He was born Lawson Edward Brathwaite in Bridgetown, Barbados, at the eastern edge of the West Indies. His undergraduate studies in history were at Cambridge University; his graduate studies, at the University of Sussex. He worked as an education officer for the Ministry of Education in Ghana (1955?62) and taught history at the University of the West Indies, before taking a position in comparative literature at New York University in 1991. His many books of poetry include a work of epic scope and scale, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973), which gathers Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969).
[Nation Language]1
What I am going to talk about this morning is language from the Caribbean, the process of using English in a different way from the 'norm'. English in a new sense as I prefer to call it. English in an ancient sense. English
1. First printed separately in 1984, Brathwaite's lecture History of the Voice was slightly modified and incorporated in his essay collection Roots (1986, 1 993), from which this selection is excerpted.
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25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
in a very traditional sense. An d sometimes not English at all, but language.
start my thoughts, taking up from the discussion that developed after Dennis Brutus's2 very excellent presentation. Without logic, and through instinct, the people who spoke with Dennis from the floor yesterday brought up the question of language.* * * In his case, it was English, and English as spoken by Africans, and the native languages as spoken by Africans.
We in the Caribbean have a similar kind of plurality: we have English, which is the imposed language on muc h of the archipelago. English is an imperial language, as are French, Dutch, and Spanish. W e have what we call Creole English, which is a mixture of English and an adaptation that English took in the new environment of the Caribbean when it became mixed with the other imported languages. W e have also what is called nation language, which is the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in by the conquistadors. Finally, we have the remnants of ancestral languages still persisting in the Caribbean. There is Amerindian, which is active in certain parts of Central America but not in the Caribbean because the Amerindians are a destroyed people, and their languages were practically destroyed. We have Hindi, spoken by some of the more traditional East Indians who live in the Caribbean, and there are also varieties of Chinese. And, miraculously, there are survivals of African languages still persisting in the Caribbean. So we have that spectrum?that prism?of languages similar to the kind of structure that Dennis described for South Africa. Now, I have to give you some kind of background to the development of these languages, the historical development of this plurality, because I can't take it for granted that you know and understand the history of the Caribbean.
Th e Caribbean is a set of islands stretching out from Florida in a mighty curve. You must know of the Caribbean at least from television, at least now with hurricane David (?) coming right into it. Th e islands stretch out on an arc of some two thousand miles from Florida through the Atlantic to the South American coast, and they were originally inhabited by Amerindian people, Taino, Siboney, Carib, Arawak. In 1492, Columbus 'discovered' (as it is said) the Caribbean, and with that discovery came the intrusion of European culture and peoples and a fragmentation of the original Amerindian culture. We had Europe 'nationalizing' itself into Spanish, French, English and Dutch so that people had to start speaking (and thinking) in four metropolitan languages rather than possibly a single native language. Then, with the destruction of the Amerindians, which took place within 30 years of Columbus' discovery (one million dead a year), it was necessary for the Europeans to import new labour bodies into the Caribbean. An d the most convenient form of labour was the labour on the very edge of the trade winds?the labour on the edge of the slave trade winds, the labour on the edge of the hurricane, the labour on the edge of West Africa?. And so the peoples of Ashanti,3 Congo, Nigeria, from all that mighty coast of western Africa were imported into the Caribbean. An d we had the arrival in that area of a new language structure. It consisted of many languages, but basically they had a common semantic and stylistic form. Wha t these languages had to do, however, was to submerge themselves, because officially the conquering peoples?the Spaniards, the English, the French, and the Dutch?di d not wish to hear people speaking Ashanti or any
2. South African poet (b. 1924). 3. Region in present-day central Ghana.
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BRATHWAITE: [NATION LANGUAGE] / 252 5
of the Congolese languages. So there was a submergence of this imported language. Its status became one of inferiority. Similarly, its speakers were slaves. They were conceived of as inferiors?nonhuman, in fact?. But this very submergence served an interesting intercultural purpose, because although people continued to speak English as it was spoken in Elizabethan times and on through the Romantic and Victorian ages, that English was, nonetheless, still being influenced by the underground language, the submerged language that the slaves had brought. And that underground language was itself constantly transforming itself into new forms. It was moving from a purely African form to a form that was African, but which was adapting to the new environment and to the cultural imperatives of the European languages. And it was influencing the way in which the French, Dutch, and Spanish spoke their own languages. So there was a very complex process taking place which is now beginning to surface in our literature.
In the Caribbean, as in South Africa (and in any area of cultural imperialism for that matter), the educational system did not recognize the presence of these various languages. What our educational system did was to recognize and maintain the language of the conquistador?the language of the planter, the language of the official, the language of the Anglican preacher?. It insisted that not only would English be spoken in the anglophone Caribbean, but that the educational system would carry the contours of an English heritage. Hence, as Dennis said, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Jane Austen?British literature and literary forms, the models that were intimate to Great Britain, that had very little to do, really, with the environment and the reality of the Carib- bean?were dominant in the Caribbean educational system. People were forced to learn things that had no relevance to themselves. Paradoxically, in the Caribbean (as in many other 'cultural disaster' areas), the people educated in this system came to know more, even today, about English kings and queens than they do about our own national heroes, our own slave rebels?the people who helped to build and to destroy our society?. We are more excited by English literary models, by the concept of, say, Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood, than we are by Nanny of the Maroons,4 a name some of us didn't even know until a few years ago. And in terms of what we write, our perceptual models, we are more conscious (in terms of sensibility) of the falling of snow for instance?the models are all there for the falling of the snow?than of the force of the hurricanes that take place every year. In other words, we haven't got the syllables, the syllabic intelligence, to describe the hurricane, which is our own experience; whereas we can describe the imported alien experience of the snowfall. It is that kind of situation that we are in.
Now the Creole adaptation to all this is the child who, instead of writing in an essay 'The snow was falling on the fields of Shropshire'5 (which is what our children literally were writing until a few years ago, below drawings they made of white snow fields and the corn-haired people who inhabited such a landscape), wrote 'The snow was falling on the cane fields.' The child had not yet reached the obvious statement that it wasn't snow at all, but rain
