Celebrating poet and activist Linton Kwesi Johnson

For those of us in the U.S. who have been following the violent racist and xenophobic rioting in the UK and the movement that has arisen to counter it, it comes as no surprise that Black Britons have been affected. The long history of British racism against Black residents, and those of Caribbean ancestry, is a subject I have covered frequently here, in stories about the Windrush Generation and their descendants. 

One of the key figures of the resistance over many decades has been internationally renowned poet, academic, and activist Linton Kwesi Johnson. Born in rural Jamaica on August 24, 1952, Johnson migrated to the UK with his father at 11 years old to join his Windrush generation mother who was already living in London.  

Johnson has gone on to become “only the second living poet to have his work included in Penguin Modern Classics.” Join us in celebrating his birthday, his life, and his impact.

RELATED STORY: Black Music Sunday: Celebrating Black History Month in the UK with dub poetry

Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. Hope you’ll join us here every Saturday. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.

I grew interested in Johnson years ago, but not for his poetry. On a trip to Europe in 1971, I got to meet with members of several European groups of Black Panthers, including members of the British Black Panther Party, which I wrote about in 2011 for Black Kos, in “The fire this time.” As a member of the BPP here in the U.S., their existence was a major surprise for me. One of the founders was Johnson.

In 2009, Maya Jaggi profiled him for The Guardian:

Linton Johnson was born in 1952 in Chapelton, a small town in the British colony of Jamaica. His grandparents were peasant farmers the land could no longer support. His mother Sylvena was a domestic, “washing clothes for single men”; his father Eric, a baker and sugar-estate worker, was one of her customers. The couple separated when Linton was seven (he has five half-sisters and two half-brothers). Sylvena emigrated to Britain shortly before Jamaican independence in 1962 and Linton spent three years with his maternal grandmother, “dirt poor but happy, farming, tending animals, harvesting sugar cane”, before joining his mother in Brixton, aged 11. When his father died in 1982, he wrote the moving elegy Reggae fi Dada, blaming social conditions for his death.

Johnson found London cold and ugly. “It wasn’t the picture-book idea one has of the mother country.” Yet he was at ease among Brixton’s large Jamaican community, and “happy because I was with my mother”. A machinist and part-time dressmaker, Sylvena remarried and, since retiring in 1988, has lived in Jamaica’s Montego Bay. “She was a hard-working woman throughout her life; I worship the ground she walks on,” Johnson says. “If there’s any good things about me, I got them from her.”

His activism began when he joined the youth wing of the British Black Panthers when he was still at school. What did that entail exactly? “Political education. You had to take part in demonstrations, sell the newspapers and study certain texts. We read Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver and Seize the Time by Bobby Seale, but also Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams and The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson. For us, class was important as well as race in the struggle.”

[…]

His poems first appeared in the journal Race Today, which was published by the Brixton-based radical black collective of the same name, which he belonged to alongside his friend, the late Darcus Howe. They were written, he says, “out of the deep sense of alienation and rejection” that his post-Windrush generation experienced in Britain. “In Jamaica, we were schooled to be British, to wave the flag when the Queen came, but when we came here we were othered by the rest of British society. That kind of estrangement was profound and it is one reason why reggae was so important to us. It gave us a sense of independent identity that was all our own.”

Two books followed, 1974’s Voices of the Living and the Dead and 1975’s Dread Beat and Blood, the latter also providing the title for his first album, which was released by Virgin Records in 1978. Made on a budget of £2,000, it signalled much of what was to come. His spoken-word lyrics, anchored and given heft by Dennis Bovell’s deft, dub-wise production, often sounded like warnings from the heart of a disfranchised black British community, whose rage at heavy-handed policing would stoke the riots of the early 1980s in Brixton, Toxteth and St Pauls.

From the album, the title song:

Will Hoare wrote for Constellations about one of Johnson’s most recognized poems, “Inglan Is a Bitch”:

‘Inglan is a bitch is another classic piece of performance poetry which focuses on the struggles of an immigrant living in London. Johnson moved to London to live in Brixton in 1965. 

