES IN CONFLICT 

73

currently pay. In addition, courtesy of an association of English with effeminacy and homosexuality, the option of being able to and actually using English in situations where it is required, is not an option for social respectability and mobility that many working-class men would consider worth taking. The pillars of the original society that brought together Africa, Europe and the Americas were language and race. If social mobility for men could not be achieved by changing language behaviours through improved competence in English, then it would have to be achieved through race or skin colour adjustment. With skin bleaching products, one is able to change one’s phenotype to make one look more European, more specifically ‘Brown’. Lighter skin, the property of the ‘Brown intermediate sector’ described by Smith (1961), is still statistically associated with higher socio-economic status, even with the darkening of that intermediate sector. The epidemic of dark-skinned men of working-class origin bleaching their skins in Jamaica over the last decade, we would argue, is a result of the shift over from language as the instrument of social mobility to skin colour. The News Media and the Massiv We have so far examined the anatomy of the language conflict in Jamaica as it is constructed in the twenty-first century. We see its ties to race and class, and, in Chap. 2, its historical roots in the European dominated global system, with its origins in the transatlantic slave trade and slave plantation colonies of the Atlantic. The Communist Manifesto might give us a quick and easy way to deal with this story. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

At the linguistic level, what faces Jamaica are the options of revolutionary reconstitution of society or the common ruin of all contending classes. The research work of Nadine McLeod (2019) explores the ability of people of different levels of English language competence to understand radio news broadcast in English. The results suggest the extent to which the

74 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

official language actually serves the purposes of the state in communicating with the population. This is in the context where, barring isolated experiments in the last forty years, English continues to be the sole medium for the narrative of television and radio news. The view of the ‘chateratti’ is that even though the ‘masiv’ may not be able to speak English or speak it well, they can understand it. This has been given as an explanation for the stubborn resistance of those who operate the media to provide television and radio news in the language most widely used in the country. In the McLeod (2019) research project, level of education is used as a proxy for competence in English. The justification is that, in a society in which exposure to English is largely through formal schooling, the level of education would tend to predict level of exposure and hence competence in English. The sample consists of 233 subjects representing different levels of the educational system and background knowledge of news. The first group, of 105 are students at the Jamaica Foundation for Lifelong Learning (JFLL). This group is in the literacy programme at the JFLL and could be presumed, therefore, to have little or no formal education. This also means that their exposure to and competence in English would be limited. The second group, ninety-eight in number, are students of The UWI.  They would have had a minimum of thirteen  years of instruction in English through primary and secondary school. In addition, they would have satisfied the university English language entry requirements which are set to ensure that the student could appropriately function in an institution in which English is the official medium of instruction. There is a third group made up of thirty informants. They were professional journalists of some experience in an English dominant work environment, all of whom, with one exception, had a university degree. One specific aim is to study the relationship between the comprehension of radio news presented in English and levels of English language competence (ELC) of respondents, as determined by their level of education or other exposure to English. Comprehension is studied in relation to literal comprehension. Literal comprehension yields results that are most directly and transparently linked to language competence and does not require additional skills, such as the ability to draw inferences, nor the need for much background information. In the experiment, eight radio news items were played for participants, after which questions were asked orally. Participants had three options to choose for each news item that

3  THE LANGUAGES IN CONFLICT 

75

was read aloud. They were required to tick, indicating the option they thought was correct. The results show that with a mean score of 47%, the least educated group, the JFLL respondents, are not even at a mid-way point between understanding and not understanding. The UWI group is at 64%, suggesting, as we expected, superior levels of comprehension compared with the JFLL group. The media group has a mean score of 88%, expectedly the highest of the three groups. We can conclude that lack of competence in English, albeit mixed in with other benefits of education and access to background information, does have a considerable effect on the levels of understanding of spoken texts in English in the language situation of Jamaica. In the above, we are dealing with the difference in world view from one linguistic culture to another. That world view difference also exists between English and Jamaican. Very often, what separates the world views embodied by the two languages is subtle and goes unnoticed, notably by the diglossic ‘chateratti’ who implicitly value the world view of English over that of Jamaican. Knowledge and information available in English transfers imperfectly, particularly among the least competent in English, the JFLL group, and those with ostensibly much higher competence in English, the UWI group. A society needs to bring together all the sources of available knowledge and understanding. These include that which is largely from outside, accessible firstly in English. There is as well community internal knowledge and culture accessible here in Jamaican. These need to be brought together to solve problems of life and community. Currently, that outside knowledge coming in via English is converted in a haphazard manner into day-to-day knowledge that can be used in Jamaican language existence. This is being done on an individual basis, depending on each individual member of society’s competence in English. A different world would involve the organized translation by professionals into Jamaican of much of the knowledge and information currently only available in English. This would give equal access to that knowledge to all Jamaicans irrespective of their competence in English. It would benefit even those with high levels of competence in English, given the evidence that even they suffer information loss when converting a body of information from English to Jamaican on an ad hoc basis. In this different world, there would still be some information that is lost in translation but nowhere quite as much as documented in the McLeod study. The benefits of this different world

76 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

would not be restricted to the poor and dispossessed. As we have seen the groups with the higher educational levels would benefit from such a change. The entire society would benefit. However, to paraphrase a song popular in Jamaica in the late 1970s, the words of which are the title of this section, while those privileged by English fight the others for the power and glory, ‘Jah Kingdom goes to waste’, just a more dramatic way of referring to the ruin of all contending classes. The national security threat noted by Smith (1961) is real.

References Christie, P. (2003). Language in Jamaica. Kingston: Arawak Publications. McLeod, N. (2019). A Comparative Analysis of Radio News Comprehension Among Groups of Jamaicans with Varying Levels of English Language Competence (Upgrade, Seminar. Language Linguistics & Philosophy). Kingston: University of the West Indies, Mona. Paul, A. (2013). Our Man in Mona: A Conversation Between Robert A.  Hill and Annie Paul. Active Voice. https://anniepaul.net/ our-man-in-mona-an-interview-byrobert-a-hill-with-annie-paul/ Smith, M.  G. (1961). The Plural Framework of Jamaican Society. The British Journal of Sociology, 12(3), 249–262. https://doi.org/10.2307/587818. The Jamaican Language Unit/Di Jamiekan Langwij Yuunit. (2009). Writing Jamaican the Jamaican Way/Ou fi Rait Jamiekan (Including Enhanced CD). Kingston: Arawak Publications. The Jamaican Language Unit/Di Jamiekan Langwij Yuunit. (2005, 2014) Language Attitude Survey of Jamaica. Retrieved from Kingston: https://www. mona.uwi.edu/dllp/jlu/projects/Repor t%20for%20Language%20 Attitude%20Survey%20of%20Jamaica.pdf Walters, K. (2017). “I Got What I Wanted But How Did They Make Me Feel?”: The Anatomy of Linguistic Discrimination in a Diglossic Situation. Unpublished Thesis, University of the West Indies Mona. Walters, G. K., & Carpenter, K. (2017). Gender-Role Stereotypes and Culture in Jamaica and Barbados. In K.  Carpenter (Ed.), Interweaving Tapestries of Culture & Sexuality. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 4

Through Children’s Eyes: Where Nation, State, Race, Colour and Language Meet

Abstract  On April 3, 1962, the Gleaner newspaper publishes an announcement from the Chairman of the Independence Celebrations Committee that ‘on the authority of the Premier and Cabinet Leader of the Opposition [sic]’ the national motto would be ‘Out of many, one people’. It further states, ‘The motto will be inscribed in the scroll of the Jamaica Coat of Arms without any further alternation [sic]’. The new motto replaces the old one; ‘Indus uterque serviet uni’ is translated as ‘The Indians twain shall serve one Lord’. The coat of arms itself is described by the Jamaican Information Service website as ‘showing a male and female member of the Taino tribe standing on either side of a shield which bears a red cross with five golden pineapples’. The subjugation and enslavement of the indigenous people of Jamaica and the Caribbean, by the British, foreshadowing a similar experience for captured, transported and enslaved Africans. Keywords  National motto • Out of many • One people • Enslavement

© The Author(s) 2020 H. Devonish, K. Carpenter, Language, Race and the Global Jamaican, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45748-8_4

77

78 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

Race and the Jamaican Nation(s): ‘Out of Many’ or ‘92% Black’ or …? On April 3, 1962, the Gleaner newspaper publishes an announcement from the Chairman of the Independence Celebrations Committee that ‘on the authority of the Premier and Cabinet Leader of the Opposition [sic]’ the national motto would be ‘Out of many, one people’. It further states, ‘The motto will be inscribed in the scroll of the Jamaica Coat of Arms without any further alternation [sic]’. The new motto replaces the old one; ‘Indus uterque serviet uni’ is translated as ‘The Indians twain shall serve one Lord’. The visual reference for this motto is the set of images on the coat of arms itself. These are described by the Jamaican Information Service website as ‘showing a male and female member of the Taino tribe standing on either side of a shield which bears a red cross with five golden pineapples’. The service or servitude referred to in the original Latin motto is clearly required of both the male and the female. Furthermore, the design in 1661 by a clergyman who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury supports the religious interpretation of the Latin motto, involving as it does service to the Lord. This original motto is being discarded as ‘bearing no relation to modern independent Jamaica’. Buisseret (2008, p.  287) presumes ‘Indians’ and ‘Negroas’ to be non-­ Christian and, by virtue of that, slaves in perpetuity, unless they have converted to Christianity or have been freed by their owners. The service to the ‘Lord’, therefore, can only be indirect, with that ‘Lord’ being served by proxy through the ‘Christian’ enslaver of the two ‘Indians’. The pineapples present on the coat of arms are witness to the European and British imperial globalization project. Symbolic of the global economic reach of this project, the pineapple, native to the Americas, ends up in the Pacific in the nineteenth century, and Hawai’i in particular. That Pacific archipelago develops as the source of the majority of the fruit produced in the world over the period of the 1920s to the 1950s. The subjugation and enslavement of the indigenous people of Jamaica and the Caribbean, by the British, foreshadowing a similar experience for captured, transported and enslaved Africans. The old Latin motto is ‘whitewashed’ to better align with the goals and aspirations of a ‘modern independent Jamaica’. The indigenous peopled represented on the coat of arms have long since died out due to the hardships of their enslavement and the diseases brought to the Americas by the Europeans.

4  THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES: WHERE NATION, STATE, RACE, COLOUR… 

79

The current population numbers close to 3 million inhabitants with the vast majority being of African descent. In the 2011 national population census for Jamaica respondents were asked which racial group they identified with. In response 92% declared themselves as Black, another 6% identifying themselves as Mixed, and the remaining 2% identified as East Indian, Chinese and White. Thus, the ‘Out of many, one people’ replacement for ‘Indus uterque serviet uni’ reduces a 92% majority to the same status as the four minority groups. The dilution of the ‘Black’ in a Jamaica entering independence was critical in the wake of Africa and Rastafari related insurrection activity, associated with the ‘Henry Rebellion’ two to three years earlier. The behaviour of the state and those who own land and capital in an independent Jamaica has been to legitimize the Jamaican state which was granted independence by symbolically connecting it to the people over whom it had authority. Working within the inherited notion of the nation-­ state, this would require that the state be a realization of the interests and aspirations of a nation. A nation, made up of 92% ‘Black’ people, was an awkward proposition for a Jamaican elite about to inherit a formerly colonial country and run it in a manner which maintained the status quo. This was an ‘about to be independent’ country which was at the heart of the system which invented race and racism four centuries previously. To accede to the notion of a ‘Black’ identity on which to base this nation would threaten the state and the local and international economic system which it existed to support. Faced with this reality, ‘Out of many’ was the sleight of hand intended to mystify the Black masses and keep them in their places. The nation as constructed by the state via its national iconography had an equal rather than equitable visual representation of the ethnicities existing within its borders. Equal representation of the five identified ethnic groups was intended to produce a massive under-representation of the group with 92% of the population and the gross over-representation of the other four groups. In the less tangible area of language, English was the unquestioned language of the state and by extension the ‘Out of many, one people’ nation. This was a perfect representation of Gramsci’s (1989, 1971) hegemony if there ever was one. The state’s conception of the nation is popularized through the symbols of the power exercised by the state. These include the coat of arms, official insignia and seals, postage stamps, letterhead and most common of all, images on coins and banknotes. The state, through a simple device,

