Peter Hitchcock

Department of English
Baruch College, CUNY

 

Postmodern Culture Version1

 

it is noh mistri
wi mekkin histri
it is noh mistri
wi winnin victri

 

(“Mekkin Histri” LKJ)

 

“The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means”

 

(The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie)

 

In order to appreciate the achievement of Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ), the African/Caribbean/European dub poet, one must come to terms with the cultural specificity of the voice, and what the voice can do. Mekkin histri. Making history? What recidivism might this be at the end of the twentieth century? The double-displacement of an African- Caribbean Black living in England, diaspora upon diaspora, comes with a double-indemnity–making and history. What cultural logic obtains in the construction/reconstruction of subjectivity as subaltern, the articulation of the margin, the trace, the veve, that still allows a trenchant sense of history, of the need to make history? Can we still conceive of subjects that make history, have a history to make, remake at a cacophonous rendezvous of victory? To understand why this notion is not a mystery (the History, for instance, of imperialist certitude) but a problematic, one must understand what makes this history: one must come to terms with the history of the voice, what Kamau Brathwaite calls the “invitation and challenge,”² or what Edouard Glissant defines as “literature” and “oraliture” (the fragmented and therefore shared histories and voices of peoples).³ One can read this history as an introduction in LKJ’s sonorous beat, and one can see this history in a dissidence of voice, in all its synesthesia and dislocation.

 

The sounds of dislocation. Our trust in electricity makes the archive of the voice seem a recent technology: LKJ himself is “available in all three formats” (CD, cassette, and the fast disappearing LP). But the voice at issue has, shall we say, a much longer geneology, a history that “happened overseas.” Thanks to Columbus’s “discovery” (the kind of “surprise” common to colonialism), the Amerindians of the Caribbean were soon in short supply and so began one of the darkest chapters in forced relocation and labor in human history. Except, of course, that such a chapter remains largely unwritten, not just because of racist ideology, the loathsome lacuna of the “official story,” but because this history is an archaeology of voice, a history intoned more than inscribed. As such, it is a history articulated in the clash and fierce concatenation of colonial power and resistance characterized by the internecine struggles of languages and cultures, Ashanti, Yoruba, Congolese, French, English, Spanish, and Dutch. The word creole only begins to do justice to the range of this struggle even if its logic of hybridity suggests a new understanding of what constitutes “sound” evidence. Theory has trained us, and rightly so, to be suspicious of the voice and the ontology it confers. Yet, what I am calling dub identity is not about the presence of being, but being in between, the “Middle Passages” that Brathwaite (among others) has elaborated, or the “black atlantic” model that Paul Gilroy has proposed.⁴ The problem of dub is the sound of diaspora, and its doubling, its versions. Thus, if the following notes are read as an introduction to LKJ, they only begin to imagine the utterance he makes, in all its complexity, as testimony and travelogue: the subjective states of being, in between.

 

Obviously, in his history of the voice Brathwaite is not claiming that dub poetry, Jamaican “sound” poetry, the righteous riddim of resistance, is purely a phenomenon of sound (who would want to fall into that Cartesian chasm of speech/writing made infamous by Derrida?). He is saying, however, that without an adequate theory of performativity and voice one cannot hope to fathom cultural expression under the mark of cultural erasure, the colonizer/ postcolonizer’s denial of voice, whether poetic, polemical, or political. For Brathwaite, language from the Anglophone Caribbean is “a process of using English,” not just in the well-documented sense of creolization (patois), but a particular socialization of the voice. Brathwaite’s specific concern has been for an anglophone hybridization bred of slavery and colonization with all the linguistic and cultural displacement that that has entailed. For Afro- Caribbean poetry this has meant not just an agonistic social function but a particular struggle over social forms of poetry. As Brathwaite pithily puts it, “the hurricane does not roar in pentameters.”⁵ Although on one level this means attempting to reproduce the sounds of specific natural experiences of the Caribbean peoples, Brathwaite also wants to emphasize the disruptive potential of these experiences and the resistance riddim they inculcate. So even when Brathwaite displays a particular respect for the poets who challenge English from within (his list includes a tradition from Chaucer to Eliot), they are not the poets of a “nation language,” the product and medium of this radically different purview.

 

“Nation language” is an extremely problematic term used to register the “submerged” capacity of dialect, of African intonation and derivation. Brathwaite distinguishes nation language from dialect because of the negative connotations associated with the latter (“bad English” etc.) but the concept of nation itself does not arrive free from contaminants, particularly those associated with the identification processes that fueled imperialist subjugation (and in addition leads Cesaire to the abrupt but pertinent conclusion that “nation is a bourgeois phenomenon”). As Benedict Anderson’s oft-quoted analysis of nations and nationality has shown, a national identity may involve active forgetting, a lack of historicity precisely the obverse of Brathwaite’s cultural impetus.⁶ Yet we cannot simply dismiss the prescience of Brathwaite’s appeal based on the sordid histories of Western imperialism. That is to say, a nation looks considerably different through the perspective of an oppressed collectivity which, while not immune to the power abuses that national selfhood may confer, may produce a significant communal resistance in tracing such an identity. For our purposes the paradox of “nation” is appropriate, for what seems to reify “nation” in the Caribbean context can vilify it in the tortuous confines of Black Britain. LKJ’s deployment of “nation language” then, serves to undermine a particularly nefarious manifestation of the nation state. Before examining LKJ’s particular form of dissidence and dissonance, I want to consider how Glissant figures the nation in Caribbean discourse, for he too is deeply concerned with how the postcolonial Caribbean subject finds a voice, makes a history.

