STORY · DANCEHALL
The women of dub poetry and the spoken word
Well supported
Jamaican-born women carried dub poetry's reasoning voice from Kingston yards to Toronto stages and a Halifax poet laureateship.
Jean 'Binta' Breeze, Cherry Natural, Afua Cooper and Lillian Allen turned reggae's rhythmic chat into page-and-stage poetry, reasoning through politics, migration and Black womanhood.
Reasoning in rhythm
Dub poetry set page-length political reasoning to reggae's rhythmic pulse, and from its earliest years women were among its most forceful voices. Jean 'Binta' Breeze carried the form internationally, while Cherry Natural -- performing since 1979 and publishing her debut collection Come Meck We Reason in 1989 under Oku Onuora's influence -- built her reputation from within Jamaica, twice winning a JAMI Award for her social commentary.
Dub poetry travelled with the diaspora, and women carried much of its reasoning voice across the water.
A Canadian second home
Two Jamaican-born women became foundational to Canada's dub poetry scene after emigrating in the 1970s. Lillian Allen, who grew up in Spanish Town, won Juno Awards for Best Reggae/Calypso Recording in 1986 and 1989 and later served as Toronto's poet laureate. Afua Cooper published her first collection, Breaking Chains, in 1983, while building a parallel career as a historian of slavery and abolition that led to Dalhousie University's James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies.
Back home, Jamaica's oral tradition beyond dub poetry proper has its own custodian in storyteller Amina Blackwood-Meeks, whose petitioning for a National Storytelling Day and directorship of the Culture in Education Programme continues a lineage of Jamaican patois performance that runs back to Louise Bennett-Coverley's pioneering recordings.