Freedom Verse

Once relegated to the literary fringes, dub poet Lillian Allen has inspired countless Canadian writers. A new book shows why

- KAIE KELLOUGH

THERE IS a certain sound a raised voice can make, a raw and elemental tone that, at its most refined, exceeds the artist. I call it the sufferation tone. Well delivered, it is intense without being histrionic. Approached with insincerity, it rings hollow, and listeners immediately detect the artifice. But, if expressed from a place of genuine anguish, it can give voice to both joy and tragedy.

Great singers can produce the sufferation tone, but it is dub poets who locate it at the heart of their work. Dub evolved out of Jamaica’s reggae culture roughly fifty years ago. To dub is a recording term that roughly means to transfer audio from one medium to another, and in the case of dub poetry, the term describes a popular art form where poems are performed using words that feel like they have been imprinted on, or stamped into, an instrumental background. Incorporating reggae’s rhythms (or “ riddims”) and drawn from the Jamaican language, dub poetry grapples with the legacies of enslavement while exploring the injustice and inequality of everyday life. Oku Onuora, who grew up in Kingston, is credited with being among the first to experiment with combining music and protest lyrics, which he did while in prison for armed robbery between 1970 and 1977. (According to legend, he had attempted to redistribute funds from a post office to an impoverished youth center.) Onuora could deliver poems as a growl of fury or a howl that doubled as a battle cry. Among the poets he inspired was someone also able to shift effortlessly from lamentation to threat to celebration: Lillian Allen.