Introduction

In Chapter 1, I examined policing, anti-Black violence, and political resistance in the dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, which engaged with and contributed to forms of radical Black political activism in the 1970s and 1980s. This chapter turns to several prominent Caribbean British women poets working and writing in the mid 1980s through the 1990s, including Valerie Bloom (b. 1956), Jean “Binta” Breeze (1956–2021), and Amryl Johnson (1944–2001). In particular, I explore the interrelation between Black British feminist politics in the 1980s and their poetry’s renovations of the dramatic monologue for voicing a politics of dissent. For Bloom, Breeze, and Johnson, the dramatic monologue remains a crucial genre for seeing and listening to the multiplicity of personae that their poems “stage” as a way of apprehending the heterogeneity of Black feminist politics premised in difference, disagreement, and dissent.

There are several points of connection between LKJ and this group of women poets. Like LKJ, they often write in creolized styles and poetic forms, with Bloom and Breeze sharing LKJ’s Jamaican cultural influences and Johnson often adapting Trinidadian calypso speech rhythms. They share LKJ’s arguable status as “performance poets” through their readings at festivals across the UK, the Caribbean, the US, and Europe throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Breeze first visited the UK at the invitation of LKJ in 1985, when she performed her poetry at the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books. LKJ was influential in promoting Breeze and advocating for the publication of her first collection, Riddym Ravings, with Race Today Publications in 1988. After moving to England in 1979, Bloom also performed at the inaugural International Book Fair in 1982 and LKJ wrote the introduction to her first collection, Touch Mi! Tell Mi! (Bogle L’Ouverture, 1982). Amryl Johnson migrated to England from Trinidad at the age of eleven in 1955 and, while her connection with LKJ may be more distant, they nonetheless both came of age in the context of entrenched, institutional racism under Thatcher’s England and burgeoning political activism in the 1970s and 1980s, which shaped their poetry’s emphasis on adopting multiple voices and personae to articulate the contradictions of their social worlds. Her early poems, such as her short lyrics in her pamphlet Shackles (1983) and Long Road to Nowhere (Virago, 1985), are distinguished by images of coldness, hardness, and simmering anger. For instance, “Midnight Without Pity” (1977) concludes:

Not unlike LKJ’s dread poetics of blood and fire, Johnson says her early work was written in an “emotion so strong that some poems were penned in blood and tears” (Johnson, in Let It Be Told, 40). As an active member of International Women’s Events, Johnson perceived the teaching, writing, and performance of poetry as a tool for social transformation as well as philosophical reflection, a stance she shares with LKJ (Brancato, Reference Brancato and Arana147).

That said, the Black women poets considered here write in ways strikingly different from LKJ’s unrelenting dread and spiraling urban alienation. Bloom, Breeze, and Johnson invest their work with sarcasm, humor, eroticism, and at times spirituality, which function as important creative resources for imagining Black British feminist politics. And whereas LKJ’s poems are largely London based, these poets occupy a diasporic space that splits, straddles, and often interfuses their Caribbean and British localities. Theirs is a racial politics of Black feminism shaped by, but not altogether defined by, experiences of racial oppression and discrimination (Puri, Reference Prince35). To this they add a sustained attention to the internal gender divisions and sexual politics shaping the differences within and between Black women’s experiences as they are mediated through the personae in their dramatic monologues voiced on both sides of the Atlantic.

At the time of their initial publication in the mid 1980s, it was certainly the case that Black British women poets were marginal to mainstream publishing houses. For instance, many poets were initially published in the 1980s with independent Black presses such as Race Today (Breeze) and Bogle L’Ouverture (Bloom) and with feminist presses such as Virago (Johnson) before being published in the mid 1990s with more mainstream independent poetry presses listing poets of color, such as Bloodaxe. The poets studied here, along with Grace Nichols and Jackie Kay, now constitute a canon of Black British poetry (by men and women), especially when we consider how several of these poets have gone on to receive significant recognition, whether through being awarded an MBE (Kay 2006, Bloom 2008, Breeze 2012), the Queen’s Medal for Poetry (Nichols 2021), or the Makar, or Poet Laureate of Scotland (Kay 2016–2021).

In the 1980s, however, we can see the marginal position of Black British poetry – and Black British women’s poetry especially – through the profusion of anthologies that appeared during these years, which thereby provide a literary topography marking the unevenness of the cultural field. Arguably at the center of the cultural field is, for instance, The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion (1982), which included only five white women out of twenty poets. Meanwhile, anthologies focusing solely on women’s poetry rarely if ever included women of color: Jeni Couzyn’s The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets (1985) did not feature a single poet of color, while Fleur Adcock’s The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Women’s Poetry (1987) included only two Black poets, Gwendolyn Brooks and June Jordan.¹

In the face of this unevenness, several independent Black and feminist presses highlighted the centrality of race, ethnicity, and gender to the production of British poetry in the 1980s and early 1990s. We can look, for instance, to Barbara Burford’s A Dangerous Knowing: Four Black Women Poets (Sheba Feminist Press, 1984), Rhonda Cobham and Merle Collins’s Watchers and Seekers: Creative Writing by Black Women (The Women’s Press, 1987), Lauretta Ngcobo’s Let It Be Told: Essays by Black Women in Britain (Virago, 1987), Black Women Talk Poetry (Black Womantalk Cooperative, 1987), Shabnam Grewal’s Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women (Sheba Feminist Press, 1988), and Shusheila Nasta’s Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia (The Women’s Press, 1991). These anthologies were foundational in advancing Black British women’s poetry generally, and in highlighting some of the now most recognized voices in the field, including the poets considered in this chapter as well as Nichols, Kay, and Bernardine Evaristo, among others.

The abundance of anthologies focusing on race, gender, sexuality, class, and embodiment demands a chapter-length study unto itself and is not the focus of my discussion.² For now, though, it is worth stating that the variety of voices, styles, modes, and preoccupations of the writings contained in these anthologies foreground the differences between, and contradictions within, Black British women’s experiences, in the plural. As Shabnam Grewal et al. state in their “Preface” to Charting the Journey, the “differences are themselves reflective of the divisions amongst the various constituencies of Black women”: the contradictions of Black women’s experiences undoubtedly stem from the historical legacy of colonialism and imperialism yet, they say, “are increasingly generated and reproduced by the contemporary circumstances in which we find ourselves” (6). Following Grewal, my study of dramatic monologues in Bloom, Breeze, and Johnson places particular emphasis on difference as intrinsic to their poetics and politics.

What’s more, even as Black British women’s poetry may come from a relatively marginal position in relation to the mainstream of British poetry by men and women, this body of work nonetheless calls for reading practices that simultaneously deconstruct this poetry’s ostensible marginality and interpretatively perform a reconfiguration of the cultural terrain of British letters. Indeed, the increasing anthologizing of Black women’s poetry was also due to their popularity and prominence on the performance circuit, which likely contributed to their publication in print because their cultural productions and names were perceived as marketable. According to Breeze, she “wasn’t published and then developed an audience, I was published because the publishers realized that there was some money to be made” (Breeze et al., “A Roundtable,” Reference Breeze28).

During these years, there were additional contexts shaping the promotion of Black women’s poetry. “The increased publication and visibility of a range of Black British women’s writing,” according to Sarah Lawson Welsh, “owed much to two factors: new national and local funding streams for ‘ethnic minority arts’ and growing networks of black feminist association” (186). This chapter begins by briefly mapping out the initial flourishing, disintegration, and reformulation of Black British feminist organizations from the late 1970s through the 1980s. As we will see, there were internal divisions within and between various constituencies along lines of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and region that made a feminist “politics of solidarity” impossible to sustain within established Black women’s organizations at the time. These internal divisions were compounded by external pressures and transformations in state funding for local community organizations addressing racial and gendered inequalities and providing social services and self-help. In the wake of “organized” Black feminist political movements, there nonetheless persists a politics of dissent that, I argue, connects to the genre of the dramatic monologue.

From there, I then focus on the ways in which these poets adapt some of the key conventions of the dramatic monologue in the 1980s and 1990s. Their experimentations with voice, personae, and polyvocality become the aesthetic material for mediating the social contradictions facing “Black women,” here understood as an irreducibly heterogeneous social category. “We need critiques,” argues Vicki Bertram concerning contemporary women’s poetry, “that explore poets’ use of personae; form and figurative language; … and that attempt to revive other subgenres” (2). Heeding Betram’s call for a careful attention to the aesthetics of women’s poetry, I examine the ways in which Bloom, Breeze, and Johnson adopt fictive personae embedded in social contexts that resemble but also stand apart from the worlds of the authors and the ways in which the categories of “Black women” are mobilized in social, political, and poetic discourses.

Taken together, their uses of the dramatic monologue both highlight and perform the nonidentity – that is, the “gap” – of race and poetry, here by marking the distance between “Black women” as a heterogeneous social category and their poetic enactments through fictive personae. As we will see, one of the dramatic monologue’s most indispensable resources is to self-consciously call attention to the distance between a poem’s “fictive voice” (a character inside a poem) and the presence of the “poet’s voice” (controlling the character from the outside). In Black British women’s poetry, dramatic monologues purposefully challenge the extent to which any voice is – or can be – purportedly “representative” of “Black women’s experiences”: representative to, for, and by whom? In doing so, these poets extend, transform, and creolize the history of the dramatic monologue, which carries aesthetic and political consequences. That is, each of the poets in this chapter renovate the conventions of the dramatic monologue to perform social commentary on Black women’s experiences of oppression and exploitation and to invent forms of solidarity premised in irrepressible, even incommensurable differences across and between women. And while their poetry certainly does not provide a blueprint for Black feminist praxis, their cultural work carries forward a politics of dissent: of the voices and lives – however marginal or excluded – that become remediated in dramatic monologues that open themselves to critical scrutiny in staging social and political transformation.

