/CORRECTED REPEAT/CULTURE-JAMAICA: Today’s Main Event, Patois vs. Queen’s English

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Howard Campbell

KINGSTON, Dec 11 2001 (IPS) - Patois, the Jamaican dialect, has consistently stirred heated debate here as to whether and what its place should be in modern Jamaica. A U.S. college student, however, is keen to make it fashionable among his compatriots.

Andrew Zouk, 23, is the author of “Learn To Speak Jamaican Patois (Potwah)”, published in the United States in September, three months before Jamaica became embroiled in its latest argument over the dialect’s relevance.

Zouk decided to write the volume after compiling a list of fragments of the dialect he had picked up from Jamaican friends while on a trip here in 2000.

In time, he discovered he had enough information to write a book that would benefit U.S. readers interested in Jamaican culture.

With a Jamaican girlfriend as his translator, Zouk completed the book in mid-2001 and has marketed it independently on his own website.

Zouk put a lot of emphasis on pronunciation, which he says is missing from similar books. “What I noticed about those books was that they were written by Jamaicans. There needed to be an American to teach Americans,” said Zouk.

Zouk’s book is an easily read 92-page manual that provides not only definitions and pronunciation guides but also sentence structure and choice expressions ranging from profanity to sexual slang.

The Brigham Young University business major’s debut book has won acceptance among the reggae community, earning an extended run on the Reggae Gateway website and reportedly has sold well among U.S. tourists and college students.

If only it was that easy in Jamaica.

In the past three months, the old argument as to whether patois use among average Jamaicans should be encouraged has resurfaced, proof that the medium of expression remains controversial in the very homeland of Louise Bennett, who is revered by most Jamaicans for championing native folklore during the years of British rule.

Recently, Kevin O’Brien Chang, a columnist with the Jamaica Observer newspaper, fanned the flames when he wrote that it should be mandatory for Jamaicans to learn Standard English. This, he said, would enhance the population’s intellect.

“The inability of many Jamaicans to express themselves understandably in English may not be our biggest problem but it is surely the one with the most obvious answer,” Chang wrote.

“Is it not embarrassing to hear some of our athletes and music stars struggling in a mangled, pseudo-American twang when interviewed abroad?” Chang asked.

He continued: “Part of the reason for Bob Marley and Shaggy’s international success is that while their accents are definitely Jamaican, the westerners who buy their records can understand their lyrics. People relate only to what they can comprehend.”

Chang – a product of the Jamaican middle class – has come under attack from compatriots at home and abroad for his stance. One man, writing from Canada, stated that patois was “our language” and accused the columnist of being a colonialist.

The shoe was on the other foot in the mid-1990s, when Carolyn Cooper, a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, advocated use of patois among Jamaicans. To drive her point home, she wrote a newspaper column for two years in broken English, something that did not sit well with high school teachers and the middle class.

“Learn To Speak Jamaican Patois”, which started out as a personal project for Andrew Zouk, is the latest effort to demystify a tongue that has never been mastered by Hollywood’s finest actors. Equally, critics cite U.S. audiences’ failure to understand patois as the biggest obstacle to reggae attracting a mass audience in the United States.

“The Harder They Come” and “Rockers”, Jamaican movies that were made in the 1970s, are still shown overseas with sub-titles. And Hollywood films with a Jamaican theme, like “How Stella Got Her Groove Back”, still have U.S. actors bumbling over the patois.

The embattled dialect got a big boost this year in the form of dancehall star Shaggy, whose totally Jamaican album “Hot Shots” has sold more than ten million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling CDs of 2001.

Who knows, “Hot Shots” could even provide a marketing peg for Zouk’s book.