SPEAK OF THE ADVENT OF NEW LIGHT: JAMAICAN PROVERBS AND ANANCY STORIES 77

Jamaicans have with the land; about how they view hardship, and about
the need to endure. And, especially in the way Marley uses it here, it
speaks about a kind of pride in suffering, about refusing "trickledown"
as Goodison calls it. It speaks about Jamaica's people.
 Folk stories do the same sort of thing. The cultural historian Richard
E. Burton calls them "a transcription of everyday life on the plantation,"
but just as importantly they are also about the telling of the untold
half. When at the end of an Anancy story a trick is played, the part of
the story that's been concealed suddenly becomes vitally important.
And the revealing of that part of the story doesn't simply set the record
straight; it rewrites the record entirely, realizing possibilities that were
never imagined. In other words, what the telling of Anancy stories
does, is imaginatively invoke "the time of turning." It is this "time of
turning" that I'm going to explore in this paper, first in the context of
Jamaican proverbs, and then in the context of folk stories. Jamaican
proverbs serve a number of rhetorical functions. They can be used to
chastise or to correct, to insult, to give advice, to drive home a well-
known fact, or simply to reflect on the way of things. As a result, it's
difficult and probably unwise to generalize about their content.
Nevertheless, I think one can say that Jamaican proverbs do, in general,
reflect the people's struggle with oppression. In the 1920s the American
ethnographer Martha Beckwith wrote in the introduction to her
collection of Jamaican proverbs:

 It is to be noted how many of the proverbs apply to poverty, hunger,
 injury, and want..... It is the fate of the folk who are put upon by their
 betters and who smart under injury which is expressed with an almost
 uncanny justness of observation; as if, by generalizing the experience
 of misery and poverty, each man became dignified in his own eyes."

If proverbs were only about generalizing the experience of misery,
however, one would expect them to be a lot more miserable than they
generally are. As Carolyn Cooper observes, what Beckwith's discussion
of proverbs overlooks is the way proverbs talk about poverty, hunger,
and injury.7 Jamaican proverbs are very often humorous, and the comic
turn they have is half of their significance. That is, if half of what



 6 Martha Beckwith, Jamaican Proverbs (Poughkeepsie: Vassar College, 1925) 6.
 7 Carolyn Cooper, "Proverbs As Metaphor in the Poetry of Louise Bennett."
Jamaica Journal 17:2 (1984) 23.