Changing English, Vol. 9, No.

1, 2002

Carlos Task: pictures of language and English teaching

JOHN HARDCASTLE

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the eld, and every foul of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof (Gen. II, 19). I began teaching English with a picture of languageof sorts. I was soon aware of, but not well informed about, the different languages in my classroom, and I became intrigued by the history that lay behind them. Carlos was a student I met early on. His islands patois was different from the LondonJamaican creole that was spoken around the school, but I could not have begun to describe systematically its distinctive features and structures. My background was in literature, and contemporary work in linguistics on varieties of English was new to me. Carlos family was from St Vincent. They were SpanishEast Indians, originally from Trinidad. His Indian forebears came to the Caribbean from the South Asian sub-continent as indentured labourers. The majority of students in this class, however, were from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds, and mainly from the Eastern CaribbeanBarbados, St Lucia, British Guyana, Grenada, St Kitts, Trinidad, Monserratrather than Jamaica. Most, though signi cantly not all, were born in London. Carlos was the only one from St Vincent. And though he got on well with his classmates, he was plainly disaffected from school life. One afternoon, he told me how, when he was a small boy, his father would take him to Kingstown market, where they sold produce from their small plot of land. He described the various market stalls with painstaking care and he solemnly named the sh on sale there. Usually, he recalled, they would stay around the harbour until late and then, if they couldnt hitch a ride, they would walk home together. Typically, Carlos began in a desultory fashion. There were false starts and awkward pauses. Then, as he evoked image after image, as he threaded memories like glass beadsgiving each sh its local namehe recovered, with powerful feeling, another life. After this conversation, I saw Carlos in a different light. I grew interested in students histories and backgrounds, especially Caribbean history, which was new to me. I had met Caribbean poetry earlier on. Now I was learning more about its contexts. Yet I struggled to nd my bearings in the complicated debates about history, culture and identity that were going on in the black community and beyond it. With my colleagues, I tried to work out the implications of such debates for London classrooms. I remember that the existing English syllabus was not much help. One teacher, who was more experiISSN 1358684X print; 14693585 online/ 02/01000715 2002 The editors of Changing English DOI: 10.1080/13586840120112297

J. Hardcastle

enced than I was, has captured the sense of the frustration many of us shared at the time. She writes about English at her school in Hackney in the early 1970s, It was still streamed, and, as in many schools, black children lled the lower and remedial streams and were considered to be a problem in all sorts of ways; and many of us knew we were failing the children. We knew we needed help, but it was dif cult to know where to turn. There were plenty of white people around, still urging assimilation and expounding de cit theories, and talking about linguistic and cultural deprivation (though to be fair, some had got beyond this); and there were black people explaining that what white teachers were doing was causing black children to fail. Lobbying groups that were starting up highlighted some of the issues, particularly of institutional racism, but there seemed to be no real dialogue anywhere at the classroom level (Goody, 1991). There was a need to establish a dialogue at the classroom level. But there was also a need to get clear about rst principles, to shift perspective and to re-imagine the scope of English in urban classrooms like mine, which is chie y what this piece is about. So we read. I remember discovering a monograph by the Barbadian poet and historian, Edward Brathwaite, Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1974), where he makes plain the signi cance of the African grain in Jamaican culture for contemporary understandings of West Indian identity. He writes: This is why, for West Indians now seeking their own identity, a study of the slave period, and especially a study of the folk culture of the slaves, is so important. It is during this period that we can see how the African, imported from the area of his great tradition, went about establishing himself in a new environment, using available tools and memories of his traditional heritage to set going something new, something Caribbean, but something nevertheless recognisably African. The psychological problem of the present-day Caribbean is that this crucial and basic African element has been ignored and is seldom recognised. It is the thesis of this paper, on the other hand, that it is in the nature of the folk culture of the ex-African slave, still persisting today in the life of the contemporary folk, that we can discern that the middle passage was not, as is popularly assumed, a traumatic, destructive experience, separating blacks from Africa, but a pathway or channel between this tradition and what is being evolved, on new soil, in the Caribbean. The crux of the argument in Folk Culture is that the continuing failure to recognise the African presence in Jamaican culture not only impoverishes and distorts West Indian history, it also damages the nations psyche. The politics of recognition (Taylor, 1994) has been fundamental for classrooms like the one where Carlos story emerged. Indeed, the demand for recognition what Edward Said has described as a startlingly dramatic sense of the insistent identities clamouring for notice everywhere we look (1990)is at the very centre of contemporary debates about multicultural education. Why has this been so? Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, has this to say: The demand for recognition is given urgency by the supposed link

