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Miss Lou: Mother of Jamaican Culture
By Kevin O’Brien Chang
Louise ‘Miss Lou’ Bennett is undisputedly the most universally loved personality this nation has ever produced or likely will ever produce, engendering unabashed feelings of pride and affection in Jamaicans of all ages, colours, classes and creeds. For more than 50 years, she tirelessly championed Jamaican folk customs on stage, radio and television. Yet apart from being our most celebrated entertainer, Miss Lou is also the most popular poet in this island’s history, outselling all others put together. Her impact on the national psyche was perhaps even more important than her artistic legacy, for she almost single-handedly gave Jamaicans pride in their cultural heritage.
In musicologist Marjorie Whylie’s words:
“All of us are the inheritors of the groundwork Louise did…Folk music only gained respectability after Louise came back from London and sang ‘Rookumbine’ on RJR….”
Her extensive travels throughout Jamaica gave her a perhaps unsurpassed knowledge of native folklore. She collected and studied folk songs, ring games, Anancy stories and riddles, becoming a primary resource for scholars and artists interested in such material. Marjorie Whylie called her “the most generous soul I know … always so ready to assist with material or contacts or pointing you in a direction for tracing further material … a casual social visit with Louise … would make a good anthropological study.”
Standing tall
As her Norman Manley Award for Excellence citation noted:
It is this truth, grounded in her faithful observation and a genuine empathy with Jamaican folk life, which makes Louise Bennett stand way above all her colleagues … . Her deep knowledge of Jamaica has helped to give her literary and theatrical work an authenticity that few other Jamaican artistes have achieved … . Many of our other significant artistes, working in their various media, are accessible only to an elite, cultivated or otherwise. Louise Bennett has achieved an excellence while reaching the entire society.
But she does not flatter us. She is forever exposing our pretences, our idiocies, our cosmic disproportions. She measures us against the values of common sense, of sanity, of reason; and, yet, in her compassion, does not seem beyond us all. She speaks not so much to as for the whole Jamaican society.
And as Rex Nettleford said: “… those who indulge her rumbustious abandon and spontaneous inducement of laughter will sometimes forget that behind the exuberance and carefree stance, there are years of training – formal and informal – as well as this artist’s own struggles to shape an idiom.”
It was Miss Lou’s insistence on the inherent worth of Jamaican expression that established in the populace a respect for their language and tradition – the belief that ‘patwa’ wasn’t merely corrupted English but a creation of immense vitality and humour.
In her own words:
“Some thought Jamaican English was vulgar, out-of-order language. It came out of the African heritage and, at that time, anything African was bad: hair, colour, skin, language, music. But I thought it was fascinating. Everything had a rhythm. It was a creation of the people. One reason I persisted in writing in dialect in spite of the opposition was because nobody else was doing so, and there was such a rich material in dialect that I felt I wanted to put on paper some of the wonderful things that people say in dialect. You could never say ‘look here’ as vividly as ‘kuyah’.”
In her 1944 poem, Bans O’ Killing, she laughed at the snobbery which denigrated all common Jamaican speech:
… Meck me get it straight Mass Charlie
For me no quite undastan,
Yuh gwine kill all English dialect
Or jus Jamaica one?
Ef yuh dah-equal up wid English
language, den wha meck
Yuh gwine go feel inferior, wen
It come to dialect?
Ef yuh kean sing ‘Linstead Market’
An ‘Wata come a me y’eye’,
Yuh wi haffi tap sing ‘Auld lang syne’
An ‘Comin thru de rye’
Her dialect performances were the direct precursors of deejay music and dub poetry. Tony Rebel, who uses Jamaican dialect as effectively as anyone in reggae, acknowledges Miss Lou as his greatest influence. While Luciano puts it this way: “She has worked forward into my consciousness that I can be proud of my culture and proud of myself.”
No single individual has been more responsible for the Jamaican nation’s emancipation from colonial mental slavery. In Rex Nettleford words again:
” … She has carved designs out of the shapeless and unruly substance that is the Jamaican dialect – the language which most of the Jamaican people speak most of the time – and raised the sing-song patter of the hills and towns to an art acceptable to and appreciated by people from all classes … .”
Many people associate Miss Lou primarily with comedy. Yet while we rightly treasure those who bring the gift of laughter, we should not forget the serious side of Louise Bennett. Only a person with a very strong sense of racial pride and self-belief could have withstood the torrents of criticism she had to endure when she first championed the language and culture of her people.
Jamaicans today might be happily at ease with themselves and their customs, but it took a true ‘lion heart’ to speak out, as she did at the height of ‘only white is right’ colonialism. Even though in much of her work she did ‘tek kin teeth kibber heart bun’ (Take skin teeth [a smile] cover heartaches), in poems like Dutty Tough she addressed the issues of her day as seriously as any reggae artist and deejay ever did.
