It’s the middle of the day. A quite sophisticated Georgetown lady is parked in her car on Church Street, waiting for a friend, with the doors locked and windows up. A scruffy individual approaches the car and says, “Lady, yuh back tyre flat.” Seeing in her outside mirror that the tyre is fine, she realizes it’s a ruse to get her to open her door. She explodes: “Look, boy. Get yuh r—- away from mi kyar, yeh.” Scruffy bolts.
The point, buried in the story, is this: on occasions requiring reasoned and refined expressions we can and do sound like Oxford graduates or products of the Lady Bentley Finishing School, but when severe pain or anger or shock comes into play Caribbean people will automatically resort to the dialect as the best way to convey the depth of our feeling. It’s like flipping a switch.
Time and again, in public or private, when confronted by situations of extreme frustration or trauma, we abandon all the English literature lectures
