Kunapipi XXVI:1

ERIC DOUMERC
Jamaica’s First Dub Poets: Early Jamaican Deejaying as a Form of Oral Poetry

Dub poetry is usually taken to refer to a particular type of ‘performance poetry’, a brand of oral poetry performed to the accompaniment of reggae music. The term ‘dub poetry’ itself is thought to have been invented by the Jamaican poet Oku Onuora to describe a form of oral art that had been developing in Jamaica since the early 1970s. Oku Onuora defined the term in an interview conducted with the poet and critic Mervyn Morris in 1979. Oku said that a dub poem was ‘a poem that has a built-in reggae rhythm — hence when the poem is read without any reggae rhythm (so to speak) backing, one can distinctly hear the reggae rhythm coming out of the poem’ (qtd in Brown, 51). So a dub poem is a poem that relies on a reggae rhythm that can be felt or heard even when there is no musical accompaniment. Oku Onuora later extended that definition to cover all kinds of musical backing, so that dub poetry would include any type of music-influenced poetry.

The term ‘dub poetry’ has not always found favour with all the practitioners of the genre. For instance Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mutabaruka have consistently rejected it. In an interview conducted in 1994, Mutabaruka told me that he found the term too ‘limited’1. Linton Kwesi Johnson has repeatedly stated that the term ‘dub poetry’ put poets ‘in a bag’ and defined only one facet of their work: ‘I just like to be regarded as a poet who writes a particular type of poetry. I think it’s dangerous to categorise you into this “dub poetry” bag’ (Steffens pp 25–27). By the mid-1980s, the term had obviously run its course and the Jamaican poet Jean Binta Breeze had pleaded, in her poem ‘Dubbed Out’, for a type of poetry that would not ‘break’ words but let them live:

i
search
for words
moving
in their music
not
broken
by
the
beat (29)

Thus ‘dub poetry’ may not after all be a valid term for the reggae-influenced poetry produced by the likes of Oku Onuora, Mutabaruka and Linton Kwesi Johnson, and maybe this term should be applied to the people it was originally meant to refer to, that is Jamaica’s first deejays. Indeed, in a Race and Class article, Linton Kwesi Johnson himself had written about the ‘dub lyricists’ and had called them ‘poets’.

The dub lyricist is the dj turned poet. He intones his lyrics rather than sings them. Dub lyricism is a new form of (oral) music poetry, wherein the lyricist overdubs rhythmic phrases on to the rhythm background of a popular song. Dub lyricists include poets like Big Youth, I Roy, U Roy, Dillinger, Shorty the President, Prince Jazzbo and others. (qtd in Morris, 66)

So the dub poetry tag was originally meant to describe the art form of Jamaican ‘toasting’ or deejaying, a brand of popular poetry produced by and for the Jamaican masses. In fact a case could be made for the recognition of Jamaican deejaying as a form of oral poetry.