Kalypsoul: The Other Self: A Scent of Baby Powder

Sunday, July 09, 2017

A Scent of Baby Powder

A SCENT OF BABY POWDER

Every Sunday morning, my brother and I went to church with Miss Aggie, the short, plump, fair-skinned, freckled neighborhood religious devotee. She bustled everywhere in a perky little waddle like Wiggles, our well-fed Pom-Pek, with its vigorously wagging tail. Her entire face was crisscrossed with wrinkles, but was

neither drawn nor sunken, so you couldn’t tell her exact age. Our guess was sixtyish. When she smiled, her amply padded cheekbones became more prominent, her ebony eyes beadier, her crow’s feet more deeply creased. Her coarse, glossy, bone straight hair framed her face in a blunt Amerindian cut that hid her ears and forehead with neither a bounce nor a bang. Either she had the blackest hair I had ever seen or used “a good dye” as Mother observed. She smelled of the Johnson’s baby powder she dusted like flour-coating on her already mottled neck, chest, and wrinkled cleavage.

Miss Aggie lived alone and spent much of her time going to, in or coming from church, attending prayer meetings, pilgrimages and funerals. She only had to hear of a death to exclaim, "Dios Mio! Choko se murió! Mamacita, lewwe go!”

When Mother politely declined, Miss Aggie would pass by afterward to announce gleefully, "Paulina, girl, you miss a nice funeral! Everybody was there!"

She loved Fr. Fennessey, whom she called "me boy.” She

baked bread for him every Saturday. Childless and many years a widow, Miss Aggie still wore nothing but mourning black with fake pearls and matching lace mantilla about her neck, instantly identifying her as a “porto l’église,” first in church and last to leave. She carried a lined, black macramé old-lady handbag with round, clear-varnished, wooden handle. It bulged with her indispensables -- house-keys, mints, handkerchief knotted with collection money, chaplet, crucifix, well-worn novena booklet, Missal, her very own bottle of Holy Water, and always some religious paraphernalia for Father to bless.

She said her biggest pet peeve was the Jehovah’s Witnesses who came door to door. “They think they could sell enough book to get into heaven? Is not so it does work, you know!” Another was what she called “the C and E crowd” – those who attended mass only at Christmas and Easter, but “full up the pews before the regular churchgoers could reach.” So every Sunday morning, without fail, she took us to Mass to save us from becoming C and Es.

Mother was only too glad to surrender us into her keeping. In church, she mouthed every word of the Mass along with Father, even the Latin parts. We dreaded Sundays which brought us her wet kisses, smothering busty hugs, sweaty little palms gripping ours, and above all merciless pinches if we giggled, yawned, or mispronounced something. Her annoyingly high-pitched voice would screech, "Is ‘who art in hea-ven’ not ‘waaart in hevv’n’!” We just knew she’d be up there nagging the angels, saints, and all the faithful departed. We unanimously opted for the other place.

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©KPLewis (Kalypsoul)

06.19.2009

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The Way I Use Language

Author’s Note: Codeflow

You will find that I have started to experiment with movement in communication referencing (in speech and thought patterns) from dialect to standard that is neither unidirectional nor formulaic. This is deliberate. The style used here is my experimentation with what I call code-flow. I find myself writing the way I speak – in a comfortable, fluid mixture of standard and dialect, often within the same sentence, the same thought. It is what we Caribbean people do in uncontrived everyday speech. It is not code-shifting with which the literary world is familiar. Code-switching or code- shifting tends to follow a certain pattern, dialect for speech and standard for description and narration as has been traditionally used in Caribbean fiction. I am taking it a step further, letting dialect flow into standard and back again in both dialogue and narration/description, mingling together in the same sentence, the same thought. To me this shows the true fluidity/reality of how we operate linguistically in everyday life. We do not think in standard English and converse in Trini dialect; we think in both and speak in both but not all the same time. I may begin a thought in the standard received form but suddenly I want to express surprise, hilarity, indignation, outrage and the standard does not have the right words. I flow effortlessly to that in which I can express those thought, those ideas, those sentiments most comfortably. I express them and, depending on what I wish to reference next, I either move back to standard, stay where I am or move deeper into another dialect comfort zone. I may say it in French Patois or Cocoa Panyol or a dialect of Hindi or of English or I may use a uniquely West African turn of phrase or grammatical construct or express m thoughts in a totally creative word or expression known only to my country or one group or individual within. Language gets created through use and new words and expressions all have a very specific starting point.

Code switching is an improvement on the outright rejection of the use of dialect as having no place in the written word or in Caribbean literature. It also differs from the outright rejection of the standard as a form of linguistic resistance to colonialism. Yet, code switching is a colonized, conformist mode that, in spite of itself, accepts the superiority of the standard and makes apologies for dialect by restricting its use only to direct speech. It reflects the pedagogy of colonial education which polarized the acceptable standard of the reading books and the classroom from the unacceptable dialect of everyday use by everyday people. It was a time when the whip was applied to purge the tendency towards dialect use in respectable settings.

Code sliding attempts a more integral blending of the two and brings together a variety of Caribbean dialects in one form. It moves in the direction of defining a distinct and decolonized Caribbean identity in the aftermath of colonialism. The term code-sliding, however, implies for me a lack of control, a downward sort of slippery slope movement, and a built-in acceptance of linguistic hierarchies. Instead I advance the concept of code-flow which conveys the sense of non-hierarchical fluidity and an effortlessness that defines acceptance of a unique identity in the context of postmodernity rather than deliberate conscious resistance in the context of coloniality or postcoloniality. It speaks of creativity, reinterpretation and transformation. The smooth fluidity of language that melds the standard with dialect in a thought, in a phrase, in a sentence, shows not so much a rejection of historic influences but an acceptance of the new self, the birth of a Caribbean identity in which colonialism and an ethos defined by resistance to it are merely blurred distant memories. Caribbean code-flow essentially involves and emerges from an unequivocal acceptance of all aspects of a new self: Africa, Europe, India and Mesoamerica, all integral to the new identity through reinterpretation and transformation. It is méstissajé, creolité, unrepentant.