that
4. The Maroons were Africans and escaped slaves Ashanti (?) Queen Mother, is regarded as one of who, after running away or participating in suc-the greatest of the Jamaican freedom fighters cessful rebellions, set up autonomous societies [Brathwaite's note]. throughout plantation America in marginal and 5. Region of western England on the Welsh borcertainly inaccessible areas outside European der, written about by the English poet A. E. Housinfluence. . . . Nanny of the Maroons, an ex-man (1859-1936). '
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25 10 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
was probably falling on the cane fields. She was trying to have both cultures at the same time. But that is creolization.
Wha t is even more important, as we develop this business of emergent language in the Caribbean, is the actual rhythm and the syllables, the very body work, in a way, of the language. Wha t English has given us as a model for poetry, and to a lesser extent, prose (but poetry is the basic tool here), is the pentameter: 'The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.'6 There have, of course, been attempts to break it. An d there were other dominant forms like, for exam
7
ple, Beowulf (c. 750), The Seafarer, and what Langland (1322?-1400) had produced:
For trewthe telleth that love, is triacle of hevene; May no synne he on him sene. that useth that spise, And alle his werkes he wrougte. with love as him liste.
Or, from Piers the Plowman (which does not make it into Palgrave's Golden Treasury,8 but which we all had to 'do' at school) the haunting prologue:
In a somer seson. whan soft was the sonne
I shope me into shroudes. as I a shepe were
Which has recently inspired our own Derek Walcott to his first major nation language effort:
In idle August, while the sea soft,
and leaves of hrown islands stick to the rim
of this Caribbean, I blow out the light
by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion
to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.9
But by the time we reach Chaucer (1345?1400), the pentameter prevails.
Over in the New World, the Americans?Walt Whitman?tried to bridge or
to break the pentameter through a cosmic movement, a large movement of
sound. Cumming s tried to fragment it. An d Marianne Moore attacked it with
syllabics.1 But basically the pentameter remained, and it carries with it a cer
tain kind of experience, which is not the experience of a hurricane. The hur
ricane does not roar in pentameter. And that's the problem: how do you get a
rhythm that approximates the natural experience, the environmental experi
ence. We have been trying to break out of the entire pentametric model in
the Caribbean and to move into a system that more closely and intimately
approaches our own experience. So that is what we are talking about now.
It is nation language in the Caribbean that, in fact, largely ignores the pen
tameter. Nation language is the language that is influenced very strongly by the
African model, the African aspect of our Ne w World/Caribbean heritage.
English it may be in terms of its lexicon, but it is not English in terms of its syn
tax. An d English it certainly is not in terms of its rhythm and timbre, its own
sound explosion. In its contours, it is not English, even though the words, as
you hear them, would be English to a greater or lesser degree. An d this brings
us back to the question that some of you raised yesterday: can English be a rev
6. The opening line of 'Elegy Written in a Country Langland (ca. 1330-1387). Churchyard,' by the English poet Thomas Gray 9. Beginning of 'The Schooner Flight,' by the (1716-1771). Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott (b. 1930). 7. Poem in Old English. 1. Verses based on the number of syllables, not 8. Collection of songs and lyric poems published accents, in a line. E. E. Cummings (1894?1962), in London. Piers the Plowman: Middle English American poet. Marianne Moore (1887-1972), poem believed to have been written by William American poet.
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BRATHWAITE: CALYPSO / 252 7
olutionary language? And the lovely answer that came back was: it is not English that is the agent. It is not language, but people, who make revolutions.
I think, however, that language does really have a role to play here, certainly in the Caribbean. But it is an
