ON THE SYNTACTICS AND POETICS OF SKUNT:
A Celebration of Berkley Wendell Semple's Kipling Plass
Jeremy Poynting
I met the ubiquity and extreme malleability of the word “skunt” in the company of my late friend Rooplall Monar when I stayed with him in Guyana in the 1970s and 1980s. But nowhere have I seen the poetics of the word more brilliantly explored than in Berkley Wendell Semple’s novel, Kipling Plass, published by Peepal Tree Press in November this year. It is not a word that appears in Richard Allsopp’s Dictionary of Caribbean Usage (1996), because Allsopp, though Guyanese (and his dictionary does have an appreciable trawl of Guyanese words) has a middle-class Guyanese sense of propriety. The word also does not appear in Lise Winer’s excellent Dictionary of the English/ Creole of Trinidad and Tobago (2009) because it is almost exclusively a Guyanese word – it is the Guyanese word, with “Rass!” being its only ubiquitous competitor (a character in Semple’s novel is called “Rass-mouth” because he says “rass” at least twice in every sentence he utters) – though no doubt the word “skunt” followed the emigration of many Guyanese to the Caribbean islands in the 1970s and 80s as well as to “the snow countries of the North”.
If the word has, as some argue, its origins in the sexist, misogynist abuse of “your mother’s cunt”, its use (at least in Semple’s novel) has mostly moved even further away from sexual, genital reference than the word “fuck” has moved in most idiomatic UK English usage, though as with “fuck”, sometimes its use does remain explicitly genital. Generally, though, its usage may be closer in meaning to the Scots use of the word “skunt” to mean rack and ruin, in the phrase “to go to skunt”. Since British Guiana was full of Scottish overseers and managers in its past, such an etymology is a real possibility.
Describing the phonetics of skunt is beyond me, but I think that its sound begins at the front of the mouth with the hiss of “s”, and then moves to the (velar) stop consonant ‘k’ at the back of the mouth, and then moves forward fast to the front of the mouth, ending with the tip of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, in an explosive movement. As a physical production it manifestly, as Berkley Semple’s novel demonstrates, lends itself very well to expressions of anger, disgust, shock, puzzlement, contempt – and amusement and pleasure.
Whatever its etymology, in Semple’s novel, the word takes on a poetic fluidity of linguistic variation and use, a demonstration of the inventiveness of Guyanese Creole, to make one sound convey a wide range of meaning without ambiguity.
The Syntax
The word itself can variously be:
a verbal exclamation (as in “What the skunt!”);
a concrete noun, which may refer to 1) a person (as in “a drunken skunt”), 2) an action (as in “The two of them commit skunt and make Kippy”), or 3) a thing (as in “raining down lash on Carl skunt”);
an abstract noun (as in “all kind of skunt” and “pure violence and skunt”);
as a pre or post-modifying noun adjunct or as a compound word (as in the “back-breaking skunt work of cutting cane”, “hearing voices of jumbie skunt” and “What mad-skunt Kippy go and do?”, and “Sunil Jagabir Bhojedat skunt, saviour of we friend from the maw”);
as a reflexive pronoun (as in “he left he skunt high and dry”, “a madness take she skunt”) expanded from the root word by suffixes as a noun in, skuntery (“Is faery tale skuntery”) and scuntification (“Then come the skuntification and fuckery”) and skuntifying (“Long and long the skuntifying go on”);
as an adjectival intensifier (“the bad skunt runner”) and expanded by suffixes as an adjective as in skuntian (“skuntian darkness”, “strangeness and skuntian confusion”,) in skuntifying (“the maw of the skuntifying sea”;
as an adverb as in Bhoje’s threat to abandon the youths “today skunt”;
and as the main root of a verb as in skuntify (“Is Mr. Ramsammy … ruin the song and skuntify we tune”), skuntalise (“they take over everything… and skuntalise things) and skuntificate (“They say nothing at all when they open their stink mouth and skuntificate”).
The Poetics
One of the beauties of the wavering between slipperiness and definiteness in the use of the word skunt is the way one meaning can inhabit another. When Kip is holed up in his mother’s house, grieving for Anita, and trying to make sense of his feelings, on one level “skunt” is an appropriate way of describing his frustrated sense of inarticulancy, that he can’t find the words to describe his inner feelings. The word here is a means of self-criticism (“I turn into a mad skunt boy and forget myself, not giving a skunt what is the name of day. Pure skunt is my state…” until he feels ashamed of himself “in this state of skunt” (178). Here skunt has the connotation of worthlessness, nothingness, but in the subtle shift between “skunt is my state” to “state of skunt”, meanings multiply. Guyana in the economic collapse and virtual party dictatorship of the 1980s is literally a state of skunt, but we also remember the adjective “skuntian” and its associations with the depth of the sea and the indeterminacy of space, with its utter Miltonic darkness (as in “skuntian darkness” and “the maw of the skuntifying sea”), that “state of skunt” takes on a metaphysical depth that very precisely describes where Kip is located in his inner and outer space and time.
As suggested in the introduction, whatever its etymology, skunt is inevitably a gendered and physically descriptive term, as when a woman is abused as “you whoring skunt” and in the phrase “mother skunt”. More subtly, and not abusively, when Kipling's friend Peep is afflicted by self-destructive thoughts after her rape, she is described as having “two spirit in she skunt”, and she herself tells Kip, when the baby, which is the result of the rape, is moving about in her womb, “Sometimes I want to take knife and cut he skunt out myself”). This gendered and bodily meaning leaks into Kips’ use of the word when he describes himself as starting to cry “like a skuntian girl”, and his use of phrases like “skuntian darkness” and “the maw of the skuntifying sea” both suggest a womblike but threatening space, which is apposite in terms of Kips conflicted feelings about his mother and her frequent state of mental distress, when, through no fault of hers, he is abandoned by her and feels an existential sense of isolation. It is clear that Berkley Wendell Semple is very much aware of the gender connotations of the word (when for instance he has Kip wishing the abusive Sepulcrita “May lighting bold burn she skunt.”, though the word is also often used in ways where the gender implications are distant.
At one level, Berkley Wendell Semple remembers and records the linguistic usage of Mahaicony village with all the evidence of acute accuracy. At this level, he shows “skunt” as a highly polysemic word in the pragmatics of village community discourse, where the speaker knows the hearer can supply the specific nuance of meaning “skunt” stands for in the context of the utterance, as in Basil Bernstein’s restricted language code, a pragmatics that shows a shared communal solidarity of values and understanding. And of course, because Kipling Plass is a novel, it is the reader who is invited to play the role of the listener, as when Sookuru’s radio doesn’t work, Kip thinks “What skunt is this now?”, the author is inviting the reader to supply the space. Rapidly, even the non-Guyanese reader picks up the clues that as a noun skunt is a word that bears a range of intensities, from the utter contempt of Kip’s view of Mr Ramsammy as a “drunken skunt”, to a state of affectionate abuse as in “Uncle Percy is a real skunt sometimes”, or of admiration as in the youths’ love for reggae singers “Big Youth or Jacob ‘the Killer’ Miller skunt”.
Truly, one little word needs a dictionary to itself.