Much More than the Notes

Episode 2: Roger Robinson

[Audio: Roger Robinson. “Shine” from Dog Heart City. Jahtari (2017)]

Roger Robinson: Lots of people call me an activist and educator. I'm not an activist — I'm not really a full-time educator either — but I am a creative citizen. I am trying to make change in communities, and that's an active thing. So it's how to live through your creativity to make the change in the world that you want to see.

Much More than the Notes. Music, its Poetics and its Politics

Episode 2: Roger Robinson

RR: My name is Roger Robinson. I'm a poet who writes books and works in music sometimes.

[Audio: King Midas Sound. “I Sound” from Dub Heavy – Hearts & Ghosts. Hyperdub, 2009]

Roger Robinson is a British writer and performer of Trinidadian descent who considers himself part of the same lineage as the British-Jamaican dub poet and activist Linton Kwesi Johnson. After many years of poetry writing, in 2020 Robinson received much-deserved recognition when his fourth collection of poems, A Portable Paradise, won two prestigious awards: the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. The book tackles issues of uprootedness, representation, belonging and race, and it even includes a touching sequence of poems that eulogises the dozens of victims of the tragic fire that destroyed Grenfell Tower in 2017, a working-class residential building in West London. Robinson is a writer who challenges the canon and the academic establishment. However, his poem A Portable Paradise is now taught in Secondary Schools as part of the British National Curriculum.

Another of Robinson's most recent works, Home Is Not a Place, was published in 2022. In this book, Robinson collaborates with photographer and writer Johnny Pitts, founder of the Afropean project dedicated to the interplay between European and African cultures. Robinson and Pitts embarked on a journey to different British coastal cities, documenting reflections on the Black British experience in the wake of Brexit through a series of visual and text-based vignettes. Apart from his career as a writer, Robinson is also an in-demand vocalist in the world of dub, working with musicians like Kevin "The Bug" Martin, on the King Midas Sound project, and the artist Disrupt, who produced Robinson's solo albums Dis Side Ah Town and Dog Heart City.

This interview and the recording of several of Robinson's poems took place on 21 June 2023 in Northampton, where he moved with his family after years of living in the London district of Brixton. Robinson is working on his upcoming first novel in this small town in the East Midlands region.

Relocations and Changes of Rhythm. From Hackney to Trinidad and Back

RR: [I] moved to Trinidad when I was three and I came back when I was nineteen. So I was more or less brought up in Trinidad, but I was born in Clapton in Hackney and we left England and went to Trinidad with my family and parents, who were studying in England at the time. And when I went back the only real adjustment was losing a Scottish accent which I picked up at the time. But fitting into Trinidad was easy because my parents were from Trinidad. So I never felt so much like an outsider. But I felt more like an outsider in terms of… my family was working class but through their education had begun to mix with middle and upper classes and so I always felt like the middle and upper classes… I didn't particularly fit in with them in my entire life. So I was an outsider, class-wise.

But then when I came back to England I really felt like an outsider. I went to a place called Ilford, Essex, which at the time was East London, a kind of hotbed for racists, and even though I didn't have many problems, I could feel the tension in Ilford, Essex. And then I started finding my way up to Brixton, which is the town that I spent… you know, I have the longest relationship with, ongoing. Even living in Northampton now and I go back to London, I still go back to Brixton.

[Audio: Brother Resistance. “Star Warz Rapso” from Rapso Take Over. Left Ear Records (1986/2021)]

Trinidad, Calypso and Rapso

Trinidad is a very creative society and, you know, they have the kind of inflection point of carnival — [it] always kind of increases that general creativity that Trinidadians have. Trinidad is actually a very spiritual place. You’ve got a lot of vibrations and they have a lot of African retentions from slavery and stuff. And so the kind of musical interests in Trinidad, soca and chutney and all that stuff, will come up seasonally, but during the year I was kind of more brought up on reggae and, you know, people like Prince Far I and Big Youth and all that type of stuff and the kind of parties that I used to go to. Because of the influence of Jamaica, but also the people I used to hang out with were really into that. That was kind of like ghetto music, for want of a better word. But also too, I was really influenced by this thing we used to have in Trinidad called rapso, which is the poetry of calypso. It's incredibly working class. The main proponents were Brother Resistance and the Network Riddim Band — Brother Resistance recently died — but they still have a few younger exponents of rapso, and rapso was intensely interesting to me. In fact, that was probably the beginning of my link to creativity, working class culture and politics, and mixing together. So it's called the poetry of calypso. There are reggae influences, but it's called the poetry of calypso.

