“In neocolonial societies such as ours,” Carolyn Cooper writes, “the very acknowledgment of certain distinctly Jamaican ‘noises’ as ‘art’ implies a transgressive ideological position that redefines the boundaries of the permissible, legitimizing vagrant texts that both restructure the canon and challenge the very notion of canonicity” (p. 15). Cooper, a senior lecturer in English at the University of the West Indies, offers these essays as “a message from an insider, transmitting a ‘bottoms-up’ history of working-class resistance in Jamaica” (p. x). The pun exemplifies the author’s playful, erotic, creative use of language.
After summarizing her approach to Jamaican popular culture, Cooper analyzes the eighteenth-century popular song “Me Know No Law, Me Know No Sin,” an early example of Jamaican oral-sexual discourse, and shows its connections with gender, language, class, “race,” and nation. She then studies poet Louise Bennett’s use of proverb as metaphor, calling Bennett “the quintessential Jamaican example of the sensitive and competent Caribbean artist consciously incorporating features of traditional oral art into the written literature” (p. 39). Bennett’s representations of female sensibility (“that cunny Jamma oman”) are the subject of another chapter.
Cooper discusses the performance poetry of Jean Binta Breeze and Mikey Smith to demonstrate “the sensitive deployment of a range of rhetorical styles of both Jamaican and English provenance . . . [in which] the pure orality of Jamaican folk poetics. . . engages in constructive dialogue with the scribal conventions of English metrics” (p. 84). In a brief chapter on the Sistren Theatre Collective’s autobiographical Lion-heart Gal, Cooper demonstrates the use of Jamaican Creole for academic analysis (pp. 91-95). Following straightforward chapters on Michael Thelwell’s Harder They Come and Bob Marley’s songs as literary texts, Cooper examines the erotic wordplay of the popular-class dance hall: “The Culture/Slackness antithesis that is mediated in the dance hall is one manifestation of a fundamental antagonism in Jamaican society between uptown and downtown, between high culture and low, between literacy and oracy” (p. 171).
In the concluding essay, “From ‘Center’ to ‘Margin’: Turning History Upside Down,” Cooper criticizes Jamaica’s “flag independence,” academic constructs of “center” and “margin,” British colonial education, and “the ambivalence about the meaning of our history as a slave society that our politicians often have” (p. 180). “The people of the Caribbean,” she asserts, “share a common capacity to make sweet music out of the industrial waste of our societies” (p. 191), Jamaican popular culture illustrates “a deep-rooted understanding of the history of exploitation and the marginalization of Afrocentric culture in the Caribbean” (p. 192). Finally, “as culture bearers, Jamaicans are not ‘underdeveloped’” (p. 192).
Cooper succeeds admirably in reproducing a “body of subversive knowledge that originates in the centers of consciousness of the historically dehumanized peoples of the region” (p. 174). Her insights enhance knowledge and discussion of the popular Jamaican culture that is often marginalized in history books and overlooked in discussions of “development” that highlight the failures of economics and politics while neglecting the successes of culture.
