MI REVALUESHANARY FREN - LINTON KWESI JOHNSON

In 2016 when Bob Dylan won the Nobel prize for literature, I was disappointed. To be clear, I love Bob Dylan, he’s maybe my favorite YTguy Boomer thing and I share the love with my dad (a YT boomer) but still, I was disappointed for 2 reasons. First, and more simply, it’s basically impossible to make any money at all writing literature and literature is so marginal to culture at large that it basically only, somewhat, penetrates the mainstream news once a year when they announce the winner of the only lit award anyone has heard of. And to give that shine to Bob Dylan, who recently sold his catalog for something like $300 million, is a tragic waste. But more pedantically, I was upset because, to me, Dylan doesn’t make literature. Literature, in my view, is words who were artistically placed primarily to be read. This cuts out things like scripts or song lyrics, which are certainly still art, just not literature. You could argue that Shakespeare is now literature since it is primarily consumed by reading instead of viewing the plays but, to use my favorite phrase, that’s the exception that proves the rule. Johnson, like all the best poets, complicates this. His poetry is written in style that seeks an approximation of Jamaican speech. I’m not going to dive into the creole/pidgin/dialect delineation debate, I’ll merely add that it’s unfamiliarity made me read it out-loud in two senses. First, literally out-loud, as well as “out-loud” in my head, in the sense that I’d have to mentally sound out the word phonetically using what little I know about Jamaican orthography, and then try to “translate” it to terms more familiar to me. The book itself comes with a CD of him reading the poems, which adds yet more layers and ways to approach, you can both read along or listen to him declaim poems that aren’t in the book. His reading, of course, unlocked a myriad of rhythms and rhymes I missed when only reading. So the whole idea of whether this is meant as literature, as I define it, or something primarily spoken and thus performed is complex and unclear. Either way, it’s a really cool experience, though I will admit that it occasionally was hard to parse on the what-does-this-word-mean level. However, Johnson’s commitment to replicating this aspect of life and culture leads to really amazing sections, in terms of just rhythm and feel, that would be impossible if he didn’t have such a mastery over his technique:

him seh:

mi haffi pick a packit

tek a wallit from a jackit

mi haffi dhu it real crabit

an if a lackit mi haffi pap it

an if a safe me haffi crack it

ar cap it wid mi hatchit

Johnson doesn’t let this technique dictate the subject matter of the poetry either. The work was much more politically focused and engaged than most of the poetry I’m used to. Here’s his description of the end of the Soviet Union:

well awrite

soh Garby gi di people dem glashnas

an it poze di Stallinist dem plenty prablem

soh Garby leggo peristrika pan dem

Otherwise, the poetry largely focuses on the struggles and injustices facing Jamaicans, and immigrants more broadly, in the UK during the 70’s-90’s. Having gone to so many protests these last months where we chant an endless list of names it was horrifying and revealing to see Johnson engaged in the same sort of exercise but listing UK names unknown, but eliciting a disgustingly familiar feeling, to me. Same all over Babylon I suppose. Even at its darkest these poems are defiant and hopeful which was a welcomed break from the more pessimistic fair I’m more typically drawn to. There’s a poem in here called “More Time” which makes the same argument as Wilde’s “The Soul of the Man Under Socialism” but in a much more mellifluous way. Gonna have to check out more Johnson. 39 dub poems