So rapso was a small movement in Trinidad and it still continues; it influences, even soca now, where people like Bunji Garlin are influenced by rapso, that kind of sing-talk DJ-type style.

So during slavery in Trinidad history there were a lot of revolutions. And because there were a lot of revolutions, the slave masters in Trinidad allowed Trinidadian or African people who were brought to Trinidad to keep some of their cultural rituals, even though they were stamped out everywhere else, because every time they tried to stop them from their cultural rituals they'd have a revolution and they'd kill everybody. So there was like “yo, let the slaves do their thing, keep the peace and go on.” So that's why the African retentions are so strong in Trinidad in particular, because of that. And also after slavery a lot of Africans kind of collected in a southern, southern, southern tip of the island and stayed together. So there was a lot of African retentions there because you have lots of different waves of different races coming in: Chinese, Indian, but on the southern tip of the island there was no mixing. So you had a whole bunch of African retentions happening there. And all these things fed through into carnival and into the idea of using calypso and carnival as a political tool. If there's anything I got from Trinidad, it’s the idea of it’s the idea of social commentary from calypso from calypso and using it and sometimes even shrouding in the lyrics, saying one thing but meaning another thing.

So there was an artist I particularly like called Black Stalin, and Black Stalin is an older calypsonian. So with Black Stalin everything was political, but everything was kind of covered up in the idea of a party and lots of things were covered up in the idea of parties. But he's talking about his strife for working-class people and that kind of cleverness kind of resonated with me. People like Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez; it’s like okay, we're seeing this thing but underneath all the working-class people know what we're talking about, you know. So I think that's one of the main influences on me in Trinidad.

[Audio: Black Stalin. “Burn Dem” from Roots Rock Soca. Rounder (1986/1991)]

A Family of Storytellers

I come from a very matriarchal family. My mother had thirteen brothers and sisters, and she was incredibly good at storytelling, but so were a lot of her sisters and the idea of this story was to teach you something about a human truth. But to teach about human truth, they would often lie, and so they were often great storytellers but they were incredible liars. And that lie was to get you to the lesson, the human truth of the lesson, and for you to learn something that you could take with you the rest of your life. My mum was a singer too, you know. She used to sing with a theatre-maker called Paul Keens-Douglas, and she used to sing Caribbean folk tunes, and she had a twin sister. Her twin sister was a singer too.

My mother was what you call a district nurse. Yeah, so a district nurse was a nurse who would work with people out in the country. So you had to have a nurse travelling out to the rural areas to deal with the people from the rural areas.

But the thing about the people from the rural areas is that they didn't trust anybody who wasn't from the area and so they used to send my mum because my mum was a good storyteller and so how it would go is we would travel out there and then, you know, she'd meet with this woman at the edge of some orange grove and then she'd be talking and laughing and telling stories and then eating food with her feet up, hanging out, exchanging all the information and stuff like that, and then by the end of the day, people come out of the brushes and then my mum would dispense all the medicine that she needed to do. Now you would think: Why would she spend a whole day talking, eating food and hanging out in order to dispense medicines? But the thing is that she had to gain their trust. So all the stories she'd tell them would gain their trust, all the laughs and jokes and everything they make. They have to like her in order to trust her and that's why they’d send her, because nobody else had that particular talent to be able to do that with those particular country people. And then she'd come home and she'd be writing all the information from the day because she'd been taking it in, but her main thing was to entertain when she was there.

[Audio: Dennis Bovell. “Silly Dub” from The Dubmaster. Trojan (1993/2022)]

Home Is Not A Place

I've been on tour for a while for the Home Is Not A Place book. People often ask about  “what do I think about home?” For me now, home is where my family is, where I can turn on the volume inside and we can feel safe and secure. That's where my home is now, because it belongs to my family, but I'm just in that mode.

I know there's a lot of people who kind of struggle and fight for home. And a lot of people who we talked to on the coast of England that we drove around, they are trying to build a home on the coast and it's very hard e ofor them but they're okay to deal with whatever they have to deal with.

