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Talk Like a Trini
As a journalist, every day I struggle with my use of the language to properly express my thoughts and experiences. I am always worried that I am saying the wrong thing, especially in my news scripts. But outside of matters of grammar and expression, and beyond issues surrounding the creative use of language, one of…
The SPOILER’S RETURN Derek WALCOTT
‘Tell Desperadoes when you reach that hill I decompose, but I composing still.’ ” Derek Walcott A statement so timely on the rot that pervades Trinidad that I had to double check the year it was written because I thought he was talking about our current state. We’ve been doing this nonsense for years.
PROF. MERVYN ALLEYNE HAS PASSED AWAY — Repeating Islands
A message from the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico. We offer the Department at his family our condolences. I (Lisa) want to personally acknowledge my gratitude for his great kindness and warmth, which I valued immensely: Mervyn Coleridge Alleyne (1933-2016) Mervyn was a renowned sociolinguist and dialectologist whose ground-breaking work on […]…
How the Language of Jamaica Became Mainstream — Repeating Islands
[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Eternity Martis (The Fader, 1 September 2016) writes about the trajectory of patois on the global stage concluding that “more than just slang—it’s a language of freedom.” [. . .] Patois, as well as its hybridized diasporic slang, is a language used by […]…
The Politics of Patwa (Patois)
An article by Doreen St. Félix for MTV.Com. While listening to a radio transmission in Kingston, Stuart Hall suddenly felt lost. It was the early 1970s, and Hall had temporarily returned to his home country of Jamaica after two decades abroad. Back in 1951, Hall had won a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford,…
Stickfighting: Gi Dem Bwa!
My new favourite thing for Carnival isn’t new at all. It’s a traditional martial art, or fighting style, that was born in Trinidad to African and Indian parents and seems to be having a revival. It’s called Kalinda or Stickfighting. I first went to Stickfighting last year, and had a blast. My favourite thing are…