Bennett on BennettAuthor(s): Louise Bennett and Dennis ScottSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 1/2, A Survey of the Arts (March - June 1968), pp.97-101Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40653061 .

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V, Bennett On Bennett Interviewed by Dennis Scott

Scott: Louise, I heard you say once - "I believe in laughter." This is one way, your way of looking at the world, but tell me, how far does your use of dialect depend on this attitude? If you were a Jeremiah, for example, would the dialect serve you just as well?

Bennett: I have found a medium through which I can pretend to be laughing. Most of the time when we laugh it is so that we may not weep. Isn't that so?

We can laugh at ourselves . . . The nature of the Jamaican dialect is the nature of comedy, I feel. As it is used by the people to express their feelings, the dialect is very adaptable. You can twist it, you can express yourself so much more strongly and vividly than in standard English. Maybe I feel this because I think in the dialect; but I haven't really answered you. Now what I think is, that you have to feel deeply about what you do. My business of believing in laughter forces me to look for the medium through which I can express that attitude. And the greatest medium I can find is the Jamaican dialect - the dialect I know, I feel; the dialect that I understand; the language, the comedy that I understand. And your other question: If I did not believe in laughter would the dialect serve me just as well. Well - I can't say - I could say something in dialect that could make you cry right now, but I don't know because I don't feel tragedy as strongly as I feel comedy. I can portray the tragic side of things or the serious side of things; but immediately the comedy of it comes to mind and that's what I want to express.

Scott: Quite apart from your own intentions do you think that this is a particular quality of the dialect?

Bennett: It is a quality of the dialect. The nature of dialect is almost the nature of comedy though it may be difficult to define either of them. Why do people talk a dialect? Why do people laugh? I mean, look how many years we have been using it. They say it came out of slavery - the mixture of different languages - (I am talking about Jamaica now) but we find dialect all over the world.

Scott: And do you feel that this inability to be serious without being funny as well is a particular quality connected with people of negro origin? It certainly is there in the American blues tradition, in the whole field of jazz. Even when you are closest to tears there is a bit of an ironic twist in your expression - there is a joy as well.

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Bennett: Well, I don't know all that much about other dialects or other countries but I know something of the Cockney, for instance, and I have found some of this very quality there. The quality I think, is stronger among the negro people in that we have a certain quality of forgiveness. I don't care whether people agree with me or not; I find that the negro people have the greatest capacity for forgiving of any people I can find anywhere. I can't think of any other race that has suffered as much as the negro has all over the world that could behave as the negro does, the ordinary negro - knowing what is happening and has happened to negroes all over the world. To behave as we do, to laugh at things as we do - well really! To make fun of ourselves and other people as we do in the midst of unhappiness! Scott: It's very interesting to hear you talk as generally as this because, forgive me, but it seems to me that in a strange kind of way you go your own sweet way and talk as you are now doing far more seldom than many of the rest of us writers and so on who are always shooting off our mouths with other creative writers. Is this true, is this impression true?

Bennett: My dear Dennis, I have been set apart by other creative writers a long time ago because of the language I speak and work in. From the beginning nobody ever recognised me as a writer. "Well, she is 'doing' dialect;" it wasn't even writing you know. Up to now a lot of people don't even think I write. They say "Oh, you just stand up and say these things!"

Scott: I take your point about yours having been a hard fight for recognition. But today one is constantly coming across statements in print by West Indian critics and writers who are very much impressed and concerned with what you have been doing in dialect, and with dialect.

Bennett: Yes, and I am very gratified, very pleased that this has happened at last. But we have to face the fact that in the beginning this wasn't so. You know, I wasn't ever asked to a Jamaican Poetry League meeting? I was never thought good enough to be represented in that anthology FOCUS. The anthology which appeared in 1962 was the first time that anything representing the community of writers contained anything of mine in it. Most people thought that after all they couldn't discourse with me at all because I was going to talk to them in Jamaican dialect which they couldn't understand.

Scott: Do you think that one cause of your having to wait so long for the recognition we all agree you do deserve is that you work in an extremely theatrical way and so often in the theatre itself - so that one tends to think of you as a performing artist primarily?

Bennett: Definitely, Though I did start to write before I started to perform! My work does lend itself so much to performance because it is oral in its tradition, legendary. People are not as accustomed to reading the dialect as they are to listening to it, and I found it a wonderful medium for the stage.

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You know, one reason I persisted writing in dialect in spite of all the opposition was because nobody else was doing so and there was such rich material in the dialect that I felt I wanted to put on paper some of the wonderful things that people say in dialect. You could never say 'look here* as vividly as "kuyah."

Scott: Talk for a little about how you began to write, how you began to write dialect, how you began to write comedy.

Bennett: From the time I was quite young, I wanted to write. At first I started to write things about birds, and bees and trees. But then I realized that I was not doing what I really wanted to do. There was life going on around me and people living their lives, and what I was writing had nothing to do with what was really happening around me. So then I started to take a greater interest in people - to listen to what they were saying and how they were saying it, and the first dialect verse I wrote was about a tram car. I remember a country woman in it said " Spread out yuself, one dress-woman a come."

