Professor Maureen Warner-Lewis Teaching history through language

“The ESC is a wonderful organisation and has been able to launch significant celebrations for Emancipation. Emancipation is a key historical moment and process for us here in the Caribbean,” Warner-Lewis asserts.

“Even after Emancipation, when indentured [East] Indians were being brought, there were also landings of indentured Africans who had been captured as slaves but who had been freed somewhere along the Middle Passage. The freedom and democracy that we talk about today is really founded on that initial freedom, that emancipation.”

She further comments that more committees, such as the ESC, are needed in ethnic communities across the region to foster and cultivate a sense of history. She recounts a recent trip to China: “There is a tremendous sense of history, thousands of years to back it up,” she says animatedly, her arms making gestures through the air around her. “It gives you tremendous confidence going forward, knowing that you are standing on something firm.”

On regional views that too much of West Indian history is concerned with slavery, she believes this is an overstatement: “This was a seminal aspect of history that lasted [centuries]. This has shaped our societies, our economies, the import and export of goods. It can’t be ignored.”

Professor Warner-Lewis describes her childhood growing up in East Trinidad and credits the diversity and social awakening of this time for her interest in history. “My mother was Barbadian and she had a fascination for Trinidadian culture. She absorbed everything and my appreciation grew because of her.

“When I attended St. Joseph’s Convent, Port-of-Spain in the 1950s, West Indian history was not taught, if you can imagine,” she says with a wry smile.

Although histories of her ancestors and other local ethnic groups were not taught in school, relics of history surrounded her everyday life. She remembers hearing drumming in the early hours of the morning in her neighbourhood as she studied. Upon investigation, she discovered a “Shango establishment” stood atop a nearby hill. There was also the “social ferment”, as she puts it, of the late 50s with the great debates between Eric Williams and CLR James, leading up to Trinbagonian Independence in 1962.

“The ’56 awakening,” she reminisces, “the year of ‘Jean and Dinah’, the PNM blasting its way into the public’s attention, and let us not forget the birth of the [Caribbean] Federation [in 1958].”

Although too young to fully understand or partake, Warner-Lewis says this environment was one in which her intellect developed and was shaped, before her departure in 1962 for the University of the West Indies, Mona (Jamaica) for a BA in Literature.

“So what is happening to me? I’m in school and learning Latin, learning French, learning Spanish. I’m reading Chaucer, Milton, and so forth, so my mind is being channeled in one direction but my social, political, and economic environment is also teaching me other things and making me curious about things I don’t properly understand.”

It was in the last year of her BA that she was introduced to Linguistics through a History of English Language course. Her post-graduate studies took her the University of York in the UK where her initial course of study was Literature. However, the late Creole-linguistics pioneer and researcher, then Department Head of Language at York University, Professor Robert LePage, saw Warner-Lewis’ young and bright potential in the field of Linguistics. LePage was especially interested in the study of languages spoken in the Caribbean as mother tongues, such as Trinbagonian Creole, Jamaican Creole, Martiniquan Cr?ole, and Haitian Cr?ole.

She says after a few weeks in the UK, she was “emotionally and psychologically ready” for such a course of study.

“I felt alienated and alone.” She recalls locals who could not understand her, who would “talk to me like I’m some creature from outer space. And you have colonised me for 200 years!

“So I was willing to go into a Masters Program where I would begin to more scientifically understand the components of Creole language.” Her MPhil dissertation was written on the history of language in Trinidad and Tobago, looking at English, Hindi, and French influences, among others.

In 1966, she returned home to collect fieldwork, when a complete shift in her research emerged.

“I discovered there were still people alive who remembered African languages. This broke new ground completely because the orthodoxy of understanding Caribbean History is that African culture had been totally eliminated. Everybody repeated that like a mantra.”

Miss Marie, a childhood neighbour in Tunapuna, spoke French Creole, “but it turned out my mother remembered she used to sing songs in a language that nobody understood.

“I began enquiring deeper only to discover she was the child of African indentured labourers; Yoruba speakers from what is now present-day Nigeria; the thing was that close to me!”

Further enquiries led Warner-Lewis to uncover that her childhood neighbourhood had in fact been a post-abolition Yoruba settlement. She began meeting with Trinbagonian “informants” who had personal memories of African parents. Her youngest subject was 60-years-old, the oldest 103.

Over the following years, she would continue to collect oral histories from African descendants from “all over the place: Moruga, Manzanilla, East Dry River, Belmont.” She recounts these shared histories and legacies with much vigour and excitement, remembering fondly the cumbersome tapes she would buy to record such exchanges and zooming around in rented cars to conduct her research.

Much of her research influenced her books Yoruba Songs of Trinidad and Guinea’s Other Suns. The latter’s 2nd Edition is being published later this year by UWI Press, with four additional chapters. Some of the new chapters explore Congolese influence on Trinbagonian language and culture, adding to the already comprehensive knowledge collected on the Yoruba impact.

“Guinea’s covers music, religion, and language. I make comments on the interface between some Orisha chants and minor key calypsos in Trinidad; I talk about African words in Trinidad language, both French Creole and English Creole; I talk about the Orisha faith, the ways in which the religion has been reinterpreted to include Hinduism and Catholicism.”

Although she does not pride herself an historian, the historic linkages through language she has been able to make enrich her tremendously.

“For me, it’s fascinating to be able to get inside the minds of people who lived before. You don’t see them as an amorphous mass, but people who found ways of surviving in a new space.”

She continues to learn and be surprised by language, the ways in which it can connect cultures and peoples, and the fluidity with which it is used. She is also a firm believer in the impact of personal histories and how they can teach and shape ways forward by creating links to past sufferings and triumphs.

“There needs to be commemorative plaques, Emancipation parks, monuments put in place!

“It is quite important to have something that we can remember our ancestors by. That way, we can never forget.”

Professor Warner-Lewis resides in Jamaica. She is Professor Emerita of African-Caribbean Language and Orature at the University of the West Indies. The 2nd Edition of her acclaimed book, Guinea’s Other Suns, will be released later this year by UWI Press