Raggamuffin Cultural Studies: X-Press Novels' Yardies and Cop Killers Put Britain on Trial

On Devil's Advocate, Channel Four television's talk show, airing in Britain on 8 October 1994, the host, Darcus Howe, attacked his two guests Dotun Adebayo and Steve Pope, directors of the new black British publishing firm, X-Press. He charged them with publishing poorly written popular "Yardie" and "Cop Killer" novels that damage the black community by perpetuating stereotypes of youth criminality. Howe opened the show with a monologue mourning the violence in his own community, Brixton:

It is a well-known fact that urban black Britain is facing what is perhaps the most serious social crisis to date. Let's isolate one community - and I live there - I'm a Brixtonian. In South London last year there were over five hundred gun crimes, many of them drug-related and most of them involving young black men both as perpetrators and as victims. In recent years the police have also become targets, and the community - the black community - is currently struggling to deal with conflicting emotions they feel about this deadly serious situation.¹

According to Howe, X-Press novels exacerbate the border clash between the state, police, media and black youth, contributing to a long-entrenched pattern of racist stereotyping of predominantly black boroughs in both state policies and societal discourses. With tabloidesque theatricality, Howe introduced and consoled a third "surprise" guest, Ivan Dunne, the brother of Patrick Dunne, a white police officer who had been shot and killed by black youths a few weeks earlier. As fate would have it, Patrick Dunne's murder coincided with the release of Cop Killer, an X-Press novel that narrates the story of an Afro-Caribbean British man who plots murderous revenge against a corrupt and racialist Metropolitan Police Force responsible for his mother's wrongful death. Ivan Dunne condemned X-Press for shamefully and insensitively capitalizing upon and even promoting the kind of violence against police that had taken his brother's life. Officer Dunne, an unarmed forty-four-year-old community bobby who patrolled his beat on a bicycle, had been blown away on a South London street by youths involved, official reports claimed, in the drug trade. Although only one of the three youths involved was thought to be Jamaican, sensationalist newspaper headlines proclaimed that Dunne was a victim of the Yardie crime wave. By inviting the brother of the slain officer to confront the directors of X-Press, publishers of Yardie fiction, on television, Howe blurred the line between lived and fictional events, indicting X-Press for constructing and popularizing a cognitive map of the British metropole as an embattled zone in which amoral Jamaican posse soldiers and their fictional counterparts pose equal menace to national security.

This article examines representations of Jamaican dancehall culture and Yardies in British journalism, police and state documents, and two novels published by X-Press, Victor Headley's Yardie (1992) and Donald Gorgon's Cop Killer (1994). Despite the fact that several X-Press novels narrate the stories of cocaine-dealing Jamaican Yardies and black British posse youths - featuring deejaying and the raggamuffin dancehall scene for the soundtrack and setting - these novels also provide incisive analysis of the history of Caribbean immigration to Britain, the impact Caribbean culture has made on British national identity, and the current status of black Britain. Rather than simply reifying stereotypical portraits of young black men as criminals, the novels provide a hard-hitting critique of racialism, the criminal justice system, and the way that the urban British cultural cityscape has been configured by media and public authorities. Although Yardie antiheroes play the role of protagonist in some of the novels, the "gangster" alternative for economic achievement is presented as a sure path to personal and familial destruction. Rastafarians, baby mothers and other characters counter descriptions that glorify the posse soldier, denouncing the societal systems that gave rise to the Yardie phenomenon and the drug trade.

The Jamaican Dancehall and Ragga Consciousness

The soundspace of the Jamaican dancehall serves as the troubled site where Jamaican youths at home and abroad intervene in the global fields of discourse that analyse representations of black youth criminality. The Caribbean region is billed in the tourism industries as a "tropical paradise", at the same time a resort holiday from the tensions of the capitalistic work world and a shopping haven. Actually, the Caribbean figures significantly in the underground economies of global capital. The dancehall is where youth formulate responses to the pressures of urban Jamaica, poverty, ghetto survival, the prevalence of the gun, and the sociological impact of the transnational politics of the drug trade. Although the Caribbean region is ideally positioned geographically to serve as a mid-distance transferral point for the illegal drug producers in South America and the consumers in North America, and several islands currently experience a high rate of drug trade and gun violence, Jamaica is uniquely positioned in discourses about Caribbean drug trades and gangs. Through the international popularity of the Jamaican sound system, dancehall deejays and "queens", and the distribution of recorded dancehall music, the youths of the ghetto and the urban Jamaican culture at large, have access to a public forum where they can express the "reality dem a deal wid". Dancehall music, although certainly dominated by references to the "gun an' gal t'ing", does not universally promote gun violence as a means of economic and social invincibility, either. Just as the Rude Boy lyrics of 1960s and 1970s reggae and rocksteady had both a tradition of badman lyrics and a critical tradition of a "Johnny, you too bad" message that mourned fratricidal gun violence, dancehall music also expresses a similar dialectic.

Exported to imperial metropoles, Jamaican dancehall music is decontextualized to some extent and comes to signify a certain posturing of resistance to the forces of state authority and the police. A vastly popular musical form in Britain, ragga and dancehall are appreciated by an audience far removed from the ghettos of West Kingston, where the music derives its narratives, lexicon and energies. The novels of X-Press, borrowing from dancehall culture, posit what I am calling a "ragga consciousness" as a means of critically analysing the histories of Caribbean, and sometimes African, immigration to England. "Ragga", a term popularized in the dancehall, is a shortened form of "raggamuffin", which might conjure up images of ragged children from Charles Dickens's novels. In the Jamaican context, however, the ragged look becomes hyperstylized.² "Raggamuffin" expresses pride in poverty but also the ability to turn society on its head, to be able to see the hypocrisies and inequities in a class- and race-structured society. Cut short to "ragga", the term is simultaneously more rough and chic. X-Press protagonists, who manifest a ragga consciousness, offer knowledgeable and insightful commentary on race relations and societal transformations, but their enlightened positions as ideal social analysts are credited to lived experience in Britain, avid reading in anticolonial and Black Power literature, and immersion in Jamaican popular music, from roots reggae to ragga or jungle. Although the press explores a diversity of themes and genres, the "raggamuffin" trickster frequently employs the humour of Jamaican proverbs and popular music to sardonically undercut the monarchy, definitions of "Little England" and immigration backlash. Although most often identified as Jamaican-descended, he resides in historically important and culturally rich areas of Black London, and he has a politicized sense of the general history of Afro-Caribbeans, Africans and Asians in postwar Britain. Finally, he positions himself in a balance between youth culture, the working classes and underemployed, and upwardly mobile "buppies".

