My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

POE TIC S OFT H E AM E RIC A S 123
Yuh wi haffe kill de Lancashire
De Yorkshire, de Cockney
De broad Scotch an de Irish brogue
Before yuh start to kill me!
Yuh wi haffe get de Oxford book
0' English verse, an tear
Out Chaucer, Burns, Lady Grizelle
An plenty 0' Shakespeare!
Wen yuh done kill "wit" an "humour"
Wen yuh kill "Variety"
Yuh wi haffe fine a way fe kill
Originality!
An mine how yuh dah-read dem English
Book deh pon yuh shelf
For ef yuh drop a "h" yuh mighta
Haffe kill yuhself.8
Bennett's wit makes all the more disturbing her point that suppression of
"variety" in language produces the cultural suppression of a people: "Bans
0' Killing". A people invents and sustains itself through its shared language
so it is not surprising that colonial governments have often prohibited
the use of native languages, dialects, patois, creoles, and pidgins
in an effort to maintain social control. Bennett, all of whose poetry is
written in jamaican idiom, points to, and defuses, the stigma attached
to dialect use; but she also makes patent the deep social scar left by the
denigration of a particular language practice as inferior. In this sense,
dialect becomes the verbal equivalent of skin color: an "objective" mark
of alterity.
The explicitly political use of dialect in contemporary poetry is apparent
in the work of jamaican "dub" poet Michael Smith, even as he toys
with old English rhymes: "Say / Natty-Natty, / no bodder / das weh / yuh
culture!,,9 Or consider not only Linton Kwesi johnson's deforming
spelling lng/an but also these raucous lyrics from "Fite Oem Back" in lng/an
Is a Bitch:
8. Louise Bennett, Jamaica Labrish (Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster's Book Stores, 1966), pp.
209-10. Bennett, a popular performer in Jamaica, was born in 1919. Bennett's poems might usefully
be compared with the Hawaiian pidgin of Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Saturday Night at the Pahala
Theater (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1993).
9. Michael Smith, It a Come (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989), p. 50. Smith, who was born
in Kingston in 1954, was killed in 1983.