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To my mother
Contents
I. Five Nights of Bleeding—Seventies Verse
6 All Wi Doin Is Defendin
7 Bass Culture
8 Reggae Sounds
9 Come Wi Goh Dung Deh
10 Song of Blood
11 Yout Rebels
12 Time Come
13 It Dread inna Inglan
14 Sonny’s Lettah
15 It Noh Funny
16 Want fi Goh Rave
17 Reality Poem
18 Forces of Victri
19 Inglan Is a Bitch
II. Mi Revalueshanary Fren—Eighties Verse
1 Story
2 Reggae fi Radni
3 Reggae fi Dada
4 New Craas Massakah
5 Di Great Insohreckshan
6 Beacon of Hope
7 Mekin Histri
8 Mi Revalueshanary Fren
9 Sense Outta Nansense
10 Di Good Life
11 Tings an Times
III. New Word Hawdah—Nineties Verse
1 Seasons of the Heart
2 Hurricane Blues
3 More Time
4 Reggae fi Bernard
5 Reggae fi May Ayim
6 If I Woz a Tap Natch Poet
7 Liesense fi Kill
8 New Word Hawdah
9 BG (for Bernie Grant in memoriam, 1934–2000)
Notes
Special thanks
INTRODUCTION
by Russell Banks
Take the title, Mi Revalueshanary Fren, and silently say it, and hear yourself saying it. Then open the book at random to any one of these extraordinary poems, and do the same. Say the poem, and hear yourself saying it. You’ll have answered the question that most contemporary English language readers, accustomed as they are to reading poetry strictly with their eyes instead of with their ears and mouths, might otherwise have shyly (or perhaps defensively) asked themselves, How best to read this work? The answer should be obvious, I suppose. For thousands of years human beings have best experienced poetry as song. What we happen to see printed on paper (or inscribed on vellum, papyrus or clay tablet) merely cues our ears and mouths, and if it’s good poetry, we hear music and sing a song not of our own making.
More than nearly any other contemporary English-language poet (I’ll come back to that categorization in a moment), Linton Kwesi Johnson writes poems that make us sing with a voice that mingles our intimate own with a stranger’s, the poet’s, intimate own. And inasmuch as the poet is a representative man or woman (and Johnson is indeed one, a true people’s poet), we end up singing a people’s song. Poetry, at its best, is the most humanizing art. It links one’s secret solitary self to the secret solitary self of another and from that other to the species; it is the antithesis of solipsism, the negation of narcissism. As my friend, the late poet William Matthews, used to say, “Sorry, Narcissis, there is someone else.” And the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson—or LKJ, as he’s known to much of the world—confirms it. In “If I Woz a Tap–Natch Poet” Johnson says he’d write us a poem “soh dyam deep / dat it bittah-sweet / like a precious / memari / whe mek yu weep / whe mek yu feel incomplete.”
He is, of course, a top-notch poet, and his bitter-sweet poems can indeed make us weep, make us feel incomplete. In 2002 he became the second living and the first black poet to have his selected poems published in England in the Penguin Classics series. He is Jamaican by birth, and though he has resided for most of his adult life in England, where he took a university degree in sociology, he writes in Jamaican creole. Not a dialect, not strictly a “patois,” either, and not a mere post-colonial version of Standard English, Jamaican creole is a language created out of hard necessity by African slaves from