Recapturing Lost Values- Caribbean Literature in the Caribbean Classroom

Recapturing lost values- Caribbean Literature in the Caribbean Classroom

ABSTRACT

Caribbean literature like English literature has been used in the Caribbean classroom largely as content for developing critical and analytical skills in students who must sit local (CXC) and foreign (GCE) examinations at the general and advanced levels. The human/humane content of the material has to a great extent, been underplayed. This paper contends that a hidden resource for the teaching of values now at risk in these societies thus remains unexploited. It examines two short stories (" Country of the one-eyed God" by Olive Senior, and "Bella makes life" by Lorna Goodison) and indicates how they may be used in the classroom as triggers for bringing specific values to the attention of young people. It suggests that if the artist is the conscience of the society, this is one way in which she/he might profitably be used.

Velma Pollard Faculty of Education University of the West Indies Mona, JAMAICA 2

There are those in the communities of the Caribbean who say there is a crisis of values in the region as a whole. A number of ills are thought to be the result of the crisis which affects the tone of the societies and eventually affects productivity.

Older people, frequently place the blame at the feet of the

lack of religious studies in the school, studies which were compulsory for everyone fifty years or less ago.

Recently schools have tried to include guidance counsellors

in their complement of staff where human and financial resources allow it. These teachers are expected to help counter the influence of the larger society and help young people deal with the processes of their own physical and psychological maturation. The ratio of counsellor to student however, is invariably high. Besides there are educators who point to the non-functionality of the counsellor and suggest that the best guidance counsellor is a subject teacher to whom the student relates positively. But those teachers tend to have heavy schedules so their time is at a premium.

The schools which have a satisfactory student advice system are few.

This paper discusses the possiblity of exploring a hidden resource for helping to treat the crisis of values. It recommends, without suggesting that this might be a panacea

for all ills or that it should replace other means, that the

literature which emanates from Caribbean societies and which

comments favourably either by implication or by open

statement on the very values which are said to be lacking

now, be utilized in the effort to affect the youth.

At present, where Caribbean texts are part of the

recommended reading for high school students, they tend to

be used in the teaching of critical and analytical skills

which have to do with the form of literature and are rarely

used to examine the values which are part of the content of

literature.

I wish to look at two short stories by Jamaican writers with a view to indicating how the literary text might be used to satisfy not only the need to be aware of the craft of writing but also the duty to alert young people to some of the values considered to be at risk in the region.

"Country of the one-eyed God"' is the story of a grandson turned criminal, who in his flight from justice, returns to the house of his grandmother who brought him up and orders her to give him all the money she has Ironically the money which is carefully hidden away represents a life-timers saving towards a rich funeral to counteract the poverty of her life. The story ends with the boy poised to destroy the 4

woman unless she hands over the money which she is intent on protecting.

In making the protagonist a grandson brought up by his grandmother, Senior uses a Caribbean, certainly a Jamiacan stereotype of absentee parents. In the playing out of the story the selection has the added impact of pointing to the lack of respect for elders which is one of the foremost of the lost values in modern Jamaica. In a recent conversation with a high school principal I found that the lack of respect ranked highest on her list of disappointments with the present generation.

The boy Jacko arrives at his grandmother's house at dawn.

She has heard on the radio that he has become, in her words,

"big wanted man". Her opening gambit is "So you came?" His response is impolite beyond anything the situation could possibly warrant:

"What yu expect?"

Ma Bell had in fact expected him and the emotions she felt as she opened the door to the boy turned animal and stranger, were mixed. The authorial voice comments ...Ma Bell was pleased that after all the call of

blood remained so strong , even as she feared to open

her door to this stranger" (my emphases)

The disrespect is in the way that Jacko addresses her. The

response might have been "Yes grandma I come" or its

equivalent. Nothing in Ma Bell's experience prepared her for

this. As the initial conversation continues the reader

discovers that Jacko has lost not only respect but a number

of other things like trust in his friends. As far as his

grandmother is concerned, friends inviegled him to leave home and should be around to protect him in trouble. But

that is not the case for the conversation continues:

"Dont you have friend?"

"Fren a dawg."

"Is free you run away with from here"

"01 lady, that time so long ago it long like from here to the moon" (p 19)

The suggestion is that his life experience has taught him that "dawg eat dawg". His friends may well have turned against him. One cannot be sure. All we have is his statement "Fren a dawg". And in referring here to Ma Bell as

"01 lady" there is a hint of contempt for her naivety. There are circumstances under which "01 lady" is a term of endearment but this is not one. Ma Bell offers Jacko the food she has prepared against his

coming. He gobbles it down and asks

"Nuh have no rum?"

For those who know the MaBells of this world the very

request is disrespectful. No child admits to his grandmother

that he might drink such a thing or that she might keep it

except for medicinal purposes. But he knows where and why

she keeps it and stretches for it over her reprimand:

Rum? Listen no bwoy. Just because yu is bull buck and

duppy conqueror 2 everywhere else yu is still bwoy in

this yard. So just know yu place. Rum in this house is

big man sinting.