Responding to the criticism that X-Press books glorify gangsterism, Dotun Adebayo argued in our interview that critics have tended to focus unfairly on the crime fiction without recognizing the variety of issues and story lines that the many novels depict:

I still have the opinion that the criticism to our books has been more because of the black community's vulnerability, if you like, within the wider society. Particularly, . . . one of the criticisms has been - and this is probably right because there have been no other, or very few, depictions of black British people in fiction - that people want to see a wide, varying aspect or characterization in my books. Now I think there is that anyway, but more people are hung up . . . The first book was Yardie, and all they think of is X-Press. . . Yardie. . . gangsterism, you know. I mean a lot of the other books go way beyond that and discuss relationships [or political sagas].³

Even the novels that focus primarily upon the drug trade and gangsterism, such as Moss Side Massive by Karline Smith (1994), contain a strong moralistic lesson against the gangster lifestyle. As Adebayo stated, "One message of the book is that if you deal with drugs, you're necessarily on the road to failure. You can't stop it. It can destroy other people you love the most..⁴ The novels forthrightly address urgent problems that black communities have decided to deal with.

Remapping the British urban terrain, X-Press novels describe the thriving Afrocentric businesses in Brixton, the bustling Caribbean take-aways in Hackney, the gentrified residences and businesses of Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove. Socially mobile, innovators of a dynamic Jamaican-influenced popular youth culture, second-generation Afro-Caribbeans living in Britain are nonetheless portrayed as very aware of the turbulent histories of the previous decades, the public disorders in Brixton, police harassment of youth on SUS charges,⁵ and the injustices of the legal system. Furthermore, the continuing use of excessive police violence against blacks, discriminatory representations in the media and state documents, and contemporary avenues of antiracialist social activism are explored in extensive expository passages. While George Lamming, Sam Selvon and Andrew Salkey, in novels such as The Pleasures of Exile, The Lonely Londoners, and The Adventures of Catullus Kelly, dealt during the 1950s and 1960s with the first sizable wave of Caribbean immigration in Britain, recording the experiences of loneliness and exile in the cold mother country, immigration backlash, the formation of racialist groups, and the "colour bar" in housing and nightclubs, X-Press novels speak to the "in-between" generation, whose parents remember and pass down their experiences as immigrants. Cut off from island life except for occasional vacations or family stories, this generation still identifies with Caribbean culture, not adopting a solely British identity. Nevertheless, the early immigrant neighbourhoods have changed. Meanwhile, housing estates, improved by hard-won community centres and Afrocentric artwork, have become relics. Projects for urban improvement have not always benefited black communities, as white, Asian and other entrepreneurs move into black neighbourhoods. Part of what is at stake in X-Press novels is urban territory, economic viability, and the freedom of cultural expression. The novels point out the failures of various efforts by black nationalist groups, black commerce, and national/metropolitan organizations for racial equality to secure substantial economic gains for black Britain. They also survey the changes in cultural urban geography as areas of previously high Afro-Caribbean population density presently undergo radical architectural, cultural, racial, economic andideological reconstitution.

The Symbolic Location of Jamaican Youths in British Discourses

Musical lyrics and numerous references to roots reggae, rough pirate radio ragga rhythms pumping from car stereos, jungle music, and hip-hop are not simply incorporated to attract a young readership or to glorify the posse soldier gun lyrics of dancehall. The particular lyrics peppering the novels reflect the way that the ubiquitous Caribbean sound field in Britain constantly disrupts the public scripts, establishing through the "rough" messages and "wicked" Jamaican sounds an alternative world view - an ultimately more spiritual and just world view that adamantly demands respect for the massive. In the post-Black Power era, when the collective action groups, such as Race Today, have disbanded and black nationalist politics have been replaced with a contemporary emphasis by cultural studies writers, film makers and artists on the heterogeneity of black subject positions and the class fractures in black Britain, Jamaican-influenced soundspaces in Britain play an essential role in relaying popular social critiques that come from the masses. The pirate radio stations that X-Press characters often tune into broadcast a heavy ragga and jungle sound that, because of its basis in improvisation, versioning and mixing, and its airplay by illegal means, cannot be commodified, censored, normalized or regulated by either the commercial music industry or the legitimate radio broadcasting industry. However, the dancehall and pirate station are also sites of intervention for the state, which, in the case of Britain, has criminalized music events as sites of social deviancy, delinquency, drugs, violence and Yardie "runnings". Policy makers have implemented legal codes specifically limiting or banning the "noise" of music with "repetitive beats" from radio stations (Broadcasting Act 1990); regulating night nuisance, designed at restricting sound system events, house parties, and raves (Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill 1993); and increasing criminal penalties for illegal pirate radio operators (Amendments to Marine etc. Broadcasting Offences Act 1967).⁶ X-Press has uniquely positioned itself - and has been positioned by the media, the police and by black British activists - directly at this site of intervention, as a reading of two of the more controversial of the X-Press novels, Yardie and Cop Killer, demonstrates.

In the contemporary public sphere of the 1990s to 2000s, British national identity is often defined in terms of a diverse cultural, ethnic and racial admixture of peoples. Rhetoric celebrating the multicultural, cosmopolitan urban environment and asserting a harmonious plural society has come to replace the more overtly racialist, anti-immigration rhetoric of ethnic absolutism in parlance during the era of Thatcherism and Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" prophesies of an England contaminated by her formerly colonized subjects. Moreover, a more economically and socially mobile black citizenry and a transgressive and pervasively influential youth culture have dramatically insisted upon more inclusive definitions of "Englishness", impacting national and metropolitan policy making, commerce and marketing ventures, and discursive reformulations of what might be termed "race sociology". Unfortunately, in discussions of race, class, gender, national belonging, exclusionary policies and inner-city cultural cartographies, young underclass Jamaican men continue to exemplify the deviancy and culturally detrimental propensities of undesirable aliens.⁷ Numerous references have been made by cultural critics to John Brown's "Shades of Grey" report, a police document that linked the muggings to Rastafarian youth and described how officers unaccustomed to Rasta attire might recognize the red, green and gold clothes, "woollen hats", and dreadlocked hair of potential muggers.⁸ During the late 1980s and 1990s, however, the incursion of Jamaican drug trade gang members - Yardies - into the British inner city has sparked a new moral panic and law-and-order campaign, resulting in increased militarization and specialization of operations from Scotland Yard. In discursive constructions, Yardies are the "most dangerous men alive", unprincipled, sadistic - and, to some degree, suprahuman and "Rhygin'-like" - murderers, rapists, torturers and invincible drug lords. Obsessed with accumulating wealth and material goods, by any means necessary, Yardies also strike out at hegemonic global capitalist structures, operating their own powerful, internationalized distributive networks and systems of security and "defence". Gordon Rohlehr, in "Folk Research: Fossil or Living Bone?", labels the posses as cultures of "terminality" that constructed their semantic codes and rituals from the Hollywood dreams and dread consciousness of the Rude Boys.⁹ According to investigative non-fiction and state commentary, the most insidious threat to British national security posed by Yardie posse soldiers is the possibility that they will recruit and train large numbers of black inner-city youth, who, because of economic deprivation, are vulnerable to the contaminating moral influences of the ruthless, lawless Jamaicans.¹⁰