Difference, Disagreement, and Dissent: The Legacy of Black British Feminist Organizations and the Politics of the Dramatic Monologue

In the early 1970s, several Black feminist organizations coalesced to focus on forms of social inequality explicitly affecting Black and Asian women.³ This was partly in response to male-dominated Black political organizations, such as the British Black Power Movement and the British Black Panther Party, as well as the largely white women’s liberation movement in Britain. For instance, in 1973 the Brixton Black Women’s Group (BBWG, initially called the Black Women’s Group) was founded by Beverly Bryan, Liz Obi, and Olive Morris as an autonomous, grassroots women’s organization (Bryan, Dadzie, and Scafe, Reference Bryan148–51). A significant political activist, Morris went on in 1978 to become a founding member of the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), a national collective that functioned as an umbrella for numerous Black and Asian women’s organizations including the Birmingham Black Sisters, Nottingham Black Women’s Group, the Liverpool Black Sisters, and numerous others. Like BBWG, OWAAD affirmed “Blackness” as a distinctly political category, encompassing the differences and linkages between African, Caribbean, and Asian ethnic women. Both groups organized around shared struggles against racist attacks and policing, housing and employment, disparities in education and childcare, women’s health and the racist policies of testing contraception on Black women such as through Depo Provera, and pan-African and anti-colonial liberation movements (Fisher, Reference Fisher73; Bryan, Dadzie, and Scafe, Reference Bryan155–68). These organizations also sought to create connections at local, national, and international levels, as advanced in their respective newsletters Speak Out (BBWG) and FOWAAD (OWAAD).

OWAAD flourished for a relatively short period of time, over five years between 1978 and 1983. Their organizing led to the first National Black Women’s Conference, which was held in March 1979 and drew together more than 300 women from across England. Due to the success of the conference, OWAAD sponsored three subsequent national conventions: one in March 1980, “Black Women in Britain Fighting Back,” which gathered over 600 participants; another in May 1981, “Black Women in Struggle,” which addressed, among other things, the New Cross Massacre and the Brixton Uprisings; and a final conference in 1982, “Black Feminism,” which drew 400 attendees. These were years of intense political activism, campaigning, organizing, and linking theory to practice, as advanced, for instance, in the landmark contributions to Feminist Review’s special issue “Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives” (Vol. 17, Issue 1, 1984).

Despite OWAAD’s commitment to become a unifying platform to address a wide range of issues affecting women of color in the UK and internationally, the organization confronted several fissures, both internally and externally. As Amina Mama and Tracy Fisher have detailed, there were several reasons for the dissolution of Black British feminist organizations such as BBWG and OWAAD. Internal to these organizations were what we might call breaks in the Afro-Asian link: Experiences of racism and sexism differed significantly between African, Caribbean, and Asian women who, consequently, had very different political priorities and objectives (Fisher, Reference Fisher85). A second and related issue concerned class divisions between the leadership of OWAAD (most of whom were middle-class and university-educated) and their grassroots organizing around working-class issues and ostensibly representing working-class members. “While members of the OWAAD understood class within the context of anti-imperialism and Marxism,” writes Fisher, “non-OWAAD black women in the community revealed the social reality of class and its socio-economic divisions” (88). A third issue related to an inattentiveness to sexuality and sexual difference, including lesbian and queer communities for whom sexuality was deemed by the organization to be a personal matter rather than a constitutive basis of difference and politics. “The task of uniting so many diverse and differing elements,” the members of BBWG stated concerning their shared objective with OWAAD, “particularly in the absence of fundamental grounding and appreciation of the concrete experiences of each particular group, proved too much” (quoted in Mama, Reference Mama4). The proliferation of – and the desires on the part of women to attend to – important difference along lines of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and locality under the banner of autonomous collective groups such as BBWG and OWAAD, then, became untenable.

Concurrent with the dissolution of autonomous Black feminist organizations, however, was the rise of “municipal socialism” among community organizations at local political levels, such as through the Greater London Council (GLC) (Mama, Reference Low and Wynne-Davies5). In 1981 the GLC formed the Ethnic Minorities Committee to address racial discrimination in the workplace, and in 1982 it established the Women’s Committee to confront gender-specific issues (Fisher, Reference Fisher99; Forrester et al., Reference Forrester45). Two years later, the GLC devoted funds to the Ethnic Minorities Committee of £2.9 million and to the Women’s Committee of £5.9 million (Forrester et al., Reference Forrester48). In the process, numerous other local committees formed across London’s boroughs, such as the Women’s and Race Equalities Committees, which sought to provide community-based services concerning, for instance, domestic violence, employment, housing, childcare, and foster care for Black women and families (Fisher, Reference Fisher100). In practice, this led to a transformation in the shape, organization, and objectives of political work surrounding race, gender, and class inequality among Black women. For instance, many members of BBWG and OWAAD became involved with the Southwark Black Women’s Centre, which, between 1983 and 2002, “focused on specific racialized and gendered issues and believed service provisioning to be a form of empowerment” (Fisher, Reference Fisher103). This brief sketch is not to deny the significant work that state-funded organizations contribute to communities of color – especially women – living and surviving in economically deprived areas. It does, however, highlight how the dissolution of previously autonomous, grassroots, radically mobilized Black feminist organizations in the 1980s occurred simultaneously with the arrival of newly state-funded community action committees focusing on accessing resources and self-help, now answerable to governmental institutions and competing with one another over finite funding.

In the wake of radical Black women’s organizations, there nonetheless remains an abiding presence of difference and disagreement comprising any politics of racialized feminism. As we can see, difference and disagreement riddled the internal politics of Black British feminism from the start regarding problems over consolidating (or not) “the Black woman”; confronting divisions of class, ethnicity, sexuality, and region; and shoring up a coherent agenda before multipronged issues surrounding immigration, labor, education, housing, health, policing, and anti-colonial politics abroad (Samantrai, Reference Rosello1–2). And British Black feminist political work, whether at grassroots levels or through state-funded institutions, was shaped by economic decline and neoliberal political forces of austerity and competition.

According to Ranu Samantrai, however, the legacy of difference, disagreement, and dissent in Black British feminist movements is at once instructive and productive. It is instructive in demonstrating how gender is central to, yet often disavowed by, Black British political discourses generally; and it is productive in mobilizing social transformation within dominant public spheres and institutions through a politics of dissent (2). For Samantrai, dominant models of democratic politics (premised in representation, multiculturalism, diversity, and inclusion) often seek “consensus” through the brokerage of majority and minority constituencies (2–3). A politics of dissent, argues Samantrai, can lay bare the internal heterogeneity of any purported “constituency,” the already existing divisions structuring English racial politics and nation-formation (3). Thus, while organized Black British feminist coalitions rose to prominence in the early 1980s and dissolved by 1989 in the aftermath of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the politics of dissent at the core of Black British feminism endures: of continually calling into question the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, whose voices are heard and whose are silenced, whose experiences are centered and whose remain in the margins due to unequal structures of power.

Black British feminism’s politics of dissent appears in aesthetic form in the dramatic monologues that appeared across Black women’s poetry in the 1980s and 1990s – and that continue to energize British Black and Asian poetry and politics up to the present. That said, the dramatic monologue’s literary history has taken shape through the confluence of several vectors of energy, including its key aesthetic features, its popular rise during the Victorian era, its gendered and racial legacy, and its dual English and Caribbean cultural contexts. Before turning to the poetry, it is worth first unpacking the genre’s aesthetic, political, and cultural energies to see more clearly the full force of Bloom’s, Breeze’s, and Johnson’s experimentations in the genre.

In my estimation, the dramatic monologue is especially suited to aesthetically mediating and voicing conflict, dissent, and difference through its dual internal and external forms of address. In writing dramatic monologues, the Black British women poets considered here draw readers to alterity and division even as their speakers and poems struggle towards a politics of solidarity as an unfinished project, subject to question and debate. Since Ina Beth Sessions’s Reference Schwarz1947 article “The Dramatic Monologue,” the key features of the genre – “speaker, audience, occasion, revelation of character, interplay between speaker and audience, dramatic action, and action which takes place in the present” – have been hotly contested in criticism (Sessions, Reference Schwarz508). Not all dramatic monologues retain or exploit these features, which become adapted, subverted, or selectively discarded under changing social-historical contexts and political pressures. Nonetheless, as Glennis Byron explains in Dramatic Monologue (2003), the genre does retain a core dynamic of situating fictionalized speaking voices in their social contexts (Byron, Reference Byron5). The dramatic monologue appears, socially and politically, in specific conditions of upheaval and uncertainty and, aesthetically, in response to “the illusory nature of the autonomous and unified Romantic subject” (3). From the Victorian period onwards, practitioners of dramatic monologues have tended to adopt alienated, marginal, and otherwise eccentric speakers situated in social contexts. As a result, the dramatic monologue, according to Byron, has had a political tendency “to question rather than to confirm” and “to disrupt rather than to consolidate authority” (100).

