Ben Etherington on 'Verse Minstrelsy and the Beginnings of Creole Poetry in Print in the Caribbean' WSRC seminar 30 Oct 2020 from caribbean newspapers Watch Video

⏲ Duration: 47 min 55 sec
✓ Published: 03-Nov-2020

Description:
In 1870, a white plantation owner, Michael McTurk, submitted two poems in a kind of Guyanese Creole to Marabunta – a short-lived satirical journal modelled on London’s Punch. McTurk was ventriloquising the persona of an old black plantation worker under the pseudonym of ‘Quow’. These were the first poems in an Anglophone Caribbean Creole written specifically for publication that would form part of an ongoing body of work. They were not without precedent. Ballads in local colonial vernacu