Creativity counts for more in good writing than any concern for the study of linguistics

Dear Editor, It is good to know that every variation of Guyanese Creolese is included in UG’s writing class (‘Standardisation is not one of the aims of the UG Creolese course’, SN, June 20). However, this makes it all the more puzzling as to why then the course is titled ‘Allidee Skuul’ which imparts an obvious bias and privilege to African Guyanese Creolese above all others and begs the question as to whether the university intends to convey racial insensitivity or exclusiveness.

While academic interest and research at UG in Creole speech or any language are expected and commendable perhaps these should remain within the confines of the ivory tower of academia. An Established System that changes ‘way’ to ‘wee’ and ‘people’ to ‘piipl’ only obfuscates the reading and understanding of Creole speech meant for public readership.

If writers were to use the Established System their readers would have to be armed with an appropriate dictionary to get through their written texts. Since most writers actually want to be read by the widest possible audience, they employ a common-sense approach to written Creolese that captures intonations and rhythms without straying so far from the known English as to make their writing opaque and frustrating for readers.

Jamaican Marlon James won the A Man Booker Prize for his novel Brief History of Seven Killings. He did not use the Cassidy Le-Page or any linguistic system and when he writes a sentence like: “By the time boy like me drop out of my mother, she give up” he is understood by English language readers everywhere including us in the Caribbean who can bring our knowledge of Creolese intonations and pronunciations to his text and get a more nuanced reading of his novel.

The work of writers from former colonies like V S Naipaul and Salman Rushdie contributed to the coinage of the phrase “the Empire writes back”. Far from seeing themselves as colonised by the English language, they have used the master’s language with superb skill and articulation to tell their stories.

Rushdie especially applied sentence constructions which tested the limits of standard English brilliantly in his award-winning Midnight’s Children. He made the language his.

Good writing is intuitive and whether done in English or Creolese it is creativity and innovation that count more than any concern for the study of linguistics which should remain the domain of academia. Yours faithfully, Ryhaan Shah