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between recognition and identity, where this latter term designates something like a persons understanding of who they are, of their fundamental de ning characteristics as a human being. The thesis is that our identity is partly shaped by the recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a con ning or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can in ict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being (Taylor, 1994). The perception that West Indians have suffered real damage and real distortion where people have mirrored back an impoverished picture of their history, their language and their culture lies at the heart of Folk Culture. On this view, the failure to recognise the African inheritance con nes West Indians to a reduced mode of being. Taylor has traced the roots of the politics of recognition back to the thinkers of the late European Enlightenment.1 He connects recognition to a new notion of authenticity associated with Rousseau, who claimed that our moral salvation depends upon restoring authentic moral contact with ourselves. Later, Herder developed Rousseaus notion of authenticity by asserting the importance of being true to oneself, and by claiming as well that each of us is his or her own measure. For Herder, being true to oneself involved a conception of originality and self-expression. He thought of self-expression as development, for individuals as well as communities and nations. Thus he began to weave together several strands: authenticity, self-determination, originality, self-expression, the historical development of languages, and crucially, literatures of people and nations. As a consequence, Herder has been regarded as the source of modern cultural nationalism.2 Writing about the origins of what Taylor cautiously calls the supposed link between recognition and identity, he suggests that certain assumptions about the rights of individuals and whole communities are actually surprisingly recent: For it was not always so, and our ancestors of more than a couple of centuries ago would have stared at us uncomprehendingly if we had used these terms in their current sense. How did we get started on this? (Taylor, 1994). Crucially, contemporary ethical and political assumptions about individual and collective rights to maintain languages and cultures depend on a prior notion of equal dignity. And for Taylor, the emergence of a modern secular discourse in the politics of equal dignity begins in the late Enlightenment, especially with Kant: For Kant, whose use of the term dignity was one of the earliest in uential evocations of this idea, what commanded respect in us was our status as rational agents, capable of directing our lives through principles. Something like this has been the basis for our intuitions of equal dignity ever since, though the detailed de nition of it may have changed Thus what is picked out here is a universal human potential, a capacity that all humans share. This potential, rather than anything a person may have made of it is what ensures that each person deserves respect (Taylor, 1994).

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J. Hardcastle

On this view, a refusal to recognise an individuals potentialnot just his or her actual achievementsis tantamount to refusing to acknowledge that persons individual worth and dignity. Moreover, without such recognition, individual and collective human potentials can never be turned into concrete actualities. In this way, the refusal to afford recognition in icts a deep injury. (Hegel, who envisaged the contest over recognition as a life-or-death strugglea masterslave dialectic from which our very identities emergeclaimed that this is not just true for individuals, but for whole communities as well.) Signi cantly, the right to be recognised is a principle that is often invoked against linguistic and cultural de cit accounts of educational underachievement. Such de cit accounts, it is objected, as well as being hugely condescending, seriously underestimate peoples cultural resources, and hence their potential, in damaging ways (Goody, 1991). It has, therefore, been important to establish that communities everywhere, especially subordinate ones, possess cultures of their own. To give just one important instance, Edward Thompsons magni cent study of popular radicalism in the nineteenth century, The Making of the English Working Class, was written, he says, to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the obsolete hand loom weaver, the utopian artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity (1968).3 My linking of Brathwaite to German thinkers of the late Enlightenment may seem unpromising. But this is what we must do to understand where the ethical and political underpinnings of Folk Culture ultimately come from. (This is partly what I mean by getting clear about rst principles and shifting perspectives.) And we have to make a parallel link to grasp the full seriousness of Brathwaites assessment of the importance of West Indian vernacular speech. He calls it an emergent language, one that is essential for the development of the people who speak it. This connection between a native tongue and a peoples development is precisely what I want to look at more closely. Where has it come from? On such a view, language plays a constitutive role in the formation of the outlookand hence the identity of individual selves and groups. Traditionally, this has been one of the chief concerns of the curriculum subject, English, that is, shaping a national identity. In his book, History of the Voice: the development of nation language in anglophone Caribbean poetry (1984) Brathwaite makes a very large assumption about language when he claims that the emergent speech of the Caribbean was born of the expressive capability of the whole community. The notion that whole communitiesespecially peoples and nationshave an expressive capability goes back to Herder at least. Indeed, for a few key German thinkers at the turn of the eighteenth century, expression, which they thought of as the objecti cation of the national spirit (Geist), was absolutely essential for the well-being of the whole community; and not just for the present, but for the future too. These thinkers were seeking to defend German language against the hegemony of French at a time when the French Enlightenment dominated the whole of Europe. For these thinkers it was important to establish the status of German as a literary language, and signi cantly the project that they established for themselves set the pattern for other nations that have wanted to make language central to their demands for cultural autonomy. Thus Brathwaite places the demand for the recognition of West Indian nation language within a history that tells how, having established their own vernacular languages, modern European states proceeded to ignore languages like Basque and

