11 / 12
Published August 11, 1974
Louise Bennett:
Our well-Known, well- loved poet
By George Panton
T
HE AWARD of the Order of Jamaica
“to Louise Bennett is one in which
all lovers of the arts (and especially
the P.E.N. Club) take special pride. One of
the best-known and most popular persons in
Jamaica she has not only brought pleasure to
scores of thousands but she has also demon-
strated that poetry is not something esoteric
which few can understand and appreciate.
Her “Jamaica Labrish” was a best-seller and
after the sale of several thousand copies of
the 1966 edition a second impression had
to be produced in 1972. The hard-covered
edition has been completely sold out but a
paperback is still available in the bookshops
($2.50).
The printed word is merely a record of
Miss Lou’s writings and is known to but
a small fraction of the numbers whom she
has delighted from the stage or through the
medium of TV and radio. Nevertheless it is
mainly on that aspect of Louise Bennett that
this short profile concentrates in keeping with
the current series of Arts Profiles.
We all laugh at Monsieur Jourdain in
Moliere’s “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme” who
expressed his astonishment “at learning from
his professor of philosophy that he had been
talking prose all his life. But many in Jamaica
laid themselves open to similar laughter at
not appreciating for a long time that what
Louise Bennett wrote was poetry. And this
included several critics, it being notable that
the “Independence Anthology of Jamaican
Literature” published in 1962 included poem
of Louise Bennett’s but placed it (along with
an Anancy story—she being the only person
to be represented both in prose and in poetry
in that book) under the Miscellaneous sec-
tion, a hodgepodge of autobiography, history,
folk-lore and humour.
Acceptance
But there were some percipient persons,
notably Mervyn Morris, himself a highly
respected poet, who took a different point of
view and stressed that, the humorous verse
despite (or because of?) its being written for
delivery from the stage was indeed poetry. He
set out this idea at some length in a series of
four articles which appeared on this page of
the Sunday Gleaner in the four weeks of June
1964. The dialect had made the middle class,
the one which read poetry and in fact did any
reading at all, regard the poems with suspi-
cion, if not condescension.
But Morris wrote: “We have moved
gradually from an unthinking acceptance of a
British heritage to a more critical awareness
of our origins and a greater willingness to ac-
cept the African elements of our past as part
of our national personality.”
This acceptance has now become almost
an insistence and no longer needs to be
stressed. But Louise Bennett had demon-
strated this long before the “culture vultures”
saw it.
Publications
In addition to the dialect, there was the
perhaps unvoiced suspicion that humour
was not the subject of which poetry could be
made and therefore Miss Bennett’s entertain-
ments had to be labelled as no higher than
verse. This idea, has now disappeared and it
is accepted that humour is poetry in a vivid
means of conveying satire or irony. Clearly
the poetry of Louise Bennett held up a mirror
to many of our foibles and forced us to laugh