Linton Kwesi Johnson
Dinovella, Elizabeth
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW by Elizabeth DiNovella Linton Kwesi Johnson Lyricist Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Jamaica but has ^become Britain’s most celebrated black poet. He immigrated to...
...He was nattily dressed in a tweed jacket, peach shirt, cream-colored slacks, and camel brown leather oxford shoes, his thin oval glasses framing his face, along with a goatee flecked with grey...
...Because if one assumes my muse is only political, which it’s not, then there would not be any need for me to write anything else because essentially there’s continuity between the Thatcherite period and the Blair period...
...He recorded several albums on the Island label, including Forces of Victory, Bass Culture, LKJ in Dub, and Making History...
...The poets of Negri tude, Aim...
...Blacks are still dying in police custody...
...Q: One of the themes in your work is police brutality...
...Both read poems about their deceased fathers...
...She validated the everyday speech of the ordinary people as a vehicle for poetic discourse...
...He married verse and reggae music into a new form known as dub...
...Through our rebellion, we helped change Britain,” he says...
...Johnson: It’s long overdue...
...So all those influences combined together with the early talking tunes from Jamaica by people like Prince Buster and the early reggae DJs like Big Youth...
...I call us the Rebel Generation...
...Not in the slightest...
...I began writing poetry before I began making records...
...Academics have this sort of dubious dichotomy between the oral and the scribal, but there isn’t any difference as far as I’m concerned...
...In the mid-1980s, he established his own music label...
...Q: Have you been writing about Blair...
...Johnson: Not really...
...1981 is perhaps most significant of black experience in Britain,” says LKJ, alluding to the New Cross Fire where thirteen blacks died...
...In 2002, Johnson became the first black poet to have his work published in England by Penguin Classics...
...My generation is the second generation,” he says...
...I wrote a poem some years ago called “Liecense fi Kill” about black deaths in police custody...
...Johnson: On that issue, no, not at all...
...You’re three or four times more likely to be given a custodial sentence for a first offense than if you were white...
...Q: Why did you decide to release Mi Revalueshanary Fren now...
...It gave me a measure of independence from record companies...
...Nowadays that is the official policy of the government, with the socalled war against terrorism...
...But he turned out to be a liar...
...He immigrated to England as a child, part of the succeeding waves of West Indians who arrived in the UK in the last several decades...
...Elizabeth DiNovella is the culture editor of The Progressive...
...I haven’t done much, maybe two or three poems...
...Blacks are still dying in police custody...
...Johnson: More or less like this country...
...But he also has written beautiful elegies for friends and family, including a dirge for his father, who died at fifty-six due to complications of diabetes...
...The Negripolice had resurrected a Victorian era law against vagrancy that had languished on the books...
...I perform when I want...
...His poem “Sonny’s Lettah (antisus poem)” is about a young man writing to his mother from Brixton prison, telling her his little brother got arrested, as did he...
...Q: Why did you decide to start your music label...
...Manipulated and politicized the intelligence services and has nothing but contempt for the Labour Party...
...Mama, I really did try mi bes, but nondiless mi sarry fi tell yu seh poor likkle Jim get arres...
...Johnson: The first was W. E. B. Du Bois, the African American scholar, whose Souls of Black Folks changed my life and made me want to write...
...I’m writing for the eye and the ear...
...He wrote “Di Great Insohreckshan” about it...
...Louise Bennett was the first Caribbean poet to bring the language of the folk to the forefront of Western cultural life...
...Then from the Caribbean and from Africa, there were other writers, like Martin Carter from Guyana and Christopher Okigbo from Nigeria...
...I can set my own agenda...
...And that’s basically the philosophy that I have adopted...
...Q: What’s the difference between the two...
...Linton Kwesi Johnson: I’ve always wanted to publish a book in America...
...Do you think things have improved...
...No one was ever convicted, but racial tensions in the neighborhood led many blacks to believe it was a firebombing...
...LKJ wrote “New Crass Massakah” as a protest...
...Q: What do you think of Blair’s plan to step down this year...
