December 20, 2017 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
Bernard Heydorn
Derogatory/pejorative language has been around for a long time. In Caribbean English usage, words such as coolie, putagee, chinee, buckman, nigger and many variations thereof are familiar. The word coolie, for example, has been a term of contempt applied to East Indian or Chinese jobbers, especially porters, as a description of immigrant labour from India or China (Dictionary of Guyanese Folklore, A.J. Seymour, 1975).
Springing from coolie is coolie-dougla – a child from the union of an African and an East Indian. A coolie jumbie is described as the spirit of an East Indian seen at night or an ugly person. A coolie bully was a member of a gang who would beat up East Indian jobbers who earned a living by carrying a load (C.A. Yansen – Random Remarks on Creolese, 1993).
Another pejorative word is nigger – referring to a black person or black people in general. The word nigger is probably directly from neger (black), which evolved during the period of early domination of the slave trade in the 17th century (Allsopp, 1996). Though distinctly derogatory, the term is often used in a jocular or familiar way among Black people themselves. However, Black people consider it highly offensive when used by anyone of another race (Allsopp, 1996). Some argue that this may be interpreted as a double standard.
Deriving from nigger is nigger business – a street masquerade show, accompanied by scratch-band music; nigger gram – a stupid rumour; nigger ground; nigger head – uncombed hair; nigger knots – thick and tough hair that has to be pulled hard when being combed; nigger mouth – untrustworthy kind of rumour; nigger pepper – very hot bird pepper; nigger pot – a large pot used for cooking; nigger ten – the X mark made by an illiterate person and accepted as his or her signature; nigger yard – the yard space allotted to or enclosed by tenement rooms. (Allsopp, 1996). Negro coffee was wild coffee.
There is also niggaman rice – pork, saltfish and rice cooked up (Dictionary of Guyanese Folklore , A.J. Seymour, 1975). C.A.Yansen in Random Remarks of Creolese (1993) talks about a Negro cop (stork). A conga quashie was an uneducated Negro from the Congo, used in derogatory terms.
Other derogatory terms include Buck man – an Aboriginal native of Guyana, also called an Amerindian. Derivations include, buck up – to improve your efforts; buck – a dollar; buck banana – a purple skinned variety of banana; buck bead – seeds from a climbing plant used by Amerindians as body ornaments; buck cotton – brown cotton; bucket pan – a bucket; buckle foot – a bow legged person; buck pot – a large black pot; buck sick – getting sick of a task; buck top – a spinning top made from an Awara seed; buck yam – a type of yam, (Allsopp, 1996). There is also bukta – a man’s brief underwear. To walk like a buckman is to walk in single file, one behind the other, like the Amerindians reportedly do in the bush.
Chinee is another derogatory term. Derivations include chinee banana - apple banana; chinee coconut – dwarf coconut; chinaman – a special spin that a bowler imparts on a cricket ball; chinee calalu – a small berry that is purple when ripe; chinee-dougla – a cross breed; chinee eddoe; chinee plum; chinee yam; chinee cabbage; chinee Christmas tree; chinee fire cracker; chinee lemon (Allsopp, 1996).
Putagee is the derogatory term for the Portuguese. Another opprobrious term for the Portuguese is putax – Ten pounds of wax, made one putax – school boy banter (A.J. Seymour, 1975). When I was a schoolboy in primary (elementary) school in New Amsterdam, the teachers administered corporal punishment with a wild cane (bamboo). The terrified student was spread eagled across a school desk while the teacher intoned “Ride duh desk putagee bumbah!” as he gave me six of the best! I am pleased to say that teaching methods have changed over the years.
Derogatory names seem to always find an audience or user. Recently I was at a Caribbean restaurant in Pickering when a Portuguese-looking man with a Guyanese accent walked in. Spotting an acquaintance across the room at a table near me he shouted “Hey Putagee. Wha yuh doin’ here!” It caught me somewhat by surprise and took me back to the old days in Guyana.
I have also been addressed by fellow Guyanese, not necessarily Portuguese, as “putagee”, in Canada. It makes me cringe, be it in private or public. I view it as embarrassing to both the speaker and person spoken to. It may be a sign of attempted superiority, or attempted familiarity, plain insulting or plain stupidity.
I cannot end this discussion without referring to a popular derogatory term to describe our colonial masters – limey. It’s originally a derogatory term for a disreputable white person of lower class (The Cassell Dictionary of Slang, 1998). The term also referred to a group of U.S. sailors who frequented Trinidad’s red-light areas during World War Two (Cassell, 1998). There are also redlegs (poor whites) in rural areas, and baccra johnny – poor white folks, many of Scottish origins.
Unfortunately, it seems poor habits, manners, and behaviours die hard and no group is spared. Speaking now in plain language, if the creeks don’t rise and the sun still shines I’ll be talking to you.
amazing scenes
By Romeo Kaseram
Seepersad Naipaul was born in Caroni, Trinidad, in 1906. A picture of Naipaul’s early life shows he was impoverished and mostly self-taught, these details reported by Shereen Ali in the Trinidad Guardian following a ‘Friends of Mr Biswas’ event on October 9, 2014. The event hosted a talk by American professor Aaron Eastley, who focused on Naipaul’s newspaper writing career. Details provided by Eastley into Naipaul’s early life reveal the boy endured a “harsh home life”; it appears he also grew up in a broken home, and was sent to live with relatives who put him to work helping out caring for cows and goats before heading off to school without shoes. It seems Naipaul would have faced a future of rural obscurity. However, in what was an autodidact’s drive for self-improvement, Naipaul applied himself during and after school teaching himself to read, write, and to understand and interpret the world around him; literacy was the key to his escape from a life working in the canefields.
