Celebrating Miss Lou
Author Nadia L. Hohn commemorates what would have been the 100th birthday of Jamaican poet Louise Bennett-Coverley with a kid-friendly mini-biography
Growing up in a Jamaican family in Toronto’s Rexdale neighbourhood, picture book author Nadia L. Hohn was discouraged by her parents from speaking in Jamaican Patois.
“They wanted me to speak proper English,” she says by phone from Vancouver, where she is working on a young adult novel as writer-in-residence at the Joy Kogawa House.
It wasn’t until later in life that she learned to appreciate just how much there was to learn from Patois, an English-based language with West African influences. As a teacher, she uses the rules of Jamaican Patois to illustrate grammatical structure to her French class. She laughs as she explains that instead of saying “very good,” such as “my very good earrings,” one would say, “my good, good earrings.”
Hohn is especially enamoured of the way one of Jamaican Patois’ most artful practitioners plays with language: The poet and radio personality Louise Bennett-Coverley, fondly remembered as Miss Lou.
Bennett-Coverley was the host of Miss Lou’s Views on Jamaican radio from 1965 through 1982 and the first Black person to host a show on BBC radio, Caribbean Carnival (1945-1946).
Bennett-Coverley lived in Toronto for the last 20 years of her life, until she died in 2006.
MISS LOU continued on E8
Hohn hopes her new picture book A Likkle Miss Lou: How Jamaican Poet Louise Bennett Coverley Found Her Voice, published this week by Owlkids, will teach a new generation of children about the celebrated personality. It arrives in advance of the 100th anniversary of Miss Lou’s birth on Sept. 7.
As a kid, Hohn had been obsessed with the artist since discovering the collection Mango Spice: 44 Caribbean Songs, which featured some of Miss Lou’s work, at a library.
She says the loose and playful Patois poems resonate just as strongly for today’s generation.
She recalls three girls of Jamaican descent in a Grade 1 class she taught who memorized Miss Lou’s poem “Education,” even reciting it on the morning announcements.
The book shows how the culture of Kingston, Jamaica, shaped Miss Lou’s signature style. The story depicts Miss Lou as a child, caught between her school’s insistence on formal English and the inspirational Jamaican Patois she heard in the streets of Kingston.
ALikkle Miss Louis illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes, who Hohn admired for the picture book One Hen, the true story of a boy from Ghana who built a farm with a single chicken.
“There was movement in her images,” Hohn says, seeing a connection between Fernandes’s style and her own story. “The words of (my) book move, the words of Miss Lou move.”
Hohn’s first version of the book was written all in Patois, but she observed her early readers struggled to follow it.
“Someone halting over the words, that means they’re not getting the story,” she says.
“I wanted the story to frame the Patois so that a Patois speaker can read this in Patois and a non-Patois speaker can read this and totally get the story.”
When she reads the Patois aloud, she relishes its Caribbean flavour. She quotes Miss Lou’s 1942 poem “On a Tramcar,” included in A Likkle Miss Lou: “Spread out youself deh, Liza/Dress ooman a come.”
“That kind of stuff, that’s the delicious part,” she says. “That’s the dessert.”
The book is dedicated to Hohn’s younger brother, Rovry Hohn, and to Groundwood Books publisher Sheila Barry, who both died as the book was in development.
Barry had published Hohn’s first two picture books, Malaika’s Costume, about Caribbean Carnival, and Malaika’s Winter Carnival, about Quebec City’s Carnaval. A third Malaika book will be published by Groundwood in 2021.
“When she said she’d like to publish Malaika’s Costume, I thought, ‘Oh, she just says that to everybody,’ ” Hohn recalls. “She’s just being nice.
“She was the first writing professional who made me feel like I could be a published writer one day. I always wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t allow myself to dream it. She made me feel like I could dream this dream.”
Hohn, in turn, is giving other writers that encouragement as part of the planning team for the inaugural FOLD Kids, a children’s literature festival that celebrates diverse voices, to be held in Brampton from Sept. 27 through 29.
The programming aims to be representative of marginalized communities and includes appearances by writers including S.K. Ali, Kai Cheng Thom, Olive Senior and Kevin Sylvester.
“Some groups were very difficult to find,” Hohn acknowledges. “One group in particular was male writers of colour.”
To redress the balance, FOLD Kids has booked self-published authors to speak and secured industry professionals to offer feedback to writers with work in progress who sign up for FOLD Kids’ Pitch Perfect event.
“In my experience a lot of Black children’s authors in Canada are going the self-published route first,” Hohn says.
“Some are going that way because they’ve had rejections from traditional publishers.”
Cultural empowerment is a lesson woven into the fabric of Miss Lou’s story.
Hohn was struck by the way Miss Lou never tempered her Jamaican-ness but, rather, championed it.
“She is trying to be nothing but herself,” Hohn says. “That is a very powerful message and I think that is why we need to celebrate her.”