From the start, dramatic monologues carry an internal division between the fictive speaking “I” and the voice of the poet. In his foundational study Dramatic Monologue (1977), Alan Sinfield proposes the concept of “the feint” to study this division. Dramatic monologues, for Sinfield, are “first-person poems where the speaker is indicated not to be the poet” (42). The genre “feigns because it pretends to be something other than what it is: an invented speaker masquerades in the first-person which customarily signifies the poet’s voice” (25). Sinfield’s notion of the feint makes apparent an internal division within the genre concerning the uses of the “I,” or what he calls the genre’s “double-consciousness” (33–34). On the one hand, dramatic monologues display signals on the page that create the perception that the “I’ is “part of an alternative, created reality” existing in “a realm of fiction” of the poet’s own making (24). Among the textual signals marking the realm of fiction are the “accumulation of dramatic detail” making the speaker’s world distinct from the poet’s world (25). On the other hand, when the “I” seems detached or abstracted from time and place (a common feature of lyric), the feint moves closer to the poet’s “I.” In some instances, the feint creates a sharp distinction between speaking voice and poetic voice, often for the purposes of dramatic irony or satire (as in Browning’s “My Last Duchess”); in other instances the feint merges the fictive speaker with poetic speaker, often to invent a shared worldview (as in Tennyson’s “Ulysses”). This creates peculiar demands upon readers who are “following the thought of a speaker who is quite aware of a reader” (29) at one and the same time as “we feel continuously the pressure of the poet’s controlling mind” (30).

The dramatic monologue’s recurring dynamic of what Herbert Tucker describes as “placing the self in context and thus into question” by being “under the regime of external circumstances” (“Monomania,” 136) creates further tensions between the narrative and lyrical modes of the genre. Writing on Tennyson, Tucker maintains that the act of writing dramatic monologues is “an illusionist’s art” whereby we see the ways in which an “I” (as a fictive character) becomes “an agency constituted through the juggling of antithetical influences, a subjectivity subject to negotiation” at one and the same time as these unstable forces and influences are what the poet manipulates in their textual invention and dramatic performance of character (128). “Lyric in the dramatic monologue,” he writes, “is what you cannot have and what you cannot forget” (“Dramatic Monologue,” Reference Teitler, Woolf and Tietler235).

From the Victorian era onwards, dramatic monologues have carried a dialectical tension between lyrical utterance through moments of an unfettered subjectivity, freed from the constraints of history, on the one hand, and, on the other, the genre’s dynamic of embedding speakers in historical social contexts, which, argues Tucker, is “the generic privilege of the dramatic monologue” and “one of its indispensable props in the construction of character” (“Dramatic Monologue,” Reference Teitler, Woolf and Tietler228). As a result, readers feel the adamant presence of a speaker (often in extremis) in her experiences, thoughts, feelings, and worldview at one and the same time as we intuit alternative perspectives external to the speaker, of how and why she has come to speak the ways she does due to forces beyond her control, which work to qualify, circumscribe, subvert, or even negate her utterances to begin with. The speakers in dramatic monologues frequently represent divided speaking-subjects in relation both to divided others and to divided and fragmented social contexts.

The “doubleness” of the dramatic monologue – and its reliance on self-in-context – is one of the central strategies through which it conducts political commentary and social critique. Isobel Armstrong proposes the dramatic monologue as a “double poem,” that is, the ways in which the same utterance on the page refers both to the speaker’s subjective expression and to an object of interpretation and inquiry (12). The doubleness of the genre “draws attention to the act of representation, the act of relationship and the mediation of language” (12–13). For her, the double poem – as occupying both subject and object through the materiality of language – consequently foregrounds the construction of personhood in relation to others and a social world and, thus, “to the cultural conditions in which those relationships are made” (13). As a genre of struggle, the dramatic monologue then is far from monological but is thoroughly dialogic in its debate with its conflicted speakers in contested worlds. Following Armstrong, this requires a dialectical process of reading by following the contours of a speaker’s subjective thoughts and feelings in their internal and external struggles and by reframing the shifting contexts that give rise to their lyrical utterances as an object of analysis. Each reading, for her, jockeys for power, “continually investing terms with new content” as we move back and forth between the speaker’s subjective expression and the processes that produce their speaking-subject position – and, by extension, the text – in the first place as an ideological object of critical inquiry.

The differences constituting the dramatic monologue are the driving engine of its nonidentity: its gaps, fissures, and divisions that together comprise a core dynamic of the genre. The dialectical features distinguishing the dramatic monologue – Sinfield’s feint (hovering between fictive I and speaking I), Tucker’s emphasis on divided selves in divided contexts (and the ensuing tensions between lyrical and narrative modes), and Armstrong’s double poem (vacillating between the expressive subject and object of inquiry) – hold in common the genre’s exploitation of its internal difference as the mechanism through which it performs social critique. From the perspective of the nonidentical, the internal difference of the genre can now be seen less as an aesthetic difference than as a structural difference, self-reflexively calling attention to the historical processes, political forces, and social conditions that produce speaking-subjects as antagonistic and contradictory expressions of ideology. What’s more, the characteristic doubleness of the dramatic monologue furnishes the means through which poets and poems rhetorically figure sexual and racial politics as social constructs that are mobilized, put on, repeated, and stylized in public discourses, in all their contradictions and uncertainties. As Glennis Byron has argued in reference to contemporary uses of the dramatic monologue (as in the work of Carol Ann Duffy, Rita Ann Higgins, and Ai), the genre remains a “democratically accessible form” through poetry’s status as public utterance (132, 144).

There are, however, further complications within the genre’s literary history, particularly along lines of gender and race in nineteenth-century England. While Tennyson and Browning were initially hailed as its central practitioners in the 1830s, feminist scholars have recuperated and expanded the canon to show how Letitia Landon and Felicia Hamons may have “invented” the genre in the 1820s, enabling a host of middle-class Victorian women poets to create “a music of their own” (Armstrong, Reference Armstrong316–17; Byron, Reference Byron46). Indeed, the dramatic monologue has been instrumental for women poets, from the Victorian era through the twenty-first century, to adopt personae to voice anger regarding sexual exploitation and women’s oppression, remaining at a distance from their speaker’s polemic even as they mobilize fury for the purposes of social transformation (Morgan, Reference Morgan205; Pearsall, Reference Pearsall223). “Anger,” write Melissa Valiska Gregory and Emily Harrington, “is arguably the dramatic monologue’s quintessential emotion” for expressing rage against gender-based double standards or for probing the depths of psychic extremity that are due to social rather than individual failures (179).

Each of the poets I consider here similarly displays anger and psychic disturbance as socially produced, such as Jean “Binta” Breeze in “Riddym Ravings (The Mad Woman’s Poem).” But anger is not the only, or even the quintessential, emotion in their writing, especially as these artists bear a keen awareness of the pervasive stereotype of the “angry Black woman.” From humor and sarcasm to impassive detachment, rage, madness, and ecstatic desires for freedom, their monologues pattern a variety of affects and postures for imagining the possibilities and limitations Black British feminist politics in dramatic verse.

The other related context concerns the racial histories flowing through the dramatic monologue, particularly by nineteenth-century white authors on both sides of the Atlantic who take on the voice of racialized others, especially Black enslaved women. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (1848) remains perhaps the most famous instance but, as Melissa Valiska Gregory has shown in her article “Race and the Dramatic Monologue,” it is only one among hundreds of such poems. According to Gregory, the flourishing of the dramatic monologue as a popular form took place concurrently with another popular theatrical white performance of Blackness: minstrelsy (216). As she says, regardless of the ways in which poets such as Barrett Browning used their speakers to contribute to the politics of abolition, the relative ease with which white writers adopted Black voices demonstrates the extent to which white appropriations of Blackness shaped the genre and its development: “For the [white] dramatic monologue, blackface is always waiting in the wings” (217).

For Black British women poets, the situation is clearly different in adopting voices in closer proximity to – and necessarily growing out of and shaped by – the experiences of the poets themselves. That said, they confront the challenges of realizing how Black women’s experiences are “typed” in advance: the sarcastic trickster (Bloom), the mad angry Black woman (Breeze), or the violent but seductive Medusa (Johnson). “By using a mask,” writes Isobel Armstrong, “a woman writer is in control of her objectification and at the same time anticipates the strategy of objectifying women by being beforehand with it and circumventing masculine representations” (318–19) – and, I would add concerning these Black British women poets, white representations by men and women. As a way through this predicament, their poetry anticipates, plays into, self-ironizes, and often slyly subverts the categories given to “Black women.”

Writing far removed in time, place, and race from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the dramatic monologues studied here extend the creolized Caribbean poetic lineage of Una Marson and Louise Bennett. Their interpretive performances of race belong to Caribbean critical discourses, which often perform their theoretical enactment in language, such as in the writings of Édouard Glissant.⁴ Glissant describes the performative self-reflexivity of his critical project through a language that “attempts to take shape at the edge of writing and speech” through the “synthesis of written syntax and spoken rhythms, of ‘acquired’ writing and oral ‘reflex,’ of the solitude of writing and the solidarity of the collective voice” (147). Glissant’s insights into the labored interweaving of textuality (written syntax) and orality (spoken rhythms) and of the tensions between the solitude of the individual writer and the struggle to give voice to experiences of collectivity certainly inform Caribbean literary discourse generally. The abiding tensions in Caribbean discourse of textuality/orality and of singularity/collectivity gain special salience, however, in dramatic monologues by Black British women poets, who renovate the genre by adopting voices at the edge of writing and speech, playing upon the oral–written continuum, and putting into question the speaker’s representative voice, individual and collective.

The dramatic monologue’s propensity for social critique takes particular shape and form in Black British women’s poetry of the 1980s and early 1990s. By playing with the core tension of situating speaking voices in social contexts, their poems conduct social commentary by inviting readers to ask: What are the social conditions and contexts that produce these speaking-subjects? In what ways does the fictive speaker depart from or merge with the poetic voice? And if, as Byron says, “language reveals the individual to be formed by the very society she critiques” (19), to what extent might forms of polemic and critique in dramatic monologues display the ways in which speakers and poems have internalized the forces and pressures that constrain them and, hence, make manifest the conditions of their entrapment and alienation as well as their struggle for release and emancipation? It is to these questions that I now turn.

