Although poetry and good prose share many features, there are several differences, not the least of which is the terseness of the poetic form. An examination of mothertongue in poetry, in this case Lorna Goodison's poetry, is qualitatively different from the exercise just performed on Senior's prose.

Pamela Mordecai and Edward Baugh have both commented on Goodison's ability to slide from one to the other code of the Jamaican speech community. Mordecai notes the significance of the effective use of code-sliding as part of the ‘mix-up’ that is Jamaican culture.¹ Baugh's more detailed description praises her skill at, inter alia, ‘interweaving erudite literary allusion with the earthiness of traditional speech’.² The idea of interweaving runs close to the present description which uses the term ‘overlapping’ to describe one feature of Goodison's style.

Two related features are here identified: one grammatical, the other lexical. In the one, two or three codes are made to overlap within the same line or poem: in the other the occasional jc [Jamaican Creole] item is woven into a poem whose fabric is undoubtedly sje [Standard Jamaican English]. The fact that all the codes in the Jamaican speech community are English-related facilitates the effectiveness of Goodison's strategies. If one of the codes were French-related, as is the situation in St Lucia, for example, the procedure would not be possible.

Baugh, in his study, looks at the poem ‘Poui’ from the second collection I am Becoming My Mother³ and shows how, by using jc verb forms in the first and last lines (‘She don't put out for just anyone / … and she don't even notice’), the poet gives a jc flavour to a poem written almost entirely in sje. In Goodison's hand the occasional jc item is like yeast in its effect on the mass of the poem. The content is accessible to jc and non-jc speaker alike, the language can be claimed by both.

Another poem from the series in which ‘Poui’ appears, ‘Shame Mi Lady’, furnishes a good example of both grammatical and lexical overlap operating within the same three lines. In order to receive the force of the strategy the reader has to be able not only to recognise but to produce jc because intonation is important. Let us examine the lines. The poet compares herself with the shrub whose name is the title of the poem:

now, if I can find favour (me with my bold face)
you bashful you shy you innocent lady
must/bound to find absolution/grace

(p. 14)

The ‘you’ of the second line is emphatic in English and is opposed to ‘I’ in the line above. But another reading is possible. The ‘you’ can be pronounced with a short ‘u’ in which case it becomes a jc pronoun with the accompanying predicate adjective ‘bashful’. The utterance ‘yu bashful’ thus translates to English ‘you are bashful’. The line then contains three sentences describing the lady and the sense must wait on the next line. That next line admits both jc and sje, giving the reader the choice between the jc ‘must (and) bound’ of emphatic obligation, and the English ‘must’. There are lexical sleights which depend only partly on intonation for their point. ‘Bold face’, for example, can be one Creole term, with the stress on ‘bold’, meaning ‘fearless’ bordering on rude, or two English words with equal stress, the one qualifying the other. In the same line a pun on ‘favour’ is also hinted at. The sje meaning is dominant but lurking behind it is the kind of jc sentence, ‘you face favour …’, for which the listener is expected to supply some animal considered daring in folk parlance, ‘favour’ being in jc a verb meaning ‘resemble’.

The poem ‘My Will’ has 46 lines. Among them there is only one instance of linguistic overlap. But the single word does have the effect of including jc among the vehicles of expression. The poet is leaving in her will a number of positive attributes and behaviours she wishes on her son. Included is the following: ‘May you never know hungry’ (p. 19). The uninitiated may well pass that over as an error and replace ‘hungry’ with the English ‘hunger’. But what it is, is the jc predicate adjective ‘hungry’ in a sentence that might read ‘may you never hungry’ and might translate to sje ‘may you never be hungry’.

Later in the same poem Goodison, wishing for the boy none of the dangerous commodity, gold, translates the Creole ‘bold face’ explained above, to English ‘… its face is too bold’. The initiated will immediately hear ‘it too bold face’. And so here again jc and sje are interwoven or overlap in the same utterance, this time only by inference. At this level the notions depend entirely on the listener's knowledge. The national community may hear two voices, the international community, one.

The rendering of complex behaviours and the sound of complex voices in a single statement by the deft manipulation of lexicon and syntax of the different codes is, I believe, Goodison's major contribution to Caribbean literature.

Perhaps the most daring use of this strategy is in the poem ‘Ocho Rios II’ from the earliest collection Tamarind Season.⁴ In this poem it is necessary to express emotions felt by all Jamaicans. Speakers of jc, sje and of the code of Rastafari are represented. The scene is set in Ocho Rios, the second largest tourist city of Jamaica. The poem begins with discourse by a Rastafarian who enters the stage soliloquising: ‘Today I again I forward to the sea’. The form ‘again’ recognises both the habit of the Rasta man and the existence of an ealier poem ‘Ocho Rios I’, analysed in detail by Mordecai in the study cited above. The first person pronoun used initially might be either jc or Dread Talk (dt), but its repetition in the sentence with overtones of the first person alternative, ‘I and I’, available only to DT, identifies the speaker as a Rasta man. The choice of verb reinforces this interpretation. For while ‘forward’ adequately describes the act of walking, it is not used in this way in sje or in jc. It is, however, a commonplace in dt. The first movement of the poem continues:

… to the build-up beach where a faithful few
lie rigid, submit to the smite of the sun.
Today I bless you from the sore chambers of my temples.

These lines are written in sje except for one area of possible grammatical overlap with dt. The reader may now recognise it in the last line. The first person pronoun ‘I’, because of the repetition performed in the first line, may be identified as either dt or sje. The presence of the Rasta man is maintainted by the use of dt. sje indicates that the sentiment expressed is shared by the larger Jamaica.

