Of Ketchup and Pepper Sauce: Discursive Strategies for Imagining the Modern Creole Nation in St. Lucia

Paul B. Garrett - Temple University

Abstract: In postcolonial societies worldwide, language and ideas about language are bound up with such contested issues as cultural identity and political self-determination. This presentation considers the role of language in contemporary Caribbean nation-building processes by examining the ways in which creoles and other vernacular language varieties are implicated in these processes. The focus is St. Lucia, a former colony of France, and then of Britain which has recently celebrated its first quarter-century of independence.  St. Lucia’s Afro-French Creole language, known as Kweyol, has been elevated to historically unprecedented levels of prestige; the language is now used extensively in radio broadcasting and other public forums as both symbol and medium of St. Lucia’s emergent nationhood. Meanwhile, however, a process of rapid language shift from Kweyol to English has become disturbingly evident, particularly among St. Lucia’s youth.  Local broadcasters have begun responding to this state of affairs by experimenting with programming formats in which they combine Kweyol with a distinctively St. Lucian variety of vernacular English. This yields on-air performances that are unmistakably St. Lucian, but are accessible to the growing numbers of St. Lucians whose command of Kweyol is limited. These densely heteroglossic performances both capture and comment on the predicaments facing St. Lucians as they negotiate rapidly globalizing regimes of language, information, and representation.