Voicing Dissent, Staging Difference: Bloom, Breeze, and Johnson

Valerie Bloom’s Touch Mi! Tell Mi! (1982) furnishes an apt entry into my discussion. Her debut collection remains her only “adult” poetry book as she went on to publish numerous collections and novels for children, a testament to her devotion to education and asserting the legitimacy of Caribbean rural and folk culture in Jamaica and Britain. Partly influenced by Louise Bennett, Touch Mi! Tell Mi! contains several dramatic monologues mostly written in rhyming quatrains (ABCB) and in a language that shifts back and forth between Jamaican creole and Jamaican English. Bloom’s poems exhibit many of the most recognizable conventions of the genre, especially through her fictive speaker’s address to a silent auditor and by situating divided speaking selves within divided social contexts. We can see one of Bloom’s central strategies through the ways in which her dramatic monologues play with the shifting feint (or the relative distance or proximity between the fictive voice and poetic voice) to take on a variety of stances and postures regarding Black feminist political concerns. Here I examine three poems that, in my understanding, are representative of the spectrum of the feint in her work. Bloom’s shifting feint, in turn, opens onto three different positions regarding her poetry’s Black feminist politics.

At one end of the spectrum, her poems humorously ironize conventional women speakers, especially those who remain entrapped in their pursuit of self-interest and normative ideals of class ascendancy through marriage. In these instances, the feint in her poems draws a sharp distinction between the speaking voice of the poem and the voice of the poet, whose “controlling mind” subtly satirizes the foibles of the woman speaker. For instance, in “Name Shame,” the speaker, “Kessiah Mugg,” addresses her silent auditor, “Miss Binns,” who listens as Mugg expresses the derision she receives from other women because she is “desperate fi change mi name” by marrying “Docta Bud” (19). From the start of the poem, Mugg describes the women around her as nosey gossips (“people fas [nosey] yuh know man”) while she herself remains level, “cool,” and never “trouble … a single soul.” Meanwhile, she has been long-suffering under the burden of her name. For “all mi life mi suffa / Wid dis yah name yah: Mugg.” She goes on to complain:

In the final two stanzas, Mugg is twice interrupted as she “hear mi name a call oba deh” and again “Yes mam, a fe mi name dis call” (19–20). So responsive is she to overhearing her name, Kessiah Mugg abruptly ends her conversation with Miss Bins and, in turn, Bloom delivers the punchline to the poem: “Oh, yuh nebba know mi married name? / Yes mamm, Mrs. Hezzekiah Spoone” (20). In a farcical substitution, the speaker has traded “Kessiah Mugg” for “Hezzekiah Spoone” in her marriage to Docta Bud, as if it were all equivalent after all. What’s in a name?

And yet, by planting Frankenstein in Mugg’s mouth, it is as if the poet-speaker Bloom invites the reader to ask: What are the social forces and pressures that produce the myopia of this speaking subject? For one, everything for Mugg is surface, from her portrayal of Budd’s “countenance bad fe true” to her desire to take on a new name, no matter the cost. Second, at several moments in the poem Mugg/Spoone reveals what other women say about her: “dem come call mi fool,” “dem sey mi gat noh shame,” “dem can tann de beat up dem gum,” “dem noh know how nutten go.” On the contrary, dem know exactly how it goes. Indeed, it seems likely that Bloom is punning on mugg/face, thereby unmasking the truth of the speaker’s superficiality, which, far from having to do with her preoccupation over her name, has more to do with her desire for wealth and upward mobility. And third, the “name shame” of the poem’s title concerns less the shame Mugg/Spoone perceives in the eyes and ears of others than, perhaps, her own sense of deficiency in terms of her class status.

This, then, is the name shame: not her embarrassment in her name nor even the ludicrous replacement of Mugg for Spoone but the “shame” (that is, the lack and alienation) the subject feels before the social forces around her, which compel her to invest in the symbolic meaning and ideological power of names as a cover for status. In the end, then, Bloom humorously reveals the arbitrary artificiality of status through the symbolic markers of name and class. From the words that others (“dem”) attribute to the speaker to the clicking sounds of women at the edges of the poem, we can see and hear the ideological truths behind the speaker’s subjectivity, whether it is held in the empty container of a Mugg or a Spoone. “Name Shame” is just one example among several that ironize the speaker’s individualism regarding Black womanhood. We can also see this pattern in “All a Baby Een Deh To,” in which an unnamed mother gives advice on raising children to “Miss Vie,” expresses her love for infants, and remarks upon the failures of parenting by her friends and family members, only to disclose at the end that she would never change a nappy because “dem all too nas’y” (52).

In contrast to the poems discussed previously, other monologues occupy what I would describe as the middle of the feint spectrum, where the speaker’s voice and poetic voice begin to narrow. In these instances, Bloom’s poetic voice holds in tension humorous sympathy and gentle irony for her woman speakers while mostly abandoning outright sarcasm and criticism. We can account for the shift in her speaker’s attitudes (and the shift in the feint) as due to a shift in political preoccupations from individualist women’s concerns to collective feminist concerns.

For instance, in her poem “Insec’ Lesson,” Bloom’s unnamed mother-speaker recounts having watched a television program about “de whole heap o’ ants an’ bug,” which quickly becomes an allegory for collectivity, shared labor, and the ways in which “[d]ey wuk an’ pull togedda” (45). At the center is the “mooma ants she big an fat / So she liddung lay egg all day” while soldier ants “guard de door, / Mek sure no enemy no come dem way.” The highest praise of all, for the speaker, goes to “[d]e worka ants” that take on the vast majority of domestic labor as they “feed de queen,” “wash dem likkle bredda,” “feed dose in de nes’,” and “clean up de mess.” From her perspective, the program documents a natural world where “all a wuk togedda, / Ina perfec’ harmony.”

In the final three quatrains, the speaker contrasts this purportedly idealistic vision with the reality of her family life of strife and conflict, where “Ivy woulda nebba wash Tim” and “Joe would mus dead fi hungry [must be dead for hunger] /If a Amos fi fine food fi ’im.” In direct contrast to the insect world of “unity,” for her, the social world of the family is riven with conflict where “we lib like dawg an pus [fight like cats and dogs]” (46). At the end of the poem, the speaker reflects:

In what appears to be a rather straightforward lesson, the speaker adopts the voice of the program’s narrator (“De man”) to disclose what she has learned from the ant world: The category of “unity” enables the ants to subsist, and without it, humankind will be relegated to oblivion due to humans’ ostensible proclivities for competition and the struggle for survival, particularly as it relates to their social family-world.

And yet if we pull back the layers comprising the fictive speaker’s subjectivity, it seems as though she has absorbed the ideology of the program that naturalizes human conflict and idealizes the harmony – and hierarchy – of the insect world. That is, the speaker has superimposed one natural allegory (the harmony and unity of the ants) with another (humans who fight like cats and dogs). It is not by accident, for instance, that the mother-speaker wishes to occupy the role of the “mooma ants” while all those around her attend to various aspects of domestic labor and give her welcome relief. In contrast to “Name Shame,” the poetic voice does not explicitly ridicule the speaker’s voice, as we saw with Kessiah Mugg. Rather, the narrowing feint invites the reader to detect what remains unspoken in the speaker’s voice. In this case, the ostensible “unity and harmony” she idealizes is nonetheless an ideological projection. In this way, Bloom’s poetic voice subtly ironizes the idealizations of her speaker as she merges into “De man” at the end.

The “insec’ lesson” of the poem, then, opens onto an as yet unspoken human lesson on social collectivity, a lesson that admittedly remains outside the domain of the text but to which the poem implicitly refers. What remains unspoken in the poem does not so much concern whether “animals might soon start reign” and bury humankind undergroun’ (a future that, at this late moment, may well be welcome for some) but rather entails an examination of the obstacles to collectivity in the speaker’s world: of what prevents shared labor, social sustenance, and a politics of care within and beyond her family. In this way, Bloom’s dramatic monologue displays the contradictions over the blockages of collectivity and shared labor, as the poetic voice vacillates between comical sympathy and gentle irony towards her speaker. The category of “unity,” like the speaker herself and the poem by extension, ultimately remains internally divided and open to dispute.

Towards the other end of the spectrum, though, are dramatic monologues where the feint separating the speaker’s fictive voice from Bloom’s poetic voice narrows even further, particularly when the poem’s subject matter shifts from individual/domestic material to anti-colonial/international preoccupations and national Black political questions. We can see this especially in the final two sections of Touch Mi! Tell Mi! through a series of monologues that explicitly address political concerns during the late 1970s and early 1980s. These poems engage the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis (“De Hostage Dem”); the 1979 Rhodesian general election, which allowed the Black population universal suffrage and majority rule (“Rhodesia Result”); police violence against Black youth in Trench Town, Jamaica (“Trench Town Rock”); Thatcher’s project for nuclear power and the anti-nuclear movement (“Nuclear Power”); and the 1981 English riots and the collapse of the welfare state under deepening recession and skyrocketing inflation, especially as it affects socially vulnerable populations left behind by Thatcher’s government (“Gi Dem Cake”). The latter poem concludes in excoriating irony:

As the feint narrows, so too do her speakers’ affects shift from wry humor and sympathy towards thinly veiled indignation and impassive refusal, even as Bloom sustains an element of “fictiveness” as a protective shield.

