[1952-]
Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Chapelton, a small rural town in Jamaica. In 1963 he left Jamaica to join his mother in London, where she lived in the largely West Indian-inhabited Brixton. Johnson was educated in Brixton and later received a BA in sociology from Goldsmiths’ College, London. When he was about seventeen years old, he began to write. He later described his work as ‘a result of the tension between Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English and between those and English English’.
While he was still at school, Johnson became involved with the political activist group the Black Panthers, and later he became a founder member of the Brixton-based Race Today collective. It was in the journal Race Today that Johnson’s poems were first printed, and it was under the collective’s guidance that he published his first volume of poetry, Voices of the Living and the Dead (1974). His second collection, Dread Beat An’ Blood (1975), includes ‘Yout Scene’, the first poem that Johnson wrote in the Jamaican language. At the point that he began to write in dialect, Johnson says, music entered his poetry as well. The music is both figurative and literal, for in 1978 Johnson released Dread Beat An’ Blood on vinyl. It was the first LP recording of his ‘reggae poetry’ or, to use a term that Johnson coined himself, ‘dub poetry’. Subsequent albums include Forces of Victory (1979), Bass Culture (1980) and Making History (1984). In 1980, he started his own record label, LKJ. Johnson has continued to publish his poetry in book form, writing ‘Inglan is a Bitch’ in 1980, and publishing Tings and Times: Selected Poems (also released as an album) in 1991.
Nearly all of Johnson’s poems are political in nature. In a broad sense, they are responses to the state of the world, urgent illustrations of the violence of both the oppressors and the oppressed. Often written in the language of England’s black urban youth – a group ‘new in age / but not in rage’ – Johnson’s poems have an oral quality that lends them a sense of vitality and relevance.
In addition to his writing and political work, Johnson has worked as a library resources and education officer at Keskidee Arts Centre, in London. In 1977 he received a C. Day Lewis Fellowship and taught as writer-in-residence in the London Borough of Lambeth. He is an associate fellow of Warwick University and an honorary fellow of Wolverhampton Polytechnic, and in 1990 he received an award at the XIII Premo Internazionale Ultimo Novecento from the city of Pisa for his musical and poetic accomplishments. Johnson has performed his work throughout the world.
Johnson’s poetry articulates the fears and concerns of both the generation of West Indians who arrived in Britain in the 1950s to work in factories and the generation of non-white Britons who were born in Britain and have no memories of life in another place. There is little romance in either generation’s view of Britain. The following poem, ‘Inglan is a Bitch’, is an apt summary of the feelings of many in Britain, both young and old, both then and now.
INGLAN IS A BITCH
w’en mi jus’ come to Landan toun
mi use to work pan di andahgroun
but workin’ pan di andahgroun
y’u don’t get fi know your way aroun’
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no runnin’ whey fram it
mi get a lickle jab in a big ’otell
an awftah a while, mi woz doin’ quite well
dem staat mi aaf as a dish-washah
but w’en mi tek a stack, mi noh tun clack – watchah!
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
noh baddah try fi hide fram it
w’en dem gi’ you di lickle wage packit
fus dem rab it wid dem big tax rackit
y’u haffi struggle fi mek en’s meet
an’ w’en y’u goh a y’u bed y’u jus’ cant sleep
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch
a noh lie mi a tell, a true
mi use to work dig ditch w’en it cowl noh bitch
mi did strang like a mule, but, bwoy, mi did fool
den awftah a while mi jus’ stap dhu ovahtime
den awftah a while mi jus’ phu dung mi tool
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch
y’u haffi know how fi suvvive in it
well mi dhu day wok an’ mi dhu nite wok
mi dhu clean wok an’ mi dhu dutty wok
dem seh dat black man is very lazy
but if y’u si how mi wok y’u woulda sey mi crazy
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch
y’u bettah face up to it
dem have a lickle facktri up inna Brackly
inna disya facktri all dem dhu is pack crackry
fi di laas fifteen years dem get mi laybah
now awftah fifteen years mi fall out a fayvah
Inglan is a bitch
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no runnin’ whey fram it
mi know dem have work, work in abundant
yet still, dem mek mi redundant
now, at fifty-five mi gettin’ quite ol’
yet still, dem sen’ mi fi goh draw dole
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch fi true
is whey wi a goh dhu ’bout it?