JOHNSON, Linton Kwesi

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Nationality: Jamaican and British. Born: Chapeltown, Jamaica, in 1952. Immigrated to England in 1963. Education: Tulse Hill Comprehensive School, London; Goldsmith's College, University of London, B.A. in sociology 1973. Career: Founding member, Race Today Collective, London. Arts editor, Race Today magazine. Formerly library resource and education officer, Keskidee Arts Centre. Writer-in-residence, London Borough of Lambeth. Fellow, University of Warwick, Coventry. Producer, 10-part program about Jamaican music, BBC Television. Awards: C. Day Lewis fellowship, 1977. Address: c/o Island Records Ltd., 22 St. Peters Square, London W6 9NW, England.

Publications

Poetry

Voices of the Living and the Dead (includes play). London, Towards Racial Justice, 1974.

Dread, Beat, and Blood. London, Bogle L'Ouverture, 1975.

Inglan Is a Bitch. London, Race Today, 1980.

Tings an' Times: Selected Poems. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1991.

Recordings: Poet and the Roots, Virgin, 1977; Dread, Beat, and Blood, Virgin, 1978; Forces of Victory, Island, 1979; Bass Culture, Island, 1980; Making History, Island, 1984; In Concert with the Dub Band, Rough Trade, 1985; Dread Beat an' Blood, Heartbeat, 1989; LKJ: A Cappella Live, LKJ Records, 1996; More Time, LKJ Records, 1998.

Play

Voices of the Living and the Dead (produced London, 1973). Included in Voices of the Living and the Dead, 1974.

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Critical Studies: By Sarah Lawson Welsh, in Bete Noire (Hull, England), 12–13, autumn 1991-spring 1992; interview with Burt Caesar, in Critical Quarterly (Oxford), 38(4), winter 1996.

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Linton Kwesi Johnson is the most prominent of Britain's younger black poets. Like his contemporaries, he has drawn upon the linguistic and musical resources of his West Indian heritage to create a poetry that is at once politically radical and rhythmically compelling. In the early 1970s Johnson began forging the rhythms of black music—jazz, soul, calypso, and especially Jamaican reggae—with the rich idioms of West Indian and black British English. The result has been a distinguished body of work that mixes compelling narratives of black British life, sophisticated political analysis, and passionate demands for racial justice and cultural autonomy. In becoming one of Britain's most exciting and distinctive poetic voices, Johnson has demonstrated how contemporary poetry can be both politically engaged and genuinely popular without sacrificing linguistic and thematic complexity.

Although written in Standard English, Johnson's first book, Voices of the Living and the Dead, displays both the passionate political commitment and the remarkable rhythmic drive that characterizes his poetry:

   Sing a song for the sawn-off shotgun
   Sing a song for the blood-stained
   blade
   Sing a song for the stones sticks
   and teeth
   Sing a song for knuckles and for feet.

Crossing the apocalyptic revolutionary theory of Frantz Fanon with the incantatory delivery of Jamaican toasters like Big Youth and IRoy, these poems offer an eloquent call to resist oppression, if necessary through violent means. Yet the poems also recognize the disastrous effects violence has played in turning members of the black community against one another:

   madness … madness …
   madness tight on the heads of the rebels;
   the bitterness erupts like a hot-blast,
                 broke glass,
   rituals of blood and of burning
   served by a cruel in-fighting;
   five nights of horror and of bleeding,
                 broke glass,
   cold blades as sharp as the eyes of hate.
                and the stabbings.
   It's war amongst the rebels;
   madness, madness, war.

By the time of his second collection, Dread, Beat, and Blood (1975), Johnson had wedded his rhythmic sophistication to an idiomatic vocabulary drawn from the dialects of black street language and Rastafarianism. It is a dark, brooding language in which the chanted repetition of key words ("dread," "war," "fire," "blood") reflects the anxiety, suffering, and anger that British blacks have experienced at the hands of a white racist society. Choosing to write in such an idiom is a political act in itself, for such language is habitually attacked by social conservatives as "substandard" and "primitive." But for Johnson such language not only expresses cultural defiance but also proves a dynamic means of expression:

   Shock-black bubble-doun-beat bouncing
   rock-wise tumble-doun sound music;
   foot-drop find drum, blood story,
   bass history is a moving
               is a hurting black story …
 
 
   Rhythm of a tropical electrical storm
   (cooled down to the pace of the struggle),
   flame-rhythm of historically yearning
   flame-rhythm of the time of turning,
   measuring the time for bombs and for burning.

The sheer technical accomplishment of this verse—its percussive alliteration, propulsive rhythm, and sophisticated use of internal rhymes—should belie any claim that dialect poetry is necessarily facile and artless.

Johnson's later poetry, while maintaining its ties to reggae culture, has somewhat de-emphasized its Rastafarian affiliations. (In fact, in "Reality Poem" Johnson gently mocks those who "leggo wi clarity" and "start preach religion" rather than face the struggle). Reflecting Johnson's longtime involvement with Britain's Race Today Collective, his poetry has increasingly become a chronicle of the political struggles of black Britons and a record of both triumphs ("Forces of Victory," "Di Great Insohreckshan") and setbacks ("Reggae Fi Peach," "New Craas Massahkah"). These poems bristle with place-names, political acronyms, and the specificity of historical events without forfeiting any of their linguistic power:

   well doun in Southall
   where Peach did get fall
   di Asians de faam-up a human wall
   gense di fashist an dem police shiel
   an dem show dat di Asians gat plenty zeal
   it is noh mistri
   wi mekkin histri
   it is noh mistri
   wi winnin victri

In his 1984 album Making History there are attempts to place the black British struggle in an international context, as in "Di Eagle an' di Bear," with its mordant suggestion that the peoples of the third world have little leisure to share the nuclear anxiety of the first:

   di Eagle an' di Bear
   are people livin' in fear
   of impendin' nuclear warfear
   but as a matter of fac
   b'lieve it or not
   plenty people don care wedder it imminent or not
   first one ta atack destry di human race
   but survivin for dose whom is aware
   dem life already comin' like a nightmare.

As its themes and language suggest, Johnson's work is first and foremost an oral poetry, designed to be read aloud within a community. Impressive enough on the page, his writing grows exponentially in power when intoned in its author's deep, mellifluous voice, especially when that voice is borne on the crackling rhythms of the reggae ensembles that often accompany Johnson at his readings and concerts. These gatherings inevitably attract a larger and more diverse audience than one finds at the average poetry reading, and this genuinely popular element in Johnson's work points to what is perhaps his greatest achievement. In taking poetry out of the classroom and placing it squarely in the street, the political demonstration, and the dance hall, he has shown how poetry can both reflect and dynamically contribute to the political struggles of its time. At a time when poetry often appears as an increasingly academic and circumscribed diversion, such an accomplishment deserves the greatest critical interest.

—Anthony G. Stocks