Mélange Travel & Lifestyle Magazine April 2017 | Page 479

would just come to me in the midst
of writing a piece, it’s like its floating
above you, and you reach up and
pull it down, and it would just
sound right. I took the name “Tim
Tim” as my stage name, because in
the French Patois-speaking islands
like Haiti, St. Lucia, Dominica and
Grenada the storyteller says “Tim
Tim”, like once upon a time, before
he begins his stories.
Why do you write in the
vernacular?
I was first influenced by the late
Louise Bennett ‘Miss Lou” of Jamaica.
In 1972 while doing post grad
studies at U.W.I Jamaica, Miss Lou
came on campus to entertain us.
After hearing her and enjoying her
and seeing her connection to the
audience, I decided to try my hand
at writing in the vernacular. The rest
as they say is history. The performing
grew out of the writing. Miss Lou
and I became great friends and did
many performances together. For
me the attraction of writing in the
vernacular was firstly the challenge
of attempting to put the oral or
spoken word on the page, to make
the written word sound as close as
possible to the spoken one. It gave
you the freedom of being a pioneer,
of creating your own structures,
of realizing that what we spoke
had structure it itself, that it was a
language not a dialect. You can have
good vernacular and bad vernacular,
there were standards.