 

As a Martinican, Glissant is less concerned with the hegemony of the English pentameter, but in his poetry, plays, fiction, and criticism he is keenly aware of the psychic disabilities that can accompany acculturation within imperial and colonial codes. Readers of Fanon will be familiar with this critique, but suprised perhaps to find that, forty years later, the dissociation of self endemic to the colonial moment still conditions to a great degree the formation of Martinican identity. For Glissant, the crisis is severe, for without measured attempts to articulate a collective memory, the break from the non-identity or “non- history” as French history, the prospects are indeed bleak, as he shows in a table imbricating economic and literary production.⁷ Within a range of contingent possibilities, Glissant sees “oblivion or organization of a Martinican economy,” “isolation as ‘French’ or integration in the Caribbean,” “sterilization or creative explosion,” and “disappearance of a community or birth of a nation.” The either/or rhetoric might seem uncompromising, but Glissant is attempting to ward off a cultural and political complacency that is eroding a viable Caribbean collectivity. But neither is he separatist: Glissant advocates a cross- cultural poetics, a creolization of cultures that celebrates the strategic value of revoicing the Caribbean’s ingrown diversity outwards. In this sense, creole can no longer subsist as a secret code: by opening to the world it changes itself and the world. But, more importantly, this gives the lie to the totalizing force of History, as a Hegelian construct, for this History is “fissured by histories” as Glissant notes, as Literature is fragmented by literatures, by “oraliture” as he calls it–the submerged voice of the collective.

 

There is no neat equivalence or complementarity in the formulations of Brathwaite and Glissant, just as one would have to specify the discursive alterity of their African- American counterparts (“nation language” and “oraliture” bear comparison with what Henry Louis Gates Jr. in another context has studied as “signifyin’,” or what Houston Baker has pursued in the Blues as forceful variations of the vernacular⁸), but they both underline that there are conceptual as well as geographic or spatial links between the islands of the Caribbean. Among them, the voice is integral to the function of memory but does not answer the question “Who am I?” that existential staple common to the discourse of colonialist angst (Prospero’s perplexity or Kurtz’s confusion); it does, however, inflect the transcultural “Who are we?” in which the “we,” although radically particularized rather than an illusory unity, recalls a historical dialogue about the cause and course of fragmented community, the diasporic disjunction and displacement wrought by the arrogance of power and the will- to-silence of colonial history. Brathwaite and Glissant, then, speak differently, but they both know the tenor of resistance. And this is as important in LKJ’s Jamaica as it is in Barbados or Martinique–the roots which lead to Inglan.

 

LKJ was born in Chapelton, Jamaica, 1952. When his mother left for England LKJ soon followed, at the age of 11. They lived on the outskirts of Brixton, well-known for its Afro-Caribbean community, where LKJ experienced not only a taste of home but a new perspective on the metropolitan centre. He recalls: “I [saw] a white man sweeping the streets. All the white people I saw in Jamaica drove fish- tail cars and smoked cigars. So when I saw someone, a white person, actually sweeping the streets it was a bit of a revelation.”⁹ So along with a profound consciousness of racism in London, the postcolonial heart of Inglan, LKJ quickly learned that the white man’s History was also “fissured” by the history of class, a constituent feature of the doubling of diaspora, and a significant mark of LKJ’s political perspicacity. In general, LKJ defies the assumptions that make poet and activist mutually exclusive terms. Not long after leaving school LKJ became involved with the Black Panthers and, although he had a full time job with the GLC (the now defunct Greater London Council) he spent as much time again organizing members, attending meetings, and distributing pamphlets. When the British government found ways to break up the Panther movement it did not stop LKJ’s involvement in Black community politics. By 1976 he was an official member of the Race Today Collective which, under the leadership of LKJ’s friend, Darcus Howe, has become a leading force in Black British struggle. Many of LKJ’s cultural initiatives, like “Creation for Liberation,” have developed under the aegis of Race Today. And, for much of his career, LKJ has maintained a gruelling schedule of readings in schools, universities, colleges, youth centres, community centres, and concert halls (which in part explains why his voice has remained defiantly public and sensitive to community issues). Among many other cultural activities LKJ has organized an international poetry reading (and produced the album of this event), presented a documentary on Carifesta for BBC television called “From Brixton to Barbados” and narrated a series on the history of Jamaican popular music for BBC radio called “From Mento to Lovers Rock.” LKJ is not interested in replacing the Ivory Tower with an Ebony one.

 

But what are the salient characteristics of the voice that LKJ brings from Jamaica? The voice is set to a rhythm, a beat that enunciates a conundrum, what Glissant calls “inscrutability” as an expression of freedom of Caribbean peoples. If for Glissant, this rhythm is initially characterized by beguine and later by a vibrant hybrid of salsa, reggae, and jazz; and if for Brathwaite what shatters the pentameter is primarily calypso; then for LKJ the riddim is reggae, which invokes both his Jamaican home, and the specific realities of Britain’s Afro-Caribbean communities. Interestingly, the origin of the word “reggae” is largely unknown. In Jamaican English it may recall rege-rege, a quarrel or a row, but it also has been linked to the sound of the guitar in the rhythm and to “raggedy,” meaning everyday or from the people. One thing is certain, since Toots Hibbert, who is usually credited with coining the word, wrote “Do the Reggay” in 1968, reggae followed LKJ to London, rather than him taking it with him.¹⁰ This is important because Black Britons do not just remember the countries of their past, they continually reinvent them as a challenge to the nationhood they now confront. And, as Paul Gilroy has noted, the focus of the alternative public spheres they create is musical.¹¹ Nation languages are sound systems.

