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Downloaded from Brill.Com09/30/2021 12:12:19AM Via Free Access 106 the AFRICAN-JAMAICAN AESTHETIC  and Social Transformation 4 — Gendering Dub Culture Across Diaspora — Jamaican Female Dub Poets in Canada and England FRO-CARIBBEAN WOMEN DUB POETS have long incorporated feminist aesthetics into their work, thereby bringing a unique per- A spective to dub culture. Not surprisingly, then, and following in the tradition of Una Marson and Louise Bennett, the Jamaican Canadian dub poets Afua Cooper, Ahdri Zhina Mandiela, and Lillian Allen all employ an African- Jamaican aesthetic to articulate the social conditions of black women in Africa and the diaspora and to call for opposition to patriarchal systems of oppression and black male dominance in the private sphere. This feminist discourse in dub poetry is particularly highlighted in Canada because Allen, Cooper, and Man- diela have been so instrumental to dub culture in that country. While I focus primarily on these three artists in this chapter, I also include some reflections on the work of Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze1 of the UK to provide a comparative analysis of how these writers utilize local Jamaican cultures to articulate black female experience. While this chapter takes up race, class, and gender by female dub poets, this is not to suggest that earlier (as well as current) Jamaican creative writers have not also worked with these themes. However, it is important to note that, historically, dub poetry has been dominated by a male perspective and has focused thematically on race and class issues. This is a result of dub poetry’s strong black-nationalist and pan-Africanist ties as both philosophies have tended to overlook intersections of gender and race in their framing of political 1 Although ‘Binta’ Breeze often distances herself from dub poetry, I include her work because some of her poems clearly experiment with a dub aesthetic. © Lisa Tomlinson, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004342330_006 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Lisa Tomlinson - 9789004342330 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:12:19AM via free access 106 THE AFRICAN-JAMAICAN AESTHETIC and social transformation. Dub poetry was also influenced by its relationship to the male-dominated reggae industry. In contrast, for female dub artists racial and gender oppression were not viewed as mutually exclusive. Roberta Timothy describes this approach “as an umbrella practice connecting resis- tance to intersectional oppression,” and notes that “African/black feminism is a tool of anti-colonialism that can support black resistance.”2 The insertion of a feminist aesthetic was also a response to the reality of white male patriarchy in diasporic locations. As Lillian Allen asserts, Being woman and a black at every moment in my life, I felt the need for a new vision of the world that included not only black people and working-class people’s rights, but also the full and equal participation of women. So it was imperative that the fight be carried on, on this front also.3 Allen’s comment speaks to her interest in addressing the intersecting factors of gender, race, and class in black women’s lives, an approach that challenges the traditionally male-dominated narratives of pan-Africanist discourse. The focus of this section is to uncover how African-Jamaican women dub poets write from different geo-social locations than their male counterparts as they attempt to negotiate their identity. Such an approach moves beyond Euro- pean and US feminist analyses, which less often centre the intersectionality of gender, race, and class in eurocentric constructions of African diasporic peo- ples. I am also interested in how these dub poets employ an African-Jamaican aesthetic in a uniquely woman-centred way, including the primacy of an in- digenous mode that draws Jamaican oral and folk culture. Since anti-colonial- ism is intrinsically tied to resistance and privileges oppositional discourses, it is useful to employ an anti-colonial feminist lens to deepen understanding of the continuity of indigenous African-Jamaican local culture and knowledges and a black literary aesthetic. Dub Foremothers As noted above, the works of the earlier writers Una Marson and Louise Ben- nett paved the way for female dub poets and their interweaving of an African- Jamaican aesthetic with feminist discourse. Marson’s work as a feminist and 2 Timothy, “Resistance Education,” 79–80. 