If, as Rohlehr argues, the Yardie culture and dancehall lyrics signify the bleak status of a Caribbean society whose youth would rather grab cash, live hard and be a beautiful corpse, the posse culture transposed to Britain signifies the final demise of traditional British society. The increasing specialization and militarization of Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police forces in response to the Yardie incursion signalled the rise of a national sociopolitical ideology and praxis that shifted the aggressive defence of colonial British interests and values in the (neo)colonies to urban battlefields at home. Master narratives of race, ethnicity and national origin figure in police discourse in the identification of "symbolic locations", potential public disorder zones and areas of high rates of drug-related crime in the inner cities. For instance, according to former police commissioner Sir Kenneth Newman's philosophy, the growth of deprived multi-ethnic communities threatened to upset the societal balance of freedom and order, increasing acts of criminal terrorism. In a speech delivered to the right-wing European Atlantic Group in 1983, Newman had previously defined his concept of symbolic locations thus: "The youths take a proprietorial posture in this location; they regard it as their territory".¹¹ Apparently, police had identified eleven locations, primarily within London's multi-ethnic areas associated with drugs and robbery, as "frontlines" that required special policing techniques. Jamaican youths, in particular, have been identified in police documents over a period of several years as proprietorial of their territory and threatening to public order. The conceptualization of symbolic locations resulted in a spatial and discursive re-zoning of Metropolitan London based on racial and ethnic demarcations.¹²

Long before Devil's Advocate accused X-Press of corrupting its young readership, some of the X-Press novels (according to Adebayo) had became quasi-training manuals for the detectives of Scotland Yard and a Metropolitan Police Force bent on eradicating the mysterious dons of the Jamaican-British drug underworld. When X-Press's first novel, Victor Headley's Yardie, began to gain national attention and press coverage, it did so in crime journalism rather than literary reviews. As Adebayo stated in our personal interview:

We each [Dotun Adebayo, Steve Pope, and Victor Headley] had to borrow money to print the book, and we didn't expect this sort of response. A lot of people got interested, not the least, the police and customs and all those kind of people, and suddenly what was happening was that it became a news story. It's one moment when a book is of interest to book reviewers, to the arts pages, but it can easily cross that line and go into the interest of the news reporters. And the reason it was of interest was that no one knew anything about "Yardies". But at that time there was a crime . . . a crime was committed by a black person who was a Yardie. This point of correspondence from the new reporters and the novel . . . Suddenly you're getting calls from the crime correspondents, saying "Yeah, I'd like to interview Victor Headley" . . . the same paper interviewing this policeman who was, ostensibly, head of the police's anti-Yardie squad. He said, "Yeah, that Yardie, . . . very interesting reading. Gave me a lot of information" [laughter].¹³

A contemporary criminal superstar, the Yardie was the apotheosis of the most deadly, mysterious, and sinister elements of the inner city. According to Adebayo.s bemused assessment of the reception of Yardie, police interpreted the fictionalized protagonist, D., as an accurate insider's psychological and sociological profile of Jamaican criminality. X-Press, whose editors might try to publicly downplay the highly charged political and social commentary in some of their novels by claiming that they simply sought to promote black authors and publish entertaining fiction for a black readership, positioned itself and was positioned, nonetheless, in the political crossfire among Scotland Yard, the state, media, black activism and expressive youth culture in the contested racialized conceptualization of the inner city and the British metropole.

X-Pressions of Black Britishness

Readers in Britain have not, for the most part, shared the media's negative responses to X-Press. Although X-Press novels now command entire sections at several bookstores in Britain and are increasingly available in the Caribbean and the United States, Dotun Adebayo, Steve Pope and Victor Headley established the press as a desktop operation, marketing their first novel, Headley's phenomenal best-seller Yardie, through the distribution of flyers at subway stations and the massive postering of readership and consumer target areas. " 'Basically, we postered the whole of Brixton,' [Adebayo] recalls. 'You woke up one morning and everywhere you looked in Brixton it said "Yardie". Within a few weeks, we'd sold thousands and thousands of copies.' "¹⁴ As Pope explained,

There was a product which simply wasn't being sold to the black public. Black people read and they'll buy books, but it's a question of PR. They need to be told where to get it, because they don't have the habit of going into the High Street bookshop and asking for a particular book. We thought there's got to be other ways of selling books.¹⁵ When few bookstores agreed to stock shelves with Yardie, Adebayo, Pope and Headley advertised in the black press and resorted to street peddling out of the boots of cars and by motorcycle, drumming up sales outside of dancehalls and Jamaican "patty" street stalls. Record shops, market stalls and news agents stocked the novel as well.

Adebayo and Pope court a broad target group of consumers and readers, appealing to educated, upwardly mobile thirty-somethings, music magazine fans and raggamuffin youths, in part through a diversification of enterprises and in part through Adebayo's self-promotion as a member of all of the above categories.¹⁶ Nevertheless, Adebayo seems committed to the dual mission of X-Press, to provide enjoyable reading material to the public and to construct a massive black readership. In our interview, Adebayo remembered the dearth of writing by black authors, and especially black British authors included in English courses during his school days. George Lamming, Sam Selvon and Andrew Salkey may have been writing novels about the lonely and alienating experiences of being a newly arrived Caribbean immigrant in Britain during the post-Empire Windrush era, but black British schoolchildren did not get adequate exposure to these writers. X-Press novels uniquely speak to the British-born generation who retain ties to the Caribbean islands in the form of occasional trips, family stories, verbal expressions and patwa, culinary preferences, and popular music, but are cut off from the current political and material experiences of the Caribbean islands in other profound ways. As Lloyd Baker, the protagonist of the X-Press novel Cop Killer says to his brother Philip, "Ours is the in-between generation. Our parents knew they were Caribbeans or Africans, but what about us? Our lot ain't too sure where we belong, here or there. Maybe our children and their children will think of themselves as truly being black British."¹⁷