80 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

imprints its version of the nation on to the minds of the nation it purports to represent. The ‘Out of many’ construct of the Jamaican nation comes from the Jamaican state. There is, of course, another nation being formed by the mass of the population through their lived experiences. This other nation has, over the years since independence, shown itself to be stubborn in its wish to self-define and to resist the state’s definition of national identity. There has been persistent resistance to hegemony. Jamaica entered independence with the racist pecking order created to justify slavery intact. White was considered the top and Black the bottom, with other races and mixed race people occupying middle position. The ‘Out of many, one people’ definition of the nation supported this by symbolically diluting the ‘Black’ in the nation. Many Jamaicans at the time of independence did accept and operate within this anglo-centric world view. In the earliest post-independence period Jamaicans of all ethnicities, particularly Afro-­ Jamaicans, were quick to point out the slightest biological connection they might have to an Irish or Scottish great-grandfather/mother. Alleyne refers to this situation and suggest that ‘Black’ has strengthened in value throughout the history of Jamaica (Alleyne 2005 p. 232). In the ensuing fifty-eight years, the national self-concept has seemingly moved away from the colonial, multi-ethnic construct to one of recognizing Jamaica as a Black, bilingual nation. In terms of our analysis, two processes could be taking place. It could be that the nation is gradually capturing the state by forcing on it, a redefinition of the Jamaican nation in whose interest it claims to govern. Alternatively, the state is co-opting the popular version of the nation, while ignoring the uncomfortable components of class, race and colour-based economic systems, which it supports, in order to fundamentally change. Another possibility is that we are witnessing a bit of both of these, which itself creates a messy kind of a process that is difficult to capture. There are, in all of this, some simple questions which can be answered. Who or what is this contested ‘Jamaican nation’? Is it the ‘Out of many, one people’ with the racial, cultural and linguistic characteristics of the 92%, or is it something else? Language and the Jamaican Nation(s) The Jamaican language situation may be described as that of conquest diglossia. In conquest diglossia, historically, the colonizing group uses its

4  THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES: WHERE NATION, STATE, RACE, COLOUR… 

81

own language both for public, formal and official functions and for private and informal functions. Members of the conquered group use their own language in domains over which they have control, notably the home, in private and informal interactions. The official, the formal and the public are typically domains under the control or influence of the state. Anyone amongst the conquered population wishing to participate in the official and public life of a conquered society has to acquire the conquerors’ language for these domains. The conquered typically develop competence in the conqueror’s language through formal education. There is, in addition, a third group. These have no competence in the conqueror’s language and are constrained to use their home language and language of private and informal interaction, for all communicative functions in the society. Only the group able to use both languages are behaving in a manner which is diglossic, using one language for official, formal and public functions and the other in the home and for private and informal interactions. English, historically the conqueror’s language, in the Jamaica of the 2010s, is used by educated Jamaicans for official, public and formal interactions. For the vast majority of this category, they use Jamaican as the language of the home and of private and informal communication. There is, however, a minority of the educated who have English as their home language and language of private and informal interaction. These individuals tend to be among the most privileged with the society and the post-independence inheritors of the roles and functions of the conqueror group. Such people, nevertheless, usually have some competence in Jamaican as another language which they use in private and informal situations when interacting with the majority who use Jamaican in these contexts. There are, in addition, those of limited or no education, who have no control of English and function in Jamaican in all contexts. The categories just mentioned know and speak just one language in common, Jamaican. Jamaican is the only language which all Jamaicans share, at least to some degree. Somewhat paraphrasing the words of the Haitian constitution, Jamaican is the language that unites all Jamaicans. This is a fact which drives advertising campaigns targeted at the general population. Such advertisements will invariably be produced with some Jamaican language included as part of a punch line or in jingles. ‘It is evident that “language” plays a very complex role in relation to ethnic, national or racial identity’ (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985 p. 238). In Belize, the adoption of Creole by immigrants, irrespective of ethnic phenotype, is what signals that they have performed the linguistic act of identity needed

82 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

for them to be viewed a belonging, as being truly Belizean. In that situation, the act of identifying with the nation focused on language behaviour. This is a special case of what Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) call cultural focusing (1985 p. 233), where a particular cultural manifestation comes to be the touchstone of national identity. Where new states are made up of several distinguishable ethnic and linguistic groups, two events occur. First, the people thrown together within the borders of this state create a set of shared norms, cultural and linguistic, to facilitate their coexistence within the territory controlled by the state. Secondly, the state itself takes upon itself the role of ‘nation builder’, seeking enforced legitimacy by foisting on the population its version of the nation which, as a state, it will claim to protect and promote. In former colonies the state which emerges is merely an evolved version of the colonial state. During the period of colonial expansion starting in the 1492, the European states were simultaneously expanding internally, crushing the remains of ethno-linguistic diversity within their own borders, be these the Scots, the Basques, the Catalans or others, in pursuit of a centralized state with one ethnic group speaking one language. That was the story of Spain, Portugal, England and France during that time. In the late twentieth century, when political independence is being granted to or being seized by the overseas inhabitants of the European colonial empires, the only model of a state available for these emerging independent states is that of the states from which they are becoming independent. Through ‘nation building’, the ex-colonial state seeks to impose its colonially influenced notions of nationhood on the mass of the population. These are usually at variance with the ideas of commonality and nationhood being developed among the mass of the population. Conflict arises, therefore, between the ‘nation’ of the state and the ‘nation’ of the people governed by that state. In post-­ colonial Jamaica, the nation of the state was one which was ‘Out of many, one people’ with its watering down of the cultural and linguistic influence of the population of African descent. The unifying language of this nation was English, the first language of sections of the ethnically European dominant classes and a second language of the rising group of people being educated to run the state and industry. The language spoken by the mass of the population, and often the only language spoken by them is Jamaican. For some, it is a form of speech to be ashamed of. For others, it is a speech form to be cursed for interfering with the acquisition of ‘good English’ by children in schools, and, yet others, a colourful ‘dialect’ to be proud of provided it remains in its place in the market, the street and on the theatre

4  THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES: WHERE NATION, STATE, RACE, COLOUR… 

83

stage. Meanwhile, at the level of the people coexisting within the borders of the state, the racial phenotype, and the cultural and linguistic forms of the African descended majority are being recognized, as dominant across all groups and classes. These forms are what have come to define what it means to be Jamaican. This is the nation of the people governed by the state, as distinct from the nation of the state. What native speakers of English, diglossic speakers of Jamaican and English, and monolingual speakers of Jamaican have in common is the ability to communicate in Jamaican. The language becomes a focused marker for ‘Jamaican-ness’. Thus, whereas English is the official language, the language of the state, Jamaican is the language of the nation, the language which binds all Jamaicans together. Out of the Mouths of Babes and Sucklings: The People’s Construct of the Jamaican Nation Stereotyped beliefs are formed over time and represent the efforts of the individual and the group to come to terms with some aspect of reality. These beliefs inevitably involve a simplification of that reality. This simplification aids that individual or group in coping with the complexity of reality. How individuals apply these stereotypes to groups of people determines their effect (Stangor 2000). At their most basic level, social stereotypes share three features: (1) people form them based on observation of some characteristics of members of a social group; (2) people expand on these observable traits to include other assumed characteristics of the observed group; (3) people use the observed and assumed characteristics to generalize to every member of that cultural group (Smith et al. 2001). Stereotypes are generalizations about an entire group, based on some of the roles that members of the group play within a particular social context, for example, as shopkeepers within the community. Assumptions are then made about how a member of the shopkeeper group might behave while functioning, let’s say, as a fully qualified medical doctor. We can apply the stereotyping rules to the categories of language, race and socio-economic status in Jamaica. One such example is the use of English in Jamaica. People who speak English have for the most part, learnt it via exposure to English in school. People who speak English are, therefore, far more likely to be educated and belong to the more prosperous socio-economic classes than those who do not speak English. In addition, the higher up the educational and socio-economic ladder we look,

84 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

the more likely we are to find people of non-Black/non-West African phenotype. At the other end of the ladder, people who are unable to speak English, those who function as monolingual speakers of Jamaican, are more likely to be of limited education and lower socio-economic status. At this end of the socio-economic ladder, we are least likely to find people of the non-Black ethnic groups. We can now examine the stereotype, the crude and simplified interpretation of reality, which emerges from the above. Someone who speaks English is presumed, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, to be educated, be high up the socio-economic ladder and to be non-Black. By contrast, someone who speaks Jamaican only, that is, unable to speak English, is presumed to be Black, uneducated and low down the socio-­ economic ladder. It should be noted that there are many contexts, notably speaking on the telephone or on radio, where the visual cues about actual skin colour and other phenotypical features have to be guessed or presumed. Expressed in terms of our state and nation framework, the nation is one made up of ‘Out of many, one people’, that is, a construct within which dark skinned people of African descent are grossly under-­represented relative to their actual share of the population, and speakers of English, high levels of education, with lighter coloured skins and higher socio-­ economic status are over-represented. In reality, the nation of the Jamaican people is made up of dark-skinned people of African descent who speak Jamaican and have limited education and low socio-economic status. A good place to study stereotypes is at the point where they begin to be consolidated in the people’s minds. This is in childhood and adolescence. Starting at this point, we can develop a good sense of how these stereotypes are developing with the passage of time. Such knowledge would begin to yield answers as to how and where the battle of the two nations is being fought, won or lost.

Who Is a ‘Beautiful’ Jamaican Versus ‘Average’ Jamaican? Adolescent Stereotypes Helping us to pull back the curtain on this evolving sense of the Jamaican nation is research on racial and ethnic self-appraisals among Jamaican adolescents. Adolescence is a stage in life when identity construction is very

4  THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES: WHERE NATION, STATE, RACE, COLOUR… 

85

much in progress. Critical to group identity is members establishing in their own minds who represents the ideal member of the group. One form this takes is knowing the standards of beauty shared by a group. Studying these standards can tell a great deal about what the group sees as its identity. The work of Miller published in 1975, ‘Body Image, Physical Beauty and Colour Among Jamaican Adolescents’ does just this. It focuses on conceptions of beauty among adolescents, examining the perceptions of teenagers of what constitutes ‘The Average Jamaican’ as opposed to ‘The Handsome Boy, and the Beautiful Girl’. Miller’s results do not suggest that standards apply to binary opposites, Black and white, African and European. Rather, they involve a nuanced combination of overlapping phenotype characteristics from a variety of ethnicities. The position at the top of the pole of beauty is no longer occupied by phenotypes associated with the white minority. At the top of the pole for beauty, social status and acceptability is now the brown-skinned individual (The Spectator Archive 1994). Miller (1975) obtained these insights by interviewing teenagers in the period at the start of independence between 1961 and 1965. For these teens, the phenotype which they considered as belonging to the average Jamaican involves having ‘bad’/kinky hair, an aesthetically neutral face, and being of a dark or brown complexion and medium height, with a wellbuilt, stout/stocky body type. This image, however, was very far removed from their concept of the handsome boy or beautiful girl (Miller (1975). Thus, the aspirational phenotypical ideal for the Jamaican female is that of a curvy, hour-glass figured, brown girl of mixed African-­European appearance, with long curly hair. Many scholars point to the selection of beauty contestants in the early years of independence, who wore the sash ‘Miss Jamaica’, and their distance from the phenotype characteristics of the majority of the population (Cooper 2019). Some change, however, has occurred over the decades since independence. Over this period, beauty contestants have darkened in complexion from white to café au lait, to various hues of brown, and to dark. This infusion of melanin, more closely approximating to levels in the majority of the population, has been somewhat marked towards the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. In spite of some of the most recent reigning Miss Jamaicas being somewhat on the darker side of the middle of the shade continuum, they possess phenotype facial features that are to some degree European. This harkens back to the African-European beauty preferences of the adolescents in the time around independence. That image has, in recent times, been more easily achievable with the