Building a home is always a sense of struggle, even if it seems easy, because belonging is not necessarily easy, even when people welcome you in. You don't have the history there, you don't have those things. But one of the things about travelling is that we've delved into history a lot and I think a lot of Black people have had the sense that they are a guest in a foreign country in England, whereas I don't think that at all, because the whole industrial revolution was kicked off of the sweat of Black people from the Caribbean. And then, you know, Black people fought in all the world wars and died. So I think, this is my home. I own here. It was built off the backs of my ancestors. I'm not a guest anywhere. This belongs to me.

A Journey Around the British Coast to Answer “What is Black Britain?”

You know, it was less a decision and more an investigation to see. One of the things is that every time we'd ask a question, we'd expect an answer and we never got the answer we expected. It was often very unexpected. So we didn't want to go with any preconceived notions of what it is, but we really wanted to see and one of the things we learned is that Black people have not been used to being asked about their lives, because we'd ask them one question and they'd talk for two and a half hours, you know, and that they wanted to talk about their lives. Especially, sometimes, it was before, during and after COVID, so people had also been locked up for a long time. So we didn't have any preconceived notions and we still can't even generalise and say exactly what it is.

But we do know that the answers were diverse and interesting. Oftentimes had a lot to do with nature, the sea. Oftentimes had a lot to do with history and parents and holidays. The relocation on the coast is a very random thing. I realised that just basically Black location in general is quite random. “I had a friend who lived there, you know, or my father brought me here once on a holiday and I liked it and I came back”.

The Sea Means Something Different to Us

The sea is always unfolding and Black people have been interacting with the sea for a very long time, against their will and sometimes with their will. But the sea also throws up different things, and it throws up different things in memory, in terms of immigration, in terms of slavery, in terms of settling, in terms of life on an island, in terms of holiday, in terms of coasts of Africa, in terms of drowning, in terms of bodies.

But one of the most interesting things I learned is in one place I went to called Holkham On Sea, Wells On Sea, in Norfolk [he refers to Holkham Beach and Wells-next-the-Sea], and I wrote a poem there about assessing your life on the border of the sea, and somebody contacted me and said at that place where I wrote that poem, there's actually an underwater forest, where the whole forest is submerged and all the trees continue growing underneath the sea.

And I was like “what?” And that that is a line where people did pilgrimages to because of the energy, the energy that you could derive from that particular place. And that was kind of shocking to me, because I kind of felt it. Sometimes, as a poet, you can just feel certain things, and I think at certain points I felt different things in the sea that had to deal with the idea of ancestors, that dealt with the idea of my history. It evoked certain things in me and, whatever the reason that might be, might be metaphysical, might be my own personal knowledge, might be subconscious; is that you couldn't ignore it when it was happening.

Twenty Parakeets

Not the common caw of the crow, not

ripened fruit, not blossoming

flower nor flames.

 

Not an imagined tropical film set

nor festive Christmas lights.

 

But twenty parakeets at home in a tree

outside a Dover car park, as content

as in any mango tree in Curaçao.

 

Ignoring the calls of being illegal

immigrants and the murmurs

that there may be a danger to local birds,

 

they seem assured in their fellowship

enough to sing their calypso

and look down on the city’s streets

as people march by carrying orange

supermarket bags, watching the streaks

of red brake-lights from passing cars

and children pointing at them, shouting

Look, look, at the birdies, Mum, look at them

dressed in their bright yellow anoraks. 

(From Johnny Pitts; Roger Robinson. Home Is Not A Place. Harper Collins, 2022)

When we were doing Home Is Not A Place we came out of a Dover car park and there was a tree full of parakeets and making a whole heap of noise and we looked up. But the thing is the parakeets aren't native to England, so they're Caribbean birds, for want of a better word. So it started to become a type of metaphor and there were like lots of theories about how parakeets came to England. One theory is that Jimi Hendrix had two parakeets and he let them go, and all the parakeets in England are Jimi Hendrix rock parakeets.

And then there's another idea. That is, this film company, which was trying to make a Caribbean scene, left the door open and all the parakeets flew out and so that all the parakeets are from that film studio: Shepperton Studios is the name of the film studio. But my theory is that all the film parakeets and the rock parakeets came together and they just had children and that's all the parakeets. You know, rock film parakeets; that's it. In this poem some of the imagery kind of comes from a photographer called Saul Leiter, who Johnny introduced me to. I wasn't into photography, but travelling with Johnny Pitts, who's a very avid photographer, and making a book, he would introduce me to all these photography books and then so much imagery kind of came into the book itself, into the poems.

