The art of words

His first words to a group, he said, were always that he could teach them nothing. What he could do was allow them the space to write. Having said that, he then noted that the first lesson that any writer needs to learn is to appreciate the music of language. This includes an understanding of how words sound and how rhythm is shaped. For him, reading aloud is a vital part of acquiring the skill of writing .

That is an interesting idea in our culture where we speak in a way that most people find quite lyrical .

There is certainly something called a Trinidadian and even perhaps a Caribbean lilt and cadence and a writer such as Earl Lovelace has gone to some lengths to capture that rhythm in all of his works. It means that he has listened to the sounds around him .

I often lament the fact that we no longer teach children to recite poetry .

Now I happen to think that how we write has much to do with what we hear and what we see and perhaps even what we touch. After all, our sense of touch creates the very fabric of our memories. As someone who makes films I also know that there is something called visual music. Rhythm is then very much about how images are put together to create sensations and how sounds are orchestrated to create effect and meaning .

In Trinidad, we have an audiovisual aesthetic, in the first instance in terms of the movement and vibrancy of Carnival. We build towards this for much of the year .

Even those who are deaf feel the rhythm and the sensation of the steel pan in the air. The sounds that vibrate at different times in terms of the variety of our music have a particular impact on how we understand and appreciate the world around us and how we perceive that world .

That sense of a richly varied cadence feeds into the writings of many of our most successful writers .

Academics have sought to identify the source of its specificity .

They tell us that our African and Asian origins have left their traces in our language, both in terms of words and of structure and, of course, in the ways in which we reference belief systems and mythologies .

Forcing children to learn poems by heart and recite them did lead in the past to the idea that European and British literature were the only kinds of literature to which we should aspire. We have now recognised that we have our own literary canon. Reciting poetry, nonetheless, had a purpose. It taught many of us to appreciate the music of words and the rhythms of poetry. Reciting, or reading aloud, therefore remains for me one of the best methods of teaching anyone to be a writer. But this needs to be attached to a belief in our own traditions of the spoken word .

The idea of writing as an art that derives from listening and from seeing how an individual or a group structures experience is very important. When we listen to nursery rhymes, for example, and recognise how even the simplest of these have deep historic implications, we begin to appreciate the power of rhythmic structures .

Nursery rhymes shape our developing consciousness. We retain an appreciation and a memory even into adulthood. Think for example of the nursery rhymes we have all chanted as children. “Ring-a-ring o’ Roses,” which urban legend maintains chronicles the Great Plague or the Black Death of Europe, is a classic example. Rhymes such as these, despite their foreign affiliations, help us to appreciate that creating rhythmically with a deep understanding of sounds and the historic importance of images, opens the door to layers of meaning. Historic events become forever memorable through a rhythm that enters one’s consciousness. If a writer is to give the freedom to the reader to see into the multiple levels of her words and arrangements of words, then of necessity she must choose each word carefully. Every word and its positioning in a line has to have a reason .

It is the way that sounds are structured that bring them into the evocative present. Images begin to resonate and to take on a life of their v e r y o w n .

T h e i r arrangementt each - es us the real p o w e r of the art of words .