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2 Source Materials A book is a life, and this White paper death, I roll it on the drum and write Rum-courage on my breath. Derek Walcott, "Greenwich Village, Winter" Because Jamaican Creole grew out of folk usage and was thus an oral language, those who spoke it rarely wrote it down. Instead, most of its chroniclers were educated Britons who wrote in the metropolitan English of their times, employing a variety of genres, styles, and registers. In literary usage, JC can play an important part in dialogue, characterization, and setting. Fictional portraits of creole characters often reflect shifts in register as well as social variation. Similarly, different genres offer different perspectives on the creole speech of the time. In this century collectors such as Walter Jekyll, Olive Lewin, and H. P. Jacobs have recorded the recollections of elderly and rural speakers. It is possible, using variants of tales and songs gleaned in this fashion, to reconstruct texts of earlier Jamaican Creole. Text 9, for example, the song "Quaco Sam," was reconstructed from variants derived from oral tradition and from widely distributed written fragments of the song. The reconstruction of a single song, however, points up the complexity of the task facing anyone who attempts to document the history of Jamaican Creole. Our reconstructions of the oral tradition have therefore been supplemented by data from private collections and supported by material drawn from jottings in old newspapers and even from inscriptions on pottery (see Plate 3 in chapter 9). Almost all surviving written records of Jamaican Creole, however, are scattered through substantial published works: histories, travelogues, 37 38 Early Jamaican Creole journals, grammars, and novels; studies of African and creole character, of slavery, of obeah; commentaries on domestic manners; missionary records . Most of these works date no earlier than the last decade of the eighteenth century. Such written sources present several difficulties. Many occurrences of creole speech are no more than fragmentary: a chance phrase that sounds quaint to its hearer; a word or two in the outlandish language of the slaves, used to add local color in a novel or travelogue; a vocabulary list or a memorable proverb. Several relatively recent texts record archaic proverbs in what must be seen as an older form of JC (Franck 1920: 425). Nineteenth -century collections such as Charles Rampini's and Thomas Banbury 's include some proverbs that, by their very nature, illuminate usage of a generation earlier. Proverbs provide phonological information and some lexical data; they also yield some syntactic information, but such data is by its very nature circumscribed. Where more substantial texts survive, other problems appear. A writer's unfamiliarity with the creole may cast doubt on the accuracy of the record. The writer's subjective attitude to JC and its speakers or interference from his or her own speech patterns may disrupt the accuracy of a text. Records of usage may be misleading because of an author's inclination to record the unusual rather than the truly representative. Some records may also be rendered more complex by the blending of historical changes with social variation. Influences from different periods of the language's history may complicate dating. Finally, the absence of a normalized spelling system for JC means that records must be analyzed and spelling patterns compared if the phonological structure is to be inferred. An example of the difficulties inherent in recording and interpreting texts can be seen in a nineteenth-century polemic disguised as fiction. The anonymous author ofMarly; or, A Planters Life in Jamaica (1828) uses his characters as mouthpieces through which he gives his views on slavery and plantation economy. The experiences of the hero, Marly, are recounted with an ear for the quaint and unfamiliar (1828: 13): "When they thought he was beyond hearing, he heard one of them exclaim to the others, 'Eh! mosquitoes hab grandy nyamn on dat new buckra!' Marly being ignorant of the negro corrupted dialect, or the talkee talkee language , did not understand the expression." Marly's embarrassment arises from the strangeness of his surroundings and from the reactions of the slaves. Their language is unintelligible and must be translated, but he is both interested in and resentful of their actual comments. If one assumes that the novel is partly autobiographical and that the hero's growing understanding of Jamaican life and language reflects that of the writer, one must still question the writer's competence [3.143.244.83] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 05:33...

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