Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze didn’t have much trouble finding a captive audience for her poetry performances when she arrived in London from Jamaica in 1985. Being the first woman on the dub and reggae poetry scene, which had gained momentum in Britain during the 1970s and ‘80s, was enough to spark the curiosity of black and Caribbean audiences. In particular, Breeze recalls, it was the women in these communities who sat up and took notice, having only seen men perform the artform before.
‘There was a really good poetry scene [when she arrived in London], because in the years previous there had been a lot of dub poets and reggae poets coming out of Jamaica that were all men,’ Breeze observes. ‘There was a lot of interest in the first woman in that field of writing in London, and there was a great welcome from the black community in particular, and black women, who were interested in seeing a woman [perform]. Generally, throughout Britain in the poetry scene there was a big welcome.’
Breeze initially travelled to the capital – at the encouragement of reggae dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson – on tour. After holding workshops at a college in Brixton, she was offered a job as a theatre teacher there – and decided to stay.
‘Britain has been very good to me,’ Breeze remarks. Finding work was never a problem, she says, when asked about the difficulties of adapting to life in London. It was the everyday things most expats to the city would admit to struggling with that complicated ordinary life – like finding affordable accommodation in one of the world’s most expensive cities.
And, of course, after sunny Jamaica, there was the cold. ‘I didn’t know how to dress for the cold, and kept buying the wrong things!’ she laughs.
Born in Jamaica in 1957, Breeze studied at the Jamaican School of Drama, alongside poets Oku Onuora and Michael Smith. She began writing, performing and recording ‘dub’ poetry in the 1970s before moving to London, where she has performed in the West End and published a number of poetry collections, including Ryddim Ravings – which includes one of her most famous works to date.
Her piece about ‘A mad woman speaking from the streets of Kingston’, [Jamaica], Breeze describes as ‘kind of my signature poem.’ If anything signifies her work, it is the voice of black women’s experiences told through monologues. Her works also reflect a diversity of experiences of black and Caribbean women – stretching from the streets of Jamaica, to life in Britain. Often, like her own life, they concentrate on women whose lives have bridged both countries.
‘I’ve written the voice of a woman who had been in England for 40 years and is now returning to the Caribbean. And she’s talking to the children she leaves in London. I’ve written a woman at home, cleaning up everybody’s mess and then doing the laundry. I’ve written a seven-year-old girl, who was sent on her own on a boat to London, to meet a mother she hasn’t seen in five years.’ Her voice rises and falls melodically, the rhythms underlying her work surfacing through pauses and a Jamaican-English drawl.
For the latest project – her first novel – Breeze plans to return to Jamaica for a year to research the oral histories of five generations of women, starting in her own home. ‘My house in Jamaica was a house full of women!’ she exclaims. There is her grand-aunt, 87, her 71-year-old mother, two sisters in their 30s, and Breeze, 47, who also has two daughters aged 22 and 12. As a starting point for the book, Breeze is beginning with a story told to her by her grand-aunt, about a woman born to English parents in Jamaica. She then moves away from her family for the following generations, ending with the voice of a woman born in London to Caribbean parentage.
The choice to include five generations of women is rooted in another Jamaican cultural tradition that Breeze will be exploring, effectively weaving the changing music and rhythms throughout the country’s history into the structure of the narrative. The working title of the book, Breeze tells me, is The Fifth Figure – a reference to a dance known as the ‘Quadrille Formation’. This particular dance, involving four couples and four different stages, or ‘figures’ – was introduced to Jamaica from Europe. Initially danced in the English homes on plantations, the African workers would adopt it and add their own music, movements, and a fifth figure.
Breeze explains that the idea is to write each woman in monologue, in a way that relates to the rhythm of each ‘figure’ of the dance, but also introducing other African influences into the voices, and therefore reflecting the changing music, and lives, over the generations.
Sounds complex? Breeze explains further, adding that the African communities vary across Jamaica in their cultural traditions and music, each having their own drumming patterns and songs used for different occasions such as wakes, weddings, name ceremonies and other celebrations.
‘I will be looking to work through these rhythms,’ says Breeze, ‘So that each woman has what is called a “signature tune”, that is, a rhythm surrounding her generation, which she returns to [at moments in the story] as her kind of motif.’
But what Breeze is most excited about is the opportunity to take the time to research and write the novel, an opportunity brought about after she won a £50,000 award from NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.
The whole event was a complete surprise, she notes, from receiving the letter informing her she had been nominated for the fellowship, to winning it. The challenge, she adds, will be to write a full-length novel after concentrating on short stories and poems for so long.
‘I know what I imagine,’ she laughs, ‘All I have to do now, is do it!’
Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze is appearing at a literature festival in Cricieth, Wales, this evening. For further information on the event, visit the Academi website, or CLICK HERE to read a previous Arts Hub article on the festival.
