Burning Age of Rage

Ifirst encountered​ Linton Kwesi Johnson on TV. My family was watching a rerun of his performance of ‘Inglan Is a Bitch’, which aired on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1980. In a pork pie hat and dark glasses, Johnson delivered his poem about the Caribbean migrant experience of his parents’ generation in a rhythmic laid-back drawl:

well mi dhu day wok an mi dhu nite wok
mi dhu clean wok an mi dhu dutty wok
dem seh dat black man is very lazy
but if yu si how mi wok yu woodah seh mi crazy

Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin it

The sight of a Black man openly criticising Britain on national television reverberated through diasporic circles. The Jamaican poet Mutabaruka responded with his own performance poem, ‘White Man Country’, whose central refrain Johnson quoted in a piece in the Guardian in 2005: ‘it no good fi stay inna white man country too long.’ The piece is collected in Time Come, a selection of Johnson’s prose from 1975 to 2021. The book includes essays, interviews, fragments of memoir and elegies, unified by Johnson’s central concerns – Black British experience, reggae culture and social justice. It’s an index not only of his thought but also of the great upheavals in British race relations over the last fifty years.

Johnson was born in Clarendon, Jamaica, in 1952. His parents separated when he was seven. Johnson and his older sister were sent to live with their maternal grandmother in Sandy River, a village he describes in one of the pieces in the collection as ‘almost untouched by modernity’, lacking electricity, paved roads or public transport. ‘I come from Jamaican peasantry,’ he writes. ‘We ate what we grew.’ His grandmother was illiterate but immersed him in Jamaica’s oral culture: folk songs, riddles, Anansi stories and especially the Psalms and Proverbs of the King James Bible. Johnson recalls these biblical cadences blending into the rhythms of everyday speech, and later into the language of reggae and dub poetry.

In November 1963, Johnson went to join his mother, who had emigrated to England to work as a nurse. London, he had heard, was a city of great ladies and dukes and horse-drawn carriages; instead he found a grey landscape of bleak buildings and biting winds. More shocking still was the existence of a white English peasantry; the ‘arrivants’ (to borrow Kamau Brathwaite’s term) didn’t know that there would be slums in England, or that the slums would be where they had to live. Johnson was enrolled in Tulse Hill School, a large comprehensive for boys. Despite having excellent grades, he was put in the lowest educational stream, a fate common to immigrant children. He describes it as one of his earliest experiences of institutional racism.

Johnson’s adolescence coincided with a period of intensifying racial tensions, aggravated by Enoch Powell’s fanatical campaigning and by the ‘suspected person’ or ‘sus’ law, which allowed police to stop and search people suspected of being in breach of the 1824 Vagrancy Act. The sus law was disproportionately deployed against Black youth in areas such as Brixton, which Johnson described as having ‘a lot of the feel of Kingston’. He later satirised the law in his poem ‘Sonny’s Lettah’, in which the speaker writes home to his mother about his brother’s arrest. Poetry satisfied the ‘need for self-expression at a formative period of my life’. But politics came with it: Johnson joined the British Black Panther Party while still at school, and was introduced to Black consciousness literature for the first time: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.

One piece collected here describes a Saturday afternoon in 1972 when Johnson came across a Black man being roughed up by plainclothes police in Brixton Market. He took out paper and pen and got the young man’s name and address to make sure there was a record. Four officers intervened and threw Johnson, along with the young man, into the back of a police van, where two Black women were already being held. They were taken to Brixton police station. In his cell, Johnson requested medical attention. Once released, he saw his own doctor, whose notes would prove vital in ensuring that the police involved were assigned to other duties.

In 1973 Johnson went to Goldsmiths College to study sociology. ‘When I enrolled I was a 21-year-old political and cultural activist dedicated to changing the world,’ he later said. His degree didn’t answer all the questions that ‘haunted’ him as a young immigrant, but ‘I left Goldsmiths armed with ways of making sense of the world around me.’ There were other formative influences. He read widely, and quickly absorbed the work of Léopold Senghor, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka, whose poetry drew on vernacular speech patterns and the rhythms of jazz and blues. Through New Beacon Books, a radical bookshop and publisher in North London, Johnson met the Trinidadian poet and activist John La Rose, who became his mentor. He was also introduced to Caribbean intellectuals including Brathwaite, Andrew Salkey and Sam Selvon.