An examination of an additional stanza, one again involving the sentiments of all Jamaica, serves to reinforce the point. It is the third movement of the poem in which Jamaica blesses the tourist and apologises to him for inclement weather:

Bless you with a benediction of green rain, no feel no way
its not that the land of the sea and the sun has failed, is so rain
stay.
You see man need rain for food to grow
so if is your tan, or my yam fi grow? is just so.
P.S thanks for coming anyway.

(p. 53)

In the first of these lines the double negative introduces the aside which marks the switch from English to jc, ‘no feel no way’. In the next line the explanation ‘is so rain stay’ is jc. It is the voice of the peasant farmer for whom ‘green rain’ which ruins the tourist's tan is a blessing. It brings green lushness and productivity to the plants which are his source of income. He apologises for what might seem to the tourist to be a selfish preference; rain over sun. Note that jc used here can be understood (I believe) by the English-speaking foreigner who might himself have rendered it ‘that is how rain is’.

All the speakers identify with the sentiments of the next two lines but it is the voice of the Rasta man that articulates it. What seems to be the impersonal ‘man’ in sje is in fact the multifunctional pronoun of dt sometimes represented by its variants, ‘the man’, ‘I-man’, ‘the I’. It is followed by the unmarked verb of jc and of dt. The next line continues with the voice of the peasant farmer in jc, to be followed by the polished English of the tourist board representative thanking the disappointed tourist for choosing Jamaica for his holiday. In each case it is language that identifies the different actors in this dramatic piece; and the voices of characters identify their place in the society, the sectors of the society they represent, enhancing the word pictures which they accompany. It is in this example that Goodison's use of the languages of the society in poetry resembles most Senior's use of it in prose.

Dread Talk, the code of Rastafari, features very strongly in the poem above. Elsewhere in Goodison the Rasta man, through his words, is constantly acknowledged as part of the Jamaican manscape. Sometimes it is necessary to repeat an idea already expressed in sje, to accommodate this code. The repetition, however, is not obtrusive because the words are different. Note for example the following from ‘Ceremony for the Banishment of the King of Swords’ from the collection Heartease:⁵ ‘… go through this again so you can penetrate it …’ (p. 53) To ‘penetrate’ in sje means to go through in a very literal sense. In dt, however, it means to ‘understand’. The sentence really means ‘go through that again so you can understand it’. What is important for the purposes of this paper is the extent to which Goodison seems to have internalised the multilingual nature of the speech community.

Another example is found in ‘A Rosary of Your Names’ from this same collection. God is worshipped here in a litany of fine words:

Your names are infinity
light and possibility
and right
and blessed
and upfull

(p. 58)

‘Upfull’ is a dt word whose meaning includes both ‘right’ and ‘blessed’. And, although it is not an English word, its sound is so much in accord with the words around it that the ear accustomed to English does not reject it.

The final example of this use is the last stanza of the poem ‘Heartease I’, in which the poet puns on the sound of the pronoun ‘I’ and so includes one strong symbol from the Rastafarian belief system articulated in the words of the code: the sound which is shared by the first person pronoun mentioned before, and the organ of sight:

Believe, believe
and believe this
the eye know how far
Heartease is

(p. 33)

‘The-I’ is an alternative to ‘I-man’ and ‘I-and-I’. It is the Rastafarian sound of the ‘ego’. It is also the sound which describes the organ of sight. ‘Seeing’ is very important to the Rastafari, its opposite ‘blindness’ is a hallmark of nonbelievers. Again one might easily think Goodison is employing non-standard English and needs to correct the verb to ‘knows’. But the sentence is: ‘I know how far Heartease is’. Choosing to write ‘eye’ instead of ‘I’ concedes that the reader will take the former for granted but needs to be pointed to the latter. Goodison is generalising a sentiment. The narrator knows how far away from the present reality Heartease is, as do we all, especially the Rasta man who is particularly far from ease in the society in which he is the oppressed (downpressed). Here is clever artistry that goes beyond the simple pun and describes a multiple consciousness in what seems on the surface to be a single mode of expression.

One challenge Goodison has more than adequately met is the representation of the complex Jamaican language situation within the terse form that is poetry.

CONCLUSION

Mothertongue as it is traditionally defined, is one-dimensional. It is that one language the individual first acquires and learns to use in communicating with other people. To operate effectively in the Jamaican situation however, and in situations similar to it, is to master at least two codes. Mothertongue in the Jamaican situation might usefully be thought of as ‘language’ rather than ‘a language’. Indeed, recent research into Caribbean language has certainly begun to consider acquisition in these terms.⁶

Notes

1. Pamela Mordecai, ‘Wooing with Words: Some Comments on the Poetry of Lorna Goodison’, Jamaica Journal no. 45, 1981, pp. 38-40.

2. Edward Baugh, ‘Goodison on the Road to Heartease’, Journal of West Indian Literature vol. 1, no. 1, 1986, p. 20.

3. Lorna Goodison, ‘I Am Becoming My Mother, New Beacon Books, London, 1986.

4. Lorna Goodison, Tamarind Season, The Institute of Jamaica, Kingston 1980.

5. Lorna Goodison, Heartease, New Beacon Books London, 1988.

6. See Lawrence D Carrington, ‘Acquiring Language In a Creole Setting’, Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, no. 28, Stanford University, California, 1989.