“The development of Patwa expresses the refusal to imitate a colonizer, their insistence on creation, their movement from obedience towards revolution. Not to nurture such a language is to retard the imagination and power of the people who created it. For Patwa to be treated with the respect it deserves, a conscious decision would have to be taken to treat it as a language, probably by a state body.
Such a decision would mean that Patwa would then be able to evolve without being limited by arguments demanding its perpetual reduction to its relationship to English. It would be constructed day-by-day and would develop in a literary dimension as well as an oral one.”
— excerpt introduction from an anthology of short stories by Jamaican Women titled Lionheart Gal
