In Olive Senior Do Angels Wear Brassieres and Zoila Ellis The Waiting Room, both of the authors play around with the notion of language being power. This can be seen through the telling of each story and how both stories are being told through the narrative of the characters Beccka and Elisa. The narrators uses the characters Beccka and Ellis to showcase the speaker’s Jamaican or Belizean Creole language and how the language is portrayed through the characters point of view. The reason why I chose these two piece was because even though Senior and Elise wrote two different types of stories, I liked how both of them focused on the concepts of the characters wanting and believing that by moving on to their idea of “the grass being greener on the other side” their worth would be increased in the eye of their peers, thereby giving them a better sense of accomplishment and importance. In this paper, I will focus on how Senior and Ellis uses their stories to explore the issue many creole language face from class, to identity issue, to the importance of ranking based on status, and lastly to how society tends to separate these groups into difference classes (Acrolect, Basilect, Mesolect) based on their availability to the resources around them.

The story’s Do Angels Wear Brassieres focuses around the main character, a Jamaican Creole speaker named Beccka and her journey toward gaining information, as well as what it meant trying to find it under the living quarters of her self-righteous, smothering Aunt Mary and her religious beliefs. Throughout the story, Beccka can be seen studying the bible, not for the religious reason her Aunt and the other women do in the story but to use it as a weapon to fight back against her Aunt Mary’s views. At one point in the story, Beccka uses her knowledge and clever wits in a series of bible riddles against the Archdeacon that Aunt Mary tried to get the approval of. Senior’s placement of the archdeacon is an important one to the story. Not only are the readers told that Aunt Mary and the women in the neighborhood want the approval of the Archdeacon, we are also told that the Archdeacon is an Englishman. We can see this in the description on page 7 when Aunt Mary is cleaning the house from top to bottom, pulling at the fine dining, hanging up the lace curtains, even going as far as to make the Archdeacon bake goods. In one short passage “Auntie Mary is due this honour at least once because she is head of Mothers Union and though a lot of them jealous and back-biting her because Archdeacon never stop outside their gate even once let them say anything to her face” Senior is able to showcase how important the Archdeacon is to Aunt Mary and the ladies of the neighborhood. This is the key in understanding that Aunt Mary wants to impress and get the approval of the representative from the “dominant” of the Standard English culture. This is also important is showing how Senior uses the character of Aunt Mary, women in the neighborhood to portray how the Archdeacon is rank as being above them not only in authority as head of the church but status as well.

With Ellis’ The Waiting Room, the story began with a Belizean Creole woman named Elisa Barker who is experiencing the process of trying to get approval for a traveling visa to the United States. Ellis makes a point of describing Elisa in the beginning of the story as this arrogant, well- dressed lady from an high-class Acrolect background. Throughout the story, Elisa is portrayed as trying to keep a tight hold onto her image so that her husband and friends can continue to believe that she has a lot of experience with traveling aboard. This is evidently not true because we see that she doesn’t have any of the required documentation with her in order to get a traveling visa to the U.S. During Elisa’s process, Ellis has different conversations going on between the other customer which is key because this is where we see the major of the Belizean Creole taking place. The other customer also complains about the difficulty they face on getting a visa, even though they have come prepared with the important documents that they need, unlike Eliza. In the end however, Eliza is rejected from obtaining her traveling visa because of her family history and her lack of confirming documents, even after she tried to persuade the officer otherwise.

According to Jermaine Allison, most Jamaicans speak Jamaican Creole, however, the country’s official language is standard Jamaican English making a creole continuum exists. Jamaican creole is one of the Atlantic English- lexifier creole spoken, meaning many aspects of Patwa vocabulary, syntax, and phonology are from English. In, Jamaica Creole their vocabulary shares similar feature with that of standard English words but Patwa words doesn’t quite mean the same thing the English words do. Olive Senior showcases many examples of this in the Do Angels Wear Brassieres dialogue and passage. Senior goes on to describe Beccka praying in the beginning of the story as “Beccka vex that anybody could interrupt her private conversation with so, say loud loud (1)”. This passage is important because it points out the character identity without stating it in plain words, by having Beccka explain her emotions as being vex instead of mad. Also, the usage of the word vex instead of vexed shows that Creole language is being used here because in Standard English they used for past tense but in Creole there is not a suffix for past tense. Senior also showcases how Creole languages often repeat adjectives and adverbs to emphasis on words and emotion instead of using words like very or extremely, which is common in the standard British and American English Lexifiers. Senior’s reduplication of the word loud twice was intentional to express the narrator’s voice as being very loud.

