Jean 'Binta' Breeze was a popular Jamaican Dub poet and storyteller whose performances wee so powerful she was called a 'one-woman festival'. Her poems are Caribbean songs of innocence and experience, of love and conflict. They use personal stories and historical narratives to explore social injustice and the psychological dimensions of black women's experience. Striking evocations of childhood in the hills of Jamaica give way to explorations of the perils and delights of growth and change - through sex, emigration, motherhood and age. Introduced by renowned critic Colin MacCabe, the book brings together new poems with poetry and reggae chants from four previous collections: Riddym Ravings, Spring Cleaning, On the Edge of an Island and The Arrival of Brighteye. Many of the poems are included on the accompanying DVD featuring two Jean 'Binta' Breeze performances filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce at Leicester's Y Theatre, plus an interview with Jane Dowson.
Jean 'Binta' Breeze (1956-2021) was an internationally-renowned poet. Born in Hanover, Jamaica, she first visited London in 1985 to take part in the International Book Fair of Radical and Third World Books, and she continued to write, perform and teach until a collapsed lung resulted in early retirement to Jamaica. She published eight books of poetry and stories. Answers (Jamaica, 1982), Riddym Ravings (Race Today, UK, 1988), Spring Cleaning (Virago, 1992) were followed by On the Edge of an Island (1997), The Arrival of Brighteye (2000), The Fifth Figure (2006), Third World Girl: Selected Poems (2011, with DVD) and The Verandah Poems (2016) from Bloodaxe. She also released several records, cassettes and CDs, including Tracks and Eena Me Corner with the Dennis Bovell Dub Band and Riding On De Riddym: selected spoken works (57 Productions). She performed her work throughout the world, including tours of the Caribbean, Britain, North America, Europe, South East Asia and Africa, and latterly divided her time between Jamaica and England. She received a NESTA Award in 2003, and an MBE in 2012 for services to literature.
Title: Third World Girl: Selected Poems
Author: Jean Binta Breeze
ISBN: 9781852249106
Binding:
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publication Date: 2011-06-30
Number of Pages: 192
Weight: 0.3811 kg
Jean 'Binta' Breeze... emerged in the 1980s as the first female dub poet, fusing reggae rhythms and music with the spoken word... Through the use of a variety of women's voices and contexts, Breeze's work challenged the usual stances of the dub and performance poetry tradition. Whether on stage, record or page, she spoke for - and to - black female experience, encompassing a wide range of subjects, styles and tonalities. -- Lyn Innes * The Guardian *
Jean 'Binta' Breeze... was a poet who first came to prominence among Jamaica's dub poets, but whose work quickly distinguished itself from its origins to gain a subtlety and versatility of its own. Dub poetry... was already capable of delivering powerful political messages. Breeze adopted this eagerly, but brought to it a more intimate voice that enabled her to advance feminism as well as openness about mental illness and sex...Her range included not only the polemical and the personal, but also more extended narratives and memoirs. -- Obituary * The Daily Telegraph *
A major, perhaps even a great voice. For stature, Jean Binta-Breeze invites a Caribbean comparison with Maya Angelou, except that her range is broader still. Her poetry shifts effortlessly through standard English to a native Jamaican which has no equal in its emotional depth. -- Alexander Linklater * The Herald *