Bloom’s perhaps most well-known poem, “Yuh Hear Bout?,” belongs to this group of political monologues. In this poem, which concludes the collection, she narrows the feint to the point that “Yuh Hear Bout?” closely resembles a short lyric utterance while still retaining the monologue’s convention of a fictive “me” addressing a silent “yuh” as they are situated in the fraught social context of the post-1981 national political domain. Structured through a series of deeply ironic rhetorical questions, the eight-line poem reads:

Bloom’s poem is deliberately shorn of specific context, as if the real-life racial attacks by the National Front against Asians, day-to-day police violence against Black youth, and repeated government failure to prevent the deportation of Black and Asian peoples were a matter of speculation and conjecture – or that these instances of outrageous hypocrisy were so banal that her readership and listeners would take them for granted.

These events were a matter of course among, for instance, the Southall Black Youth Movement, the United Black Youth League, and the Newham Monitoring Project (among numerous others), which organized under the slogan “Self-Defence is No Offence” to protect Asian youths from racial violence and police harassment, instances that gained national recognition such as through the trials of the Bradford Twelve (1981) and the Newham Eight (1982) at the Old Bailey.⁵ They were also a matter of course for those who published (and read) the pamphlets distributed by the Institute for Race Relations, such as Police Against Black People (1979), as well as the Black magazines, such as Race Today and The Black Liberator, that covered police violence targeting Black men, as I discussed in Chapter 1.

The speaker’s dry, ironic tone both registers the banal ubiquity of the injustice of social violence confronting Asian and Black peoples and, further, lays bare a deeper, redoubled violence: the violence that representatives in power remain untouched in their culpability for enabling and enacting racial violence, whether through the force of police beatings or through the negligence of MPs. This added layer of violence gets to the core of the poem’s muted but incendiary rage. It is as if the poem raises the possibility that maybe, just maybe, those responsible for committing and perpetuating state-sanctioned violence – “di people,” “de policeman,” “di M.P.” – might be held accountable and brought to justice. Such possibilities, however, are immediately foreclosed and denied: “Me neida.”

Bloom’s terse final line makes nearly indistinguishable the poetic voice and the speaker’s fictive voice. And yet, in my reading, there remains a thin line between them that puts into play two contrasting forms of knowledge. If we listen to Bloom’s poetic voice, we can hear the ways in which the poetic voice knows that “yuh” never, if ever, “hear about dem” being brought to justice because “dem” created the world of social violence, a world in which “dem” remain safely secure under the protection of the law upholding white power and class privilege. Bloom’s poetic voice is a knowledge of negation: of a justice that doesn’t exist, hasn’t existed, and perhaps never existed in holding far-right white groups, police, and representatives of the state to account for the state’s violence against Black and Asian peoples. Yet this dark knowledge is masked by the lighter, satirical perspective of the speaker’s fictive voice. The casual throwaway ending, “Yuh noh hear bout dem? / Me neida,” might be construed as “well never mind, no matter, so much for that,” thereby covering the travesty of injustice in ironic resignation. The fictive voice’s nonchalant attitude is, however, a defense mechanism, covering her rage with the mask of resignation. Between these two speaking positions, between negation and resignation, the “Me neida” hovers in a politics of impassive refusal and smoldering dissent, especially as instances of racial violence and white unaccountability on the part of the state continue without any recourse in sight. Through dry irony and impersonal detachment, Bloom’s poem carves out a space of relative autonomy that separates the “me” from the negations of her world, if only for a moment, through the cold, dissenting voice of “me neida.”

Whereas Bloom experiments with the feint to articulate an array of Black feminist political positions, Jean “Binta” Breeze foregrounds the dramatic monologue as a “double poem,” in the ways described in the work of Isobel Armstrong. That is, the monologues from the middle of her career in Riddym Ravings and Other Poems (1988) and Spring Cleaning (1992) display an overarching tendency to take on the voices of socially alienated, mentally disturbed, and otherwise marginal Black female figures. In the process, however, Breeze’s poems – or what I am going to call her “meta-monologues” – invite her readers to consider the ways in which they co-implicate her speakers, poems, and listeners in the aesthetics and politics of transmuting experiences of destitution and suffering into embodied works of art, whether recited on the stage, in audio or video recording, or in the pages of her collections.

It is worth briefly noting that Breeze’s dramatic monologues, in their general emphasis on figures of despair, differ significantly from her dub and anti-dub poems and her short lyric poems. Across the majority of her oeuvre, Breeze takes on a variety of subject matter spanning the beauty of the Jamaican countryside where she grew up in Hanover, West Jamaica (such as in “Suntrap” and “Cherry Tree Garden”), the sea as a historical repository of the Black Atlantic and as a potent space of transhistorical femininity (“Atlantic Drift” and “Ilands”), intergenerational feminine connections and the maternal (“Baby Madda,” “Twins,” and “For Hope), international anti-colonial politics (“Arising” and “Third World Blues”), passionate eroticism and sexuality (“Repatriation,” “Love Amidst the War,” and “Love Song”), the significance of spirituality as a resource for hope and potential transcendence (“Ja” and “A Song to Heal”), and her self-reflections upon the possibilities and limitations of dub as an art form (“dubwise,” “dubbed out,” and “Red Rebel Song”).

In her dramatic monologues, however, Breeze takes on polemical voices of dissent in ways that interfuse women’s domestic concerns with public political content and that furthermore break free from the category of dub poetry, which she perceived as delimiting (“Dub and Difference,” Reference Brathwaite607). Perhaps most significantly, Breeze stretches the limits of the genre’s propensity for enacting metapoetics or, for my purposes, meta-monologues. As she says, “the poetry performance is about the voice” (Breeze et al., “A Roundtable,” Reference Breeze40). The stillness of her presence behind a lectern and a microphone, she says, is about “seducing the air, through all the techniques of voice” so that for her listeners “the language becomes the main focus.” For her, the activities of writing, reading, reciting, and audience/readerly reception carry transformative potential through the creation of literary-political community even as her poems repeatedly signal their mediated distance from their alienated subjects, such as in two of her most famous dramatic monologues, “Ordinary Mawning” and “Riddym Ravings (The Mad Woman’s Poem),” discussed here. In doing so, she makes her monologues – and, by extension, their uses of language, character, and voice – the subject matter of representation, which she deliberately opens to social and political analysis.

For instance, in “Ordinary Mawning,” the woman-mother-speaker describes the overwhelming feeling of waking up to face the day and the “ordinary” activities of getting the children out the door for school, cleaning up, doing the laundry, and eventually preparing for dinner:

As Breeze explains in an interview, she grew up working-class and although her professional career provided her a degree of privilege, she wanted to write “Ordinary Mawning” for the working-class women she was surrounded by: “we’re here now, we’re enjoying an evening out, and so many women couldn’t because of the children and because of the work” (Breeze, “Writing the Woman’s Voice,” 4–5). Throughout the poem, Breeze reinforces the speaker’s emotional alienation through deliberate uses of negation, especially through the repetition of “it wasn’t,” “nor,” and “no,” such as in the lines “no / it wasn’t no duppy frighten mi” and “nor no neighbor bring first quarrel / to mi door” (49). At one point, the woman-speaker movingly recounts how the day-to-day matters of domestic labor become suffused with the weight of international politics on “de mawning news”:

But “no,” she says, it isn’t even this. Reflecting upon her domestic life and the quotidian acts of “get up / get de children ready fi school” and “what to cook fah dinna dis evening,” she briefly imagines her life without children at all: “annada wish me never did breed but Lawd / mi love dem mawning.” It is as if she is suspended in ambivalence, internally divided between envisioning a life that could have been and, conversely, resigned to the life that is, feeling herself cleaving from herself and under her own erasure.

As the poem proceeds, the word “mawning” (and its resonances of morning, moaning, and mourning) accrues powerful emotional force in the final two stanzas:

The speaker’s radical estrangement from herself, looking at her frock hanging upon the clothesline as wholly other, is encircled by the spiraling repetition of “jus anadda,” “perfectly,” “ordinary,” and “mawning.” On the one hand, the speaker’s emotional subjective experience (as we take on her voice and think and feel through her desire “trying to see a way / out”) creates a hollow space of emptiness, as the speaker is left utterly bereft to “do nutten / but jus / bawl.” On the other hand, though, even as the subjective voice of the poem veers towards emptiness, the poem itself – as an artifact and object of inquiry – accrues meaning through its plaited repetition, building to crescendo its emotional impact, creating an open space to “jus bawl” as an affective release from the speaker’s conditions of constraint.

In this way, Breeze’s double poem links together two mutually related dialectical positions in her title “Ordinary Mawning”: The speaker’s “moaning” voices her alienation from herself even as the poem itself, through its repetition, patterns momentary consolation in “mourning” the working-class woman – and all the nameless women – who have experienced the erasure of their lives, lives that may have gone otherwise. This is a decidedly ethical act on Breeze’s part and a crucial way through which her poem interweaves the domestic with the public, the personal with the political.

And it is from here that Breeze’s meta-monologue demonstrates how it has used the mother-woman-speaker’s alienation to create a possibility for reparative healing in conditions of destitution. “Ordinary Mawning” bemoans – and sharply critiques – the injustice of the social-political conditions that render female mothers emotionally hollowed out, conditions that are tragically “ordinary” (all day, every day, all the time) and that require their own negation – as if to say “no” or “enough, I cannot anymore, I want something else, I need something other.” Until that point, Breeze’s poem holds space for “perfectly ordinary” women to “jus bawl” the inordinate struggles of the everyday as an act of survival.

