Speak of the Advent of New Light:
 Jamaican Proverbs and Anancy Stories


 Hugh Hodges


 In a poem entitled "Mother, the Great Stones Got to Move" Lorna
 Goodison speaks of a story that contains

 exact figures,
 headcounts, burial artifacts, documents, lists, maps
 showing our way up through the stars; lockets of brass
 containing all textures of hair clippings.'

"[S]ome of us," she adds, "must tell it." This story is known in Jamaica
as 'the half that has never been told,' the half concealed by colonial
history. The dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson calls it "a hurting black
story," and suggests that the very sound and shape of Jamaican music
do in fact begin to tell it he calls it bass history:

 Shock-black bubble-doun-beat bouncing
 rock-wise tumble-doun sound of music;
 foot-drop find drum, blood story,
 bass history is a moving
 is a hurting black story.2

 So, the Jamaican people may not always have had books to tell their
history, but they have always had an oral tradition, a tradition which


 Lorna Goodison, "Mother the Great Stones Got to Move," bTo Us All Flowers Are
Roses (Urbana: University of Illinois) 4-5.
 2 Linton Kwesi Johnson, "Reggae Sounds," Dread Beat And Blood (Neustadt:
Schwinn, 1984) 100.