With Selvon’s encouragement, Johnson abandoned his attempts to write poetry in standard English and began experimenting with Jamaican Creole. His Goldsmiths dissertation on the sociology of reggae lyrics was important too. ‘I wanted to write words that sounded like a bassline,’ he told an interviewer. ‘I wanted my metre to be the metre of the bassline, and the actual vocalisation of the words to be like the reggae bassline.’ He was drawn to the work of the Jamaican poet and folklorist Louise ‘Miss Lou’ Bennett-Coverley and the improvised vocal styles of Jamaican sound system ‘deejays’ or ‘toasters’, who talked or chanted over instrumental tracks.

Johnson’s first collection, Voices of the Living and the Dead, was published in 1974. A year earlier, he had performed the title poem on stage at London’s Keskidee Centre, the first Black arts centre in Britain. (A group of Johnson’s old schoolfriends, Rasta Love, provided musical accompaniment with Nyabinghi drumming.) His poems from this period document his early political activism from ‘the frontline’ in Brixton. ‘Five Nights of Bleeding’ was dedicated to Leroy Harris, a young Black man stabbed at a party in South London:

night number one was in BRIXTON:
SOFRANO B sound system
was a beating out a rhythm with a fire
coming down his reggae reggae wire.
it was a sound shaking down your spinal column,
a bad music tearing up your flesh;
and the rebels them start a fighting
the youth them just turn wild.
it’s war amongst the rebels;
madness, madness, war.

In ‘All Wi Doin is Defendin’, Johnson addresses the police, warning that ‘all oppression/can do is bring/passion to di heights of eruption.’ Poems such as these came to seem almost a prediction of uprisings to come, in London, Birmingham and Liverpool, but Johnson denied having any special foresight:

After the carnival riots of 1976 and 1977 in Notting Hill … people began to say that my early 1970s verse was prophetic. I don’t know about that; what I do know is that if you were a young Black person in the early 1970s living in urban Britain, you did not have to be prescient to know that sooner or later the police would ignite an explosion.

Dread Beat an’ Blood, Johnson’s second book of poems, appeared in 1975. It includes ‘Doun de Road’, which addressed the rise of the National Front and the need for ‘futile fighting’ among Black men to come to an end:

and the National Front is on the rampage
making fire bombs fe burn we.

terror fire terror fire reach we:
such a suffering we suffering
in this burning age of rage.

Johnson described it as the book on which ‘my reputation as a reggae poet was built’ and it’s often mentioned as one of the most influential works of poetry published in Britain during the 1970s. When he graduated from Goldsmiths in 1976, however, Johnson struggled to find paid work. Already a married father of three, he took various part-time jobs. Time Come includes a selection of the journalism he wrote to help make ends meet, often combining music criticism with cultural commentary and placing reggae in a sociological context.

Johnson’s reviews shed light on his own practice as well as defining the parameters of dub poetry generally. He coined the term ‘dub poetry’ in 1975, in an essay on ‘Jamaican Rebel Music’. ‘Dub lyricism,’ he writes, ‘is a new form of (oral) music-poetry, wherein the lyricist overdubs rhythmic phrases onto the rhythm of a popular song.’ In ‘Writing Reggae’ (2010), another essay collected here, he elaborates:

Dub is the recording engineers’ art of deconstruction, where a reggae composition is stripped down to its drum and bass skeletal structure and reconfigured, recreated, with fragments of other instruments, enhancing the danceability of the music. This recreated minimalist rhythmic structure provided the perfect background for the deejay/toaster to hone his lyrical skills … constitut[ing] a new form of oral poetry, something akin to the griot tradition in Africa, which I variously called ‘dub-lyricism’ and ‘dub-poetry’.

In 1977 Johnson won a Cecil Day-Lewis Fellowship and became writer-in-residence for the London borough of Lambeth. He then got a job as a librarian at the Keskidee Centre, where he was responsible for building the collection and organising programmes for schools. This period is well captured in Franco Rosso’s film Dread Beat an’ Blood (1979), which includes interviews, recordings and clips of Johnson at poetry readings as well as footage of street riots and demonstrations. There’s a great clip of Johnson sitting at a table with a group of young Black women, one of whom reads a passage in Creole while Johnson smokes a cigarette.