86 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

advent of the practice of skin bleaching and weaves, wigs and hair extensions. Today, beauty contestants may use their own natural hair or transform themselves through the use of a variety of cosmetic hair pieces. Against this background, it has been suggested by some that a truly representative dark-skinned African Jamaican with matching facial features and hair type has yet to be selected to represent the country on the international stage. Exceptions to these are rare but do exist in the form of Miss Jamaica World and the Miss Jamaica Universe winners. Who Can Be Jamaican? Child Versus Traditional Stereotypes Critical to the above discussion is the notion of the average Jamaican. The work of Miller (1975) was about the views of adolescents on the topic and its relationship to their ideal, ‘the beautiful’, in the first half of the 1960s. The work of Carpenter, Coore and Devonish (2007) and Carpenter (2008) fast forward us forty-plus years to Jamaican children in the first decade of the twenty-first century. At this point, we can find out, through research, what stereotypes children hold of the average Jamaican in terms of race and language. First a panel of adult judges were asked to select from a large pile of photographs, those they felt represented the traditional racial groups that live in Jamaica (Statistical Institute of Jamaica 2011) through consensus. These were photographs of African Jamaicans with varying phenotype characteristics and skin shades, Indian, Chinese, European and mixed ethnicity Jamaicans. The judges selected sixteen photographs which they think represented the racial groups. Second, as a means of triangulating and standardizing the results of the adult panel, intact groups of twelve-year-old Jamaican pupils from a government primary school, in an urban, working-class community were interviewed. In Jamaica, the average child leaves the primary level of schooling by the age of twelve years, having had six years of formal schooling and cultural indoctrination. The twelve-year-olds, being the oldest pupils in the school, could be expected to represent the racial stereotype thinking of younger members of their school. They were interviewed individually by male and female researchers and asked to give their classifications of the sixteen Jamaicans represented by the judges’ photographs. Surprisingly, the twelve-year-old respondents determined that there were only six racial categories that make up the Jamaican population. They excluded photos of people of full European phenotype, describing these as

4  THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES: WHERE NATION, STATE, RACE, COLOUR… 

87

Table 4.1  Jamaican national identity ethnic categories Traditional racial categories

Children’s racial/ethnic categories

1. African Jamaican

Black African  1. Black/African Jamaican   2. Dark-­brown Jamaican   3. Brown Jamaican  4. Indian Jamaican  5. Chinese Jamaican  6. White Jamaican White American (foreigner) White American (foreigner) White American (foreigner)

2. Indian Jamaican 3. Chinese Jamaican 4. Interracial/Mixed Jamaican 5. White/European Jamaican 6. Arab Jamaican 7. Jewish Jamaican

‘foreigners’. The twelve-year-olds called the European phenotype photos ‘White American’. A few also excluded images of the darkest complexioned people, these being described as ‘African Black’. What emerged from this research was a series of ethnic categories for the child respondents, ranging from (1) Black/African Jamaican, (2) Dark Brown Jamaican, (3) Brown Jamaican, (4) Indian, (5) Chinese and (6) White Jamaican. The most European phenotype, previously occupied by what the traditional adult classification would label as White/European-­ Jamaican, was now replaced by the traditional adult category, the AfroEuropean or Mixed ethnicity-Jamaican (Table 4.1), albeit labelled by the children, ‘White Jamaican’. The children use this established ‘White Jamaican’ adult label, but with phenotypes having African-European characteristics, the traditional adult ‘Mixed’ racial category. The children were consistent and confident in their responses despite being involved in multiple parallel interviews each being conducted by a different researcher. Table 4.1 presents the traditional adult racial/ethnic categories alongside those of the children. What Does a Jamaican Look Like: Twelve-Year-Olds The photographs selected by the twelve-year-old pupils were remarkably uniform in phenotype characteristics. The male and female photographs selected by the pupils to represent the stereotypical male and female Jamaican bore an uncanny phenotypical resemblance to each other. They both fell into the category labelled ‘Dark Brown Jamaican’. The grade six pupils were also asked to say why they chose a particular photograph. The

88 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

explanations given by the children established that they associated the label ‘Jamaican’ with a phenotype with the characteristics of ‘dark-brown, cool complexion with oval face and cherry lips’ (Carpenter et al. 2007). This description is similar to Miller’s (1975) whose informants also mentioned the same shade of skin and ‘cool complexion’. Having arrived at a sense of what the oldest group of children in the primary school level of the education system, in a typical Jamaican government school, sees as the racial groups in Jamaica, we were interested in finding out how early these stereotypes were formed. If we were to believe the developmental reports from other studies, we could expect children to develop stereotype knowledge in early childhood.

Young Children and Stereotypes At the individual level, stereotype formation is a gradual cognitive process, though it begins to occur at a surprisingly early age. Racial/ethnic stereotypes are fairly stable by the age of three and a half years and cemented by the age of seven years. Children acquire the attitudes and biases to other language speakers from their caregivers (Eder 1989; Harter 2001). Schooling provides a space for reinforcing cultural stereotype information. In Jamaica, the curriculum emphasizes the differences between ethnic groups in an attempt to create categories corresponding to the official adult construction of ‘Out of many, one people’ with its established ethno-­ racial classification. Children, particularly younger ones, are sometimes viewed as unreliable subjects for objective research, due to the changeable nature of their views. However, the Jamaican children in the research reported on here are between the ages of seven and twelve years, and well beyond the cognitive stage of egocentric thinking and therefore able to give information about the state of knowledge of others, even while holding their own beliefs. Matched Guise Tests (Lambert et al. 1960) were conducted with children of various ages. These tests are particularly useful in revealing stereotype biases. In matched guise tests, audio recordings are made of the same speaker saying the same thing, once in one language variety and then the other. The recordings are played to subjects who are told that each recording is of a different person. They are asked to give their impressions of the speaker heard in each of the recordings.

4  THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES: WHERE NATION, STATE, RACE, COLOUR…  Black/African

Dark-Brown

Brown

Indian

Chinese

White

Jamaican

Jamaican

Jamaican

Jamaican

Jamaican

Jamaican

89

Fig. 4.1  Racial Identity Instrument (RII)

Who Looks Like Me, Who Speaks What and Who Speaks Like Me? One hundred thirty-eight boys and girls between the ages of five and ten years, from the same school as the twelve-year-olds reported on previously, were presented with the array of male or female photographs (Fig. 4.1) consistent with the child’s gender, by a researcher of the same gender. Two recordings of the same male/female saying the same thing in Jamaican and then English were played. The children were asked to indicate, ‘Who said that?’, ‘Who do you speak like?’ and ‘Who looks like you?’ from the photo array (Fig. 4.1). Who Looks Like Me? In response to the question, ‘Who looks like you?’, children could choose more than one ‘look like me’. A majority, 61%, had Dark-brown Jamaican as one of their choices; 41% had Black/African Jamaican as a choice, with just under a third of the sample (32%) having the Indian Jamaican as one of their selections. These five- to ten-year-olds identified least with the Brown (24.6%), White (23.2%) and Chinese-Jamaicans (13.1%). Differences in racial and linguistic self-concept were observed across gender. Boys were more likely to have Dark-brown Jamaican (64%) as one of

90 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

their choices than did girls (57%). Approximately half the girls made Indian Jamaican as one of their picks, which is more than twice the number of boys (15.9%). Girls also had a slightly higher frequency of selection of the White Jamaican (27.5%) as looking like them than did boys (20%). Finally, Chinese Jamaican was a choice for close to 15% of the girls, as compared with only 11% of the boys. How much of the above is aspirational and how much corresponding to reality? This question is important because people are generally prone to over-report the possession of high-status attributes and to underreport having low status attributes. This social acceptability response bias is common in respondents who want to appear more socially acceptable to researchers (Whitley and Kite 2018). Traditionally, in the Jamaican context, having lighter coloured skin is equated with higher social status and wealth, while having darker skin is associated with lower social status and poverty (Alleyne 2005). Against this background, one is justified to be somewhat sceptical of the child selections for ‘look like me’ across the different racial and colour groups. A panel of expert adult judges using the same photograph array classified each child who was a subject of the investigation. The judges classified 57% of the children as being of Dark-brown complexion (Carpenter 2008), very close to the 57% and 64% of girls and boys respectively who made that category one of their selections. Who Speaks What Language? In relation to the issue of ‘Who said that/Uu se dat?’ matched guise test, the results indicated that the children largely identified the Black/African Jamaican, the Dark-brown Jamaican and the Chinese Jamaican as the ones to have uttered the Jamaican language version of the stimulus. This allows us to extrapolate that they see these groups as the ones who are predominantly users of Jamaican. Looking again at the data, we see that the main tendency is for the child respondents to identify the Brown Jamaican, Indian and White Jamaican as the speakers of the English language recording. We can use this to conclude that the children have a stereotype of these groups being users of English.

4  THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES: WHERE NATION, STATE, RACE, COLOUR… 

91

Who Speaks Like Me When asked, ‘Who speaks like me?’, 43% of the children said the Black/ African Jamaican and Dark-brown Jamaican, 12% opted for the Chinese-­ Jamaican (who they had previously identified as speakers of Jamaican) spoke like them. Nineteen per cent of the children identified with the Indian Jamaican as a speaker of English. The Children’s Composite Stereotype of the Jamaican The children who took part in the 2005 series of studies are, at the time of writing, young adults. The oldest, the twelve-year-olds, are now twenty-­ six  years old. The youngest, the five-year-olds, are now twenty  years of age. Even allowing for some refinement of racial categories as a result of more exposure, information and education, we have caught, through the eyes of over 100 children from an urban working-class community, a picture of an evolving Jamaican identity. This picture is framed by stereotypes of race, colour, class, language and identity. A ‘true’ Jamaican belongs to the Dark-brown Jamaican category, has a ‘cool complexion’, oval rather than broad face, ‘cherry lips’, and speaks Jamaican. The Black/African Jamaican occupies, relative to the Dark-brown Jamaican, an overlapping but somewhat less central position within the inner circle of Jamaican identity. Other groups accepted as Jamaican, albeit within an outer circle, are Chinese, Brown, Indian and African-European Mixed Jamaicans. Jamaican is the language thought of as most likely to be used by Dark-­ brown, African/Black and Chinese Jamaicans. It is also the language most normally expected to be employed in everyday functions such as buying and selling in the market. English, by contrast, is the language of Jamaicans belonging to some groups within the outer circle, notably Indian, Brown and African-European Mixed Jamaicans. It is also the language thought to be most likely used in professional contexts such as in communication with a medical doctor. The groups, Black/African Jamaican, Dark-brown Jamaican, Chinese Jamaican, Indian and Mixed Jamaican, are accepted as Jamaican within the wider circle of Jamaican-ness. We, however, have an inner core of ‘true’ Jamaicans which encompasses the inner ring of African/Black and Dark-­ brown Jamaicans, and an outer ring which is made up of the following, using standard adult terminology: Brown (African features and hair combined with lighter brown complexion), Mixed race (visible mix of African

92 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

and European features in skin colour, hair type and features), Chinese and Indian Jamaicans. What all members of the outer ring have in common is membership of a group that is linked to nineteenth-century servitude in Jamaica. Slavery across the British Empire was abolished in 1834. In Jamaica in the following decades, emancipated Africans were replaced by Chinese and Indian indentured servants imported to work as labourers on sugar plantations. Excluded from the Jamaican-ness of the children are those groups who are phenotypically white/Caucasian and approximations of these, for example, Jewish and Arab. This exclusion from the circle of Jamaican-ness of the White/European and phenotypically similar groups can be explained based on history. They are the group historically responsible for imposing a servile condition on the groups of the inner and outer Jamaican circle. The origins of the children in the study are poor, urban working-class communities in Kingston, Jamaica. What we have presented, from the responses of these children, is a set of stereotypes of what it means to be Jamaican existing among the mass of the population. This is the developing and evolving view of the Jamaican nation as constructed by the ordinary people who constitute that nation. It clashes with and accommodates the ‘Out of many, one people’ construct by identifying the African/Black and Dark-brown Jamaicans as the core group within the nation, while accepting non-core groups, the ‘many’ as part of the nation, but not central to it. In this way, it has shifted from the equality between groups within the nation, as expressed by ‘Out of many, one people’ in 1962, to some kind of numerical equity, within which it is recognized that one group is 92% of the population, with the remaining four or five groups constituting the 8%. Clearly, the 92% are the core with the remaining groups peripheral to but nevertheless part of the broader circle that is Jamaica. Jamaican-ness, however, is not seen as including the White/ European Jamaicans who, as the descendants of the invader, conquerors, enslavers and contractors of indentured servants, are seen as foreign to Jamaica and Jamaican-ness. The resistance to White/European/North American dominance through this exclusion of whiteness from the definition of nation is the significant area in which the mass-based conception of the nation continues to compete with the official ‘Out of many’ construct of the Jamaican state. The clash between a European and North American dominated world economic system and the wretched of the earth has a global resonance. The sound of clashes within the historical centre, that is, Jamaica, around which the global network has been built, necessarily

