gender in some performance poems

MERVYN MORRIS

Gender in some performance poems

We may quarry art for information, as academics and intellectuals often do. What artists usually hope for, however, is that their work may be received primarily as experience, as aesthetic experience, significant (hopefully) but above all pleasurable andlor moving.

I want to say a little about ‘Gender in some performance poems’, and share with you two performance poems by Jean Breeze which seem to me remarkable and in which gender is clearly important.

By ’performance poems’ I mean poems which, though they may be available in print, seem to be (or are) designed for presentation to an audience rather than for silent or quiet reading by a single reader to and for herself. I shall be referring mainly to work by authors who have been labelled - though some of them resist the label - ’dub poets’. But if we say that ‘dub poetry’ incorporates, or is performed to the accompaniment of, reggae rhythms, we are forced to acknowledge that ’dub poetry’ constitutes only a fraction of the output of the writerslperformers we call ‘dub poets’. ’Per- formance poetry’ encompasses more of the work they do, and the term may have the further advantage of encouraging recognition that there are performance poems also among the works of many poets we more often associate with print. Some performance poems have musical accompaniment; many do not. And there are performance poems which are sometimes presented with music and sometimes presented without.

If the poem in print does, however minimally, alter with the specific context of its reception, the ’performance poem’ is even more difficult to fix, dependent for its meanings on the variable interaction between text, performer, audience and occasion. I shall be referring to particular record- ings, I shall sometimes attempt to describe details in performances I have heard and seen.

In the generation after Louise Bennett, our best-known Jamaican ‘performance poets’ are men. As men they are, in our society, gender- privileged. They are also mostly gender-blind, or only partially sighted. Except in a jokey poem of courtship and refection called ‘Loraine’, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s work (which is important) seems virtually unaware of gender; though ‘Inglan Is A Bitch’, and ’Sonny’s Lettah’ is addressed to

Gender in some performance poems 79

‘Mama’. When Mutabaruka pays tribute to a ‘Black Queen’ she is idealized (’Jah perfect creation’) and subordinate (’Jah gf t to man’). His ’Hard Times Love’ promises love but notes several obstacles to love in the ghetto. ‘Sistas Poem’ declares: ’Sistas, ah feel you pain,! Is a shame./ Sistas, ah feel you pain,/ Some men is to blame’ (mainly for abandoning their pregnant women). But, the poem continues, ‘Sistas, sistas, have no fear. / Some of we breddas, we really do care.’ Oku Onuora has, in Echo, a number of poems in praise of women, variously commended (and rec- ommended) for beauty, loyalty, strength, determination. But the most vivid gender references in his work present women in the context of oppression, as in ’Bwoy!’ (’de sight a de sista deml a ketch men/ mek mi clench mi fist’) or in ’Pressure Drop’:

dawta sigh ‘lard! hear de pickney dem a cry‘ man a pass sey dawta fat dawta smile but dawta cyan check dat dawta haffi a check fi food fi put ina pat dawta sey all man want a fi get im han unda skirt barn! she sey she a breed im vanish like when yu bun weed dawta wan wuk but is like sey dawta nu have nu luk or dem nu have enough wuk? dawta sey she naw ketch nu men she sey she naw falla nu fren dawta confuse too often dawta get use dawta bawl ’lard! wey mi a go do?‘

pressure drop

dawta willin fi wuk

(Echo, p. 13)

In work by Mikey Smith we glance women similarly exploited. Like Doris in ’Me Cyaan Believe It’:

Dons a modder of four get a wuk as a domestic Boss man move een an bap si kaisico she pregnant again bap si kaisico she pregnant again an me cyaan believe it me seh me cyaan believe it

( I t A Come,

In work by Mikey Smith, as in work by other men, there is grateful ac- knowledgment of the male persona’s mother:

80 Critical Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 1

. . . she woulda wuk night an day, make sacrifice an pray. For all she waan f i know, dat her son come out to sinting better so she can move outa de hog pen an show off pon her frien.

In the poem ‘Revolutionary’ the persona asserts the importance of estab- lishing a stable situation for one’s mother:

Now I tun man I sight up a revolutionary vision: if we waan seh roots any at all we haffi go stop we mumma from moving from yard to yard

( I t A Come, p. 44)

In the performance poems by (these) men, women, when presented in a positive light, are seen as inspiring and supportive. When presented as negative, women are most often seen as pathetic, powerless rather than malign. The male persona is often sorry for them, the poor things who must barter with their bodies to survive, the patsies left holding the baby. And in performance poems by men, the victimised women are usually seen as incidental figures in a broader canvas of injustice and oppression.

It should come as no surprise that women authors, no less concerned than men with crying out against oppression, often foreground gender. In their experience, the poems suggest, there often is a gender bias in oppression. Male authors may contend or may imply that disadvantaged men and women share a common distress; women may examine many problems shared with men, but they tend also to write about problems specific to women. There is a prototypical women’s performance poem which we might call ’Belly Woman’s Lament’ (which is the title of an actual poem, by Lillian Allen). One of the strongest poems of this type is ’Baby Madda’ by Jean Breeze who, though she has performed at Sunsplash, is less well known in Jamaica than she deserves to be.