Rastafari Versus the Yardie: Societal Critique in Victor Headley's Yardie

Although Victor Headley certainly creates a fascinating portrait of D., the drug-dealing protagonist of Yardie, by drawing upon images from consumer culture, the media and dancehall stylee, he also mitigates the appeal of such a lifestyle by characterizing it as a "road to self-destruction" that can end in inner delusions, madness and death. D. faces inescapable consequences for his actions. However, Headley also avoids spinning a simple morality tale. After decades of immigrant backlash and moderate social reform in England, D. appears on the scene, one of a new class of Jamaican immigrants who completely resist acculturation, British law and order, policing, and the "step ladder" approach to social climbing. At a time when the Empire's history has been nostalgically refigured on television in such miniseries as the Jewel and the Crown and rigorously indicted by numerous postcolonial theorists in international academies and formerly colonized nations, the Yardie, a figure who cannot be colonized, appears in British literature. He, instead, may colonize England, importing the dread and menace of living in a Third World ghetto "home" to the mother country. A product of neocolonial economic oppression, political tribalism, and an imported consumer and gun culture, he epitomizes the vices of cultures fed on Hollywoodesque morality: "Boom Bye-Bye" to anyone who crosses him.¹⁸ At least in the fictional world, he is not intimidated or humiliated by immigration authorities, police or bureaucratic agents. That is certainly some of his appeal as a fictional character. Even the specialized Yardie Squads are powerless to stop him:

The half-dozen officers who stared out of the windows of the vans like caged animals, were part of what has been called "high-profile policing" . . . Unless they were prepared to provoke a full-scale insurrection, there was no way they would leave the safety of the van even if they saw something outside that gave them reason to.¹⁹

Yet D. is also portrayed as a product of sound system culture and thus, roots reggae and ragga have, for decades, conveyed prophecies of his ascendancy in a world where "sufferers" have to hustle to survive. His ruthlessness was portended by Bob Marley, who warned that "a hungry man is an angry man". He is Peter Tosh's "Stepping Razor". In Headley's novel, Rastafarians, who take on the role of wise, spiritually centred, conscious and self-actualized mentors to the younger generation are either gunned down by drug posses or ignored by the powerful drug dons. Rastafari, sacramental ganja, roots reggae and the hopes for social change through spiritual redemption have been dashed away by a "cocaine" generation, dancehall and the gun. D. made an early choice about which path he would follow. During his childhood, he had the option to follow the path of consciousness and righteousness. Children of the early 1990s, Headley warns, are growing up during an era of dancehall music and gun lyrics. Previously,

the Rasta movement was the dominant influence in the life of the island and every song that came out of the leading studies of the era expounded on the Bible, African history, or Black consciousness. But times had changed; the lyrics coming from D.'s cassette were rooted in . . . the present state of the ghetto social, or anti-social life, the violence and drugs. (p. 52)

It is interesting to contextualize the arrival of the Yardie in British literature in terms of the contemporary status of Jamaicans in British society, public policy and policing, media representations, and popular culture. Yardie's author, who seems highly aware of British press reportage of Yardie criminal activities and Yardie Squad policing tactics, certainly employs some of the tropes of Jamaican gangsterism circulating in Britain at the time. Although he portrays D. as a ruthless drug lord, torturer, murderer and rapist, he does not glorify the life of a posse don for a young readership or criminalize black British society in general. The novel functions as a Rastafarian-influenced warning to Caribbean society, black Britons and the British society at large about the violent transformations in store for societies that do not find appropriate ways to fully enfranchise the youths of the current and future generations.

The novel begins with D.'s arrival from Jamaica to Heathrow Airport near London. A "mule" carrying a kilo of cocaine, D. escapes with one half of the load from the two rankings sent to "welcome" him to England, which he uses to finance his own new drug distribution operation, complete with labs, dealers and enforcers. What ultimately destroys D. is his own unconquerable addiction to cocaine, which contributes to his volatile temperament and rash behaviour. Early in the novel, readers are told of D.'s childhood dreams to escape from the grinding poverty of downtown Kingston for the prosperity of Britain, and of his initial forays into the drug business that would help his dreams and nightmares to materialize:

From school days in the poverty-stricken areas of downtown, dreaming of the big life he heard about from those who had managed to reach America, Canada, or England. He had waited for his break for years. The break out of the dusty, hungry streets and into the bright lights of big cities with their flashy cars and large houses. (p. 6)

In fact, it does not take long for D. to acquire the "flashy" symbols of financial success after he reaches England. Just as journalists and police documents have stressed the Yardie's preference for stylish clothes and cars, Headley emphasizes the way that D. is posturing, costuming, acquiring visibility and displaying the material successes a corporate executive might be able to afford:

As a prosperous businessman, D. had invested in his image and bought himself an almost new green Mercedes coupe. Several tailor-made suits, silk shirts, trousers, and expensive soft-leather shoes completed his style and made him one of the sharpest dressers in town. As a final compulsory touch, he had completed his look with an extensive range of expensive gold jewelry. For a newly arrived "immigrant", he looked like a million dollars. Understandably, he had become an instant celebrity in his new area, as much for his style as for his seemingly endless supply of crack. He had acquired a considerable following amongst the ghetto youth, eager to work for this new don and reap rich rewards. (p. 44)

This passage indicates that D. establishes his business enterprise, a high visibility, and a celebrity status by acquiring the material trappings of corporate and black underclass success. Headley's portrait certainly suggests the powerful lure that these signs offer, validating the fear expressed in police documents and newspapers that Jamaican Yardies will recruit large numbers of ghetto youth to join their merciless posses. Just as press and police fear, the newcomers, as presented by Headley, are completely amoral and responsible for increasing urban violence:

The high proportion of newly arrived Jamaican youths in the area had adversely affected the local hustlers; the competition was now tougher. Furthermore, the new-comers didn't operate by the same principles as their UK counterparts. They were totally ruthless; they didn't respect the established hierarchy, and were not prepared to allow anything like friendship or allegiances stand in their way. They were hungry, and wanted money. Lots of it, and now. As a result, in the last five years, the atmosphere in the area had become more tense, even more volatile, than before. The use of violence in settling "trade" disputes had now become common practice. (p. 27)

D., the antihero who finally destroys his operation by getting too involved in cocaine addiction himself, raping a rival posse member's woman friend, and getting arrested and framed on a murder rap by a rival posse leader, conforms in several ways to the sensationalist representations of Yardie criminals produced in public discourse and police documents.

However, "representation" and "identity" are different "narrative" constructs. As Stuart Hall has argued, "[i]dentity is a narrative of the self; it's the story we tell about the self in order to know who we are".²⁰ In a flashback about his brother, a conversation with a Rasta elder and other moments of reflection, Don D. reveals the disjunctures between how he performs the persona of the don-dadda, how he is represented and perceived by others, and how his own sense of his identity has been shaped. In these passages, the Yardie lifestyle is condemned, but the systemic injustices of Caribbean, US and British societies, and the damaging effects of global consumer networks are also condemned. Two Rastafarians in the text serve to bring to light the "truth" that both the ruthless Jamaican drug don and the international societies he invades are all participants in the same Babylonian system that will put the young generation at risk.