By the late 1970s, executives at Virgin Records had noticed, and begun to exploit, the growing market for reggae. Johnson had briefly worked for them as a freelance copywriter, and a friend gave him an address for Richard Branson, who was impressed by his demo tape and offered him a multi-album deal. Johnson had the foresight to turn it down, agreeing only to one album. (He would subsequently sign to Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, then Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong Records.) He had long dreamed of making a record with the sound engineer and producer Dennis Bovell,

the only recording engineer who knew how to record reggae properly, to get the drum and bass sound right. All the other English sound engineers would record reggae as though they were recording an ordinary rock band. You had to record the bass and drums for reggae in a particular way to get the right sound.

Bovell was working out of Gooseberry Studios in Soho at the time. Once Johnson had the go-ahead from Virgin, ‘I linked up with Dennis, with some of these amateur and semi-professional musicians, and went and made the album.’ Dread Beat an’ Blood (1978), which set poems from Johnson’s 1975 collection to reggae tracks, was named Reggae Album of the Year by Sounds. Further recordings, most notably the Bovell-produced Forces of Victory (1979) and Making History (1984), consolidated his critical standing, earning plaudits from John Peel and Robert Christgau.

Johnson​ has maintained that ‘writing poetry or making music … is not a substitute for hardcore political activism.’ But his poetry was intertwined with that activism: he drew inspiration from the anti-racist movement and chronicled it; he absorbed its language and also provided many of its most memorable lines. ‘It Dread Inna Inglan’ (1978) was written in response to the framing of George Lindo, a Black man jailed for burglary by an all-white jury in Bradford, despite three white colleagues giving clear evidence supporting his innocence. Johnson delivered the poem through a megaphone at a protest outside Bradford police station. (The song of the same title samples the crowd’s chants.)

A number of poems and pieces concern the Met’s Special Patrol Group, which was involved in a series of race-related controversies. Perhaps the most infamous of these occurred in 1979, when the white anti-racism activist Blair Peach died following a clash with police officers during a protest against the National Front in Southall. An internal investigation concluded that Peach had been killed by an SPG officer but the report wasn’t made public and no one was ever charged. ‘Reggae fi Peach’, the third track on Johnson’s album Bass Culture (1980), captured the widespread outrage at this miscarriage of justice: ‘The SPG them are murderers (murderers)/We can’t make them get no furtherer.’

In his prose, Johnson returns repeatedly to the riots of 1981, which started after a fire at a house party in New Cross in South-East London. Yvonne Ruddock, who died in hospital, and Angela Jackson, who survived, were celebrating their birthdays together when a blaze engulfed the Ruddocks’ family home. Thirteen young Black people between the ages of 14 and 22 died. As Peter Fryer wrote in Staying Power (1984), ‘the entire community [was] convinced that the fire had been started by fascists’ – not least because an unexploded incendiary device was found outside the house and the Ruddocks had received racist hate mail.

There had been at least two devastating racist arson attacks in New Cross in the preceding years. In 1977, the Moonshot, a Black youth and community centre, was firebombed and National Front supporters clashed on the streets with members of the Anti-Nazi League. In 1980, Lewisham Way Youth and Community Centre was firebombed in a racist attack. Although there was no forensic evidence supporting initial reports of a firebomb at the New Cross house party, the police were heavily criticised for their failure to communicate with locals and to show they were investigating whether the fire was racially motivated. Members of the Black community accused the authorities and mainstream media of blaming the victims for the fire. ‘Plenty paypah print pure lie/fi bline joe public eye,’ Johnson wrote in ‘New Crass Massakah’. He returned to the subject in ‘We Have Not Forgotten’, his brief, unblinking prologue to a 2021 reissue of The New Cross Massacre Story: Interviews with John La Rose (1984): ‘There were two inquests into the New Cross fire, both of which returned open verdicts … The response of the police, aided and abetted by sections of the media, with the implicit approval of the government, was to use their power to deny justice to the survivors of the fire, the bereaved and the dead.’

