Pidgin ( ah nostalgia
Cornelius Hamelberg
Linton Kwesi Johnson ( British Poet
For poetry in Jamaican Patois here are some good samples:
The Poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson
Also seminal : Linton Kwesi Johnson : Time Come - Selected Prose
My son interviewed him in September last year for his book launch in Gothenburg
Sentence 1: Because of the slave trade, white shirt, white prayer garments, white tennis shoes, White Jesus, Cecil Rhodes, colonial mischief, the English Language which colonised North America and the rest of what was once the British Empire , we have the English Language Empire , and as a matter of post-colonial convenience English became and remains the official language of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Liberia, South Sudan, and South Africa.
Sentence 2 : Today, the dominance of English as a global language, its various offshoots, hybrids, pidgins, Englishes flourish to the extent that Robinson Crusoe’s Man Friday is now a big man, he is now sometimes an emperor, a president, a king, a mathematician, a scientist, a medical doctor, a professor of many disciplines, a philosopher, a chief, a gigantic chest-beating poet, a priest, a paedophile, even a thief, and it’s exactly as Dylan sang, “Steal a little and they throw you in jail; Steal a lot and they make you king”
Sentence 3: Just like Great Satan and little satan/ junior satan according to Iranian demonology, so too in post-colonial reality and, if you have a sense of humour, according to the highbrow, disdainful perspectives of some of the purveyors of academic cruelty there are many grades and gradations of our lumpen humanity: We have Big Grammar & little grammar, pidgin English, Broken English and many other varieties of second class English Language Citizens.
Over here in Sweden it’s known as Svengelska or SWENGLISH , i.e. Swedish + English, quite a mix. Sometimes, quite unconsciously, it’s absolutely ( “absolut”) one of the languages that I speak. My Gambian friend’s Swedish wife speaks English with a Gambian-English accent. I was quite taken aback when I first heard it. I had thought that she was an Englishwoman and that she had mistaken me for a Gambian and was either mocking me, or speaking to me in my own language in her very Gambian-English accent when she told me , ”My husband is not at home” etc etc ; so in return I started talking to her in a traditional birdy num-num Indian-English accent popularised by Peter Sellers and she was also surprised and wanted to know if I had been living in India
In these intense moments of idleness, my only purpose in posting at all, is to promote some interest, not to sound professional or professorial (after a lifetime of reading - I’ve had the time to do that and I know how professorial sometimes sounds especially from the bloke who is the first Oxford graduate in his village - and therefore not without pride with the first African on the moon kind of feeling he may expect or be expected to become everybody’s besserwisser, forgivably self-laudatory, or unforgivably pedestrian, trite, and absolutely boring when you consider that at this very moment there are more than 26,000 students at Oxford, including 12,470 undergraduates and 13,920 postgraduates, all coming from somewhere or other and just right now there are 21,656 fellow human beings known to be students at Cambridge…
Re - the happy, self-advertising, self-praise ( as usual) and attention-seeking ”Today’s quote” has got me to think some of the thoughts that you are reading in this post; as for “defiance” I daresay one of the pioneers and great popularisers in that genre is FELA another is Bob Marley
For entertainment, there’s always the fecund Mr Macaroni - armed with that distinctive sense of humour and a culture-based sense of comedy that makes him celebrated as one of the most effective satirists and social critics of our time, on planet Nigeria
Back in the day, in a pidgin of sorts, easy and readable : Sam Selvon
Poetry? Another level : Derek Walcott
#In this forum : Derek Walcott
It’s all so very interesting. When it comes to language poverty/poverty of language, language incompetence, beggars have no choice. I have been listening lately to Wi Yard and keeping the regular company of the old school connoisseurs of one of the oldest and richest of the so-called “pidgins”, the Krio language . Connoisseurs such as Sam Oju King - born on Banana island - and incidentally, a friend of Fela , since Fela’s days in Ghana. No mystery about Sam, here’s the rascal ,the eloquent one, always a joy to listen to and to learn from.
I’d just like to add this note that even Sam Oju King is not as eloquent as my Yoruba grandmother who spoke a rare and much more elegant Victorian Creole / Krio - no doubt, the kind of Krio that the likes of Ajayi Crowther and Herbert Macauley spoke and in my generation folks like dear Gladius Lewis must be still speaking with much of the vocabulary sprinkled with pithy proverbs and other poetic devices etc derived from the King James Version of the Bible.
For richness, depth and eloquence, perhaps only Haitian Creole can compare, since Haitian Creole goes back to the 17th and 18th centuries.
No wonder Dany Laferrière is a member of the Académie Française
Lastly when it comes to pidgin / broken etc i’s most appropriate place is theatre which features the living language of the people.
As for BBC News Pidgin - for me it’s pure comedy, its forced and contorted expressions only produce paroxysms of laughter in yours truly. That Man Friday BBC pidgin English, is that the way Nigerians speak in everyday real life?
I wonder to what extent Nollywood is uncompromising when it comes to fully exploiting the dramatic potentials in it’s “use of Pidgin “