Creole in Literature: Beyond Verisimilitude: Texture and Varieties: Derek Walcott Author(s): John J.

Figueroa Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 25, Non-Standard Englishes and the New Media Special Number (1995), pp. 156-162 Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3508824 . Accessed: 09/03/2011 04:48
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Creole in Literature: Beyond Verisimilitude: Texture and Varieties: Derek Walcott

JOHN J. FIGUEROA
MiltonKeynes

The crucial question for the politicians of Creole and West African Pidgin, and for all nationalist monolinguists, is whether it is really worth giving up variety (and what ordinary people, let alone a genius, can do with it) for a certain kind of political and cultural uniformity, sometimes called purity. Is this search for uniformity more relevant to closed, intimate forest societies, than to, say, present day Africa, and the multi-ethnic West Indies? And does this insistence on one variety of a community's speech show an ignorance of language and its uses, especially of its non-semantic aspects? Living and working in Africa strengthened my long standing intuitive doubt about the doctrine of one language, one culture, one political unit; and of course one language per person, a la English xenophobia. Wole Soyinka's Ake seems to me strong evidence against monolingualism and against monoculturalism. As Carlos Fuentes put it in his BBC broadcasts, 'Monolingualism is a curable disease'. And so would be monodialectism. More importantly it would remove the rich possibilities for texture and foregrounding in literature, or even in general conversation and story telling. Further evidence, to put it negatively, of the lack of need for monolingualism in the makers of fiction might come from such people as Ford Madox Ford, Nabakov, Manzoini, Beckett - not to mention old stalwarts such as Chaucer, Dante, and Erasmus. And in the African context, what ofAquiano, Achebe, and Emecheta, to mention but a few? In a brief note, in my CaribbeanVoices,Volume II,1 I point out how Derek Walcott, in his sonnet sequence Tales of the Islands, uses our West Indian experience of a variety of language registers to symbolize one important aspect of our living - especially our sense of living on the periphery of the great world, far from metropolitan centres. The sonnet which begins 'Poopa, da' was a fete! It had free rum free whiskey' contains the now well-known lines: While he drunk quoting Shelley with 'Each Generation has its angst but we has none' And wouldn't let a comma in edgewise. (Black writer chap one of them Oxbridge guys)2
1 Caribbean ed. byJohnJ. Figueroa, 2 vols (London: Evans, I966-72), n, 225. Voices, Poems(London: Faber, 1986), p. 22. Walcott, Collected

2 Derek

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Now dialect, creole, is often used in literature simply to give verisimilitude. When used for this purpose alone it can be, and often is, banal. Verisimilitude exercises a writer because of the problem of probability and plausibility for one thing, but it goes well beyond that. Literature and art always pattern verisimilitude so as to 'say something'. But in this saying it makes an object of contemplation, rather than a tool of action. And although much that is used to pattern that which 'says' something is collected from real life, it is removed from its own life situation and is no longer a slice of its original life. The making of images, condemned by many religions, is dangerous not on the Platonic non-truth grounds, but because it is so easy to forget that it is an image, and as an image it is made by some one or some power. The use of non-standard varieties as a part of texture, and structuring, rather than simply as a slice of life, can be significant and uniquely communicating. But to use them so as to make the social point that they can have status has its limitations, and often defeats the status objective as in cases when a peasant (or a black person) is made to speak in his/her natural register and produces only laughter, often because what is said has no meaning deeper than a slice-of-life meaning, or than showing that the proper register is known by the author and is being displayed. Of course that use of language will always have connections with so-called roots, ancient or modern. But the very term roots is an image often masquerading as a realistic term, deeply connected with real life: in fact humans, and other animals, especially mammals, get their sustenance through their mouths, and are not rooted in the way in which trees have to be rooted in order to exist. Jan Mukarovsky raised some of these questions, in connection with use of non-standard varieties, some time ago in his Standard Language and Poetic Language.3 There the main questions tend to be about foregrounding by the use of dialect, and the possible loss of significant meaning in fiction when a language so develops that what was meant precisely as a variation, to indicate a feeling, or make a point, has since become standard, or has changed in some way. The formulary 'In choirs and places where they sing' sounds ironical in modern English, but repetition of the same meaning through different semantic formulations used to be the standard form of emphasis in early English. Hence your passport is likely to have a request that you should be allowed to pass 'without let or hindrance'. Foregrounding is part of creating texture in poetry; creating texture is part of creating meaning within the limited space allowed to a poet in, say a sonnet of a quatrain. Limitation of space is often a forceful advantage because it makes concentration and concision of language necessary, in
3 Trans. by Paul L. Garvin in A PragueSchoolReader(Prague, I932; repr. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, I964).

