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Book Review
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The Fader, Book Review >>
literary lion
LKJ carves his initials on the rock of ages
Rappers like to style themselves with all kinds of colorful acronyms but very few wordsmiths have the gravitas to hold down an all-caps monogram on par with cultural icons like FDR or MLK. Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson—LKJ to those who know—is just such a dude, however. Born in Jamaica and transplanted to the UK at age 11, LKJ discovered poetry as a "weapon in the struggle for Black Liberation" when he joined the London branch of the Black Panthers while a student at Goldsmiths College in the 1970s. Quickly discovering that "English was not an adequate vehicle to say the things that I wanted to say, the way I wanted them said," Johnson found his voice by falling back on the musical speak of his native island, the spectacular vernacular variously called patois, Creole or afro-lingua.
In the process he single-handedly created the term and the persona of Dub Poet, a logical convergence of the patois verse of Louise "Miss Lou" Bennett and the deejay style of reggae pioneered by U Roy and King Stitt. "I've always been interested in the relationship between language and music. Jamaican language, spoken language is quite musical in my view and my approach to writing verse is informed by the fact that I hear and try to capture that." In practical terms this means that LKJ has been as much recording artist as scribe, releasing albums like 198O's immortal Bass Culture wherein he recites over the dub instrumentation of Dennis "Blackbeard" Bovell. Even when intended only for the printed page, much of his verse is written with a particular bassline in mind, and typeset in a phoneticized form ttiat demands to be spoken out loud.
Although deservedly lionized in the UK, where he is the first living black poet to be included in the Penguin Classics series, the newly released collection Mi Revalueshanary Fren on Ausable Press (with accompanying audio CD) will be his US print debut. The fight-the-power worldview of his early work is unmistakably etched into titles like "Inglan is a Bitch" and "License fi Kill," but the book title refers to what he describes as a "matured and broadened" version of his militant stance (please note the "revalue" within "Revalueshanary"). Far from dated though, it reads as urgent as ever in pieces like "Dread Beat an Blood" (dedicated to old school reggae deejay Big Youth): "electric hour of the red bulb/ staining the brain with a blood ftow/ an a bad bad ting is br&brewing."
EDWIN "STATS" HOUGHTON 11/01/06
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