It all changed when I was sent to boarding school (in Scotland), something that happened to all expatriate children, as inevitable as puberty. However, my routine was turned on its head, everything was reversed: now I flew to Africa in the holidays. My family, my home, my room, my things, my friends were all as they had always been but now I saw them for only two months of the year. But back in Britain I was beginning to understand the place; I was beginning to be assimilated; I had started to fit in.
I was barely four months old when I made that first flight in the Hermes from Africa to England in 1952. My parents took me up to Scotland to present me to my grandmothers and the rest of the family. For some reason my father went back early and my mother and I joined him some weeks later at the end of our leave. By curious chance, as we were waiting in London airport for our plane to be called, there was a photographer from the Evening Standard patrolling the departure lounge looking for a light-hearted filler, I suppose, a bit of human interest for a corner of a page, snapping babes in arms about to go on a long plane journey, still a rarish event in those days, no doubt. My mother has kept the cutting. In the picture one glum and tearful toddler sits morosely on her mother’s knee. Opposite, is me, aged six months, fizzing with energy, bald and beefy as a Buddha, beaming hugely, my mother’s arm clamped around my middle trying to stop the thrashing and the squirming. ‘Why is master William Andrew Murray Boyd so happy?’ the caption asks. I could not answer then, but I can now – I was flying home.
Linton Kwesi Johnson
[1952-]
Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in Chapelton, a small rural town in Jamaica. In 1963 he left Jamaica to join his mother in London, where she lived in the largely West Indian-inhabited Brixton. Johnson was educated in Brixton and later received a BA in sociology from Goldsmiths’ College, London. When he was about seventeen years old, he began to write. He later described his work as ‘a result of the tension between Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English and between those and English English’.
While he was still at school, Johnson became involved with the political activist group the Black Panthers, and later he became a founder member of the Brixton-based Race Today collective. It was in the journal Race Today that Johnson’s poems were first printed, and it was under the collective’s guidance that he published his first volume of poetry, Voices of the Living and the Dead (1974). His second collection, Dread Beat An’ Blood (1975), includes ‘Yout Scene’, the first poem that Johnson wrote in the Jamaican language. At the point that he began to write in dialect, Johnson says, music entered his poetry as well. The music is both figurative and literal, for in 1978 Johnson released Dread Beat An’ Blood on vinyl. It was the first LP recording of his ‘reggae poetry’ or, to use a term that Johnson coined himself, ‘dub poetry’. Subsequent albums include Forces of Victory (1979), Bass Culture (1980) and Making History (1984). In 1980, he started his own record label, LKJ. Johnson has continued to publish his poetry in book form, writing ‘Inglan is a Bitch’ in 1980, and publishing Tings and Times: Selected Poems (also released as an album) in 1991.
Nearly all of Johnson’s poems are political in nature. In a broad sense, they are responses to the state of the world, urgent illustrations of the violence of both the oppressors and the oppressed. Often written in the language of England’s black urban youth – a group ‘new in age / but not in rage’ – Johnson’s poems have an oral quality that lends them a sense of vitality and relevance.
In addition to his writing and political work, Johnson has worked as a library resources and education officer at Keskidee Arts Centre, in London. In 1977 he received a C. Day Lewis Fellowship and taught as writer-in-residence in the London Borough of Lambeth. He is an associate fellow of Warwick University and an honorary fellow of Wolverhampton Polytechnic, and in 1990 he received an award at the XIII Premo Internazionale Ultimo Novecento from the city of Pisa for his musical and poetic accomplishments. Johnson has performed his work throughout the world.
Johnson’s poetry articulates the fears and concerns of both the generation of West Indians who arrived in Britain in the 1950s to work in factories and the generation of non-white Britons who were born in Britain and have no memories of life in another place. There is little romance in either generation’s view of Britain. The following poem, ‘Inglan is a Bitch’, is an apt summary of the feelings of many in Britain, both young and old, both then and now.
INGLAN IS A BITCH
w’en mi jus’ come to Landan toun
mi use to work pan di andahgroun
but workin’ pan di andahgroun
y’u don’t get fi know your way aroun’
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no runnin’ whey fram it
mi get a lickle jab in a big ’otell
an awftah a while, mi woz doin’ quite well
dem staat mi aaf as a dish-washah
but w’en mi tek a stack, mi noh tun clack – watchah!
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch
noh baddah try fi hide fram it
w’en dem gi’ you di lickle wage packit
fus dem rab it wid dem big tax rackit
y’u haffi struggle fi mek en’s meet
an’ w’en y’u goh a y’u bed y’u jus’ cant sleep
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
Inglan is a bitch
a noh lie mi a tell, a true
mi use to work dig ditch w’en it cowl noh bitch
mi did strang like a mule, but, bwoy, mi did fool
den awftah a while mi jus’ stap dhu ovahtime
den awftah a while mi jus’ phu dung mi tool
Inglan is a bitch
dere’s no escapin’ it
