Dear Editor,
In mi ool eej a guin bak to skuul. Translated into Guyanese Creolese this means ‘In my old age I am going back to school.’ I hope tutors Charlene Wilkinson and Dhaniswary Jaganath will give a passing grade to this public attempt to flaunt my new skill.
It’s the special ‘Aliidee Skuul’ (Vacation School); Introduction to Writing in Guyanese Creole, sponsored by the Department of Language and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Education and Humanities, University of Guyana. From this writer’s perspective it’s a matter of pride as well as a delight to be navigating the contortions of the English language while minting – defining – the identity of our lyrical Guyanese Creole; the resistance of some academics and intellectuals to this process continues to baffle me.
The author Frederick Kang’ethe Iraki, in an insightful discourse on ‘Language And Culture’ http://scholar.google.com/ scholar?q=Language+and+Culture explores the interplay between language and culture as well as how these two constructs evolve with time and concludes that:
“Language gives full expression to people’s values and norms, and since values and norms are dynamic by nature, language has to be in tandem with cultural transformations.”
It occurs to me therefore – that the formulation of a definitive Guyanese language is an essential aspect of Guyana’s quest to achieve the ideal state of social vohesion in our national strategy.
Consider all those rules the English language imposes (many times they just don’t compute) and the problem facing our children who’re expected to sufficiently grasp the intricacies of this ‘foreign’ language in order to pass CXC and other exams, with no attempt define the association with the vernacular in which they express themselves daily in their homes and in playgrounds with their peers. Just think about all those inanities – such as The Mighty Sparrow highlighted in his Calypso ‘Dan is the Man in the Van’ in which he accused English textbook author Cutteridge of “trying to keep us in ignorance”; then imagine us sitting there in the UG Education Lecture Theatre laughing at it all while preparing to express ourselves in writing in our own inimical Guyanese fashion.
Sparrow said: “…‘if mih head was bright I woulda been a damn fool.” Those words symbolize the travesty of the British colonial era with its imposition of mindlessness, still (incredibly) informing the ‘failure’ of our education system more than half a century after Independence.
In our first Guyanese Writing in Guyanese Creolese class on Monday June 12, 2017, we wrote (translated) Sparrow’s words thus – “ef mi hed woz brait a wuda bin a daam fuul”.
Enriching this experience is the value added fact that one of the tutors, Dhanaiswary Jaganath, is a Jamaican who occasionally shares relative perspectives from her national dialect.
Bravo to UG’s Department of Language Studies Faculty of Education and Humanities.
Yours faithfully,
Joan Cambridge