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!