Is Jamaican patois inherently vulgar and base?

Groundins

Charles H E Campbell

Sunday, March 27, 2011

So far, I have stayed out of the public fray between the Broadcasting Commission and Ragashanti. Meanwhile, in various interviews since the removal of his afternoon programme on Nationwide, Ragashanti has been positing that one of the unstated, ulterior motives of the commission, occasioning their request for the programme's discontinuation, is a middle-class prejudice against the almost exclusive use of the Jamaican lingua by his guests and himself, in expressing their views.

This has found fertile ground with some of his supporters because; historically this bigotry has been a significant trait amongst our colonial indoctrinated petty bourgeoisie. To illustrate this from a personal experience, I remember taking the decision in the mid 70's to begin incorporating the use of our national vernacular into a television programme called Farm World, of which I had been the presenter for about two years. After a few episodes using this new approach, the programme was suddenly discontinued because of a flood of complaints from influential people, even though simultaneously, the feedback I was getting from our, then mostly unlettered, farming community was quite positive, in that they were able to better grasp my interpretations of the techniques and methods being taught by the featured expert guests.

I dare say however, the backward, narrow-minded position of the Jamaican middle class, on this issue, has significantly eroded over the years, as a generation passed. Today, Jamaica has become far more liberal in its acceptance of this media practice, as is evidenced by merely scanning the media landscape at any given time of day. In fact, to be fair to Ragashanti, whereas on his daytime programme, he is versatile at the use of English and patois interchangeably, it seems that many of our other media personalities -- especially Disc Jocks -- can't, but 'haxcentuate' the patois. So Dr Kingsley 'Ragashanti' Stewart cannot claim to have broken new ground in this regard. Afterall, Mutabaruka's very popular, successful, on-going Wednesday night programme on Irie Fm, The Cutting Edge, predates his programme by many years.

To go even further back, actor/comedians like Bim and Bam, Ranny Williams and Charles Hyatt, for decades, made the use of patois in public performances on stage and in the electronic media, their calling cards -- without offending our sensibilities. Miss Lou's children's programme Ring Ding ran on morning television for umpteen years. Their judicious use of patois to entertain and educate, is a blueprint that still serves as a guide to many of us who have followed in their footsteps, in legitimising and raising the profile of Jamaicanese.

To accept the spoken language comparisons of English versus patois, given by Ragashanti, an anthropologist by profession, in his television interview with Winford Williams last week, would lead one to also conclude that Jamaican Patois is inherently vulgar and base. Furthermore, for him to hide behind the guise of a comedian in denying the social responsibility of daytime radio is disingenuous at best, while pandering to the most base instincts of his listeners, with an objective to exploit. As our folklore tells us, in our society, "what is joke to one man is death to another."

Ragashanti should take heed. It truly despairs, to observe someone who has pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, turn around, emphasise, encourage and manipulate his (mostly female, uneducated) listeners' perverse, destructive domestic habits and a lifestyle spurred by them having been socially retarded, as a consequence of dwelling in the oppressive, twilight ghetto zones of our garrison communities, ruled by the gun, sustained by the drug trade and various forms of extortion, with their predisposition to embrace warped values, manifest in bleached-out skins, wigs, false nails and numerous children born to, and sporadically maintained by a retinue of sperm/income donors, themselves exploiting the situation to the hilt.

The question I wish to ask Ragashanti is: should standards of public decency be completely sacrificed in our drive to further indigenise our media culture? In this matter, I am in full agreement with the sentiments expressed by Ian Boyne in his Gleaner commentary last week Sunday. "Such outrageous and offensive content has no place in daytime radio, if at any time." It also goes, without saying that -- my favourite source for news and news analysis -- "Nationwide's demise would be catastrophic to Jamaican Journalism." Therefore, as Boyne concluded, "a way must be found to protect both public morality and press freedom.

Email: che.campbell@gmail.com

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Is Jamaican patois inherently vulgar and base?