In 2000, I won a writing competition that awakened me to the depth and variety of Caribbean languages. As the Jamaica finalist for the My Caribbean essay competition, I joined more than 20 children from the region to form the youth delegation of the 24th Caribbean Tourism Conference in Bridgetown, Barbados.
I spent days with peers from islands that, until then, I did not know existed, such as the small but brilliant Sint Eustatius and Saba in the Leeward Islands. What I remember most are the simple greetings and phrases the other children and I taught one another in our different Creoles. Every child had an official language they wrote in to win their national competition – English, French, Dutch etc – but as soon as we were comfortable enough, we ditched those and shared as much as we could in our everyday tongues.
It was during the futuristic fervour of the new millennium, so the My Caribbean competition tasked us with writing about three things we would preserve from our country in a time capsule to the year 3000. In my memory box was the work of Louise “Miss Lou” Bennett-Coverley, a poet, performer and advocate of Jamaican language. Like most other children in Jamaica, I first learned to recite poetry by Ms Lou in school. Her work developed in the vein of writers such as Claude McKay, who defied linguistic standards of the early 20th century and wrote for the Jamaican dialect.
