Looking for an English literary context, critics have sometimes compared Johnson to John Clare, presuming perhaps a similarly provincial naiveté, which at best misreads him and at worst condescends. When I read him, however, I hear the great Renaissance song-poets like Skelton, Wyatt and Herrick, many of whose poems were set to music and meant to be performed; I hear the Caledonian folk music of Robert Burns, and note the linguistic parallels in relation to British English between Burns’ Gaelic brand of English and LKJ’s Jamaican creole. One thinks of Emily Dickinson, who, for the sub-strata of her poems, relied on the metrics and diction of those old New England Protestant hymns. Or one is reminded of Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka and Michael Harper in their dedicated use of the modalities of the blues and jazz. Among recent English-language poets one might compare him to Paul Muldoon who, no surprise, is Irish, not English, has written opera libretti and is a part-time rock musician, and whose poems, like LKJ’s, touch us quickest when read with ear and mouth. The point is that, from the 16th century forward, poets writing in every available variant of the English language have had easy access to a rich tradition that is underwritten, as it were, by music; and it’s in this tradition, certainly not the romantic pastoral, that I would place LKJ.
In LKJ’s case, the music that underwrites his poetry is reggae. Literally, as well as literarily. Though he is known world-wide as a recording and performing reggae musician and dub-poet and can fill a stadium, the music, he says, “was not only a vehicle to take my verse to a wider audience but was organic to it, was born of it.” I first heard his name back in the late 1970s when I was living in Jamaica, and reggae was just beginning its conquest of the world music scene, and LKJ was a prominent member of the London-based cadre of Jamaican reggae artists. He was known as one of the first, and is surely still one of the best, dub-poets, and may in fact have coined the term in an article he wrote in 1977 in Race Today, where he says, “‘Dub-lyricism’ is a new form of (oral) music-poetry, wherein the lyricist overdubs rhythmic phrases on the rhythm background of a popular song.” But he wrote poetry for the page as well, and unbeknownst to me had published books before he began making records, and had made several important strictly literary decisions that he has hewed to ever since. “I wanted to write poetry that was accessible to those whose experiences I was writing about, namely the black community . . . I wanted to write oral poetry that could hold the interest of the reader as well as the listener. I heard music in language and I wanted to write word-music, verse anchored by the one-drop beat of reggae with meter measured by the bass line or a drum pattern; I wanted to write lines that sound like a bass line.” For these purposes, Jamaican creole was the ideal, perhaps the only, language. And the rich Jamaican oral tradition, steeped in folk songs and Anancy tales, rhyming games and riddles, religious songs and proverbs and, of course, the King James Bible, became his mother-lode of imagery and narrative structure and intent. A home-grown music, a mother-tongue, and a mother-lode: one could do worse; one could not do much better.
It’s also useful to know that Johnson “came to poetry through politics,” the politics of black liberation in England and America in the late 1960s and 1970s. Like most Afro-Caribbean intellectuals of his generation, he had to step outside the university and the English literary canon in order to encounter the work of writers whose experiences of race and racism corresponded to his own. He joined the British Black Panthers, and through the Panthers he discovered and then began to explore the vast continent of literature by black authors about black people—at that time a subterranean literature, by and large, even in America. Trained in sociology, he eagerly devoured the writings of W. E. B. Dubois and C. L. R. James, but one book from that period was of special eye- and ear-opening importance to him, as it was to so many of us: Black Poetry, edited by Dudley Randall, published in 1969 by Broadside Press. There he read for the first time the poems of Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay, as well as his near-contemporaries, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Sonia Sanchez, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Later, under the guidance of the older Jamaican poet, Andrew Salkey, then living in England, and in the pages of Caribbean journals like Savacou and BIM, and in the publications and on the shelves of the late John La Rose’s and Sarah White’s publishing house and bookshop, New Beacon Books, he immersed himself in the poetry of Caribbean writers like Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite.
One can sense the presence of all these writers and influences in Johnson’s work and often even locate it exactly in this poem or that. And yet he is like no one else writing today. There is a ludic quality to the language and structure of his poems, a determined, ironic playfulness that cuts against the rage and grief that brings the poet to write in the first place. Whether it’s a ballad (“Inglan Is a Bitch”) or a dramatic monologue (“Sonny’s Lettah”) or an elegy (the four “Reggae fi . . .” poems), or a poem that brings us the news from the street like a ten-penny broadside tacked to a post (“Street 66,” “Five Nights of Bleeding,” “New Craas Massakah”), the poems of Linton Kwesi Johnson are as redemptive and life-affirming as the blues.
I
FIVE NIGHTS OF BLEEDING
Seventies Verse
YOUT SCENE
last satdey
I nevah deh pan no faam,
so I decide fi tek a walk
doun a Brixton
an see wha gwaan.
di bredrin dem stan-up
outside a Hip City,
as usual, a look pretty;
dem a lawf big lawf
dem a talk dread talk
dem a shuv an shuffle dem feet,
soakin in di sweet musical beat.
but when nite come
policeman run dem dung;
beat dem dung a grung,
kick dem ass,
sen dem paas justice
to prison walls of gloom.
but di breddah dem a scank;
dem naw rab bank;
is pakit dem a pick
an is woman dem a lick
an is run dem a run when di wicked come.
DOUBLE SCANK
I woz jus about fi move fahwod,
tek a walk tru di markit,
an sus di satdey scene—
yu know whe a mean—
when I site breddah Buzza
bappin in style
comin doun FRONT LINE.
him site a likkle sistah
him move fi pull a scank
but she soon sus him out
seh him dont in her rank;
soh when shame reach him,
him pap a smile,
scratch him chin,
but di sistah couda si tru him grin:
breddah Buzza coudn do a single ting.
“Hail, Buzza!” I greet him.