The father of dub poetry, Linton Kwesi Johnson, has won the 2012 Golden PEN Award, awarded annually to an accomplished writer, resident in Britain, whose work has had “a profound impact on readers, and who is held in high regard by fellow writers and the literary community”. Previous recipients have included Salman Rushdie, Harold Pinter and Margaret Drabble.
Speaking to the Independent over the weekend, the 60-year-old poet and musician noted his shock upon hearing the news. “I’m not exactly in the mainstream of the British literary scene; I’m nearer the periphery,” he said, going on to explain that he hasn’t, in fact, written a line of poetry in years. “If a poem happens to come to me, I write it. But I am not bothered. If I never write another poem, so be it.”
Johnson has written profoundly on civic unrest, race and police brutality in Britain. His poetry collection, Mi Revalueshanary Fren, was published in the Penguin Modern Classics series, and his albums – notably Dread Beat an’ Blood (1978), Forces of Victory (1979), Bass Culture (1980) and Making History (1983) – which blend reggae, toasting and rhythmic, haunting spoken word, did so much to bring the language, culture and concerns of British Afro-Caribbeans to cultural prominence, particularly in times of difficulty.
“Di Great Insohreckshan” was written in response to the 1981 Brixton riots, at a time when The Spectator claimed Johnson’s phonetic rendering of English-Jamaican patois “wreaked havoc in schools and helped create a generation of rioters and illiterates”. Another powerful poem, “Sonny’s Lettah”, is spoken from the perspective of a young Jamaican, writing to his mother from Brixton jail, after his brother is randomly apprehended by police: “Jim start to wriggle / di police start to giggle…”
Johnson sees poetry and music as vehicles for liberation, available to all, something he explained in an interview before performing at the Festival des Libération in France last year (see below). Perhaps the timing of the award, so recently after PEN’s Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot was published, hopes to offer a reminder of what poetry and music have done for the oppressed throughout history.
Below are some choice performances by Johnson and the Dub Band, live and on the Old Grey Whistle Test. To read a short interview with Johnson, published in the NS in 2008, click here.
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