Book Review: Jamaica Talk by Frederic G. Cassidy

Jamaica Talk:

Three Hundred Years Of the English Language in Jamaica

by Frederic G. Cassidy

      If you’ve ever been to Jamaica, or if you’ve spent any time around members of the Jamaican diaspora community, you might have had a certain type of experience. As the conversation starts you notice the Jamaican accent. Some words are pronounced differently, Some of the grammar is different from what you ordinarily hear although you can still understand what is being said. The language is musical and you’ll probably be charmed by the easy going and friendly manner of the person you’re talking to. I’ve seen many women swoon when they hear a handsome Jamaican man speak. And then another Jamaican person comes along and, without warning, they’re speaking in some language you can’t comprehend even though you think you might be hearing some words that sound like English. What has happened is that they have codeswitched from Standard English to Jamaican Creole, also called “Jamaican Patois” or “patwa” as it is sometimes spelled.

Many speakers of English as a first language find Jamaican Creole to sound cool 0r interesting. Closed minded people, on the other hand, will think of it as a corrupted form of “pure” or “proper” English. Jamaicans simply think of Jamaican English as their normal way of speaking while linguists see it as a fascinating source of scientific study for a wide variety of reasons. The latter two catagories are of high importance for Frederic G. Cassidy, the half-Jamaican and half-Canadian linguist who wrote Jamaica Talk, a pioneering study of this subject matter.

A creole language is defined as deriving from a standard language spoken by the dominating colonial class. Creoles can start as pidgin languages, develop their own rules of grammar and pronunciation, and then get passed down to the following generations as a first language. Creole languages never fully separate from the original language and so something like Haitian Creole is classified as a non-standard variety of French even though native speakers of French might not be able to understand it. The same can be said for Jamaican Creole. But Cassidy explains that the dividing line between Standard English and Jamaican Creole is not easy to pinpoint. The two varieties exist as end points on a continuum rather than being distinct entities unto themselves. Eductaed Jamaicans will be more fluent in Standard English while rural, uneducated Jamaicans will be more fluent in Creole. Most Jamaicans speak the mesolect, a mixture of both, adjusting their linguistic styles according to who they are speaking to.

It would be impossible to discuss Jamaican language without exploring its etymology in the context of Caribbean history. The original inhabitants of Jamaica were Arawaks. Later on, colonialists from Spain and Portugal imported African people, mostly from the west coast and the Kongo river basin. Many of these slaves did not have a common language since they came from tribes or villages speaking mutually exclusive languages. British colonialists came later, bringing over larger and larger numbers of slaves over two centuries of rule. Since work, especially in the sugarcane farming and processing industries, depended on communication for the purpose of instruction and domination, the colonialists and Africans had to negotiate linguistically by combining elements of African, English, and some other European languages to functionally run plantations. Colonial Jamaica was like a laboratory for the creation of new linguistic patterns, utilizing chance, trial and error to birth Jamaican Creole as we know it today.

Cassidy provides a good explanation of Jamaican prosody and pronunciation. The languages spoken by the West African people brought to Jamaica, like Twi or Ewe, are phonemically tonal whereas English isn’t. English is, however, a syntactically tonal language. Similar to Asian languages like Chinese, Thai, Lao, and Vietnamese, the meaning of a word in African tonal languages changes according to variations in rising, falling, neutral, or wavy pitches. A word like “ma” in Chinese can have four different meanings according to the tone used by the speaker. English uses grammatical tones to mark things like questions which are marked as such by rising tones at the end of the sentence. West African languages do not have these syntactic tones. So when speakers of languages using phonemic tones speak a language that doesn’t, but does have tones in its syntax, the result is a spoken language that some might say has a musical quality to it as Jamaican English does. Cassidy comments on the way Jamaican English has lilts and drawls. And since tones in West African languages are mostly carried by the vowels, this effects the phonetics of consonants in their linguistic environments too.

I don’t like to say that this linguistic environment corrupts Standard English pronunciation because that implies that speakers of Jamaican Creole are peaking an inferior variety of English whereas they are actually speaking the language they learn from birth, a language that has developed over three centuries to meet the needs of the people who speak it. The scientific view is that there is no right or wrong English, no good or bad English, and no pure or impure language of any kind. There is only English as it is spoken according to the needs of the people who speak it. It is that organic, pragmatic form of spoken language that interests linguists rather than an idealized version of a pure language that no one actually speaks.