Headley implies that young Jamaican ghetto youths who are given better role models, values, training and educational opportunities might be able to escape the "vicious cycle of poverty and crime". D.'s brother Jerry had "turned away from a future as a ranks and become a Rasta" when he was eighteen (p. 38). Jerry fits the "Brother Man" image of the kind, conscious, socially committed Rasta brethren.²¹ He reasoned with elders in Bull Bay, took a job as a mechanic, relocated to Maxfield Avenue in Kingston and lived with a "pretty girl who had given him a baby daughter". Beloved by all, he assisted elderly neighbours, fed the hungry, and encouraged youths to learn a trade or a craft, holding "woodwork, painting, or mechanic workshops" (p. 37). He reasoned with everyone about "Africa, Marcus Garvey, and the achievements of Black people throughout history", and he could identify the intelligence and potential of the youths who frequented his yard and were in danger of turning to badmanism. D. adored his brother and might have been saved from the path he had chosen if his brother had lived. But Jerry objected to the cocaine trade and tried to protect his neighbourhood from the Spicer Posse dealers.

True to his new life, Jerry was firmly opposed to the drug trafficking that had started to swamp Jamaica. Situated as it is between South America the producer and the United States the consumer, the island had quickly become a transit point for the cocaine trade. The Bahamas, the original stop-over, were too exposed by then, and covered by the US Drug Enforcement Agency. Cocaine offered the means of making big money, and a sure route to a better life in the States for thousands of Jamaican youths. Almost overnight, it became as readily available as the locally produced ganja.

To a God-loving, clean-living Rastaman like Jah Jerry, cocaine was a devilish invention, manufactured by the white man to maintain Black People in a state of mental slavery. It brought nothing but suffering and death. (p. 96)

Jah Jerry's "overstanding" of the role that Jamaica played as middleman in an international drug marketplace and his criticisms of the deadly effect cocaine addiction and the violence of drug running would have on ghetto youths earned him a quick and violent death when he attempted to bar the Spicer Posse from his small corner of the world. D.'s Rastafarian brother contextualizes the involvement of youth in the drug trade by analysing economic and social conditions in neocolonial Jamaica as well as international flows of capital and drugs.

Headley also contextualizes the graft, illegal runnings and violence of youth culture by criticizing the violence of the state and police. Facing a lack of opportunities and equipped with inadequate education or skills, Jamaican underclass youth also feel the need to arm themselves when the "pressure drop" from the police. In neocolonial Jamaica, the police force, according to Headley, suffers from corruption, involvement in crime or extortion and excessive violence. D.'s friend Donna gave him sanctuary once when he was hiding from the police in Jamaica: "The policeman, Lancey, was the most ruthless officer in the Jamaican police force. Known for his efficiency as a legal killer (eradicator), he would have punished Donna for hiding D., on top of exacting a vicious revenge on him" (p. 16).²² The Jamaican police force is portrayed by Headley as just as corrupt and violent as the youths: "Police?! Anything ah run in Jamaica, police ina it. Anyway, right now the bad bwoys dem shoot down police too and feel no way. Ah so t'ings run ah Yard" (p. 184).

D.'s identity has been shaped not only by his status as a Yardie drug lord but also by his brother's idealism. Although he is involved too deeply and motivated too much by money to change his lifestyle, he feels the sting when Piper, an older Rastafarian, gently criticizes D. as a negative role model for the upcoming generation. Like Jah Jerry, Piper has contributed in many positive ways to his communities and to the younger generation.

Piper was well known around town. He was old enough to be D.'s father. He had been in England for years . . . Piper had worked in the community for a long time, setting up projects to train young people in various crafts, teaching drumming and coaching football teams. He was loved and respected by all in the community as a man of deep faith and education. It was said that he had graduated from university many years before, and that his boundless knowledge extended to numerous disciplines. Piper had witnessed the development of the black community over the last twenty years, being one of the first Dreads to come to England. (p. 56)

He mourns the senseless killings of young people, "Is like dem cyan wait fe kill someone. Any lickle t'ing, dem lick shot." Piper blames the needless deaths of so many on "vanity", "gold, money, drugs, even woman. Truly, man worse than beast" (p. 57). Society is also to blame for inculcating the youth with desires for the "spoils" without teaching the value of love and life:

Me seh society spoil dem, because it show dem dat money is all dat matters. Yet at the same time, education is set up a way dat mek dem feel it is of no value to dem. Imagine, a youth see a man who have a criss car, jewellery, and nice clothes and him know seh is not work and education the man get it t'rough. You nah feel seh the youth will want to do the same t'ing dat man do fe get money? (p. 58)

Piper rebukes D. for his explanations of the need to turn to crime for profit. When D. reminds Piper, "T'ings rough out deh, you know, Rasta," Piper replies with the Biblical saying commonly heard in Rastafari reasonings and reggae, "What good is it if a man gains the whole world and lose his own soul?" Although D. does not heed the wisdom of the Rasta elder's words, Piper's commentary and Jah Jerry's analyses perform a social critique of neocolonial Jamaican and British society, the values promoted by global capitalism and popular culture, and the Yardie alternative for survival. All are Babylon.

Raggamuffin Consciousness and (Anti)Social Agency: Interrogating the Yardie Phenomenon in Donald Gordon's Cop Killer

If Rastafarians and the "roots" generation has been superseded in popular culture by the dancehall messengers of profit, slackness and fratricidal violence, X-Press novels position the raggamuffin as the mediating force between generations and various sectors of society. The raggamuffin protagonists in X-Press novels are generally in their late twenties to early thirties (men or women), educated, informed and opinionated about the experiences of Caribbeans in Britain, aware of class divisions and economic issues, knowledgeable about historically black boroughs, urban renewal and conflicts with the state or police, and sometimes involved in community improvement or youth groups. Raggamuffins hang out in the dancehalls and may smoke a little mind-clearingsensi; however, they are adamantly not involved in the drug trade and voice heavy criticism against the detrimental social impact of cocaine. X-Press raggamuffins remember the roots musics and sound system culture of their formative years but also keep their radios tuned to the "ruff" ragga riddims of the pirate airwaves. The ragga lyrics both threaten an unjust state with retribution and mourn self-destructive violence in youth culture. Raggas appreciate the way that the British state has been intimidated by reports of the .Yardie. incursion while they recognize that black Britain has been continually subjected to damaging and sensationalist misrepresentation by the press and police. Though they might drive classy BMWs, sport chic dreadlocks and dress in ragga style, they are not preoccupied solely with the trappings of the upwardly mobile lifestyle. The ragga aspect of their identities keeps them in touch with the masses, and they choose to live in predominantly black neighbourhoods. Their bookshelves are filled with X-Press books, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Roots, and other popular anticolonial and Black Power consciousness-raising material. The raggamuffin theorizes critical pedagogies for "place making" in the city.