Writing for the Page, Writing for the Microphone

I always write for the page — the microphone stuff is after — so there's always been, even stuff I record now… it has to work on the page first. If it's not working on the page, I'm not interested in it just being an utterance.

Sometimes literature could be a bit boring. And I like musicians; they're fun. And so people used to ask me to write lyrics for their bands. And I say “I have an idea”. So just hanging out in studios when I was a lot younger, and so from there, and then people asked me to record an album, like Kevin Martin/King Midas Sound, and I recorded for some of his Bug project and then from there it just kept on going. I like music as much as I like literature, sometimes even more. But it's also a way to get to people who might not read books. They might not read a book, but they could still hear the poem. So it's useful for that. Put some good music behind anything; you can give them anything. It's like sugar and medicine.

[Audio: Imamu Amiri Baraka. “Answers in Progress” from It’s Nation Time. African Visionary Music. Black Forum/Motown (1978)]

Reading Amiri Baraka’s Blues People 

One of the kind of major books that allowed me to understand music was Blues People by LeRoi Jones, who eventually changed his name to Amiri Baraka. I'd always liked LeRoi Jones and Amiri Baraka's poems, but when I read Blues People I profoundly began to understand what music was and it kind of partly started my journey towards music.

(…)

Believe it or not, I did not connect all musics to African music. I did not connect samba, salsa, soca, reggae, calypso, blues. I did not know it had one root and one root was African music. So before that book I was just like “what?” I thought they were all individual products of the particular culture. No. They all changed because of the context, but they all have one root in African music.

And to me that was a revelation. All of a sudden, I was just like, my whole world and understanding of music changed. So I could listen to dub and if someone started playing salsa I could go and just take what I do and put it on salsa, because I understand what the root of the music is. So it's like understanding the root of anything. This is the origin of everything. It's just like ta, ta, ta, ta, ta. And then you listen to Afrobeat, it's the same beat, ta, ta, ta. You're like “oh, shit, all these things have one root”. And you take it to soca and you're just like “oh, this is the same beat”. It's just like… that was a revelation to me, because then I understood what Black music actually was.

When? Years ago, probably about, must be about nearly thirty years ago, but I ain’t forgot it. And also, too, I was just getting into music at the time, so it made sense to me, so I could understand why Roy Ayers made a track with Fela Kuti. I could understand why Malian guitarists would collaborate with blues musicians. I could understand what John Coltrane jazz was about after I saw it in the context of percussion, because before I had no code to get it. When you get the code, you're just like oh, okay.

[Audio: Aba-Shanti-I and The Shanti-Ites. “Zulu Warrior ('96' Mix)” from The Wrath of Jah – Verse 1 (Earth Rocker). Falasha Recordings (1996)]

Aba Shanti-I Sound System

Aba Shanti-I Sound System could shake the trauma out of you with pure bass sound. During the hundreds of years of trauma, Black people became accustomed to using particular frequencies of bass and certain rhythms of drums to relieve their generational hurt. Certain rhythms became highly valued. These healing frequencies became wailing Blues and Jazz in America, became whispering Samba in Brazil, became Soca in Trinidad and became, and became and became. Now Aba Shanti-I, he has every principle healing frequency on 45 vinyl. It is said that he lives in a big house but sleeps only in one room, as every other room holds black 45s (bathroom included). As with anything else, soon, white people heard of the healing and felt like they had to get some, even though they were not sure of the illness they were suffering, but rather knew that something was not right), but the frequencies spoke differently to them. It made them dance, but a dance that made them grieve the transgressions of their generations. It made them cry hysterically with a deep, deep sorrow and drop out from the system and twist their blond flowing hair into dreadlocks. Healing still, but healing different ills.

(From Johnny Pitts, Roger Robinson. Home Is Not A Place. Harper Collins, 2022)

[Audio: Aba-Shanti-I and The Shanti-Ites. “Zulu Warrior ('96' Mix)” from The Wrath of Jah – Verse 1 (Earth Rocker). Falasha Recordings (1996)]

Aba Shanti I Sound System I wrote, funnily enough, going back to Amiri Baraka; the same thing I was mentioning is in this poem about there was one root and it was going to different things. But Aba Shanti I Sound System was, like, when you go the bass was so loud that it would wash you and you feel like. You feel like “oh, there's something that happened to me in there” and people talk about that kind of idea of bass by vibrational wash. So I found that quite interesting. I want to get into words. I wanted to get Aba Shanti into words because he used to be in Brixton, handing out flyers, saying “Brixton Recreation Centre, Aba Shanti, Aba Shanti!” And I like the idea of the sound of Aba Shanti, I just like how it sounds.