4  THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES: WHERE NATION, STATE, RACE, COLOUR… 

93

resonates with and reverberates around that network. This is the route by which the language of the music and the music of the language travel the globe. Race, Colour, Socio-economic and Linguistic Stereotyping In this particular case, a female speaker was recorded talking about her morning routines: waking up, having a shower and something to eat, dressing and then going to work. This narration is done and recorded, once in Jamaican and once in English. The recordings are played to 107 seven- and eight-year-old pupils in two Jamaican primary schools (Carpenter et al. 2007). The audio recordings in the two language guises are accompanied by two stimulus cards and a ‘distractor photo’. The first stimulus card was a picture of a female African-Jamaican market vendor and the second was the distractor photograph of children playing. The third stimulus card was of a young female doctor of similar phenotype to the vendor, in terms of hair, eyes, nose, mouth and dark-­ brown complexion. The visual cues identifying the vendor were attire, and a produce stand in the background with fruits and vegetables on display. For the doctor, the visual cues were a white medical coat and stethoscope. The script for the guises used was recorded in English and Jamaican: JE: ‘In the morning, when I get up, I wash my face, brush my teeth and go to work’. J: ‘A maanin taim, wen mi get op, mi wash mi fies, brosh mi tiit and go a wok’. Each child respondent was presented with one of the stimulus cards of the females (market woman/female doctor). A recording in one of the two languages was played. The question was then asked, ‘Who said that?’, and accompanied by a request to identify the speaker from the pair of photographs. The child was then shown the distractor photo and asked to describe it. The second of the two photos was then introduced and the recording in the second language guise played. The question and request were then repeated. The order of presenting the cards of the market woman and the female doctor was reversed for every other child respondent. The results show that on playing the Jamaican language guise 52.3% of the children selected the market woman as the speaker and 17.8% selected the doctor. The remainder, 29.1% responded ‘Don’t know’. By contrast, the responses to the English guise show 51.4% for the doctor and 15% selected the market woman, with the remaining 33.6% responding ‘Don’t

94 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

know’. At the most superficial level, we can conclude that the children view market vendors as speakers of Jamaican and doctors as speakers of English. However, the facts of the language situation are a bit more complex. In each case, the photograph created the sense of who the person was (vendor or doctor) by visual cues which were linked to context. A vendor dressed in market clothes, as opposed to church clothes, would most likely be in a market. This is reinforced since a stall with fruits on display is included in the image. In the case of the doctor, she is not dressed in the kind of street clothes she would wear had she gone to the market to buy fruits, but rather is wearing the stereotypical white coat and device associated with doctors on duty in a doctor’s office, clinic or hospital. The doctor’s office type background reinforces the impression of the doctor on duty. Once we take the context into account, our interpretation of the children’s responses itself needs to be more complex. The overwhelming association of the Jamaican language with the market vendor may not be restricted to the person but to the domain. The language of the market is Jamaican and even the doctor in that domain, in the process of buying fruits, is likely to speak Jamaican. If, in the course of buying fruits, she happens to be conversing with the vendor about her daily routines, her speech is likely to be in Jamaican too. If, on the other hand, the market vendor goes to see the doctor, depending on personality and level of control of English, the market vendor is likely to try to produce her best English, at least at the start of the interaction. Thus, the Jamaican language association with the vendor and English with the doctor is not just about the speech of the vendor or doctor but about their likely speech in the specific contexts they are portrayed in. The particular decisions the children make are based on (1) stereotypes about the normal choice of language in domains in which the women in the two photos are presented, and (2) stereotypes about the language competence of the individuals shown and their capacity to use the language variety appropriate to the context. Combining these two elements, the child respondents are saying that they expect the vendor to be able to use Jamaican and to use it in the context of her vending in the market. They are also saying that the doctor is likely to have a high level of competence in English and would use it in the course of her professional practice as a medical doctor. Although not actually tested, but nevertheless likely to be present, is the knowledge that socio-economically the doctor is higher up the ladder than the vendor and that the ability to use English has the effect of raising one’s socio-economic status.

4  THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES: WHERE NATION, STATE, RACE, COLOUR… 

95

Through Foreign Eyes and Ears: Stereotypes of the Jamaican Nation The children whose perceptions of what it is to be Jamaican, as discussed, did not arrive at those perceptions in a vacuum. In addition to their lived experience and what they were taught in school, there is also what they absorbed via the mass media. Of particular interest is the influence brought about by the advent of satellite and then cable television in the late 1980s and the democratization of access by the late 1990s. Foreign tourism related advertising of Jamaica became easily available on foreign channels broadcasting for North American and international audiences. This feedback sometimes caused controversy because some Jamaicans were uncomfortable with the way the country has been sold overseas. Some of the more enduring images directed at an external audience are those generated by the Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB). This began before independence and continue to the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century (JTB media library https://www.jtbonline.org/downloads/unrestricteduse-images/). We will examine a selection of these advertising images and consider how they contribute to the projected image of Jamaicans abroad and at home. Advertising serves a dual purpose of reflecting the aspirations of the consumer as well as informing the consumer’s tastes and desires (Straubhaar et al. 2017). Even though the intent is to get people to buy, advertising also has the task of convincing consumers of what they want to be, to have, or to long for. This is true whether one is encouraging the purchase of one product over another or selling one country over another as a desirable tourist destination. Soon after independence in 1962, the JTB print campaigns took a bold new approach. Under the stewardship of its then new Director of Tourism, John Pringle, the tourist board set out to capture a wider audience of potential visitors by distinguishing Jamaica from its island neighbours in the then British West Indies. The issue of differentiation from its neighbours was not simply a commercial consideration for Jamaica. It was central to the existence of an independent Jamaican state. The country had gained independence in complicated circumstances. Ostensibly, the Jamaican state gained political independence from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In real terms, however, Jamaica had voted via a referendum to exit, or should we say ‘Jexit’, the Federation of the West Indies, dominated by countries of the Eastern Caribbean, and move to independence on its own. Jamaican was in competition with Trinidad, the other large

96 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

territory in the federation. The location of the federal capital was in Trinidad. At the level of popular culture, the label of the popular music of Jamaica at the time was calypso. This, however, was a descriptor shared with Trinidadian music, and one which was more identified with Trinidad than Jamaica. The differentiation of the nation represented by the Jamaican state from that of its neighbours was not only relevant to its share of the tourism market. Rather, it was the foundation of any justification for the existence of Jamaica as an independent state in the first place. In a September 14, 1964, New York Times article, ‘Advertising: Campaign Is Wooing Tourists to Jamaica’, Pringle is quoted as proclaiming: A nation has to develop an entire advertising image and merchandising approach…We have set out to merchandise the foreign face of Jamaica. Jamaica was being sold as just another island off the coast of America. It was being sold as a colony of England rather than as an independent country.

And foreign it had been indeed. The 1950s–1960s colonial image of Jamaica as part of the British West Indies was captured in numerous generic posters. These show almost cartoon-like drawings of Brown and Black market women with baskets on their heads, boys with dancing figures on top of their hats, barefooted men riding laden donkey; women dancing the flamenco (decidedly not Jamaican) portrayed a country that was simply tropical, far-away, lost in time and untouched by industrialization. By the time of its independence in 1962 Jamaica already boasted a public television station, the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, founded in 1959. Pringle’s initiative then marked the advent of a new Jamaica to the world and via the existing technology of photography and film, a somewhat new image of Jamaica and its people began to emerge. Pringle’s drive to polish the country’s foreign face was implemented quite fittingly, not by a local advertising company, but by a foreign one. This was a Manhattan advertising agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, Inc. (DDB International), which has, through several mergers and across five decades, become one of the largest advertising agencies in the USA. The strategy of engaging an overseas firm rather than a local agency was a pragmatic one which worked to the commercial benefit of the Jamaican tourist industry. DDB international, positioned as it was outside of Jamaica, was in the best position to portray the country as the visitor wanted to see it, even if it was not how the locals saw themselves or wished to be seen. The

4  THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES: WHERE NATION, STATE, RACE, COLOUR… 

97

Jamaica Tourist Board’s sixty-year campaign, led by a foreign agency, portrayed Jamaicans to the outside world, including Jamaicans in the diaspora, as an idealized paradise-people leading lives of leisure. This blended in well with the ‘Out of many, one people’ orientation of official propaganda about the Jamaican nation promoted by the Jamaican state within Jamaica. This was the bright shiny polished face of Jamaica being shown to the world by an external arm of the Jamaican state, reinforcing the internal message which other arms of the same state were promoting internally to the population of the country. Six years after independence, there were the Rodney Riots of 1968 associated with the rise of Black consciousness and the Black Power movement. These events racially challenged the ‘Out of many, one people’ foundation of the state, as well as the economic and political control exercised by whites, be these operating internally as big business people and landowners or externally through the big white powers of the north such as the USA, Canada and the UK. These events opened the way for a rise of radical left-wing politics in the Jamaica of the 1970s, resulting in the election of a government which reflected these sentiments. This led to a shift towards the official presentation of Jamaica as a Black majority population (Hall 2018). The turbulent years of the 1970s brought with it an unprecedented flight of capital and the Jamaican middle class to the USA, the UK and Canada. This was triggered in part by efforts of the USA during the Cold War to destabilize a Jamaican government seen to be left wing and friendly with Cuba, the USSR and the national liberation movements of Africa. With a change in government in 1980, there was a shift in the orientation of the Jamaican state towards a conservative, pro-US stance. International JTB advertising changed focus, working to erase the turbulent image of the country with a revival of colonial imaging. The 1980s were characterized by nostalgic tourism filled with benevolent and welcoming natives, beckoning tourists to ‘Come back to Jamaica…come back to the way things used to be’. A series of ‘come back to…’ advertisements followed. Some of these outputs were designed to present a romanticized nostalgia for the pre-independence Jamaica. The most current JTB ads as of 2019 celebrate Jamaica’s musical and athletic excellence, present a variety of cool, dark-brown, oval faces with cherry lips. This is interwoven with images of the potential tourist who is invariably white. The 2012, ‘once you go you know’ campaign features a variety of Jamaican icons such as Usain Bolt running across the island with real Jamaicans in the

98 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

background as extras. The most recent campaign launched in 2018 is the, ‘Join me in Jamaica’ campaign which visits favourite roadside cook shops and interviews the owners who are preserving Jamaican culture. To date it is the most unscripted campaign with Jamaicans speaking Jamaican as well as English. There are no voiceovers, just the people talking to the viewer. The focus is the Jamaican celebrities, music, cuisine, tourist attractions and natural surroundings.

Through Local Eyes and Mouths: Stereotypes of the Jamaican Nation Like foreign advertising of Jamaica, the local advertisements can and have had an effect on the national stereotypes that children hold. Newspaper advertisements from two very different corporations provide snapshots of what local advertisers believe is the optimal image of the Jamaican. These are taken from their advertising in the period from 2000 to 2018. The Grace Kennedy Group is a company which, in 2019, is close to 100 years old. Their food brands have a high profile in the Jamaican market and in the Jamaican diaspora. In 2000 a print ad posed the question, ‘What do you remember about growing up in Jamaica?’ accompanied by the image of a light brown complexioned woman smiling at the camera (Grace Kennedy Group 2000). She has a broad heart-shaped face, with naturally soft curly hair, representing the mixed-race group from among the 8% non-­ Black population. The caption above her head in block capitals describes her childhood memories of the Grace products and below her image were three tins of corned beef ranging from the largest to smallest size. This image would, for most Jamaicans, communicate the stability, status and education of a middle-class English speaker. In 2005, Grace Kennedy Foods began promoting their long grain white rice using a mixture of the Jamaican and English languages and considerably darker skinned models. In the top middle of the advertisement we see ‘Grace Rice sure cooks up nice!’. This use of ‘cook’ as an intransitive verb, with the subject representing that which is the recipient of the action of cooking, is typical usage in the Jamaican language. To coincide with this use of a Jamaican language influenced turn of phrase is the image of a dark-brown skinned woman with her hair pulled back. She is wearing an apron while serving rice and smiling for the camera, while a little girl peeks out from behind her. Our Jamaican woman/housewife,

