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A passionate Jamaican poet, Jean Breeze, who enjoyed his dub poetry performance, a half-spoken, half-told style of storytelling often supplemented by reggae beats, died in a Kingston hospital on August 4. He was 65 years old.
His death was announced on social media by the British agency Renaissance One Writers and Events. The cause was not specified, but he had suffered from chronic lung disease for years.
Miss Breeze, known as Binta, is considered the first woman to make her name in the male-dominated genre of dub poetry. (Dub is a recording term that refers to the process of adding or removing sounds.) The genre originated in Kingston in the 1970s and was amplified in London and Toronto, both of which had large populations of Caribbean immigrants, and Ms. Breeze gained notoriety.
He was distinguished by the passion of his performances, the raw honesty of his personal stories, and his use of the lyric vernacular of Jamaica. In the late 1990s, the poet Maya Angelou He asked Ms. Breeze to give a performance at her 70th birthday party, in which Ms. Breeze sang to a gospel choir, so lively that Ms. Angelou immediately walked up to the stage and embraced her.
Ms. Breeze described her poetic vision in her poem “The Garden Trail” (2000). “I want to make words into music, to go beyond language to sound,” he wrote. He became known for blending Jamaican patois with standard English to create innovative poetic forms and rhythms.
Longtime friend Owen Blakka Ellis: told Global Voices Web site.
One of Miss Breeze’s most vivid childhood memories was of sitting in her grandmother’s bedroom and reciting poetry to her every night.
“So it came from a voice, not a page,” He told Marxism Today in 1988. “Voice is as important as poetry because it gives life to the word,” he said. He added that this is the reason why he attaches so much importance to performance.
“It’s hard to predict in advance what a reading will be like,” he said. “Sometimes it’s very painful and sometimes very liberating. But it is always a communication.”
His work has drawn on a variety of influences, which Marxism Today calls “London’s reluctant melting pot, rural Jamaican childhood, and Kingston’s urban anxiety.” Its main themes were the struggles and exploitation of women, political oppression and mental illness.
Ms. Breeze was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her early 20s, and her work is full of references to what she calls “insanity.” In one of his early works, “Riddym Ravings and Other Poems” (1988), the “freaks” of the title A homeless woman sitting on a bench in the park. It was also known as the “Poetry of the Mad Woman”.
At the same time, most of his work was cheerful. Other collections included: “On the Edge of An Island” (1997); “The Arrival of Brighteye and Other Poems” (2000), containing a version of Chaucer’s tale of the Wife of Bath; “The Fifth Figure” (2006), about five generations of Black British women; and “Third World Girl: Selected Poems” (2011). He also made several recordings, including “.ride the de Riddym” (1996) and collaborated with the African-American a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock.
Ms. Breeze split her time between Jamaica and England and regularly performed at literary festivals. He was also a theater director, choreographer, actor and teacher, and wrote for television and film. He settled for a time in the Midlands town of Leicester, where he taught creative writing as an honorary writer at the University of Leicester School of English.
Jean Lumsden was born on March 11, 1956 in rural Jamaica. His father was a public health inspector and his mother trained in midwifery. Jean was raised in Patty Hill, a small village in the Hanover hills, by his grandparents, who were farmers.
Coincidentally, he emerged as a dub poet.
He taught and practiced Rastafarianism after high school. One day he heard Otis Redding’s song “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” on the radio – for which he was often guided. It inspired him to take a bus to Montego Bay, about 15 miles away, and sit there on a pier to see who was coming.
Finally, a Rasta man saw him writing and asked if he was a poet. He said it was. He said there was a party in his honor that night. Haile SelassieThe last emperor of Ethiopia, revered by the Rastafarians. The man asked him if he wanted to read a poem there and invited him to rehearsal with a group.
when he appeared, by agreement, The famous Jamaican dub poet was at rehearsal and told the band to back him up with a certain rhythm. He then recited the poem “Slip, you idiot”. Muta liked his performance and took him to a studio to record the work.
“And in a month” In an interview with Contemporary Women’s Writing magazine in 2018, she said:“As the first female dub poet, I had the first recording played on the radio in Jamaica.”
He later enrolled at the Jamaica School of Drama in Kingston.
By then, a brief marriage to one of her former teachers, Brian Breese, had ended. (He changed his last name to Breeze.) Among the survivors is a son, Gareth Breese, a famous West Indies cricketer, and two daughters, Imega and Caribe.
A turning point came when he met leading Jamaican dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, who invited him to perform at the International Radical Black and Third World Book Fair in 1985.
Miss Breeze was particularly popular in the UK and in 2012 Queen Elizabeth II. Appointed by Elizabeth as a Fellow of the Order of the British Empire for services to literature. He had previously thought that if he won such an honor, he would reject it because he was against the concept of empire and colonialism. But when the time came, he was more than happy to accept it.
“I’ve always had some kind of a soft spot for the Queen because I see her as a mother figure in a big family trying her best to keep the kids in line,” Ms. Breeze told The Jamaica Observer in 2012. to myself, ‘Here goes my mother’”
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