I wanted to write about sound systems and what is their importance. But not just the importance of a kind of community-building thing; what's the metaphysical importance? And also to talk about how in Aba Shanti dances it wasn't just Black people, they had loads of white people there, but always a particular type of white person. It's always someone who dropped out from society and who had twisted locks and it was kind of like white Rastafarians. They just, I'm not sure, they were Rastafarians, but they were kind of living off-grid, you know. It would attract that particular type of white person and I was like “oh, why always them and not just everybody else?” And so I was trying to just make sense of it and also too with a poem I was just trying to write until it makes sense and that’s one of the ones that resolved like that. I might write loads and loads of poems on just a topic and I'll just write till it makes sense to see what comes out of it. And this is one of them that would, yeah. Aba Shanti is the owner of the sound system, but it's also called Aba Shanti-I sound system. So he's the owner; he's a DJ and it's his sound system. Everybody wonders how old he is because people were like “he's like a hundred”. He's not a hundred, but he’s really hard to place and he doesn't tell anybody his age. So it's just like, how old is he? It becomes a kind of obsession. So there's something quite mythical about him in general and he has massive locks and so he's been around for such a long time and you can find lots of stuff on YouTube of Aba Shanti dances.

[Audio: Linton Kwesi Johnson. “Wat About Di Workin' Claas?” from Making History. Island (1984)]

The Influence of Linton Kwesi Johnson

I think when I'm looking at the lineage of my poetry, I'm definitely in the lineage of Linton Kwesi Johnson, primarily because of him being a working class writer, but also a writer who combines his writing with music but also with politics, which is a really interesting combination for me. But also there are not many writers who wrote about Black Britain, per se. There are many writers who wrote about like a longing for Jamaica or a longing for Caribbean islands, and stuff like that. But he really documented Black British life in the ‘70s. What it's like to be Black and British, even though people would probably call themselves Caribbean in England. But he documented what the specificities of living in England was like. And as he's gone on, his work has only become stronger in terms of it's one of the few records of that time by somebody of that time, because you don't have a lot of documentation by the people who were actually here. And in that way I find him incredibly interesting and he's also stuck to his vision. I consider him not just lineage but a kind of faraway mentor of mine, because his vision was so strong and unwavering. It was such an innovative thing in his time. Now we call it dub poetry, but not many people were doing it before him. You had probably The Last Poets put it with jazz. You had a few people in Jamaica, who might have put some poetry to stuff, but before him, in terms of literature, there was not many people. Before him you had like toasters who were not necessarily… who were literate in their own ways, people like Prince Far I and people like Big Youth, but they were more operating because of a dance situation. They're trying to entertain a crowd as opposed to write poems about community, per se.

[Audio: Roger Robinson. “Smash and Scatteration” from Dis Side Ah Town. Jahtari (2015)]

A Portable Paradise

And if I speak of Paradise,
then I’m speaking of my grandmother
who told me to carry it always
on my person, concealed, so
no one else would know but me.
That way they can’t steal it, she’d say.
And if life puts you under pressure,
trace its ridges in your pocket,
smell its piney scent on your handkerchief,
hum its anthem under your breath.
And if your stresses are sustained and daily,
get yourself to an empty room – be it hotel,
hostel or hovel – find a lamp
and empty your paradise onto a desk:
your white sands, green hills and fresh fish.
Shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope
of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep.

(From Roger Robinson. A Portable Paradise. Peepal Tree Press, 2019. © Roger Robinson, reproduced by permission of Peepal Tree Press)

[Audio: Roger Robinson. “Smash and Scatteration” from Dis Side Ah Town. Jahtari (2015)]

A Portable Paradise and the T. S. Eliot Prize

A Portable Paradise was the title poem of the book. It was actually the last poem written. It was one of the first ones that newspapers got a hold of. Because it was the last poem in the book, I actually forgot about it. I wrote it because my friend, called Nick Makoha, was reading the manuscript and says “you don't have a title poem”. I was like “ahh” and we were less than two weeks away to printing and he says “you have to write a title poem”. And I kept on writing poems and he said “these are trash”.

