The Politics of Patois
Is taking on your new country’s dialect respect or appropriation?
I recently had a week-long argument with a new friend about whether I should learn to speak patois now that I’m living in Jamaica. This friend says I would be showing respect to talk to Jamaicans in “their own language.” I am firm in my belief, that as a born-and-raised American, I have every right to speak in my own.
Before I go any further with people reading this possibly thinking I’m an Ugly American, let me be clear: I am arguing against personally speaking patois, not understanding it. I’ve been here for almost three years, and while I use only a handful of phrases in patois, I understand much, if not most, of what is said around me. Yes, I do believe that it’s important to understand people on the terms they’re most comfortable with.
Also, please remember that Jamaica’s official and primary language is English. I am neither naive nor arrogant enough to believe that if I had chosen to move to, say, Thailand, I would not have a responsibility to learn and communicate in the Thai language (although many Thai people speak fluent English). I would have assimilated as quickly as possible, and we wouldn’t be having this argument. But by choosing to live in a country that speaks my native language, I believe I am well within my rights to continue using it.
I am half-Jamaican — my mother lived in the the mountains outside of Port Antonio (fave vacation spot of James Bond author Ian Fleming) until her early adulthood — and my heritage has been thrown out as an additional argument for why I should speak patois. I have grown up listening to my uncles speaking patois (though my mother and aunts always spoke perfect English). I visited family here as a child, and made the island my favorite vacation spot as an adult.
But I have never lived in Jamaica, and I have never spoken patois with any of my relatives. Until I was seven, I didn’t even realize my own mother knew how to speak it . . .
It was summer of 1974, and my mother and I had recently returned to Minnesota after a two-week vacation in Port Antonio and Kingston. My mother was trying to take a nap on the couch before going to work (she worked nights at a hospital), and I was being loud doing something that 7-year-olds do.
My mother asked me to stop multiple times, but I wasn’t paying attention to her. So she yelled. A string of words that I had never heard from her before, and probably couldn’t have repeated immediately afterwards. After having recently spent so much time around family, she had unconsciously reverted back to speaking patois.
As far as I was concerned, my mother could have been speaking in tongues — and I couldn’t have been more freaked out if her head had spun around like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. And even she knew she scared the crap out of me, because she hugged me and apologized for yelling — something that my mother never did.
Anyway, you get the point. Patois has never never been a part of my language, as it has been for (I’m convinced) all Jamaicans that grew up here. I have cousins who grew up in predominantly Jamaican neighborhoods in New York and England, and they speak patois like they came from the islands, but (unsurprisingly) I just wasn’t exposed to the same things in Minneapolis.
Okay, I’ve given you the logical reasons why I have no interest in learning patois right now. Now I’ll give you the real reason:
There’s a guy I met when I first moved here, he’s Canadian. (Side note: there are a lot of Canadian ex-pats in Jamaica, and a very high percentage of them are douchebags. Just sayin'.) He’s lived in Montego Bay for 10 years (seven when I met him) and I’m pretty sure he’s content to stay here until immigrations kicks him out on his ass with a big ol’ “Do Not Return” stamp in his passport. Good for him, I feel the same way.
But this guy thinks that living here for a decade has automatically given him the talent of picking up a dialect that does not come naturally to him.
It doesn’t.
He butchers the dialect. I regularly crings when he “reverts” to his patois, and I’ve seen other people do it too. And there’s something deep down that really bothers me when he does. I want to scream at him, “YOU’RE NOT JAMAICAN AND YOU’LL NEVER BE!!” Irrational, I know, but if I feel that way, I often wonder how locals feel when they hear him.
Ultimately though, Jamaican ancestry or not, I know I sound almost (but not quite) as idiotic as he does when I try to speak the lingo of the land. And I refuse to put myself up for the awkwardness and ridicule of others for no legitimate reason.
So, there it is: the rational (or as rational as I’m capable of) arguments for speaking my native tongue and vocabulary, and the childish, immature and self-conscious (and yet, in a way, stronger) argument for doing the same.
What do you think?
