Jamaican-Canadian Lillian Allen's dub poetry album Revolutionary Tea Party is dedicated to her daughter Anta and her "little friend"—"the future who stand up!" This album and her Conditions Critical are both about standing up to oppressive principalities and powers with laughter and dignity, with love and anger. Together they are a double whammy of resistance and affirmation. Both recordings won Canadian Juno Awards for best reggae/calypso albums of their respective years.
While they are not hot off the press, they continue to fire up new possibilities for cultural resistance through the innovative collaboration of voice, music, and technology. Those who draw strength and hope from popular culture with a justice vision will find much to celebrate here.
Lillian Allen said in an interview, "Anything that victimizes humanity would be fair game for my poetry." Inviting others to join in struggle, her poems and music confront an array of intersecting justice issues. "Dis Ya Mumma Earth" follows in the black church tradition of preaching oratory. Allen calls her congregation to "Get up! Stand up!/Shout en masse/Wail in the wilderness/Our will...will be/Peace, justice, equality/Join hands in liberation dance/Freedom chants/We are our only weapon for peace."
Dub poetry is kin to a variety of African and Caribbean-influenced oral and musical forms including spirituals, gospel hymns, slave work songs, call and response preacher-congregation exchanges, freedom speeches, dialect poetry, story-telling, reggae, and rap, to name a few. It derives specifically from the Jamaican DJ practice of dubbing improvised lyrics over a prerecorded reggae track on which the vocals have been dubbed out and the instrumental tracks altered for emphasis.
Allen employs a number of dub strategies on her albums. These include combinations of oral, musical, and electronic effects such as chant rhythms, multileveled voice projection, sound repetition, echoes, fades, and instrumental underscoring of the spoken.
As a solo voice, Allen's is that of a Jamaican prophet. It is powerful and riveting. She says she can't sing, but can she deliver. Through strategic pauses, inflection, projection, and emphasis, she throws her dynamic voice against the powers. Still, one of the most striking features of her albums is her collaboration with other voices. Toronto rappers Ringo Junior and Screecher Nice, former members of the Parachute Club Lorraine Segato and Billy Bryans, Quebecoise feminist Lucie Blue Tremblay, Afra-Canadian gospel quartet Four the Moment, and her daughter, Anta, among others, create a choral effect on many of the tracks. These multiple voices testify to the power of community and vocalize the will of the people. The voice of resistance is finally not a solo voice.
LIKE OTHER TRANSPLANTED dub practitioners in Toronto (Clifton Joseph) and England (Linton Kwesi Johnson), Lillian Allen directly connects culture-making and resistance work. Both of her albums are inscribed with a short-form manifesto: "Dis word breeds my rhythm. Dis word carries my freedom. Dis word is my hand: my weapon!"
"Rub a Dub Style Inna Regent Park," set in one of Toronto's racially mixed and economically depressed suburban wastelands, underscores the creative transformation of anger to action that dub poetry enables: "Could have been a gun/But's a mike in his hand." Such vision of responsible resistance is desperately needed on the North American inner-city front.
For Allen, creating new cultural forms is a means of opening up space for self-determination. "We Are the Subversives," through confrontational direct address, playfully challenges the way those of us from privileged backgrounds often impose limiting definitions on those who are different: "You made me a uniform/A place in line/Stick me in the dictionary/Legitimize your understanding/...I break from your sentence/Write a paragraph of my own/Create new forms/Space/I dig laneways to jump your highway ride/Turn gutters into trenches."
I daresay that such urban guerrilla tactics are not directed solely at the Brian Mulroneys and George Bushes of this world. Many whites on the Left can only see those who are racially and ethnically different as one-dimensional performers in a multicultural or revolutionary tableau.
Because dub poetry is culturally and historically specific, it resists the melting pot philosophy of appropriation, integration, and assimilation. Lillian Allen's voice itself reminds us of her Caribbean heritage.
In refusing to conform to "standard English," her hybrid patois carries forward a powerful memory of enslavement history where English as a "foreign" tongue was imposed on uprooted African peoples. In the cross-cultural exchange incited by Allen's poetry, it is those from Anglo-European stock who are displaced, while the Afra-Caribbean female voice takes center stage.
"One Poem Town" parodies and subverts a John Wayne-style cultural gatekeeper who enforces standard English and poetry forms. It was written when the Canadian League of Poets refused membership to Lillian Allen and two other dub poets in 1984 because they were not poets but performers. Allen's portable "take out art" resists Anglo-European standards for poetry. In taking dub to the people, she leaps class, economic, and literacy barriers that might prohibit some folks from access.
WHILE THE LEAGUE has since opened its doors, cultural racism takes other forms. Since her last album in 1987, instead of taking to the road and toning down her justice vision to enhance her commodity status, Allen works in the Toronto community with local teen-age rappers. She says they are already recognizing that they can't say what they want to say and be rewarded. Many of them choose to "sell out" to the sex-and-violence rap-for-white-boys market. Alternately, she feels artists can be trapped in a multicultural ghetto, where they can't get grants unless they are working on a "world beat" project.
A number of Allen's songs explode the "click/click/click/postcard perfect" misconstructions of "Canada" as the land of opportunity and "the Caribbean" as "beautiful tropical beach." Her title track, "Conditions Critical," diagnoses Jamaica as chronically ill from North/South economic disparities. "Unnatural Causes" casts the homeless as the new pioneers in the Canadian "arctic" of indifference and upends the sacred cow of North American democracy by reminding us that "all people are created equal except in winter." "Unclick": The photo-opportunities from the windows of Allen's tour bus give witness to the underbelly of late 20th-century democratic capitalism.
Allen frequently challenges gridlocked economic, racial, and gender oppressions. A number of her songs give voice to the culturally specific experience of immigrant domestic workers and other Afra-Caribbean females. "Why Do We Have to Fight" contests the notion of a universal "woman" for the women's movement: "A woman's work is not recognized/If she be black it doubly-dized/Without a man she's in nothings land."
Akin to spirituals and gospel songs, "Sister Hold On" is a kind of prayer for those women downed by "Babylon System": "Just hold on sister/Remember your strength/Remember those passed...Remember you're whole/And you're not alone...See this music, this poetry/This heart/Is reaching out/Reach out/Hold on sister." Four the Moment provides back-up for this communal laying on of hands.
In her title song, "Revolutionary Tea Party," Allen stirs some kitchen table analysis into her recipe for cultural resistance. Allen's tea party provides a safe space for dreaming dreams, gathering strength, and building coalitions: "You who work in the present tense...Come mek wi work together, Come sit here with me/An mek wi tea...Come mek wi give you little nurturing...."
Here is a powerful home-grown wisdom that world-weary justice workers everywhere would do well to heed. Retreat time is the foundation from which responsible and empowered resistance is born. Then "rebel in the streets if that's the beat." To everything there is a season.
Lillian Allen ends her South Africa freedom song with wise words that I believe will be the undoing of the world's power brokers: "They can't kill the spirit." We don't walk alone on the long freedom road. There is a faithful company who walks with us as we walk with them. Dub poetry is "Riddim an' Hardtimes"—redeeming hard times—as we keep on standing up for justice.
Revolutionary Tea Party by Lillian Allen. Redwood Records. 1984.
Conditions Critical by Lillian Allen. Redwood Records. 1987.
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