 

If LKJ’s poetry deploys Brathwaite’s sense of “nation language” it does so as an impasse, a knot that cannot simply be untied by more generally accepted definitions of national selfhood. The doubling of diaspora requires a supplementary (simultaneous rather than sequential) notion of such language to acknowledge both the geographic displacement and that, to borrow a popular phrase, “the empire strikes back.” This would be a “version” of “dissemiNation,” in Homi Bhabha’s terms, “the moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering.”¹² Again, the version is characterized by sound, the community is gathered in an aural mix which, because it is sound (and not whole) is in continual flux: there are versions of versions. The version supplements both the nation and dissemiNation because, although the latter is characterized by a theory of performativity, it elides the “inscription” of the voice in the other narration of nation. For once, the perquisites of deconstruction would seem to mitigate against the realities of a specific diasporic culture even as it aptly describes the decentering and irreducible processes at work. For the sake of argument, let us say (in a creolized version of Marx’s eleventh thesis) that philosophers have grafted the world, the point here is to dub it.

 

Of course, the heritage of sound serves another national function. Indeed, LKJ’s voice is at once a critique of the imagined community of “Britishness” resplendent in the lamentable wave of authoritarian populism now known as Thatcherism¹³ (Thatcher herself is described by LKJ as the “wicked wan”¹⁴). That nation, despite its recalcitrant xenophobia, is all but dead. The problem, of course, is that this older paradigm of national purity (the little englander mentality) has, in its death throes, created a new culture of white anomie which, though assured of failure, seriously disables a more edifying vision of human community. And the African-Caribbean peoples of Britain, like their post-colonial Asian counterparts, are caught up in the manichean logic of exclusion/inclusion that drives the hegemonic ethnos and its attendant phantasms. From New Cross to Brixton, from Toxteth to Moss Side, from Southall to Notting Hill (a geography not of violence, but resistance and affirmation), this is what I want to critique as the culture and condition of dread. Dread, here, has several meanings that have to be thought simultaneously and in collision for LKJ’s voice and voicing to be understood. Dread has its roots (!) in Jamaican Rastafari, the religious cultural movement, and, in that declension, describes a communal realization: “the awesome, fearful confrontation of a people with a primordial but historically denied racial selfhood.”¹⁵ More generally, it connotes a sense of crisis (“Dread in a Babylon”), whether political or cultural, of apocalyptic nature in which social contradictions cannot be answered accept by an intense destabilization of the “order of things.” And, of course, there is dread as danger, because every stand against injustice invites retribution from those who see inequity as a niggling but necessary byproduct of their barbarism. Then there is dread as defiance:

 

Maggi Tatcha on di go
wid a racist show
but a she haffi go
kaw,
rite now,
African
Asian
West Indian
an' Black British
stan firm inna Inglan
inna disya time yah.
far noh mattah wat dey say,
come wat may,
we are here to stay
inna Inglan,
inn disya time yah....

 

(LKJ “It Dread Inna Inglan”¹⁶)

 

This marks a significant difference with LKJ’s Caribbean counterparts, for there is no ideology of return in LKJ’s view. Brathwaite, for one, went back to Africa, to Ghana, to rediscover his roots, then crossed the Atlantic once more to elaborate on his experiences. And, as is well known, Jamaican Rastafari includes a roots thematic specifically focused on Ethiopia as the domain of Haile Selassie, the reincarnation of Jah (and therefore Ethiopia is viewed as a promised land). Even when fronting Rasta Love, the band he named, LKJ never felt comfortable with this view: “I couldn’t identify with this Selassie thing. I just couldn’t identify with that at all.”¹⁷ So even though rasta provides an oppositional politics for LKJ (in its various challenges to ideologies of racial subordination and, indeed, capitalism), the deployment of dread is quite specific in his work, and is overdetermined by Inglan’s situation.

 

dis is di age af reality
but some a wi a deal wid mitalagy
dis is di age of science an' teknalagy
but some a wi a check fi antiquity
w'en we can't face reality
wi leggo wi clarity

 

(“Reality Poem,” LKJ)¹⁸

 

In a way, this is closer to Glissant’s notion of decentered Caribbeanness, a condition much more suspicious of prelapsarian origins as a solution to psychological dislocation. When Glissant left Martinique, it was for Paris on a scholarship. The relocation of Afro-Caribbeans to England after the Second World War was not primarily a function of educational opportunities (although these cannot be discounted), but an economic decision fostered by the machinations of a British government newly cognizant of its labor shortages. Dread manifests itself in many ways in LKJ’s poetry but in general it is used to describe the material conditions of Black Britain, or Inglan, an existence suppressed or marginalized in the consciousness of England, or White authority.

 

Dread is underlined by dub. Dub sharpens the defiance by writing over the OED, by spelling the sounds of actual English usage in the anglophone African/Caribbean community. Dub itself describes the paradox of the poet’s voice, for dub means both the presence and the absence of Jamaican speech rhythms. Again, a confrontation with deconstruction’s primary reflex might seem in order (the word as the presence of an absent voice) but that only partially explains the paradox at issue. Dub is instrumental reggae, reggae with the lead vocal track removed and replaced (by a sound engineer) with various sound effects (echoes, reverberation, loops, vocal bites, etc.). Dub reggae’s very emphasis on production, on mixing, is itself a challenge to the ideology of the artist as performer or originator (and is sometimes snubbed by reggae artists precisely because it threatens or subverts their copy-rights). This feature emerges in many other forms of popular music (for instance, rap, techno-punk, and rave), which all sample each other with wild abandon, but often as much with the voice track as without. But if dub reggae mixes out the vocals, dub poetry lays down the voice as an instrument within the reggae beat; indeed, the voice is so closely allied with this beat that if you remove the reggae instrumentation you can still hear its sound in the voice of the poem. Dub means simultaneously instruments without voices and voices without instruments. This neat chiasmus is not a tribute to the wily signifier so much as a product of dread identity, subaltern subjectivity as sound, silence, and warning. Dub is underlined by dread.

