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

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The stories of her actual life are intermingled with the stories the protagonist creates there and then.

Louise Bennett-Coverley

It’s ripped to fragments by another man, one who hated not that the pages were blank but that they’d been written on. In recognition of her achievements, Harbourfront Centre, a non-profit cultural organisation in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, has a venue named Miss Lou's Room. The destruction of the written word echoes through the whole story, bounces against its walls, jumps from the real to the imagined and back. Many of these records are written by Louise herself, showing how rich personal stories exist within official government records.And it is only then, isn’t it, that we realise, somewhat reluctantly, that we didn’t read the last few lines of the previous page properly. Like our doodling protagonist, we are stuck with the problem that representation remains representation, no matter how much closer we think we’ve got to the heart of a thing. The central core of Checkout 19 is a memoir of Bennett's narrator's reading life (and the narrator must be Bennett herself, I felt, at least in part), and I was quite thrilled when I discovered that it was about reading — I like nothing better than hearing about other readers's reading lives, especially when their reading overlaps with my own to the extent that hers does. As I read Checkout 19 I felt something like how I might feel if I'd happened upon an old photograph of my beloved mother in a drawer, a photograph I'd never seen before, and in that instant I saw my mother the way she had been before I was born, and before she had children, or met my father, where she was completely herself and knowable to me as my mother, but she was also beautiful in a way I didn't know. This job provided her with the opportunity to garner much information about Jamaican culture as she travelled to towns and villages across the country.

Hon. Dr. Louise Bennett Coverley (1919 – 2006) - The Rt. Hon. Dr. Louise Bennett Coverley (1919 – 2006) - The

I say "novel Pond" but the book is said to have missed out on the Goldsmiths Prize because it was considered a story collection. She carried through her work here with enthusiasm, as what she felt was part of her general effort to see as much as possible of the English Theatre, its working, and its productions.Having the RMAS approach to training at its core, IOTP is designed with a syllabus that sees male and female integration throughout training.