[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for sharing this link.] Sean O’Hagan (Guardian) reviews the new Penguin edition of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Selected poems (with an introduction by Gary Younge). He writes: “The poet and activist’s life in verse has chronicled black British history as it was being made. He talks about staying hopeful, about integrity, and about taking 20 years to find his voice.”
Linton Kwesi Johnson’s New Penguin Edition Selected poems includes three previously unpublished verses, the latest of which is titled Di First Lackdoun. Written in August 2021 in his signature style – London-Jamaican patois rendered as spoken – it recounts a walk he took in his local park in Brixton as the long weeks of the first Covid winter gave way to spring.
people juss skattah like littah
all ovah di pure green carpets
redeem ert a sky a sun
some sit in a wide circle
as in some traditional aintshent
a ritual of bringing life back
The poem is joyous, celebratory and filled with an almost childlike sense of wonder and upliftment. Until, then, in the last line, when the music and laughter distanced from society, the cyclists and skateboarders he encountered, is suddenly drowned out by a very familiar noise – “di unrelentin wailin soun of sirens” from passing ambulances.
“The jam was incredible,” he tells me, as we sit, drinking ice water, in the sunny backyard of a pub in Herne Hill, “because most nights you couldn’t hear a sound. In Brixton! But in dawn would start again and, from dawn to dusk, it was just the siren. The ambulances go up and down, up and down.” He pauses for a moment as if transported back there. “Lambeth was hit hard, but touch wood I was all right.”
[. . .] Dressed for the hot weather in a white T-shirt, baggy shorts and sandals, rather than a suit, tie and trilby, Linton Kwesi Johnson doesn’t look his age. He’s flashier, more animated and mischievous than the earnest young activist whose spoken word reportage, delivered over hypnotic reggae beats, almost single-handedly defined the term “dub poetry.” In a quartet of groundbreaking albums made in collaboration with producer Dennis Bovell – Fear, beat a blood (1978), Forces of Victory (1979), Bass culture (1980) and Making History (1983) – Johnson recited the words of anger, struggle and defiance he had written to the pulse of reggae bass lines he heard in his head. Many of those spoken word songs remain resonant today: Mekin Histri, a protest poem against police and government corruption; Liesense fi Kill, which addresses the deaths of young black men in police custody; Five Nights of Bleeding, an internal evocation of the internal violence that can erupt without warning at a blues dance or a reggae concert – “cold knives as sharp as the eyes of hatred”.
“I was trying to find a bridge between standard English and spoken Jamaican,” he says of his initial decision to express himself in the vernacular of the London-Jamaican community to which he belonged. “A lot of poetry at the time sounded like the Caribbean trying to sound American, a bit like those Mick Jagger songs where he’s trying to sing like he’s from the deep south. For me, what was important was the authenticity of the voice. I didn’t want to imitate anyone else. I wanted it to sound like me.”
In his introduction to the new edition of Johnson’s Selected poems, author and political journalist Gary Younge recalls the “thrill of transgression” he felt as a teenager in the 1980s when he saw Johnson recite England Is a Bitch on television. “I didn’t know you could do that,” Younge recalls thinking, “effectively say what you’re thinking about racism in Britain out loud in public and still work.”
Others were less thrilled by Johnson’s boldness and linguistic iconoclasm. In 1982, in the wake of the first Brixton riots, the Spectator railed against his phonetically transcribed Patois poems, claiming they had “wrecked the schools and helped create a generation of rioters and illiterates”. Never one to seek mainstream or literary validation, Johnson’s politically anchored self-assurance was unwavering in the face of such loaded criticism. “From the beginning, I saw my verse as a way of chronicling black British history as it was being made,” he tells me. “I certainly didn’t see myself as an angry young black poet, as I was often portrayed, but as someone who was trying to articulate in verse the experiences of my generation.”
Artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen recently used Johnson’s angry elegy New Craas Massakah in an episode of his acclaimed BBC drama series. Small ax. It was originally written in the wake of the 1981 New Cross house fire, in which 13 black teenagers died in a suspected arson attack. Young poet and critic Kadish Morris, who first met Johnson aged 13 when he came to a poetry workshop in Leeds organized by her mother, recalls the poem’s inner charge in the context of the film. of McQueen. “It was so powerful and raw to hear the poem on the visuals of that time,” she tells me, when I ask if his work still resonates with a new generation of performance poets. “Everyone was on Twitter afterwards asking: ‘Who was that poet?’ What was that poem?’”
