Reflection on Women Do This Every Day: Selected Poems of Lilian Allen

In an introduction to her compilation of poems, Allen introduces the motivation behind the creative resistance within her works. She considers the “British-style” school system’s efforts to erase the “bad language” and culture from the malleable minds of children to be an orchestrated strategy to “degrade and destroy the very essence of [the Jamaican] identity.” This act, of attempting to colonize the mind, is a violent product of assimilation, and relates to the construction of civilized/uncivilized dichotomy within race relations. Allen’s poems, saturated with so-called “bad talk,” resist European attempts to limit authentic Jamaican expression within language and art. In addition to the erasure of identity and language, the poems address several issues that are directly linked to colonization of the body and of the mind.

The first poem, Nelly Swelly Belly, is about a young Jamaican girl who is raped and impregnated by Mr. Thompson, who [I think] we are to assume is a white British man. Thompson capitalizes on his power and violently forces innocent Nelly into the heinous act, robbing her of a childhood she was not yet ready to part with. If we are to consider Nelly’s story as an allegory for the violent attempts to install “Britishness” into the Jamaican identity, and the permanent attempt to erase the very essence of a pure Jamaican existence, we may consider Allen’s last stanza as a powerful measure of resistance. As an army forms inside of Nelly, we are not to recognize her as a victim of the white man’s crime. Rather, the once “defenseless” little girl emerges as a strong and empowered woman. In this way, the violence done to her only inspired and strengthened a solid Jamaican identity. While Mr. Thompson might have succeeded in colonizing Nelly’s land and body, she powerfully resists his attempts to colonize her mind.