The repercussions of the house fire were enormous. ‘Some six weeks after,’ according to Johnson, ‘the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, chaired by the late John La Rose, mobilised twenty thousand people for a march through the streets of London.’ (Other estimates have it somewhere between six and fifteen thousand.) This televised display of Black solidarity became known as the Black People’s Day of Action, drawing enraged marchers from up and down the country.

Brixton, to the west of New Cross, was another site of significant tension between Black residents and the police. It was widely believed that officers would ‘leave stations with the express purpose of going n----- hunting’, as one contemporary report put it. In early April 1981, the Met launched Swamp 81, an operation designed to combat crime in Brixton by maintaining a heavy police presence. The term ‘swamp’ had gained traction following Thatcher’s 1978 interview with World in Action, in which she claimed that ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.’ Swamp 81 involved deploying 120 plainclothes officers to Brixton. In total they made 943 stops. Most of the targeted individuals were under the age of 21 and Black (the area was 64 per cent white). Houses and businesses were raided and 118 people were arrested.

If Swamp 81 was intended as a policing experiment, it illustrated the contempt of the police for Brixton’s Black community. Locals saw it as the culmination of years of harassment. On 10 April police apprehended Michael Bailey, a young Black man who had just been stabbed. When Bailey refused to explain his injuries, he was accused of failing to co-operate with the police. Witnessing what seemed to be an unjust arrest, a concerned crowd intervened and Bailey ran to a nearby house; the family inside called for a cab to take him to hospital. The police stopped the cab and eventually called an ambulance, but the crowd intervened again, seized Bailey and took him to hospital themselves. Rumours quickly spread that the police had stabbed Bailey and even that he had died in police custody. Tensions erupted spectacularly the following night, leading to one of the worst public disturbances in recent British history: 82 arrests, injuries to 279 police officers and 45 civilians, damage to 145 properties and 117 vehicles (56 of which belonged to the police). The George, a Brixton pub that refused to serve non-white patrons, was burned to a shell.

Johnson wrote ‘Di Great Insohreckshan’ – ‘dem seh wi bun dung di George/wi coulda bun di lanlaad’ – about the April uprising and ‘Mekkin Histri’ about the subsequent riots in cities up and down Britain. ‘The Black People’s Day of Action and the uprisings that followed in 1981 and again in 1985 were the harbingers of change,’ he writes in Time Come. ‘These dramatic demonstrations of Black self-empowerment left the Conservative government of the day with no alternative but to implement policies that would accelerate the emergence of a Black middle class and a move towards inclusion.’

Johnson’s work has done much to shape ideals of multiculturalism in Britain. Perhaps most significantly, he made white British readers recognise Jamaican patois. Most readers need to articulate the poems in order to understand their meaning: glancing at the page isn’t enough. There are elisions, missing articles and phonetic spellings. Some words become more baroque in their transliteration – ‘edificaeshun’, ‘reckreashun’ – and there may be other meanings at play. In 2002, with the release of Mi Revalueshanary Fren, Johnson became the second living poet (after Czesław Miłosz) to be published by Penguin Classics. His work is taught in schools and studied at universities. Even so, it can often seem all too relevant. ‘Fite Dem Back’, recorded in 1979, could have been written in response to the neofascist riots that swept the UK last summer:

Fashist an di attack
Noh baddah worry ’bout dat
Fashist an di attack
Wi wi’ fite dem back
Fashist an di attack
Den wi countah-attack
Fashist an di attack
Den wi drive dem back

A petition in 2016 to make ‘Fite Dem Back’ the national anthem received enough signatures to be debated in Parliament; it was rejected on the grounds that ‘the present national anthem is a matter of tradition.’

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Dread Beat an’ Blood, Johnson’s groundbreaking second collection, and Rosso’s documentary has been newly restored for the occasion. But 1981 is the date when, as Johnson sees it, things began to change. ‘For the last thirty or more years, I’ve been talking about 1981,’ he told Paul Gilroy in 2021. ‘The uprisings throughout urban England made the British state sit up and take note … But one of the lessons that we can learn from what happened in 1981 is that we cannot afford to be complacent about racism and fascism in this country.’ Aged 73, Johnson may no longer be writing, but he remains necessary.