Miss Lou: Louise Bennett and Jamaican Culture

By Mervyn Morris

The career of Louise Bennett ('Miss Lou') is an essential component in any reckoning of Jamaican culture. This book offers a brief account of her life (1919-2006): a story of challenges and blessings, of a journey towards national and international acclaim. It draws on a variety of sources, including interviews, archives, academic theses, documentary projects, recorded performances and Louise Bennett's own writings.
It also offers an assessment of Miss Lou's contribution to the arts. She was a key figure in the transformation of the Little Theatre Movement pantomime; a generous, well trained actor; an expert creator of Anancy stories; a television personality regularly engaging with children; a distinctive radio commentator; a laughing poet evaluating attitudes, sometimes with complex irony.
Miss Lou used Standard English comfortably in many contexts, and did not wish the country rid of it; but she chose in most of her creative work to employ the language most Jamaicans speak. Her ebullient delight in Jamaican Creole spread joy and promoted respect. A diligent researcher into Jamaican heritage, she acknowledged its various streams, but was especially concerned with continuities out of Africa.
When the Asian culture and the European culture
buck up on African culture in the Caribbean people,
we stir them up and blend them to we flavour,
we shake them up and move them to we beat,
we wheel them and we tu'n them and we rock them
and we sound them and we temper them,
and lawks, the rhythm sweet!
Her name is frequently invoked by Jamaicans, especially in relation to national identity. As 'Jamaica's First Lady of Comedy' she delighted audiences in many parts of the world, and her publications have been praised internationally.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Signal Books
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781909930117

Mervyn Morris

Mervyn Morris (b. 1937 in Kingston, Jamaica) studied at the University College of the West Indies and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He taught at the University of the West Indies, retiring in 2002 as Professor of Creative Writing and West Indian Literature. He is the author of ‘Is English We Speaking’ and Other Essays (1999), Making West Indian Literature (2005) and Miss Lou: Louise Bennett and Jamaican Culture (2014). His collections of poetry are The Pond (1973, revised 1997), Shadowboxing (1979), Examination Centre (1992), Vestiges (a limited edition, 1996), On Holy Week (1976, 1993, 2016), and I been there, sort of: New and Selected Poems (2006). A Poetry Archive recording of him reading became available in 2011. He received Jamaica’s Order of Merit in 2009, and was appointed Poet Laureate in 2014.

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Title page

Miss Lou

Louise Bennett and Jamaican Culture

Mervyn Morris

Signal Books

Oxford

Publisher information

First published in the UK in 2014 by

Signal Books Limited

36 Minster Road

Oxford OX4 1LY

www.signalbooks.co.uk

2014 digital version by Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

© Mervyn Morris, 2014

The right of Mervyn Morris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. The whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copyright owner.

Cover Design: Tora Kelly

Cover Images: © Maria LaYacona

Dedication

To

Fabian Coverley

and

Judge Pamela Appelt

Acknowledgements

Thanks especially to Pamela Appelt and Fabian Coverley, executors of the Louise Bennett Coverley estate, for granting early access to material in Canada and for permission to quote from Louise Bennett’s work.

I am also indebted to Mary Jane Hewitt, whose dissertation on Zora Neale Hurston and Louise Bennett has been an invaluable resource; and to Ruth Minott Egglestone who shared a chronological file on Louise Bennett and Eric Coverley which she created while researching the Jamaican Pantomime.

I am grateful for the help of many other individuals, including Peter Ashbourne, Yvonne Brewster, Gracie Cameron, Alvin Campbell, Frankie Campbell, Grub Cooper, Dorothy Cunningham, Leonie Forbes, Linda Gambrill, Tony Gambrill, Nick Gillard, Barbara Gloudon, Colleen Hall, Joan Andrea Hutchinson, Rosie Johnston, Emily Zobel Marshall, Lois Kelly Miller, Easton Lee, Tony McFarlane, Louis Marriott, Alma MockYen, Oliver Samuels, Maureen Warner-Lewis and Marjorie Whylie.

I also wish to thank

The British Broadcasting Corporation Archives, Caversham

The British Library, London

The Institute of Jamaica

The Jamaican Language Unit, University of the West Indies, Mona

The Little Theatre Movement, Jamaica

McMaster University Library, Hamilton

The National Library, Jamaica

Talawa Theatre Company, London

The University of the West Indies Library, Mona

The University of the West Indies Press

Quotation

I have found a medium through which I can pretend to be laughing.

- Louise Bennett

Permissions

The author and the publishers thank the National Library of Jamaica, the Gleaner Company, the Jamaica Tourist Board, the Little Theatre Movement, Dr Owen Minott and the Louise Bennett-Coverley Estate for permission to reproduce photographs

Introduction

When Louise Bennett died in July 2006, she was mourned internationally. Substantial obituaries (not only in Jamaica and the Caribbean but also in New York, Toronto, London and other places) extolled her extraordinary contribution. ‘Miss Lou’ had lived an inspirational life as poet, researcher and actor, spreading delight in Jamaican heritage and showing that the language most Jamaicans speak - Jamaican Creole (‘dialect’, ‘patois’, ‘nation language’) - is worthy of respect.

