Baptist Minister promotes use of Jamaican language in Parliament

 

Baptist minister Reverend Dr Glenroy Lalor has taken issue with the use of the Jamaican language, commonly called patwa (patois), not being allowed in the country’s parliament.

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Reverend Lalor, Pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in St. Andrew, in his sermon on Sunday, made reference to opposition MP Nekeisha Burchell not being allowed to deliver part of her maiden speech in the annual Sectoral Debate in the Jamaican tongue on May 13.

 

She was stopped shortly after she began by House Speaker Juliet Holness, who reminded her that doing so would be contrary to the relevant provision in the Standing Orders of the House of Representatives.

 

Reverend Lalor expressed incredulity at the fact that “The mother tongue, the heart language, is illegal in the people's house!”

 

Pressing the matter further, he declared: “Were the Throne of Grace and the place of heaven having the same rules of the Jamaican Parliament, those prayers would go unheard and unanswered. Those prayers would be ruled out of order, perhaps by the gatekeeper, Saint Peter, who would say, 'There's no accommodation. It is a breach of divine protocol, a violation of the heavenly standing order.'" 

 

He said the recent incident caused him to recall the words of former journalist and commentator Winston Babatunde Witter many years ago: “Dem look wi vote in a patwa, but spen wi money in a English.”

 

 

Asserting that “language is never neutral,” he said “wrapped up in language are issues such as identity, power, dignity, and belonging.”

 

Recalling the late Baptist minister and scholar, Reverend Ashley Smith, he said: “Were he to comment on the standing orders of Parliament excluding the language we all speak, he would say, ‘That is just another expression of the self-hate we have internalized from enslavement and colonialism.’ He would go on to say, ‘It is the exaltation of, that which he loved to call, stranger values.’ You know what that is? You prefer everything that come from foreign, (calling it) good, and everything that is made locally is bad. The self-hate and the stranger value."

 

Placing the issue in the context of the Biblical Pentecost, he said that spiritual  phenomenon affirmed “the inclusive nature of the love of God.”

 

“We, all of us, can address God in our own language,” he declared.

 

Pressing that point further, he declared: “If God was in the Jamaican Parliament, the cry of your grandmother and mine, ‘Do poopa, Jeezas, Father God, please hear mi deh call to you right now from mi knees pon the mercy seat. Si me here, Lord. See me here. Blessed Holy Spirit, hear me now… Were the throne of grace and the place of heaven having the same rules of the Jamaican Parliament, those prayers would go unheard and unanswered. Those prayers would be ruled out of order, perhaps by the gatekeeper, Saint Peter, who would say, "There's no accommodation. It's, it is a breach of divine protocol, a violation of the heavenly standing order."