“SAY IT LIKE YOU SEE IT”: RADIO BROADCASTING AND THE MASS MEDIATION OF CREOLE NATIONHOOD IN ST. LUCIA

Abstract

This article examines the role of Caribbean creole languages in the imagining and “mass mediating” of postcolonial nationhood. The focus is radio broadcasting in St. Lucia, where an Afro-French creole language known as Kwéyòl coexists with the official language, English. Since St. Lucia's independence in 1979, Kwéyòl has been used increasingly on the airwaves (formerly the exclusive domain of English) by broadcasters intent on rapidly “modernizing” the language to transform it into a vehicle of national development on a par with English. But when Kwéyòl is forced into strongly regimented “English” broadcasting formats and genres, as when international news reports received at the studio in English are translated word for word into Kwéyòl, the results often seem less than “authentically” St. Lucian. In recent years some broadcasters have been responding to such problems by experimenting with distinctively “creole” programming formats that give voice to local folk perspectives and counterdiscourses. These densely heteroglossic broadcasts simultaneously capture and comment on the predicaments facing Caribbean peoples as they negotiate steadily globalizing political economies of language and information that are often hostile to speakers of “small” languages such as Kwéyòl, and to “micro-states” such as St. Lucia.

Key Words:

• Caribbean
• St. Lucia
• creole
• nation
• language
• mass media

The fieldwork on which this article is based was supported by the Fulbright Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; immediate post-fieldwork support was provided by the Spencer Foundation. The work time necessary for writing this article was made possible by a Temple University Research/Study Leave, a Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. I am grateful to Sam Flood for allowing me to interview him and to the many other St. Lucians who contributed to my research. For helpful comments on drafts of this article, I thank Karla Slocum, Deborah Thomas, Peter Snow, and two anonymous reviewers; thanks also to Roger Abrahams, who served as discussant when I presented an oral version at the New York Academy of Sciences in December 2004. I am solely responsible for any and all shortcomings.

Notes

1. See Blommaert and Verschueren (1998) for a critical examination of how these and related ideas figure in popular ideologies of language in contemporary Europe.

2. Considering the importance that Anderson (1991) attributes to New World “creole” societies (notwithstanding his humble acknowledgment, as a Southeast Asianist, that the New World is a region “on which my knowledge is quite superficial” [p. xv]), it is striking that he wholly ignores the Caribbean, even in his treatment of what he characterizes as “the ‘last wave’ of nationalisms” (pp. 113–140), which focuses on “the colonial territories of Asia and Africa.”

3. The application of such concepts as nationhood, nationalism, nation building, and national identity to Caribbean societies tends to be problematic for a variety of reasons, virtually all of them stemming from the ceaselessly dynamic interplay among local, regional, and global socio-cultural and politico-economic processes that gave rise to these societies and continues to shape them today (e.g., Olwig 1993; Slocum and Thomas 2003; Thomas 1999; Trouillot 1988, 1989; Williams 1991).

4. Not until relatively recently has Kwéyòl been dignified with a “proper” name. Many St. Lucians who speak it on a daily basis continue to refer to it as (the) patois (which could perhaps be regarded as an alternate proper name, if rendered in the standardized orthography [Louisy and Turmel-John 1983] and capitalized: Patwa). St. Lucians’ references to (the) patois/Patwa are usually not at all derogatory in intent, but those who possess cultivated awareness of the term's colonial origins now prefer to call the language Kwéyòl instead. The latter appellation is now widely recognized among the general public in St. Lucia, although still not widely used colloquially. In English, both spoken and written, Creole is often used instead of Kwéyòl.

5. My use of these two notions is inspired in part by Bauman and Briggs's (2003) identification of “purification” and “hybridization” as two key principles for conceptualizing the role of language and ideologies of language in the construction of modernity. The term “instrumentalization” is suggested by, and adapted from, Carrington (1990).

6. This local intelligentsia enlisted the assistance and collaboration of some non-St. Lucian experts (see Carrington 1983, 1990) for reasons both practical and ideological, not least of which was a desire to forge links between St. Lucia and other French-creolophone territories.

7. Because of space limitations I am unable to examine this quasi-nationalist project in any depth here, much less to give adequate consideration to the problematics of doing so. For an insightful discussion of such matters, including the challenges of reconciling “event” and “history” with “collective memory” and the local discourses and ideologies out of which it emerges, see Price (2001).

8. It would seem that these developments in the St. Lucian context have been part of a broader, pan-Caribbean phenomenon. Shields-Brodber (1992: 494), writing about radio talk shows in Jamaica, describes a similar timeframe: “Two or three decades ago, there probably would have been no doubt about Standard English being the unmarked variety on any radio programme … Today the reality is somewhat different.” Jamaican Creole “is increasingly establishing its footing in the electronic media; not only in advertisements, cultural presentations and disk jockey shows, but also as a medium of expression in discussion and call-in programmes.” Schnepel (2004: 144–147) notes that in Guadeloupe, which as a département d’outre-mer remains subject to French law, the liberalization of government control over the media in 1982 had rapid effects: “Free radio stations sprang up, and for the first time Creole was unleashed over the airwaves … By the end of the 1980s, news broadcasts containing Creole dialogue had increased dramatically.”

