February 2007 Issue

Lyricist Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Jamaica but has become Britain’s most celebrated black poet. He immigrated to England as a child, part of the succeeding waves of West Indians who arrived in the UK in the last several decades. “My generation is the second generation,” he says. “I call us the Rebel Generation.” This generation would not put up with the racial abuse its parents did. “Through our rebellion, we helped change Britain,” he says.

As a teenager in 1970, he joined the British Black Panthers and by the 1980s was a journalist and editor of the journal Race Today. He’s also reported for BBC and Channel 4.

As a young man growing up in south London, Johnson saw many people his age criminalized under what was known in the neighborhood as “sus law.” The police had resurrected a Victorian era law against vagrancy that had languished on the books. “Sus being short for suspicion,” Johnson explains, noting that the common charge was “attempt to steal from persons unknown.” His poem “Sonny’s Lettah (anti-sus poem)” is about a young man writing to his mother from Brixton prison, telling her his little brother got arrested, as did he.

Mama,
I really did try mi bes,
but nondiless
mi sarry fi tell yu seh
poor likkle Jim get arres.

LKJ (as he’s known) writes poetry in Jamaican Creole and his live performances are mesmerizing. His voice thumps like a bass line. His words lilt and cut, telling stories of police brutality and racial oppression. But he also has written beautiful elegies for friends and family, including a dirge for his father, who died at fifty-six due to complications of diabetes.

“1981 is perhaps most significant of black experience in Britain,” says LKJ, alluding to the New Cross Fire where thirteen blacks died. No one was ever convicted, but racial tensions in the neighborhood led many blacks to believe it was a firebombing. LKJ wrote “New Crass Massakah” as a protest.

wi did know seh it coulda happn
yu know—anytime, anywhe
. . .
it coulda be mi
it couda be yu
. . .
who fell victim to di terrah by nite

In April that same year, police began “Operation Swamp 81,” and harassed the black community. “It was the last straw,” says LKJ. “There was a riot, and it spread.” He wrote “Di Great Insohreckshan” about it.

LKJ has released a dozen albums. He married verse and reggae music into a new form known as dub. He recorded several albums on the Island label, including Forces of Victory, Bass Culture, LKJ in Dub, and Making History. In the mid-1980s, he established his own music label.

In 2002, Johnson became the first black poet to have his work published in England by Penguin Classics. He has authored four collections of poetry. Mi Revalueshanary Fren, Penguin’s compilation of selected poems from the 1970s-1990s, was just published in the United States. The book includes a CD of Johnson reading.

I caught up with LKJ on his book tour stop in Madison, Wisconsin, in October. He was nattily dressed in a tweed jacket, peach shirt, cream-colored slacks, and camel brown leather oxford shoes, his thin oval glasses framing his face, along with a goatee flecked with grey.

The next day he performed his verse alongside former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser for a broadcast on National Public Radio. Both read poems about their deceased fathers. Poetry, said LKJ, is “a way of grieving, a way of remembering. . . . And that’s when the personal and the particular become universal, because we all lose our loved ones, and we all know what it is to suffer loss.” When the NPR host asked Kooser what he thought of LKJ’s work, Kooser replied, “I wish I could write a poem like that.”

Q: Why did you decide to release Mi Revalueshanary Fren now?

Linton Kwesi Johnson: I’ve always wanted to publish a book in America. People know me as a reggae artist; they don’t know me as a poet. But I am a poet, and I began with the word. I began writing poetry before I began making records. I published two volumes of poem before I even make a record.

Q: Why include a CD with the poems?

Johnson: I’m writing in my mother tongue, which is an oral language, and people may not be familiar with my phonetic spelling, so we thought the a cappella CD would help. It’s an aid to the reader unfamiliar with reading Jamaican nation language in print. In any event, I write for both the reader and the listener. I’m writing for the eye and the ear.

Q: What’s the difference between the two?

Johnson: There isn’t any. Academics have this sort of dubious dichotomy between the oral and the scribal, but there isn’t any difference as far as I’m concerned.

Q: Who influenced your writing?

Johnson: The first was W. E. B. Du Bois, the African American scholar, whose Souls of Black Folks changed my life and made me want to write. Then I read a lot of African American poets, like Langston Hughes, like the Jamaican Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, African American writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and LeRoi Jones.

Then from the Caribbean and from Africa, there were other writers, like Martin Carter from Guyana and Christopher Okigbo from Nigeria. The poets of Negritude, Aimé Césaire in particular, and his classic work, Return to My Native Land, had a big impact on me.

The Last Poets, whose use of Afro-American vernacular with percussion as a vehicle for poetic discourse, corresponded in my mind with Louise Bennett’s dialect poetry from Jamaica. Louise Bennett was the first Caribbean poet to bring the language of the folk to the forefront of Western cultural life. She validated the everyday speech of the ordinary people as a vehicle for poetic discourse. She had given it “aesthetic weight.” So all those influences combined together with the early talking tunes from Jamaica by people like Prince Buster and the early reggae DJs like Big Youth. All that coalesced into what we now know as reggae poetry or dub poetry or whatever people want to call it.

Q: Why did you decide to start your music label?

Johnson: I come from a school of political thought influenced by the great Trinidadian political activist and philosopher C. L. R. James. My teacher and my mentor, the late John La Rose, the founder of New Beacon Books in England, also developed this idea of autonomy. Self-activity is the only activity. If you want to change your situation you have to build independent institutions—social, cultural, political institutions—in order to advance your struggles. And that’s basically the philosophy that I have adopted.

Starting my label was just practicing what I was preaching. It gave me a measure of independence from record companies. I can set my own agenda. I don’t have to have a record company’s agenda. I don’t have to go and do two albums and a tour every year or whatever. I write when I want. I make a record when I want. I perform when I want.

Q: One of the themes in your work is police brutality. Do you think things have improved?

Johnson: On that issue, no, not at all. Not in the slightest. Blacks are still dying in police custody. I wrote a poem some years ago called “Liecense fi Kill” about black deaths in police custody. Nowadays that is the official policy of the government, with the so-called war against terrorism. The government has given the police the official license to kill brown skin and dark skin and black skin people, as they did in the case of [Brazilian Jean Charles] de Menezes, who they allegedly suspected of being a terrorist.

Blacks are still dying in police custody. You are still six or seven times more likely to be stopped and searched. You’re three or four times more likely to be given a custodial sentence for a first offense than if you were white.

Q: Have you been writing about Blair? You’re known for your poetry under Thatcher.

Johnson: Not really. I haven’t done much, maybe two or three poems. Because if one assumes my muse is only political, which it’s not, then there would not be any need for me to write anything else because essentially there’s continuity between the Thatcherite period and the Blair period.

Q: How are things in London these days?

Johnson: More or less like this country. There’s a culture of fear, and we’ve lost our civil liberties in the so-called war against terrorism. Just like here, I guess.

Q: What do you think of Blair’s plan to step down this year?

Johnson: It’s long overdue. He was perceived as an asset to the Labour Party when he won the election in 1997 by charming the British middle classes. But he turned out to be a liar.

He has so much contempt for the electorate that he ignored the largest demonstration ever in the history of England against the war. He lied to the nation. He lied to Parliament. Manipulated and politicized the intelligence services and has nothing but contempt for the Labour Party. So good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.

Elizabeth DiNovella is the culture editor of The Progressive.