Her short essay, “Can a Dub Poet Be a Woman?” (1990), is instructive in framing the aesthetics and politics of her dramatic monologues. Growing up, Breeze regularly recited the poems of Louise Bennett at annual festivals and competitions. After moving to Kingston and attending the Jamaican School of Drama in 1978, she was invited by dub poet Mutabaruka to perform and later record her own work, in particular her anti-IMF poem “Aid Travels with a Bomb,” as part of his compilation Word Sound ’ave Power (1982). At the same time, she made connections with fellow dub poets Mickey Smith and Oku Onoura and was subsequently signed to her first record contract with ROIR records for her debut album, Riddym Ravings (1987), which led her to be named as “the first female dub poet in the male-dominated field (Breeze, “Can a Dub,” Reference Brathwaite47).

In her essay, she describes three ways in which her work was received because of her gender that she had not previously perceived up to that point. First, she says that when Mutabaruka re-recorded “Aid Travels with a Bomb” in his own voice, she was told that her lyrics sounded “masculine” because the political content seemed far removed from “the subjective or the personal,” ostensibly the preserve of women’s poetry (47). Second, she recounts being told that her stage presence while performing at the Reggae Sunsplash festival was too “sexual” because “a radical dub poet should not be ‘wining up her waist’ on the stage” (48). Thereafter, Breeze would dress in khaki military uniforms and, later, full dresses, although she remains defiant that “the body can also sing” in a “radical voice.” Third, she describes how her American music label, ROIR, refused a contract for her second album, Tracks (later signed to LKJ Records in 1991), because her content was “becoming too personal” (48). As she says, “[my] politics were shaped by my personal experiences and those of the people round me in my day to day concerns,” especially the voices of women that, she says, “work through me or the truth they bring.”

Too political but not sufficiently emotional, too sexual and therefore not truly radical, and too personal and yet not political enough – such are the double standards Breeze faced as a “dub poet.” Hereafter, she largely refuses (or heavily qualifies) the category of dub after breaking the mold with “Riddym Ravings (The Mad Woman’s Poem),” her most iconic and celebrated dramatic monologue, which uses the genre’s characteristic doubleness to inhabit and, in fact, exploit these contradictions. What’s more, through the very title holding in parenthesis “(The Mad Woman’s Poem),” her monologue calls attention to itself as its own object of analysis. In doing so, Breeze anticipates the mad woman’s objectification (and, as we will see, her sexualization) in advance and thereby voices her as a performative and political act. And by experimenting in the dramatic monologue, Breeze sidesteps the category “dub poetry” itself: The woman’s voice of mental illness and psychic disturbance is at once deeply personal and subjective at the same time it becomes a product of the social illnesses that produce “her”: a doubleness which the poem, as a meta-monologue, both expresses in voice and re-mediates, if not partially recuperates, in poetic form.

Readers familiar with the poem will know that Breeze adopts the fictive voice of a rural homeless pregnant woman suffering from mental illness who hears a reggae song playing on “de Channel One riddym box” in her head. Evicted by her landlord (“dem trow me out fi no pay rent”), she wanders the streets of Kingston before being committed by “di dactar and di landlord” multiple times to Bellevue mental hospital and poor house (Riddym Ravings, Reference Breeze58). Each time the doctor and the landlord “operate” on her to “tek di radio outa mi head,” she hears the lyrics of the DJ, a refrain that the poem marks off in italics:

The DJ’s refrain gives lyrical expression to the displacement and alienation (“no feel no way”) of agricultural communities suffering from homelessness and unemployment in an alien urban environment (“town in a place day ah really kean [can’t] stay”) who nonetheless yearn for the lost consolation and beauty of the countryside (“mi waan go a country go a look mango”), a yearning that is reinforced by Breeze’s elongated “o” sounds in her voicing of these lines.

In certain ways, it seems as if the woman is under the spell (and constraint) of the DJ, the doctor, and the landlord alike, especially through the word “ribbit” (or rivet). That is, just as the doctor and landlord use constraints in Bellevue to tie (rivet) the woman to the hospital bed to perform their operation and, later, electrical shock treatment to attempt to cure her of her madness, so too do the lyrics rivet her with the nostalgic illusions of returning to the safety of the countryside as a lost maternal presence of wholeness and completion. As Breeze explains, though, “ribbit” has a particular meaning in reggae, where “the rhythm is so good that it holds you in a heavy dub and you cannot move out of it” (“An Interview,” Reference Breeze57). In another sense, then, the woman herself is in charge of the rhythm, not under the spell of the DJ, by instead repurposing the lyrics for her own meanings, inhabiting their space, and remixing and mastering them as a way of gaining control over her physical imprisonment. Under the spell of the ribbit, she can see and voice the madness of her social world even more clearly. So, yes, the doctor and landlord do forcibly bind her to the hospital bed. Their physical constraint over her body, however, cannot overcome the power of the reggae beat inside her and, by extension, the ways in which she recodes the lyrics through her irrepressible desire to attain freedom and autonomy from her social alienation, an alienation that is misperceived as “madness” by the voiceless figures of medical-economic-patriarchal authority.

Through the persona of the mad woman, Breeze adds political subject matter without running the risk of being charged with writing political poetry. As Breeze has widely acknowledged, however, the poem is in fact deeply personal as she herself contended with mental illness from young adulthood onwards. “I once spent three and a half weeks in a mental hospital,” she says (“An Interview,” Reference Breeze57). Like the woman in the poem, Breeze has stated how, during a psychic breakdown, she heard Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” (1968) on the radio, which led her to sit on Montego Bay, where a Rastafarian approached her and invited her to perform at a poetry reading with Mutabaruka (Breeze, “Dub and Difference,” Reference Brathwaite608). Both Breeze’s poem and Redding’s lyrics connect through their mutual emphasis on displacement (“I left my home in Georgia / Headed for the Frisco Bay”), alienation (“this loneliness won’t leave me alone”), and longing, which we can hear in sound through the resemblance between Redding’s “waaastin tiiiiimmme” and Breeze’s “go looookah mangooooh” (Redding, “(Sittin’’)”). The desperation of Breeze’s restless speaker, however, evacuates the consolation of making any dock her home. Like the woman in the poem, Breeze says that she too would walk the streets with her baby and “maybe if a bus passed and it had a beautiful red rose painted on the side I would say ‘That’s the bus I’m getting on.’ And perhaps I would have no money to pay the fare” (“An Interview,” Reference Breeze57). Breeze’s personal experiences with mental illness and with how she felt herself viewed by middle-class people around her (and whom she knew and grew up with) changed the ways in which she perceived what she calls “the mad sector of society,” especially Rastafarians. But for her, the figures whom respectable society deems “mad” are, she says, “the real observers of society, the only ones who could observe society because they had placed themselves outside all the pressures and rules and guidelines of society” (“An Interview,” Reference Breeze57).

With this biographical background in mind, we can see the ways in which Breeze deliberately sets up a series of instances in the poem distinguishing between how the “mad woman” perceives herself and how she feels herself perceived by others. Across the poem, she occupies a zone of abject marginality, caught in the interstices of necessity and criminality, dignity and depravity, cleanliness and dirtiness. For instance, she perceives the pavement of King Street begin to “bubble an dally in front a mi yeye [eye]” and she becomes dizzy due to the ravages of hunger (Riddym Ravings, Reference Breeze58). But as she approaches a garbage can in a backlot to forage for a piece of rotten pork, “dem nearly chap aff mi han enna de butcha shap.” Later, she describes how she was initially greeted by people around her, “mi use to tell everybody ‘mawning’” but as she slides further into destitution, “di lickle rosiness gawn outa mi face / nobody nah ansa mi” (59). As a result, she wraps herself in rags and finds small consolation in reading the newspapers while sitting on Parade (at the heart of downtown Kingston) and sustaining fantasies of consuming “sweet saaf / yellow heart breadfruit / wid piece a roas sallfish,” which likely signifies her desire to return home. But when she tries to board the bus to the countryside, she is admonished by the conductor: “dutty gal, kum affa di bus.”

What becomes clear over the course of the poem are the ways in which her “madness” has been produced from the social codes and authoritative discourses enforcing upon her the class hierarchies and gender divisions of cleanliness/dirtiness, which she has internalized – and which, in truth, seem to have begun at “home,” a word she repeats several times. For instance, immediately after the bus conductor calls her a “dutty gal,” she says “but mi kean go home dutty? / fah mi parents dem did sen mi out clean” (60). These short lines reveal how her “home” was itself already a space of contamination from the beginning, in so far as her family upholds patriarchal discourses aligning the feminine with cleanliness and purity. Consequently, she strips down and begins to bathe herself in public before hearing two “mawga gal” [thin women] mock her, saying “who kudda breed smaddy [somebody] like me?” (60). At the same time, she reflects that these women don’t know about:

In her mind, her “pure nice man” visiting her in the early morning hours stands in sharp distinction to the “likkle dutty bwoy” the other women go home with. It is precisely because she has been relegated to the category of the “dutty” that the mad woman suffers the madness of the patriarchal codes that have come to define her – and that she compulsively repeats.

Fittingly, her public bathing scene denudes – and threatens – the arbitrariness of the authoritative discourses and social hierarchies whose precariousness leads “de dactar and de landlord” to institutionalize her in Bellevue a third and final time to try to “tek de whole radio from outa mi head” (60). It is unclear as to whether the doctor and landlord are performing an abortion, a forced sterilization, or other procedure. But when they are not looking, she says that “mi tek de radio / an mi push i up enna mi belly” because she wants to transmit the DJ’s song to her unborn child: “me waan my baby know dis yah riddym yah.”