4  THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES: WHERE NATION, STATE, RACE, COLOUR… 

99

who was much lighter skinned in 2000, has become the dark-brown woman of the oval face (Grace Kennedy Group 2005). The images in the advertisements of this, the largest and best-known food manufacturer in Jamaica, increasingly consists of the stereotypical Jamaican, identified earlier by the school children in this chapter. The image of choice is now much less likely to be from the previously over-represented four or five minority racial groups making up the 8%. At the end of the 1990s, the choice of image is now more likely to be determined by equity, with selection of the phenotype range of the 92% Black/African and Dark-brown Jamaican phenotype, the one seen every day in the workplace and on the streets. A much newer company, Digicel Jamaica, is a modern, international, telecommunications firm, which is very popular and provides another opportunity to examine how the Jamaican is represented in advertising, by a company headquartered in Ireland. This cell phone and internet giant has taken the country by storm since 2001. The company grew from 100,000 customers in the first three months to over 2 million users in a country whose population size is close to 3 million. In less than twenty years of operation in Jamaica, they have presented advertising campaigns that appeal to a wide cross-section of potential users. They too have reflected an image of the Jamaican that is representative of the racial and linguistic reality, one which conforms to the model of the cool complexioned, dark-brown Jamaican with an oval face and cherry lips who is bilingual in Jamaican and English. Ad campaigns have included ‘Call mi’, ‘Set fi di Summa’. The non-standard English spelling suggests Jamaican language pronunciations for these phrases. Their advertisements include celebrity endorsements from athletes, musicians, television and radio celebrities, who reflect the best and most creative exports of the country. At the same time, they have not neglected to show the face of the average Jamaican worker both urban and rural. Consistently, across the wide range of advertising media, their selection of models to represent their products has been in line with the typical phenotypical and linguistic characteristics identified by the children in the research of who is a Jamaican. It is reasonable to assume that, as with the JTB and its foreign target audience, decisions on advertising aimed at Jamaicans inside Jamaica are strategic. The secret of the effectiveness of local advertising lies in the content being recognizable to the local audience and being seen by them as reflecting their identity and cultural values. In short, the finished product contains sufficient elements of the people’s existing culture for it to be

100 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

accepted by them (Straubhaar et al. 2017). The images presented to the potential consumer must have personal resonance, therefore, even as it drives the viewer towards choosing the product. Because images used in successful advertising tend to reflect the values of the society, they can be used, as we are doing here, to identify generally held stereotypes among the wider population. In Jamaica, for centuries, ‘good’ speech, like ‘good hair’—hair that is either straight or curly but not kinky—has been associated with the English language and all things phenotypically White/ European. Jamaican media houses and advertising agencies have slowly inched their way towards a new Jamaican language and phenotype ideal, which is both bilingual in Jamaican (J) and Standard Jamaican English (SJE) and personified by a new Jamaican image. The current media landscape contains more advertisements and local programming that allows for rapid code-switching between both languages, even within a single sentence (Christie 2003). Already the linguistic and phenotypical Jamaican of the past decade is being revised through new cosmetic enhancements. The natural curly hair of the light-brown complexioned female smiling nostalgically is being replaced with a café-au-lait female, sporting hazel contact lenses and long curly hair extensions. The male image is fashion-forward, clean and manicured, with or without the shaven heads and the ample beards that have also become fashionable. This reflects a combination of the adolescents in Miller’s (1975) study of ‘the beautiful girl’ ‘the handsome boy’ and the Carpenter, Coore and Devonish (2007) children’s image of who is a typical Jamaican. It will be interesting to see what a new cohort of primary aged children recognize as the stereotypical Jamaican and which combination of race and language markers they identify with. For the present we can conclude that the ideal Jamaican, apart from being of a cool, dark-brown complexion, oval face and cherry lips, is also a speaker of both Jamaican and English. How does the state accommodate to this insurgent challenge to its notion of the population it serves by some of its youngest elements, its children?

The Nation Represented in the Cinematic National Anthem There is a tradition that in public places, at the start of some kinds of entertainment, notably plays and the showing of films, the national anthem is played. People are expected to stand to attention for the anthem. Of

4  THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES: WHERE NATION, STATE, RACE, COLOUR… 

101

these public spaces, the cinema is the one most people, inclusive of children of urban working-class background, are likely to encounter the playing of the anthem. The playing of the anthem is accompanied by a video. We use the racial and ethnic stereotypes of the children in the Carpenter, Coore and Devonish (2007) study to ‘read’, through the eyes of one such child, the visual representations of the national anthem and, by extension, the nation, as it is presented in this medium. With the screen dark and without any images, we hear, ‘The national anthem represents the beauty, pride, strength and resilience of Jamaica and our people. My name is Shelly Ann Frazer-Pryce. Please stand as we pay honour to Jamaica, our culture and our history’. As the last sentence is uttered the screen becomes bright and we see in writing ‘Proudly presented by’, and below the logos and trademarks associated with six respected Jamaican companies covering beverage, meat and baked products, as well as the banking, automotive and mass media sectors of the economy. This is the nation, in the form of the national anthem, as those who own and control capital would like its citizens, young and old alike, to experience it. As the anthem plays, what rolls out before our eyes is a series of images constructed in several clusters or phases. At the heart of the video is the shot, at around 1.17  seconds, of the band of the Jamaica Constabulary Force in musical performance, suggesting that we are seeing them in live performance of the anthem we are hearing as part of the soundtrack to the video. This the cue linked visually to the arm of the state which preserves law and order leaves us in no doubt that the video is speaking with the authority of the state. The video is best understood in the way that we remember it, starting from the most recent, that is, the ending, and working backwards to the beginning. The final shot is of the Jamaican flag, another symbol of the nation and the state, fluttering in the wind. Moving backwards, we see a shot of six members of the air wing of the Jamaica Defence Force, standing in front of a helicopter, saluting. The flag we see immediately after is presumably the object of that salute. Immediately before this is a shot of white clad marching members of the naval arm of the Jamaica Defence Force coming to attention and saluting, the female officer in the lead with eyes raised. Immediately before this is a clip of members of the air wing of the Jamaica Defence Force, the same ones we see at the end of the video. They are at this time marching from the direction of the helicopter, into saluting position. Before this is a shot of Usain Bolt, the famous Jamaican athlete, on the victory podium at the 2012 Olympics, having won the 200 metres

102 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

sprint final. He is mouthing the words of the Jamaican anthem, in keeping with the tradition of playing the anthem of the victor’s country at the medal ceremonies as he looks up, presumably to the national flag being raised, Before that, there is the image of a male and female teenager, phenotypically Indian and wearing garb suggestive of South Asia, lowering arms that had been raised in dance, and coming to attention, eyes raised. Immediately before that, we see a shot of five teenagers, four males and one female. Two are phenotypically Indian, one white, one Chinese and the one at the centre, a phenotypically Dark-brown Jamaican. They are dressed respectively in blue, white and crimson Japanese style karate costumes. They bring down arms that had been raised in some karate routine down to their sides, stand to attention and look upward. Before that, there is a shot of seven members of the Jamaica Fire Service, in front of a fire engine, taking off their helmets and standing to attention with eyes raised. Before that, there are three members of the mounted branch of the Jamaican constabulary force, two males and one female, bringing themselves and horses to attention, and looking upwards. The ‘attention and eyes raised’ sequences just mentioned are prefaced by the already mentioned shot of the band of the Jamaica Constabulary Force being conducted in playing the national anthem soundtrack to the video. The images in this final cycle focus us on two national symbols: the national anthem being played and the flag. The latter is displayed for an extended period at the end, over four seconds of a ninety-four-second video sequence. Saluting the flag, the focus of the end sequence and of the entire video, are two sets of people. First and last in the sequence are the coercive organs of the state, specifically the police force and two branches of the military. All images of these are of Dark-brown or Black/African Jamaicans. Sandwiched in-between are the people, presumably the ‘nation’ to whom these national symbols apply. There are eight of these. One is Usain Bolt, the Olympic sprinter, who is phenotypically within the African/Black and Dark-Brown range. The only other is the Dark-brown karateka. The remainder consists of four Indian, one white and one Chinese phenotype. This is the equal representation implied by ‘Out of many, one people’ rather than the equitable one implied by the 92% versus 8% actual racial distribution. The first phase of the video, the one which begins it, defines Jamaica in terms of its physical state. This is done through an image of a dawn sky with the sun rising over the landscape, and aerial shots of the Jamaica Blue Mountain range, an old church, coral reefs with a diver swimming near it,

4  THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES: WHERE NATION, STATE, RACE, COLOUR… 

103

a waterfall with pools of water running into each other, a heron standing in a marshland. Then there is the next phase which involves images of the state as protector. The protecting images are of a fire engine, a coast guard boat and a military helicopter. These would reappear at the end, with the personnel operating them standing to attention to salute the flag. They are the state in its protective and security roles, guarding the nation and its territory. What follows is a sequence involving a scenic shot of vehicles driving on a road, the Kingston harbour and port, a hotel and beach. These presumably represent the economic life and activities under the guard of the protective services. The third phase is a life cycle sequence involving shots of three different sets of children, courtship symbolized by a Dark-brown woman seeming to gesture seductively at the camera immediately after we see the image of a ‘Brown’ young dreadlocks man, marriage, old age involving an old African/Black couple coming from church, and images of food that provide sustenance for life. The last is signalled by a buxom Dark-brown young woman in front of a food stall against the backdrop of a sign saying ‘Good Body Soup’, followed by a scene of a fruit stall with a Dark-brown girl running, a bunch of bananas in hand. The importance of the children in the above phase suggests the idea of children being the future of the nation. Who, then, are these children presented to be? In the first of the three shorts, we see three mixed race (African and other), two Chinese, one Indian and one dark-brown African Jamaican, sitting on a lawn clutching footballs and waving at the camera. In the second shot, we see, against a scenic backdrop of mountains, three primary school aged children on the veranda of a luxurious house, playing scrabble. Two are Brown girls, one with long curly hair and they are with an unusually pale white boy in a Jamaica T-shirt. Next is a shot of three Chinese children dressed in traditional clothing look up at the camera, smiling. The next phase of the video is eclectic, grabbing images from a range of activities in the daily life of Jamaicans. There is a sequence involving dance, secular in the form of carnival and dancehall, and religious in the form of Rastafari. This is followed by an image of female high court judges—the judiciary. Then sport, via a still photograph of the narrator of the video herself, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, 100 metres Olympic gold medallist, doing a lap of honour with the Jamaican flag. This introduces the image of the Jamaican flag for the first time, an image which, as we have already seen, is made central to the video in the final phase. Fraser-Pryce’s image

104 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

is followed by a still photograph of Usain Bolt, gold medallist, along with the Jamaican silver and bronze medallists, at the medal ceremony for the Olympics 200 metres final at 2012 London Olympics. The flying of the flag and the playing of the anthem are both implied by this still photograph. Scenes linked to music and entertainment, teacher in a school compound, circled by children, and a dance scene from what is probably the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) follow. It is this which sets the stage for the final phase which we have already discussed. Those performing their daily functions, the police, the army, coast guard, the athletes, the teacher, the adult carnival and dancehall dancers, the NDTC dancers, the vendors and even the members of the judiciary in the video are all or nearly all in the Dark-brown to African/Black Jamaican range. The Jewish, Chinese and Indian ethnic minorities all appear in the video in clothing and with other insignia that identify them with an ethnic group. In the case of the white/European group, they are presented on horseback playing polo, a game within the Jamaican context associated stereotypically with that group. In the case of the African/Black and Dark-brown adults in the video, all wear clothes appropriate to the function they are performing. This is true of members of the protective services, the judiciary, the teacher, the dancers of various types and musicians. Others appear in religious garb as do members of the group in the Rastafari ceremony, or the old couple coming from church, Bible in hand. Interestingly, the African/Black bride is dressed in the white wedding gown appropriate to her role as bride. She is being married to the phenotypically white Jew who, in addition to the expected suit, is wearing a kippah or yarmulke on his head, a sign which, in the Jamaican context, signals both religion and race. The African/Black and Dark-Brown children are, except for the girl in the fruit stall scene, confined in the video to a cameo appearance surrounding and clutching fondly on to their equally Dark-brown teacher in a seemingly concrete school yard surrounded by school buildings. Through the eyes of a child, the Jamaica presented by the video of the National Anthem is very clearly race, class and colour coded. African/ Black and Dark-brown people man the protective and legal branches of the state, provide entertainment in the form of music, dance and art, and are the source of agricultural products and food. These are religious people, either as traditional Christians or Rastafari. As for children, the Dark-­ brown ones go to concrete schools in urban areas and help their parents at

4  THROUGH CHILDREN’S EYES: WHERE NATION, STATE, RACE, COLOUR… 

105

fruits stalls, Meanwhile the ‘Out of many’ children play Scrabble, play with a ball, do karate or dance in fancy ethnic costumes, doing all this against the background of seeming wealth and comfort. An African/Black or Dark-brown child can aspire to join the security services or even the legal profession, be an artist or performing artiste, providing services to those who own commercial, trading and tourism operations and play polo. Or, one can become a teacher and teach a new generation of African/Black or Dark-Brown children in a concrete school complex. Most importantly from a child’s point of view, the African/Black and Dark-Brown identity which the children identified in the study as central to their notion of the Jamaican identity is reduced to a minority ‘Out of many, one people’ representation in the video. Their ‘outer core’ Jamaicans making up the 8% minority are the inner core in this representation. The struggle between the ‘Out of many, one people’ nation of the state as shown in the national anthem video and the Dark-brown nation as visualized by these children cannot be sharper. The children studied in this chapter, and whose stereotypes of race, colour, language and the Jamaican nation, we have tried to capture, are now young adults. They would have been subject to the attempted indoctrination via the national anthem video numerous times in the cinema. As potentially global Jamaicans travelling through life and, in the case of some, the world, which of the two Jamaican nations will they, by way of their living and practice, carry with them? This is the complexity that represents the feel-good phrase ‘Jamieka tu di Worl/Jamaica to the World’.

