“If it wasn’t for reggae music I wouldn’t be sitting here today,” Linton Kwesi Johnson told his audience at last month’s Bocas LitFest, and for some of the audience that was also true, thanks to LKJ himself.
His music – a spacey dub of drum and bass, with that huge, deep, deadpan, doom-laden voice booming his verse over it – became for many young people what he described reggae as being for himself: “a crucial umbilical cord that sustained my Jamaican identity.”
For others with ties to the region, the music – including his music – was also a key to their Caribbean side. Somewhere in my mother’s attic, for instance, is a dusty, worn copy of Dread Beat and Blood, LKJ’s seminal album.
Born in Jamaica in 1952, Johnson has lived in the UK since he was 11, becoming a leader of the generation that mapped out what it meant to be black and British. For them, as he pointed out, reggae was part of the culture of resistance, in the days of the “sus” law, racist riots and Rock Against Racism campaigns. (“Sus” was short for “suspected person,” and the law meant that in British urban centres, the police could and did stop and search young men for walking, liming or simply existing while black. Its use led to race riots in British cities.)
Johnson’s career was inspired first not by music but by the American civil-rights activist WEB DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk. Politics led him to poetry, but you couldn’t make a living from that. Hence, eventually, the music.
He listened to and was influenced by the reggae classics – Burning Spear; Toots and the Maytals; the Mighty Diamonds and no doubt the countless other three-man bands of the day; all three of the original Wailers – “everything,” he told his hearers at Bocas.
His career had begun unpromisingly, assembling filing cabinets in a factory: he had a wife and three children to support, and took what work he could get. But Johnson soon became writer in residence and librarian at London’s Keskidee Centre, the first arts centre for the black community, in north London. There he was mentored and encouraged by people like Andrew Salkey, Sam Selvon, Mervyn Morris and John La Rose.
Johnson, who had been an activist even before he went to university, was also part of the Race Today collective which produced the eponymous magazine out of Brixton, and which was influenced by CLR James.
His new book is very different from the collections of his poetry inspired by music. The discipline acquired from his degree in sociology is evident in Time Come, a compilation of his selected prose – journalistic essays, book and music reviews, profiles, introductions and lectures – stretching back to the mid-1970s.
The writing in this collection often has an academic tone (sometimes including footnotes) even when he’s writing about reggae. His references range through Miss Lou, Stuart Hall, Mutabaruka, Gordon Rohlehr, Rex Nettleford and Big Youth, among others. This is journalism at its best: informed, instant history of the times that Johnson has not only lived through but helped to sha