According to Jenny Sharpe, the act of transmitting the song to her child also “transmutes one of the most normative naturalised significations of the female body – maternity – into a technologically mediated relation” (Reference Shakespeare454). This act of technological transmutation, however, further extends to the meta-monologue of the poem itself as a technological re-mediation of the poem’s subjective voice and, by extension, of Breeze’s poetic voice. In the final lines, we read:

At the very moment the woman undergoes electric shock, the voice of the DJ proclaims “Murther,” a reggae exclamation announcing that “this track is killing it,” and “Pull up Missa Operator!,” as in “pull up the needle and play it all over again from the beginning.” Breeze’s final lines are particularly harrowing in double voicing despair and refusal. In one sense, these lines are an expression of anguish, signifying the patriarchal violence and psychic “murder” that the doctor and landlord inflict upon the woman through their “operations,” sending her deeper into a spiral of suffering held on repeat. In another sense, though, it also seems as though Breeze grants the speaker an amount of control through her position of refusal. For instance, Breeze’s ambiguous spellings of “murther” (and its close resemblance to “mother”) and the feminine address to “missa operator” carry the possibility that the poem engenders the speaker to become the DJ-to-herself. In this latter case, the speaker gains an element of autonomy by begetting herself as “mother” to herself. She also lays claim to the conventionally male role of DJ, with her now behind the decks and mastering the music of her life, however dark and dreadful. Within the poem, then, the final lines “bawl out” the agony of the woman’s suffering and grant her agency in becoming her own private DJ as “missa operator,” raving to her own beat in a space of refusal to the social forces all around her.

These lines, however, further extend to Breeze’s poetic voice and the doubleness of her meta-monologue. In transmuting her subjective experiences of suffering into forms of aesthetic enjoyment through technological mediation and reception, these lines co-implicate the poet, the poem, and the listener in the conditions that produce the woman’s madness. By the end of the poem, Breeze-as-poet has achieved “mastery” in composing “Riddym Ravings,” which is an outgrowth of her personal experiences, for sure, but is also now a cultural production pronouncing her as an artist of her own life. “Murther”: she’s killed it.

By playing upon the tensions and conflicts of taking on the voice of psychic disturbance, “Riddym Ravings” clarifies the contradictions that relegate certain people – especially unnamed “mad women,” whether living in Kingston, London, or elsewhere – to social alienation and deprivation, calling upon her readers to listen to and look at the world from the perspective of “the mad sector of society.” At the same time, her poem adamantly refuses – and protests against – the madness of the social world that puts Black women’s suffering on repeat, even as her meta-monologue carves out a space of aesthetic agency for forging intergenerational feminine alliances as they are transmitted in sound and networked across electrical airwaves.

Up to this point, I have considered individual dramatic monologues by Bloom and Breeze, focusing on their respective aesthetic experimentations in the feint and the meta-monologue to voice a politics of dissent. But what about instances where dramatic monologues appear in a poem sequence and take on a multiplicity of voices? We can see such a case in Amryl Johnson’s “integral collection” Gorgons (1992), which transports the myth of Medusa into the contemporary era to tell the story of seven different women from around the world who remain frozen in their lives but who nonetheless embark upon a journey that would break them out of their petrified social conditions towards self-recognition and collective release (5). The journey motif is a hallmark of Johnson’s poetic project, from her early collection Long Road to Nowhere (1985) through her final collection, Calling (2000). Over the course of Gorgons, however, Johnson writes a total of nine voices that are distinct from, but related to, one another. In doing so, Johnson thereby experiments even further with the genre’s polyvocality to mediate the conflicts, differences, and inequalities cutting across the category of Black women’s “experiences.”

As she explains in her introduction to Gorgons, the dramatis personae include, first, the voice of the woman poet figure who appears in the beginning, middle, and end of the collection to reflect upon the writing process of her artistic creation. Second is the Medusa-Gorgon who awakens in horror to a world frozen to herself and to the seven women who comprise her fictive daughters, the main characters of the collection. These are the dancer Catalina, who is rebellious and sensual; Blind Woman, who is “thwarted,” “bitter,” and trapped by her “prison of frustration”; Lucille, who suffers from drug addiction and dependency; Inez, a poet/politician who uses calypsonian language to become a spokesperson for her Caribbean community; Dulcine, a prophet figure who also becomes deluded by her visions; Mayo, a freedom fighter and figure of political resistance; and Island Woman, who speaks in creolized English and is a nomadic figure of restlessness and wandering (Gorgons, Reference Jeon5). Johnson arranges the collection by devoting individual monologues to each character, requiring the reader to listen to the speech patterns and individual preoccupations unique to each woman. Johnson also includes a voiceless male figure, Hunter (who also appears under the name Driver), who functions strategically in the poem as an obstacle to the women’s tortuous journey towards knowledge and potential emancipation. Through its very structure, then, Johnson writes what I would consider a “multiple monologue” in Gorgons. In doing so, Johnson brings into stark relief my chapter’s exploration of the ways in which the differences and divisions distinguishing the dramatic monologues by British Black women’s poetry during this time can become generative for advancing a politics of solidarity. Johnson’s project, however, is not without its own conflicts and contradictions.

In the opening poem, “Spheres of Resistance,” the poetic voice reflects upon the act of taking on women’s voices and experiences, which she describes as amorphous, dancing forms, as if arising from the underworld and creeping in from the margins of consciousness:

The poetic voice casts herself, in part, as a choreographer for the turning, twisting forms to which she gives shape and voice. At the same time, though, “they” remain at a remove and wholly other from the poet figure, resistant to her authorial and aesthetic control. Johnson’s broken lineation and uses of white space and gaps (here and throughout this opening poem) mark the agency of these figures to “form links” with one another at the same time as they are separate and distinctly other in ways that are, we read, “contorted / grouped in leaning support.” Indeed, Johnson subordinates her poetic “I” to the fictive women who speak through her:

From the very opening, Johnson’s poet figure asserts alterity and difference as integral to her project, which is less “creative” than “interpretive,” a mediator for forces, figures, and voices of alterity.

The title’s Medusa figure most prominently centers the ways in which Gorgons is written under the sign of difference. In Johnson’s rendering, her “Gorgon” arises from out of the earth, “shrugging worms ants / unmounding stones,” and awakens to “a world / without sound or movement” (9). She appears in three instances across the collection. Throughout, she suffers from an internal blindness as someone who “had looked but not seen” (9) the ways in which (in her eyes at least) she has “hushed all life” and rendered the world of the women characters “motionless,” without purpose, and “fossilized” (24). As we read the respective monologues of Medusa’s fictive daughters, we see how they all in different ways are “frozen” due to internal psychic crises and external conflicts beyond their control. We can see these afflictions, for instance, through Lucille’s drug addiction and failed intimacy with her lover, Elaine; through Inez’s struggle with acquiring a form of calypsonian language to become a poet/political spokesperson; Catalina’s desire for a life beyond the rigid roles assigned to her through her training as a ballerina; or Blind Woman’s “search for a space which breathes” connection and intimacy beyond what she calls the “prison” of her loneliness and frustration (22–23). In the face of the women’s suffering, Medusa is riddled with a sense of responsibility and remorse: “Children,” she cries, “is it I who did this?” (36).

Johnson does not provide any contextual clues regarding Medusa’s figurative blindness or what she calls “the turmoil of [her] vision” (9). So what, exactly, is it that Medusa cannot see? How can we account for her sense of “remorse” for the afflictions of her fictive daughters (36)? In other words, how are we to understand the poem’s internal logic of Medusa holding herself responsible for the women’s suffering: After all, isn’t she victim-blaming?

In an interview, Johnson passingly refers to Marina Warner’s scholarly book Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985) as informing her poetic rendering of Medusa (Johnson, “Because, Don’t Forget,” Reference Johnson and Ngcobo225). In Monuments & Maidens, Warner studies the ways in which the stare of “Medusa,” as an apotropaic emblem and aegis for Athena as goddess of war in Homer’s Iliad, became mobilized by Athens as “an instrument of terror,” one that seeks to turn away danger through her terrifying look (109). For Warner, the Greeks deployed the feminine Athena to bear the emblem of Medusa to carry out “men’s business” of war (110). “It aligns Athena,” Warner says, “with patriarchal priorities, and thus makes her appropriate and safe as a goddess for a society like Athens,” thereby bypassing Ares as god of war (110). One explanation of Medusa’s turmoil in the poem, then, derives from her sense of remorse for the ways in which emblems of the feminine – namely, her terrifying gaze adorning the aegis of Athena – have been exploited to justify patriarchal power, political violence, and women’s subordination.

Before her transformation – we might even say petrification – into an aegis for Athena, however, Warner looks to Medusa’s origin stories in Hesiod’s Theogeny and, later, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which may provide another explanation for Medusa’s turmoil and remorse in Gorgons. For Warner, Medusa’s origin as a beautiful mortal who “lays with Poseidon” attributes to her a form of sexual power for which she is punished by Athena, here aligned with discourses of patriarchal control and restraint over women’s bodies and sexuality (112). When Perseus beheads Medusa, the mortal hero Chrysaor and the winged horse Pegasus (symbol of unfettered poetic imagination) spring forth from her side, and, according to Ovid, snakes appeared spontaneously after her murder by Perseus (113). According to Warner, “Medusa is filled with ambiguous potency: she is both death-dealing and capable of bringing forth miraculously” (112). What’s more, the snake, she says, stands as a “prime archaic symbol of vital energy” through its capacity to shed its skin and regenerate itself (113). With Warner in mind, we can see how Medusa occupies a highly contradictory and therefore threatening position through her irrepressible feminine sexual power, her alignment with self-generating maternal creation even after death, and her subsequent transformation into an apotropaic emblem of war under the sign of Athena.

