Transforming Urban Identities: Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Performance of Voices
can English be a revolutionary language?1
Edward Dodson, BA English Language and Literature
To read or listen to Linton Kwesi Johnson’s dub poetry is to experience a ‘revolutionary’ use
of (Standard) English.2 Linguistic revolution does not occur, however, in his provision of a
patois alternative. Through a reading of Johnson’s poetry as a performance of voices, I will
argue that his aesthetic transforms the discursively hegemonic identity of Standard English.3
Utilizing Bill Ashcroft’s poststructuralist approach to postcolonial studies, I read Johnson’s
texts as foregrounding the ‘scene of a constitution of meaning’.4 These ‘meaning event[s]’5
explicitly take place in ‘actual practice rather than structural abstraction’;6 his voices are
located in specific locations of London’s urban environment. The precise construction of a
socially situated voice enables an exposition of the performed aspect of all discourse.
Indeed, vocal construction extends to a performance of SE itself. It is this strategy of
Johnson’s poetics which, I argue, enables the political transformation of SE’s dominant
identity within social as well as literary spaces.
Brathwaite’s question, which I use as an epigraph, is a potent one within postcolonial
literary studies. As Ashcroft explains,
One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over language. The
imperial education system installs a ‘standard’ version of the metropolitan language
as the norm, and marginalizes all ‘variants’ as impurities. Language becomes the
medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated…7
Such cultural colonialism would have impacted upon our young poet. Johnson was born in
Jamaica but moved to London when he was eleven, thus being educated in both Jamaican
and English schools.8 On either side of the Atlantic, Johnson would have been subjected to
the ‘imperial education system’ Ashcroft describes. During the increasingly racialized and
racist tensions of 1970s and 1980s, the social and state enforcement of SE upon migrant
communities, persisted beyond the school gates. Lord Scarman was ‘calling for blacks to
speak ‘standard’ English’’ during the same period in which he ‘wrote the controversial
report on the Brixton riots of 1981’.9
Johnson did not heed Scarman’s call. Having disagreed with the Brixton report – in
the provocatively celebratory ‘Di Great Insohreckshan’, the speaker concludes ‘never mine
Scarman’ –10 his poetry similarly rebels against repression of discursive freedom. The iconic
title of ‘Inglan is a Bitch’ demonstrates a subversion of linguistic national identity. He refuses
to speak/write ‘England’. In offering instead an abbreviated ‘Inglan’, the proud imperial
1
Edward Kamua Brathwaite, ‘Nation Language’, Post-Colonial Studies Reader, p.282
I refer to Johnson’s texts as poetry; but this term does not exclude their performed (as well as textual)
existence.
3
Subsequently, I will refer to Standard English as SE.
4
Bill Ashcroft, Empire Writes Back, p.59
5
Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, p.60
6
Ashcroft, Empire, p.47
7
Ashcroft, Empire, p.7
8
Johnson, ‘In conversation with John La Rose’, p.52-53
9
James Proctor, ‘Part 2: Introduction’, Writing Black Britain, p.97
10
Linton Kwesi Johnson, Selected Poems, p.61 (subsequent references appear in parentheses)
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signifier is translated by Johnson to fit a particular voice and sensibility. The thudding ‘an’
suffix, which he also attaches to the empire’s capital ‘Landan’ (p.39) on the first line,
phonically articulates the poem’s dejected tone. Through lived experience of the city,
traversing its figurative underbelly ‘pan di andahgroun’ (p.39), the speaker understands that
‘Inglan is a bitch fi true’ (p.41). The anti-Thatcherite irony of excessive labour opportunity
coexistent with vast unemployment is emphasized through a rhymed linkage; whilst there is
‘wok in abundant | ... dem mek mi redundant’ (p.40). Dialect modulates the suffix ‘ance’ to
‘ant’ in order connect the two lines and their paradoxical interrelation. The violent potential
of such linguistic transformation is encapsulated by the climactic aggression of ‘All wi doin is
defendin’. A youthfully embittered speaker describes his means of resistance:
wi hav fist
wi have feet
wi carry dandamite in wi teeth
(p.12)
The speaker’s ‘teeth’ literally embody the poem’s (linguistic) violence, culminating a list of
the more traditional ‘weapon[s]’ (p.12) of dissidence.
