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3 The Caribbean novelist and language A search for a literary medium Jean D’Costa The Caribbean writer operates within a polydialectal community with a Creole language base. The relationship between Jamaican Creole and other oral and written varieties of english exemplifies this direct challenge to the fiction writer.1 The medium—written language—belongs to the sphere of standardized language that exerts pressure within the writer’s own language community while embracing the wide audiences of international standard englishes. If writers are to satisfy themselves, their local audience, and that wider international audience, they must evolve a literary dialect that will meet the following : the pressure for authentic representation of their immediate language culture and the demands for acceptability within and without their own community .Writers must reconcile these multiple and partially opposing aims and devise for them an orthography that goes beyond playing with spelling systems , phonetic or otherwise, by creating orthographic signals that assist in expression and communication and that can reach both local and international audiences. In this chapter, I use my experiences as a writer of children’s fiction to explore some of the difficulties faced by writers placed in this kind of linguistic environment.I do not claim to have solved satisfactorily any or all of the major language problems encountered while writing Sprat Morrison (1972), Escape to Last Man Peak (1975), Voice in the Wind (1978), and a failed historical novel, Evening, Morning (unpublished, 1980) that foundered on linguistic problems. The audience receiving the literary work alone can decide whether the work does provide a solution, or not. my exploration of the choices faced by Caribbean writers begins by describing something of the process of creative ideation leading to the selection of graphic signs on the written page. Caribbean writers setting out to express in written form those mental events that they desire to communicate to audiences both inside and beyond their immediate speech communities face at The Caribbean novelist and language / 69 once a range of necessary acts of selection before a single word can appear on paper. Writers must confront in their own minds the array of possible language forms that arise at the bidding of any single notion to be expressed and communicated . At this partially conscious level we must sift the mental events, emotions, and patterns of association, each of which may surface in more than one variant lect of a total “language competence.”2 At this level, the simplest ideas—leaving a room, recognizing a sound or color—make simultaneous claims upon more than one lect in the writer’s language competence.for those whose receptive and productive abilities are widely separated, the claim may be made upon forms that the individual knows but would never use in her own performance. The presence of the whole system or set of systems is always a felt reality, whatever the final selection may be. This process suggests a kind of language competence on the part of Caribbean people in which variation, minimal shifting, and code-switching form a complete internalized reality that should be seen as a whole structure rather than as discrete systems realizing themselves in different surface structures.The treatment of variation and of minimal shifting would seem to bear this out. I make the claim therefore from the objective evidence of language usage in the Caribbean of a range of language varieties reaching from basilect to acrolect, from deep Creole to standard english. This situation is characterized also by the ability of speakers to code-switch—to choose features of Caribbean Creole or standard english in response to certain kinds of stimuli.scholars working in the field since the 1950s have explored these aspects of Caribbean language culture. I make the claim also from the subjective experience of a native speaker of Jamaican language: I have internalized certain varieties and elements within the Jamaican continuum, and, even as I compose this sentence, I find myself responding to the pressure of alternative codes within the continuum that disturb and influence the nature of the message I wish to convey. I also find that these varieties and elements (for want of a better name) seem to form an integrated structure within my mind. such problems of expression as exist in the operations of my own mind become apparent to me only when I move into communication. This problem stretches beyond the well-known business of organizing a spoken into a written form or the simple difficulty of operating well...

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