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Gaelic, and to suppress the vernaculars of overseas colonials. Against this tendency, he sets a countervailing one, that has grown among those poets and linguists who have looked since the eighteenth century to the idea of oral literatures. In Folk Culture Brathwaite gives a history from below, because, as a matter of psychological survival, he needs to forge a strong connecting link between a contemporary West Indian way of life and its African ancestral heritage. Folk Culture is a historical anthropological work that is concerned with the way that slaves carried their historically developed cultures to the New World. It describes how they transmitted the elements of a living folk culture to later generations; and, crucially, how the folk culture continues to shape the lives of ordinary West Indians today. Moreover, Brathwaites monograph tells how this folk culture was sustained under unspeakably brutal conditions, and how the culture was refashioned to t new circumstances. Signi cantly, it also suggests how the African folk culture has produced a distinctive collective outlooka psychologyfor a West Indian way of life. Crucially, he warns that the failure to recognise the African foundations of West Indian culture will do permanent psychological damage to the community in the future, because it will deprive West Indians of the necessary means of self-understanding. Brathwaite has wanted to recover the Jamaican African folk heritage precisely because of its signi cance for contemporary debates about West Indian identity. And his picture of West Indian language emphasises the oral tradition as a resource for artistic and popular expression. In this way he continues a well-established tradition of using West Indian vernacular speech forms for artistic ends. Nation Language does not gure as a eld for specialising linguistic anthropology, though Brathwaite is familiar with the literature of this discipline. Rather, Nation Language is pictured symbolically as a site of assignation, where history and contemporary social and political forces meet, and where a peoples fate will be decided. Debates about West Indian identity intensi ed after political independence in1962. Brathwaites historical anthropology emerges from the broader perspectives of black historiographycurrents associated with the Negritude movement, PanAfricanism and the struggle for civil rights in the USA. A common theme among such movements has been the need for black people to assert their identities, with their own culture, their own civilisation and their own original contribution, especially to literature. In the essay Timheri Brathwaite writes about the impact of the Trinidadian-born activist Stokely Carmichael, who galvanised the West Indian imagination in the late 1960s: [he] magnetized a whole set of splintered feelings that had for a long time been seeking a node [he] enunciated a way of seeing the black West Indian that seemed to make complete sense of the entire history of slavery and colonial suppression, of the African diaspora into the New World. And he gave it a name (1970, pp. 3544). Moreover, the close relationship between artistic movements, education and politics is particularly striking in Brathwaites account. It throws light on his crucial involvement with the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) between 19661972 in London, and re ects a serious attempt to replace existing cultural fragmentationwhere the African presence went unrecognisedwith new communal wholeness, born of a central vision shared among West Indians everywhere. Looking back now, I can see how these broader cultural perspectives enlarged my

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conception of what the curriculum subject, English, might offer students like Carlos. I have suggested that Brathwaite makes a huge assumption about the nature of language and its relation to inherited ways of seeing and being in the world. I want to say more about this relation now, especially about the connections he makes between vernacular speech and literary expression. In History of the Voice he writes passionately about an emergent language that is rooted in the historical experience of the African diaspora and enslavement. A history of the West Indian voice, then, must attend adequately to evolving patterns of political and cultural domination and subordination. It is a matter of power. Hegemonic relations along ethnic and racial lines have persisted right up to the present, in contemporary London as well as in the Caribbean, depositing their tell-tale traces and accents in language. And such relations have been evident in schooling, of course. One marked consequence of the colonial education system, that many writers from the Caribbean have registered, has been that generations of Caribbean children have internalised what is often termed the sensibility of the metropolitan culture, not least through the teaching of English language and literature. As a consequence, children have acquired a language and a sensibility that is sometimes ill matched to their ordinary experience. Brathwaite puts it like this: And in terms of what we write, our perceptual models, we are more conscious (in terms of sensibility) of the falling snow, for instancethe models are all there for the falling of the snowthan the force of the hurricanes which take place every year. In other words, we havent got the syllables, the syllabic intelligence, to describe the hurricane, which is our own experience, whereas we can describe the imported alien experience of the snowfall (1984). He offers a poignant illustration of the kind of distortion that sometimes happens: a child in a Caribbean classroom writes about Christmas, the snow was falling in the cane elds. This is just a small instance of the way that the metropolitan orientations in Caribbean schooling have skewed representations of West Indian realities in the past. And signi cantly, Brathwaite contrasts nation language with dialect. Dialect, he says, invariably carries pejorative overtones: Dialect is the language used when you want to make fun of someone. Caricature speaks in dialect. Dialect has a long history coming from the plantation where peoples dignity is distorted through their language and the descriptions which the dialect gave to them. [i.e. The image of themselves that was mirrored back to them]. Nation language is the term he coins to describe the submerged area of the peoples language which is more closely allied to the African experience in the Caribbean. He chose the term because he wanted to evoke the languages origins in the folk culture of slaves. Simply attending to the forms and structures of spoken dialects, vernaculars and creoles without paying heed to the social history would leave half the story untold. For Brathwaite, nation language is the essential part of what he calls the total expression of the people and the expressive capability of the whole community as it is most perfectly realised in the oral culture of the Caribbean. He puts it like this:

Carlos Task Reading is an isolated, individualistic expression. The oral tradition on the other hand demands not only the griot but the audience to complete the community: the noise and sounds that the maker makes are responded to by the audience and are returned to him. Hence we have the creation of a continuum where meaning truly resides. And this total expression comes about because people in the open air, because people in conditions of poverty (unhouselled) because they come from a historical experience where they had to rely on their very breath rather than on paraphernalia like books and museums and machines. They had to depend on immanence, the power within themselves, rather than the technology outside themselves (196768).