 

The paradox of dub as it signifies dread is a function of its multi-levelled etymology. Obviously, the lingo of the sound engineer is paramount, although this was formerly associated with the manipulation of sound and voice tracks in cinematic production or the copying of film onto film. Copying is important, both as a productive capacity and as a logic of repetition. Because of the question of property rights, dubbing is tantamount to repetition as sedition (dub has also meant “to forge keys” as well as “to lock up”; and “to invest with a dignity” as well as “to smear with grease” in two other instances of self-deconstruction). Coincidentally, perhaps, dub has an onomatopoeic function, specifically in “dub” and “dub-a-dub,” the sound of a beating drum. As LKJ recalls in “Reggae Sounds,” the drum is integral to the beat: “Thunda from a bass drum sounding/ lightning from a trumpet and a organ/ bass and rhythm and trumpet double-up/ team-up with drums for a deep doun searching.”¹⁹ I will say more about the bass in due course, but the point here is to emphasize dub’s undecidability and its technical associations which are both highly evocative of its cultural politics. The latter, ultimately, is what dread is all about.

 

Although dub poetry is now associated with a number of poets (Oku Onuora, Mikey Smith, Mutubaruka, Brian Meeks, Breeze, Anita Stewart, etc.) it is almost synonymous with LKJ. Indeed, he claims to have coined the term in the early Seventies.²⁰ For LKJ, dub poetry should be distinguished from dub lyricism, the latter being the process by which deejays lay down their own voice track over reggae (he has in mind Big Youth, U-Roy, I-Roy)–we know this more commonly as “talk-over” or “toasting.”²¹ Dub lyricism is the voice at its most spontaneous for (with the original voice track removed) the deejay can directly involve his or her audience through call and response methods, or by using current events to recontextualize the dread. Toasting, then, is a special skill tuned in to the tenor of the live event which in the Seventies and early Eighties was epitomized by the one thousand watt-plus sound system discos (either those of the clubs, or the more underground roving systems set up in abandoned houses or warehouses or sometimes just in the street until the police or authorities found a way to pull the plug). Obviously, there is some overlap in LKJ’s work: “It Dread Inna Inglan” on the album Dread Beat and Blood begins with call and response and features a crowd chanting “Free George Lindo” (the reference is to a wrongful arrest case in Bradford). Also, the fact that LKJ himself has released dub versions of his dub poetry (most conspicuously, the album LKJ in Dub) and thereby allows his music to be “talked over” would seem to make the practical separation of dub poetry from dub lyricism problematic. The main difference, however, is that dub poetry privileges the word over the music, or else incorporates the rhythm of the instruments into its enunciation. For LKJ in particular, the poetry should outlast its musical accompaniment or affiliation. This is an oddly purist and anti-populist stance but it has several explanations.

 

The first is that LKJ considers himself a poet, and not a reggae artist. Clearly, he has learned much from reggae and the musical traditions on which it is based (like mento, ska, rude-boy, and rock-steady) but he does not believe that reggae can exhaust the possibilities of poetry in African/Caribbean cultural expression. Indeed, in a scathing review of Bob Marley in 1975 LKJ suggests that it is reggae music’s commercialization which underlines the danger in the poet becoming overly dependent on it. He cites the example of Marley being “found” by Island Records’ Chris Blackwell (referred to as the “descendant of slave masters”) and promoted as a “Rasta rebel” to boost lagging record sales. The irony is obvious:

 

The "image" is derived from rastafarianism and rebellion, which are rooted in the historical experience of the oppressed of Jamaica. It then becomes an instrument of capital to sell Marley and his music, thereby negating the power which is the cultural manifestation of this historical experience. So though Marley is singing about "roots" and "natty," his fans know not. Neither do they understand the meaning or the feeling of dread. And there is really no dread in Marley's music. The dread has been replaced by the howling rock guitar and the funky rhythm and what we get is the enigma of "roots" and rock.²²

 

One wonders what LKJ would have to say about Shabba Ranks and other notables of Ragga (a hybridization of rap and reggae) or dancehall stylee? Dread, here, seems to contain its own fear, in this case connected to the rock industry’s economic and race relations: in short, the twin demons of sell-out and cross-over. For LKJ, commercial dread is either dreck or simply a contradiction in terms: it is reggae shorn of its sense of crisis, of its political edge. One could argue that Marley contradicts LKJ’s case, but LKJ’s musical career itself proves that the rock industry is not quite the monolothic capitalist entity that he makes it out to be. Indeed, LKJ’s break into pop occurred a couple of years later in his relationship with Virgin Records. Initially, he wrote biographies to accompany Virgin’s emerging list of reggae artists but eventually he got a chance to cut a record of his poems (drawn principally from the Dread Beat and Blood collection) with a reggae backing (LKJ had been doing this since 1973 with his band Rasta Love, but without a recording contract). While it was Mike Oldfield rather than reggae that catapulted Virgin towards multinational goliath status, LKJ’s point about capital remains pertinent: the corporate deployment of reggae directly supports those it putatively opposes. Taking poetry seriously simultaneously distances the white-dominated media conglomerates for which multiculturalism means capital diversity, while it also assures that the poetry itself can only have a local effect. With the market for printed poetry being so small, the dub poet must rely on live performance as the focus for the message, but for LKJ this means reading principally without the reggae band. Since his “farewell performance” in December, 1985 in Camden, LKJ has made less band-backed appearances, although the release of a new music collection Tings an Times in 1991 underlines that his concert farewell did not end his desire to produce reggae albums. Yet if economic exigency can be seen to compromise LKJ’s poetic principles the general rule remains that he is suspicious of reggae more because of the industry in which it is entwined than its tendency to demote the voice and the dread it embodies.