...You are still six or seven times more likely to be stopped and searched...
...It was the last straw,” says LKJ...
...All that coalesced into what we now know as reggae poetry or dub poetry or whatever people want to call it...
...There’s a culture of fear, and we’ve lost our civil liberties in the socalled war against terrorism...
...In any event, I write for both the reader and the listener...
...Poetry, said LKJ, is “a way of grieving, a way of remembering...
...As a teenager in 1970, he joined the British Black Panthers and by the 1980s was a journalist and editor of the journal Race Today...
...Johnson: There isn’t any...
...Starting my label was just practicing what I was preaching...
...The book includes a CD of Johnson reading...
...I make a record when I want...
...She had given it “aesthetic weight...
...But I am a poet, and I began with the word...
...Mi Revalueshanary Fren, Penguin’s compilation of selected poems from the 1970s-1990s, was just published in the United States...
...Just like here, I guess...
...There was a riot, and it spread...
...I don’t have to have a record company’s agenda...
...He has authored four collections of poetry...
...C?saire in particular, and his classic work, Return to My Native Land, had a big impact on me...
...Self-activity is the only activity...
...If you want to change your situation you have to build independent institutions— social, cultural, political institutions—in order to advance your struggles...
...Johnson: I’m writing in my mother tongue, which is an oral language, and people may not be familiar with my phonetic spelling, so we thought the a cappella CD would help...
...Q: How are things in London these days...
...You’re known for your poetry under Thatcher...
...This generation would not put up with the racial abuse its parents did...
...His voice thumps like a bass line...
...I write when I want...
...So good riddance to bad rubbish, I say...
...And that’s when the personal and the particular become universal, because we all lose our loved ones, and we all know what it is to suffer loss...
...I don’t have to go and do two albums and a tour every year or whatever...
...Sus being short for suspicion,” Johnson explains, noting that the common charge was “attempt to steal from persons unknown...
...He’s also reported for BBC and Channel 4. As a young man growing up in south London, Johnson saw many people his age criminalized under what was known in the neighborhood as “sus law...
...LKJ has released a dozen albums...
...His words lilt and cut, telling stories of police brutality and racial oppression...
...People know me as a reggae artist...
...I published two volumes of poem before I even make a record...
...LKJ (as he’s known) writes poetry in Jamaican Creole and his live performances are mesmerizing...
...Johnson: I come from a school of political thought influenced by the great Trinidadian political activist and philosopher C. L. R. James...
...He lied to Parliament...
...wi did know seh it coulda happn yu know—anytime, anywhe . . . it coulda be mi it couda be yu . . . who fell victim to di terrah by nite In April that same year, police began “Operation Swamp 81,” and harassed the black community...
...He has so much contempt for the electorate that he ignored the largest demonstration ever in the history of England against the war...
...He was perceived as an asset to the Labour Party when he won the election in 1997 by charming the British middle classes...
...I caught up with LKJ on his book tour stop in Madison, Wisconsin, in October...
...The government has given the police the official license to kill brown skin and dark skin and black skin people, as they did in the case of [Brazilian Jean Charles] de Menezes, who they allegedly suspected of being a terrorist...
...Poet Laureate Ted Kooser for a broadcast on National Public Radio...
...When the NPR host asked Kooser what he thought of LKJ’s work, Kooser replied, “I wish I could write a poem like that...
...Then I read a lot of African American poets, like Langston Hughes, like the Jamaican Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, African American writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and LeRoi Jones...
...My teacher and my mentor, the late John La Rose, the founder of New Beacon Books in England, also developed this idea of autonomy...
...they don’t know me as a poet...
...Q: Who influenced your writing...
...Q: Why include a CD with the poems...
...It’s an aid to the reader unfamiliar with reading Jamaican nation language in print...
...The Last Poets, whose use of Afro-American vernacular with percussion as a vehicle for poetic discourse, corresponded in my mind with Louise Bennett’s dialect poetry from Jamaica...
...He lied to the nation...
...The next day he performed his verse alongside former U.S...
Vol. 71 • February 2007 • No. 2
