MERIDIONAL Revista Chilena de Estudios Latinoamericanos Número 10, abril-septiembre 2018, 215-225 “What Seems to Be Standard English Often Isn’t”: A Conversation on Language and West Indian Literature with Jamaican Poet Mervyn Morris Thomas Rothe Doctor (c) in Literature, conicyt fellow/Universidad de Chile, Chile
[email protected] Born in Kingston in 1937, Mervyn Morris is one of Jamaica’s most renowned poets and critics. Growing up in Jamaica, he witnessed the boom of West Indian literature in the 1950s and also the social changes brought on by Independence in 1962. He studied abroad at Oxford for three years on a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and returned to Jamaica in 1961, devoting the rest of his career to teaching. From 1970 to 2002, Morris was professor of West Indian Literature at the University of the West Indies (uwi), Mona, where he also taught Creative Writing. In 1976, he received the Silver Musgrave Medal and in 2009 the Order of Merit, one of the Jamaican government’s highest awards. In 2014, he was named the first Poet Laureate of Jamaica since Independence, a title he held until 2017. Morris’ poetry deals with social concerns in post-Independence Jamaica without explicitly raising political banners, cultivating a poetics that critically examines the status quo through different literary devices, such as vernacular language and irony. In addition to his contributions in little magazines throughout the Caribbean, he has published many full volumes of poetry, which include The Pond (1973), On Holy Week (1976), Shadowboxing 216 MERIDIONAL Revista Chilena de Estudios Latinoamericanos 10, abril-septiembre 2018 (1979), Examination Centre (1992), I Been There, Sort of: New and Selected Poems (2006), and Peelin Orange (2017).