50 JOSEPH T. FARQUHARSON

 At the same time, it may be surprising to learn that Bennett is not
 the originator of "Jamaican-poetry-in-creole"; she had forerunners such
 as Tom Redcam, Una Marson and Claude McKay. However, it is she
 who expands and gives prominence to the style. She, like so many
 other revolutionaries, was not the one who conceived of the revolution,
 but she took the idea and ran with it and became for many decades a
 one-woman army determined to defeat the forces of negativity where
 the vernacular and its potential were concerned.
 By employing JC to produce literature, Bennett created ripples that
 have now grown into tidal waves, waves which are beating back the
 ships of linguistic bigotry. Such widespread use in verse of a linguistic
 variety which was perceived as a reduced/simplified/bastardised form
 of Standard English (SE) was beyond a doubt a revolutionary move
 because one woman thought that "for too long, it was considered not
 respectable to use the dialect. Because there was a social stigma
 attached to the kind of person who used dialect habitually. Many people
 still do not accept the fact that for us there are many things which are
 best said in the language of the 'common man"' (Scott 101). Miss Lou
 made this statement in the late 1960s, and one must admit that some
 of the stigma is still there, but her pioneering work has effected in
 many persons an attitudinal change towards creole. Its use in literature,
 the mass media, and corporate society is on the increase.

 Decolonisation: Identity and Linguistic Rehabilitation

 As I move into the second section, I must point out that this paper
does not pretend to be exhaustive since obviously, I cannot cover the
total value and impact of Bennett's poetry in one paper. This second
section will focus on her treatment of languages] and its decolonising
potential.
 You might ask why look at 'language' as a theme especially within
the context of decolonisation? Ashcroft et. al. comments on the
importance of language to the hegemonic colonial system:

 One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over
 language. The imperial education system installs a 'standard' version
 of the metropolitan language as the norm, and marginalizes all other
 'variants' as impurities. (7)

 Bennett skilfully utilises language as an instrument of decolonisation.
The first and most obvious point is that she has chosen to present her