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literature texture is part of meaning, or is meaning itself, due to what emanates from juxtaposition. Consider these lines from Derek Walcott's The Saddhuof Couva,in which the old wise man, originally an indentured labourer from India, is contemplating the difference in mores between the old times and the new, between Trinidad his new country, in which he has become a village Counsellor, and India to which he is too old to return; he thinks to himself: Playing the Elder. There are no more Elders. Is only old people.4 'There are no more Elders' is as standard as can be. 'Is only old people' is pure Trinidadian. Put them together, in the same mouth, and a meaning is made palpable - a meaning difficult to get in any other way than by creating that certain kind of texture, by using together the standard and creole varieties of a particular language, with all the implications of the tensions between the intimate and the formal, the old and the new, the synchronic and the diachronic. Before proceeding further, two important memoranda: literature is concerned with contemplation; it is not mainly instrumental. Secondly, literature is an imitation of life, not a slice of it. It is something made and fashioned, and it is enjoyed, appreciated, and communicated with, as an imitation, as fiction, not as life itself. This does not mean that fiction is not intimately connected with, and involved in, the community from which it comes, but it is an image of the community, not as some say, as seen in a mirror, but an unautomatic image made, fashioned by some person or persons in a partly conscious process of work, of making. (Jt6rlo is the Greek word, from which our word poetry originates, indicates first of all the act of making.) The difference between a slice-of-life approach and the reflection of, and on, life approach, is well illustrated by the Paolo and Francesca episode in Dante's Commedia. If modern television were dealing with the matter we would simply have to see the couple rolling around in the bed, or on the chaise longue (Mrs Campbell, please note), if not actually coupling. That is partly because television is afraid of having anything to communicate about the consequences of, say, sexuality and adultery. It is more concerned with viewing statistics, and therefore with titivating us by showing graphically what can go on in bed. Very often the very graphic nature of the portraiture blinds us to any patterning of meaning in the episode. Dante's way was so different. He shows the two young people, Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, reading about Guinevere together, makes it clear that 'their eyes have met', and simply has Francesca say:

4 Collected Poems,p. 372.

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he who will never be separated from me, kissed me, on my lips, all trembling, [...] that day we read no farther. But there was more to it than that, for we meet them not on their couch of pleasure, but in one of the rings of Hell - 'he [...] will never be separated from me'. For 'one thing with Hell, at least it organise', as Derek Walcott has Spoiler the Calypsonian say.5 And, of course, Walcott is the master of the use of varieties, both of discourse and dialects to make meanings for pleasurable and insightful contemplation: One thing with hell, at least it organise in soaring circles, when any man dies he must pass through them first, that is the style, Jesus was down here for a little while. (p. 438) For me one of the marks of genius in Walcott was his very early willingness to draw on all aspects of his cultural heritage. This has caused some, whom Rex Nettleford designates as 'blackists', to dismiss him as being Eurocentric. But he was the first among us West Indian writers born in the early twentieth century who was not afraid of mixed categories. He was the first significant Anglophone poet to be willing to mix meaningfully greatly differing varieties and registers of language. Claude McKay - under the influence of a 'dreadful European' - first made his mark in ConstabBallads (19 I 2), written entirely in Jamaica creole. His next collection, published in the USA, was in as standard an English as one could find. He did not again write poetry in the common tongue of Jamaica, although he used it in his novels. And he certainly did not ever mix the varieties in his mature poetry. Evan Jones, in the late I940S, partly on a wager and a challenge from Neville Dawes, did mix the varieties, but mostly from the point of view of achieving verisimilitude - of letting the Banana Man speak in an authentic voice. He probably came nearest to achieving more than verisimilitude in The Lamentof the Banana Man, but the varieties are fairly close together: My yoke is easy, my burden is light, I know a place I can go to any night. Dis place Englan'! I'm not complainin', If it col', it col', if it rainin', it rainin'.6 But he hardly ever made a special meaning by doing so, or set a tone as Walcott has done with the weaving together of: 'Playing the Elder. There are no more Elders. I Is only old people.' Edward Kamau Brathwaite was later to expand the range of Caribbean language as it is used in poetry; but his

5 'The Spoiler's Return', Collected Poems,p. 432. 6 Caribbean Voices, I, 80.

p.

