Louise Bennett-Coverley

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Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley , OM , OJ , MBE (also: Miss Lou ; born September 7, 1919 in Kingston ; † July 26, 2006 in Toronto , Canada ) was a Jamaican writer . She is considered one of the most influential figures in Jamaican culture in the 20th century.

Life

Louise Bennett was born in Kingston to the baker Augustus Cornelius Bennett and his wife Kerene Robinson-Bennett, a seamstress. She attended Ebenezer and Calabar Elementary Schools before going to St. Simon's College and Excelsior College in Kingston, later Friends College at Highgate , St Mary . With a scholarship from the British Council , she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London in the 1940s and, shortly after arriving in England, got her own program on the BBC with Caribbean Carnival . After graduating, she returned to Jamaica in 1947. In 1950 she went back to England to work for the BBC ( West Indian Night ) and other artistic activities. From 1953 she worked for a year in the US for radio, where she also worked at the theater and directed a musical before moving back to Jamaica in 1954, where she spent the next three decades. In Jamaica she became involved in theater and taught drama to young people and adults in social work groups as well as at the University of the West Indies (Extra Mural Department). She has also given lectures on Jamaican folklore and music in the United States and Great Britain . Between 1966 and 1982 Bennett performed Miss Lou's Views on Jamaican radio up to three times a week , self-written monologues, usually a few minutes long. From 1970 to 1982 she hosted the television program Ring Ding , in which children were introduced to Jamaican folk culture. In the early 1980s she moved to Fort Lauderdale , USA, then to Toronto, Canada in 1987, where she lived until she died.

With poems written in Jamaican patois , which she had been creating since the age of 14, she helped to bring the language, which was originally regarded as a dialect of the common people and, in her youth, often simply as bad English by the British colonial rulers, to the artistic level to raise and thus to bring to general reputation. In her poems, which have been published in books since the early 1940s and, after initial resistance, also in Jamaican newspapers, she managed to express the Jamaican philosophy of life, religion, wit and the spontaneity of feelings. In an ironic, humorous and socially critical way she often ridiculed prejudices based on class and skin color differences or criticized people who were ashamed of being Jamaican or black.

Louise Bennett was married to entertainer Eric Winston Coverley since 1954, who died in 2002. She had a stepson and several adopted children. She died in Toronto on July 26, 2006 at the age of 86.

Honors

For her contributions to Jamaican culture, she became a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1960 and received the Norman Manley Award for Excellence (in the field of art). She was also awarded the Order of Jamaica in 1974 and received the silver and gold Musgrave medal for outstanding importance in the field of art and culture. In 1983 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies . Her composition You're going home now won a 1988 Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television nomination for Best Original Song (in the film Milk and Honey ). In 1998 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from York University in Toronto. The Jamaican government also named her a cultural ambassador, and on August 6, 2001, she was honored with the Order of Merit for her outstanding contributions to the development of art and culture .

It was included in the anthology Daughters of Africa , edited in 1992 by Margaret Busby in London and New York.

Works (selection)

  • Dialect Verses (1942)
  • Jamaica Labrish (1966)
  • Anancy and Miss Lou (1979)
  • Selected Poems (1982)
  • Aunty Roachy Seh (1993)

Discography (selection)

  • Jamaica Folksongs (Folkways, 1953)
  • Yes M 'Dear (Island Records Jamaica, 1981)

Filmography

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bennett-Coverley, Louise
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bennett-Coverley, Louise Simone (full name); Bennett, Louise (maiden name); Miss Lou (stage name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jamaican writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 7, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Kingston , Jamaica
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 2006
Place of death Toronto , Canada