9. For an added bit of historical depth, the social importance of the marketplace in pre-Emancipation plantation societies is worthy of consideration here: as Olwig (1993: 49) notes, “[T]he market, as a public gathering place, provided a space where the slaves could congregate in large groups, exchanging gossip and forming a ‘public opinion’ on important matters outside the control of their masters” (quotation marks in original).

10. The station takes its name from St. Lucia's unofficial nickname, “The Helen of the West” (sometimes rendered “The Helen of the West Indies”). Alluding to Helen of Troy, this nickname makes reference to the fact that St. Lucia was repeatedly fought over by the French and British during the colonial era, changing hands no fewer than fourteen times as the two powers vied for imperial dominance in the region. These struggles were motivated by the crucial geopolitical considerations of the times, first and foremost, St. Lucia's strategic location between the French colony of Martinique and the British colony of Barbados.

11. “Jouk Bois” would be rendered in the standardized Kwéyòl orthography (Louisy and Turmel-John 1983) as Djouk Bwa. But when I interviewed him in 1996, Sam Flood mentioned that he prefers that written Kwéyòl be more faithful to French; so I honor that preference here in the spelling of his nickname (but not in my transcriptions of his broadcasts).

12. Sam Flood is no longer affiliated with Helen FM; hence, this paragraph is written in the past tense. In the paragraphs to follow, I switch to the present tense and to the “ethnographic present” (i.e., the time of my fieldwork in St. Lucia: 1996 and early 1997).

13. Cf. Urla's (2001: 158) description of news presentations on Basque free radio: “[F]ree radio news would sometimes break open the formulaic quality and categories of news found in mainstream media. Even when radio announcers were repeating news reported in the papers, they were encouraged to annotate the reports with their own opinions and perspectives.”

14. In an analysis of Jamaican radio call-in programs, Shields-Brodber (1992: 503) notes that in Jamaican conversations, simultaneous speech (in the form of interruptions and overlaps) “does not result in the automatic silencing of one of the parties, and it does not necessarily disrupt the flow of the interaction … [F]urther, some speakers are able to continue the articulation of their own point of view while at the same time responding to what the other speaker is saying simultaneously, displaying a dexterity in conversational manipulation that is notunusual in the society.” In the interaction being analyzed here, it is not clear whether Jouk Bois is displaying this sort of dexterity or simply squelching Huntley's attempts to introduce an alternative point of view. In any case, Shields-Brodber's observations can surely be generalized to St. Lucia and other Caribbean societies, as suggested by the earlier work of Reisman (1970, 1974a, 1974b) and Abrahams (1983) on the use of Caribbean creole languages in modes of speech variously characterized as noise, broad talking, and bad talking.

15. Urla (2001: 150–151) notes that a similar ethos prevails in Basque free radio (where it seems to be more fully realized than in Flood's program or anywhere else in St. Lucian broadcasting).

16. Accusations that Sam Flood's Kwéyòl is sometimes “too French” probably originate mainly among younger listeners whose own colloquial Kwéyòl is heavily anglicized (Garrett 2000). On the other hand, there is in fact a tendency on the part of Kwéyòl “purists,” of both instrumentalizing and reappropriating orientations (but particularly the former), to “Frenchify” the language. The former do so mainly by coining French-based lexical neologisms, whereas the latter (Sam Flood among them) make use of a fairly small set of attested but semiarchaic forms that have passed out of common usage, particularly among younger speakers (Garrett 2000).

17. One of Jouk Bois's best-known (and most-repeated) tag lines, which he uses to express incredulity at someone's unfathomable bad behavior, impertinence, or stupidity, is M’a kay konpwann, m’a vlé konpwann, èk an véyité gad’, m’a kay jenmen konpwann! ‘I can’t understand, I don’t want to understand, and really, I’ll never understand!’

18. This may be a somewhat less problematic stand to take in St. Lucia and other settings where the creole is not lexically related to the contemporary standard-official language and is, therefore, more easily portrayed as a wholly separate language than in, for example, Barbados, where Bajan tends to be thought of as merely “broken” English or a “dialect” of English (see Fenigsen 1999, 2003 for nuanced discussion of the Bajan case). St. Lucia may seem to be an unusual or special case in this regard, but as Snow (2000) points out, such situations are actually quite numerous in the Caribbean.

19. In this respect, reappropriation tactics can be regarded as examples of what Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) characterize as “the invention of tradition”: a quintessentially modern enterprise that highlights “the contrast between the constant change and innovation of the modern world and the attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant” (Hobsbawm 1983: 2).

20. Cf. Urla (2001) on Basque youth's creation of a radical “counterpublic” or “alternative public sphere” through free radio.