Johnson’s resistant poetics can be situated in the ‘West Indian literary tradition
which’, according to David Dabydeen, ‘seeks to subvert English canons by the use of lived
nigger themes in lived nigger language’.11 Brathwaite’s notion of ‘Nation Language’ also
advocates a resistant Caribbean verbalization which ‘is not the standard, imported educated
English’12 but is ‘much more closely allied to the African aspect of experience in the
Caribbean.’13
Such a ‘vernacular’ which ‘can embody [...] authenticity’,14 for Ashcroft, upholds an
‘essentialist view of language or of some ‘authentic’ cultural experience’.15 Indeed,
Johnson’s voice cannot be reduced to ‘authentic’ essentialism. Firstly, his identity and voice
negotiate British and Jamaican cultural contexts. Secondly, and herein lies the essay’s
theoretical foundations, the dialect of Johnson’s poetry is emphatically not that of his
speaking voice. This claim is evidenced by the textual rendering of his interview with John La
Rose.16 Of course, the voice bears resemblance to Johnson’s own and to other dialects in
postcolonial communities. Nonetheless, Johnson’s texts present a performed voice, an
exacerbation of dialect which translates the speaker’s identity in a carefully constructed
manner.
As analysed earlier, ‘Inglan is a bitch’ reveals the tonal function of Johnson’s vocal
construct. The poem also gestures towards an under-acknowledged strategy of his poetics:
the adoption, or performance, of SE. In the fifth verse, a new voice enters; ‘dem sah dat’
(p.40) invokes the presence of an outsider commenting on the speaker and the community
with which he is associated. The following five words – ‘black man is very lazy’ (p.40) – is the
poem’s only sustained moment of conventional spelling and pronunciation. I read this line,
then, as an acknowledgment of Johnson’s ability to give voice to, to perform, SE.
11
David Dabydeen, ‘On Not Being Milton’, Routledge Reader in Comparative Literature, p.412
Brathwaite, p.282
13
Brathwaite, p.283
14
Ashcroft, Empire, p.42
15
Ashcroft, Empire, p.41
16
For aural evidence, see ‘interview [Greece 1987]’
12
2
Such a strategy is explored more fully in ‘Street 66’, a poem whose specific urban
locations situate the type of discursive performances on offer. Its narrative presents a
vibrant house party which is intruded upon by the appearance of police. The party’s interior
offers the space for dialect, for poetic and rhyming indulgence in the Rastafarian imagery of
‘mystic red, | green, red, green . . . pure scene’ (p.9). A ‘greenah riddim’ (p.9) combines the
marijuana-hazed hedonism with the rhythmic beat of both the party and the poetry which
constructs its ‘pure scene’. Whilst the majority of the poem adopts the dialect pronunciation
common in Johnson’s work, the narrative intrusion of police offers the opportunity for an
alternative voice. In response to Western’s dialect-inflected question ‘‘Who’s dat?’’, comes
the reply ‘‘Open up! It’s the police! Open up!’’ (p.10). The text performs the SE voice of the
police. This type of expression is associated with a certain social space, that is, outside of the
party. The ability to disrupt patois and adopt SE awakens the consciousness of performance,
in the rest of the poem and Johnson’s poetry at large, of an alternate voice.
‘Language’, then, can be considered ‘a material practice and as such is determined
by a complex weave of social conditions and experience’.17 Ashcroft, here, invokes
Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole. Instead of a traditional focus on the
codes of language, known as langue, Ashcroft argues that:
A post-colonial approach to linguistics [...] reinstat[es] the parole as the realization of
the code in social life. Parole confirms the importance of the link between individual
agency and discursive structure…18
Attention to the performance of voice in urban spaces, as exemplified by ‘Street 66’,
reasserts the parole in such a manner. By enabling purposive switches in voice, Johnson’s
poetics foregrounds the situational and tactical construction of dialect. The dialect voice is
not essentialized as ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’; hence, Johnson enables a similar de-essentializing
to occur to the voice of SE. In their moments of polyvocality, Johnson’s poetry reminds us
that the culturally dominant voice is always already a type of performance. The
governmental and state authority associated with this voice is thus figured as a kind of
performed option, rather than an essential state of superiority.
