A Likkle Miss Lou: How Jamaican Poet Louise Bennett Coverley Found Her Voice

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Indeed, for all her digressive self-narration, her imperiously delivered opinions, it is not always easy to know what our protagonist feels about the events of her life. When she reassures Dale that she barely thinks about what he did, she seems to be telling the truth, but in the aftermath she cannot really determine if she is upset or not, even as her body shakes—which, to this reader at least, is a response that should provide some kind of answer. What it means to be upset is physically expressed but not articulated as emotion. Our narrator is in one way thoroughly devoted to the project of living out who she is, leaning into her tastes and proclivities. But this comes at a certain cost, and, for her, the cost is self-knowledge. Although she lived in Toronto, Canada for the last decade she still receives the homage of the expatriate West Indian community in the north as well as a large Canadian following. Preference, if any, for a particular University or other institution and name of Professor with whom I desire to study:

Louise Bennett’s Women Without a Story - The New Yorker Claire-Louise Bennett’s Women Without a Story - The New Yorker

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’. Stewart, Jocelyn Y. (2 August 2006). "Louise Bennett-Coverly, 86; Helped Preserve Culture and Language of Jamaica". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 14 September 2016. And for me that is a metaphor for Claire-Louise Bennett’s writing – a sense that the conventional literary novel with plot, characters, linearity is not for her – a refusal to fit into pre-existing templates and a search for something new to do with literature. A search though that has perhaps not yet reached fulfilment and is still uneven in its results but still interesting for an observer. 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's narrator points out that Ann Quin was a working-class writer like herself, and she mentions two other working-class writers, Tove Ditlevson and Annie Ernaux, both of whose memoirs I've read recently. How pleased I was to find them referenced, and to find Bennett's words about memory (though not in the context of those authors) which echoed the thoughts I'd had — about odd unconnected images which my memory has retained — while reading Ernaux's very analytical memoir, Les Années: I understood that my memory had isolated and preserved several images in such a way that they were deprived of any interwoven meaning they might possess...In addition to her studies at RADA, Miss Lou hosted a weekly thirty-minute radio programme, Caribbean Carnival at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). She also worked with repertory companies in other parts of the United Kingdom before returning to Jamaica. Miss Lou went to London in 1950 and again worked at the BBC hosting a one-hour show called West Indian Guest Night. Claire-Louise Bennett’s highly acclaimed debut, initially published in Ireland earlier this year, is a collection of 20 stories – the shortest of which runs to a couple of sentences. They are all told, it seems, by the same female character, whose semi-reclusive existence the tales revolve around. Reading them is an immersive experience. We come to share the “savage swarming magic” the narrator feels under her skin by focusing at length on her “mind in motion” (the only exception being the final story, told in the third person). For all this propinquity, we would be hard-pressed to recognise her, should she suddenly emerge from her rural retreat. One of the most striking aspects of this extraordinary book is how well we get to know the narrator – whose brain and body we inhabit – yet how little we know about her. We don’t even learn her name.

Louise Bennett-Coverley | Books | The Guardian

British Council Scholarship records, held in the BW 84 series, contain hundreds of personal files which can help to tell the stories of a range of overseas students. Louise’s application form contains a wealth of information about her education, publications, current occupation, and her future profession. Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley or Miss Lou". Toronto Star. 6 June 2012 . Retrieved 14 September 2016. 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. a b c Moses, Knolly (29 July 2006). "Louise Bennett, Jamaican Folklorist, Dies at 86". The New York Times . Retrieved 28 November 2015. She attended Ebenezer and Calabar elementary schools, St. Simon’s College, and Excelsior High School in Kingston. In 1945, she was awarded a British Council scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London, England.In 2011, photographs, audiovisual recordings, correspondence, awards and other material regarding Bennett were donated to the McMaster University Library by her family with the intention of having selections from the fonds, which date from 1941 to 2008, digitized and made available online as part of a digital archive [16] A selection of Bennett's personal papers are also available at the National Library of Jamaica. Launched in October 2016, the Miss Lou Archives contains previously unpublished archival material including photos, audio recording, diaries and correspondence. [23] The holdings of the Miss Lou Archives were donated to the Library by Bennett as she prepared to take up residence in Canada. [17] Awards and honours [ edit ] there are books, writing, men, women, coming of age, imagination, stream-of-consciousness, auto-fiction, and our own reflective experience. Part III Won't You Bring in the Birds is then much the longest and also the most striking. At its heart this is based on the narrator's recollection, and elaboration, on a story she wrote many years previously, and it is striking how in recounting it she pinpoints the timing by the novels she had read by that time: 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”.