[…]

The poem essentially describes to the reader a list of poorly paid jobs he was forced to do whilst living in London ending each stanza with the phrase ‘Inglan is a bitch, there’s no escaping it’. The repetition of this phrase throughout the poem keeps the audience reminded of his subject, essentially saying ‘it’s a horrible life but there’s no better option’. The phrase is followed in each stanza by another line such as ‘No baddah try fi hide fram it’ and ‘Y´uhaffi know how fi survive in it’. This last line appears somewhat comforting each time and hinders the effect of the irate ‘inglan is a bitch’ line. The repetition of this stanza also means it acts almost as a sort of chorus within the poem.

In 2009, Alex Pryce, wrote for the British Council’s Literature site a critical perspective on Johnson’s work:

Linton Kwesi-Johnson can be said to be the most significant Jamaican poet writing in the U.K. because his verse is read and appreciated widely and far beyond the community it is initially grounded in.

Yet, for such an influential contemporary voice, Kwesi-Johnson appears to have published little – a mere 5 collections since 1974. Numerical values aside, there can be no doubt that what has been published is of immense cultural importance. Publishing editors apparently concur as in 2002 he became the first black poet to have his Selected Poems (2006) published in the Penguin Classics series. … His selection for this esteemed series is testament to the immediate and enduring power of his work both during the 30 years they address and to readers today.

[…]

Russell Banks in his introduction to Mi Revalueshanary Fren (2002) succinctly identifies Kwesi-Johnson’s poems as works ‘that make us sing with a voice that mingles our intimate own with a stranger’s, the poet’s intimate own … we end up singing a people’s song’. This musical element is an important part of Kwesi-Johnson’s art; its reggae heritage lends rhythm, and even in some instances, theme. Music, like verse, offers the possibility of transcendent freedom in ‘Bass Culture’ when ‘di beat will shif / as di culture alltah / when oppression scatah’ (Dread, Beat An’ Blood). The ‘musik of blood / black reared’ (‘Bass Culture’) is part of community, but it is one forced into resistance, at war with itself because of its subordinate class status and the many social problems that causes.

Johnson describes himself as a reluctant interviewee. … But rereading all the interviews he has given over the years, I was struck by how comprehensively they chart each turn in the evolving history of British race relations. From the Black Panther movement to the New Cross fire and Brixton riots of 1981, through the Metropolitan police’s notorious Special Patrol Group, the Stephen Lawrence murder and the Macpherson report, right up to the Grenfell Tower tragedy, Johnson has provided the social commentary absent from so much of the public narrative. Sometimes, he has sounded full of rage – and at other times, more hopeful. I’m curious, therefore, to hear how he would characterise the present moment.

“In terms of our country, it would be foolish to say that we haven’t made some progress. Because we have.” […]

“But, right now, we are living through a time of reaction; the rise of Conservative populism. And some things simply won’t go away. I’m sure I’ll be crucified for saying this, but I believe that racism is very much part of the cultural DNA of this country, and most probably has been so from imperial times. And, in spite of the progress that we have made, it’s there. It is something we have to contend with in our everyday lives.”

Gary Younge, professor of sociology at the University of Manchester, interviewed Johnson for Chatham House in 2023 about what “post-racial” really means:

LKJ
My parents’ generation and mine, we so much wanted to be a part of British society but there were these barriers erected. But I think what has happened over the years is that through our anti-racist struggles against the marginalization of our children in schools, for equal treatment on the factory floor and equal pay, to get justice in the courts, all of the battles we have fought, we have been successful at last to integrate ourselves into British society.

But it’s just nonsense that we are in a ‘post-racial’ situation. I hate that term. A measure of how much we’ve become integrated is that I heard a couple of black women in my local pub in Brixton talking about all these Eastern Europeans coming over here and taking our jobs and I’m thinking, ‘Really?’ That was a measure of how British we had become.

Younge
That seems a double-edged sword – we have become very integrated into a racist society.

LKJ
In British politics today, there are quite a few black and Asian MPs in both political parties, and in the Tories some of these people of colour seem to believe they have to be more anti-immigrant, anti-working class and express extreme right-wing views to feel comfortable within the Tory party – people like Kwasi Kwarteng, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel.

Four years ago, Johnson was awarded one of the UK’s most prestigious literary awards, the PEN Pinter Prize.

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