He was like “if your title poem is not good, the whole book is a failure”. So I kept on sending them versions and then he said, “oh, this one's good”. He says “work on this one”. And then eventually it turned out to be in this. That's why I forgot about it, because it was in a blind rush just before printing. But having said that, A Portable Paradise is a poem that seemed to seep into the culture and matter to different people in different ways, and I'm talking about every race, every culture, every class seems to like this poem, and for some reason — I mean, I think it's a good poem — but I don't know why this one out of all the other poems. But I'm happy about it.

[Audio: Roger Robinson. “Smash and Scatteration” from Dis Side Ah Town. Jahtari (2015)]

A Portable Paradise was born out of necessity. I mean, I had written a lot of poems and this is the book that I cared the least about [in terms of] reception. It's a book that I needed to write. It's a book that the responsibility I feel fell on my shoulders with all these things that were happening to Black British people at the time and I really didn't care what the literary industry or anybody else thought. To be honest with you, I wasn't about to hear anything. Most of it was written in a blind rush. Every day I was writing and writing, sometimes staying in my library — wake up and just roll out of bed, start writing. Half of it I don't remember writing. That's how much I was in a reverie. And when I finished, I remember ringing a friend and telling him like “every single book I've ever written was for me to write this book”. This is before prizes. Just talked with another writer and he's like “really?”, “yeah”. Sent him a copy of it. He was like “my god, this is amazing.” He loved it. Then it started to have like these little hush things.

One interesting thing when you're going to win a big prize, a lot of people tell you “I think you're going to win a big prize”. So, like, people had read it, and it's like I'm sure “you're going to win a big prize” and it never happened to me before. But I have to be honest with you. I am not interested in prizes in the least. I'm interested in the utility of poems and I thought the poem, the book, had a lot of utility and I think the book was probably the most challenging of books for middle-class society to read because it's beautiful but at times kind of damning. And so when I got nominated, I was surprised and very happy and I thought to myself “wow, it was amazing”, I got nominated for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Like, literally, a nomination for the TS Eliot Prize for me was just like I actually cannot believe it.

When I won, I kind of really wasn't surprised. It sounds weird. When I got nominated I was like “I think I'm going to win.” I told my wife “I think I'm going to win this”. She was like “really?”. I was, like, I just think I am. And then I won. But it was still a shock. But I thought I was going to win. It was just like there was a tidal wave of things happening, and so yeah, so when I won then there were lots of people calling, lots of producers wanting to do stuff, lots of people who I do not know how they ever got my contact, but I’m glad because, you know, getting the TS Eliot allowed me to open a door for so many writers who were unrecognised and encourage writers who were going in a certain direction. So I think that’s why it’s good, for all the kind of things I could do for the communities I want to work with. And I’m super happy I won and I won another prize directly after it for the same book, which was another big prize called the Ondaatje, and so those two things together started really building up stuff. But it is definitely a turn of events. I think it made me more confident in the direction I was going in. And, yeah, it was a good thing for me and my family and for other writers and for Black British writing in general, and independent publishers.

[Audio: Roger Robinson. “Flowers” from Dog Heart City. Jahtari (2017)]

A Young Girl with a Dog and a Page

Bartholomew Dandridge, ca. 1725

Oil on Canvas, 48 x 48 inches (121.9 x 121.9 cm)

In the painting you’re behind the dog

an accoutrement like the fermenting grapes

and rotten peaches in the basket that you hold.

You look at her in her lace trim dress

not as a childhood friend, but like

a deity you worship. But there’s something

in your acting that speaks of pain;

perhaps because you and the dog

have the same collar; perhaps, not

for the first time, you know you are

less important than the dog.

Even the painter cannot ignore

the wet sadness of your eyes.

He tries to tone it down by lighting

the girl and the dog brightly,

but all that does is make you

a darkness in the background,

a dark and ghostly presence

searing through history.

But I cannot leave you as a ghost,

so I’ll name you Quamin, from the Akans

and put you in fine blue linen,

place her unlit behind the dog,

an animal collar around her alabaster neck.

You're in a fine hat with a peacock feather,

and I’ll have her look at you in awe.