Cassidy also examines other aspects of phonology like ellipsis or intrusive sounds. Notable is the absence of the voiced and unvoiced /th/ that occurs in Standard English. A word like “with” thereby gets pronounced as “wid” or “wi” in Jamaican Creole. Combined with the ellipsis, or absence, of consonant clusters, “thing” is pronounced as “tin”. Consonant cluster ellipsis, intrusive glides, and vowel shifts also can make a word like “going” become realized as “gwine” in spoken Creole, while “boy” becomes “bwai”.

Syntax is another matter. The bigots and conservatives have made the claim that Jamaican Creole has no grammar; the defenders of the language argue that it is just as grammatically complex as Standard English even though it follows different syntactical structures. Some differences are the absence of possessive plural case markers, the /’s/. Instead the gender neutral pronoun “him” is used as a possessive marker attached to the noun. “Bob drives John’s car” in Jamaican Creole is “Bob drive John car him”. Creole also has an absence of word-final /-s/ inflections to mark plurality. Instead the pronoun “them”, pronounced “dem” is inserted after the pluralized noun so that “Bob has bananas” becomes “Bob ha banana dem”. Plurals can also be formed by repeating the noun so that “He has cars” is realized as “Him ha car car”. Creole doesn’t account for nominative or accusative cases with either case markers or syntactic order and accusative pronouns are used for nominative nouns. Pronouns are also gender-neutral with no distinction for the “he/she” dichotomy. The masculine “him” is used universally. Therefore “He goes home” in Standard English is “Him gwine home” in Creole can also mean “She goes home” depending on context. A sentence like “Him dri fi home him fi ca him” would be confusing to a non-speaker of Jamaican Creole, but those who speak the language would hear “He/she drives to his/her home in his/her car”.

Jamaican Creole verbs also have no inflection, nor do they have tense or conjugation. Auxiliary verbs like “is”, “go”, “have”, “could, “can” and so on are also absent with the exception of those used as time markers such as “will”, pronounced “wi” to mark future tense. Thus “Bob will walk to his house” gets spoken as “Bob wi wak fi hass him”. Rather than using gerunds, or the word-final /-ing/ verb forms, to indicate continuous action, verbs are instead repeated. So “Bob is eating mangoes” becomes “Bob nyam nyam mango dem”. “Nyam” is the Jamaican Creole verb for “eat” and is probably of West African origin.

And there is so much more. Syntax in Jamaican Creole bears a lot of similarity to some languages in Southeast Asia especially to Bahasa Malay-Indonesian which itself is an invented language based on a Creole that was spoken by sea merchants around the Malaysian peninsula and the archipelagos of the Philippines and Indonesia. Such similarities raise questions about the formation of creoles as to whether there are universal patterns in their formation or not.

The beginning chapters on history, etymology, syntax, prosody, and phonology actually take up a thin section of this book. More than half of its chapters are categorical documentations of the Jamaican Creole lexicon or vocabulary. Each chapter accounts for a sub-category of the lexicon such as occupations, medicine, farming, tools, food, plants, animals, and geography. Some explanations are given for the probable etymology of words in English, Spanish, Portuguese, or one of the many West African languages brought over during colonialism with Twi and Ewe being those that Cassidy cites most often. While these chapters on the lexicon are endlessly fascinating to read, they are less scientifically rigorous than the other chapters at the beginning of the book. Some of these vocabulary items are now obsolete since Cassidy depends heavily on written texts from the colonial era to catalog and document the Creole lexicon.

Frederic G. Cassidy maintains a fine balance in Jamaica Talk. Parts of it may be challenging for the non-linguist because of the technical language he uses in the earlier chapters. But this technical language is not overused and some of it is well-explained and illustrated with diagrams to make it more clear. Most of the book, especially the sections on the Jamaican Creole lexicon, are easy to read and use very little technical language. It is successfully written for linguists and non-linguists alike. It is also of historical value since Jamaican Creole is such a tragically under-represented language in the linguistics field and little has been written about it before or after the publication of Jamaica Talk. Also it was researched and written around the time Jamaica gained its independence as a nation from England and the pride in this West Indian island nation’s culture radiates out of Cassidy’s writing.

He would definitely say that Jamaican Creole, like reggae and jerk chicken, is a national treasure. Jamaica is a beautiful country with its beaches and jungles. Even the alligators have a relaxed approach to life providing you aren’t around them at dinner time. But it’s also worth visiting for the people with their melodic language and easy going ways, at least as long as you don’t go wandering around Kingston alone at night and are careful around gangster war zones like Trench Town or Tivoli Gardens.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

 

Play It As It Lays

by Joan Didion

      There’s an old joke that goes, “How do you say ‘I love you’ in New York? Fuck you. How do you say ‘fuck you’ in California? I love you.” That’s the cultural climate in which Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays takes place. But while that cultural climate is important for the story, it isn’t the main point the author addresses.