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Brathwaite is an electrifying performer of his own work. His readings have sometimes been compared to live jazz sessions. Indeed, in his lecture, Jazz and the West Indian Novel, he explores the connection between nation language and native musical structures. Elsewhere, he speaks of jazz musicians, still tunnelling the ancient African tone scales and rhythms on European instruments. He tells a wonderful story about arriving in a village to put on a play in Ghana (where he worked after coming down from Cambridge) and starting to drumlike Max Roach. Whereupon an outraged old lady complained that if he carried on like that he would do serious harm to the villagers. Its a funny story, but serious too, because it suggests something of the psychological forces evoked by the complex tonal patterns among those who are attuned to them: In the Caribbean we make drums, but we dont know why we make them. Thats what I mean about culture. In West Africa you make a drum because its a sacred object. Theres a ritual attached to how you make a drum. If you go back to the beginning and just look at the thing, the goat that is used has to be a specially consecrated animal, you dont just take any old goat and use it. It also has to be a certain colour and all that. The tree from which you make the barrel of the drum is also a tree from a sacred grove, simply because its going to make contact with a divinity. And all of that gives order to the culture, which we in the Caribbean dont havethe difference between order and the lack of itand thats why the poem has a sense of disorder as part of its meaning. Ill give you an example of what I mean. A practical example. I was producing a play in Ghana. There talking drums being used by members of the cast, you knowmusicians. Anyway, during the break in the performance they were just practising and playing. And one drum was empty, not being used, that is. And I decided that I would go and add my beats to it. Now, my beats are not Akan beats. I didnt know any drum language at the time. But I knew jazz drumming. So what I did was when they were playing, I took two sticks and I began to beat this drum as if I were Max Roach or somebody like that. An old lady, who was really the kind of godmother of the whole production, I will never forget her face, she almost sprang at my throat. I mean, I had to stop her immediately. Now do you see what I am getting at? What I was doing conveyed a signal to her, it wasnt just listening to a sound, but I was actually saying something, which was giving her pain: physical, psychological pain. And

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J. Hardcastle what she told me was that what I was doing could in fact have caused someone to have a t, or to have become dumb because every tone of the drum conveys a speci c message to the people who are hearing it. And in fact people have been known to be made dumb, and that is why the poem talks about, God is dumb until the drum speaks. You cut a drum with a knife and you cause someone to lose the use of their vocal chords, you see. And therefore the whole business of ritual is not just an external occasion, Its something that is very real and unless you know about it you are in danger of insulting it on the one hand or being unable to tap its great potentials of expressions of power.4

Brathwaites description of the open-air performancethe performance that depends for its success on the subtle exchanges between the poet and his or her audienceis especially striking too. He has in mind the call-and-response patterns that link Blues and Gospel to the musical traditions of West Africa. The notion that meaning resides somewhere between the speaker and the audiencewhat is usually referred to in connection with Bakhtin as indeterminacyis an intriguing one. Again, curiously, to grasp where such a notion of meaning comes from we have to go back to thinkers of the German Enlightenment, especially Fichte and Von Humboldt, who were the rst to suggest that meaning arises on the social plane in the spaces between interlocutors. I still nd Brathwaites argument about the importance of the African heritage a compelling one, but I have to admit that there are dif culties with it. He privileges the African roots of a West Indian culture and identity because he wants to secure recognition for the African presence in the lives of the ordinary people of Jamaica. Essentially, he is seeking to establish a basis for popular solidarity. Obviously, he has no wish to exclude the languages and cultures of any of the other peoples who make up West Indian society. Indeed, he is wonderfully sensitive to the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of the peoples of the region and he has written school textbooks that describe and explain how such heterogeneity has come about. But how are the other peoples of the Caribbeanthe Amerindians, the East Indians, the Chinese, the Lebanese and so onsupposed to relate to the African heritage as he describes it? How did Carlos family, who were SpanishEast Indian West Indians, moving from Trinidad, rst to St Vincent and then to Hackney, relate to it, for instance? This is one obvious dif culty. I shall touch on three more. First, the concept of West Indians as a community is surprisingly hard to de ne. Where do we draw the boundaries? West Indians are not con ned to a single geographical region. Rather, they are scattered over continents. The social realities (of migrant labour) have led to the scattering of families and to the dispersal of entire communitiesto London, New York, Toronto and so on. Brathwaite, of course, makes such dispersal a central theme of his epic sequence of poems, the Arrivants Trilogy (1973). Although a full discussion of this question is beyond the scope of this chapter, I need to mention it, at least. Second, change and adaptation under pressure have been as important historically as rootedness or cultural continuity. Widespread cultural dislocation and discontinuity have come about with the movement of labourWest Indian workers cutting cane in Cuba, harvesting cash crops in the USA, drilling for oil in Venezuela, constructing the Panama canal, or working on London transport. It is possible to speak of a West Indian diaspora

