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The 1970s, (Dub) Identity, and Working-class Poetries
Amidst the engaging recent posts by Peter O’Leary on the “Poetry of the 1970s” conference in Maine and Alan Gilbert on poetry and identity/identifying practices—as well as steering away from the seemingly looming question of whether or not I ever was a member of the Communist party!—I wanted to continue to post &/or discuss poems that I’ve used or plan to use in my factory and workplace workshops, poems that push the political and the innovative in myriad ways yet always include a race/class overlay or overdetermination (rather than fronting one at the expense of the other) as well as poems that scale back and forth between the local and the global. So, having already written about U Sam Oeur’s “Work at the Douglas Corporation, Urethane Department…” and Emelihter Kihleng’s “Micronesian Diaspora(s),” let me add a poem that I think it would be most productive to read alongside any 1970s configuration of poetry that has been inscribed to include Late Capitalism and Language as well as poets such as Tom Raworth and Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer (to cite just a few mentioned by O’Leary), Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “It Dread Inna Inglan”:
dem frame-up George Lindo
up in Bradford Toun
but di Bradford Blacks
dem a rally roun
mi seh dem frame-up George Lindo
up in Bradford Toun
but di Bradford Blacks
dem a rally roun…
Maggi Tatcha on di go
wid a racist show
but a she haffi go
kaw,
rite now,
African
Asian
West Indian
an Black British
stan firm inna Inglan
inna disya time yah
far noh mattah wat dey say,
come wat may,
we are here to stay
inna Inglan
inna disya time yah…
George Lindo
him is a working man
George Lindo
him is a family man
George Lindo
Him nevah do no wrang
George Lindo
di innocent one
George Lindo
him no carry no daggah
George Lindo
him is nat no rabbah
George Lindo
dem haffi let him go
George Lindo
dem betta free him now!
—from Mi Revalueshanary Fren: Selected Poems
An article by Darcus Howe in the New Statesmen reflects on that period. Howe informs us that Lindo was a bin spreader at Tyersall Combing works in the UK’s textile sector in 1978. Lindo, Howe writes, was framed for a robbery and given a prison sentence. Activist social movements worked not only to free Lindo but to sue the police (and win!). Howe’s article also brings the political, cultural, and economic issues of the late 1970s Lindo case square into the 21st century.
How, and to whom, might the Linton Kwesi Johnson poem (and the George Lindo case) speak differently and perhaps more powerfully than a poem by, say, Raworth or Mayer or W. S. Merwin, for that matter? Which potential communities of readers might each of these poets attract? Repel? Intrigue? Disperse? Why does this matter? What is to be done?
For those interested in reading more widely about the poem and LKJ, Peter Hitchcock’s “It Dread Inna Inglan’: Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dread, and Dub Identity” (Postmodern Culture, 1993) is currently available free online. Reading LKJ’s poem alongside David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, a book I’ve mentioned before (and a book/writer I find crucial to my thinking about poetics, and particularly in framing a way of thinking about the period of the 1970s to the present), flushes out the Harvey volume (and particularly the sections on “Maggi Tatcha”) in interesting and productive ways. And, of course, for those of you who like to take your poetry oral/aural as well as textual (and count me in your group), here’s a version of “It Dread Inna Inglan” on Youtube. Enjoy!
Posted in Group Blog, Uncategorized on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 by Mark Nowak.
Comments (2)
Hi Mark,
I’ve been enjoying your posts. Since you’ve mentioned Harvey a couple of times, I thought I’d point out that one can watch videos of his lectures on Capital Vol. 1 (13 2-hour lectures) here: http://davidharvey.org.
Jasper
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Mark Nowak asks:
>How, and to whom, might the Linton Kwesi Johnson poem (and the George Lindo case) speak differently and perhaps more powerfully than a poem by, say, Raworth or Mayer or W. S. Merwin, for that matter? Which potential communities of readers might each of these poets attract? Repel? Intrigue? Disperse? Why does this matter? What is to be done?
Mark, if you keep asking questions like the last one, rumors of your CP fellow-traveling will only spread. As a former ten-year member of the Socialist Workers Party, once mugged by a gang of three Stalinist fellow-rail workers while I sold The Militant outside the Milwaukee Road yard, I do indeed hope these are just rumors!
Then again, back in the late 80s, when you and I used to get together to drink cheap beer, talk about poetry, and listen to Brian Eno as grad students in Bowling Green, Ohio, you weren’t, as I recall, all that interested in politics (which is no criticism, whatsoever), and I doubt you would have joined the CP shortly after the whole world suddenly changed, so likely the rumors are specious, to take your defense.
On your questions above, at least on one level: I believe the second question you ask answers the first one, frankly. There are, obviously, different reading formations, and aesthetic/social value is crucially contingent on axiological dynamics and tensions operating within and between them, no? What speaks “more powerfully” is not something that inheres in a poem’s language or form (as the “post-avant” tends to teleologically believe, and as a number of its leading figures shamefully demonstrated in the build-up to the Iraq war): What speaks “more powerfully” is ultimately a matter of conjuncture and the playing out of individual and collective positions in the overall cultural field.
Nothing exciting or original there, but that said, your suggestion that working class poems like Linton Kwesi Johnson’s are undervalued in the literary world at large and should be seen as more intrinsically “powerful” or consequential (you *are* suggesting this, correct?) vis-a-vis the poetry of mainstream or avant formations seems suspiciously premised on assumptions that working class poetry should, or can, be in some way reckoned by standards of the high-art poetry economy, that there is some kind of negotiating to be done, for a seat more towards the head of the table.
Such comparative anxiety, granted, is hard for us academics, whatever our stripes, to get away from. But why fret over how working class poetry might be granted more cultural capital in the teeny market of belles-lettres? Isn’t the real, ultimate question how such poetry might lead to deeper and sustaining forms of autonomous solidarity and class identity, regardless of what other literary types might think? How the poetry might deepen connections to its real, vital audience, its needs, its ideological independence, without concern for what academics, or prestigious publishers, or government foundations might think about it, or do for it? Why does it matter, after all, if Linton Kwesi Johnson’s dub poetry is as “powerful” to professors at Orono as Barrett Watten’s power-pointing pop-tarts about Late Capitalism? As much as they talk about Badiou, after all, What is to be done is not going to be done by the high-art poetry communities. Especially as they prattle on about being the radical opposition while swooning for the hipper of the two parties of big business…
Come to think of it, with a view to the precipitous domestication of Language Poetry and its professionalized progeny, WHY on earth would you want trade-union poetry to have ANY connection to the academic order of things?
I’ve been a dues-paying member of the AFT for seventeen years now, and my poetry teaching is almost completely to working class and farm kids, so asking all this in solidarity!
Kent
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