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4 To Us, All Flowers Are Roses Writing ourselves into the literature of the Caribbean Velma Pollard The language of the earliest written creative efforts of colonized peoples the world over has tended to be the language of the colonizer, which is the language of education and of all official transactions in these societies. In the former british West Indies,that language has been english.The very act of writing in another language, during the fledgling years, was revolutionary in a situation where literature invariably meant english (or at least british) literature. In schools in the Caribbean as in other british colonies, children were taught british and european history and studied english novels, poems, and plays. merle hodge in her 1970 novel Crick Crack, Monkey dramatizes and satirizes this situation.1 olive senior’s now famous words describe it succinctly: “There was nothing about us at all.” studying history Ancient and modern Kings and Queens of england steppes of russia Wheatfields of Canada There was nothing of our landscape there nothing about us at all.2 When writers began to react negatively to being written out of the literature and to being represented entirely by english, the language of their formal but not of their intimate motions, they sought ways of including the sound of a local and authentic voice in what they wrote. Different writers achieved this in different ways. Very few chose to write exclusively in the Creoles, popular languages born of the interaction between the African languages of the slaves and the european languages of the planters .louise bennett of Jamaica, among the women,stands out for having written in Jamaican Creole from the forties, when she began, and for the rest of 94 / Pollard her days. Today bennett tends to be regarded as a “performance” poet, which means that her verse is meant to be performed,spoken before an audience,not read in a quiet interchange between reader and text. other writers have written predominantly in english but have used varying means to achieve a satisfactory Jamaican Creole flavor. This chapter illustrates how lorna Goodison and olive senior, Jamaican women writing predominantly in english, write themselves, their culture, and their identity into their work by exploiting the dual linguistic heritage. one of the advantages of writing in an environment where the official language is related to the popular Creole is the possibility of using the same word or the same phrase with different meanings because the closest relationship between the languages is at the level of lexicon. so, for example, the title of this chapter, “To Us, All Flowers Are Roses,” which is the title of lorna Goodison’s 1995 collection of poems, means in english (at a metaphorical level) that all flowers are as valuable as roses are, but in Jamaican Creole it means (at a very literal level) that the term rose may be used to describe all flowers.3 so that a rose garden need not have any roses at all.The following quotation from a farewell speech on the campus of a tertiary institution supports the point made in Goodison’s line. The worker who was chosen to give the gift to the outgoing principal’s wife said,“Through as we know miss l . . . like roses we give ar this orchid,” which translates: “because we know that mrs. l . . . likes flowers we are presenting her with this orchid.”The title of one of my own collections of short fiction is Considering Woman, which in english has woman as object to be considered, that is, thought about.4 In Jamaican Creole, she is subject and the present participle/adjective “considering” describes her attitude. so “Considering Woman” becomes “Woman, a thinking (considering) person.” The reader who does not understand Jamaican Creole has access to one meaning, the bilingual reader has access to at least two. What is important here is that the Creole speaker is continually being identified as a vital (and vibrant) part of the Jamaican man/woman scape although the writing is mostly in english. The breach, which senior’s poem quoted at the beginning of this paper identifies, is being constantly repaired in the new writing. As an example, let us examine briefly the opening lines of an exquisite short Goodison poem “o love you so fear the Dark”: o love, you so fear the dark you so accustomed to fighting. . . .5 The second line might be read in english with a stress on “you,” making it a repetition of the...

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