Louise Bennett..the info u might not know

[Blackstar*]

Re: Louise Bennett..the info u might not know

Miss Lou to get official funeral
Observer Reporter
Friday, July 28, 2006


JAMAICAN cultural icon Louise Bennett-Coverly, who died in Canada Wednesday at age 86, is to be accorded an official funeral, Jamaica House announced yesterday.

At the same time, Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller has announced the setting up of a special planning committee, to be chaired by Tourism Minister Aloun Assamba, to coordinate arrangements for the funeral.

The committee, a Jamaica House statement said, will include a representative from the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party. However, neither the names of the Opposition representative nor the other members of the committee were given.

Meanwhile, a special thanksgiving service for the life of Miss Lou will be held in Toronto, Canada, next Thursday, August 3. The service, Jamaica House said, is being given all the recognition and courtesies of the government, and a delegation, including representatives of the Opposition, will be in attendance.

The prime minister has also announced that, in keeping with Miss Lou's wishes to be buried by the side of her husband, arrangements were being made to have his body and that of Miss Lou's returned to Jamaica for the official funeral.

Condolence books for Miss Lou are to be opened at all overseas missions and at the Ministry of Tourism, Entertainment and Culture, the Institute of Jamaica and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade.

Source

[juneplumm2]

Re: Louise Bennett..the info u might not know

Many moons ago, I met her when my dance class performed on Ring Ding. I can still remember her smile and the sound of her laughter.
~Rest in Peace Miss Lou... you will be greatly missed~

[Simeon]

Re: Louise Bennett..the info u might not know

2 long caa baada fi read all dat...she a bury a jamaica??

[Q3210]

Re: Louise Bennett..the info u might not know

In 2003, when Miss Lou was on an official visit, the then PM tried coercing her to return to Jamaica to live with promises of a free house and medical.
Miss Lou moved not one inch.
But now in death they`ll do what they want with her and her long dead husband.

[evanovitch]

Re: Louise Bennett..the info u might not know

[ QUOTE ]
In 2003, when Miss Lou was on an official visit, the then PM tried coercing her to return to Jamaica to live with promises of a free house and medical.
Miss Lou moved not one inch.
But now in death they`ll do what they want with her and her long dead husband.

[/ QUOTE ]

boo, how dem a 'coerce' along wid 'promises of free house and medical?'.....u a grieve so much u tongue tied.... [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70459-hugs.gif[/img] u up....is a hard time fi alll we Jamaicans, home an abroad... ah Ms Lou gaan...waieeeeeeeee...mi a get ole [img]/forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img]

[halfwaytree]

Re: Louise Bennett..the info u might not know

Forty-four years after independence, Jamaican culture is now mainstream. Dreadlocks. Reggae. Patties everywhere. Jerk seasoning. Liberal doses of "patwa" punctuating schoolyard chatter.

And middle-class white kids are hip to dancehall riddims that underlay sometimes impenetrable vocals.

So, to mark the passing last week of the queen of Jamaican culture, the patwa promoter Louise "Miss Lou" Bennett-Coverley, here's an illustrated reference guide on How to Speak Jamaican.

Think of this as a bit of continuing education. The ABCs of the Jamaican language ... for Canadians who have tried English and found it wholly inadequate to communicate their true feelings.

On this Caribana Saturday, a day before Jamaican independence day, and two days before Toronto returns Miss Lou to her people for public viewing and a state funeral Wednesday, take the time to decipher the wonderfully lyrical and gloriously befuddling Jamaican tongue.

After all, on your next visit to Montego Bay you do want a head start on how to communicate with the locals. "Hello there, Mr. Rastaman, would you happen to have a joint of ganja?" just doesn't cut it anymore. It should be more like, "Hey, yardie, gimmie a spliff, noh."

It's all about Miss Lou, the monumental figure, cultural icon, mother of Jamaican dialect, and most loved Jamaican who died in Toronto July 26, after living here 19 years.

Without Miss Lou, academics and linguists wouldn't be writing scholarly articles about "bilingual, biliterate" Jamaica. Neither would they be debating whether the native tongue is creole or a dialect or, indeed, a language.

"Miss Lou is the cornerstone of Brand Jamaica," Robert Pickersgill, Jamaica's minister of housing, transport and works told a memorial service in Toronto Thursday.

Speaking right after Pickersgill, Olivia "Babsy" Walker, speaking for Jamaica's opposition party, drove home the point, comparing Miss Lou to U.S. civil rights icon Rosa Park because Miss Lou "refused to give up her Jamaican dialect for the Queen's language and convinced generations of Jamaicans that we didn't have to give up our culture."

So, there's always been something deeper and more sobering behind the rollicking humour of Jamaican-speak — a fact not lost on anyone who leafs through the pages of any of Miss Lou's books of dialect verses.

