The late Jeannette Layne-Clark’s imaginative comic writing is evidently popular if the longevity of her theatre production Pampalam is taken into account. That show celebrates it 33rd anniversary this year. In addition, the Lick Mout’ Lou character has spawned imitations in various sections of the media over the years.
I believe we need to place this work in the context of Barbadian fictional writings and to demonstrate its capacity to engage serious and sustained thought. This led me to analyse some of Jeannette Layne-Clark’s work in my Master of Philosophy thesis in 2008, as I sought to place her alongside another Barbadian writer of considerable reputation, George Lamming. This was an academically risky, but I felt worthwhile, endeavour.
Lick Mout Lou and In The Castle of My Skin! These are absolutely not normally thought of in the same breath!
Nevertheless, I argue in the thesis that Lamming employed strategies in the writing of his classic novel In The Castle Of My Skin, which put him and Jeannette Layne-Clark as fellow participants in a common tradition. Despite their evident differences, they both exploit a similar double voice that is rooted in folk laughter and the classic carnival pose of one thing forced to overhear another.
I suggested the tradition goes even as far back as an 1877 letter to the Barbadian newspaper of the day, and included the Lizzy And Joe series in the newspaper by Edward Cordel in the 1950s.
For reasons of space I will not explore the Lamming/Clark connection or give details of the letter or of Lizzie And Joe. However, this short excerpt and analysis of some of Clark’s writings suggest that we ought to think more seriously about the offerings of our own late comic writer Jeannette Layne-Clark.
Layne-Clark’s work includes Bajan Badinage, and More Bajan Badinage which are published collections of performance monologues; Pampalam, a drama production of the monologues for Barbadian stage; Lick Mout Lou, a newspaper column presented as a letter in Bajan by the fictitious Barbadian woman Lou to her fictitious friend Nesta in England, and two CDs: Dumplings in de Stew with performers Marvo Manning, Alfred Pragnell and Andrea Gollop; and the CD Lick Mout Lou, Up Front And Personal.
Layne-Clark uses a strategy I call “creole narrative”. Creole narrative is not simply the dialect, Bajan, but signals the adoption of a number of manouevres.
One of these is the display or flaunting of the power to choose. This means exaggeration of even the linguistic forms one chooses. It means giving oneself permission to use profanities that one theorist, Mikhail Bahktin, in his analysis of the works of French writer Voltaire calls “billingsgate”. It especially means to be self-consciously self-authorised, or “own-way”, as we say in Bajan. In fact, that “own-wayness” is itself a characteristic of the language the writer appropriates.
Kamau Brathwaite is a master of this type of “own-wayness” as we notice, for example, his habit of creating words as he goes along. His whole oeuvre (works) charted in “Nation Language”, and now “Sycorax video style” demonstrates that own-wayness, and has cost him in relationships with publishers. That stopping he? Pshew!
The insertion of this creole narrative into spaces of formality, like newspapers and the novel form, or poetry publishers’ agendas reveal language that is also and at once performance.
It is deliberate irony, and thus institutes English, or the grander narratives of progress as Homi Bhabha, a literary and cultural theorist, calls colonial languages, as “demotic” (Homi Bhabha 246). English, in other words, is shown to be potwah (patois).
Jeannette Layne-Clark, as these other writers mentioned, is well aware of the “denigrated” status of the Bajan creole, and is using this medium to be witty at the expense of the Standard English interlocutor. The latter’s voice is paradoxically returned through the creole.
When Layne-Clark put “BBC-trained journalist” at the end of some of her other writings as a journalist, annoying quite a few Bajans in the process, she might have been signalling her own distancing from Bajan.
She was also very correctly summoning up that interlocutor to whom she dropped word in her vernacular pieces. (Bajans who got annoyed need to discover exactly what annoyed them about the fact of her training.)
In other words, creole narrative self-consciously draws attention to standard English as a discourse, that is, as itself a political performance with a clearly articulated architecture of relations of domination and power that mediates the lives of those who speak it and those who do not.
Therefore, the foregrounded aim of a Jeannette Layne-Clark in using creole narrative is to be political as opposed to being merely expressive or informative.
That is, she seeks to draw attention more to the form of the language than she seeks to be open or communicative in a simple sense. True, one cannot help but communicate an interest.
However, the obvious aliveness of the creole narrative to its medium should gesture rather violently to some other desires, and probably genres being present than comedy, an obvious genus.
Let me give another example to clarify. This style recalls the tea meetings of old time Barbados spoken of in a chapter of my thesis where “speechifying” using grand-sounding and sometimes nonsense words is performed. The word “speechifying” itself is an example. In this performance, the vernacular voice makes obvious reference to its oppositional other – the ‘standard’ form – and thus creates a double voice.
Your laughter then flows backward to question the uses to which speakers of “legitimate” speeches put language.
Another theoretical point I need to make before looking at specific pieces by Jeannette Layne-Clark is this. The implication by the performance of an expected vernacular-speaking audience that can respond as insiders to the words being dropped also creates the double voice.
If I am dropping words, somebody else must be listening who I am hoping will overhear and understand. Maybe the Bajan saying, “picking sense from nonsense” can help to explain.
The performance identifies these insiders as persons knowledgeable of the true nature of existing social relations of power. It is significant and quite fascinating then that Edward Cordel calls the Lizzie And Joe series, Overheard.
This tradition of double-voicing fuels the irreverent laughter of the creole voice that Jeannette Layne-Clark falls back on. It is significant then that she presents, as an icon of this voice, the wide open mouth of Lick Mout Lou on the front cover of Badinage, or heading the newspaper column.
NEXT WEEK: Jeannette’s characters