 

Connecting this notion of voicing dread and making history suggests an important way of understanding the construction of the subaltern subject. Dub has its own code of othering which distances and/or alienates official discourse while addressing the real foundations of the Black community (the economic plight of postcolonialism, the racism of neo-colonialism, etc.). That the subaltern subject is an active political subject is crucial to LKJ’s history of/in the voice, which provides a significant documentary record of recent race relations in Britain. “New Cross Massakhah,” for instance, is not just a harrowing description of the arson murder of at least thirteen young Blacks attending a birthday party in South London in 1981, but also a story of community outrage, mobilisation, and protest. The Race Today Collective organized a mass demonstration to call attention both to the burgeoning violence against Blacks and to the woeful misrepresentation of the Massacre in the British press.²³ For the poem, the point of crisis is also the point of memory. The narrator of the poem recalls the party as a celebration of community culture (“di dubbin/ an di rubbin/ an di rackin to di riddim”) and the violence and subsequent hypocrisy as an affront to the same, while constantly appealing to the community’s sense of this crisis (“yu noh remembah”). In particular, the poem draws a distinction between this community identity and the infamous “public” which is seen to be much too malleable before the police, the press, and the government’s “official story.” The rhythm of the story switches between the liveliness of the party and the heavier bass beat of the aftermath and this itself is a measure of dread. But the beat underscores the resistance polemic that is the content of the poem (“wi refuse fi surrendah/ to dem ugly inuendoh”). As with many of LKJ’s poems, the dread emerges in the difference between the “England” of the dominant public sphere and the “Inglan” of a historically specific English community. Although the outrage over New Cross was not the only cause, the riots across England in 1981 were a product of this glaring cultural, social, and political discrepancy. In this sense, the dub poet does not describe the crisis but articulates it as a function of contemporary community relations (in Jamaica dub serves a similar agonistic purpose). The aesthetics of dub poetry are not founded on description but praxis and the “wi” of its community appeal.

 

“New Cross Massakhah,” (like LKJ’s “Di Great Insohreckshan” about the riots of ’81, and “Sonny’s Lettah” about the notorious “sus” law) evokes a poignant aesthetic of song and solidarity–the “Other” talks back, and dialogically. By this I mean to invoke Bakhtin’s sense of the utterance being authored by the other.²⁴ Since the addressor anticipates audience response, the other voice is embedded in the speaker’s text. Each word is structured by the relationship between speaker and listener and the immediate conditions in which that “exchange” takes place. As we know, Bakhtin tended to hypostatize the novel as form, but there is good reason to dialogize dialogics through and beyond that domain. Thus, if the subaltern does not speak, as such, it is only within the restrictive logics and codes of the dominant discourse. This raises the paradox of dub once more, for there the subaltern is not represented but is heard. On the one hand, the social conditions dub critiques engage a particular community and context; on the other, the alienating English of dub distances the normative and normalizing tones of the linguistic orthodoxy (“Queen’s English” or “BBC English,” for instance).

 

But the language of dub also calls attention to the racial differences that stratify Britain’s working classes. This, of course, has been the explicit subject of several reggae talk-over hits, the most famous of which is Smiley Culture’s “Cockney Translation.” Both Gilroy and Hebdige have provided cogent analyses of this brilliant paean to multiple voicing, but Smiley was not the first to highlight the differences within, in this case, working-class London. Cockney meets patois in LKJ’s 1979 poem “Fite Dem Back” which ventriloquizes London’s white working class as a harbinger of racist attitudes. The clash of language is also a struggle of race relations. The first verse of “Fite Dem back” begins with a “version” of Cockney: “we gonna smash their brains in/ cause they ain’t got nofink in ’em.”²⁵ The second verse replies to this National Front mentality with “some a dem say dem a niggah haytah” and continues, “fashist an di attack/ noh baddah worry ’bout dat/ fashist an di attack/ wi wi’ fite dem back.” The simplified sociology of “us” and “them” (“wi” and “dem”) is, as I’ve argued elsewhere, not a function of crass dichotomous thinking, but a register of strategic opposition.²⁶ Not all Cockneys are fascists, but “dem” who are must be challenged. The value of Bakhtin’s theory of the utterance and, indeed, Brathwaite’s notion of nation language, is that both provide models for understanding community address at the macro- and micro- social levels. And the artist, in both cases, must have a highly developed sense of public voice and responsibility, or what Bakhtin calls “answerability.”