References Alleyne, M. C. (2005). The Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Archive, S. (1994). The Colour Bar, from Spectator Archive.http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/30th-march-1934/8/the-colour-bar-in-britain Buisseret, D. (2008). Jamaica in 1687: The Taylor Manuscript at the National Library of from University Press of the West Indies. Kingston: University of West Indies Press. Carpenter, K. H. D. (2008). Race, Language and Self Concept in Caribbean Childhoods. In F. Hickiling (Ed.). Perspectives on Caribbean Psychology. Kingston: CARIMENSA.

106 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

Carpenter, K., Coore, C., & Devonish, C. (2007, September). Uu fieva mi, uu taak laik mi: Race, Language and Self-concept in Jamaican Elementary School Children. Caribbean Journal of Education, 29(2), 181–205. Christie, P. (2003). Language in Jamaica. Kingston: Arawak Publications. Cooper, C. (2019, 15 December). Damned Bewitching Beauty Contests. Jamaica Gleaner. Retrieved from http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/commentary/20191215/carolyn-cooper-damned-bewitching-beauty-contests Eder, R. A. (1989). The Emergent Personologist: The Structure and Content of 3 ½ -5 ½ and 7 ½ -Year Olds’ Concepts of Themselves and Other Persons. Child Development, 60, 1218–1228. Grace Kennedy Group. (2000). Retrieved from: https://www.gracekennedy.com/ Grace Kennedy Group. (2005). Retrieved from: https://www.gracekennedy.com/ Gramsci, A. (1989, 1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith Eds and Translators). New York: International Publishers. Hall, S. (2018). Familiar Stranger. London: Penguin. Harter, S. (2001). The Construction of the Self: Developmental and Sociocultural Foundations: A Developmental Perspective. New York: Guilford Press. Lambert, W.  E., Hodgson, R.  C., Gardner, R. C., & Fillenbaum, S. (1960). Evaluational Reactions to Spoken Languages. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 20(1), 44–51. Le Page, R.  B., & Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985). Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, E. (1975, March). Body Image, Physical Beauty and Colour Among Jamaican Adolescents. Journal of Social and Economic Studies, 18(1), 72–89. Kingston: Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies. Smith, E. R., Mackie, D. M., & Claypool, H. M. (Eds.). (2001). Social Psychology (4th ed.). New York/London: Psychology Press. Statistical Institute of Jamaica. (2011). Population Census of Jamaica. Kingston: Government of Jamaica. Stangor, C. (Ed.). (2000). Stereotypes and Prejudice (Key Readings in Social Psychology) (1st ed.). Routledge: Abingdon-on-Thames. Straubhaar, J., LaRose, R., & Davenport, L. (2017). Media Now: Understanding Media, Culture and Technology. (10th ed.). Boston: Cenage Learning. Whitley, B.  E., Jr., & Kite, M.  E. (2018). Principles of Research in Behavioral Science (4th ed.). Abingdon-on Thames: Routledge.

CHAPTER 5

Jamaica Here, Jamaica Everywhere

Abstract  Jamaicans are aware that the level of influence they have in the world way outstrips the size of the country or the size of its population. There is a phrase that sums up Jamaicans’ understanding of the place of themselves and their country in the world. In the mass media and in private conversation, the explanatory phrase, ‘Wi likl bot wi talawa’ always comes up. It may translate into something like ‘We are small but we are strong’. The word ‘talawa’ does not translate well into English. The entry for this word in the Dictionary of Jamaican English (Cassidy and Le Page 1980, p.  436) says, ‘Sturdy, strong, not to be underestimated; tough, stubborn’. Amongst Jamaicans who travel, there is an oft-repeated statement that there is no place in the world, however remote, where you would not be able to find a Jamaican. Keywords  Jamaicans everywhere • Talawa • Global presence

Small but Strong: ‘Likl Bot Talawa’ Jamaicans are aware that the level of influence they have in the world way outstrips the size of the country or the size of its population. There is a phrase that sums up Jamaicans’ understanding of the place of themselves and their country in the world. In the mass media and in private conversation, the explanatory phrase, ‘Wi likl bot wi talawa’ always comes up. It may translate into something like ‘We are small but we are strong’. © The Author(s) 2020 H. Devonish, K. Carpenter, Language, Race and the Global Jamaican, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45748-8_5

107

108 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

The word ‘talawa’ does not translate well into English. The entry for this word in the Dictionary of Jamaican English (Cassidy and Le Page 1980, p.  436) says, ‘Sturdy, strong, not to be underestimated; tough, stubborn’. The best understanding of the meaning of the word is not to treat each of these as an alternative meaning for ‘talawa’ but to assume that it carries all of these meanings at the same time. On frequent occasions that a Jamaican excels outside of Jamaica, on the clichéd ‘international stage’, proud newspaper headlines, announcements on radio and television, and posts on social media proclaim ‘Little Jamaica has done it again’ or words to that effect. There is the idea that Jamaica is little but that its global presence, reach and influence, is big. Folk explanations as to how this power and influence arose always come back to the idea that Jamaicans are special. Somehow or other, in spite of the problems faced by the country and its people, God has blessed Jamaicans with the good fortune to be born in the island, and with a capacity to endure, achieve and excel. This blessing makes Jamaicans stand out wherever in the world they go. We are unqualified to question the creator’s blessings. We think, however, that we have non-divine explanation. It takes the form of being in one place and everywhere at the same time. The here can be everywhere because it was an important part of the making of that everywhere.

Exodus: Movement of Jamaican People ‘Let My People Go (… at a Price)’ Amongst Jamaicans who travel, there is an oft-repeated statement that there is no place in the world, however remote, where you would not be able to find a Jamaican. The modern propensity to migrate from Jamaica started with the Abolition Act passed by the British Parliament in 1833. As scholars have argued, from Eric Williams (1944) to Clinton Fernandes in Daley (2018), by the early nineteenth century, the plantation slave system in the British Caribbean had run its course. It had fulfilled its historical roles to provide a model for plantation slave colonies, to act as a source of finance for the Industrial Revolution in Britain and as the centre around which a global maritime mercantile system had developed. With British industrial capitalism now dominant, the stage was set to abandon the economically stagnating plantation slave colonies, nearly all of which were in the Caribbean. This came via the Abolition Act of 1833 which, with some

5  JAMAICA HERE, JAMAICA EVERYWHERE 

109

exceptions, abolished slavery in the British Empire. It did not, however, abolish racism on which that system was based and which had now become the central ideological support for the expanding British and other European imperial powers across the globe. In fact, embedded within the very Abolition Act was racism: massive financial compensation for those who owned enslaved people now declared free, and no financial or other compensation for the victims of enslavement. So one fine morning in 1834, the Blacks are declared free, albeit in the transitional role of unpaid apprentices until 1838. Society is disrupted. An estimated 800,000 enslaved people were set free across the British Empire, the vast majority in the Caribbean. The British government set aside 20 million British pounds to settle the compensation claims associated with Slavery Abolition Action (1833). This was the equivalent of 40% of the annual expenditure of the British government in that year. In today’s currency, the sum is estimated to be the equivalent of 300 billion British pounds in present-day terms. The British government took a loan to cover this expenditure. This loan was in the form of the Slavery Abolition Act (1835) Loan. The largest beneficiaries of compensation were those enslavers who owned humans as property in Jamaica, with their payment in total being £6,121,446, followed by British Guiana with £4,281,032, Barbados with £1,714,561 and Trinidad with £1,021,858. The Former Enslavers: Taking Compensation Money and Running The abolition of slavery freed the enslavers arguably even more than it freed the slaves. The capital of the enslavers, in the form of the people they owned, was now converted into money. This was in the form of the financial compensation for loss of property funded by the British state. The Atlantic economy of which the British Caribbean was a central part had extended into the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. With sugar production in the British Caribbean no longer profitable, the enslavers were now free to take the capital they owned, so helpfully made portable by the slave-to-­ money conversion built into the Abolition Act of 1833, and run. They could head for the new frontiers of empire where there were vastly more profits to be made. These were Canada, the East Indies and Australia. They, of course, also took with them to these new frontiers a world view which saw non-Europeans as inferior and not entitled to the same rights as Europeans. Racism, forged in the Atlantic, was now globalized.

110 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

The anatomy of this operation is discussed in an article covering the archival work of the Australian historian, Clinton Fernandes, as reported by Daley (2018). The work uses the ‘Legacies of British Slave-ownership database’ at the University College London, to track the activities of British Caribbean slave-owners at the point where the enslaved people over whom they had legal ownership rights, were emancipated. Effectively, given the use to which much of the funds were used, this was a loan to fund further colonial expansion, notably in the Pacific. Milton Fernandes, as reported by Daley (2018), argues that, based on the record of payments to slave owners, many of these resettled in Australia using the proceeds from the compensation they received for the emancipated slaves. Two cases of prominent early Australian settlers make this point. Fernandes work identifies one Isaac Currie (1760–1843), a prominent Australian banker of the period, who was ‘associated with four compensation claims in Jamaica, worth more than £15,379 for 841 slaves’ (Daley 2018). An even more interesting case, revealing the interlocking relationships between Jamaica and the rest of the British Caribbean at the time, was that of Reverend Robert Allwood. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica, the son of an owner of enslaved people, also called Robert Allwood. Fernandes uses the University College London slave compensation database to establish that the Reverend Robert Allwood, sought compensation in 1836 for over 10,000 British pounds for 202 slaves owned in British Guiana under a mortgage. Allwood migrates to Sydney, Australia, in 1839, five years after the Abolition Act came into effect. He is a founder of the University of Sydney, is a former vice chancellor of that institution, and is revered in the history of Australian divinity and education (Daley 2018). The two examples just cited are crucial. The movement of enslaving colonialists and their capital end up at the heart of both the financial, educational and cultural organization of the British Empire in its iteration in the Pacific Ocean, specifically here, Australia. The Former Enslaved: Taking Labour and Running Of the estimated 800,000 people freed as a result of the 1833 Abolition Act, 311,455 were from Jamaica, 84,075 from British Guiana, 83,225 from Barbados and 20,428 from Trinidad. It is worth noting that, of the dozen or more countries with enslaved people being emancipated, Jamaica alone constituted almost 40% of those freed. The enslaved who were freed,

5  JAMAICA HERE, JAMAICA EVERYWHERE 

111

however, unlike their enslavers, received no financial or other compensation. They were no longer tied to the plantations and their owners. Often having no land of their own, one of the best economic options for those who were emancipated was to migrate. In contrast to the former enslavers, when the former enslaved migrated they travelled with their labour, their only economic asset. By 1850, soon after the abolition of slavery, the African descended population of the British West Indies was on the move. One target was Panama, where they worked as labourers building first the Panama railroad, and later, from 1880 onward, the Panama Canal. Not surprisingly given the much larger population size of Jamaica relative to the rest of the British West Indies, a large majority came from Jamaica, though an important minority were migrants from Barbados. A similar mass migration took place to Costa Rica with the United Fruit Company importing thousands of workers between 1900 and 1915 to work on its banana plantations and other operations there. British Caribbean workers were being recruited by these US-run operations in Central America because of a belief, as British subjects, that they spoke or at least could understand English. These migrations have left a significant population of people of African descent of Jamaican and other British Caribbean origin in and around Caribbean coast cities such as Colón in Panama and Limón in Costa Rica. Many have retained to the present an English-lexicon Creole which modern-day Jamaicans would claim is Jamaican. There were other destinations as well. Many migrants left the British Caribbean, and Jamaica in particular, for the USA in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Among the migrants headed to the USA was Marcus Garvey who would go on to form and lead the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). This was a Pan-Africanist organization with branches across the Eastern USA, the Caribbean and Africa and millions of followers worldwide. The Pan-Africanism of the United Negro Improvement Association would inspire many of those who rose to lead African colonies to independence in the second half of the twentieth century. The years between 1885 and 1920 represent the peak period for migration from the British West Indies to Central America and the USA in the century after the abolition of slavery. The historian Franklin W.  Knight estimates that, for this period, the British West Indies had a net population loss of 120,000, due to outward migration. Peach (1967) suggests a higher figure in the range of 200,000 and 250,000. The location of the

