Linton Kwesi Johnson wanted his poetry to be a cultural weapon

When Jamaican-born dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson immigrated to the U.K. as a child, the country didn't quite live up to the "England" he had pictured in his imagination.

"You literally had images in your head of the streets of London paved with gold," he tells Q's Tom Power. "Horse-drawn carriages, and kings and queens, and princes. There was a bit of a rude awakening when you saw the grey brick houses and the smoke coming out of the chimneys."

Coming to England was also the first time Johnson encountered racism.

"You could feel the hostility of certain teachers towards you," he says. "You'd go on a bus and people wouldn't want you to sit beside them and this kind of thing."

Angered by the treatment in his new home and inspired by the Black liberation movement in the United States, Johnson joined the British Black Panthers. The Panthers exposed him to Black history and the writing of Black political theorists and thinkers for the first time. One book — The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois — stood out to him in particular.

"It was one of the most moving pieces of literature I'd ever read," says Johnson. "And although it was prose, it was very poetic prose, with echoes of Victorian-era English. It offered very moving portraits of the life of Black Americans in the post-emancipation period at the turn of the 20th century. And that stirred something within me. That made me want to write.… I suddenly felt this need to articulate the experiences of my generation growing up in England in a racially hostile environment."

Prior to that, Johnson's primary exposure to poetry had been the Bible.

"The only poetry I had been immersed in, and actually liked, was the poetry of the Old Testament," he says. "In the Psalms — a lot of Solomon and stuff — which I had to read to my illiterate grandmother in Jamaica."

I suddenly felt this need to articulate the experiences of my generation growing up in England in a racially hostile environment.- Linton Kwesi Johnson

When he started trying to write his own poetry, he struggled to find a voice. It wasn't until he was mentored by two older Caribbean-born, British-based poets — John La Rose and Andrew Salkey — that he really began to understand the craft. They introduced him to the work of Black American poets like Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka, which in turn, led him to proto-rappers The Last Poets, who gave him the idea to start fusing poetry and music.

Johnson invented the term "dub poetry," but, ironically, he didn't mean for the term to be used to describe what he was doing. It was a way of talking about reggae deejays as poets.

"I was listening to the reggae deejays from Jamaica, who were not singers, but are not quiet talkers," he says. "[They're] people who are intoning their spontaneous lyricism to a drum and bass track. So that led me in the direction I wanted to go. I became aware of jazz poetry, blues poetry, and I thought to myself, 'Well, I'm Jamaican. Why don't I write reggae poetry?'"

The full interview with Linton Kwesi Johnson is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Linton Kwesi Johnson produced by Ben Edwards.

Q23:52Linton Kwesi Johnson: Dub poetry, the Black Panther Party, and poetry as a ‘cultural weapon’