 

Dub emphasizes what constitutes a voice in social discourse.²⁷ Mikey Smith, whose brutal murder in 1983 cut short the career of Jamaica’s premier dub poet, always wrote his poems, but the scripts do little justice to the instrumentation of his voice in live performance. Brathwaite comments that Smith “published” his poetry at public poetry readings, and notes that transcription of Smith’s voice is especially difficult when he includes noise, such as an imitation of a motorbike, to extend syllables at key moments (I will return to noise in due course). The word “woe” in his poem, “Me Cyaan Believe It” on the album version is a scream of almost four seconds in length, yet in his poetry collection, It A Come, it is rendered as “woeeeeeeee” which, while emphatic, does not convey the effect. Interestingly, at a recent conference in New York honoring Brathwaite, LKJ recited Smith’s poem from memory and followed the rhythm and stress of the album version almost exactly. Clearly, LKJ was dependent on Smith’s oraliture and his own experience of Smith recitations for his performance (the vocal clues are not sufficient in the written text). This underlines a paradoxical degree of unrepeatability and untranslatability in dub poetry that resists its reproduction as writing. The coding of dub is in tune with the live event and the community in which that event occurs.²⁸ Bakhtin’s term “eventness” (sobytiinost’) describes this material specificity, a moment that constrains abstract transcription. Although Bakhtin has in mind an “act” rather than a speech act, he believes such activity should be linked to the process of art, art as an event of being rather than an object of “purely theoretical cognition.”²⁹ Again, the key to the event is the co- authoring of the addressee, a sympathetic “co-experiencing” certainly more possible in an Afro-Caribbean community than, for instance, the halls of Westminster or Scotland Yard in their current forms. What makes for identification in one context might make for alienation and hostility in another. The dub poet is sensitive to the “eventness” of dub poetry and knows that one community’s dread is another community’s fear. LKJ, then, does not “give voice to the struggle” so much as explore how the voice is structured from within by struggle as a material context, both as social oppression and as linguistic violence.

 

Thus, Bakhtin’s assertion that cultural voice always exceeds the personal, the individual, has a particular resonance in the dub poet’s community address–and for Black Britain at present, this voice is constructed at the margin where it (dialogically) confounds the centripetal logic of a “little englander” mentality. In addition to Bakhtin’s dialogism, such a reading picks up on Homi Bhabha’s notion of “dissemiNation” as a liminality of cultural identity, but double-voicing, in principle, is also highly evocative of dub’s doubling of English. This doubling forms a coda to Gates’s elaboration of the “talking book” in African vernacular traditions because here we have not just texts talking to one another in their revoicing of the history of black struggles but an emphasis on speech qua speech as a (dis)figuring of moribund nationalist ideology. Dub poetry would seem to be a rather obvious “speakerly text,” but it is my contention that it is better heard as a textualizing voice. The four beat bass rhythm of reggae (with its stress on beats two and four) might carry this voice, but what articulates it as such is the ambivalent subjectivity of dread. This is not a jargon of authenticity but an intimation of crisis in excess of its putative speaker. Voice, then, instantiates dread in two ways, the first of which is characterized by Kobena Mercer in his Bakhtinian model of Black British aesthetics: At a micro-level, the textual work of creolizing appropriation activated in new forms of black cultural practice awakens the thought that such strategies of disarticulation and rearticulation may be capable of transforming the ‘democratic imaginary’ at a macro- level by ‘othering’ inherited discourses of English identity.³⁰

 

The second instantiation, which is not presence but present danger, is (like Mikey Smith’s “woe”) to make the voice noisy; that is, to employ sound as syntax, as syncopation, as “sonority contrasts” (Brathwaite), and as instrumentation. This is the measure of dread beat, for it picks away at authority’s rationalism (Thatcher’s and now Major’s monotonous “common sense”). Dread beat interrogates and interpolates this often harmful status quo by not being quiet. As LKJ notes, “To us, who were of necessary birth, for the earth’s hard and thankless toil, silence ‘as no meaning” (“Two Sides of Silence”). While African American rap has provided an exhortation to “bring the noise,” dub poetry has been doing this for quite some time and belongs to the same tradition of affective sound. But LKJ’s move beyond silence suggests a doubling or troubling of identity for, as Jacques Attali has pointed out, what noise is to chaos, music is to community. Dub fashions both: the noise destabilizes the false ontology of Britishness (an oxymoronic discordant harmony) while the dread riddim provides a musical gloss on the fractured and tenuous realities of the diasporic subject.

 

I have been trying to suggest how the voice of dub poetry instantiates a version of making history: the voice, here, as an active component of community identity. In the main, reggae has provided dub with its dread riddim but, as we have noted, LKJ believes that dub is not reducible to reggae even if it owes it a rhythmic allegiance. As with most “sound” protest, dub’s doubling provides a subaltern community with a medium for resistance and active intervention in the political arena. While this might seem to confine dub poetry to the margins as subculture, this does not mean cultural subservience. In fact, I believe it is closer to what Deleuze and Guattari have examined as the deterritorializations of “minor literature,” but in this case as a textualizing voice.³¹ LKJ’s “Bass Culture” is typical of the (sub)cultural (sub)version of dub. Obviously, the title puns on bass as being both the instrument of the beat and as being somehow obnoxious or repulsive. Who finds the bass base goes to the heart of the politics of culture that dub foregrounds. On the face of it, “Bass Culture” exudes all the major features discussed so far: the thumping beat of bass is its subject matter, here tied to the beating of the heart but also to Brathwaite’s point about the rhythm of the storm; it is a poem about dread, both as threat and as cultural identity (“dread people”); the violence it registers has everything to do with the tropical storm it imitates and the history of oppression it records and from which it learns; the voice is both musical as it follows the bass line, and noisy, as it makes a thunder crack (“SCATTA-MATTA-SHATTA-SHACK”) a slogan of defiance; the voice is specific about its own musical moment (“an di beat will shiff/as di culture altah/when oppression scatta”) which will pass according to a particular historical situation; in acknowledging the power of the voice (partially indicated in the dedication to Mr.Talk-Over, “Big Yout”) it makes no claims as to its originality but instead emphasizes a shared sense of “latent powa” as a bloodline of history, a “muzik of blood”; and the dread is a threat because it challenges the norm (“the false fold”) in its language, its riddim, and, of course, in its title. But there is also an ambivalence of context in “Bass Culture” that allows dread to signify simultaneously in two moments of identity. The first is the colonial condition in which dread is the “latent powa” that eventually comes “burstin outta slave shackle/ look ya! boun fi harm di wicked.” The second moment, however, is the dread present where this same latency must be utilized to “scatta” oppression within postcoloniality. Dread keeps the “culture pulsin” with bass riddim as long as it is “BAD OUT DEY”–a situation that did not necessarily end with the independence of Jamaica or the migration of some of its population to Britain. Dread, then, becomes a conceptual as well as experiential link in the story of Afro-Caribbeans. Thus, when I suggest that dub identity is about being-in-between this does not mean that the community voiced by LKJ has not arrived in England (we have already noted that it “stan firm inna Inglan”) but that arrival in itself does not end the legacy of racism that structures England’s national selfhood. The dread beat still has that to beat.