‘Jamaica’s First Lady of Comedy’, she was an expert performer who fulfilled engagements in many parts of the world. She communicated effectively even with people not familiar with Jamaican Creole. She would give the gist of an item in Standard English before launching into the Creole, and find that very soon the audience was responding well. Various recordings[1] confirm that, even in her seventies, she had formidable energy and a charismatic ability to connect.

Her voice was wonderfully flexible, changing pitch and texture as the moment required. As with her voice, so with her body language. Although she had an ample figure, she was remarkably light on her feet, and she could say volumes by the smallest physical alteration: the sudden, well-timed glance; the raising of the eyebrows perhaps; self-parody made lucid in a shallow bow.

She starred in pantomimes, was recorded singing Jamaican folksongs, did regular radio broadcasts and hosted a children’s television show. She taught drama. She wrote articles and gave lectures on Jamaican culture. She published books of poems and Anancy stories.

In the early decades of her career she was often taken to be merely an observant entertainer. She was always more than that. ‘I believe in laughter,’ she declared.[2] But she generated laughter of many kinds and for various purposes: corrective laughter, laughter as tolerant recognition, laughter as a coping mechanism - survival laughter.[3] Her work is usually assessing values and attitudes, and it is often ironic. She told Dennis Scott, ‘I have found a medium through which I can pretend to be laughing.’[4] When he asked her, ‘Is your work angry?’ she replied, ‘Not obviously. Not obviously angry.’[5]

As Edward Baugh has pointed out, ‘In her commitment to Creole and to the common people’s voice, Bennett was one of the most revolutionary poets of the 1940s, though she was generally not recognized as such.’[6] Working in the language of the majority, she had many indications of their approval; and some members of the cultural establishment were supportive. But at every stage in her career she was opposed by persons anxious to defend Standard English against what they considered the virus of Creole. Some people are not convinced that Jamaicans can, and ought to, master both languages.

Louise Bennett grew up in humble circumstances. Later, when - because, by then, she was educated and a property-owner - she was identified as ‘middle class’ she resisted the categorization: ‘I think I speak to all Jamaica,’ she said. ‘I can’t feel that I belong to any class or that I write for any class.’[7]

*

This book examines the legacy of ‘Miss Lou’ (the Hon. Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley, OM, OJ, MBE, Hon. D. Litt.). It traces her life from beginnings through to her local and international eminence, and discusses aspects of her work.

1 See Recommended Books and Recordings.

2 Quoted by Rex Nettleford in Louise Bennett, Jamaica Labrish (Kingston: Sangster’s Book Stores, 2005 reprint), p.10. See also ‘Bennett on Bennett’, Louise Bennett interviewed by Dennis Scott, Caribbean Quarterly Vol. 14 Nos 1 & 2, March-June 1968, p.97. The interview is reprinted in Hinterland ed. E. A. Markham (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1989), pp.45-50.

3 Humour becomes, as it were, the expression of a people’s will to live...’ (Nettleford) Jamaica Labrish, p.22.

4 ‘Bennett on Bennett’, p.97. Hinterland, p.45

5 ‘Bennett on Bennett’, p.101. Hinterland, p.50

6 Edward Baugh, in A History of Literature in the Caribbean Volume 2 ed. A. James Arnold (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001), p.246.

7 ‘Bennett on Bennett’, p.100. Hinterland, p.48.

1. Beginnings

Jamaica needed Louise Bennett when her talents emerged. She came into public view at a time when, across the Caribbean region, there had been widespread unrest and when, increasingly, colonial assumptions were being questioned. In January 1939 Norman Manley, one of the leaders of Jamaica’s national movement, said:

We can take everything that English education has to offer us, but ultimately we must reject the domination of her influence, because we are not English... nor should we ever want to be.

Instead we must dig deep into our own consciousness and accept and reject only those things of which we from our superior knowledge of our own cultural needs must be the best judges.

It takes political action to stir a country into a state of national consciousness, and the labour upheavals of the past year have resulted in the birth of organized national political life.

This political awakening... goes hand in hand with cultural growth, and this is the change that we are seeing taking place. Around us and before our very eyes are stirrings of the first shoots of a deeply felt ‘national’ artistic and intellectual life.[1]

Colonial education had induced in many Jamaicans - more than ninety per cent of us black and descended from Africans brought to the New World as slaves - a tendency to undervalue African elements in Jamaican culture. It became the lifelong project of Louise Bennett, working in a variety of modes, to increase the recognition of these elements, and to share her infectious pleasure in the lore and practices of most Jamaicans. Her life and work have contributed greatly - and continue to contribute - to Jamaican self-discovery and self-acceptance.

Though Jamaica’s official language is English, the mother tongue of most Jamaicans is Jamaican Creole, in which words borrowed or derived from various languages (English, predominantly) combine with structures retained from Africa. When Louise Bennett began writing and performing in the 1930s, the vernacular she employed was usually called dialect or patois/patwa. She was resisted by some