78 HUGH HODGES

proverbs do is appeal to familiar, collective wisdom, the other half of
what they do is protean they introduce something new and
surprising.
 So, if we can't usefully generalize about what proverbs say, we can,
perhaps, say something about the way they say what they say, or the
way they do what they do. Proverbs in Jamaica function in broadly
the same way as they do in West Africa. Yoruba proverbs, for example,
serve two functions. First, they have a didactic function: they are held
to express the synthesized, collective wisdom of the people, so using
one is in effect an invocation of authority.' Second, and perhaps more
important, they give oratory aesthetic power. In fact, Yoruba proverbs
get their authority mostly from the aesthetic pleasure they give. The
same thing can be seen in Akan oratory, in which the principle function
of proverbs is aesthetic or poetic rather than didactic.9 In both cases
what gives a proverb its aesthetic power is its uniqueness and the
concreteness of its images.
 Admittedly, some of this doesn't apply straightforwardly to Jamaican
proverbs. Certainly proverbs have not, historically, had the same status
in Jamaica that they had in pre-colonial Africa they have been part
of a folk culture that Jamaicans used to be taught to execrate, and
from which many Jamaicans still try to distance themselves.
Consequently, the kind of imaginative, concrete proverbs that would
lend a speech power and authority in Africa are just as likely to have
the opposite effect in Jamaica. So using one in oratory or poetry is a
bit of a calculated risk. It is a risk that Louise Bennett for one has been
taking for more than fifty years. She has been writing and performing
poetry in patwa, championing the language of the people since the
1940s. On the radio and on the stage Louise Bennett performed patwa,
in the process restoring the authority of the proverbial voice by showing
that it was capable of talking about contemporary Jamaica.
 Here's an early example. The poem "America," about the massive
emigration to the United States that Jamaica experienced in the 1940s,
begins with the ironic observation:

 Every seckey got him jeggeh
 Every puppy got him flea.

 Oyekan Owomoyela, A Ki i: Yoruba Proscriptive and Prescriptive Proverbs
(Lanham: University Press of America, 1988) 4.
 9 Lawrence Boadi, "The Language of the Proverb in Akan," African Folklore, ed. R.
Dorson (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1972) 83.