112 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

British Caribbean migrant communities in Central America, and in particular in and around the city of Colón, at the Caribbean/Atlantic end of the Panama Canal, had an important effect. It positioned a Jamaican-­ dominated community at the gateway from the Atlantic and the Pacific. In 1915 when the canal was opened and in the decades immediately after, sailors were the primary means by which mass-based anti-colonial political ideas, information and publications were transmitted around a world dominated by European colonial powers. The location of a significant sized population of Jamaican origin at the entrance to the Panama Canal was significant. The UNIA of Marcus Garvey used a global network of merchant seamen to distribute the organization’s publication, The Negro World, around the world and to get around bans and censorship by the British, French and other European colonial authorities. The post-World War II period triggered large-scale migration to the USA, to Canada and to the UK.  Hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans migrated to the USA, with some estimates suggesting 1 million Jamaicans currently living in USA, which would represent one-third of the population of Jamaica. The numbers of Jamaican migrants to Canada and the UK have been estimated in the hundreds of thousands. This has left large concentrations of Jamaicans in the large metropolises of the Anglo-North Atlantic, from Miami to New York and Toronto, on one side, and from London to Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol, on the other. Like with the case of location in Colón, right close to the Panama Canal during the early twentieth century, migration was again, in the late twentieth century, strategically positioning Jamaicans to spread their influence. Global communication networks concentrated in these big, metropolitan centres provided global access to the language, music and culture coming out of a newly independent Jamaica. The strategically positioned migrant groups in the UK and the USA served as global amplifiers for the music and performed language recordings being exported from Jamaica from the late 1950s onward. Peach (1967) estimates that 300,000 migrants arrived from the British and ex-British Caribbean in the UK by the 1964. Most of these were Jamaicans. The influx of these migrants, beginning with those arriving on the ship, the Windrush, in 1948, is not without irony. They arrive in the UK in time to play their part in paying off, in their roles as taxpayers, a portion of the debt incurred by the Abolition of Slavery Act (1835) Loan. This was the loan contracted to compensate the enslavers rather than the enslaved. The debt was only finally paid off on February 1, 2015. The

5  JAMAICA HERE, JAMAICA EVERYWHERE 

113

post-World War II wave of migrants to the UK contributed in their taxes for up to sixty-five years, to the repayment of the loan which was used to pay off the enslavers of their ancestors. This is against the background of their ancestors, the victims of enslavement, not receiving any compensation. The US migration produced an interesting complication. Caribbean migrants from present or former British colonies, including Jamaica, were moving into cities of the North in the USA, to live alongside large African-­ American populations who had in the earlier part of the twentieth century themselves migrated from the Southern USA.  African Americans and Jamaicans, cultural cousins at least, now living side by side in the big cities of the USA, were poised for competition, collaboration, absorption of the weaker by the stronger, or some mix of these. In the area of music production, here is how things actually played out. The manipulation of the non-vocal portions of sound recordings was a staple of Jamaican dub music from the 1960s onward. Styles of talking and chanting over such sound tracks, described in Jamaica as toasting and deejaying, were also fixtures of Jamaican popular music. In 1973 by DJ Kool Herc, a recent migrant to New York from Jamaica, applied these innovations to African-American popular music tracks and Hip-Hop was born. Ever since then, Jamaican Deejay and Dancehall music, themselves off-­ shoots of Reggae, have circled the globe as a distinct but junior partner alongside Reggae’s much better-known offspring, Rap or Hip-Hop.

Race, Global Capitalism, and Being Here and Everywhere Racism was perfected and institutionalized first in the British colonies of the Caribbean, with Jamaica as by far its largest possession. From this base, the British had built, by the nineteenth century, a global empire which claimed to rule two-thirds of the world and on which the sun never set. Racism was adapted and adjusted to justify the colonial subjugation of huge areas of the non-European world, as well as social and cultural responses to it, around the globe. The original British Caribbean model of racism became extended across the world to create a hierarchy of ‘races’ of people. Races were ranked according to the level of respect for rights as human beings which the European expansionist imperial powers thought was expedient to grant a particular ‘race’. This was, in turn, determined by the specifics of how that

114 

H. DEVONISH AND K. CARPENTER

imperial power was proposing to exploit the resources and labour of each conquered people. The effects of global racism as developed in the seventeenth-century Caribbean do not reside only in the past. Neither are these effects limited to countries with black people or with non-white people more generally. They are embedded in disputes about human migration across international borders and, as well, the migration of jobs across these borders. Racism has its origins as an ideology in support of an economic system set up so as to pay no wages to its workers, enslaved people. By definition, therefore, racism lowers the wage rate. Here, we shall globalize the argument originally made by Piketty (2017) narrowly in relation to race in the USA, Brazil and South Africa. Racism persuades people who are ‘white’ or ‘less black’ that they are more deserving of wealth, earnings and material benefits than those who are ‘more black’. Wealth redistribution to the most needy, or increases in wages, will benefit all, including those who are ‘white’ or ‘less black’. However, it will benefit the most those who are ‘more black’, given that they at the bottom of the pile. Racism programmes the ‘whites’ and ‘less blacks’ to prefer the status quo, which grants them relative privilege, even if this is in poverty, just one step up from those who are even poorer. The ‘whites’ and ‘less blacks’, therefore, turn their backs on the alternative in which they, along with those below them, are materially better off. As every trade unionist knows, any discrimination against a category of worker, for example, on grounds of gender or race, reduces the wage rate for everybody. Those in the discriminated against category can be offered lower wages on the excuse that their labour is less valuable because they belong to a disfavoured group or category. For those outside this group or category, the ability to bargain for higher wages is limited by the fact that they have competition from a disfavoured group prepared, because of discrimination, to take lower wages. In a situation of racism, a large share of the surplus produced goes to the owners of capital than would otherwise be the case. This does not merely apply within countries but across them as well. Jamaica played a central role as a locus for the development of racism and disseminating it across the globe. It played a similarly important role in the creation of the economic system, global capitalism, which is justified by the ideology of racism. Modern Jamaican music, language and popular culture are responses at the local Jamaican level to the very racism and

5  JAMAICA HERE, JAMAICA EVERYWHERE 

115

capitalism which it has helped to make global. This is the notion mentioned at the start of this chapter. Jamaica, like a particle which has mass, can only exist in one place at a time. However, the influence of Jamaica is spread over considerable space. Jamaica, while located within its geographical boundaries, is everywhere. It is, at the same time, everywhere in the global system of capitalism supported by racism which it helped create. The outcome is clear. Local Jamaican responses, in the form of cultural production in music and language, to phenomena made global from a Jamaican base, cannot but fascinate the world.

References Daley. (2018). Legacies of British Slave-ownership Database from University College London. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ Peach, G.  C. K. (1967). West Indian Migration to Britain. The International Migration Review, 1(2), 35–44. Piketty, T. (2017). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translator A. Goldhammer. Harvard: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press. Williams, E. (1944). Capitalism and Slavery (1st ed.). North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.

References

Alleyne, M. C. (2005). The Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Amin, S. (1973, 1976). Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism. Sussex: The Harvester Press Limited Publisher, Hassocks. Arbell, M. (2002). The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean: The Spanish-Portuguese Jewish Settlements in the Caribbean and the Guianas. Jerusalem: Anchor Academic Publications. Archive, S. (1994). The Colour Bar, from Spectator Archive. http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/30th-march-1934/8/the-colour-bar-in-britain Bartholomew D., Hawkins, R. A., & Lopez, J. A. (2012). Hawaii Pineapple: The Rise and Fall of an Industry. HortScience. Retrieved from https://journals. ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/47/10/article-p1390.xml Beckles, H. (1989). Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Women in Barbados. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Beckles, H. (2016). The First Black Slave Society: Britain’s Barbados, 1636–1876. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Bilby, K. (1983). How the “Older Heads” Talk: A Jamaican Maroon Spirit Possession Language and Its Relationship to the Creoles of Suriname and Sierra Leone. New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 57(1/2), 37–88. Bridenbaugh, C., & Bridenbaugh, R. (1972). No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624–90 (The Beginnings of the American People, Vol. 2, 1st ed.). Oxford University Press. Brown, A. (Ed.). (1991). Mass Media and the Caribbean (Vol. 6). New  York: Routledge. © The Author(s) 2020 H. Devonish, K. Carpenter, Language, Race and the Global Jamaican, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45748-8

117

118 

REFERENCES

Buisseret, D. (2008). Jamaica in 1687: The Taylor Manuscript at the National Library of from University Press of the West Indies. Kingston: University of West Indies Press. Buisseret, T. (1687, 2008). Jamaica in 1687: The Taylor Manuscript at the National Library of Jamaica. Kingston: National Library of Jamaica. Bureau, U.  S. C. (2010). World Population Review. http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/jamaica-population/ Butzkamm, W., & Caldwell, J. (2009). The Bilingual Reform: A Paradigm Shift in Foreign Language Teaching (1st ed.). Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. California, U. o. (2006). In R. E. Hill (Ed.), The Marcus Garvey and United Negro Improvement Papers (African Series) (Vol. X). Berkeley: University of California Press. Cameron, J.  C. (2019). Links in the Chain: British Slavery, Victoria and South Australia. Before/Now, 1(1), 30. Campbell, M.  C. (1990). The Maroons of Jamaica 1655–1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal. New Jersey: Africa World Press. Carpenter, K. H. D. (2008). Race, Language and Self Concept in Caribbean Childhoods. In F. Hickiling (Ed.). Perspectives on Caribbean Psychology. Kingston: CARIMENSA. Carpenter, K., Coore, C., & Devonish, C. (2007, September). Uu Fieva Mi, Uu Taak Laik Mi: Race, Language and Self-concept in Jamaican Elementary School Children. Caribbean Journal of Education, 29(2), 181–205. Chami, F. A. (2002). East Africa and the Middle East Relationship from the First Millennium B.C. to the 15th Century A.D. Journal des Africanistes, 72(2), 21–37. Cheshire, J. (2012). 18th Century British Shipping Routes Visualised Using Modern Mapping Technologies. https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/ apr/13/shipping-routes-history-map Christie, P. (2003). Language in Jamaica. Kingston: Arawak Publications. Cooper, C. (2019, 15 December). Damned Bewitching Beauty Contests. Jamaica Gleaner. Retrieved from http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/commentary/20191215/carolyn-cooper-damned-bewitching-beauty-contests Cramer, P. G. A. (2003). Ethnic/Racial Attitudes and Self-Identification of Black Jamaican and White New England Children. Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology, 26, 242–254. Craton, M. (1992). The Transition from Slavery to Free Wage Labour in the Caribbean, 1780–1890: A Survey with Particular Reference to Recent Scholarship. Slavery & Abolition, 13(2), 37–67. https://doi. org/10.1080/01440399208575065. Daley. (2018). Legacies of British Slave-ownership Database from University College London. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

 REFERENCES 

119

Daumann, C. (2000). Atoms to Be In Two Places At Once. Quantum Physics Just Got More Real. Retrieved from https://asgardia.space/en/ news/2000-Atoms-to-Be-In-Two-Places-At-Once de Villers, J. A. J., & Harris, L. C. A. (1911). Storm van’s Gravesande: The Rise of British Guiana, Compiled from His Despatches (Vols. I + II). London: Hakluyt Society. Devonish, H., & Jones, B. (2002). Talking Rhythm Stressing Tone: The Role of Prominence in Anglo-West African Creole Languages (Caribbean Language Series). Kingston: Arawak Publications. Devonish, H., & Jones, B. (2017). Jamaica: A State of Language, Music and Crisis of Nation. Inna Jamaican Stylee, 13(1), 118–130. Dunn, R. S. (1972). Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. North Carolina: Omohundro Institute of Early American History & University of North Carolina Press. Eder, R. A. (1989). The Emergent Personologist: The Structure and Content of 3 ½ -5 ½ and 7 ½ -Year Olds’ Concepts of Themselves and Other Persons. Child Development, 60, 1218–1228. Ehret, C., & Posnansky, M. (1982a). Linguistic inferences: Early Bantu history. In Ehret, C. and M. Posnansky (Eds.), The Archaelogical and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History. California: University of California Press. Ehret, C., & Posnansky, M. (1982b). Spread of food production to Southern Africa. In C. Ehret and M. Posnansky (Eds.), The Archaelogical and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History, (pp.158–181). Farquharson, J. T. (2001). Linguistic Ideologies and the Historical Development of Language Use Patterns in Jamaican Music. Language & Communication, 52, 7–18. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/ pii/S0271530916301069. Frith, K.  T., & Mueller, B. (2010). Advertising and Societies: Global Issues (3rd Revised ed.). Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing. Gilpin, J. (2019). Education Ministry Endorses Patois Bible. Jamaica Gleaner. Retrieved from http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20190110/ education-ministry-endorses-patois-bible Gopnik, A., & Seiver, E. (2009). Reading Minds: How Infants Come to Understand Others. Zero to Three, 30(2), 28–32. Gordon, N.  S. (2008). Media and the Politics of Culture: The Case of Television Privatization and Media Globalization in Jamaica 1990–2007. Boca Raton: Universal Publishers. Grace Kennedy Group. (2000). Retrieved from: https://www.gracekennedy.com/ Grace Kennedy Group. (2005). Retrieved from: https://www.gracekennedy.com/ Gramsci, A. (1989, 1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith Eds and Translators). New York: International Publishers.