Born on 11 March 1956, in Patty Hill, Hanover, Jean ’Binta’ Breeze (her maiden name was Lumsden) spent some of her earliest years with her grandparents, who were peasant farmers, while her mother was studying to be a midwife. Her father was a Public Health Inspector. Jean had her early education in Hanover, earning at Rusea’s A levels in Spanish, Geography and English Literature. In 1974 she married one of her former teachers, a Welshman, Brian Breese. They had a son. The Breeses separ- ated in 1978 and Jean, who had taught at secondary schools in Hanover and then worked for the Festival Commission, enrolled as a student at the


Jamaica School of Drama. She became a Rastafarian. After one year of Drama School she went off to the Clarendon hills. She remained there for three and a half years.

In an interview with Jean Small, Breeze has described aspects of her life in the Clarendon hills living in what she called ’iyabingi tradition’.

You don’t deal with anything that is Babylon. You don’t buy anything from the shops. You know, like to get up in the morning and make the baby porridge, you have to get up and light a wood fire, then grater the corn - dry corn, right? - then you put the corn on to boil, and grater the coconut for milk, and when you done putting in the milk then you cut cane and squeeze the cane to sweeten it. And me do that daily.

(Interview, 1 January 1987)

’Baby Madda’ - Breeze had a daughter while living in Clarendon hills - was provoked by her own actual experience. Unlike some poems of this type, it avoids self-pity:

ah know plenty sista ah suffa said like I but I sey to de sista neva, neva cry . . .

The poem is a satirical attack on patriarchal insensitivity. Right at the beginning, the woman persona registers basic biological facts: it is the woman who carries and nurtures the unborn child, it is the woman who undergoes the physical pain of childbirth. And this mere man, so separate from the burden and the pain, finds the newborn baby more than he can cope with. The verb in line three - ‘a go tell’ - quietly implies that the insensitivity may be repeated time and time again. ’King and queen life really tough’ - not just the life of this particular king and his queen, but man-woman relationships in general. The female Rastafarian persona registers a certain distance now from the baby-father, now ’dis african’ - ‘when I lef i madda go to dis africanl I never did expec no more a babylon’. The Rastafarian baby-father has become an oppressor’ an agent of babylon.

In performance the satire is made more telling by the joyously affirmative rhythms of the Rastafarian drumming and by the visual impact (indeed, the spectacle) of what looks like a Rastafarian woman in open protest against her ’king’.


baby madda mi come troo nine months tek all de pain den de idren a go tell mi seh im kean tek de strain go home to you madda she wi help you mind de yout go home to you madda I a tell you, is de truth well I heart really shake up I a tell you, Jah man fa wen I lef I madda go to dis african ah neva did expec no more a Babylon im seh go home to you mad& she wi help yuh mind de yout go home to you mad& I a tell you, is de truth ah sey, wen I can forward again pon de scene fah 1’s a irie dawta an ah want to live up clean im sey im doan know fah to how Babylon rough im kean sey fah sure king an queen life really tough go home to you madda she wi help you mind de yout go home to you madda I a tell you, is de truth well dis yah likkle queen I forward pon de scene I madda tek I een ah still a live up clean ah bring up I yout an ah teach her de truth fah de aiwa mus come wen I reach de higher home ah know plenty sista ah suffa said like I but I sey to de sista neva, neva cry


fah de love of I an I is fah de King mos high Almighty Creator who love I an I I wi

go home to mi madda she wi help mi mind de yout I wi go home to mi madda I ah tell you, is de truth

Breeze is an effective satirist. In ‘Hustler Skank’ (on the Riddym Ravings cassette) the edge of caricature is made keener by the fact that the role of this boasy man (’mi trash, mi ready, an mi still alive’) is being played by a woman. When shelhe says:

Watch yah now - yuh see me - me jus waan get rich quick Only ting mus wuk hard is my dick

the effect seems to me similar to what Sistren so often achieve in the fine exaggeration of their stereotypical males as played by women.

Jean Breeze‘s most remarkable achievement so far is ‘Riddym Ravings’ (the mad woman’s poem). The persona is convincing, and very disturbing: a pregnant woman psychotic wandering the streets of Kingston. In her distress she keeps remembering rural Jamaica as a happier place than town: ‘waan go a country go look mango’. The opening words of the poem indicate that she has been admitted to Bellevue Hospital more than once. And from the very first stanza her condition is explicitly related to economic hardship: her bed has been seized, and she has been evicted for non- payment of rent. She has had to sleep in the street. She has been hungry to the point of dizziness - she has watched the King Street pavement ‘bubble and dally’ before her eyes. (The ironic imagery is drawn from the slang of young men. In another context to bubble is to be having a good time or to be getting ready to have a good time; and to dally is to bob and weave on a motorbike. The mad woman is more realisticalfy associated with garbage, the back lot, and rotten pork, than with motorbikes and partying.)

What seems to matter most to this mad woman is the dj music. The doctor and the landlord - a sinister pairing - stop the music playing in her head. To the mad woman’s way of thinking the doctor is one of the agents of (economic) oppression.


As text it is disturbing enough; on the commercially available audio tape it makes a strong emotional impact; but to be present when Jean Breeze does this poem is to see and hear it fully realized. I recall witnessing in October 1986 a performance of extraordinary and harrowing authority. I remember, for example, feeling shivers when, with a very sudden gesture, she created the moment when the woman pushes in the plug again.

gender in some performance poems

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