If voice is performed with a certain social location, then its discursive meaning is
constituted within a social milieu. Indeed, for Ashcroft there is no ‘‘ownership’ of meaning’;
instead, he proposes a site of ‘conflict between language, reader and writer’. 19 Johnson’s
choice of medium – spoken-word artist and musician – is essential to an understanding of
the dialogic ‘meaning event’. As Christian Habekost states, the dub poet ‘must be constantly
aware of the delicate double relationship between him/herself and the audience, and
between the poem and music’.20 Whilst acknowledging the explicitly performed aspect of
Johnson’s practice, this essay will not pursue an already well-analysed topic, but will
investigate his engagement with SE. My approach will consider how the authoritative
identity of the dominant voice, once situated as a performance whose meaning is
constituted in dialogue, is politically transformed.
‘Beacon of Hope’, an apparent anomaly in Johnson’s oeuvre, is written in SE. Any
two lines, for example ‘welcome nocturnal friend | I name you beacon of hope’ (p.62),
17
Ashcroft, Empire, p.41
Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, p.65
19
Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, p.60
20
Habekost, p.99
18
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reveal the drastic alterations in spelling from Johnson’s usual practice. Use of the personal
pronoun ‘I’ is surprising to a reader or listener of Johnson; elsewhere, the pronoun ‘wi’
‘captures’, according to John McLeod, ‘both the plural ‘we’ and the singular ‘I’’. 21 ‘Friend’ is
also starkly normative in relation to the abbreviated spelling adopted in poems such as ‘Mi
revalueshanary fren’. Alongside typographic variations, the poem’s title bespeaks a mood of
abstract idealism absent in Johnson’s other poetry (compare to ‘It Dread inna Inglan’, for
example). The clichéd cosmic imagery, ‘beyond the stars | to a new horizon’ (p.63), is
equally jarring, as is the replacement of Rastafarian with Biblical motifs: ‘bread’, ‘water’ and
‘good news from afar’ (p.63).
Such stylistic manoeuvres, utilizing the discourse of SE, enable Johnson to compose a
nature poem. In its use of the lyric ‘I’, ‘Beacon of Hope’ recalls a generic form conventionally
associated with Romanticism. Engagement with 18th and 19th century Anglo-European forms
does not, however, position his poem within that tradition, but actively disrupts it. Situated
within the discursive context of Johnson’s oeuvre, ‘Beacon’ reveals the extensive utilization
of SE to be a blatant construction of voice. This vocal construct is engaged dialogically with –
in its very negation of – other types of voices; as Mark Currie writes in another context,
‘what is not there in a discourse is constitutive of what is’.22 In this manner, nature imagery
functions negatively, signifying a lack of the metropolitan ‘vibrating violence’ glimpsed in
‘Street 66’ (p.9). Romantic style offers alliterative ‘flashing fluoresence’ (p.62), whilst in New
Cross ‘di flames dem risin highah’ (‘New Crass Massakah’ (p.56)). Such a contrast in rhythm
and phonetics, functioning alongside choices of content, bely a vast gulf between the social
locations upon which each genre is predicated.
The Anglo-European literary tradition, which is metonymically represented by the
style and tropes of this poem, is drawn irretrievably into the contextualizing process. The
discourses of SE, including such privileged literary genres, are vitally dependent on certain
social premises. By exposing this socially conditioned performance, Johnson’s poetry
transforms SE from its assumed authoritative literary and social identity. Not only is it a
performed voice, but this performance is made possible through a denial of other voices
and the social spaces which produce them. There is an implicit ideology of exclusion at work
in the adoption of any vocal – any generic – form and Johnson’s varied poetics teases out
this unacknowledged aesthetic strategy. Hence, his poetry does not merely establish an
alternative identity, but uses its possibility and performance to problematize the certified
position of dominant identities.
Word Count: 1,952
21
22
John McLeod, Postcolonial London, p.133.
Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory, p.80
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