120 

REFERENCES

Hall, S. (2018). Familiar Stranger. London: Penguin. Harter, S. (2001). The Construction of the Self: Developmental and Sociocultural Foundations: A Developmental Perspective. New York: Guilford Press. Hinton, P. R. (2000). Stereotypes, Cognition and Culture. Hove: Psychology Press. Holm, J. (1983). An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horn, J. (2016). The Easier They Come. The Jamaica Gleaner. Retrieved from h t t p : / / j a m a i c a - g l e a n e r. c o m / a r t i c l e / c o m m e n t a r y / 2 0 1 6 0 4 2 7 / easier-they-come Howard, D. (2018). Jamaican Language Anchoring Cultural Exports. The Jamaica Gleaner. Retrieved from http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/ focus/20181202/dennis-howard-jamaican-language-anchoringcultural-exports Illich, I. (1981). Shadow Work. London: Marion Boyars Publishers. Indies, B. S. o. t. W. JESUS Film Patois Patwa Jamaican Language Film. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGEMxmThdoA&t=6s Irvine, A. (2008). Contrast and Convergence in Standard Jamaican English: The Phonological Architecture of the Standard in an Ideologically Bidialectal Community. World Englishes, 27, 9–25. James, C.  L. R. (1989). The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage. Kahle, L.  R. (2012). Creating Images and The Psychology of Marketing Communication (Advertising and Consumer Psychology) (1st ed.). Mahwah/ New Jersey/London: Laurence Erlbaum Associates. King, N.  Jamaica Tourist Board Launches ‘Join Me in Jamaica’ Campaign. Caribbean Life. Retrieved from https://www.caribbeanlifenews.com/ stories/2018/6/2018-05-25-nk-jtb-launches-new-jamaica-marketingcampaign-cl.html Knight, F. W. (2011). The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kupperman, K.  O. (1995). Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lalla, B., & D’Costa, J. (1990). Language in Exile (Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole: Caribbean Archaeology and Ethnohistory). Alabama: University of Alabama Press. Lambert, W. E., Hodgson, R. C., Gardner, R. C., & S. Fillenbaum. (1960). Evaluational Reactions to Spoken Languages. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 20(1), 44–51. Laurence, R. (2014). 40 Years on from the Party Where Hip-Hop Was Born. Capital et Idéologie. Le Seuil. Paris. Le Page, R.  B., & Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985). Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 REFERENCES 

121

Le Page, R.  B., & Tabouret-Keller, A. (1998). Ivory Towers: The Memoirs of a Pidgin Fancier. Kingston: Society for Caribbean Linguistics. Manley, M. (1974). The Politics of Change: A Jamaican Testament. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. McLeod, N.  C. (2016). Race, Rebellion, and Arab Muslim Slavery: The Zanj Rebellion in Iraq, 869–883 C.E. Louisville: The University of Louisville’s Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations. McLeod, N. (2019). A Comparative Analysis of Radio News Comprehension Among Groups of Jamaicans with Varying Levels of English Language Competence (Upgrade, Seminar. Language Linguistics & Philosophy). Kingston: University of the West Indies, Mona. McQuail, D. (2010). McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory (6th ed.). New York/ London: Sage Publications. Miller, E. (1975a). Self-Evaluation Among Jamaican High School Girls (B. a. Reddock Ed. Vol. 22). Miller, E. (1975b, March). Body Image, Physical Beauty and Colour Among Jamaican Adolescents. Journal of Social and Economic Studies, 18(1), 72–89. Kingston: Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies. Neild, B. (Producer). (2017, July 12). The World’s Coolest Nationalities: Where Do You Rank? Retrieved from http://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/coolestnationalities/index.html Nelson, T.  D. (2015). Handbook of Prejudice, Stereotyping and Discrimination (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Nida, E. A. (1966). Principles of Translation as Exemplified by Bible Translating. In R.  A. Brower (Ed.), On Translation (pp.  11–31). New  York: Oxford University Press. Observer, J. (2017). Jesus Film Goes Patois. Jamaica Observer. Retrieved from http://www.jamaicaobser ver.com/enter tainment/Jesus-Film-goespatois_95810 Online, T. J. G. (Producer). (2015). Greetings Massive! Obama Addresses Jamaican youth. [YouTube Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=DhGrq7QPTKY Oxford University Press. (2013). Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Languages. https:// www.eva.mpg.de/linguistics/past-research-resources/language-contact/atlas-­ of-­pidgin-and-creole-language-structures-apics.html Paul, A. (2013). Our Man in Mona: A Conversation Between Robert A. Hill and Annie Paul. Active Voice. https://anniepaul.net/our-man-in-mona-aninterview-byrobert-a-hill-with-annie-paul/ Peach, G.  C. K. (1967). West Indian Migration to Britain. The International Migration Review, 1(2), 35–44. Peggs, A. D. (1955). A Short History of The Bahamas. London: The Deans Peggs Research Fund/Imperial College.

122 

REFERENCES

Piketty, T. (2017). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translator A. Goldhammer. Harvard: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press. Powa, D. (Producer). (2019). Clifton Brown, Nobody Canna Cross It [YOUTUBE Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hknVoAoyy-k Quarrier Spence, C. (2014). Ameliorating Empire: Slavery and Protection in the British Colonies, 1783–1865. PhD Dissertation, Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts. Retrieved from https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/ handle/1/13070043Spence_gsas.harvard.inactive_0084L_11797.pdf Rodrigues, J. (2019). Major Global Trade Routes 1400–1800. Retrieved from https://transportgeography.org/?page_id=4023 Rojas Contreras, I. (2019). The Paris Review. Retrieved from https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/06/18/translation-as-an-arithmetic-of-loss/ Safa, H. (2005). Challenging Mestizaje: A Gender Perspective on Indigenous and Afrodescendant Movements Latin America. Critique of Anthropology, 25(3), 307–330. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X05055217. Schacter, P.  V. F. (1968). A Phonology of Akan: Akuapem, Asante and Fante. California: UCLA, Press. Schomburgk, R. H. (1971). The History of Barbados: Comprising a Geographical and Statistical Description of the Island, a Sketch of the Historical Events Since the Settlement, and an Account of Its Geology and Natural Productions. Hove: Psychology Press. Sheridan, R. B. (1974). Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775. Kingston/Barbados/Trinidad: Canoe Press. Small, K. (2018). GATFFEST: Jamaican Patois Vs Queen’s English. Jamaica Gleaner. Retrieved from http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/entertainment/20180514/gatffest-jamaican-patois-vs-queens-english Smith, M.  G. (1961). The Plural Framework of Jamaican Society. The British Journal of Sociology, 12(3), 249–262. https://doi.org/10.2307/587818. Smith, N. (1987). The Genesis of Creole Languages of Surinam. Doctoral Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam. Retrieved from https://www.worldcat.org/title/genesis-of-the-creole-languages-of-surinam/oclc/36118094 Smith, A.  D. (1993). National Identity (Ethnonationalism Comparative Perspective) (Reissue ed.). Nevada: University of Nevada Press. Smith, N. (2005). Surviving the Middle Passage: The West Africa-Surinam Sprachbund. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. Smith, E. R., Mackie, D. M., & Claypool, H. M. (Eds.). (2001). Social Psychology (4th ed.). New York/London: Psychology Press. Stangor, C. (Ed.). (2000). Stereotypes and Prejudice (Key Readings in Social Psychology) (1st ed.). Routledge: Abingdon-on-Thames. Statistical Institute of Jamaica. (2011). Population Census of Jamaica. Kingston: Government of Jamaica. Straubhaar, J., LaRose, R., & Davenport, L. (2017). Media Now: Understanding Media, Culture and Technology. (10th ed.). Boston: Cenage Learning.

 REFERENCES 

123

The Jamaica Information Service. (2019).  Jamaican Coat of Arms. Retrieved from https://jis.gov.jm/information/symbols/jamaican-coat-of-arms/ The Jamaica Information Service. (2018). Reggae Music Jamaica’s Most Valuable Export  – Grange Tells UNESCO Creative Cities of Music Meeting. Retrieved from https://jis.gov.jm/reggae-music-jamaicas-valuable-export-grange-tellsunesco-creative-cities-music-meeting/ The Jamaican Language Unit/Di Jamiekan Langwij Yuunit. (2009). Writing Jamaican the Jamaican Way/Ou fi Rait Jamiekan (Including Enhanced CD). Kingston: Arawak Publications. The Jamaican Language Unit/Di Jamiekan Langwij Yuunit. (2005, 2014). Language Attitude Survey of Jamaica. Retrieved from Kingston: https://www. mona.uwi.edu/dllp/jlu/projects/Repor t%20for%20Language%20 Attitude%20Survey%20of%20Jamaica.pdf The University of Chicago Press. (1975, September 22). Calendar of State Papers from The University of Chicago Press on Behalf of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (Publication no. https://doi. org/10.2307/2715113). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2715113 UNESCO. (2018). Thirteenth Session of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (13.COM). Port Louis, Republic of Mauritius. November 26–December 1, 2018. https://www.unescoichcap.org/overview-of-13th-session-of-the-igc-for-the-safeguarding-of-ich/ Walters, K. (2017). “I Got What I Wanted But How Did They Make Me Feel?”: The Anatomy of Linguistic Discrimination in a Diglossic Situation. Unpublished Thesis, University of the West Indies Mona. Walters, G. K., & Carpenter, K. (2017). Gender-Role Stereotypes and Culture in Jamaica and Barbados. In K.  Carpenter (Ed.), Interweaving Tapestries of Culture & Sexuality. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Walvin, J. (2007). A Short History of Slavery. London: Penguin, UK. Whitley, B.  E., Jr., & Kite, M.  E. (2018). Principles of Research in Behavioral Science (4th ed.). Abingdon-on Thames: Routledge. Williams, E. (1944). Capitalism and Slavery (1st ed.). North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. Williams, K. (2017).  Language Ideology in Jamaica.  Unpublished MPhil Dissertation. Kingston: University of the West Indies, Mona.

Index

A Adolescent stereotypes, 84–86 B Barbados, 25–30 Birth of the global Jamaican, 39–42 C Children’s stereotypes, 90–94 Colourism, 52 Constructing International Black identity, 39–42

I Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2 Invention of race, 32–36 J Jamaica goes global, 39–42, 107–115 Jamaican ideals of beauty, 85 Jamaican National identity, 78–80, 87

F The former enslaved, 110–113 The former enslavers, 109–110

L Language and community, 37–38 Language and enslavement, 20 Language and gender, 69–73 Language and national identity, 80 Language of the masses, 63–67 Language war, 49–51

H How Jamaicans children see themselves, 88 How Jamaicans see themselves, 83

M Mapping the language journeys, 21–30 Media and the people, 73

© The Author(s) 2020 H. Devonish, K. Carpenter, Language, Race and the Global Jamaican, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45748-8

125

126 

INDEX

Movement of Jamaican people, 108–113 Music to the world, 44 O One love movement, 1–7 Opinions from the chateratti, 55–59 P The price of freedom, 108–109 Providence Island, 21 R Race and global capitalism, 113–115 Race, colour and language meet, 78 Reggae music, 2–13, 44 The role of language, 12–13

S Small but strong, 107–108 Stereotypes from outside, 95–98 Stereotypes of race and income, 93 Stereotypes of the Jamaican nation, 98–100 Sugar plantations, 16 U UNESCO, 2 W What Jamaicans speak, 63–67 What language do Jamaicans speak, 90–94 Who is a Jamaican, 87 Who looks like me, 89 Who speaks like me, 89