‘Africa Speaks in
Me’: How the Diaspora Shaped the Languages of the Caribbean,
Then and Now
Ann Albuyeh, English Linguistics,
University of Puerto Rico: Río Piedras
safni@caribe.net
The significant impact of the Atlantic
slave trade on the languages of the West Indies is indisputable and
has been a topic of much study by linguists over the last few decades.
Despite the obvious limitations of written records regarding the linguistic
contact of Africans and Europeans in the Caribbean centuries ago and
the processes of language change which reduce our ability to detect
sources, there is much that can be ascertained.
This paper will discuss the languages, from Yoruba to Pidgin English,
that we believe Africans brought with them to the Caribbean during
the more than three centuries of forced migration; the fate of those
languages in the West Indies and the subsequent evolution of the pidgins
and creoles of the region; and the legacy of borrowed words from African
languages which are in evidence today in both standard and non-standard
European languages spoken in the Caribbean, focusing specifically on
English and Spanish.
The paper will conclude with an investigation into Puerto Rican university
students’ awareness of and attitudes toward ‘Africanisms’ in
their everyday Spanish (“Africa Habla en Mi”). The paper
will then discuss the response of several West African academics regarding
the identification of the African sources of these “Africanisms.” Finally,
it will look at the West African influence on the language of Puerto
Rican literature, specifically the early twentieth-century poetry of
Luis Palés Matos.
Poems of South African Jail and Exile:
A Reassessment of the Early Poetry of Dennis Brutus
When Nelson Mandela was sent to Robben Island in 1964, he was kept
in an isolated area with others who were, in his words, “risky
from the security perspective, but even more dangerous from a political
standpoint.” Together with Mandela were George Peake, a founder
of the South African Coloured People’s Organization, Billy Nair,
a member of the Natal Indian Congress, and the poet Dennis Brutus (1924-
), imprisoned for his political activism.
As with the other inmates, Brutus’ eighteen months hard labor
in southern Africa’s most notorious prison was one of anger,
reflection, and resolution. On release from prison in 1966, Brutus
was sent into exile and his writing banned.
Moving first to Britain, then to the United States, Brutus published
his poetry abroad, producing Letters to Martha & Other Poems from
a South African Prison (labeled “poems of indictment” by
Wole Soyinka) in 1968 and a collection of his South African jail and
early exile poetry, A Simple Lust, in 1973.
This paper will reassess Dennis Brutus’ contribution not only
to South African letters, but also read his early poems in a trans-national
context in which they are rediscovered in the work of other Africans,
for example, of Angola’s Agostinho Neto (1922-1979) and Malawi’s
Jack Mapanje (1944- ), who were incarcerated, often without charge
or trial, for their involvement in the struggle against colonialism.
Dennis Brutus continues to campaign for all those who suffer political
injustice and to write poetry.
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