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contribution in this respect would need a separate long article, and came some time after McKay. Let me open up further this exploration by returning to Spoiler the Calypsonian. I purposely put it this way to show how easy it is to forget the role of the author in fiction, and oddly enough, the role of language. We forget at our peril that what we read or hear in fiction has been made by some one, and expresses his/her patterning of experience. (Further, this is all done in language, a fact which many experts in both Linguistics and Literature have tried to dodge for years. Fortunately things are now changing.) In the passage quoted above 'One thing with Hell, at least it organise', Walcott puts words into the mouth of Spoiler, the Calypsonian, and places him in a certain fictional context. Spoiler has returned from Hell to have a look at Trinidad - Trinidad as Walcott, not without reason, sees it: Trinidad in which the biggest smuggler of them all is made chairman of the Committee of Enquiry to investigate smuggling, as the poet puts it in the mouth of the character Shabine: 'with himself as chairman investigating himself'. Spoiler is impressed with how little things have changed, except for the worse, since he departed the scene: The shark, racing the shadowv of the shark across clear coral rocks, does make them dark that is my premonition of the scene of what passing over the Caribbean. (p. 433) But the nationalists, the excusers, the ones who are likely to want one variety of language only in their polity - they must have a voice: all you go bawl out, 'Spoils, things ain't so bad'. This ain't the Dark Age, is just Trinidad, is human nature, Spoiler, after all, it ain't big genocide, is just bohbohl. (p. 434) It is at the end of all this that Spoiler is made to say, in the face of the unbelievable confusion and layering that is Trinidad - a state of affairs that has to be communicated, and appreciated, authentically, through varieties of language as much as through individual images: 'One thing with Hell, at least it organise'. And the stroke of genius in using organise instead of is organised, is not only the obtaining of verisimilitude in Spoiler's voice, but rather in the expression and communication of, among other things, the real disorganization of a place in which the colloquial organiseis the best way to express the 'soaring circles, when any man dies | he must pass through them first, that is the style'. Notice the meaning that comes out of the contrast in diction and tone between the line starting 'One thing with Hell' and the one ending 'that is the style'. The deep meaning of fiction comes though texture and structure. Texture is achieved mainly by antithesis, like the woven patterns in a carpet. Antithesis can be achieved as in placing 'soaring circles' along with 'at least it organise'. The texture can be indicated in the very kind of word

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used, and the variety of register from which it comes. Let me cite an example from the opening of Book ii of the Aeneid of Virgil - of that same Virgil who was Dante's guide through the underworld as clearly as Dante is Walcott's. And I take this example not without malice aforethought, for it seems necessary in post-colonial and neo-colonial situations to remind the brethren constantly that the world did not really begin in I963, nor 1838, nor 1775,
nor in I668, nor even in Io66. 'Conticuere omnes intentique ora tenebant' - is the opening line of Book in. 'Pius Aeneas' is about to tell Dido of the fall ofTroy- 'et pars magna fui'. But he is telling her at a state banquet, not on the initimate couch to which eventually Dido's infatuation was to lead, as also to her desertion by him, and to her subsequent suicide. 'All in silence intently wait to hear' what this wanderer has to tell them. And so Virgil starts with the word conticuere which in In this way, in the very first word of daily speech would have been conticuerunt. this book he signals complicatedly about the whole formality and fatality of the situation. He has textured his verse in a certain way, and not only because, as those who do not write verse are likely to think, conticuere might be more easily fitted into the prosody of the poem. What we have here is the use of the 'upper' register to give a meaning, just as in Walcott we have seen, on occasion, the introduction of the 'lower' variety to say something not easily said in any other way. And as for texturing and patterning, note that two books later when Aeneas has finished the tale of the sacking ofTroy, Virgil's final line begins: 'Conticuit'. They had all been silent when he started, he now falls which could silent, after his gruelling tale. ('Et pars magna fui'). Conticuere, has become conticuit.And so in the have been the more colloquial conticuerunt, structure of his tale he clearly marks the beginning and the end of a most important episode by variations on a word, and one of those variations also sets the tone of something that is starting on the level of the State, and of Troy to Carthage - with the founding of Rome always in the background. It starts for conticuerunt which that way but it is to end in personal tragedy. Conticuere becomes conticuit('he holds his peace') foreshadows the fact that he is going to remain silent when she expects him to speak of his love, and to act upon it. Not only Aeneas travelled far from home, from Troy to Carthage; so also did the 'guy', from St Lucia to Oxbridge. So that in his mouth the expected 'we have none' - with respect to angst - became 'we has none'. The tiny odyssey of'the Oxbridge guy' has been no less disturbing to him than the dynastic happenings, of which Aeneas was a great part, were to him. And all this is done in language, but not only with the ostensive, semantic aspects of language. And it is done through a certain kind of texturing which can, in the hands of a real artist, include the juxtaposition of various registers of a language, and various varieties within that language, and the variations on the suprasegmental aspects of language. Note in the following extract from Walcott's Omeros,not only the vulgar 'Who the hell is that?' taken in contrast to homage, and not only zero copula

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in 'She? She too proud!', but also the special West Indian intonation with which this dismissive remark by a 'carry down artist' must be said: I felt like standing in homage to a beauty that left like a ship, widening eyes in its wake 'Who the hell is that?' a tourist near my table asked a waitress. The waitress said, 'She? She too proud!'7 Just as some paintings open for us a window on to the world, take us outside as it were (they were never wrong about suffering, the Old Masters), and some bring the world into us; so a writer of a sonnet with but fourteen lines can open the window and take us outside, or bring the wide world, or the patterned garden, into our small room- even if, as a result, we find the fragrance hurts. The poet has only language to do all this, and if he is wise he nurtures the varieties he knows, and he fears not to use the whole of his repertoire. And he will resist very strongly those who tell him that in the interest of national solidarity or, God help us, his roots, he must restrict himself to one variety alone- preferably that which has not been defiled by formal education. Conticui.It is now time for me to hold my peace.
7

Derek Walcott, Omeros (London: Faber, I990),

p. 24.