Although some raggamuffins in X-Press novels "settle the score" with Britain by pulling an extended and outrageous skank, such as Leroy Massop's illicit affair with Princess Diana in The Ragga and the Royal, what made Donald Gorgon's novel Cop Killer²³ particularly controversial was, of course, the fact that the protagonist takes out a murderous revenge on cops, and the novel incorporates rap and dancehall gun lyrics with a "revenge" message. As Houston A. Baker, Jr, notes in Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy, "cop killer" music lyrics stir a "justified fear on the part of white men that a black OG (Original Gangster) order does exist, and that in such an OG imaginary, someone is always desirous of actually shooting the sheriff - or at least of challenging seriously the law on its own public and economic grounds".²⁴ The novel's title, of course, reminds readers of Ice-T's speed metal song "Cop Killer":

I got my 12 gauged sawed offI got my headlights turned offI'm bout to dust some cops offCop Killer, better you than meCop Killer, fuck police brutality²⁵

Ice-T's cop killer song provoked a national moral panic in the United States.²⁶ The song denounces the legitimized authority police have "to kill a minority". Versioning themes already expressed and suppressed in rap music, the X-Press novel Cop Killer intervened in the contested arena between black urban expressivity and state law-and-order campaigns. Adebayo and Pope advertise X-Press paperbacks as "Books with Attitude", even echoing the name of the controversial rap group NWA in their own promotional slogans. In addition to taking deadly revenge against the police in retribution for excessive brutality and corruption, the raggamuffin Cop Killer meditates upon the various means by which black British citizens may protect their rights, fight racialism in the justice system and demand full respect and citizenship. Reggae, ragga and rap boom from Ruffneck FM, the pirate radio station in Hackney, providing Lloyd Baker and the city with a running commentary on the urban struggle for civil and economic justice.

In the opening scene of the novel the police are staking out a neighbourhood in Hackney. Their conversations focus on their frustrations about the changing face of the British nation and urban neighbourhoods. The commanding sergeant complains: "God, this place is looking more like fucking Istanbul every day. This used to be a really nice area, but I'm glad I don't live here anymore. It's a fucking rubbish tip. All the shit of the world comes here, from Pakistan, from Niggerstan and from Coon City. What a fucking mess, eh?" (p. 2). In this global neighbourhood, there is one immigrant who makes the police more tense than any other, the Jamaican Yardie. In police logic, any encounter with a black man is potentially deadly. All black men are constructed as possible Yardies: "With the growing number of attacks on officers, [the Inspector] was only too aware that these days being a policeman carried no special dispensation from a yard man's 'matic or a cockney's sawn-off" (p. 4). Because of paranoia caused by the Yardie scare, police make their "house calls" with their own hardware, breaking down doors and depending on the element of surprise and fire power in case they find themselves in the middle of a Yardie shoot-out. Following a false lead, the police raid the Bakers' residence, on the suspicion that Phillip Baker might be a "baby gangster" and drug dealer. After the police use a sledge hammer to bust in the door, they panic and shoot to death Verone Baker, "aged 57, born in the Parish of St Ann, Jamaica, mother of Phillip and Lloyd Baker" (p. 10).

This cinematic scene has become an unfortunate but common trope in journalism, anti-racism campaigns and, more recently, in studies of the Yardie phenomenon.²⁷ Race relations workers deemed these kinds of raids on black people's homes "unnecessary and provocative" often carried out in a "haphazard and cavalier fashion".²⁸ In 1985 a group of officers raided Cherry Groce's house in Brixton, in search of her son who was wanted for armed robbery. Although he no longer lived there, the officers "smashed down the door with a sledge hammer". When approached by an officer pointing his weapon at her, Cherry Groce backed away, at which point she was shot. She survived but was paralysed and confined to a wheelchair.²⁹ Her case remains well known today, and, at the time, served as a rallying event for collective organization against the heavy-handed policing against black people. Cynthia Jarrett's case also served to politicize people on the issue of police tactics and is inscribed in the memory of black Britain. As police were searching her son's possessions, one officer pushed Mrs Jarrett out of the way, causing her to fall. Patricia Jarrett called for an ambulance, but Cynthia was dead upon arrival at the hospital.³⁰ The Yardie Squads intensified smash and search procedures. Innocent people, who have been falsely accused by informers, have been startled out of their beds by such raids. These cases raise serious questions about the police procedures and the specific targeting of racial and ethnic groups for specialized surveillance. Thus, the scenario presented in Cop Killer is not simply a sensationalist fictive invention designed to create unwarranted animosity towards the police. Rather, the realistic scenario, presented in an extended work of fiction, allows for meditation upon the systemic failures of policing that allow these tragedies to take place, the impact of police and journalistic Yardie hype, and, more generally, the avenues of action available to black Britons who seek to create and demand a just society.

By analysing the aftermath of the shooting, the way the case is handled by the justice system, the way London's black community reacts and the way Verone Baker's two sons, Lloyd and Phillip, each react to their mother's death, the novel makes a strong statement about how black Britain is configured in various public discourses on race, citizenship and nation. Ruffneck FM, the pirate radio station, intervenes in these discourses as the "Voice of Hackney" (p. 10). When London's black activists react loudly against the shooting, the Metropolitan police commissioner takes the bare minimum actions that will quell a possible civic disorder: "Realising that he had a potential riot on his hands, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner suspended all the officers involved and charged the Inspector with murder. Three months later an inquest returned a verdict of 'unlawful killing' over the death of Mrs Baker" (p. 19). As a defence, the officers claimed that the shooting had been a "terrible accident", and that "police were risking their lives every time they raided the property of a 'Yardie drugs dealer' and that they had to be extra vigilant" (p. 20). Thus the police play upon the Yardie scare as justification for excessive violence and unwarranted harassment of innocent people who have absolutely nothing to do with any real or mythic Yardie crime wave.

Lloyd, one of Mrs Baker's sons, constantly criticizes press and police representations of black crime, his mother's death and the way the Yardie phenomenon is used to manipulate public policies and practices. For instance, as his rage increases, Lloyd pins clippings of all of the newspaper articles covering the case to his bulletin board and wall. He frequently "frames" the press coverage for the reader, explicitly pointing out the hypocrisies of the public sphere and state. He also expresses a pain and fury that insist categorically upon the need to attack such misrepresentations and injustices:

A cutting with the headline: "Murder Charge Cop Walks Free" was pinned to the centre of the board; a constant reminder of the pain he had endured and the pain he did not want to forget. A gun target sight had been drawn carefully and purposely in red felt pen over the face of the police Inspector who had shot his mother . . .