“Sun a shine an pot a bwile, but
Things no bright, bickle no nuff
Rain a fall, river dah flood, but,
Water scarce and dutty tough.”
In Tony Rebel’s words “Miss Lou was a sort of female Marcus Garvey.” She was a giant on whose shoulders all reggae artistes and dub poets now stand.
This extract appeared in the Gleaner newspaper on September 12, 2010. 
It is from Kevin O’Brien Chang’s forthcoming book Jamaica Fi Real: Beauty Vibes and Culture coming in October.
CXC Syllabuses
The Caribbean Examinations Council wishes to advise the public that syllabuses for the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) and the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) are scheduled to hit the shelves of bookstore throughout the region in early October. Under a new arrangement with Caribbean publishing house, Ian Randle Publishers, the syllabuses will be published and distributed by Ian Randle Publishers through a network of bookstores in the region, rather than being published by CXC. This arrangement makes the syllabus more widely available to learners, teachers and parents in a more attractive and accessible style. The Council regrets the delay in the publication of the syllabuses and apologies to its clients for any inconvenience caused.http://www.cxc.org/node/3158
It’s Risky Business
One of Ian Randle Publishers’ newest releases Risky Business: Perspectives on Corporate Misconduct is set to be launched at the Norman Manley Law School on October 1, 2010.
About the Book
The international financial crisis which began in August 2007 brought into sharp focus the regulation of the financial services industry. However, even before then, the quest to control money-laundering, Executive excesses, terrorist financing and financial crime generally, had resulted in the upsurge of a new regulatory environment worldwide.
In Risky Business, the Contributors, bringing both expertise and experience, present different perspectives on the new regulatory practices and offer guidance on the role of governance in the scheme of regulatory reform. Divided into two parts: International Perspectives and Jamaican Perspectives, the book firstly focuses on the wider global regulatory context, while the second part examines the Jamaican situation and the initiatives taken there primarily through the passage and implementation of the Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA).
While of particular interest to scholars and practitioners of financial regulation, company and commercial law, and comparative law, the easy and accessible presentations of the contributions in Risky Business will also enlighten the general reader interested in the financial services industry anywhere in the world.
The Contributors:
Shazeeda A. Ali; Fletcher N. Baldwin; Evan Bell; Christine A. Chambers; Alwyn Herriman; B. St. Michael Hylton; Daniel Ryan Koslosky; Eva Lomnicka; Peter D. Maynard; Chizu Nakajima; Barry A.K. Rider; Candice Rochester; Bryan Sykes; Stephen Vasciannie; and Michelle Nadine Walker.
About the Editor
Shazeeda A. Ali is the Course Director for Legal Aspects of Corporate Misconduct in the LLM programme at the Faculty of Law, University of the West Indies and the author of the book Money Laundering Control in the Caribbean (Kluwer).
When to use AN instead of A
A and AN mean the same thing. A is used before words beginning with a consonant (any letter except a, e, i, o, or u) and AN is used before words beginning with a vowel: a, e, i, o, or u; or in front of a silent h. So basically, if a word has a vowel sound, AN should be used.
Remember too, some words beginning with the letter u don’t always sound like a vowel. U has two pronunciations:
(a) uncle, umbrella, ulcer – here the U is a true vowel and AN should be used
(b) university, uniform, union – here the U has a ‘y’ sound and A should be used
Examples:
AN unofficial report
A unique form of protest
AN excellent piece of work
AN heir to the throne
A young offender
A guardian angel
AN hour later
AN effort to discredit the politician
A unified force
A meeting of athletes
A foreign university
AN interim committee
AN honest day’s work
A health centre
Adapted from Merle Hodge’s The Knots in English: A Manual for Caribbean Users; Forthcoming: Ian Randle Publishers
12 steps to Generating your Own Product Bar Code
We’re often asked where we get our Bar Codes or how we get them done. We actually generate them ourselves. Here are the steps:
Install the Coral Draw Software
Launch programme after installation
1. Pull down drop down menu of ‘application launcher’ (found on the top menu bar – an icon looking like a torpedo/rocket ship)
2. Select barcode wizard (this opens a dialogue box)
3. Select ‘EAN-13’ (if ISBN is 13 digits)
4. Punch in the first 12 digits of the ISBN, the last digit will automatically be inserted, then click next
5. For best resolution of barcode when printed, insert the following values in the corresponding fields and click next.
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- printer resolution – 300
- units – inches
- bar width reduction – 1 pixel
- magnification scale – 100
- bar height – 1.0
- wide to narrow ratio – 2.0
6. Check ‘make this barcode human readable’ in the new dialogue box and click finish
7. Click yes to ‘copy barcode to clipboard’ when prompted
8. Go to ‘edit’ and choose ‘special paste’ from the main menu
9. Choose ‘picture (metafile)’ from options in the new dialogue box
10. Click ok and you’ve got your barcode
11. To export as jpeg, go to main menu and select ‘file’ and choose ‘export’ from the drop down menu
12. Save image as jpeg
NB. Some people choose to add the ISBN at the top of the image, you can insert this manually by simply creating a text box and typing the numbers. Do this before exporting the image.