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as well as an African one. For over a century and a half, West Indian migrant workers have been forced to nd work outside their own islands, separated from their relatives and the communities they grew up in. Carlos family was no exception. Third, what Brathwaite calls nation language is not coextensive with a clearly de ned speech community, or not in the sense that linguistic anthropologists might recognise. Essentially, Brathwaite wants to evoke the notion of a common language because he is seeking a unifying principle that might afford cultural and political cohesion in the region. The evocation of nation language offers a way of imagining community.5 But by concentrating on the African heritage languages as the foundation of a West Indian oral culture, and by calling it the cultural expression of the people and so on, he risks losing sight of the dynamic transformational processes among many languages. He speaks of what is being evolved, on new soil, in the Caribbean from the perspective of the African heritage, but often in a way that leaves the emergence of the new as a disembodied abstraction. Crucially, a strong connection is presupposed between languages and the consciousnessthe collective psychologyof the peoples who speak them. Brathwaite continually makes an implicit link connecting historically produced languages to the outlooks of peoples and nations. Oddly enough, such presuppositions hark back to nineteenth-century pictures of language, and to links made between languages and national mentalities. Such pictures, which predate modern linguistics, have been important for nationalist and imperialist movements ever since, as well as for national liberation movements. Most of the languages and cultures coming into the Caribbean, from the sixteenth century on, were creolised, and the character and degree of creolisation has varied from island to island.6 A few have survived almost unchanged, among them what Brathwaite calls the ancestral languages of the Caribbean: the African languages of the Maroons; Hindi, spoken by some of the East Indians; and varieties of Chinese, spoken by former indentured labourers.7 Carlos, you may recall, came from a SpanishEast Indian background. He spoke a St Vincent patois, but surely that doesnt mean that his world outlookor his psychewas the same as his Afro-Caribbean neighbours. He used idioms of a TrinidadianEast Indian community (as it was spoken in St Vincent, that is as it was modi ed in contact with other creoles), but he was already familiar with the London vernacularsLondon Jamaican creole and cockneythat were spoken around him. His community had its own peculiar customs and traditionsits ways of seeing and doing thingsas well as ones shared in common with others. Such patterns are complicated because they are continuously evolving. Its hard to be speci c. Yet the point is that cultural speci cities matter. And there is the additional problem for teachers of how to make speci cities count for something in classrooms. Finally, Brathwaite aims to do more than rescue a forgotten African heritage for the sake of it. Rather, he wants to provide the cultural means by which West Indians can mirror back an accurate picture of themselves. Such a picture is indispensable, he implies, for the community to develop to its full potential. Crucially, he aims to offer the symbols and narrativesthe tools and memoriesof the African tradition, so that West Indians can identify themselves as a people. Tools and memories, he says, are precious in a region where a materially impoverished people has had to rely on their very breath rather than

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on paraphernalia like books and museums and machines. Lacking the external technologies that are taken for granted in metropolitan cultures, West Indians have been forced to depend on what he calls immanencethat is, a spiritual resource that lies within. When I rst read Folk Culture and History of the Voice, few of the dif culties I have touched on struck me. Rather, I got clearer about them over time. Getting clearer seemed one of my responsibilities as an English teacher. It was part of what made teaching in London intrinsically interesting. I had read Derek Walcotts poetry before I started teaching. Indeed, his collection of poems, In a Green Night (1969), provided my introduction to Caribbean literature. Walcott offers perspectives that are sometimes curiously at odds with Brathwaites.8 In his essay, What the Twilight Says (1970), for instance, he writes sceptically about the African revival: If the old [African] gods were dying in the mouths of the old, they died of their own volition. Today they are arti cially resurrected by the anthropologists tape recorder and in the folk archives of departments of culture. And later in the piece, The African revival is escape to another dignity, but one understands the glamour of its simpli cations. Both writers are passionately involved with the formation of new culture in the Caribbean, as they are both deeply concerned about the fate of West Indians in Britain. But whereas Brathwaite demands recognition for a nation language that is rooted in the African folk heritage of the Caribbean, Walcott insists upon a universal human capacity for creating a new language for new conditions where there was nothing before. Pictures of language have been centrally important for both writers. For Brathwaite, on the one hand, the language of the people keeps alive a view of the world (and a way of being in the world) that remains essentially African. For Walcott, on the other, there is a radically mixed-heritageillegitimate, rootless mongrelized and a new language yet to be fashioned: What would deliver him [the New World Negro] from servitude was the forging of a language [in the Caribbean] that went beyond mimicry, a dialect that had the force of revelation as it invented the names for things, one that nally settled on its own mode of in ection, and which began to create an oral culture of chants, jokes, folk songs and fables; this, not merely the debt of history was his proper claim to the new world. Walcott has consistently pictured the business of attaching names to things as an intrinsically creative task: something new is to be brought into being where there was nothing before. This task constitutes a de ning image of the New World poet. Pastoralists of the African revival, he insists, should know that what is needed is not new names for old things, or old names for old things, but the faith of using the old names anew. Thus, Walcott invokes the Martiniquan poet, Aime Cesaire (Walcott, 1992),9 Storm, I would say. River, I would command. Hurricane, I would say. I would utter leaf. Tree. I would be drenched in all the rains, soaked in all the dews (1970, p. 17). Adams task of giving things their names is a signature image that occurs throughout Walcotts work. For instance, where he writes of his youthful ambition to create a distinctive Caribbean theatre: Then we would walk like new Adams, in

