I saw The Cove recently at the UWI Open Campus in Dominica, where it was screened by environmental artist and activist Peggy Oki (I’ll write a bit more about how I met Peggy in a future entry). It is an excellent movie (and parts of it were filmed in the Caribbean; a couple of people I’ve met in Dominica for my research appear in the movie, though not always in a flattering light), and I was delighted to find out this morning that it won the Best Feature Documentary award at the Oscars® last night.
Berbice Dutch Creole
In 2003, linguist Hubert Devonish met Bertha Bell, then aged 103, the last known speaker of Berbice Dutch Creole, one of the Caribbean’s indigenous languages. Mrs. Bell died in 2005, and in March 2010, Berbice Dutch Creole was officially declared extinct.
- a•wa (ɑ-wɑ/ah-wah)
excl. (Dominica, St. Lucia)
- 1. Negative expression indicating strong ridicule, despair, disappointment, objection, impossibility, etc.
- 2. No way, no, oh no
“Sun,” “sunlight”—to me they had always been different words. “Sunlight” was a nice word. “Sun” was harsher; it was what the sunlight of early morning in Trinidad turned to at about eight, when it was time to go to school. The slogan on the label for Trinidad Grapefruit Juice, when I was a child, was “Fruit Ripened in Tropical Sunshine.” I had always thought that the words were too pretty. “Fruit Ripened in Hot Sun” would have been truer to the climate I lived in; but then they might have been less of a slogan. “Tropical Sunshine”—they were tourist words, I always thought; and indeed they could have little meaning for someone who had known nothing else.
# · (1)
“Nom Tèw (Man of the Soil)”
Filmed in Dominica.
Goodness, people (if anybody is even still reading this), has it really been nearly 6 months since I last posted here? Well. I’ll have to do something about that, won’t I?
From Jaicko, the most recent Bajan breakthrough into the US music biz.
