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i thought i would type out this bit of backgound ...there is more but this is the early information....
[img]/forums/images/graemlins/70459-hugs.gif[/img]Ms Lou [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70459-hugs.gif[/img] walk good [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70373-kiss.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70377-loveeyes.gif[/img]
Taken from the introduction of "Selected Poems"...Louise Bennett...edited by Mervyn Morris (Snr Lecturer in English, UWI)
Louise Bennett was born at 40 North Street, Kingston Jamaica, on 7 September, 1919, the only child of Augustus Cornelius Bennett and Kerene Robinson. Her father owned a bakery in Spanish Town but, as her mother put it, he ‘went to bed rich and woke up poor’ : he lost nearly everything after a mysterious incident. People got sick on a batch of his bread; and, when an investigation revealed arsenic in the salt, his whole stock was dumped and the bakery closed. Within a year Louise’s father fell ill and dies, when his daughter was only seven. For her mother, an accomplished dressmaker, the struggle continued. She would be sewing at the machine when Louise went to bed at night and when Louise got up in the morning: to the young child it often seemed as though work had continued all night.
Louise recalls that her mother sewed ‘for every type of Jamaican’. The child was taught to respect them all: ‘everybody was a lady -the fish lady, the yam lady, the story lady, the teacher lady...’ There were plenty of people for the young Louise to listen to and to observe. She remembers noticing from then that laughter was very important, and that sad or tragic information might be communicated without solemnity. She also came into contact with many instances of black Jamaican self-contempt. ‘When I was a child nearly everything about us was bad, you know; they would tell yuh seh yuh have bad hair, that black people bad...and that the language yuh talk was bad. And I know that a lot of people I knew were not bad at all, they were nice people and they talked this language...’
As a student of Calabar Elementary School, then at St Simon’s College (1933-36) and Excelsior High School (1936-38), Louise was particularly fond of literature, and she worked at it. She was sure from very early that she wanted to write. At first, she tried in Standard English. In one of her early attempts, the persona wakes up, looks out on a full moon, and is inspired by a passing cloud:
This tiny cloud my future held
Advantage of this fact I’ll take
But how? I thought, and then resolved,
A wish upon the cloud I’d make
I wished not for preeminence,
Nor grand prize in a lottery,
But power to express my thought
And whims in dulcet poetry.
‘I wish’ I wished, ‘that I could be
A poet great and with my pen
Trace paths of peace and harmony
For the uncertain minds of men.
Inspire me O tiny cloud
O messenger of god
Strengthen any ability
I have already had.’
In a sense the prayer was answered. It was not long before Louise discovered her real ability, her true vocation. One day she set out, a young teenager all dressed up, for a matinee film show in Cross Roads. On the electric tramcars which were then the basis of public transportation in Kingston, people travelling with baskets were required to sit at the back, and they were sometimes resentful of other people who, when the tram was full, tried to join them there. As Louise was boarding the tram she heard a country woman say” “Pread out yuhself, one dress-oman a come.’ That vivid remark made a great impression on her, and on returning home she wrote her first dialect poem, ‘On a Tramcar’, which began:
Pread out yuhself deh Liza, one
Dress-oman dah look like seh
She see de li space side-a we
And waan foce harself een deh.
It was her beginning. She wondered ‘why more of our poets and writers were not taking more of an interest in the kind of language usage and the kind of experiences of living which were all around us, and writing in this medium of dialect instead of writing in the same old English way about Autumn and things like that.’ She wrote more and more dialect poems, and found that her schoolmates liked them. Gradually she developed a wider audience, performing at free concerts all over the place. She came to the notice of an impresario, Eric ‘Chalk Talk’ Coverley, who invited her to appear in the 1938 edition of the very popular Christmas morning concerts he organizes: his cheque for two guineas was Louise Bennett’s first professional fee for performing.
She tried to get some of her poems published in the Gleaner, but the Gleaner (in the person of Michael de Cordova) was less than enthusiastic, and she did not press too hard. Then one evening in 1943, shortly after a few of her poems had been broadcast by Archie Lindo on ZQ1 (Jamaica’s first radio station), she received at the YWCA a phone call from Horace Myers, a wealthy man who lived where the Courtleigh Hotel now stands. He was inviting Louise to recite for his dinner guests. Louise agreed, and a car was sent to fetch her. Her performance went down well, and Michael de Cordova, who happened to be present, asked her to come and see him at the Gleaner the following morning. On 23 May, 1943, the Gleaner began to publish Louise Bennett each Sunday, paying her 10/6 - half a guinea- a column.
Louise and her remarkably understanding mother resisted the many people who expressed horror at the notion of a career in writing. There was no money in it, they said. Louise and her mother would die in the almshouse, they warned. But Louise’s mother was absolutely sure the girl should be encouraged to develop her own particular talent. ‘If you can write as well as I can make a frock,’ she told Louise, ‘I’ll be satisfied.’
