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Linton Kwesi Johnson (b. 1952) was born in Jamaica and came to London in 1963. In the 1970s, he created a style of ‘dub’ poetry that mixes West Indian speech patterns with radical political ideas, which in public performances would be recited over reggae rhythms. His poetry first appeared in the magazine Race Today, which, in 1974, published his first collection Voices of the Living and the Dead. This was followed by Dread Beat an’ Blood (Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1975); Inglan Is a Bitch (Race Today, 1980); Tings an’ Times: Selected poems (Bloodaxe Books/LKJ Music, 1991); and Mi Revalueshanary Fren: Selected poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2002). Johnson is even better known for his live performances, and he has recorded a number of albums of this work. In ‘Inglan Is a Bitch’, the title poem to his third collection, quoted above, Johnson articulates the experience of working-class West Indian immigrants who as young men came to Britain in the 1950s, now expressing their anger at often being the first to be made redundant whenever the British economy suffers a downturn.
