I have written often enough, and fervently believe, that cricket is an important element in our lives binding us closely together as West Indian nation – though I have to admit that recent West Indies cricket has displayed hardly any resemblance at all in the skill, camaraderie, spirit, pride and commitment to the game which once, win or lose, filled me with joyful anticipation, exhilaration and a sense of heightened patriotism.
But I write now of another imaginative possession which defines our nationhood even more basically than cricket.
West Indians are confident – or rather know instinctively – that they share a broad intellectual and cultural unity, but this resists neat definition. When it comes to exact description it is not easy because the sceptic can always point to values and aspects of culture and heritage and intellectual achievement which are not held in common and which, therefore, could define us as being different if the point was pressed. At an extreme, what might an Indo-West Indian of Hindu religion and attached to the heritage and customs of the Indian sub-continent possibly have in common with an Afro-West Indian of Christian religion whose attachment by ancestry to the continent of Africa and its heritage is essential to his make-up?
In fact, one thing they have in common is language, the English language either in its standard form or in one of other of its adaptations. Even in their differences there is important common grounding in the basic language they – and all West Indians – have inherited. This is an indication why, of all the elements in our heritage, the English language, the familiar tongue we have willy-nilly inherited and adapted to our various uses and to describe our varied experiences and beliefs, is so absolutely essential in grounding our nationhood. We cannot retreat into fortresses where we are finally isolated. The opportunity to debate, argue, explain, refute, intellectualise, clarify, quarrel – communication at a fundamental level – is basic to the grounding of any nation.
It is, I believe, the language we have in common which provides our truest, most solid, bedrock. Our histories, ethnicities, customs, religions, cultures, myths, legends and lore have a shared accessibility in the language we use both in our everyday life and in our greatest literary creations. West Indian cultural and intellectual activities, in all their variety and astonishing creativity, are expressed in one language which no West Indian is excluded from understanding.
This is so obvious that it may be in danger of being forgotten or its importance minimized by being taken for granted. It doesn’t often occur to us that being able to breathe is essential to life. But it is a vital thing that a Clive Thomas and a Ken Ramchand in their scholarship, a Wilson Harris and a VS Naipaul and Martin Carter and a Derek Walcott in the literature they create, a Louise Bennett and a Sam Sevlon and a Paul Keens-Douglas in their dialect story-telling, a Bob Marley and a Mighty Sparrow in the songs and lyrics which have captivated the world, all express themselves and their genius out of a common tongue.
This is vital not only because all these are perceived from outside as reflecting in their universal genius a West Indian identity and we are proud of that, but also because we ourselves see them as joined in a West Indian enterprise – they belong to us – which is our birthright more intimately than anyone else’s.
Even in the visual and performing arts English is the common currency of initiation, explication, interpretation, and historical recording which confers a common West Indian status and identifies the genius as West Indian.
I do not think anything can be more important than this. In a paper presented to the Second Conference of West Indian Literature at Mona as long ago as May, 1982, VS Reid exhorted us never to forego the extraordinary benefit we enjoy in our possession of the English language.
“In our search for the tap root, let us not sever the nourishing laterals…We who talk, and talk quite sensibly too, of working and playing and trading with the world, must be able to communicate with the world. We are heirs to a heritage brought by our blood-sweat-and-tears. We are heirs to the English language. A good bit of luck. It is the closest approximation to an international tongue that has ever existed. Millions in the world would give anything to be able to speak it. Maybe it is the only plus salvaged from savage slavery, much of whose residual we need to be quit of; but desuetude here is self-defeating.”
English, after all, is by now our own language. We have inherited it and then enriched it, added to it, adjusted it to our needs and inspirations, built it into our shapes and sun gardens, shifted it right and left, up and down, loud as trumpets, soft as whispering, until it suits us in all our West Indian guises. We have not always felt constrained by Benjamin Franklin’s admonition to “write with the learned, pronounce with the vulgar.” We have certainly believed, with Walt Whitman, that “Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.”
The packaging of information and entertainment is the fastest growing industry in the world and the extraordinary fact is that 80 per cent of the information currently travelling around the world is in English. The economic and cultural advantages which expert possession of the English language confers are therefore enormous. If we neglect the assiduous cultivation of this most prized possession we throw away a natural benefit which others devote huge amounts of GDP to win.
It is essential, therefore, that we preserve and nurture this common inheritance. At the most basic level this means, surely, giving an extremely high priority to the teaching of English throughout the educational system. This seems not to be appreciated by those in authority in the West Indies. The CXC results in English, for example, throughout the region are uniformly poor. Such results are not only a recipe for semi-literacy among the working population but also indicate that perhaps the most potent of all the legacies we enjoy in common is being neglected.
In our primary school classrooms much more attention should be devoted to giving our children a love of reading and an early facility in using language. In our secondary schools the teaching of literature, as well as English language, must find a more prominent place. The imagination of our young people must be fired early by the infinite potential and universal outreach of our common language and the immense achievements, not least West Indian, of its literature.
If there is a shortfall in quality or quantity of English teachers in the schools let us realize that we are short-changing our children in a most fundamental way and undermining the bedrock on which the building of a nation depends.
