Review of ‘Time Come – Selected Prose’ by Linton Kwesi Johnson. # 122. 13/06/2023
Out of Many, One People
Welcome, primarily to a book review; but also the ‘Add Ons’ include a longer than usual item on the Royal Academy exhibition ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South’
Review of ‘Time Come – Selected Prose’ by Linton Kwesi Johnson. Picador 2023.
Amongst the positives and negatives of Britain’s journey to a multi-ethnic society, perhaps the biggest sufferers have been the children of the Windrush generation. [Note to those leading prayers this Sunday: Windrush 75 is on Thursday 22nd June]. Whilst the migrants themselves suffered racism, exclusion, hostility and insult, at least it followed from their own decision. One which in material terms often led to improvement. By contrast their children faced not only a prejudiced society, a harsh environment and bitter winters, but often faced these things after several years of separation from their pioneering parents. That alienation and anger frequently ensued is not surprising.
The poet Linton Kwesi Johnson – perhaps best known for his depiction of the situation in the poem ‘Inglan is a Bitch’ (1980) – became a leading voice of that generation. He came to Britain in 1963, aged 11, having been cared for by his grandmother in Jamaica. At school he joined the Black Panther Party, wrote for Race Today, and had his first collection of poems ‘Voices of the Living and Dead’ published in 1974. ‘Time Come – Selected Prose’ is a collection of thirty-seven articles, reviews and speeches, with the first in 1975, the most recent 2021.
Together they give us a glimpse of Johnson in four different modes.
1. A Child of Windrush.
The book is a helpful account of what it was like to migrate as a child to Britain in the 1960’s. As well as occasional references there is a fuller autobiographical account in ‘Writing Reggae: Poetry, Politics and Popular Culture’. 2010 (p136 ff). Much of it refers to the literary influences he received, especially from Jamaican folk sources, including his illiterate grandmother’s frequent reference to the Psalms, but also more ominous experiences. ‘The Britain that I grew up during the 1960s and early 1970s . . . was still a decidedly racially hostile place for non-whites’. This is starkly illustrated by the experience when he was 20 when, whilst taking notes of the violent arrest of a black youth in Brixton, he found himself thrown into a van by police who ‘beat and kicked us while racially abusing us’ (p 196). He and the others arrested ‘were acquitted of all charges, thanks to the presence of two black people on the jury’ (pp 195-6).
Less fortunate was his highly rated collaborator, the musician and producer, Dennis Bovell, who with a similar pattern of early upbringing, also experienced false charges by the police and spent six months in Wormwood Scrubs before being released on appeal. Bovell’s biography is recounted in a Race Today article, pp 57-67. Johnson also interviewed Caryl Phillips, coming to Britain from St Kitts as an infant in 1958, got an Oxford degree, and became a playwright and novelist, often depicting the lives of black people in Britain (p115-128).
We have, then, a useful primary source in understanding a generation who experienced first-hand, and often painfully, a major transition period in Britain becoming a multi-ethnic society.
2. A Reggae Poet.
Johnson’s chief claim to fame is as a poet, but as a poet who often performed live with a musical backing. As he simply puts it: ‘For second- and third-generation young blacks in Britain, reggae music was an important factor in the formation of new identities of un/belonging’ (p 85). I enjoyed Johnson’s writing most when he writes about reggae – articulate, precise, thoughtful. He has some superb turns of phrase: with reference to Bob Marley ‘Genius . . . is not merely an exceptional personal attribute; it is historical in the sense that it becomes manifest when there is a conjunction of the biographical and historical’ (p 87). It is a genius that ‘lies in his ability to translate the personal into the political, the private into the public, the particular into the universal, with a seeming simplicity that guarantees accessibility’ (p 73).
Johnson’s writing of poetry mined the same experiences, rooted from his childhood in the creole language and popular forms of Jamaica, but applied to his contemporaries in Britain: ‘my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation coming of age in a racist society’ (p 181), and using the linguistic forms of black youth.
During the 1970s the performance and interjections of Jamaican deejays became increasingly prominent to the point where their improvisations, interjections and manipulation of recorded sounds moved them into being recording artists in their own right. This emergence of ‘dub’ facilitated the amalgam of Johnson’s poetry with reggae backing so that he became increasingly known for both live performance, and also recording - to the extent that he set up his own label.
3. An Anti-Racist.
The form of Johnson’s art and its political content, as with swathes of reggae, are therefore inseparable. To quote Paul Gilroy’s ‘Introduction’: ‘This material insists upon the truth, value of art, the inevitability of social struggle and the eternal necessity of pursuing justice, equality and peace’ (p xvi). We have seen that he always saw his poetry as a means to social change. Words such as ‘rebel’ or ‘revolution’ (or ‘Revalueshan) occur frequently in his poetry and the prose gathered here. He has a strong affinity with Rastafarianism, though he disassociates from their divinisation of Haile Selassie, as also he rejects Christianity and Islam because of their enslaving histories.
Experience had given him a strong awareness of the extent and brutality of racism, which means he states unequivocally that the 1981 New Cross fire that killed 14 young people at a birthday party was a ‘racist arson attack’ and a ‘Massacre’, though the evidence is uncertain. His speech in Brixton in 2012 on the riots which began in Tottenham after the killing of Mark Duggan was confused. He blames both the police and austerity, sees it as both a black and working class response. There is no recognition that it evolved into a looting fest, facilitated by the recently discovered potential of social media for gathering flash-mobs. He recognises that ‘We are no longer as marginalised as we were in 1981’ (p 186), yet the overall tone is downbeat. Everyday improvements are no substitute for the hoped-for revolution.
