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12 mixing Codes and mixing Voices language in earl lovelace’s Salt Velma Pollard The opening paragraph of J. edward Chamberlin’s Come Back to Me My Language : Poetry and the West Indies runs as follows: “slavery shaped the West Indies . It was expensive and inconvenient, and presented considerable problems of governance; but nobody came up with an alternative, especially for the production of sugar.The desires and anxieties of the european colonizers in turn shaped slavery, through the institutions that developed for establishing civil and religious order in the region and for promoting its economic prosperity.”1 earl lovelace, in the first chapter of his novel Salt,2 describes the very “inconvenience ” to which Chamberlin makes reference and the conflict of interests that played itself out as the europeans tried to develop systems of civil and religious order, toward curbing the natural impulses of the slave: And it was hard. It was hard to mould the negro character, to stamp out his savage tendencies. They tried to make provisions for allowing him innocent amusement after mass and until evening prayers,to see that he didn’t cohabit without the benefit of matrimony, to lay out the work for him to do, pass around later to see that he do it. no really they try. . . . There was no natural subservience here. nobody didn’t bow down to nobody just so.To get a man to follow your instructions you had to pen him and beat him and cut off his ears or his foot when he run away. you had was to take away his woman from him and his child. And still that fellow stand up and oppose you. (6) lovelace’s description might be said to provide the details for Chamberlin’s general comment, and while the novel warrants appreciation for the imagination and the sensitivity with which it treats aspects of the culture-history and 204 / Pollard the politics of one Caribbean island, this chapter will restrict its comments to the language of the narrative and will try to describe with illustration the different levels of transformation that lovelace performs on the english of which Chamberlin’s writing is an example. It will also discuss the manipulation of voice, which is the most striking feature of the style lovelace employs in this extraordinary novel. for just as the narrative voice shifts and slides in and out of codes, mixing Trinidad Creole and english, even so it shifts and slides in and out of voices, mixing the subject voice with the object voice, sometimes without a break, sometimes using a direct quote as a bridge from one voice to the other. Critics concerned with theory will eventually hail earl lovelace as the postcolonial writer par excellence, not only because he includes in his text phenomena from all the strands that make the culture-history of his island but because he takes a summary leap in the manipulation of language. In this more than in any other of his novels, lovelace moves beyond the traditional boundaries of the genre.The writing seems to be unselfconscious and disarming . Close scrutiny, however, reveals a complexity of style that runs parallel to the complexity of the society whose social, cultural, and political problems the novel tries to resolve. Ashcroft et al.,commenting on language in some postcolonial writing,speak of appropriation and define it as “the process by which the language is taken and made to ‘bear the burden’ of one’s own cultural experience.”3 The present chapter is concerned with how lovelace manages this appropriation. The use of Creole languages in Anglophone Caribbean writing is not new. In fact, it is old enough to have warranted analysis by the critics quoted here. Code, however, has tended to be a feature of the identity of the speaker. so, for example, olive senior, Jamaican poet and novelist, in an interview with Anna rutherford, concedes that she makes her characters “speak directly to the reader”and each tells the story in his/her mothertongue, whether it be Jamaican Creole or Jamaican english.4 And Warner-lewis,writing on language in samuel selvon’s Moses Ascending, says that the novelist uses the “first person narrative technique” in which moses “tells his own story” in narrative marked by swift transitions in language register, depending on context.5 What is different about earl lovelace’s use of language is his exploitation of the linguistic possibilities of the Caribbean environment, the way he mixes the language of...

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