19 - Sonic Solidarities

Summary

This chapter explores how an epistemology of sound has contributed to the rebellious and coalitional genre of dub poetry in 1970s and 1980s Britain. The development of black British dub in the 1970s is both timely in its ability to articulate a demotic poetics accessible to the communities from which it speaks and untimely in its politically impertinent capabilities. While Afro-Caribbean poets dominate the genre, the writing often remains committed to questioning the boundaries of race and nation. The form itself is constituted by a variety of mediums which shape an inherently hybrid poetic expression. Through an interrogation of the work of three influential black British dub poets – Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, and Benjamin Zephaniah – this chapter traces the means by which these poets cultivate manifold insurgent sonic solidarities. While firmly located within the frame of the written word and the materiality of the printed page, their poetry is impelled by the sonic and at times performative qualities of the poet. The writing of Johnson, Breeze, and Zephaniah achieves its lyrical alliances through the ineffable and kinaesthetic entanglement between the text and the sound.