John Barr's Grace

I've just finished reading John Barr's book, "Grace", which I had picked up when he read at the Longfellow National Historic Site.

I went in wondering how a white businessman could justify taking on a Caribbean persona and writing in his dialect. When he read it in person, well, let's just say it was clear that he doesn't speak our dialect. He seemed like an affable enough fellow (yes, I know some people think he's the Antichrist - whatever), and when I was getting the book signed (yes I bought it - my curiosity was burning me) I told him I was from the Virgin Islands and his eyes lit up. It turns out that he vacations in the British Virgin Islands.

Anyway, as I read the book, I was taken with the person he creates. Granted, sometimes it seems to leave the West Indian milieu, but hello? So did I. I honestly felt like John Barr was reveling in the possibilities and freedoms that our non-standard dialects afford. More power to him - it made me realize how alienated from Calypso my own writing is. I can prose it, but I have yet to put it into poetry. In short, Barr has love for the language of the islands. And he has a good ear for it.

Despite what I said about his inability to speak the dialect, he did a pretty good job of writing it. And how much more inauthentic is it than when bourgeois West Indian writers who had their dialects beaten (or educated) out of them use it?