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a nourishing ignorance which would name plants and people with a childs belief that the world is its own age (1970, p. 10). (Like Joyce, he writes from the impulse to awaken from the nightmare of history.) And in his long autobiographical poem, Another Life: Gregorias, listen, lit, We were the light of the world! We were blest with a virginal, unpainted world With Adams task of giving things their names (Walcott, l973). Adams task has been a recurrent image in the literature of the New World. Indeed, it has been the de ning image for writers who have wanted to make a clean break with the past in order to achieve a fresh relation to new realities. As R.W.B. Lewis, in his study, The American Adam (1955, p. 53) has argued, the theme of Adams task describes the special responsibility shared by American artists for making new culture in new conditions. Here, typically, is Walt Whitman, for instance, chanting dei cally the possibilities of a democratic culture in the United Statesa culture that is freed from the arti ciality of an oppressive European past: I, chanter of Adamic Songs, Through the new Garden the West, the great cities calling (1860). Here too is the FrenchRussian, Cuban-born novelist, Alejo Carpentier, proclaiming the paramount importance of Adams task for (Latin) American artists. In his novel, Lost Steps (1968), he evokes the incongruous presence of three ethnic, Latin American artists who fetch up in Paris in the 1920s: three Young Wise Men (an Indian poet, a Negro painter and a white musicologist) led by the star shining over the great manger of Saint-Germain-des-Pres: ` Years later, having frittered away their youth, they would return, with vacant eyes, all initiative gone, without heart to set themselves to the only task appropriate to the milieu that was slowly revealing to me the nature of its values: Adams task of giving things their names (Carpentier, 1968). Walcott invokes both Whitman and Carpentier. These writers raise a fundamental questionone that has preoccupied Walcott and one that occupies us hereof how absolute novelty can be communicated in language. John Locke touched on this question when he wrote: In the beginning, all the world was America. Perhaps the most signi cant difference between Brathwaite and Walcott in the present context comes down to their contrasting pictures of language. Such contrasting pictures shape their assumptions about how West Indian speech relates to the past, and how artists in the Caribbean might connect with an authentically popular culture. Their common hope is that such a language will become a resource for the whole community. Where have these pictures linking language, history and national identity come from? Paradoxically, both writers draw on the same constellation of ideasthe ones that I have been associating with the writers of the German Enlightenment. Such ideas were taken up and reshaped in different national circumstances across Europe in the nineteenth century. Essentially they are about the special role of the poet in forging the national language. I want to get behind these pictures, to gain a little historical distance and to get clearer about

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how they arose in the rst instance, in order to see why they might be signi cant for debates about English teaching today. I began with a sketch of a London classroom, and with Carlos memories of his childhood in St Vincent. I followed with a brief discussion of two poets for whom contrasting pictures of language and history have been especially important. Chie y at issue is the picturing of language in history. But also there are concerns about the role of language in peoples development and its role in forging a sense of self that remains continuous under changing conditions. This I think is what links Carlos to the poets. Carlos recollection of Kingstown market evoked powerful feelings. Perhaps these feelings took us all by surprise. The way that he threaded memories together, the names he chose to keep the recollections owing, combined to create unforeseen patterns of meaning. Signi cantly, the meanings he attached to the images he called up were not the same as the ones he felt as a child, though they were saturated with childhood associations. I was especially touched when he spoke about his father, though, of course, I didnt share his memories. Franklin, Carlos spa,10 who was from Monserrat, murmured Ai, Carlosand chuckled. A picture of language that makes sense of such episodesthere were others besideshas to include, centrally, history: not just the language biography of the speaker, but also the history of the language itself, considered within the broader currents of a social and cultural history. What I have in mind is something close to what Brathwaite calls the history of the voice. But a picture that makes sense also needs to include the essentially creative business of binding words to tangible experience, much in the way that Walcott speaks of Adams task of naming things. For Carlos, the impulse to name, and to give past experience present signi cance is essentially self-constitutive. He uses words to recover something of the person he once was and to realise what he has become. This is an ordinary, intrinsically human businesssomething we all must do if we are to forge identities for ourselves, or restore authentic contact with ourselves, in Rousseaus terms. But we cant do it in isolation. We need recognition. I think that Brathwaite is doing something of this when he recalls Takoradi and Kumasi, towns in Ghana. He has just been speaking about the slow crossing from West Africa to the Caribbean, and the sense he had of not leaving Africa at all, but going into an extension of it. He touches on continuities of expression and, shortly after, he recollects the village markets in the West Indies: So many words in the Caribbean are African words, which one didnt know. Partou they say in the Caribbean, meaning owl. partout is twi for owl. Niam, to eat. Even aye koo is a word we use when we greet people knocking at the door. So there was that. Another example [of continuities between Ghana and the Caribbean] was the markets in Ghana. There is a pattern of segregation of sexes in the market, theres a certain noise pattern, a choreography of sound, which was identical in the Caribbean, the way people squat, the way they like to put their trays on the ground rather than on tables, the way they cut up meat, the cod sh, the way they display the cloth, the attitude and manner of the butchers, you could think it was an uncle or a nephew, one country to the other.11

