5 - Contrapuntal Conversations in an Antiguan Village

Summary

The conventions which order speech interaction are meaningful not only in that they order and mediate verbal expression, but in that they participate in and express larger meanings in the society which uses them. This paper attempts a look at a particular structure of conventions and associated meanings in Antigua, West Indies.

George Lamming, the West Indian writer, opens his book The Pleasures of Exile with a quotation from Shakespeare's The Tempest – a play which he discusses at length in the book as a symbol of the cultural relations of the metropolitan countries with their Caribbean colonies:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and

hurt not.

The word ‘noise’ has unfamiliar meanings here – and the ambiguities that result may serve us, as I feel they often do West Indians, to characterize and to symbolize both the structure and the ambivalent value of certain central patterns of West Indian speech.

Lamming himself is aware of these ambiguities. Of a West Indian politician in England he remarks, ‘He would shout his replies when the devil's disciples came to heckle. And that is as it should be; for there is no voice which can make more noise in argument than the West Indian voice’ (1960:91). And of himself, ‘So I made a heaven of a noise which is characteristic of my voice and an ingredient of West Indian behaviour’ (1960:62).