Louise’s education continued. She had done a correspondence course in journalism soon after leaving Excelsior. In 1943 she got a place at Friends’ College, Highgate, where she did a course in social work and began her serious study of Jamaican folklore. She had grown up in Kingston, had indeed not travelled into the country beyond Spanish Town until she was 10 and went to her grandmother’s funeral in St Mary ( about which her mother, who had spent early childhood there, had often spoken). As her Gleaner column widened the circle of admirers, Louise was often invited to the village festivals then current, where she was often asked to judge the merit of dramatic presentations based on her verses. From Friends’ College she continued to move around the country, steadily deepening her understanding of rural Jamaican language and experience.
Increasingly involved in performing and in assessing performance, she began to feel the need for formal training. With a view to studying there, she wrote off to her aunt (her father’s sister) in the United States. But Lady Huggins, the Governor’s wife whom Louise had come to know through the Jamaica Federation of Women, suggested she apply for a British Council Scholarship. Having amply demonstrated great promise in various plays and pantomimes, Louis Bennett was in 1945 awarded a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), the famous drama school in Britain.,
Within months of her arrival in London she had a BBC programme of her own. She wrote and broadcast many poems from London. She did very well at RADA, and she rejected opportunities to remain in Britain as a professional actress. She returned to Jamaica in 1947 and taught for a short while at Excelsior. She was co-author of the 1949 Little Theatre Movement pantomime. Finding money hard to come by, she went back to England in 1950 to work again for the BBC, in charge of ‘West Indian Guest Night’. She performed with repertory companies in Coventry, Huddersfield and Amersham. At the urging of her aunt in America, she moved to New York in 1953. She had a difficult time at first. After a stint of punching holes in dog collars, she joined the telephone order team at Macy’s. Gradually she moved into more congenial activity. She and Eric Coverley co-directed a folk musical called ‘Day in Jamaica’ which included folksongs, Anancy stories, Bennett poems and ‘Chalk Talk’ routines by Eric. The show began at St Martin’s Little Theatre in Harlem and, by request, moved around Episcopalian church halls in New York , New Jersey and Connecticut. Louise did some work on WWRL with Alma John, a famous black broadcaster. She also sang folksongs at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village. In May 1954 in New York she married Eric Coverley, and they returned home in 1955.
[img]/forums/images/graemlins/70459-hugs.gif[/img]Ms Lou [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70459-hugs.gif[/img] walk good [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70373-kiss.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/graemlins/70377-loveeyes.gif[/img]
Taken from the introduction of "Selected Poems"...Louise Bennett...edited by Mervyn Morris (Snr Lecturer in English, UWI)
Louise Bennett was born at 40 North Street, Kingston Jamaica, on 7 September, 1919, the only child of Augustus Cornelius Bennett and Kerene Robinson. Her father owned a bakery in Spanish Town but, as her mother put it, he ‘went to bed rich and woke up poor’ : he lost nearly everything after a mysterious incident. People got sick on a batch of his bread; and, when an investigation revealed arsenic in the salt, his whole stock was dumped and the bakery closed. Within a year Louise’s father fell ill and dies, when his daughter was only seven. For her mother, an accomplished dressmaker, the struggle continued. She would be sewing at the machine when Louise went to bed at night and when Louise got up in the morning: to the young child it often seemed as though work had continued all night.
Louise recalls that her mother sewed ‘for every type of Jamaican’. The child was taught to respect them all: ‘everybody was a lady -the fish lady, the yam lady, the story lady, the teacher lady...’ There were plenty of people for the young Louise to listen to and to observe. She remembers noticing from then that laughter was very important, and that sad or tragic information might be communicated without solemnity. She also came into contact with many instances of black Jamaican self-contempt. ‘When I was a child nearly everything about us was bad, you know; they would tell yuh seh yuh have bad hair, that black people bad...and that the language yuh talk was bad. And I know that a lot of people I knew were not bad at all, they were nice people and they talked this language...’
As a student of Calabar Elementary School, then at St Simon’s College (1933-36) and Excelsior High School (1936-38), Louise was particularly fond of literature, and she worked at it. She was sure from very early that she wanted to write. At first, she tried in Standard English. In one of her early attempts, the persona wakes up, looks out on a full moon, and is inspired by a passing cloud:
This tiny cloud my future held
Advantage of this fact I’ll take
But how? I thought, and then resolved,
A wish upon the cloud I’d make
I wished not for preeminence,
Nor grand prize in a lottery,
But power to express my thought
And whims in dulcet poetry.
‘I wish’ I wished, ‘that I could be
A poet great and with my pen
Trace paths of peace and harmony
For the uncertain minds of men.