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Brathwaite worked in Ghana for eight years altogether, and he sums up what his time there meant to him like this: I came to a sense of identi cation with these people, my living diviners. I came to connect my history with theirs. He continues, I came home to nd that I had not really left. The middle Passage had now guessed its end. For Carlos, the story will be different, but no less worth the telling. Yet Walcott also takes us close to the contemporary signi cance of Carlos SpanishIndian Trinidadian heritage: Deprived of their original language, the captured and indentured tribes create their own, accreting and secreting fragments of an old, an epic vocabulary, from Asia and from Africa, but to an ancestral, ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by slavery or indenture, while nouns are renamed and given the names of places like Felicity and Choieul The stripped man is driven back to that self-astonished, elemental force, his mind. That is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong. They survived the Middle Passage and the Fatal Rozack, the ship that carried the rst indentured Indians from the port of Madras to the cane elds of Felicity, that carried the chained Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic Jew, the Chinese Grocer and the Lebanese merchant selling cloth samples on his bicycle. And here they are, all in a Caribbean city, Port of Spain, the sum of history, Froudes non-people a downtown babel of shop signs and streets, mongrelised, polyglot, a ferment without a history, like heaven. Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writers heaven (1992). Port of Spain then is the sum of history, with no history. Walcotts paradox constitutes a provocation. Earlier, he has referred to the notoriously condescending judgement of the nineteenth-century British historian, Froude, the way that the Caribbean is looked at, illegitimate, rootless, mongrelised. No people there, to quote Froude, in the true sense of the word (Walcott, 1992). Walcott celebrates the Caribbean city, and a marvellously rich, cosmopolitan history that is quite beyond Froudes recognition. A nal point about the scope of English. The syllabus in secondary schools is still, mostly, a narrow, parochial affair. Welcome national initiatives about teaching literatures from other cultures, and the forms and structures of language, have been devised (and mandated) centrally in recent years, at a distance from the communities they seek to educate. In important ways such initiatives may have reduced, not expanded, the scope of English teaching, where the role of teachers in contact with communities on site, as it were, has been underestimated. We need broad, cosmopolitan (a word that resonated powerfully for the thinkers of the German Enlightenment I mentioned earlier) perspectives on language and literature if we are to develop a rich, uni ed theory of English that is culturally ne-tuned. I have tried to suggest how such a theory is needed to make adequate sense of Carlos story. How else could we afford him the uncondescending recognition his task of naming things solicits?