(From Roger Robinson. A Portable Paradise. Peepal Tree Press, 2019. © Roger Robinson, reproduced by permission of Peepal Tree Press)

[Audio: Roger Robinson. “Flowers” from Dog Heart City. Jahtari (2017)]

I think there's a writer called Saidiya Hartman, and so she has this thing called Critical Fabulation. That you could go through all archives that are done a long time ago, and the times were so rife with racism, sexism, homophobia and everything else that you could go back and reread these archives and reread them in a decolonized way, and so sometimes, based on that, I'll go back to paintings and see if I could read them with a decolonized mind and write about it. So that's it really. Sometimes it's an exercise I do.

[Audio: Roger Robinson. “Brixton Summer” from Dog Heart City. Jahtari (2015)]

Awards, Syllabi and the Canon

The canon as it exists for academies is just a bunch of dead white males, you know what I’m saying? But I'm a part of that canon. I don't know, I don't really care. My canon, I'm a part of my canon, which Baraka is a part of. It is just like Baraka, Komunyakaa, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Kwame Dawes. I have my own personal canon and that's the kind I'm interested in. Who cares about canons? It really doesn't matter. Does it help? Nobody becomes a poet to make money. Nobody becomes a poet to get props. You become a poet because it's like a vocation, like a priest, and if you’re giving the people what they need, that's what counts. Nothing else counts. If you get a big prize, you get a big prize. To do what? To get to write more poetry. That's what the prize is for: to give you more time to help more people. That's all it is. That's all it is. These canons are things that are status quo. 

[Audio: Roger Robinson. “Brixton Summer” from Dog Heart City. Jahtari (2015)]

I think universities in general are middle-class status quo organisations, which is not a bad thing. But being middle-class status quo organisations, it's hard for them to see any working-class movements in literature and it's also hard for them to turn around and just say, okay, well let's change this, because they're always, since the internet… Something can happen tomorrow in LA and I find out about it. I can take it in and the next day I can apply. Universities can't move like that because they're like a big boat that takes a long time to turn around, you know, because institutions don't move quickly enough. I can't blame them. Things are changing. So I'm on the syllabus now, along with lots of my friends who are poets, on the GCSE, the O-level syllabus and the A-level syllabus, which is madness to think that somebody saw it and thought “okay, we should teach children this”, because I never pictured that in my lifetime, especially me and most of my friends who I came up writing with.

[Audio: RZA. “Ghost Dog Theme” from Ghost Dog. The Way of the Samurai. Epic (2000)]

You know Jim Jarmusch, the film-maker. He said “There's no low and high culture in his world”. In his film he'll put Wu Tang Clan instead of classical music. He said “there's no low and high culture, there's just culture”, and what matters will remain and what doesn't matter will die off and eventually it will all die. 

In 150 years, only a few things will be remembered, you know, if anything. It's all temporary, you know, and there's no ranking to it. And if you want to rank it, just, like, do you matter for the short time you live on Earth? Are people taking the poem and does it help? Is it in service? That's what matters. They've got lots of academic things that don't matter, but then they have some academic things that really do matter. Just because it's academic doesn't mean that it's good, you know, or that anybody will read it, or that it will help anybody. It will be in service, you know. It's like things need to be in service. Not everything I write matters. But some things do and I know it matters because people tell me it matters. And that's what I want. I want things to matter to people.

[Audio: RZA. “Ghost Dog Theme” from Ghost Dog. The Way of the Samurai. Epic (2000)]

And if I Speak of Paradise

Then I am speaking about my grandfather

And if I speak of my grandfather

I am speaking about horse racing

And if I speak of horse racing

I am speaking about my father

And if I speak of my father

I am speaking about shirt jacs

And if I speak of shirt jacs

I am speaking about intellectuals

And if I speak of intellectuals

I'm speaking about revolutionaries

And if I speak of revolutionaries

I'm speaking about independence

And if I speak of independence

I'm speaking about Paradise

And if I speak of Paradise…

(From Roger Robinson. A Portable Paradise. Peepal Tree Press, 2019. © Roger Robinson, reproduced by permission of Peepal Tree Press)

[Audio: Roger Robinson. “Bun Bun Bun” from Dog Heart City. Jahtari (2017)]

Much More than the Notes was researched, written and produced by Rubén Coll, and presented by Sarah Pilar Iacobucci.