Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Revalueshanary Verse

Mi Revalueshanery Fren, Linton Kwesi Johnson‘s latest collection of  dub-tongued, impossible-to-read-without-reading-aloud poems, draws from his forty year career, which began in London when he organized a Black Panther poetry workshop. From his earliest to most recent poems, words, which require the oral participation of the reader, are themselves participant in a revolutionary program–of giving voice to the voiceless, of liberating poetry from the prison house of the page.

His first books, Voices of the Living and the Dead and Dread Beat An’ Blood, bore the influence of Jamaican toasting sessions, in which selectors would play the instrumental side of 45s for deejays to improvise chants, stories, screams, lyrics and commentary over. Johnson would go on to produce many albums of dub poetry, but it is remarkable that the aspect of the aural in his poetry did not overtake the literary in his musical productions. The poems do not become songs, so to speak. They are poems to be taken from the page. An epistolary poem from prison, “Sonny’s Lettah,” brings the elements of textuality/imprisonment and  personal connection beyond the page/liberation into conversation.

Dear Mama,
Good Day.
I hope dat wen
deze few lines reach yu
they may find yu in di bes af helt.
…
I really did try mi bes,
but nondiless
my sarry fi tell yu seh
poor likkle Jim get arres.

It woz di miggle a di rush howah
wen evrybady jus a hosel an a bosel
fi goh home fi dem evening showah;
mi an Jim stan-up
waitin pan a bus,
nat cauzin no fus,
wen all af a sudden
a police van pull-up…

Police brutality, after N.W.A., is a perhaps trope too familiar to the ear. We must defamiliarize ourselves from it to hear the how the poem is, as Johnson says, “a cultural weapon.”

In the 1980s he worked extensively in journalism and the promotion of Jamaican music, especially dub. The political project of black liberation led his cultural efforts and his poetry, but the poetry was never an instrument of political necessity. The use of creole language itself (blending English, Spanish and Portuguese with the Caribe indigenous Arawak and African languages like Ashanti) is an affirmation of himself as a living testament to diaspora. As such, he claims as his heritage poets Chris Okigbo, Derek Walcot and T.S. Eliot. In his “If I Woz A Top-Natch Poet,” he considers the presence of these poets in his tradition, while that his presence among them injects symptoms of loss:

if I woz a tap-natch poet
like Chris Okigbo
Derek Walcot
ar T.S. Eliot

I woodah write a poem
soh dyam deep
dat it bittah-sweet
like a precious
memari
whe mek yu weep
whe mek yu feel incomplete

If we are to feel incomplete, it is because Johnson’s poem has entered the emotional body as a testament of something missing. This voice of something missing is like a missing voice of history in that it is speaking in the idiom of a near-forgotten creole people. But what is missing is not Kwesi Johnson, it is our recognition of the historical voice that he embodies. When we read the poem, and we must read it aloud, we are embodying that voice. Because the language has to be spoken, the music had to remain secondary. But no matter. Johnson’s music is immanent in the poetry.