Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley (Miss Lou) renowned poet, actress, social commentator, comedienne, folklorist was born on Sunday, September 7 1919 at 40 North Street, Kingston to parents Augustus Cornelius Bennett a baker and Kerene Robinson, a dressmaker. Bennett identifies herself as a writer when she’s writing, and resists the label at other times; she is wary of the “they” that seems to crop up repeatedly in contemporary discourse, and alive to the idea that language itself has been shaped by the dominant classes throughout history, with particularly scorching effects for the working class and for women. Asked recently to write about a book that changed her life she says she realised that Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology, which she studied at A-level, had had a profound effect. “After that, I just thought: ‘Oh, my God, everything’s just made up. And it’s made up by the ruling class, and there isn’t such a thing as reality. It’s all just ideology, and it’s there to suit them, and we’re all a load of plebs. And I’m not. And they can shove it!’” She renewed her involvement with the annual little theatre movement pantomime, helping to create a distinctly Jamaican institution out of what had begun as a pale imitation of English models. Dubbed "the first lady of Jamaican comedy", she was regarded as the pre-eminent Jamaican theatre personality of the 20th century. Sparky prose but some of the essays/sections feel too long and repetitive so a tighter edit would have worked better for me. But when Bennett is on form, she's excellent. Lots of feminist topics here that have become de rigeur though treated with some freshness: periods, boyfriends, female bodies, sex that is in that horrible liminal space of non-consent but not-resisted either. I like the politicised take on life but I expected something a bit edgier. Other times though I found the writing a little less original or redolent. A lengthy section on menstruation seemed to be something that would have been provocative twenty years ago. And this is buried in a second chapter set in the narrator’s school days which seems sprinkled with thesaurus -swallowing overwriting – for example repeated attempts to try chemistry explosions are: Such recursive hijinks were most often deployed in the science labs, where the pupils’ incendiary hands might easily alight upon and combine a spectrum of appliances and substances that could be counted on to interact with each other in a palpable and fairly predictable fashion – though the exact scale of the ensuing reaction could not be quite so reliably gauged.” – in retrospect though I wonder if this chapter represents the narrator’s early development as a writer.

Claire-Louise Bennett review – portrait of a Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett review – portrait of a

And there are stories within the stories of course. The stories of her actual life are intermingled with the stories the protagonist creates there and then. And the books… She is the one who defines certain key events of her life through the books she reads. Or rather, the book by itself often would be that key event. There are many names. I counted 18 females writers mentioned as a list. But that is how she lives; that is what is important to her: My idea is, not as others have done before, to encourage my people to accept a form of art totally unsuited to their personalities, but to apply the excellent English methods of culture to the wealth of native material we possess. There is in the West Indies, a large amount of undeveloped art, which, thanks to the Royal Academy, I could make into valuable contributions to the cultural development of my country.Louise Bennett Coverley 'Miss Lou' fonds". Digital Archive @ McMaster University Library. McMaster University Library . Retrieved 28 November 2015. Jamaica's culture and dialect were woven into Louise’s artistic craft. She wrote numerous books and poetry in Jamaican Patois, a language which has become symbolic of Jamaica’s vibrant culture. It is spoken primarily in Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora. Indeed, Louise was influential in championing Jamaican Patois as an artistic medium. A warm and generous person, she was loved and respected not only by Jamaicans at home and abroad but also by a wider international constituency. She frequently showed that she could communicate effectively with any audience, including people not familiar with Jamaican Creole. When persuaded to visit the country for the independence celebrations in August 2003, she was the focus of a massive outpouring of love and formal recognitions of her enduring significance. Yes, now that that monumental disappointment was done and dusted we felt quite optimistic. We did. We did. We felt light as a bird and fairly upbeat in fact. But we didn't have any money. No, we didn't - we owed money. We did actually. So what we felt and wanted was neither here nor there. We had to get real. That's right, we had to face up to reality. Get real. Get real. We didn't want to. No. No. No we didn't." Within the last four years, I have acted in several successful plays and have written short plays in Jamaican dialect, which have been performed throughout the island. I have also published three books of both prose and poetry written in Jamaican dialect and was an active worker in the literacy campaign.

Louise Bennett-Coverley - Wikipedia

I’d love to see this be massively edited to see her beautiful writing gain some direction and meaning to shine through. Bailey, Carol (1 January 2009). "Looking in: Louise Bennett's Pioneering Caribbean Postcolonial Discourse". Journal of West Indian Literature. 17 (2): 20–31. JSTOR 23019946. Towards the novel’s close, a deep friendship is ruptured by a double dose of trauma, gesturing to the pitfalls of confusing life and literature. Even so, its most vital relationships remain those between its narrator and the volumes that pile up around her.Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton, before moving to Ireland where she worked in and studied theatre for several years. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize and went on to complete her debut book, Pond, which was published by The Stinging Fly (Ireland) and Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) in 2015, and by Riverhead (US) in 2016. Pond was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2016.

Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett – a life in books Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett – a life in books

The other chapters are in some ways riffs around the same ideas, linked by narrator and recurring ideas, themes and incidents – all underpinned by literature – writing and reading.What Bennett aims at is nothing short of a re-enchantment of the world. Everyday objects take on a luminous, almost numinous, quality through the examination of what Emerson called “the low, the common, the near” or the exploration of Georges Perec’s “infra-ordinary” – a quest for the quotidian. Unlike Perec, however, the narrator does not set out to exhaust circumscribed fragments of reality; quite the contrary. “I don’t want to be in the business of turning things into other things”, which only ends up “making the world smaller”. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but make it a feminist rendition with a female protagonist: In this Künstler- and Bildungsroman, an unnamed narrator ponders her development as a reader and a writer in an experimental style. She grows up in a working-class family in South West England, then moves to Ireland (like the author), always accompanied by the stories she constantly ingests. Yes, this is a book about the love of storytelling, but not in a moralistic, reading-is-good-for-you kind of way: Here, literature is an obsession, both a force of connection and separation. Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley or Miss Lou OM, OJ, MBE (7 September 1919 – 26 July 2006), was a Jamaican poet, folklorist, writer, and educator. Writing and performing her poems in Jamaican Patois or Creole, Bennett worked to preserve the practice of presenting poetry, folk songs and stories in patois (" nation language"), [2] establishing the validity of local languages for literary expression. [3] Early life [ edit ] It is a risky business as well: many people do not like to read about writers writing and writers reading other writers. But I am glad she took the risk and did it with style. After her year at RADA, Louise hoped to continue her studies in the Caribbean, most notably spending a period of time in Trinidad. In a letter to the British Council, she wrote that ‘after a very profitable year of studies at the Royal Academy…I have come aware of the fact that the natural end of my course lies in the West Indies’.