Sounding Jamaican—After Carolyn Cooper

This essay pays homage to the influential scholarship and activism of the Jamaican literary and cultural critic Carolyn Cooper. In form, it imitates Cooper’s code-switching newspaper columns and analysis of Sistren Theater Collective’s Lionheart Gal, traversing the borderline between scholarship and autobiography, between Patwa (Jamaican/Jumiekan) and English. Cooper’s legacy in championing the native tongue of Jamaica—not as bad English or noise but as a capacious language for both academic discourse and creative work—is to offer multiple ways to sound authentically Jamaican on the page. For creative writers navigating a global publishing market of anglophone editors and readers, this ongoing quest for a truer yet accessible orthography has both creative and market risk. But it also holds out rewards in reclaiming the Jamaican mother tongue and in developing an unapologetically Jamaican literature on the global stage.