Contemporary Poetry

108 contemporary poetry

Initially, he explains dub poetry as an attempt to fi nd a way of
addressing what DJs at the time were doing. They would ‘get
a piece of instrumental music... and improvise spontaneous
lyricism describing everyday happenings and events’ (p. 256 ).
In responding to the application of the term to his own work,
Johnson argues that he and poets such as Mutabaruka and other
Black British poets perform poetry in its own right, creating
‘poetry to be recited to a poetry-listening audiences, something
separate from the sound system tradition’ (p. 257 ). Critic Christian
Habekost argues that dub poetry also emerges from ‘the musical
cross hybridization of African rhythms and North American
sounds’ which result in the formation of Ska music.^23 Habekost
adds:

One of dub poetry’s crucial achievements is its artful fusion of

different artistic expressions, its bridging of the gap between

oral and text media, singing and talking, music and literature.

In the wider context of cultural dynamics, dub poetry func-

tions as a connecting link between the ‘black’ oral tradition and

the white literary tradition. For a Caribbean culture it repre-

sents both the African presence and European infl uences.^24

Dub poetry’s inception in the 1970 s enabled an important bridging
of divergent and often antithetical traditions.
Key to dub poetry is its engagement with narratives of oppres-
sion, histories of economic exploitation, protests against racism
and police brutality. The performance of the work illustrates what
E. A. Markham considers as a play with the role of the poet through
emergent and competing personas:

The poet as performer is coming out of this side of not

being quite the preacher/teacher/activist/comic/apologist/

bore, stripping off the sermon/lesson/protest/joke/cause of

outside authority, thereby admitting to a degree of vulner-

ability, thereby working against structures (most of them

oppressive) which, in order to deny/conceal that vulnerabil-

ity, wear the face of authority. In this spirit performance is a

continuous process of becoming.^25