In his groundbreaking poem The Song of the Banana Man, the writer Evan Jones, who has died aged 95, conceived a new form for Caribbean poetry that merged the cadence and language of Jamaican patois with that of standard English.
Written in 1952, broadcast on the BBC’s Caribbean Voices radio programme in 1953 and published in Barbados in Bim magazine in 1954, the poem captured the pride of a Jamaican farmer who works the land during a time when the huge sugar estates owned by foreign concerns were being replaced by locally owned smallholdings, and records the stirrings of an agitating workforce that was heading towards self-determination.
