Linton Kwesi Johnson's Dub Poetry and the Political Aesthetics of Carnival in Britain

British dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ) moved to Britain from Jamaica on the cusp of adolescence in 1963. He arrived in the metropolis during a time of tremendous social and cultural ferment. Living in Brixton, South London, LKJ was quickly immersed in the radical currents that circulated throughout the black and Asian diasporic world at the time. The Black Panthers, whose youth wing he joined while still attending secondary school, exposed LKJ to the fertile blend of socialist political-economic analysis and black consciousness that characterizes the internationalist strands of the black radical tradition.¹ In addition, as a young member of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) in London during the early 1970s, LKJ participated in the groundbreaking debates that took place within that organization concerning the appropriate forms and themes of artistic production among members of the Caribbean exile community in Britain.² Popular culture acquired increasing significance as these artists struggled, under the weight of the increasingly incendiary political events of the period, to forge a role for themselves as artists and popular leaders.

Following the lead of figures like Edward Kamau Brathwaite, LKJ sought to craft his own poetic language in order to overcome the traditions of linguistic and mental colonization imposed by the educational apparatus in the British colonies of the Caribbean. He found a model for his own work in what he called the dub lyricist: Jamaican and black British deejays who would “toast” or invent improvised rhymes over the heavy rhythm tracks of reggae dub records. As he explains in an essay published in Race and Class in 1974, LKJ turned to the dub poetry movement that was made into a potent cultural force in Jamaica by Rastafarians including poet Bongo Jerry as a way of developing a vernacular aesthetic. Such an aesthetic, LKJ believed, offered a vital connection to the lives of black diaspora youths, and responded to the political and aesthetic desires that emerged as West Indians settled in Britain.³ Although LKJ wrote of the “dub-lyricist” as making “a vital contribution to the oral documentation of the history of Jamaica and to the Jamaican oral tradition,” he himself was actively adapting this West Indian tradition to circumstances confronted by black communities in Britain.⁴

LKJ’s lyrics reflect, in other words, the shift from a predominantly exilic focus on the Caribbean evident among older members of CAM to one grounded far more closely in the issues critical to young black people born and raised in Britain. His work nevertheless remained responsive to transatlantic cultural currents. In 1979, LKJ released his second full-length album, Forces of Victory. The songs featured on this album were published the following year in the collection Inglan is a Bitch.⁵ Unlike his previous LP, Dread Beat and Blood (1978), Forces of Victory successfully integrated spoken word and musical accompaniment, leading to a compositional style far more heavily influenced by the dictates of lyrical performance than is evident in previous compositions.⁶ In addition, Forces of Victory and the collection of verse that followed after consistently deployed what is now seen as LKJ’s characteristic black British vernacular for the first time. The album is therefore of particular significance, announcing the arrival of LKJ’s mature style as well as offering important accounts of black British experience during the late 1970s.

The LP Forces of Victory took its title from the theme developed by the Race Today Collective, of which LKJ was a prominent member, for the Caribbean Carnival held in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood in 1978. According to an editorial statement in the Race Today, the collective’s journal by the same name, Carnival was “central to the developing cultural movement within the West Indian community in the United Kingdom.”⁷ In fact, Race Today had been deeply involved with the festival since 1976, when running battles broke out between black youths and the London metropolitan police force, presaging the massive riots that convulsed Britain’s cities during the next decade. As its title suggests, LKJ’s album brings...