Inspire me O tiny cloud
O messenger of god
Strengthen any ability
I have already had.’
In a sense the prayer was answered. It was not long before Louise discovered her real ability, her true vocation. One day she set out, a young teenager all dressed up, for a matinee film show in Cross Roads. On the electric tramcars which were then the basis of public transportation in Kingston, people travelling with baskets were required to sit at the back, and they were sometimes resentful of other people who, when the tram was full, tried to join them there. As Louise was boarding the tram she heard a country woman say” “Pread out yuhself, one dress-oman a come.’ That vivid remark made a great impression on her, and on returning home she wrote her first dialect poem, ‘On a Tramcar’, which began:
Pread out yuhself deh Liza, one
Dress-oman dah look like seh
She see de li space side-a we
And waan foce harself een deh.
It was her beginning. She wondered ‘why more of our poets and writers were not taking more of an interest in the kind of language usage and the kind of experiences of living which were all around us, and writing in this medium of dialect instead of writing in the same old English way about Autumn and things like that.’ She wrote more and more dialect poems, and found that her schoolmates liked them. Gradually she developed a wider audience, performing at free concerts all over the place. She came to the notice of an impresario, Eric ‘Chalk Talk’ Coverley, who invited her to appear in the 1938 edition of the very popular Christmas morning concerts he organizes: his cheque for two guineas was Louise Bennett’s first professional fee for performing.
She tried to get some of her poems published in the Gleaner, but the Gleaner (in the person of Michael de Cordova) was less than enthusiastic, and she did not press too hard. Then one evening in 1943, shortly after a few of her poems had been broadcast by Archie Lindo on ZQ1 (Jamaica’s first radio station), she received at the YWCA a phone call from Horace Myers, a wealthy man who lived where the Courtleigh Hotel now stands. He was inviting Louise to recite for his dinner guests. Louise agreed, and a car was sent to fetch her. Her performance went down well, and Michael de Cordova, who happened to be present, asked her to come and see him at the Gleaner the following morning. On 23 May, 1943, the Gleaner began to publish Louise Bennett each Sunday, paying her 10/6 - half a guinea- a column.
Louise and her remarkably understanding mother resisted the many people who expressed horror at the notion of a career in writing. There was no money in it, they said. Louise and her mother would die in the almshouse, they warned. But Louise’s mother was absolutely sure the girl should be encouraged to develop her own particular talent. ‘If you can write as well as I can make a frock,’ she told Louise, ‘I’ll be satisfied.’
Louise’s education continued. She had done a correspondence course in journalism soon after leaving Excelsior. In 1943 she got a place at Friends’ College, Highgate, where she did a course in social work and began her serious study of Jamaican folklore. She had grown up in Kingston, had indeed not travelled into the country beyond Spanish Town until she was 10 and went to her grandmother’s funeral in St Mary ( about which her mother, who had spent early childhood there, had often spoken). As her Gleaner column widened the circle of admirers, Louise was often invited to the village festivals then current, where she was often asked to judge the merit of dramatic presentations based on her verses. From Friends’ College she continued to move around the country, steadily deepening her understanding of rural Jamaican language and experience.
Increasingly involved in performing and in assessing performance, she began to feel the need for formal training. With a view to studying there, she wrote off to her aunt (her father’s sister) in the United States. But Lady Huggins, the Governor’s wife whom Louise had come to know through the Jamaica Federation of Women, suggested she apply for a British Council Scholarship. Having amply demonstrated great promise in various plays and pantomimes, Louis Bennett was in 1945 awarded a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), the famous drama school in Britain.,
Within months of her arrival in London she had a BBC programme of her own. She wrote and broadcast many poems from London. She did very well at RADA, and she rejected opportunities to remain in Britain as a professional actress. She returned to Jamaica in 1947 and taught for a short while at Excelsior. She was co-author of the 1949 Little Theatre Movement pantomime. Finding money hard to come by, she went back to England in 1950 to work again for the BBC, in charge of ‘West Indian Guest Night’. She performed with repertory companies in Coventry, Huddersfield and Amersham. At the urging of her aunt in America, she moved to New York in 1953. She had a difficult time at first. After a stint of punching holes in dog collars, she joined the telephone order team at Macy’s. Gradually she moved into more congenial activity. She and Eric Coverley co-directed a folk musical called ‘Day in Jamaica’ which included folksongs, Anancy stories, Bennett poems and ‘Chalk Talk’ routines by Eric. The show began at St Martin’s Little Theatre in Harlem and, by request, moved around Episcopalian church halls in New York , New Jersey and Connecticut. Louise did some work on WWRL with Alma John, a famous black broadcaster. She also sang folksongs at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village. In May 1954 in New York she married Eric Coverley, and they returned home in 1955.
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