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NOTES [1] The German variant of the European Enlightenment arose comparatively late, in the second half of the eighteenth century, and it extended into the nineteenth, overlapping with German Romanticism. [2] Traditionally, Herder has been viewed as an opponent of the Enlightenment. Ironically, such a view is chie y the product of late nineteenth-centur y German, neo-humanist scholarship, which emerged against the background of the foundatio n of the German Empire in 1871, and the associated effort to assert a distinctly German cultural tradition. On this view, an eighteenth-century German anti-Enlightenment movementthe Sturm und Drang decade of the 1870sculminates in the cultural achievements of classical Weimar and German Romanticism. But this is misleading. Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose ideas about languages and national outlooks are relevant to what this article is about, belongs to the late Enlightenment. He died in 1835, and his work, The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and its in uence on the Mental Development of Mankind the so-called Kawi Introductionwas published posthumously the following year. In the 1790s he was closely in touch with the post-revolutionary inheritors of the French Enlightenment, the ideologues (Destutt de Tracy and Abbe Sieyes). Like Herder, von Humboldt learned much from French Enlightenment thinkers about language. Crucially, however, he rethought many of their precepts from the perspective of the major philosopher of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant. [3] See also, Carlo Ginzburg (1981) The Cheese and the Worms, which offers an extremely clear picture of the special signi cance of historical anthropolog y for studies of cultures produced by the popular classes. [4] This is a rough transcript of a BBC radio broadcast in l982. Edward Brathwaite is in conversation with sixth formers, Anne Walmsley, Joan Grif ths (the producer), Peter Traves and me. It proved an extraordinary afternoon, especially when we were joined by an Atumpan (tonal) drummer from Ghana. Brathwaite engaged the students with a striking account of his personal sense of the African presence in West Indian life. [5] Brathwaite acknowledges his debt to the poet Claude McKay, for instance: McKays rst two books of poetry (1912) written in Jamaica, are unique in that they are the rst all-dialect collections from an anglophon e Caribbean poet. They are dialect as distinct from nation because McKay allowed himself to be imprisoned in the pentamenter. [6] See, for instance, Brathwaites pertinent comments about the way that specialising linguistics have failed to go into nation language as it affects literatureThey have set out its syntax, transformation, structure and all of those things. But they havent really been able to make any contact between the nation language and its expression in our literature. [7] For a recent study of nationalism and identity in the Caribbean region see Stephano Harney (1996). [8] The so-called Brathwaite versus Walcott debate, an extremely complicated episode in the history of Caribbean literature, and one that has divided writers and critics in the cultural politics of the post-independenc e years. In my view, the best introduction to the topic is undoubtedl y Anne Walmsleys book, The History of the Caribbean Artists Movement (1991). Patricia Ismond discusses many of the key issues in an extremely important early article, Walcott vs. Brathwaite (1971). Here, though, I am less concerned with the history of the debate than with the potential of the two poets pictures of language for a teacher who was struggling to make sense of Carlos experience. [9] See Aime Cesaire (1970). The excellent introduction by Mazisi Kuene describes the experiences of black students who have been subjected to a system that denies them their cultural achievements. He cites Fanon on linguistic hegemony in the Francophone Caribbean: The middle class in the Antilles never speak creole except to their servants. In school, children are taught to scorn the dialect. One avoids creolisms. Some families expressly forbid the use of Creole . Kuene concludes, The student who spoke in perfect French was a demigod. To survive in his acquired status he had to avoid lapsing into patois and in making this effort he af rmed the success of the French colonial policy and saw his reality only in terms of the French corpus (p. 18). [10] An old-fashioned West Indian dialect word for friend, deriving from sparring partner. Carlos and Franklin used the term knowingly as an out-of-date expression. [11] A full discussion of the relation among languages, peoples and ways of seeing the world is beyond the scope of this article. There exists a vast literature on the subject. Contemporary linguistics usually refer to the SapirWhorf thesis in this connection, and for an early critique of the misalignment of languages and peoples see the work of Sapir (1970), who made clear in the 1920s the way that races, languages and cultures are not distributed in parallel fashion, that their areas of distribution inter-cross in the most bewildering fashion, and that the history of each is apt to follow a distinctive course. The pre-Saussurian history of theorising such relations, however, is not well known beyond the obvious link between nineteenth-centur y diachronic linguistics (philology) and forms of cultural nationalism.

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REFERENCES

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BRATHWAITE , E. (1968) Masks (Oxford, Oxford University Press). BRATHWAITE , E. (1970) Timheri in Savacou 2, September. BRATHWAITE , E. (1973) The Arrivants (Oxford, Oxford University Press). BRATHWAITE , E. (1974) Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (London, New Beacon Books). BRATHWAITE , E. (1984) History of the Voice: the development of nation language in anglophon e Caribbean poetry (London, New Beacon Books). CARPENTIER , A. (1968) Lost Steps, rst published in Mexico in 1953, translated from the Spanish by H.ONIS (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books). CESAIRE, A. (1938/1970) Return to my Native Land, translated from the French by J. BERGER & A. BOSTOCK (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books). GINZBURG , C. (1981) The Cheese and the Worms (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul). GOODY, J. (1991) From a white teachers perspective, in: Foundation s of a Movement (London, edited and published by the John La Rose Tribute Committee). HARNEY , S. (1996) Nationalism and Identity: culture and the imagination in a Caribbean diaspora (Kingston, University of the West Indies). ISMOND, P. (1971) Walcott vs Brathwaite, Caribbean Quarterly, 17:3 & 4. LEWIS, R.W.B. (1955) The American Adam: innocence, tragedy, and tradition in the nineteenth century (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). SAID, E. (1990) Narrative, geography and interpretation, New Left Review, March/April. SAPIR, E. (1970) Language, rst published in l921 (London, Rupert Hart Davis). TAYLOR, C. (1994) Multiculturalism: examining the politics of recognition, edited and introduced by A. GUTMAN (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press). THOMPSON, E.P. (1968) The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books). WALCOTT, D. (1969) In a Green Night (London, Jonathan Cape). WALCOTT, D. (1970) What the twilight says: an overture, in: Dream on Monkey and Other Plays (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). WALCOTT, D. (1973) Another Life (London, Jonathan Cape). WALCOTT, D. (1992) The Antilles: fragments of epic memory (The Nobel Lecture) (The Nobel Foundatio n and London, Faber & Faber). WALMSLEY, A. (1991) The History of the Caribbean Artists Movement (London, New Beacon Books). WHITMAN , W. (1860) Ages and ages returning at intervals, from children of Adam, in: Leaves of Grass (London, New English Library, 1958).