Tastes Like Home
We’re so excited about two ‘out of the box’ projects that are slated for publication later this year. Jamaica Fi Real by Kevin O’Brien Chang is a full colour coffee table book on Jamaican music, history, culture, sports, religion, food, art and places of interest. It’s not a travel guide by any means, and in fact may well be the first book to give a down to earth, true Jamaican portrayal of the beauty, vibes and culture of Jamaica. The other project is called Tastes Like Home and is a food memoir and Caribbean cookbook rolled in one. Our author/chef Cynthia Nelson has us licking our lips as she describes old time favourites that make us long for home. Visit Cynthis’a blog to get a taste of what’s in store with this book.
IRP and CXC Launch Exam Past Papers
Didacus Jules (left), Registrar at the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) accepting new past paper books from Ian Randle, Chairman of Ian Randle Publishers on Thursday April 8, 2010 at CXC Headquarters in Barbados.
CXC has granted Ian Randle Publishers exclusive rights to publish syllabuses and past examination papers for all CAPE and CSEC subjects. IRP also has rights to publish all subject reports, specimen papers and mark schemes for both CAPE and CSEC. IRP was chosen as CXC’s publish after a transparent bidding process where regional and UK-based publishers competed to offer CXC a range of services.
Read the full story at http://www.caribdaily.com/article/275452/cxc-launches-new-line-of-past-papers-booklets/
Sam Sharpe and the Quest for Liberation
In 2008 we published Daddy Sharpe: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Samuel Sharpe, A West Indian Slave Written by Himself, 1832 by Fred Kennedy.
The Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture at Regent’s Park College, the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Jamaica Baptist Union, and BMS World Mission will host an international conference on Sam Sharpe at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford from April 13-16, 2010. The Conference title is Sam Sharpe and the Quest for Liberation:Context, Theology and Legacy for Today.
The Conference takes as its centre-piece the story of Sam Sharpe, the Baptist deacon and enslaved person who played an important role in the ‘Great Jamaican Slave Revolt’ of 1831. One of the leaders of a group of enslaved persons who took part in a ‘sit-down strike’ against slavery, he was executed together with more than 500 others. Nevertheless, their revolt is recognized by historians and theologians as having a powerful influence on the process leading to the abolition of slavery, and Sam Sharpe is honoured as a National Hero in Jamaica. The story is of a Baptist Christian whose actions were clearly motivated by his faith and by his reading of scripture; he is reported to have said, ‘In reading my Bible, I found that the white man had no more right to make a slave of me than I have to make a slave of the white man.’ He remains a witness to the principle of ‘liberation from below’: that is, true liberation comes when those who are oppressed or marginalized participate in making their own freedom and justice, rather than simply having it granted to them by those who have power and authority. This is what the Conference identifies as the ‘legacy’ of Sam Sharpe today.
Taken from http://www.rpc.ox.ac.uk/newsevent.php?newseventid=13
Congratulations Professor Verene A. Shepherd
Congratulations to Professor Verene A. Shepherd who has been appointed to the Working Group of Experts on People of African descent. The working group was established by the (United Nations) Commission on Human Rights to address human issues affecting people of African descent.
Professor Shepherd is Professor of Social History at the University of the West Indies, Mona, and the author and editor of several books, her latest being Livestock Sugar and Slavery: Contested Terrain in Colonial Jamaica. She is also the producer and host of ‘Talking History’ on Jamaican radio station Nationwide Radio 90 FM.
Symposium in honour of Prof. Rex Nettleford
The Hugh Lawson Shearer Trade Union Education Insitute (HLSTUEI), Open Campus, the University of the West Indies (UWI), in collaboration with the Mona Campus, UWI, are working together to organise a symposium in honour of the late Professor Emeritus, Professor Rex Nettleford.
The symposium will be held from April 7‐9, 2010 at the Mona Visitors’ Lodge on the Mona Campus in Jamaica.
For further information on the symposium, call the HLSTUEI at 977‐4290 or email hlstuei@open.uwi.edu .
Taken from the Tertiary Level Institutions Mailing List
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