 

But we are left with a central question: does the voice make history or simply record it? The answer lies in the ambiguity of “telling history.” History is that which has disallowed the subaltern voice, and yet talking history permits a trenchant sense of both a subject without a voice and a voice without a subject. That which makes history telling depends upon the specific positions of speaker and listener which are in excess of individuality. LKJ is, therefore, a vessel of history–he carries the voice rather than being coterminous with it. What makes history telling is not the individuation of the voice, as the griots well know, but the process in which the story keeps getting told. If the little englander subject makes the voice self present with the speaker, then dub identity answers by making history a function of the voice. In this sense, you know when LKJ is making history, because the community voice is telling it. Aime Cesaire once pointed out a massive contradiction in European identity in just three words, “Colonization and civilization?” The questions are different now (for instance, racism and multiculturalism?) but LKJ gives voice to current crises in Black Britain by historicizing them. While I have only begun to detail the importance of this history I hope the version here at least underlines that there is a history at stake and a role for the poet in speaking it, in something other than pentameters, and somewhere other than overseas.

 

Notes

 

1. A shorter “version” of this essay was first given at the MLA conference in New York, December 1992. The talk was backed with dub reggae, and the intonation of each sentence picked up on that bass beat. The form of the presentation, therefore, attempted to demonstrate the instrumentation of voice in dub poetry. This, of course, included an example of LKJ’s performance–the poem I will discuss later, “Bass Culture.” The present “re-mix” pushes against the impossibility of reproducing that event even as it admits the importance of this form of irreducibility. It is itself a dub version, the voiceless B-side of a reggae record–toned down, of course! A longer version will follow. For more on versions, see Dick Hebdige, Cut ‘N’ Mix (London: Comedia, 1987). Hebdige’s book exemplifies the ability to hear and read the riddim crucial to dread.

 

2. I refer here to Brathwaite’s provocative essay, “History of the Voice” first presented at Carifesta 76 in Jamaica and subsequently expanded and revised as a lecture given at Harvard University, August 1979. The full text with bibliography has been published as Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice (London: New Beacon Books, 1984). My efforts here are strongly influenced by Brathwaite’s emphasis on orality in his essay (his talk, like mine, has an audio track), although I will also focus on the difficulties of representation in his concept of the “nation language.”

 

3. See Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992): 77. Both Glissant’s and Brathwaite’s notion of history challenge the totalizing paradigms of Western history (particularly the Hegelian model). The status of the voice in relation to writing, however, is perceived somewhat differently as we will see. Glissant has a deconstructor’s flair for writing that remains suspicious of speech even as he wants to instantiate a “scriptible” voice. Brathwaite, however, is much more sanguine about the scriptability of the voice in its a radical distancing of the colonial word. “Dread” emerges in the tension between these polemics.

 

4. The dilemma of being in between, or crossing is explored in Kamau Brathwaite’s Middle Passages (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1992), a brilliant collection of poems that fracture English, the page, and any sense of Black diaspora as a unitary experience of dislocation. For more on the “black atlantic” model, see Paul Gilroy, “Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992): 187-198.

 

5. Brathwaite: 10.

 

6. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). Anderson’s thesis is linked to a simultaneous temporality called “meanwhile” which gives the form of the nation its assumed integrity. As Bhabha has pointed out, this works very well for realist models of representation, but overlooks (or, for our purposes, stutters) the liminality of cultural identity: the “imperceptible” and the unutterable remains just that. LKJ, for one, has attempted to speak what he calls this “silent space.”

 

7. See Glissant: 94-95. My point in this diversion is to suggest that without an adequate knowledge of the deformations of the Caribbean nation one cannot begin to understand the voice of dread in the metropolitan “center.”

 

8. See Henry Louis Gates Jr. The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and, Houston Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

 

9. See Mervyn Morris, “Interview with Linton Kwesi Johnson” Jamaica Journal, 20:1 (Feb/April 1987): 17-26. Most of this interview was conducted in 1982, but it was subsequently updated in 1986. As such, it provides an important overview of LKJ’s upbringing and intellectual/political development.

 

10. Hebdige points out that Toots might have had the term, but the rhythm had appeared on earlier recordings, principally, Lee “Scratch” Perry’s production, “People Funny Boy.” Perry would go on to produce a number of groups, including the Wailers and the Upsetters. See Hebdige: 75.