Jamaican Creole or Patwa phonology has a sound system that is independent from the English system. The speakers of Patwa do not use the “th” sound in words, also Patwa sometime pronounce the “h” sound in the beginning of a Standard English word. A passage in the story in which Senior shows the absence of the “th” sound would have to be between the conversation between Aunt Mary and her neighbor Fat Katie.  When Fat Katie replied to Aunt Mary’s statement about Beccka being of hard ears she states “Den no so me saying (2), this is used to shows how the author chose to have Fat Katie speak in a Patwa dialect. By Senior having Fat Katie speaking in Patwa it showcases the tradition of Patwa speaker dropping the “th” in their dialect/language to D so instead of “Then” Fat Katie speaks “Den”. In such a short sentence the reader are able to see from the women viewpoint of class, ethic, self-identity wrapped into one. But on the other hand, this is a contradiction against Senior deciding to use Standard English in the passage below it with the dialogue of “That child should be getting blows from the day she born. Then she wouldn’t be so force-ripe now. Another example of Senior using both Patwa and Standard English phonology in the passages is when she writes “A hear her already (1) and “Guess what she asks me the other day nuh (3). In the Patwa dialogue, the phonology of the language would pronounce the word as ear because of the silence letter of the “h” sound, however, it is present here but absent in the sounding of the word huh. The reason behind Senior doing this might have to do with the issue of how the Creole language not being acknowledge for a long period of time so it had to exist along with its language lexifier.  So many languages like Patwa can be seen as being a continuum between the creole and the lexifier language.  This would be a prime example of many Creole languages using something called code-switching which allows for the mixing between the spelling and sounding of standard and non-standard words.

Lastly, as for the orthography inside of Senior’s story, it was stated in Sebba (1996) paper that since there is no official orthography of the written use of creole in Britain, writers can come up with their own orthographic practices when writing with an Creole dialogue. Some example of how Senior made up her own orthographic practices to write this Patwa story is by spelling certain words differently like She wi instead of she will, bus’ instead of busting ass and lastly Aie in turn for Ah.

In the Waiting room, Eliza Barker and the other women waiting to get their visiting visas to U.S are Belizean Creole. Belizean people are said to speak English, Kriol, and Spanish too, however, it is stated that in school Belizean people will often learn the written and reading system of Standardized English.  Wikipedia said that Belizean Creole might best be described as “the lingua franca of the notion making communication between people who do not share a native language or dialect possible”. Like Patwa, English is Belizean Creole lexifier, meaning that most of the Belizean Creole vocabulary comes from English vocabulary and since it exists alongside its language lexifier making code-switching possible too. Ellis uses a combination of mixing between the spelling and sounding of standard and non-standard words in the dialogue of the women talking like” Dat’s good girl. I going to Chicago to my son. I hear it cold over dere but girl, I can’t take Belize no more”. Unlike Senior, Ellis’ passages are mainly filled with standard English, with the only little Creole being shown within the community of the ladies talking to each other. So, Ellis construction of the story being mainly made of Standard English is important in showing the issue that can come with Belizean people only learning in school the written and reading system of Standardized English. So, if the Belizean people are unable to do so like the other women in the story, there will be a separating of people because of the Basilect class inability to get that same learning, so Ellis uses the character the afro women to show Elisa status rank above the other. If not for the other women, Ellis story would have been filled with Acrolect speakers making her story seem less creole writing. Even in the description of the ladies, there is a form of separating of class from Elisa being described as “Her freshly permed hair lopped elegantly around her shoulders. Her makeup was fresh and sophisticated. The only other two women who were describe was given a description of reeking of what smelled like kusk- kush and a fat black woman with a greasy curly afro placing them in the basilect class. Ellis too however, also showcases how a repeat adjectives and adverbs to emphasis on words. This can be seen in passage of dialogue of words like cheap, cheap, cheap and dem hard, dem hard.

Ellis Zoila, The Waiting Room

Olive Senior, Do Angel Wear Brassieres?

https://jamaicancreole.commons.gc.cuny.edu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belizean_Creole