Maria is one problem of a woman. She addresses the reader directly in the first person during the opening monologue. From that we learn about the novel’s two elemental metaphors: gambling and rattlesnakes. Maria approaches life as a game of chance. The gambler at the roulette wheel acts without agency over the ball; it just lands where it lands and the player has to accept the result whatever that may be. The gambler “plays it as it lays”. The other, more subtle metaphor is that life will bite you whether you like it or not. Rattlesnakes are hiding, biting anyone who is unlucky enough to cross their paths. But rattlesnakes don’t ordinarily attack people. They only bite when provoked so the best way to avoid getting bitten is to play it as it lays. Just avoid getting involved. Knowing this puts Maria into a permanent state of anxiety. After getting bit once, she is expecting another bite to come at some random time. One other detail we learn from Mariah’s opening monologue is that she doesn’t care at all about motivations or explanations. What happens happens and the reason behind it doesn’t matter. Everything is on the surface. Joan Didion, as a master of irony, uses Mariah’s monologue to explain what motivates the protagonist to approach life without the understanding of her own motivations.

Maria’s opening monologue is followed by two other monologues. One is that of her closest friend Helene. The other is that of her husband Carter. From these two we learn that neither of them understand Maria, but they both perceive her as mentally unstable. And although they are the two closest people in her life, both of them are emotionally distant and more like caretakers who put up with her out of a sense of duty more than from genuine interest. There are also subtle foreshadowings of the affair between Helene and Carter, as well as the death of Helene’s husband BZ, all of which culminate at the end of the story.

As a writing technique, the three separate introductory monologues function effectively in presenting three separate perspectives on Maria. This may sound too obvious to be worth mentioning, but what is unique about it is the way the novel shifts back to Maria in the first person throughout the rest of the book. Keeping this in mind, the reader follows Maria’s subjectivity through the lens of two other characters who see her from inaccurate perspectives she can not see herself. Considering that Didion’s style in this novel is called minimalist by some, the perception of depth and multi-dimensionalism in the narrative are heightened. This minimalist irony is taken a step further in that the people surrounding Maria in her life aren’t much more introspective than she is. They aren’t deep thinking. They aren’t analytical people. They just do what they do and when Maria doesn’t make sense to them, they leave her to herself and do soemthing else.

So who are these people? Carter is a film maker. Maria is his wife. They live in Los Angeles. Maria has starred in two movies, but mostly she doesn’t do much. In a haze of tranquilizers and alcohol, she lays by the pool or drives endlessly on the LA freeways in her corvette while listening to the radio. The main source of meaning in her otherwise pointless life is her daughter who lives in a home for mentally disabled children.

One movie Maria starred in was a short experimental film made by Carter. The whole film is close up shots of Maria going about her daily life. She is the only element of the film. The other movie she starred in was made by BZ, Helene’s husband who is also a film maker who sometimes delves into directing pornography. The latter movie stars Maria as the woman in a biker gangbang. BZ describes it as a movie where the female subject is nothing more than a prop since the gangbang is all about the bikers using her body to fulfill their homosexual desires for each other.

Both films are pivotal in understanding Maria because they negate her as a human being in two fundamentally opposing ways. Carter’s film is entirely about her surface, showing only how she appears and what she does with no examination of her subjective life. In the other film, her humanity is negated because, as BZ describes it, she disappears in a screen full of cocks. Inexplicably, Maria claims that BZ’s biker movie is her favorite because it is the one in which her character has the most agency. It is an ironic statement coming from a woman who convinces herself she is refusing to exercise agency in her own life. I say “convincing herself” because she actually does display agency all throughout the book.

Maria does exercise agency when she goes to visit her daughter unannounced at the home for disabled children. The caretaker at the home, however, berates her for not making an appointment because a spontaneous visit like that disrupts her routine and can upset the girl’s stability. Maria also chooses to take her daughter to a Christmas celebration at her ffriends’ mansion, but this results in disaster when her daughter becomes violent.

Maria also exercises agency when she takes trips to Las Vegas to escape from the miseries of life in Los Angeles. On one trip, she randomly encounters her godfather in a casino. The man gives her his phone number and post office box address so she can contact him later. On another trip back to Las Vegas, she tries calling him only to find out the number is invalid. She tries to contact him again by waiting at the post office for several days in hopes he will show up to retrieve his mail from his PO box. But after waiting, Maria learns that the box is rented, not by her godfather, but by an insane woman who doesn’t know him.

