Performance Poetry of Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze and Louise Bennett: Positioning Identity

Defining performance poetry is very difficult. For some critics the words in literary piece engage in an interactive response with the readers, composers and other words. This interaction is, in a way, performance. Therefore this engagement and its responses that we are calling performance happen undeniably all the time within the text. However apart from this internal textual performance and the reader response performance, if we can call it so after the reader response theory, there is this traditional view of performance that is more related to oral culture or something to do with orality of language. Performance poetry is the poetry being performed in front of an audience using language. Here it could be random or scripted, accompanied or not accompanied with music, with or without the active participation of the audience. Dub poetry which originated in Jamaica is considered to be one of the most successful forms of performance poetry. Descending from oral cultures of Africa and influenced by reggae music initially dub poetry was inseparably associated with music or the reggae “riddms”. Linton Kwesi Johnson, the most famous reggae dub poet and Bob Marley, the reggae singer, had not merely proliferated in their respective fields of poetry and songs, they also, for the first time, showed their artistic creativity to the world as the true Jamaican Art. However like many other genres of literature, in the fields of fine art or any kind of recognized art, women were thought to be not as progressive as men. This paper would try to highlight two women dub poets, Jean “Binta” Breeze and Louise Bennett, who not merely proved themselves extremely successful but also have showed how they distinguish themselves and their poetry from the already available, though recently made (because the genre is not very old) poetry, and at the same time, how they are continuously negotiating with the various layers of marginality and defining their own position in Caribbean literati and world literature.