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    Mi Revalueshanary Fren
    Mi Revalueshanary Fren
    Mi Revalueshanary Fren
    Ebook124 pages1 hour

    Mi Revalueshanary Fren

    By Linton Kwesi Johnson

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    About this ebook

    Johnson is the first black poet and the second living poet in history to be published in Penguin’s distinguished Modern Classics series. Author of five previous collections and numerous record collections. He is known world-wide for his fusion of lyrical verse and reggae (dub). Grammy award nominated performer praised by the likes of David Bowie, TLS, NY Times, LA Weekly for his poetry and music. BBC profiled and interviewed Johnson in 2004. His recordings have sold millions of copies.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAusable Press
    Release dateAug 1, 2016
    ISBN9781619321571
    Mi Revalueshanary Fren
    Author

    Linton Kwesi Johnson

    Linton Kwesi Johnson, born in 1952, is a Jamaican-born reggae poet who came to the UK in 1963. Joining the Black Panthers whilst still at school, he has been a life-long activist fighting for racial equality and social justice. In 2002, with Mi Revalueshanary Fren, he became the second living poet, and the only Black poet, to be published in the Penguin Modern Classics series. In 2023 he published Time Come, a selected anthology of prose written and performed across his decades-long career. He has recorded several albums, many on his own LKJ Records label, and has toured the globe. His awards include the 2020 PEN Pinter Prize from English PEN and, in 2021, being appointed an Honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of the West Indies. LKJ lives in Brixton in south London.

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    • 5/5
      Linton Kwesi Johnson, also known as LKJ, is the most celebrated of the dub poets, and Mi Revalueshanary Fren is an excellent introduction to LKJ and dub poetry. He was born in Jamaica, and moved to Britain as a child in the early 1960s, a period in which thousands of Jamaicans and other West Indians migrated to the UK. The new arrivals experienced a great deal of culture shock and prejudice, and most had to work in menial and degrading jobs. During the Thatcher administration there were several notable clashes between the residents of Brixton, a London neighborhood that was home for many of these immigrants, and the police, including the 1981 Brixton Riot. LKJ describes the simmering tension in Brixton in "All Wi Doin Is Defendin", which was written before the Brixton riot.Other poems in this volume provide a history and commentary of the experiences of West Indian immigrants in London, both good and bad. There is a great deal of humor and joy in LKJ's poetry, along with the anger and bitterness that the community experienced. "New Crass Massakah" describes the tragic New Cross fire of 1981, in which 13 young blacks died during a house party, which many in the community felt was an act of arson.LKJ is widely admired in the UK, and he is the second living poet to be published in the Penguin Classics series.In addition to writing poetry, LKJ, along with other dub poets, reads his work over reggae music, and has released several albums under his label LKJ Records. This book also includes a CD, "A Cappella Live", which includes 14 poems from this volume.

    Book preview

    Mi Revalueshanary Fren - Linton Kwesi Johnson

    INTRODUCTION

    by Russell Banks

    Take the title, Mi Revalueshanary Fren, and silently say it, and hear yourself saying it. Then open the book at random to any one of these extraordinary poems, and do the same. Say the poem, and hear yourself saying it. You’ll have answered the question that most contemporary English language readers, accustomed as they are to reading poetry strictly with their eyes instead of with their ears and mouths, might otherwise have shyly (or perhaps defensively) asked themselves, How best to read this work? The answer should be obvious, I suppose. For thousands of years human beings have best experienced poetry as song. What we happen to see printed on paper (or inscribed on vellum, papyrus or clay tablet) merely cues our ears and mouths, and if it’s good poetry, we hear music and sing a song not of our own making.

    More than nearly any other contemporary English-language poet (I’ll come back to that categorization in a moment), Linton Kwesi Johnson writes poems that make us sing with a voice that mingles our intimate own with a stranger’s, the poet’s, intimate own. And inasmuch as the poet is a representative man or woman (and Johnson is indeed one, a true people’s poet), we end up singing a people’s song. Poetry, at its best, is the most humanizing art. It links one’s secret solitary self to the secret solitary self of another and from that other to the species; it is the antithesis of solipsism, the negation of narcissism. As my friend, the late poet William Matthews, used to say, Sorry, Narcissis, there is someone else. And the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson—or LKJ, as he’s known to much of the world—confirms it. In If I Woz a Tap–Natch Poet Johnson says he’d write us a poem soh dyam deep / dat it bittah-sweet / like a precious / memari / whe mek yu weep / whe mek yu feel incomplete.

    He is, of course, a top-notch poet, and his bitter-sweet poems can indeed make us weep, make us feel incomplete. In 2002 he became the second living and the first black poet to have his selected poems published in England in the Penguin Classics series. He is Jamaican by birth, and though he has resided for most of his adult life in England, where he took a university degree in sociology, he writes in Jamaican creole. Not a dialect, not strictly a patois, either, and not a mere post-colonial version of Standard English, Jamaican creole is a language created out of hard necessity by African slaves from 17th century British English and West African, mostly Ashanti, language groups, with a lexical admixture from the Caribe and Arawak natives of the island. It is a powerfully expressive, flexible and, not surprisingly, musical vernacular, sustained and elaborated upon for over four hundred years by the descendants of those slaves, including those who, like LKJ, have migrated out of Jamaica in the second great diaspora for England, Canada, and the United States. Fortunately, its grammar and orthography, like that of pre-18th century British English, have never been rigidly formalized or fixed by an academy of notables or any authoritative dictionary. It is, therefore, a living, organically evolving language, intimately connected to the lived experience of its speakers.

    Looking for an English literary context, critics have sometimes compared Johnson to John Clare, presuming perhaps a similarly provincial naiveté, which at best misreads him and at worst condescends. When I read him, however, I hear the great Renaissance song-poets like Skelton, Wyatt and Herrick, many of whose poems were set to music and meant to be performed; I hear the Caledonian folk music of Robert Burns, and note the linguistic parallels in relation to British English between Burns’ Gaelic brand of English and LKJ’s Jamaican creole. One thinks of Emily Dickinson, who, for the sub-strata of her poems, relied on the metrics and diction of those old New England Protestant hymns. Or one is reminded of Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka and Michael Harper in their dedicated use of the modalities of the blues and jazz. Among recent English-language poets one might compare him to Paul Muldoon who, no surprise, is Irish, not English, has written opera libretti and is a part-time rock musician, and whose poems, like LKJ’s, touch us quickest when read with ear and mouth. The point

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