Another significant example of Maria exercising agency is when she gets pregnant while cheating on her husband. Carter gives her a choice between having an abortion or divorce. He qualifies the latter option by telling her that he will get custody over their daughter if she chooses to break up with him. Although Carter’s intention is manipulative, he does offer a choice. Since Maria’s daughter is the only thing she cares about in her life, she chooses the abortion. That procedure, illegal at the time of publication, proved to be psychologically traumatic for Maria. Here we see how a pattern in her life emerges: every time Maria tries to exert control over her circumstances, something rotten happens as a result. Every time the rattlesnake bites.

That is a pattern that explains why Maria is the way she is. She runs away from choices and responsibilities because every choice she makes damages her. She numbs the pain with drugs and alcohol in an attempt to erase her mind and emotions. She becomes anhedonic, unable to feel pain or pleasure, living the life of a lobotomy victim or a zombie. For her this is a defense mechanism against the entanglements of the world; for the others in her life, it is a sign of mental illness in a woman having a nervous breakdown. Probably both perspectives are accurate.

And yet another side of Maria is revealed when she visits the supermarket. In the store, she recognizes a crowd of other Southern Californian women whose lives are just as empty and pointless as hers. She recognizes them because they all pirchase the same grocery items. Therefore she consciously chooses to buy groceries that differ from them in an attempt to differentiate herself. It is a form of camouflage. She wants to conceal her similarities to the other lonely shoppers, but there is also a touch of pride in her cover as though she wants to individuate herself in some way. Since the other people in the store can’t see her motivations, if they even notice her at all, this can be little more than a private pleasure. No matter how trivial it is, it is still an attempt at clinging on to some sense of self-worth. Maria also takes a small turn in her rejections of casual sex in Las Vegas towards the end of the novel.

But any subtle changes in Maria are destined to go unnoticed by Helene, Carter, BZ or anybody else around her because they are inattentive to her feelings to begin with. Her husband and friends go out to a remote location in the desert of Nevada and drag her along with them because Carter worries she is losing her grip on reality. Once there, they leave her in the hotel room during the days when they are on a movie set filming a western. Maria mostly stays in a drugged stupor while staying in bed. She finds common ground with BZ who comes to her in despair because Helen and Carter are having an affair and not trying to hide it. Both BZ and Helene have hit rock bottom and BZ tries to convince Maria to overdose on pills with him. He dies in bed beside her but she lives because she refused to kill herself. Suicide would entail taking control over her situation so she does nothing. Ironically, playing it as it lays is what saves her in the end.

On one level, this novel is about the shallow lives of rich people in Hollywood working in the film industry. Maria is surrounded by friends and family acting out of self-interest and brute instinct without any awareness of what is going on with the people around them. Maria’s relationship to them is toxic and dysfunctional. It is through their ignorance that they negate her humanity, treating her like little more than an appendage. And yet they say they love her. Joan Didion’s opinion of the upper crust in California is made clear. On another level, this novel is a character study of a woman who doesn’t have much character whilE in the middle of an existential crisis. But Maria isn’t really on a downward spiral because she was at the bottom to begin with. That’s a shocking statement about somebody with wealth, privilege, and an endless amount of leisure time. She also tries to negate her own humanity by refusing to take control by avoiding choices and letting life happen to her. Despite that, her humanity keeps emerging. Her attempts at self-negation are deliberate, but what I think Joan Didion is demonstrating is that there is something about humanity that can’t be submerged, negated, or denied out of existence no matter how hard people may try. Maria attempts to delude herself into thinking she has no self-awareness or capacity to choose, and yet she keeps making choices in matters that reveal she does have some kind of self-knowledge, albeit self-knowledge that is partially hidden from her conscious mind.

Play It As It Lays could be a 1970s American echo of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, the novel I would argue is the most sadly misinterpreted book of the 20^th century. Maria is a lot like Mersault in that she lives the life of a nihilist. It is a life that lacks quality because, like Mersault, she avoids taking control and minimizes her willingness to make choices. Both characters live a pointless, empty existence. But just as so many readers misinterpret Mersault as being some kind of hero, I fear a lot of readers will misinterpret Maria as being a woman who is hopelessly lost in the world. It all depends on how conscientious you are in paying attention to subtle details. If you pay close enough attention, you will notice the abundance of times Joan Didion mentions rattlesnakes in this story. If you read quickly and don’t pay attention, you won’t. If you read carefully enough to be aware of all the rattlesnakes, you should be able to see all the subtle signs that Maria has more agency than you realize. In that there is humanity and in that there is hope. If you only see Maria through the eyes of Helene and Carter then you haven’t understood Joan Didion’s message. The less like them you are, the better off you will be in life anyhow.