KINGSTON, Jamaica – Dr Ceila Brown-Blake, associate dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of the West Indies, Mona, is calling on the Constitution Reform Committee (CRC) to include Jamaican Patwa as an official language of communication, as the country seeks to sever ties with the British monarchy, in its quest to become a republic.

Brown-Blake made the plea in an hour-long lecture she gave to over 500 attendees recently at the 11th Hilory Pamela Kelly Distinguished Lecture, hosted by the Language Teaching and Research Centre, a division of the Faculty of Education and Liberal Studies at the University of Technology, Jamaica. The lecture was titled ‘Colonial Linguistic Damage and Responsibility for Repair’.

Amid ongoing talks about reparations from Great Britain, Brown-Blake, who holds a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in linguistics and Master of Laws (LLM) in commercial and corporate law, charged that Jamaicans owe it to themselves to self-repair and become agents of linguistic reform, by embracing Jamaican Creole – the language of majority of Jamaicans.

“I submit that linguistic repair for colonial linguistic damage is part of what we owe ourselves. How then do we go about an agentive linguistic repair? My view is that the law emanating as it does from us, via our various parliaments, should be employed as a pathway to galvanise linguistic reparation,” said the veteran law educator.

“We also need to be inward-looking to exercise our own agency. This agentic response, I believe, honours and continues the tradition on the part of our ancestors of differentiation, resistance, and self-assertion at the level of language that we’ve seen operating despite the damage wreaked by colonial attempts at linguistic acculturation and a colonial ideology of prejudice against African and Caribbean vernacular languages,” she said.

Brown-Blake, who has spent her career examining how language intersects with justice and legal rights in the Caribbean context, emphasised that legislation is needed to help reduce the stigma associated with Jamaican Patwa and create an atmosphere – even in courtrooms – where Creole-speaking citizens are not disenfranchised or discriminated because they do not master the English language.

“Legislation, which aims to upend the colonial linguistic paradigm of vernacular stigmatisation and inferiority, partly maintained by conquest diglossia, should be enacted. One of the characteristics of the law is its capacity to act as an agent of change to transform social practices. This derives from its capacity to mandate, supported by its capacity to encourage and require compliance via enforcement provisions,” noted Brown-Blake.

“But I think that the law assumes importance beyond this in efforts at reparatory justice. As I’ve shown in the discussion on the nature of the colonial linguistic damage, the law and judicial system have been key elements in inflicting, supporting and maintaining that damage. And so the use of the law as a means of repair becomes important, not only as a symbolic act of denouncing the oppressive way in which the law has been historically employed, but also as a subject matter itself in need of repair,” she highlighted.

Brown-Blake, who served as an international visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Humanities Centre in the United States, stated that the CRC should take inspiration from countries such as New Zealand, India and South Africa, which have given recognition to indigenous languages.

“A reparatory effort that should aim, as far as language is concerned, to infuse an ethos of affirmation of our vernaculars, which are a critical reflection component, if not an essential part of the construction and creation of our Caribbean civilisation and identities…

In New Zealand, the colonial discriminatory policy of exclusion of the use of the Maori language in courts, sanctioned and enforced by the New Zealand Court of Appeal, in the case of Mihaka, was brought to an end with the promulgation of the Maori Language Act of 1987. That piece of legislation not only made Maori an official language of New Zealand, but also expressly provided for the right to speak Maori in legal proceedings. This marked the beginning step in the process of change in attitudes and in the status and use of Maori in courts. There’s a very long way to go in terms of normalising the use of Maori in courts in New Zealand, but there is increasing acceptance by the New Zealand judiciary of the use of Maori in legal proceedings. They have now developed the practice of Maori English bilingual introductions and endings in the courts of New Zealand,” the senior lecture mentioned.

“In India and in South Africa, there is not just legislative, but constitutional recognition of indigenous languages. And that is significant firstly because a constitution is the legal foundation of a state and tends to reflect the broad philosophical underpinnings of a state,” underscored Brown-Blake.

The enshrining of Jamaican Creole into the constitution would be a step in the right direction – a repeated call made by several linguists since the country gained independence in 1962.

“But it’s also legally significant because of the elevated position that constitutions tend to hold in law, in that they are the supreme law in the sense that other laws must yield to the constitution in the event of any inconsistency between those laws and the provisions of the constitution. Constitutional provisions thus possess a unique legal status, which mirrors the degree of significance that a state attaches to the content of the provisions. So, the constitution of India declares Hindi as the official language of the Union, even though this is effectively heavily qualified by other provisions of the constitution of India, which allow for English to be used in public domains, though English is not expressly declared as an official language of the Union,” Brown-Blake explained.

Brown-Blake insisted that the abandonment of the British monarch should be tangibly evident in the language of the people, which was derived from their African ancestry.

“Jamaica’s law emanated from the parliament of the United Kingdom and it has been criticised as being alien to the people of Jamaica on that basis. The idea in this constitutional reform endeavour is to become a republic – in which we are becoming a republic – is to have the constitution issue from our parliament an act of absolute agency via which political decolonisation effecting political repair will be achieved. In this process, language should be central both at the symbolic and the substantive level,” said the attorney-at-law.

“The essence of republicanism, of course, is the abandonment of the reigning British monarch as head of state and first citizen of our country and installing one of our own in this prevalent position. But the notion of Caribbean republicanism encompasses a range of values including the assertion of identity, citizenship, decolonisation, as well as democracy, equality, and justice. And it is part of the custom of republics to enshrine in their constitution symbols of these values as we have seen in the case of India and South Africa,” added Brown-Blake.

The associate dean maintained that Jamaican Patwa is a part of the fabric of the Jamaican society and every citizen should have the right to speak it freely. This is in line with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (UNESCO) International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-2032), aimed at indigenous language preservation, revitalisation and promotion.

“The nexus between language and identity, which is state of citizenship, makes the vernacular languages of the commonwealth Caribbean, like Jamaican, ideal candidates for asserting and symbolising the values of identity and citizenship. The concept of national identity incorporates the notions of sameness as well as difference – so intra-nation similarity but distinctiveness from other nations.

Our respective Caribbean vernaculars are well positioned to convey those values of identity and citizenship to be an emblem of our collective sameness and at the same time to distinguish us from any other nation. And as people, as a people, as a Caribbean people, we know this,” argued Brown-Blake.

In commenting on the lecture, honouree Kelly noted it was interesting.

“In fact, when I knew that she was coming, I had sort of gone on to ChatGPT to find out what the thought would be, but I got much more from her… I quite enjoyed all that she had said. I found it very insightful, very thought-provoking,” she said.

– Oneil Madden