Still, the turn of phrases, the mangling of metaphors, the malapropisms, mispronunciations, deliberate misrepresentation of words to stress a point, the sheer robustness of the language is what excites and attracts.

"Unmanasable" as a surrogate for unmannerly is precious. So is a "tongue-go-free" instead of a chatter-box. Calling someone "tallawa" where others say "stalwart" is just right — especially when it's usually accompanied by, "Him likkle (little) but him tallawa."

"Su-su" quickly turns to "kas'kas" and then to "labrish" in a progression of rumour-mongering that's always bound to deliver laughs "till yu belly bus."

If mutilation and condemnation are perfectly good words in standard English, the Jamaican, speaking in the vernacular, sees no problem with "murderation" and "fretation."

De whole district catch frightation

on de ceremonial day

After so much courtenation

Fe see Tom married to May.

Referring to a man as "fenkey, fenkey" or "boogooyagga" can't be positive, even if one doesn't know the exact meaning.

Of course, it was the uneducated (Jamaicans might say illiterated) mind that gave birth to many such diversions from Oxford English. And in colonial times when educating the slaves wasn't a preoccupation of the British empire, the slaves still had to communicate the best they could.

The guardian of the empire, the Jamaican middle class, and the vast majority of professionals and leaders frowned on the use of Jamaican patwa in any official circles.

It would be well into the 1970s before the country's elite started easing the snobbery around Jamaican dialect, much of this coming on the heels of the social upheavals that accompany the Michael Manley government.

Louise Bennett, compared to most of her fellow islanders, had a privileged upbringing. But she fell in love with the peasants and common folk, the street vendor, researched their words and their ways of expression, embraced it, lived it and set out to preserve it and turn it loose on the world.

Born Sept. 7, 1919, in Kingston, Miss Lou grew up in colonial Jamaica when Britain controlled the island and Jamaica's elite waged war against the corruption of standard English.

The young poet couldn't have her works published in the local newspaper, until its publisher heard her perform at a private party and gave her a weekly column in the Jamaica Gleaner.

By age 23 she had already published Anancy Stories, without literary acclaim. Even her masterful work, Jamaica Labrish, published in 1966, was snubbed. The Jamaican establishment ridiculed the use of substandard English as a symbol of illiteracy. But, oh, the people loved her.

By the 1960s she had carved out a place in the psyche of the nation.

On radio, television, on vinyl records where she sang the folk songs learned from the villages where mento music would morph into ska, rock steady, reggae, dance hall and who knows what tomorrow, she propagated a culture.

Harry Belafonte came calling for advice, and popularized Caribbean music abroad. Her exuberance as the teacher of the nation knew no bounds and because she was free from what Walker this week called the "tribalism of our politics" she gave wing to the "process of emancipation from mental slavery."

By the time Bob Marley came along, singing "Redemption Song" and others as reggae captured the world, he had no misgivings about singing in Jamaican. He stood on Miss Lou's shoulder — as does every dub poet, dance hall DJ. Jamaicans go forth into the world with a pride and a passion, a sense of "I can do anything" because Miss Lou breathed it into their DNA.

Miss Lou was the teacher. Her classroom was the nation. Her props were the poor labourer returning home at evening time, the higgler in the market square, the uneducated servant girl using her chutzpah and blarney to outsmart the middle class and privileged.

Her tools — songs, stories, the hilarious ebb and flow of daily life in tenement yards or on country roads or in market square — were so genuine, so authentic as to render her lessons essential and timeless.

It's scandalous to hear now that most of her radio shows, including The Lou and Ranny Show which captivated the country in the 1960s, have not been archived. In an interview in 2003, Miss Lou said all episodes of her Ring Ding children's television programs on JBC, Jamaica's answer to Sesame Street, have been "scrubbed and recorded over with other programs. None, to my knowledge, were preserved, so there are none available for sale."

Her body of literary works — the poems, anancy stories, musings, proverbs and timeless ode to the Jamaican spirit — is readily available because of her brilliant foresight. She published them and the books — Jamaica Labrish, Selected Poems, Aunty Roachy Seh, Anancy Stories and Ms Lou — are still in circulation. So are several vinyl recordings that will no doubt become part of a Miss Lou revival.

"In a quarter of a century 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 has raised the sing-song patter of the hills and of the towns to an art level acceptable to and appreciated by people from all classes in her country."

Rex Nettleford, that luminary Jamaican educator of University of the West Indies fame, wrote that about Miss Lou as a forward to her seminal book, Jamaica Labrish. The year? 1966.

Since then, nothing's changed, except her shadow has grown.

Miss Lou will be buried Wednesday in Heroes Park in Jamaica, after lying in state.

She'll be only the second woman afforded the honour of a final resting place with the likes of first prime minister Alexander Bustamante, Michael Manley, Marcus Garvey, and the slave liberator Sam Sharpe.

Royson James
Toronto Star