Jamaican English – In A Nutshell
For some poets, the use of patois "patwa" is crucial, not only as a means of indigenous expression in African-Caribbean poetry but also as a programmatic statement. The purely linguistic opposition "vernacular vs. standard language" or "creole English vs. Standard English" is extended to mean "language of the people vs. language of the establishment.” Some poets regard the use of patois as an act of resistance to the European domination of Caribbean culture. They see themselves as subversive linguistic agents in the continuous struggle against notions that denounce creole as "bastard language," "baby talk," "broken English," "bad English" etc. Terms like these are in no way anachronistic remnants of colonial history is illustrated by the fact that, even today, Patois is regarded by a great number of people as "dirty" language, as an expression of social and intellectual backwardness.
was the first poet to establish the "dialect" (as she referred to it) as a form of speech with equal rights. Stressing their African descent, dub poets are quite aware of the fact that patois, not even in its roughest form ("basilect"), is not the original and indigenous form of speech which their black ancestors brought with them. In line with the policy of the British slave masters, African tongues in their original form were eradicated, to be replaced by English. The consequences of this cultural confusion are well-known: English and African words were mingled with African syntax, phonology and rhythm, and the Jamaican creole developed-an un-English English unintelligible to the slave masters, an effective act of resistance that was at first invisible
Today, in school or in society in general, standard English is still "the passport to status and class" while Patois "is still the target of middle-class snobbery" (Nettleford in Bennett 1966: 23, qtd. Habekost, 65). Schools in particular served as an institutional safeguard for this system. Whether in England or in Jamaica, not only was Patois not to be used, but its very raison d'etre was denounced. Regarding the situation in English schools, Ansel Wong states that by adopting such a dogmatic attitude towards patois and by refusing to legitimize its use as a language in its own right, schools negate the black child's linguistic competence. The effect of this is that the teaching of English in most schools has become a process of dismantling the child's competence rather than adding a second language to his London Jamaican dialect. [1986: 120]
