Me Nuh Choose None

Drawing on textual modes of fictional representation first valorised then disseminated by British imperialists, this story appropriates then abrogates Eurocentric ideals of normative creative expression. By appropriating the rhythm of lyrical poetry into the descriptions of this fictionalized Jamaica as well as the structure of modernist prose into Akúa’s psychical shift from colonial subject to postcolonial agent, “Me Nuh Choose None” inverts these narrative conventions historically used to systematize and exclude in order to puncture the imperious myth that complex writing in English primarily concerns itself with gratifying the colonial centre. Moreover, by treating the textual approximations of the Jamaican storyteller Miss Lou’s oral folktales with equal depth and sophistication as the instances of alliteration and onomatopoeia, this story abrogates the autocratic standard of “proper” spelling and pronunciation so as to textually privilege Jamaican folklore using the literariness usually reserved for Western texts. The effect is a form of fiction that acknowledges the dense matrix of cultural and colonial systems English writing exists within, while simultaneously gesturing between and beyond these systems to the linguistic interstices of postcolonial liminality.