 

11. Like many other writers (including Baker and Hebdige), Gilroy connects the black diaspora through the strong musical links between Africa and the Caribbean, North America, and Western Europe. Gilroy’s study breaks new ground in several ways, however, particularly in detailing the complex alliances and oppositions that develop in Black Britain. The nexus of race and class is vital in this regard, as is his analysis of the production and institutionalization of racism in and outside government.

 

12. See Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Nation” in Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990): 291-322. Interestingly, this concept describes a temporality that distances, so to speak, from within, the History of Western national identity. But, for LKJ, I would argue, this principle itself needs to be qualified in light of the double diaspora, in terms of spatiality and tonality (the focus, if not the function, of the Brathwaite/Glissant metacritiques).

 

13. See Stuart Hall’s perceptive analysis of this phenomenon in his The Hard Road To Renewal (London: Verso, 1988). It is important to maintain the sense that, although Thatcher embodies Thatcherism, its political formation and deformation pre- and post-dates her terms as Prime Minister.

 

14. See/hear, Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Di Great Insohreckshan” in Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tings an Times (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1991): 43-44; and “Di Great Insohreckshan” on Linton Kwesi Johnson, Making History (Mango: MLPS9770, 1984).

 

15. See Joseph Owens, Dread: The Rastafarians of Jamaica (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1982): 3.

 

16. See/hear “It Dread Inna Inglan,” in Linton Kwesi Johnson, Inglan is a Bitch (London: Race Today, 1980): 14-15; and “It Dread Inna Inglan” on Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread Beat An’ Blood (Virgin: FLC9009 [tape], 1990). The latter is a reissue of the 1977 album of the same name.

 

17. See the Morris interview: 19.

 

18. See hear “Reality Poem” in LKJ, Tings An Times (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1991): 30-31; and LKJ, Forces of Victory (Mango: MLPS9566, 1979).

 

19. Linton Kwesi Johnson, Tings An Times: 18.

 

20. The earliest reference in his work I can find is an essay from 1976. See “Jamaican Rebel Music,” Race and Class, 17:4 (1976): 397-412. Even so, this still contradicts Stewart Brown’s contention that the term was first used by Oku Onuora in 1979. See “Dub Poetry: Selling Out” Poetry Wales, 22:2 (1987): 51-54. There are references in the music press as early as 1974 but these are usually tied to “talk-over” rather than LKJ’s sense of dub as poetry.

 

21. For more on talk-over and toasting see Hebdige, especially Chapters 10 and 11. Given LKJ’s distinction, it would seem rap is closer to dub-lyricism than dub-poetry because the latter can function as its own instrumentation.

 

22. See Linton Kwesi Johnson, “Roots and Rock” Race Today, 7:10 (October 1975)): 237-238.

 

23. Paul Gilroy provides a pertinent analysis of the Massacre and its aftermath in his “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Chapter Three. See also, the Special Issue of Race and Class, “Rebellion and Repression,” 23:2/3 (Autumn/Winter 1981/82).

 

24. The implications of Bakhtin’s theory of the utterance for subaltern studies are discussed in my Dialogics of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), especially the preface and chapter one. The relevant Bakhtinian texts are: V.N.Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R.Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973); Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press); The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Speech Genres, trans. Vern McGee, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); and Art and Answerability, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). In many ways, dub is a “version” of Bakhtin’s discourse of the streets which he reads in the organized heteroglossia of the novel.

 

25. See/hear “Fite Dem Back” in Inglan is a Bitch (London: Race Today, 1980): 20; and on Forces of Victory (Mango: MLPS 9566, 1979). The transliteration of the sound, on this occasion, does not do justice to the effect in the song: “nofink” is actually “nuffink” on the album and is far more evocative of an East End accent. As an Eastender, I appreciate this verisimilitude.

 

26. See Peter Hitchcock, Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Practice (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1989).

 

27. This is a constituent feature of what Brathwaite calls “sound poetry.” Legendary among these are Mighty Sparrow, Miss Lou, and Bongo Jerry. The latter’s poem, “Mabrak,” with its invocation of a “black electric storm” and its plea to “recall and recollect black speech” does not go unnoticed in LKJ’s poetry. See Brathwaite: 25-48.

 

28. LKJ describes this function thus: The kind of thing that I write and the way I say it is as a result of the tension between Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English and between those and English English. And all that, really, is the consequence of having been brought up in a colonial society, and then coming over here to live and go to school in England, soon afterwards. The tension builds up. You can see it in the writing. You can hear it. And something else: my poems may look sort of flat on the page. Well, that is because they’re actually oral poems, as such. They were definitely written to be read aloud, in the community. [Quoted in Andrew Salkey’s introduction to Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread Beat and Blood (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1975): 8].

 

29. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990): 189. See also, the discussion of eventness in Bakhtin’s work by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson in their introduction to Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, eds., Rethinking Bakhtin (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989).

 

30. See Kobena Mercer, “Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination: The Aesthetics of Black Independent Film” in Mbye B.Cham and Claire Andrade-Watkins, eds., Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988): 59. Mercer’s approach to Black British film, particularly in its creative use of the Volosinov/Bakhtin text on the “ideological sign,” complements my interest here in the dialogic voice of dub poetry. For an excellent analysis of contemporary British cultural politics see also, Kobena Mercer, “Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics” in Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990): 43-71.

 

31. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). This will be developed in a subsequent “version.” For an application of “minor literature” to postcolonial discourse see Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, “Caliban as Deconstructionist: C.L.R.James and Post-Colonial Discourse” in Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, eds. C.L.R.James’s Caribbean (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992): 111-142.