SPEAK OF THE ADVENT OF NEW LIGHT: JAMAICAN PROVERBS AND ANANCY STORIES 79

 An yuh noh smaddy ef you noh
 Got family ovah sea!'"

"Every beggar has his bundle of kindling/ Every puppy has its fleas/
And you're not somebody if you don't/ Have family overseas."
Introducing the poem with two traditional proverbs, one of them in
deep patwa, is an assertion that Jamaican culture contains within it
the wisdom to deal with a changing world. The proverb becomes a
metonym for the entire culture, a homeland that the emigrant does
not leave behind when she leaves Jamaica. The fact that proverbs still
apply to her keeps the emigrant within the familiar circle.
 Bennett's use of patwa encouraged those who grew up listening to
her to explore patwa in their own poetry. Moreover, by using and
renovating traditional proverbs, she made it possible for poets to begin
framing new ones, to take the voice she had rediscovered, and amplify
it. Take, for example, Lorna Goodison's three-part poem "From the
Garden of Women Once Fallen." The second part of the triptych, called
"Of Bitterness Herbs," reads:

 You knotted the spite blooms into a bouquet-garni
 To flavour stock for soups and confusion stews.
 Now no one will dine with you.

Each succeeding verse begins with a newly-made proverb.

 A diet of bitterness is self consuming. Such herbs
 are best destroyed, rooted out of the garden
 of the necessary even preordained past.

 Bitter herbs grow luxuriant where the grudgeful crow
 dropped its shadow, starting a compost heap of need in you
 to spray malicious toxins over all flowers in our rose gardens.

 Bitterness herbs bake bad-minded bread, are good for little
 except pickling green-eyed gall stones, then eaten alone
 from wooden spoons of must-suck-salt."

The proverbs here serve a complex rhetorical function. The first verse
casts the subject, at least metaphorically, as an Obeah woman a


 11 Louise Bennett, "Proverbs" Jamaica Labrish. (Kingston: Sangster's, 1966) 179.
 Goodison, "From the Garden of Women Once Fallen," Roses 40-1.