— Work Songs, Proverbs, and Storytelling in Jamaican Literary Traditions —

1 — Work Songs, Proverbs, and Storytelling in Jamaican Literary Traditions — What seemed like centuries of inactivity and forgetfulness were like seeds within which lay the possibilities for a glorious rebirth.1 Nothing will be able to prevent tales, legends, songs come from afar or created, transformed by us, from being a part of us, revealed to us as an exteriorization of our collective self.2 T WAS THROUGH THE ORAL TRADITION that I first learned about my Jamaican heritage and culture. As a young child going to school in Canada I in the late 1970s and 1980s, I found little mention of Jamaica, the Carib- bean or Africa and no easy means of gaining information about them. The public library’s bookmobile, which visited my neighbourhood every Tuesday evening, had few books on the regions. Even areas of the curriculum that might easily have been made more inclusive were not. Songs sung in music class, for instance, were alienating because they tended to make references to remote places, peoples, and foods that I could not easily connect with. The songs were always sung in Canadian English and never had the same rhythmic sounds as the ones I was used to hearing at home. You cannot imagine my delight when 1 Olive Lewin, “Traditional Music in Jamaica,” Caribbean Quarterly 29.1 (1983): 43. 2 “Contes, légendes, devinettes, chansons, proverbes, croyances, fleurissent avec une exubé- rance, une générosité et une candeur extraordinaires. Magnifiques matières humaines dont s’est pétri le coeur chaud, la conscience innombrable, l’âme collective”; Jean Price–Mars, “Le folk-lore et la littérature,” in Price–Mars, Ainsi parla l’oncle: Essais d’ethnographie (New York: Parapsy- chology Foundation, 1928): 189, tr. & quoted in Wilfred G. Cartey, Black Images (New York: Teachers College Press, 1970): 24. © Lisa Tomlinson, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004342330_003 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Lisa Tomlinson - 9789004342330 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 11:26:03PM via free access 2 THE AFRICAN-JAMAICAN AESTHETIC in Grade Six my music teacher introduced two Caribbean folk songs to the class as though she had somehow felt my isolation and detachment. When school ended that day, I excitedly ran home to relate proudly to my family how I was the only child in the class who knew the lyrics to one of the songs and how I even got the opportunity to translate the Jamaican creole words to my class- mates. From that day, I looked forward to every music class and was always the first student to raise my hand to request one of the two songs. The lack of such inclusivity in the Canadian school system as a whole was troubling to me. Having to sit in class day after day and never seeing or hearing about my place of birth or culture often made me feel invisible and insigni- ficant. I was aware of being lost among a sea of white faces that saw me as an outsider coming from some poor, remote, exotic island. It was not until I got home each day that I felt complete and regained some sense of self and equi- librium. The proverbs my mother used in jest, in anger, and at times of grief offered me comfort and access to my cultural history. Beneath every word she uttered in Jamaican creole I found myself. I also looked forward to hearing the duppy stories and riddles that older cousins would share with my siblings and me. The ring games my sisters and I played with the few Caribbean children in the neighborhood during our summer holidays also offered a sense of belong- ing. Indeed, I often dreaded returning to school in the fall. Equally, the reggae lyrics that regularly bellowed from our home speakers kept me updated with the transformation of Jamaican creole and schooled me on current and past events in Jamaica and Africa. As Bob Marley said in an interview, “Reggae music is people music [...] reggae music is news [...] is news about yourself, your own history [...] things that they won’t teach you in school.”3 It was not until later, in my teenage years, that I came to understand that the various forms of orality that were at the root of my home were so em- powering and meaningful because they offered me a means to recentre myself in an environment with which I often felt at odds. The present study’s exploration of the African-Jamaican aesthetic and its critical influence on the cultural life and well-being of Jamaicans in the island and its diasporas in part grows out of this early awareness that, for me as a 3 Bob Marley, Time Will Tell (New York: Polygram Videos, 1991). Lisa Tomlinson - 9789004342330 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 11:26:03PM via free access 1: Worksongs, Proverbs, and Storytelling 3 Jamaican Canadian, orality was as essential to my education as the scribal traditions so valued by educational institutions in the Americas. Remembering Africa: Orality, Resistance, and the Creation