It Mek

I have bookshelves. Many shelves, full of books, and then there are the books that do not fit on the shelves. After more than five years in this house, the gradually increasing entropy of tsundoku had gotten to be too much, even for me. In the last few weeks, my wife and I--on my initiative--have alphabetized the books by author's last name, re-shelved them, and purged the collection of duplicate copies and other things we do not want. The books from U-Z are still unshelved, and I estimate we need at least another 8 linear feet of shelving to accommodate them. But more importantly, the process reminded me that I own a lot of good books that I have yet to read, and that perhaps I ought to do that.

So what I am doing is choosing an as-yet-unread-by-me book off each shelf, sequentially, and reading it. Thus far I have read It Begins with Tears by Opal Palmer Adisa and Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks. Today I started I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti. It was only as I was making my way through the Barghouti that I realized it would be worthwhile to blog about each such book I discover, or rediscover. Rather than do two separate posts about the Adisa and the Banks, I will post about their unexpected commonalities.

Banks is a writer who gets inspired by places. The novels and stories of his that I have especially enjoyed are those which peer into the wickedness of two of the stranger places I have lived, which he and I share biographically--southern Florida, and the Adirondack region of upstate New York. The stories work because, no matter how marginal the characters whose lives they trace, the places seem true, recognizable, and therefore uncanny. Rule of the Bone is not one of Banks' best works, I suspect precisely because it takes a lengthy detour into a place that Banks clearly does not know as intimately, Jamaica.

Adisa knows Jamaica very well, as it is her home. She tells the story of a village by interleaving the stories of those who have stayed, those who have returned, and the supernatural neighbors whose joys and tears wreak opposite effects upon the human world. While the book is written in literary Standard English, the characters speak in Jamaican creole, rendered on the page through the device of "eye dialect." Banks does the same, for a major character in Rule of the Bone is "I-Man," a Rastafarian who becomes a kind of spiritual guide to Bone, the teenage stoner dropout from Au Sable Forks who gives the book its name. There seem to be a lot of things that Banks does not understand about Jamaica, and a Jamaican could do a better job than I of picking them all out. I will focus on one symptomatic word: "mek".

"Mek" sounds like the Standard English verb "make," and that is how Banks has I-Man use it, as an eye dialect marker in places where make would have been used by an American or British speaker. In the mouths of Adisa's characters, "mek" reveals the wider ranger of grammatical functions and meanings that it has taken on in everyday Jamaican language. Yes, there are plenty of examples where it is used like make. But also: "Me dance wid all de boys cause me did love dancing, but me neva mek no boy touch-touch me breast or put dem hand unda me dress." (222) Here it functions more like "let" would in Standard English. As also in this folk saying, which Adisa uses as a chapter title: "Stand steady mek ant crawl over you." (180) In other places, "mek" functions more like an exclamatory "why?" For instance: "God, Marva, mek you use so much pepper! De children can't eat dis!" (130)

The last usage relates grammatically to one that can be found in texts that both Adisa's novel and Banks' reference, the corpus of Jamaican folk and popular music, with the latter coming into the awareness of North American culture vultures like Banks and me by way of ska and reggae. So for example, I have long puzzled over the lyrics to Desmond Dekker's classic "It Mek". The full refrain, and various interpretations of it on the internet, suggest a meaning along the lines of "That's why!" (As in, that's why you'll get what's coming to you.)

You think I never see you when you jump over de wall
You think I never see you when you accidentally fall
Me said a it mek - mek you pop your bitter gall
A it mek - while you accidentally fall
A it mek - hear she crying out for ice water

And now that I've puzzled that out with a bit of help from Adisa's rendition of everyday Jamaican speech, it occurs to me that the song carries the same note of glee at misfortune foretold that I would hear when my grandmother, translating Yiddish speaking ancestors, would gloat "God got you" at my misbehaving younger brother.

The levels of meaning to "mek" would have required more time and care for Banks to discern, just as it would have taken more time and care for him to sort out some of the apparent disjunctions in his narrative. (For example: Why would I-Man, seemingly a respected ganja wholesaler in Mobay and a prosperous smallholder in his home village, have ever left Jamaica to cut cane and pick apples on a migrant farmworker visa in the States? Reasons there may be, and are even suggested in the text, but he is too much the one dimensional "magical Negro" figure for them to ever hold.) In his narration, Bone refers throughout to Jamaican creole as "their Jamaican language," not recognizing the words he hears and eventually learns as English, and while this seems to be intended an indication of a northcountry crust-punk's lack of sophistication, it is something that linguists would regard as perhaps naively accurate, in comparison with the homogenized tolerance of treating all linguistic differences as matters of "accent." Creoles are languages in their own right, and can support not only the everyday speech of the village and the market, but carry the weight of literature and statecraft as well. That they are denigrated and held as lesser by their own speakers, regarded as "bad English" (or French or Portuguese or...) derives from social facts that make themselves felt within, but go far beyond, language.