It is probably less common today but it was once a part of one’s English classes to suffer through Chaucer, the author of The Canterbury Tales. I say ‘suffer’ because in secondary school it was likely to have been perceived as boring and frustrating, but at university, when I first encountered it and was genuinely interested in learning something from it, it seemed far too difficult to even be considered boring. Thankfully, my knowledge of French helped me immensely: the grammatical structure of middle or Chaucerian English was fairly similar to that of modern French. Even the vocabulary looked more like French.
One might ask at this point, why attempt to read or study anything so difficult? Why not just read it in translation? Why bother at all? Quite simply, the way in which someone says or writes something can give us, as the reader, a great deal of information – particularly about a world far removed from our own. To experience or consume any work of art is to attempt to see things from the point of view of the producer, or artist.
The world as described in the poetry of Jamaican-born poet Linton Kwesi Johnson is not 
as far removed from my realm of experience as I would prefer, and yet I found myself in a similar position to the reading of Chaucer. Yet this time, I relied upon another language to jumpstart my comprehension of Johnson’s poetry – that of music, and rhythm.This is no coincidence: Johnson clearly states that “I didn’t discover music… I was born with music, from the time I heard my heart beating.” As a child in rural Jamaica, he could hear drums and music systems set up for dances – miles away from where he resided. He even admits that he has a bass line at the back of his mind when he writes.
The language used in Mi Revalueshanary Fren which collects selected poems by Johnson spanning three decades is a mix of 17th-century colonial English, West African from the slaves, and a smattering of the indigenous Caribbean tribal dialects. It was not so long ago that varieties of English like this were considered inferior to the motherland’s English, but now people and academia are embracing such world varieties.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!
2 - Snarkattack
Thanks very much Natalie! I'm so flattered, truly.
3 - Ray Ellis
Nice and informative article. I used to listen to listen to Linton Qwesi Johnson's reggae recordings, but you provided a new insight into his work--I would have never connected him to Chaucer! Good work, and congrats!
4 - Snarkattack
Thanks Ray, for your comment and kind words. I'd love to hear his reggae recordings, he's a bit before my time but he writes a lot about the London I was born into. Chaucer was a Londoner I believe, so they do have more in common than we think.
5 - -E
Congrats! This article has been selected as one of this week’s Editors’ Picks.
6 - Snarkattack
Aw, thank you! It means so much to me that the Blogcritics folk seem to enjoy my reviews.
7 - Douglas Watts
This is a fair review. LKJ's Jamaican patois is not easy to understand on the printed page unless you already know the words from listening to his recorded versions. His CD "Live with the Dub Band -- 1984" (LKJ Records) is good because he introduces each poem with a concise description of what it is about and why he wrote.
8 - Snarkattack
I do hope that means it's satisfactory, Douglas? :) Either way, thank you very much for your comment.
Personally, I'm fortunate in that my father and some of my Anglo-Indian relatives are originally from the West Indies, so the inflections and rhythms of the patois is a little less foreign to me but I wanted to try and encourage the reader who may have less background.
Naturally, emotion is conveyed very well in LKJ's readings, so it's not necessary to understand each and every word but rather to rely on our personal humanity, and intuition.
He really is an amazing artist, I'm very glad to have discovered his work.