McQueen also commissioned a new poem, Towards Closure, from Johnson, for his latest documentary series, Uprising. It is the last poem in the book, a short, poignant tribute in plain English to the memory of the victims. “It was perfect and powerful because Linton has stayed true to the truth,” says McQueen. “Truth is his fire. And the truth is dangerous, but he knows how to handle it. It’s very hard to do that as an artist and have it be piercing, but the truth vibrates through his words and voice. There’s a clarity to it.”
The Penguin volume neatly divides Johnson’s verse into three chronological sections: the 70s, 80s, and 90s. “The first decade was about the urgency of expression, things I needed to get off my chest,” he says. “The second was all about learning my craft and how to structure my language, and the third was when I finally started to find my voice. I’m a classic late developer, so it took me 20 years to get there.”
Was it difficult to decide which poems made the final cut? “It basically came down to how embarrassing they were to read again,” he says with a laugh. “If they weren’t worthy, they had a chance.” Are there others who, with comfort, bring him a sense of deep satisfaction? “That would be going a little too far. I’d say there’s maybe five or six good poems in there and the rest I can live with.”
Johnson’s modesty belies his artistry as well as the lasting cultural significance of his work. He came to poetry, he writes in his afterword, “from the ignorant literary forest”. Born in the small rural town of Chapelton in the parish of Clarendon, Jamaica, he traveled to London in 1963, aged 11, his mother having made the journey ahead of them. “I come from the Jamaican countryside,” he says matter-of-factly. “My family were subsistence farmers, so basically we ate what we grew. Occasionally, we might have a few extra eggs to take to market, or some sugar cane or ginger. That’s how we lived.”
He recalls being fascinated as a child by “nonsense rhymes, side rhymes, and anansi stories,” as well as the Bible verses he memorized in school. “You could say I was grounded in the Jamaican oral tradition by the time I left.”
His activism began when he joined the youth wing of the British Black Panthers while still at school. What exactly did that mean? “Political education. You had to participate in demonstrations, sell newspapers and study certain texts. We read Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver and Seize the Time by Bobby Seale, but also Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams and The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson. For us, class was as important as race in the war.”
Johnson went on to study sociology at Goldsmiths and, for a time, wrote freelance music reviews and wrote artist biographies for Virgin Records. In his afterword to Selected poems, he writes: “Poetry for me has never been a calling. It was more like a visceral need for self-expression at a formative time in my life when I was trying to find my way in the world.”
His poems first appeared in the magazine Race Today, which was published by the Brixton-based radical black collective of the same name, to which he belonged along with his friend, the late Darcus Howe. They were written, he says, “out of a deep sense of alienation and rejection” that his post-Windrush generation experienced in Britain. “In Jamaica, we were educated to be British, to fly the flag when the Queen came, but when we came here, we were different from the rest of British society. That kind of alienation was profound and is one reason why reggae was so important to us. It gave us a sense of independent identity that was all ours.”
Two books followed, 1974 The voices of the living and the dead and 1975 Dread Beat and Blood, the latter also providing the title track for his first album, which was released by Virgin Records in 1978. Made on a budget of £2,000, it signaled much of what was to come. His spoken word lyrics, anchored and buoyed by Dennis Bovell’s deft and wisecracking production, often sounded like warnings from the heart of a disenfranchised black British community whose rage at tough policing would fuel the riots of the early 1980s in Brixton, Toxteth and St Pauls.
The double poetry that Johnson created drew on many different sources, including the work of pioneering black American poets of the 1950s and 1960s such as LeRoi Jones and Jayne Cortez, Caribbean writers such as Kamau Brathwaite and Andrew Salkey, and Jamaican reggae DJs or toasters such. such as U-Roy, Big Youth and Prince Jazzbo, who improvised over instrumental cuts of popular songs. [. . .]
For the full article, see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jul/31/linton-kwesi-johnson-selected-poems-interview
[Detail of photo by Adama Jalloh/The Observer. ‘Reggae gave us a sense of independent identity that was all our own’: Linton Kwesi Johnson.]
