Caribbean

The Caribbean archipelago stretches in an arc of some 2,000 miles from Trinidad, only seven miles off the coast of Venezuela, to the Bahamas, not far from Florida. Within it, English is used in a continuum from a relatively standardized form to many varieties of local dialects or creoles, reflecting the diverse origins of the islanders, ranging from the English colonists, the owners of plantations, to their slaves, who were of African, Spanish, and Indian origins. Not all of these island varieties have been described with equal detail.

In his classic study Jamaica Talk (1961) Frederic G. Cassidy notes the complexity of the relations between color and labor: “No simple division between master and servant or black and white was ever made. From the beginning of English settlement there were indentured white servants very close to slavery; on the other hand, many blacks earned or were granted their freedom.” He quotes Edward Long, who observed in 1742: “The Creole Blacks hold the Africans in the utmost contempt, stiling [sic] them ‘salt-water Negroes’ and ‘Guiney birds,’ but value themselves on their own pedigree” (1961, 156). He notes that the term Creole has shifted substantially in meaning. The earliest attributive use (dated 1740) refers to “the Creole Negroes,” but by the following century the sense was “an individual born in the West Indies, of white parents,” before taking on a general sense of “native.” Furthermore, in the Jamaican variety of English, “The word [niega], which the OED enters under neger , but which is usually spelled nayga or naygur in the dialect literature, is used by black people to condemn those of their own colour…. Naygur is often tantamount to ‘good for nothing’ and neegrish is ‘mean and dispicable’” (1961, 156). Degrees of blackness were, furthermore, significant, as Long pointed out: “The nearest to a Negro is a Sambo, the next a Mulatto, next a Quadroon, next a Mustee, and next a Mustaphino” (Cassidy 1961, 162). The collection Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the 18th and 19th Centuries contains a number of insights—for example, brown was used for people of mixed race, who “formed a relatively privileged class between the black, dispossessed majority and the ruling white minority” (D’Costa and Lalla 1989, 143). A popular jaunty local song recorded in 1793 by J.B. Moreton describes the sexual adventures of a slave girl and her white “massa” and how she is beaten by the “misses”:

My massa curse her, “lying bitch!”
And tell her, “buss my rassa” (“kiss my arse”).
(ibid., 14)

Moreton also records the cruelty and contempt with which freed mulatto women (“these African queens”) treat their slaves and former companions: "the yellow snake says to her poor black wench …: " You damn’d [s]corpion! You black vipa!… Kackkaw foa you! [shit for you!]" (ibid., 17).

Buckra , which in the American South has become a term of contempt for a poor white, has always had an elevated status in Caribbean English. Deriving from an African language, probably Ibo or Efik in Nigeria, in which mbakara means “he who surrounds or governs,” it is first found, according to Cassidy, in Antigua in 1736, and four years later in Jamaica (1961, 155). Although used since the eighteenth century to mean a white man, it could in the past be used more generally: “it is not used exclusively in referring to the white man; a brown or black gentleman is also called so in acknowledgement of his gentility, or genteel appearance” (1961, 155).

Effeminacy is specifically despised. “A mama or mama-man is one who does woman’s work, is woman-like or mean, worthless as a man. The word said to be the highest possible insult among the Jamaican folk is [mampaalo], which may be spelled mampalo . It means a man who is unmanly, abusive to women; also one who indulges in abnormal sexual relations of any kind. (Cf. Colombian mampaalo , a cock without fighting spirit)” (Cassidy 1961, 182). This complex of ideas and symbols runs across various cultures, being also apparent in the American English taunting use of chicken and Middle Scots crawdon , meaning a cock that will not fight, used by William Dunbar in his flyting with Kennedy about 1500.

Since the 1960s there has been an entirely new development, as the United Kingdom has accommodated many immigrants from the Caribbean with the typical problems of assimilation and alienation faced by communities dealing with such demographic changes. A number of Caribbean poets in the United Kingdom have started to use Creole forms in protest poetry, which establishes the black immigrant identity by ironically reclaiming ethnic slurs. One powerful instance is Mikey Smith’s “Nigger Talk” poem, from News for Babylon :

Funky talk
Nitty gritty grass-root talk
…
Dis na white talk;
Na white talk dis.
It is coon, nignog, sambo, wog talk.

This is quoted in David Dabydeen’s article “On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today,” which begins: “It is hard to put two words together in creole without swearing. Words are spat out from the mouth like live squibs” (in Ricks and Michaels 1990, 1-14). This is a powerful expression of the oral tradition in Caribbean poetry. The other, usually termed the literary tradition, is finely exemplified in the remarkable work of Derek Walcott, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.