In Gorgons, we can explain Medusa’s turmoil and remorse in two related but contradictory ways that relate to the collection as a “double poem.” On the one hand, the affective subjectivity of Medusa’s “I” registers her sense of responsibility and guilt for her daughters’ suffering. Her guilt, however, is due to an internal blindness: Medusa cannot fully see the ways in which she has internalized the patriarchal discourses and political ideologies that have made her into an emblem of feminine terror, in ways over which she has little to no control. To her rhetorical question, “Children is it I who did this?,” we can reply, patently, “no” (36). In this first line of interpretation, her remorse is a symptom of patriarchal violence, as represented in the poem by the figure of Hunter, whose name recalls Athena as goddess of the hunt, and the obstacle to the women’s journey of recognition. “Medusa” has nothing to feel guilty about: Her suffering and the afflictions of her “daughters” have nothing to do with her. In this way, she remains blind to herself due to the patriarchal world that has created her in its own distorted image.

And yet, when we look at the “I” not as the expression of Medusa’s subjectivity but, rather, as the poem’s status as an object of inquiry, we can see, on the other hand, how Gorgons deploys Medusa’s turmoil strategically. The anguish and responsibility that Johnson’s poetic voice attributes to her function as a mechanism for reactivating and reanimating Medusa’s prior sexual potency and creative regeneration before she was transformed into an emblem of fear. The “I who did this” is, along this second line of interpretation, the multiple monologue of the poem itself through its aesthetic struggle towards inventing models of feminist solidarity in difference.

Johnson’s project in Gorgons is, perhaps, akin to Hélène Cixous’s theorization in “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976), which calls for forms of women’s writing that break free from the circles of self-hatred and labor to invent what she calls “other love” (893). “The new love,” Cixous writes, “dares for the other, wants the other, makes dizzying, precipitous flights between knowledge and invention,” which, ultimately, “calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love,” one in which “we will never be lacking” (893). Like “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Gorgons calls for a switch in perspective from the lack of the petrified world to the abundance of intersubjective attachments between women in alterity and difference. And yet, also like Cixous’s écriture feminine, Johnson’s poetic project similarly runs the risk of flattening out the very differences her writing would seem to champion.

In the poem, Johnson taps into Medusa’s prior history of her mortality, her sexual potency, and her capacity for ceaseless regeneration to forge links between the women in the poem in ways altogether independent of the patriarchal forces that shape but ultimately fail to define them. Each of the women, in different ways and in different locations, hear Medusa’s “single cry / of anguish,” which reverberates throughout Gorgons. For instance, Mayo hears in the wind a violent “sound” that, she says, “became my eyes / It became my ears / other senses // my inspiration” for her to assume the role of militant political resistance (60). Even as Lucille does not recover from the “poison” of her drug dependency, she taps into her “longing” to create a “song of unrequited love” as a folk singer and rekindles her relationship with Elaine (65). And Catalina and Blind Woman conjoin in the poem, meeting in a dark alley, each grasping the wrist of the other and leading one another forward “from darkness into light” in affective intimacy and care (66).

Medusa’s cry, in these various ways, ultimately leads the women to begin “humming / a dangerous tune” (72). Theirs is a song of threatening violence and that which refuses to be contained. In the final third of the collection, the voices begin to blend into one another in a raucous chorus, singing a song of shared vulnerability through difference and by increasingly taking on a collective “we.” As Johnson explains, she envisions each character as “an attribute” and, when taken together, they form a composite subject and “make a complete person” (Johnson, “Because, Don’t Forget,” Reference Mitchell230). Overall, the trajectory of the collective “we” proceeds from being trapped within “a naked understanding” (69) and metaphorically blind to themselves – “We who had looked but / did not have eyes to see” (71) – towards recognition and potential emancipation, as enunciated in the penultimate poem “Far and High (The first song they learnt),” which Johnson indicates is meant to be sung in chorus:

As is clear from these lines, Johnson envisions Gorgons as contributing to an as yet unfinished feminist project of overcoming, ascendency, and transcendence. To this I would add that her desire to write a coherent, unified subject (the “we,” as she says, composing a “complete person”) unfortunately appears at the expense of those who remain excluded, outside, or even recalcitrant to being absorbed within liberal models of feminist politics of upward movement.

In Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (2002), Toril Moi takes account of the strengths and weaknesses of Cixous’s utopian politics, which, to me, resonate with the kinds of limitations similarly besetting Johnson’s Gorgons:

Similarly, it is as if the primordial, self-present “voice” of Medusa’s song carries the Imaginary capacity to overcome the divisions separating the (normative, strategically essentialist?) women figures in the poem now subsumed as an undifferentiated “we,” with little reference to the actual social structures and material conditions producing these differences in the first place. There is a strong ideological tendency in Gorgons to attempt to resolve or unify differences that remain incommensurable to one another in ways not unlike British Black feminist organizations in the 1980s, which could not account for the proliferation of differences along lines of race, ethnicity, class, region, ability, and sexuality.

That said, the poem’s apparent culmination in a utopian politics is qualified in the text through – if not altogether undermined by – marginal references to ongoing instances of gender violence. In one of the final poems in the sequence, “They Bled Inside the Same Wound,” Johnson’s speaker calls into question any pretense of forward movement by focusing the reader’s attention instead upon:

If Gorgons ultimately enunciates a utopian song of emancipation in “Far and High,” it does so by momentarily delving into, yet seeking to surpass, prevalent and pervasive histories of patriarchal violence and women’s self-harm that persist unabated the world over.

In the final poem, “Shout!,” Johnson’s poet-speaker self-reflects upon the insufficiency of her entire poetic project before the voices of women that she has mediated. “They crept in from the edges,” she writes, but the women’s voices ultimately remain, as she says, merely a “stream of / shaped sounds flowing from / the orifice” (78). In “Shout!,” Johnson also repeats a particularly resonant word regarding her project: “the whorl” (78). “Whorl” carries with it a sense of twisting, swirling, revolving, turning over, and hence literally signifies “revolution.” It is as if Johnson interfuses the inchoate “whorl” of the women’s experiences as “shaped sounds” with the messy “whorl” of Gorgons itself, as a recursive work of art that turns in upon itself only to intimate the potentiality of revolutionary Black feminist politics beyond the poem.

To be sure, Johnson’s poetry does not aspire to a politics of abolition in ways that, for instance, we will see in the poetry of Bhanu Kapil and D. S. Marriott in Chapter 5. The “kinds of political problems” that Toril Moi identifies “for the feminist reader of Cixous” could well apply to Johnson: “marred as much by its lack of reference to recognizable social structures as by it biologism, [their] work nevertheless constitutes an invigorating utopian evocation of the imaginative powers of women” (124–25). Similarly, Johnson’s Gorgons draws readers into an unruly politics through the “whorl” of writing: to the re-turning of Medusa in the modern world, to repeating cycles of violence against women, and to the revolutionary possibilities of women’s collective struggle for emancipation by inhabiting the wounds of history and dwelling in differences. The emancipatory politics of her poetry, in this sense, anticipates the writings of Bernardine Evaristo, Lemn Sissay, and Daljit Nagra, whom I discuss in Chapter 4.

The final lines of “Shout!” conclude:

In the sound of the wind’s “hollow sigh,” we can hear the “strongest echo” of Medusa’s enduring cry of anguish as the Aeolian inspiration flowing through Johnson’s multiple monologue. In the end, Gorgons displaces itself as nothing more than “a hollow sigh” before the unruly, cacophonous voices within and, finally, beyond the text – in truth beyond any text, be it aesthetic, political, or otherwise – which remain unaccounted for, unassimilable, nonidentical, and finally, true to the spirit of Medusa, radically other. In having enunciated a multiplicity of voices, though, Johnson nonetheless credits her cultural creations with the capacity to “alter vision,” to “shout,” and thus to reawaken the petrified world into the intoxicating fullness of, in the words of Cixous, “other love” (Johnson, “Because, Don’t Forget,” Reference Johnson225).

Conclusion

Black British women’s poetry makes seen and heard the lives and voices that have otherwise been appropriated, silenced, or erased in British letters. They interrogate the available models of “Black womanhood” within Black feminism and dominant white culture. What’s more, their writing struggles to transform the assigned roles of “Black women” through a politics of dissent, thereby calling into question the boundaries of recognition within dominant political communities: whose voices are heard (and silenced), whose experiences are visible (and occluded), and which actors occupy the political stage (and remain in the wings). In these ways, their writing continues the legacy of dissent in Black British feminist organizations in the 1970s and early 1980s. Needless to say, the Black feminist politics of dissent endured within British Black and Asian letters and has become a powerful resource for subsequent Black and Asian women poets who have come to prominence in the ensuing decades, such as Bernardine Evaristo, Dorothea Smartt, SuAndi, Zena Edwards, Patience Agbabi, and Malika Booker, among numerous others.

Finally, these artists exploit the performative dimensions of dramatic monologues to dramatize the pleasures of poetic creation. In the wry sarcasm of Bloom’s humorous personae, the raving riddyms of Breeze’s madwoman, and the raucous “shout” of Johnson’s Gorgons, we can detect the aesthetic enjoyment of giving utterance, shape, and form to the unruly experiences of racial, gender, and social differences. Throughout, I have shown the ways in which their artistic creations conduct metacommentary on their writing’s ambivalent relationship between the subjective expression of Black women’s voices in poems on the one hand, and, on the other, the social realities determining lived experiences ranging from suffering and deprivation to irrepressible desires for emancipation, as these experiences themselves become enacted in the shaped sounds of poetic form. By inhabiting the gaps between poets, speakers, contexts, poems, and readers, these Black women poets carve out a space of difference and nonidentity as constitutive of any Black and Asian feminist politics of solidarity as an open-ended problem and itself shaped by ongoing forms of exclusion and division. Their uses of the dramatic monologue, then, require of readers a stance of perpetual self-vigilance: of continually putting to question who is speaking, for whom they are speaking, in whose interests, with what relative power, and in whose name.