I remember it was a wonderful description. I was just a school girl but all dressed up to go to pictures and looking well developed. At about this time I began to wonder why more of our poets and writers were not taking more of an interest in the kind of language usage and the kind of experiences of living which were all around us, and writing in this medium of dialect instead of writing in the same old English way about Autumn and things like that. I have always been fascinated by the hills and I used to write a lot about them. The hills were every- where; even going up Orange Street on the tram car there were the hills ahead of us. Well, I wrote a poem once about running to the hills and breezes and so on and at the end of it I found myself wonder- ing about the people who lived there. I think it ended "the people work and play much cooler than we do." This, mind you, at the end of a deadly serious poem. You see, even as early as that, I was finding a sense of comedy along with the most serious subjects. To cut this short then: being interested in people and what the people were doing and the 'now' of their lives, these were my pre-occupations and the themes I tried to develop.

Scott: And do the poets whom you read have any influence on your own work?

Bennett: I should think so. I'll tell you! At the beginning of my career what I knew most about were the English poets at the time. But I think I was most interested in their rhythms and techniques, and I think I have been greatly influenced by their techniques. Not con- sciously. Perhaps at the beginning, but nowadays I am quite certain that the things that strike me in contemporary writers - certain qualities, certain things that are said that impressed me, work on me quite unconsciously. And when I say impress me I mean, I feel "this is true, this is real." And I try to say the same things in my way. I am sure that most of our writers are very sincere about what they are saying and the way they say it. They are not just writing because it

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is fashionable, they feel what they write. But the language in which they say these things is not the language in which I would say them, or that I feel. Our people - the people that I keep on studying and portraying - they have a wonderful sanity and clarity in their language - though its not "acceptable"! But this is really a digression. The answer to your question is yes.

Scott: Among the current crop of writers whose work do you particu- larly enjoy? Bennett: Dennis, do you know that everybody has influenced me in some way? Just as in my reading of poetry. I couldn't ever say that I have a favourite poet or novelist or essayist among West Indian writers. There are certain things that certain writers say that I like and remember, but I have not got a favourite writer. I have favourite quotations, favourite speeches, favourite lines.

Scott: Your position in this country, if seems to me, Louise, is that of a middle-class professional entertainer. Or perhaps "professional entertainer of the middle-classes" or -

Bennett: Oh, never that.

Scott: Who then do you speak for in your poetry, and who do you speak to?

Bennett: I think I speak to all Jamaica. In a performance for instance - I don't want to talk about my writing - a large cross section of the community from the Governor-General to the man in the street can react to the lines and the situations I present. So I can't feel that I belong to any class or that I write for any class. The Jamaican peasant who speaks the dialect - not only the peasant, for we all speak the dialect to some extent - he is an extremely self-aware and perceptive individual and expresses his awareness of the society, as I have said already, in colourful and accurate terms. Even when he seems deliberately to be expressing himself in nonsense rhymes, for example, he is actually saying things very vividly. Take the folk songs for instance, do you remember "London Torbun" you know; "You no heari' wha' me heari?" "No, no, sah." Now this recalls a sad incident. Some turbine on an estate had exploded and people died in the accident. Its a sad tale, but because a Jamaican does not dwell on the sorrow of an occasion exclusively, the song is not a sad one so it has a feeling of lightness and cheerfulness and on first hearing sounds like almost like a child's nonsense song. "Me heari seh London Torbun / boiler bottom burs' / Kill over nineteen man! / Me heari seh, los' can' fin' . . ." and so on: "Miss Matti man los' cyan fin/ De likkle bwoy los' cyan fin'." And even the animals enter the picture in later verses, you know, "The goat head los' cyan fine." And of course its all part of another tradition - the practice of singing a "dinky" to cheer up the family of a dead person so that they don't cry. What is interesting is that when you look between the lines you find all the sorrow there and all the facts too, but if you don't search for it, if you don't care, well then you wont find it.

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Scott: So then if as you say (and I agree with you,) your work appeals to so large a cross section of our people, how do you explain the fact that it took so long for people to regard your art as "respectable"?

Bennett: Because for too long, it was considered not respectable to use the dialect. Because there was a social stigma attached to the kind of person who used dialect habitually. Many people still do not accept the fact that for us there are many things which are best said in the language of the "common man."

Scott: One last question then - Because of this quality of laughter in your work it is easy sometimes for us, for the audience to miss the social seriousness, the serious social intent behind the work is this true and is this deliberate on your part.

Bennett: This is true. Many people do miss it. Sometimes their missing of the point is deliberate. They prefer to pretend that it's all in fun. And I don't mind. I go along with them. As long as I myself am sincere about what I am doing I feel that the truth of a thing must reveal itself to the right people.

Scott: And are you content with this situation. Would you like people to see what's behind the humour as well? More people, I mean.

Bennett: Yes I would, but I know that it takes time.

Scott: And about anger finally. Is your work "angry"?

Bennett: (pause) Not obviously. Not obviously angry.

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