(p. 17)

Police responses to Caribbean immigration are placed within a historical continuum. Lloyd remembers that during his teenage years " 'stop and harass' was routine police policy with black men" (p. 40). To Lloyd, the current emphasis on the Yardie incursion reveals the racialist national subtexts of belonging and exclusion. Lloyd believes that the police "just couldn't handle the fact that things had changed, that the streets of London now belonged to black youth". However, the real and imagined brutalities of the Yardies confirmed that urban territories were under the proprietorship of communities and that Yardies operating in these communities could intimidate the police force drastically by the heinous nature of their violence: "they saw a potential 'Yardie' in every black face" (p. 39). Increased surveillance and harassment could be justified then as a response to the Yardie threat. One clear message Lloyd learns from his friend Herbsman who lives in Brixton is that the Yardie scare has at least forced the police to realize that they can also be subjected to "excessive force": "The cops got guns, but we got guns, too. The only time dem respeck we, is when they're staring down the barrel of a Smith & Wesson . . . 'Boom, boom!' " (p. 33).

As Lloyd becomes more enraged and withdrawn, planning his murderous revenge, his brother, Phillip, responds to their mother's death by becoming a spokesperson for the "Justice for Verone Baker Campaign Group". The author interrogates the efficacy of collective action, of fighting the system through standard channels of advocacy. Although only twenty-three years old and a college student, Phillip trains himself in the legalities of the case, investigates the possibility of civil prosecution of the officers responsible for his mother's death after the sergeant is simply transferred to another station and cleared of criminal charges, plans a "Black Rights" demonstration and consults with Hackney's black member of Parliament, Erskine Pinnock. After a brief sojourn to Jamaica, Phillip gains perspective on the "black experience" in England, which makes him more determined in his activism for a more just society. Speaking to his brother, Lloyd, he voices a view that is repeated in other X-Press books: Caribbean people born in Britain, though they may identify with the Caribbean islands, are culturally British.

I'll tell you something, big brother, I didn't think I'd say. I'm glad to be back in this country, though. I really know now what the expression, "black British" means. Over here we think we're all Caribbeans, and you get all these geezers with the yellow, green and black all over their motors, but most of them couldn't survive out there. It would be like going to another world. It really is a very different culture over there. It made me realize that we'd better stop looking to the Caribbean as if it's home and one day we're going back. That ain't going to happen. Yeah, we all love chat patois . . . But really and truly when it comes to emigrating back, we couldn't put up with some of the harsh realities of life over there. We got to start demanding a lot more from this country, and the way this country treats us. There ain't no fuckin' escape route to some other country. This is our country. All these people who go around calling themselves Jamaicans, when they was born up in Hackney Hospital need to get with the programme. As far as I'm concerned, we're black British, and white man and black man had better wake up to that reality. (p. 99)

Lloyd respects his brother's activism but doubts that channel of action will gain any results or a conviction of any of the officers involved in Verone Baker's murder. He warns his brother, "I don't think anything will come of it, because there ain't no justice for black people in this country. I read a line in a book which said, ' "justice" is the means by which established injustices are sanctioned' " (pp. 21-22). Then Lloyd quotes the Peter Tosh reggae song, "I don't want no peace an' love an' there ain't ever gonna be no peace until we get equal rights an' justice . . . Without justice, the only peace they've got for us is 'rest in fuckin' peace . . . or rest in fuckin' pieces' " (p. 22). In a letter to a journalist, Lloyd later expounds on his theories of societal injustice further after he takes on the persona of the Cop Killer: "Justice is the construction of those who have the power to oppress and subjugate those in a weaker position" (p. 51).

The dialectic between the world views of the two brothers presents contrasting visions of the black experience in England. The pervasiveness of police brutality is embedded in everyday Jamaican speech. The brothers suggest this by the casual greeting they exchange, which becomes a sardonic joke between the brothers: "You wan' tes' me, well step right in and take some licks" (p. 98). The novel's author "tiefs" this line from Linton Kwesi Johnson's popular dub poem "Street 66", a poem about the police banging on someone's door. The inhabitant invites the police to "step right in and take some licks", meaning, of course, that the police will get a beating and the citizen will not passively give in to police aggression. For Lloyd, turning his aggression against the police becomes his prime directive. "Anger, revenge, justice, and nihilism" become the "raw motivators" in his life (p. 90). Like other characters in other X-Press novels, Lloyd mourns the wasted talents of his and the younger generations:

At school he had seen the dreams of able black friends destroyed by a system that labelled them fit only for the dole, factory, or street corner. So much talent blown away. He despised all those wasted years he had spent working in pointless jobs for bosses who looked at him as though he was a form of life one step up from a dog. Every day, as he cruised the streets, he saw too many hopeless, soul-destroyed youths who burned with an undirected, uncontrollable rage. The living dead of a damned generation. The going-nowhere victims of a society, whose power to destroy minds, was stronger than that of any known obeah.

(p. 91)

As Lloyd develops his plan of revenge against the system, Burning Spear's vintage roots reggae song plays in his mind, "Do you remember the days of slavery?" He believes that British society perpetuates his generation in "mental slavery". Becoming more generally interested in abuses of the system against "ordinary people by the enforcers of law and order", Lloyd fills his notice board and then his walls with clippings from theGuardian and the Inquirer which suggest the high incidence of police brutality and the media focus on the criminalization of ordinary people (pp. 94-95).

Constantly tuned into the pirate radio Ruffneck FM and fed by reading X-Press novels, philosophy, Black Power literature and manuals on building explosives from common household items, Lloyd throws off the yokes of mental slavery. The reggae and ragga music play a key role in Lloyd's reasonings about societal justice and violence. Society attempts to censor and outlaw music that attacks the injustices of its foundational practices and values. In return, the pirate stations adopt an outlaw stance: "All day long, the cop killer had been listening to music so ruff, tuff, hard and loud it couldn't be played on legal radio, no way. But this wasn't legal, it was Ruffneck FM style and they were outlaws because they played the records people wanted to hear" (p. 108). One of the relevant messages that the musical outlaws relay to the massive is that the way to demand respect from a corrupt and racialist society is to fight fire with fire. As one rap tune defines the "gangsta fanatic", "Now, I'm the kinda nigger that is built to last if you fuck wit' me, I'll put a foot in yo' ass" (p. 11). Although Lloyd adamantly objects to fratricidal violence and the way that young men can ruin their lives with cocaine and guns, he comes to believe that a society that employs excessive violence in policing its immigrant populace must be dealt with through excessive violence. Lloyd hums along with the radio as a dancehall MC chats about the violent deaths and wasted talents of so many reggae musicians, sound system operators, and deejays, who were either killed because they dared to express politically dangerous opinions or died senselessly because of their connections with gangsterism:

Same way dem kill Big John, Fluxy and Echo,And make Prince Far I's woman a widowSame way dem kill Peter Tosh, Free I an' Tubby,Next t'ing me know dem find Tenor Saw ina gullyLee Van Cliff he died as a crackheadDirtsman dem shoot him up inna him bed

