posted on 18 Dec 2024

Time Come: Selected Prose by Linton Kwesi Johnson

I can’t immediately think of a more necessary or overdue collection of non-fiction than the recently published Time Come, almost forty years’ worth of journalism, essays and talks by the great dub-lyricist, cultural and political activist and reggae musician, Linton Kwesi Johnson. As Paul Gilroy describes it in his excellent introduction it represents a wealth of ‘firmly analogue writing’ rescued from the obscurity of long-gone publications and is mostly unavailable online. 

Sometimes even the most well-intentioned of literary rescue operations fail, revealing writing that has not survived the circumstances or occasions that gave rise to it; but this isn’t the case here: one reads this collection aware that it is a living, breathing social, cultural and political history of the black experience in Britain, the struggle for justice and against racial discrimination and oppression – a history which still has breath in its body, heat in its blood, and a strong, vibrant pulse. And I think this to a great degree is because of Johnson’s distinctive voice – a crystal clear prose in which every word seems to have been weighed for meaning and tone and temperature, and which even at its most passionate and angry is never merely strident or self-aggrieved and is always somehow tinged with an attractive personal modesty.

The earliest pieces tend to come from the 70s music press, where he wrote superbly about the rise of reggae to an international music. Anyone who still treasures some of the mid-70s classics of reggae and dub – LKJ’s own records, the mighty Burning Spear’s Marcus Garvey, Culture’s soaring, hypnotic harmonies on Two Sevens Clash, or Steel Pulse’s Handsworth Revolution (surely one of the greatest black British reggae records ever made and an astonishing debut), will find much to enjoy in these early pieces. Johnson writes about reggae with the seriousness and acuity and precision of language that an earlier generation brought to the critical appreciation of jazz records. He examines the political, cultural, social and religious language of reggae, the ‘potent metaphor[s] of retribution’ in its Rastafarianism, the persisting strand of ‘African consciousness’, and its rediscovery of the late-nineteenth century heroes of Jamaican liberation and Pan Africanism, such as Marcus Garvey. I don’t think anyone was writing of reggae in quite this way until LKJ came along and I found these early pieces fascinating.

But it was the Thatcher decade of the 1980s that most radicalised LKJ and these pieces are particularly interesting for the light scattering of autobiographical information they provide – especially his involvement in the ‘autonomous political and cultural movements’ that grew out of the struggles of that time and the tragedies that black communities experienced, such as the racist arson attack that resulted in what became known as the New Cross Massacre of the 18th January 1981. Fourteen young people were killed and dozens sustained life-changing injuries when a sixteenth birthday party was fire-bombed. Out of this calamity came the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, which within three months would mobilise over 20,000 people in a Black People’s Day of Action – a gigantic march through London demanding justice. It was, Johnson says in a 2011 piece on the thirtieth anniversary of the fire, ‘an unprecedented demonstration of black political power’ signalling an irreversible shift in UK race relations. 

The forces of the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, the Race Today Collective (black theoretical and political writing and campaigning and cultural events), the Black Parents Movement (challenging racism and disadvantage in the educational system) and the Black Youth Movement (starting new youth activities and cultural initiatives and challenging racist policing) would eventually join together in what is now regarded as one of the most powerful black community alliances this country has ever seen. 

These powerful movements of black self-empowerment – autonomous and far beyond the control of any of the mainstream political parties, trade union structures, or far left groups – were central to Johnson’s life but as ever he is modest about his own role in these struggles, preferring to focus on the tireless Trinidadian activist, John La Rose, whom LKJ writes beautifully and movingly about in a 2006 obituary (La Rose died in February of that year aged 78). 

La Rose truly was at the heart of this community action. He began life as a Trinidadian labour activist, founder of the Workers Freedom Movement and editor of its journal, Freedom. In 1961 he came to Britain, settling in London. He founded the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), which included Caribbean writers and intellectuals such as Sam Selvon, Andrew Salkey, C.L.R James, Stuart Hall, Wilson Harris and many others to whom the young Linton Kwesi Johnson became close. In 1966, along with his partner, Sarah White, La Rose founded New Beacon Books, the first ever specialist Caribbean bookseller, distributor and publisher in the country. This in turn was instrumental in establishing the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, which began in 1982 and would provide powerful links – political, cultural, practical – between radical UK publishers, writers and booksellers and those directly involved in liberation struggles elsewhere in the world, especially of course in anti-apartheid era South Africa. Johnson served for many years on the book fair’s organising committee. ‘John was not only my mentor, friend, comrade,’ LKJ wrote in his obituary, ‘he was like a father to me. He was the most remarkable human being I have ever known’.

These and many other exemplary figures from a long ‘Caribbean tradition of radical and revolutionary activism’ make appearances in Johnson’s journalism and he is at his best, his most moving, his most generous, when writing of the profound influence they had in shaping the person he would become and the direction his own cultural and political efforts would take.

I read this collection in a couple of sittings as Storm Darragh raged outside and it seemed somehow appropriate. It is a rich, varied and startlingly vivid account of over forty years of black British struggle – a life in the eye of the storm, if you like – and anyone looking for a better understanding of those years and the continuing relevance of that experience will find much to fascinate and inform here – and most importantly, much to enjoy. A feast.

 

Alun Severn

December 2024