The next request is for money in the brusque manner of a thief: "A need some money"

Ma Bell s objection here is evident in her manner if not in her words. The author comments:

Ma Bell shrank away. Never before in her house had

anyone shown such a lack of manners, for if the

children she raised acquired nothing else, it was

manners that she hammered into their heads from birth. 7

(p 20)

Jacko wants the money to escape from Jamaica. He has his passport and is going to "foreign" where he has mother and father. Ma Bell is outraged. Would he dare embarass his parents "them and them family" in foreign?

Jacko's response articulates what is at least one possible response of offspring to the parental neglect resulting from the migration which has been the scourge of island societies certainly since the turn of the century. Migration has been described in positive ways by economists who write about the place of foreign remittances in the Gross National Product of Caribbean islands. It has been less highly touted by those who write about the brain drain. But it is to the social workers and in Jamaica to those who read the newspapers that we must turn to see what happens to children when one parent, sometimes both parents migrate. Even there the comment from the child him/herself is rare.

The artist however, the conscience of the society holds out the response for our pity and our education:

Oh. So me not family? Them never shame me? Them never

shame me when they walk way leave me? Look how long I

wait for them to send for me and all I ever hear is

next year next year. Next year never did come for me for every year them breed up a new pickney. They never

could afford to send for me. Well, long time now I

decide to start take my next year this year. I couldn't

wait no more.

(p 21)

The value system that allows parents to lose a child in their search for a better life seems short-sighted in the light of what can happen to the child. it is true that parents sometimes flee dire poverty and hope to find a better life to which to take the child, eventually. But in so many cases as in this, that time never comes and the child gets lost in the parents' search for material things.

This brings us easily to the second story which this paper considers- Lorna Goodison's "Bella makes life." In this case the mother goes after the material goods available in the foreign city,New York. Significantly, when she returns on a visit she is wearing a necklace with a huge pendant which reads "Material Girl"

This story makes its case in a more obvious fashion than the other. The mother and the father in the story function out of very different value systems. Joe Joe the father remains

in Jamaica and takes care of the children,while his wife

Bella goes up to New York to earn dollars to help them, in

her words, "to make life". Joe Joe is quite unable to see that their circumstance is so desperate as to require this sacrifice from his wife. Although he does not say it to her at first, he rejects the gaudy clothes, the expensive toys and eventually has to draw the line at the Jherri curls she puts in his son's hair.

The lesson Bella says she learnt in America "...if you want it you have to go for it" makes little sense to him. The author says he nearly asked her "...if she want what."

Meanwhile he misses the mother of his children and the companion she used to be who he could just "sit down and reason with and talk about certain little things" (p 32)

Even when Bella did come home she could find no time for family since she was constantly out selling the clothes she bought in America for that purpose or she was in but laughing loudly with new friends.

In counterposing the father's values to the mother's,

Goodison actually presents him as the role model to which young people may be pointed. In exposing the mother to ridicule, she sets up the character they might be led to reject.Note for example how she is made to put a price on everything. The following injunction is offered loudly to her young son: Devon, beg you don't bother to take that Walkman

outside, is twenty-nine-ninety-nine I pay for it at

Crazy Eddie's. or the one to her daughter:

Ann-Marie, iust take time with that jagging suit, I pay

twenty three dollars for it in May's Department Store

(P 85)

It is significant that the name of the place where she purchases the Walkman is "Crazy Eddie's. Her Americanization is a kind of madness. In exasperation Joe Joe asks "Bella what the hell do you, you make America turn yu inna idiat?

Why you don't just gwan up there and stay then..." When she leaves again immediately after New Year, the reader is left to believe she will never return.

There are other conflicts and other implied resolutions in the story "Bella makes life". But we are concerned here only with values that can be passed on to young people. Bella's lack of appreciation for the small things of life, her vulgar display of the world's goods allow a high premium to be put on their opposites.

Both these stories are very well written and lend themselves to analyses concerned with the art of shortstory writing and to stylistic details in general. I am suggesting however that where the moral positions are as carefully worked in as they are here, it is the duty of the teacher not only to bring them to the attention of students but to point to the direction favoured by the writer.

The discussions that might follow the reading of the texts give students a chance to bring out into the open some of the feelings they have about issues they hardly discuss. The

"problems" on which the stories turn are common ones in the modern Caribbean where the need for quick wealth leads people along a variety of roads. Teenagers have thoughts about these matters. For some of them the relationships and situations described in the texts are part of their own experience or at least of people within their own families.

The chance to say their thoughts out loud, to listen to the varying points of view of their friends and of a responsible adult is salutary. Even an attempt to defend the "wrong" point of view is a healthy exercise.

Respect for others, self-respect, hard work, a sense of excellence, are some of the values high school principals have indicated to me to be most absent in the young people they are trying to prepare for life. There are short stories, novels, plays and poems which point, without preaching, to these very values. If literature is used to promote these, the writer as the conscience of society might function to have a positive effect on those students who are open enough to receive the word. NOTES

1. "Country of the one eye God" In Summer Lightning and