(p. 16)

Listening to sound clashes and musical shoot-outs on the pirate waves, Lloyd begins to prepare for his "showdown" with police, developing Rhygin'-like posturing. The radio deejay calls out, "Dis is the one an' only, one hundred per cent pure wickedness, Rrrrrrrffneck FM. Dem call we the assassin 'cause we nah tek no prisoners, fe true. Hackney posse, hol' tight. Tottenham massive, rrrrrespeck. Stokey rude bwoys, big up . . . An' to all the South London pirates - yuh cyann tes' we. Fe True!" (pp. 83-84). Employing the cinematic rhetoric of gangster films and cowboy westerns, the deejay organizes the urban metropole into black British massives. Lloyd practises his imaginary shoot-outs in front of the mirror, alone in his room:

His head still spinning from the lethal mixture of sensi and brew, he danced around the flat with his knees dipped slightly and his fingers cocked up in the air to simulate pistols. He danced over to the photograph of the police Inspector on his notice board and took careful aim down the sight. He fired both his 'guns' and with a smile of satisfaction, blew the imaginary smoke from the 'barrels'. . .

(p. 23)

The Ruffneck pirate riddims employ the same Hollywoodesque rhetoric to provide Lloyd with an arsenal catalogue:

M16 is an eradication gun,Forty-Four is a Clint Eastwood gun,Forty-five is a bad bwoy gun, also a cowboy gun,Twenty-two is a lickle gun,Winchester an Indian gun . . .

(p. 53)

This catechism for baby gangsters demonstrates that gun violence is a construction of Western society at large. Jamaican popular culture and the posses may "version" these tropes of gun culture, but as the toast reminds listeners, the Winchester was both used to kill Native Americans - and used by Native Americans to kill their aggressors.

When Lloyd acts, smashing up a motorcycle officer in a road accident, cracking an officer's skull with a concrete block, cutting the sergeant's throat, blowing up the police station at Bethnal Green, shooting a cop during a traffic stop and the inspector, the press and police assume some of the attacks to be connected to the Yardie crime wave. Lloyd, once more, serves to analyse the way that black people and Yardies are misrepresented in the public sphere:

The undertone of much of the media reporting had a distinctly racial bias. The tabloid press had seized on the quote from Scotland Yard which said that the colleague of the murdered officer thought be saw two black youngsters running away from the scene laughing. By the time it had appeared in the press, the possibility had become a fact. One newspaper had even come up with the headline "Yardie Probe Over Cop Murder". The story quoted an unnamed police source, saying that detectives were examining a possible link between drug dealers in the area and the killing. (p. 111)

The boys the officer sees running from the crime scene are actually two fearful white boys dressed in the raggy-baggy style. The press automatically racializes the attack against the police and blames it on the nation's number one bogeyman, the Yardie.

The actual Cop Killer has no relationship at all to the drug trade or Yardies, however. In this way, the novel suggests the manner in which the press has largely inflated and mythologized the Yardie phenomenon.

State Gangsterism and the Ragga Utopia: Contending Representations of Black Britain in X-press Novels

The X-Press novels intervene in public discourses of national identity, race, class, economics and social justice by examining the contradictions between the positive social transformations some sectors of black Britain have experienced and the various ways in which British society has continued to "bar the door" to its black citizenry. For instance, Cop Killer includes a detailed description of Brixton's "makeover" since the days of the 1980s public disorders and its importance as the "black capital of Europe":

"Downtown" Brixton resembled a neighbourhood in New York City rather than South London. It now boasted to be the black capital of London, which was the black capital of Britain, which was the black capital of Europe. The area now contained a multi-complex cinema, a string of upwardly mobile buppie shops, and the largest Caribbean-style market for a thousand miles in any direction. This battle-scarred area of London and its long-standing Caribbean community had overcome all adversity to become a bustling, booming, happy neighbourhood, with a rastaman's shop every other corner; blasting the latest reggae tune through mega-speakers and where you were never more than twenty yards away from a pattie. Recently, a new breed of black businessmen/women had moved into the cheap, ex-frontline stores, offering a more varied and better quality product than the traditional businesses. This new breed looked professional. They had their shop fronts painted in the most elegant colours and revived the ethic that "the customer is always right" . . . Nowadays white shoppers flocked to the place also, reassured that the area was no longer a threat. After all, "Brixton Riot" was now the name of a rum cocktail in a buppies winebar across the road from the tube station.

(p. 29)

X-Press novels proudly represent the self-generating economic activity of areas such as Brixton. Although this is the ideal X-Press world recreated out of the ashes of the riots - a ragga Utopia where reggae fills the air waves of the streets - the gentrification, urban renewal, and professionalization of historically black neighbourhoods has not guaranteed an end to the societal hostility against black citizens. Despite the public promotion of antidiscrimination policies and the rise of a black middle class, many injustices persist. X-Press poses a variety of responses to injustice . an examination of biased discursive representations, collective activism and, if all else fails, militancy. The Cop Killer explains his vendetta to Jackie, a journalist from the leading black British newspaper, by using the same explanation that the Yardie Don D. gave to justify his path to the Rasta elder Piper in Yardie:

T'ings rough out deh, yah know. An militant times you need a militant solution, seen? . . . A lot of youts nowadays choose the rough way . . . Robbing, stealing and so on. What kinda way is dat, enh? People say they.re bad. But you need to ask why they are like that? . . . If those youts had opportunities they.d stand a chance, but they ain't got none . . .

(p. 167)

In the novels of X-Press, reggae, ragga, dancehall, jungle and rap musics carried throughout Britain amplify the militant observations of a black populace that 1990s Britain has not achieved social justice or multicultural harmony in the urban environs.

Critics such as Devil's Advocate's Darcus Howe might complain that X-Press presents a narrow range of identities, lures young readers to the "Yardie" life and exacerbates the clashes among black communities, the state and police. Against this charge, I contend that X-Press novels strongly criticize both gangsterism and the mythologizing of black criminality by the police and press. During the summer that I first interviewed Dotun Adebayo and Steve Pope - a few days before the interview, in fact . Brian Douglas, a Caribbean man, was beaten to death by the London Metropolitan Police. Much was made of the fact in the press and by racial justice activist groups that Douglas had been beaten by an American-style baton. When the police force had first adopted the longer baton, members of the black community accurately predicted that its first victim would be a black man. Douglas's death brought out over one thousand people to demonstrate outside Kennington police station.³¹ X-Press novels address the policing of the Caribbean populace and popular culture in Britain, in a literary world where few other sources take on the same task. The incisive raggamuffin "cultural studies" and the musical and lyrical weapons in X-Press novels defend the importance of the ruff pirate and outlaw sounds of 1990s black Britain dancehall space for creating a space where youths can reflect on the serious challenges facing black communities and society at large.