Burns' Night

Yesterday we co-hosted a Burns' Night. One of our neighbors on the housing compound is originally from Scotland. We had cocktails at that house and dinner at ours (on table settings provided by our co-hosts - Michael and Maria).

The entire party escorted the haggis between venues. We realized during the opening toast to the bagpiper and the chef that Joe was both. He'd cooked a vegetarian haggis. The real haggis, for all that it got to be in parade and stabbed during the address, was merely transported from England and actually prepared by a diplomat from the British Embassy. The British Ambassador to Turkmenistan, His Excellency Peter Butcher and our charge d' affaires (guy in charge) Ambassador Miles, were in attendance. I mention this mainly because I was inordinately amused by the appropriateness of the former gentleman's name. As the literature major, I gave the customary quasi-lecture and the life and letters of the poet called the Immortal Memory Speech. I'm copying the text (which I didn't follow quite as faithfully as I should have below).

After the haggis, the speeches, the dinner, the toasts to the lassies and reply to the lads, and dessert (Really Good Apple Crisp), a couple of guests read Burns poems translated into German and Norwegian. Joe had told me I should try to work this language into my speech as well but I couldn't think how. Then once we started talking about the translations, I remembered that there are a number of people in Germany who have done very interesting work on Caribbean Creoles. Their interest seems to stem in part from the analogy between English language varieties and German language varieties. In addition to all the usual challenges, translating Burns requires a fine sense the different dialects in the target register, and can lead to good comparative work. (See Susan Muhleisen's Creole Discourse, for example.)

Because we wound up hosting this event almost a month after the actual date (Robert Burns' birthday), it wound up displacing our usual Dimanche Gras brunch. Though the table set up was great, we just couldn't have more people over until we cleared the dishes. We're ready for Lent now.



The Speech:

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It's my honor to address you on the immortal memory of Robert Burns. I'm not Scottish and I'm here sort of by accident. You see, I am married to the bagpiper. We met in university and while I was studying abroad junior year, he found things got a little too quiet and took up the pipes. I can imagine what it was like because I've heard Joe tune. I don't think could have taken six straight months of that. But by the time I got back he was actually out of the really awkward phase, so now he has two droning bags of hot air to squeeze.

Now as to why I've been nominated to give this address. I was an English major and I took the aforementioned study abroad trip to Hong Kong. I was fascinated by Hong Kong English – the words, claques, and rhythms that it borrowed from Chinese. Soon after I got back, I read Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses which is influenced by Indian English. I realized that “our” language – the English we associate with CNN and the BBC - shifts because there are all of these varieties of English in the world and that when we read literature from other places the possibilities the language we hold in common expands. Burns' memory is immortal because he was one of the first writers to counter the linguistic bigotry of English (we won't even go into the linguistic bigotry of French, or for that matter, Russian) by writing the language as it was spoken where he lived, as it was influenced by the language that preceded British domination.

My specialty is language (English and English-lexicon Creole) in Caribbean iterature. So I'm going to talk about some connections between Scottish English and Jamaican English, starting with a poem by a Jamaican poet, Louise Bennett. Now, some of you may have strong feeling about extra-bardic readings at a Burns' night, but the fact of the matter is that while my Jamaican accent is bad, my Scottish accent is worse.

Louise Bennett, affectionately known as Miss Lou, developed the dramatic personae in her poems by performing them in before audiences. She wrote this poem Bans a Killin, as a response to a letter published in a local paper that criticized her for writing in Jamaican dialect.

http://louisebennett.com/newsdetails.asp?NewsID=6

Now the first thing you'll notice are the references to Burns' poetry, to Auld Lang Syne, to Comin' through the Rye, and these references are clearly indicative of the poet's legacy, his immortal memory. But the second thing you'll notice is that Bennett mislocates Scottish language as part of the imperial English against which Jamaica and Scotland share a common cause.

But it isn't just that Jamaican and Scottish language are both threatened by the idea of the Queen's English. Jamaican English also has other ties to Scottish English. Many working class people from the United Kingdom, migrated to the West Indies, both before and during and importation of enslaved Africans. In the racially-charged environment of the Caribbean it isn't necessarily politically correct to acknowledge the hardships that laboring Europeans encountered in the West Indies but the story is in the language. In Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaican Creole, Jean D'Costa and Barbara Lalla cite the pronunciation of “w” after a stop, as in “gwine” - the Creole for “going” (51) and the use of the word “cruddle” instead of “curdle” (225) as examples of possible retentions from presence of Scots on the Caribbean island.

When I first started studying Creole I thought of it as imperfectly transmitted English, as though the reason that Creole speakers didn't use verb inflections was because all they ever heard were commands from the overseers. I've since read many, many theories about the genesis and evolution of Creole, all of them more coherent than this one, but not all of them better. You see, we so often get caught up in English as we learned it in school that we loose sight (or more particularly the sound) of English as we learn it in life. I now believe that any time we talk about the creation of Creole we have to start with the agency of its speakers, with the things that motivated them to dissemble and testify, to story-tell and sing.

We also have to remember that there wasn't one English in the 16th and 17th centuries, forces like nationalism, universal education, and mass media were just beginning to take shape, and in the “United” Kingdom of the 18th century there were already voices like Robbie Burns's fighting and mocking language policy. The regional and socioeconomic varieties of English, have always been there, “Standard English” comes from these dialects. The dialects don't come from “Standard English” – they don't owe anything to textbooks or the Queen.

And so in Jamaica you had people from all over the world, each contributing a little to the development of the Jamaican language. And Burns almost wound up in Jamaica himself. In 1786, he published his first book of poetry to fund his passage. He had recently been jilted out of a marriage, not by his knocked-up girlfriend, but by her father who had decided that helping to raise illegitimate twin grandchildren was less trouble than dealing with a son-in-law like Robbie Burns. It was only after the couple produced a second set of twins, and Burns' work had made him a celebrated figure in Edinburgh, that the old man gave in and Robbie married his Bonie Jean. So rather than migrating to the Caribbean to spread his language and lineage throughout Jamaica, Burns sent his poetry including “On a Scotch Bard Gone to the West Indies” to shape the development of Jamaican literature, including the dialect poetry of Miss Lou.

If we're to learn from one another and the literature of the world, we can't just let the words stay silent on the page. This is the great tradition in which we are gathered here tonight to read the works of one of the greatest poets in the English language or any language, to bring his words back to life and back to the people, to toast the immortal memory of Robert Burns.