of a People’s Narrative I return to the framework of indigenous knowledges as a referent for the long historical experiences of people of African descent in the Caribbean, as laid out in the Introduction, to help map and define African-Jamaican aesthetics. Given the near-genocide of some of the first inhabitants of the Caribbean, and not- withstanding the disruption of slavery and colonization, African peoples who arrived in Jamaica brought semantics of their own indigenous knowledges, be- liefs, cultural and religious practices, kinship and communal patterns, all of which were then transformed through contact with the local environment and reality to create other indigenous knowledges. The resulting mix of culture is evident in what now constitutes indigenous African-Jamaican aesthetics, such as the oral modes of work songs and proverbs nurtured in Caribbean slavery. I purposely begin my research with an examination of work songs, proverbs, and storytelling, which I take to be early and instrumental markers of indigenous African-Jamaican aesthetics. My intention here is not to provide an exhaustive overview of Jamaican oral cultures, as the social history of orality in the Caribbean has been amply documented elsewhere;4 rather, I aim to re- chart its trajectory in the genesis of a national literature. Jamaica’s rich legacy of oral cultures offers counter-narratives to dominant discourses of the region by re-imagining the social realities of African-Jamaican communities, retelling African diasporic histories and restoring social agency. Scholars such as Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Honor Ford–Smith, and Carolyn Cooper5 have pointed to the importance of orality on Caribbean cultures, which they identify “as the 4 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London & Port of Spain: New Beacon, 1984); Mervyn Alleyne, Africa: Roots of Jamaican Culture (Chicago: Research Associates School Times Publications, 1996). 5 Brathwaite, History of the Voice; Honor Ford–Smith, Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaica Women (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1987); Cooper, Noises in the Blood. Lisa Tomlinson - 9789004342330 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 11:26:03PM via free access 4 THE AFRICAN-JAMAICAN AESTHETIC locus of a self-defined critical perspective emerging from Caribbean people’s experience.”6 Brathwaite, for example, argues: The African Presence in Caribbean Literature cannot be fully or easily per- ceived until we define the term ‘literature’ to include the non-scribal material of the folk/oral tradition, which, on examination, turns out to have a much longer history than our scribal tradition, to have been more relevant to the majority of our people, and to have unquestionably wider provenance [...] while a significant corpus of ‘prose’ and ‘poetry’ has been created – and read – by a few persons in the major Antilles; folk tales, provenance, and chant are found everywhere without fear or favor and are enjoyed by all [...] with this re/vision in mind, we see an African literature in the Caribbean beginning to reveal itself.7 It is in the context of Brathwaite’s comments that this work begins with an examination of Jamaican oral culture. Here, I focus on a literature in its em- bryonic oral form before its transition to the scribal in order to subsequently explore the continuity between this oral literature and the works of early African-Jamaican creative writers. In particular, I consider how work songs, proverbs, Anancy folk tales, and duppy stories centralized African-Jamaican narratives and worked as an early non-scribal literary tradition. I also examine how these oral forms were employed and transformed in early diasporic con- texts. For enslaved peoples, the oral tradition served as a primary means of locat- ing themselves amidst forced dislocation much as it functioned for me in my Canadian classroom. Oral narratives represented, and continue to represent, the body of a community’s cultural and philosophical thoughts. In the case of Jamaica, Carolyn Cooper broadly characterizes orality thus: a set of cultural (e.g. obeah, myal, ettu and rival) and linguistic practices (proverbs, riddles, and performance poetry) that defy, challenge and subvert ‘high culture’ including books.8 This radical notion of orality suggests that 6 Carol B. Duncan, This Spot of Ground: Spiritual Baptists in Toronto (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008): 15. 7 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature” (1974), in Brath- waite, Roots: Essays in Caribbean Literature (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P): 204. 8 Cooper, Noises in the Blood, 15. Lisa Tomlinson - 9789004342330 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 11:26:03PM via free access 1: Worksongs, Proverbs, and Storytelling 5 it is more than the act of telling and retelling a story.

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