Naipaul became the Guardian’s ‘Central correspondent’ in the early 1930s, working for three periods with the newspaper until his early death in 1953. Eastley says in that time the newspaper was conservative and exclusive, its target readership the white, urban elite in Port-of-Spain. However, under direction of its new editor, Galt MacGowan, the paper moved to modernise from 1929 into the early 1930s, livening up what it offered with more local content and seeking to extend circulation to a wider audience. It was during this modernising drive when Naipaul came on board as the first East Indian reporter. The collaboration paid off for MacGowan and the Guardian for a few short years, Eastley noted: sales of the newspaper went up, and readers in remoter parts of the island were offered something different and new. The writing space and its momentum allowed Naipaul to discover and explore a whole new expressive profession; and not only did he write stories, he also editorialised, and sometimes was even a player in his reports.
What drove Naipaul was his love to write engaging stories about ordinary people – short, well-narrated, and conveying with an economy of words vivid scenes while filled with sensory detail, Eastley said. One story about an old man illustrated Naipaul’s technique: “Alone, uncared and unlooked for, save for the sentinel presence of a faithful dog that seldom leaves his master’s bedside, a man crippled with age lies convalescing from a long illness in a tiny, palm-thatched cabin that he’s built with his own hands among the lone coconut palms on the Caroni coast.” Another report about domestic violence reveals Naipaul’s love for an active, emotive, and evocative voice: “Green-eyed jealousy made this man kill the only woman he loved, hack a man to death, sever the right hand of another and deprive a 16-year-old youth of an ear.” Other stories gripped the reader with Naipaul’s personal narratives of daring and adventure: staking out a haunted house in an attempt to capture ghosts; another detailed the discomfort of spending the night with frogs in a tree after he was knocked off his bicycle. Stories as these tickled MacGowan, and delighted the Guardian’s readership, Eastley told the ‘Friends of Mr Biswas’ audience. That Naipaul became a writer at all was incredible, Eastley added: “The story of Seepersad the journalist is a story of perseverance and luck, audacity, delusion, and resilience.”
Naipaul’s only book, The Adventures of Gurudeva, is a collection of short stories first published in 1943, as Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales. It was later published in London after his death. In his essay, The World of Seepersad Naipaul (1906-1953), Brinsley Samaroo notes the “bold inscription” under the title page indicating the book was published in Trinidad, in what could be an assertion of independence in a time when texts were printed in Britain. In the book’s introduction, then News Editor of the Guardian, Charles Espinet, notes “these stories are written in the sincere fashion of a man who knows his subject and has a deep understanding of the customs of his people”. Samaroo highlights this boldly, noting: “In all of these stories the theme is the transitional journey being made by a people who are caught between two worlds and are trying to make some sense of the new Caribbean space.”
Samaroo goes on to note the intersection Naipaul introduced between the worlds of the coloniser and colonised: “With the acuity of the artist's eye… Naipaul interpreted a landscape which had previously been indiscernible to the Western ways of seeing which predominated in the society… During a period when colonials were making every effort to conform to European literary styles and images… Naipaul was among those who fought against that tide. His characters came from an alternative model in which other people now came centre stage: black Shouter Baptists, the descendent of an African slave, Chinese shopkeepers and the adherents of goat sacrifice. To this can be added the appropriate use of our evolving creole as a legitimate medium of communication at a time when the King's English was a passport to upward social and literary mobility.”
In the Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Anthony Boxhill tells us in Gurudeva, Naipaul “portrays in a detailed and unsentimental way the life of the Trinidadian Indian community of his day. He understands the stresses under which the people live, the pressure to give up their traditions for creole ones, and he is not afraid to experiment with both form and language in trying to articulate the real experience of his people”. Samaroo highlights this comment: “The literary career of… Naipaul speaks to the trauma of transition from Colonialism towards Independence, from Indianite to adaptation and accommodation with another New World, from the absence of a sense of history to a proud acclamation of our past, warts and all. In this he was not alone but rather a part of a vanguard of angry young people who dreamt new dreams and saw a brighter sun on the horizon. In this way he was one of the early de-mystifiers of vast areas of darkness in the story of these islands.”
As Eastley pointed out in 2014, Naipaul contributed in many ways in creating a path for those who would later speak out and be heard: “He courageously refused to be controlled by public opinion …and he never devolved into bitterness. Throughout his life and throughout his journalistic career, there were absolutely moments of utter desolation, of utter disillusionment. It’s true that his opportunities were severely limited, but within that, we still see his genius... And he ultimately never gave up on life... He never ceased, as a writer, to try to connect with people.” Naipaul was the father of writers Shiva and Vidia.
Sources for this exploration: Trinidad Guardian; Wikipedia; Routledge Encyclopedia for Post-Colonial Studies; Brinsley Samaroo: The World of Seepersad Naipaul (1906-1953).