SOURCE: “Language and Identity: The Use of Different Codes in Jamaican Poetry,” in Winds of Change: The Transforming of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, Peter Lang Publishing, 1998, pp. 31-36.

In the following excerpt, Pollard analyses the use of various Jamaican dialects to convey meaning in Goodison's “Ocho Rios II.”

The struggle to find a voice that is truly representative of the speech communities out of which they write has been a very real one for Caribbean creative writers ever since the primacy of the European languages they inherited came to be debated. Commenting more than a decade ago on writing in the Anglophone Caribbean, Gerald Moore, literary critic, noted some success in finding that voice, or a close approximation to it, in the drama and in the novels in the early fifties.¹

Jean D'Costa, Jamaican linguist and fiction writer, extends the requirement to include the need for the...