ABSTRACT

There are many ways and many places in which Caliban appropriated Prospero’s language, but none so striking as the land of the ‘Canibals’. The political and cultural implications of English language use in the Caribbean produce a variety of English that is so fluid and dynamic – a continuum in fact – that it disrupts our ordinary views of how language works, and forces us to re-think the connection between language and culture. Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s term for culturally specific forms of Caribbean English is ‘nation language’ which is heavily influenced by the African heritage in Caribbean cultures, a heritage in which African languages exist merely as traces:

… it is an English which is not the standard, imported, educated English, but that of the submerged, surrealist experience and sensibility, which has always been there and which is now increasingly coming to the surface and influencing the perception of contemporary Caribbean people.