So there is a sense of growing disappointment that the rebel rhetoric has failed to deliver. The 1976 hope in a ‘Race and Class’ article that Rastafarian music is ‘laying the spiritual and cultural foundations from which to launch a struggle for liberation’ (p 23) has given way by 2013 to the sad reflection that ‘The technologically driven music of young blacks at the start of the new millennium seems to reflect more the realities of urban life and the dominant consumerist ethos of our time’ (p 85).
4. A Veteran.
My enjoyment of the book declined as I read on. The opening sections on ‘Reggae Sounds – Music’ and ‘Story – Literature’ were alive with expectation and hope. Whilst the anthology is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, the later sections on Politics, Places and Moments, and People were mostly written after the Millennium – often tributes to people or honours acceptance speeches. The book is a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of social activist and anti-racist writers, poets and publishers, especially in Jamaica, Britain and South Africa. He is warm-hearted, generous spirited and affirming, but the spark is no longer there. He writes nostalgically in 2000 of a visit to Brixton’s Railton Road ‘front line’, no longer ‘an oasis of Caribbean cultural identity, resistance and rebellion Brixton’; instead ‘Looking back, the days of the front line were my halcyon days’ (pp213,214).
That ‘black people as a whole have made significant advances since the end of the 1980s’ (p 186) is in fact a tribute to the witness to truth and justice made by Johnson and others. Yet there is an air of disappointment, partly because the hoped for ‘Revalueshan’ was (fortunately) never going to come; partly because there is still work to be done in countering racism and enabling Black British flourishing. And if you have made your name proclaiming ‘Inglan is a Bitch’ then it is unsettling if England becomes less bitchy.
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Add Ons
The Royal Academy exhibition Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South closes this Sunday, unfortunately. It is one of the most impactful exhibitions I have seen. Particularly impressive are the scuptures made from abandoned items such as tin cans, wire, scrap metal, bits of cloth, wooden planks and so on. Out of these items extraordinarily striking forms are made. Some, such as Thornton Dial’s ‘Tree of Life (in the Image of Old Things)’ are fairly abstract. Others are more explicit. Lonnie Holley’s ‘Copying the Rock’ is both humorous – a battered photocopier, with a large rock on the copying plate, yet also poignantly hopeless – ‘It’s like I’m living in hell’ scrawled in paint on the opened copier plate lid.
Whilst the essay in the catalogue by Raina Lampkins-Fielder primly avoids mentioning Christianity as part of the social context of the exhibition, there are some strong religious references. The first item in the exhibition, Thornton Dial’s ‘Mrs Bendolph’, uses strips of cloth and carpet in strong horizontals and verticals that struck me as very Crucifixion-like. Perhaps more explicit was Mary T Smith’s ‘He’ – a rough vertical plank, topped by a haloesque tyre rim and painted board.
Overall this recontextualising of fragments to make coherent art-works stuck me as a parallel with dub records that Linton Kwesi Johnson (reviewed above) describes: ‘The advent of multi-track recording and the introduction of sound effects like echo and reverb facilitated the emergence of a particular style. . . Dub is the recording engineers’ art of deconstruction, where a reggae composition is stripped down to its drum and bass skeletal structure and reconfigurated, recreated with fragments of other instruments, enhancing the danceability of the music’ (p151). In both the artistic and musical genres traditional, western conventions of presentation are simply laid waste. They have no authority on a people of a very different cultural tradition. Traditionally records were meant to faithfully reproduce the sound you could hear live. (The early Paul McCartney objected to double-tracking as ‘unethical’). Dub abandoned the distances between recording artist, deejay and the audience – who received a sound that was an amalgam of music, engineering technique and flamboyant live presentation.
So, some of the artists in this exhibition have simply over-ridden the tradition that art is created de novo on a canvas or block of wood or stone. Instead it is simply the creative assembling (Johnson’s reconfigurating’) of whatever materials lie to hand to make objects of extraordinary materiality and physical presence.
To try pushing the parallel a further stage, James K A Smith in his outstanding ‘Thinking in Tongues’, on the philosophical implications of Pentecostalism, writes: ‘Our philosophical categories are calibrated to a certain range of phenomena and experience; when we encounter phenomena outside that range, the experience stretches and contests those categories and frameworks, forcing us to retool and reconfigure our assumptions, categories and methodologies. . .A third methodological strategy will be operative throughout this book: a constructive role for testimony, witness and story’ (p xxi). As Walter Hollenweger pointed out several decades ago, Pentecostalism’s use of testimony and song as basic theological resources was both innovative and biblical. Dub performers and these Black, Southern artists seem to be similarly original and reconstructive.
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Windrush Service at Southwark Cathedral on Thursday, 22nd June at 2pm.
The service will involve worship, music, reflections, readings and prayers and will touch on the themes that are relevant namely the invitation, the recognising of struggle following the invitation and the creative, unique and significant contributions made by the citizens and their descendants since then.
The purpose of this service of thanksgiving is to honour the legacy of the Windrush generation and hear how younger voices are building on the heritage. We will be celebrating their achievements, expressing our gratitude, and acknowledging the struggles that they have faced.
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Grudging congratulations to the Abu Dhabi sponsored Manchester City team on winning the Champions League. Their team showed the important place of diasporic people in football, lining up with a Nigerian Swiss (Akanji), Turkish German (Gundogan), Irish Englishman (Grealish) and Ivoirian Dutchman (Ake). (Do check out on You Tube Akanji’s astounding and almost unbelievable capacity for mental arithmetic).