3 Allen, Women Do This Every Day, 18. Lisa Tomlinson - 9789004342330 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:12:19AM via free access 4: Gendering Dub Culture Across Diaspora 107 cultural activist was not separate from her literary career. She wrote from a black female perspective, as seen in her poems (e.g., “Cinema Eyes” and “The Stone Breakers”) and plays (Pocomania and At What Price), and I believe she can be read as Jamaica’s first feminist writer. Surprisingly, in the preface to her book Women Do This Every Day, Lillian Allen does not mention Marson as one of the “outstanding” Jamaican literary figures of the past. She does, however, acknowledge Louise Bennett, who, like Marson, inserts a feminist sensibility into Jamaican literature by focusing “especially [on] rural women and poorer women of the city.”4 Building on Marson’s legacy, Bennett wrote entirely in Jamaican Patwa and drew on other forms of African-Jamaican orality (such as riddles and Anancy stories) to explore Afro- indigenous culture from a female perspective. Carolyn Cooper uses Bennett’s poem “Jamaican Oman,” along with other poems, to mark “the genesis of an indigenous feminist ideology” in Jamaica, which, she argues, pre-dates the more recent women’s movement of Western societies.5 Dub poets themselves are well aware of the debt owed to foremothers like Bennett. There is a strong sense of female community informing the work of women dub poets in the diaspora. Lillian Allen’s and Afua Cooper’s poems often pay tribute to female figures in their lives along with “sheroes” from Jamaica, continental Africa, and the wider African diaspora. In “Tribute to Miss Lou,” for instance, Allen honours Bennett for her efforts in legitimizing Jamai- can Patwa in writing and performance. When Allen professes, “Pred out yuself Miss Lou / Lawd, yu mek we heart pound soh,” she celebrates the work of a woman whose poetry captures Jamaica’s cultural and linguistic richness, result- ing in a distinct literary form.6 Referencing Bennett’s popular children’s pro- gramme ‘Ring Ding’, Allen dramatizes dance, music, and black religious perfor- mances to represent the vitality of the Jamaican language in the works of Bennett: Get up dance clap sweat pon de ground 4 Lillian Allen, in Utterances and Incantations: Women, Poetry and Dub, ed. Afua Cooper (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1999): 46. 5 Cooper, Noises in the Blood, 48. 6 Allen, Women Do This Every Day, 43. Lisa Tomlinson - 9789004342330 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:12:19AM via free access 108 THE AFRICAN-JAMAICAN AESTHETIC tambourine sing a ring ding sing a ring ding.7 The poem not only reveals the vitality of the local Jamaican language, but also its versatility in expressing the multiple layers of an African-Jamaican cultural aesthetic. Black Feminism Both Allen and Cooper uncover the daily realities of black women and their struggle for social transformation and justice. Many of their poems challenge a Western feminist framework that fails to adequately take into account racial and class oppression. And contrary to notions that black feminist discourse emerges solely from the USA, Allen and Cooper and their female dub compat- riots are inclusive of Caribbean diasporic feminist histories. In their poems, such as Allen’s “I Fight Back,” these women articulate a critique of racism similar to that found in LKJ’s “Fite Dem Back” and “Inglan Is A Bitch,” but do so from a female viewpoint. To highlight the labour exploitation of people of Afri- can descent, both women turn to the lives of black domestic workers in Canada. Cooper’s and Allen’s poems capture the stories covered in Silenced, a seminal work on Caribbean domestic workers by the Jamaican Canadian Makeda Silvera.8 Silvera’s book, like the poems examined in this chapter, offers oral testimonies of the poor working conditions and everyday struggles of the Afro-Caribbean female working class. By centering black female narratives, Silvera, like these poets, empowers black female voices and disrupts the myth of Canada as a welcoming haven for immigrants. In this way, the silencing re- ferred in Silvera’s title is broken. Allen’s “I Fight Back” speaks specifically to the female immigrant experience, describing the long working hours, separation from children, and racial stereo- typing domestic workers endure. Her use of the Patwa term ‘backra’ points to the parallels between current economic exploitation and plantation slavery, thereby revealing a radical modernity and literary Sankofa: 7 Allen, Women Do This Every Day, 44. 8 Makeda Silvera, Silenced: Talks with Working-Class Caribbean Women about their Lives and Struggles as Domestic Workers in Canada (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1983). Lisa Tomlinson - 9789004342330 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 12:12:19AM via free access 4: Gendering Dub Culture Across Diaspora 109 I scrub floors serve backra’s meal on time spend two days working one twelve days in a week [...] They label me Immigrant, law-breaker, illegal, minimum wager Refugee Ah no, not mother, not worker, not fighter I FIGHT BACK I FIGHT BACK I FIGHT BACK.9 This poem serves effectively to contest the notion of Canada as a land of op- portunity and reveals the particular difficulties faced by female immigrants from regions in the global South, like the Caribbean, who must often take low- paying jobs in order to survive, creating what Himani Bannerji calls “feminized poverty” and “race-gendered class forms of criminalization and exclusion.”10 The poem also offers a strong critique of how the labelling of racialized women as “immigrant” and “illegal” have further underwritten exclusionary practices that serve to push them to the margins of society.
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