“Sometimes I Wanda/Who Will Translate/Dis/Fe de Inglish?” Strategies for Transcribing Jamaican Creole in the Dub Poems of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah

International audienceThe question of dialect has always been central to Caribbean literature, and more specifically to poetry. In a (post)colonial context of diglossia between standard English and Jamaican Creole, and of a strong hierarchy between oral and scribal forms of linguistic and literary expression, the mere possibility of writing ‘real’ literature in Patwa was severely contested until quite recently. Yet, an increasing number of poets have experimented with Creole over the course of the last century and have amply demonstrated that it is a legitimate medium for poetic and literary expression.This paper looks at various strategies employed by Anglo-Jamaican dub poets Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah to use Creole in their work, and more specifically at the connections and tensions between live performances and written texts. Attention will be paid to the different language varieties employed by poets in performance and how they are transcribed in writing through various orthographic codes. The paper is based on close readings of poems by Johnson and Zephaniah and examines how they employ the spelling conventions of English to transcribe features of Creole, especially pronunciation. The performance style of the two poets and their use of rhythm, which are two features intimately linked to Creole, is also be studied in depth. The detailed examination of the texts and recordings of the poems is situated more generally within the poets’ aesthetic choices and strategies for persona construction and career building. Textual analysis is complemented by contextual elements, and notably the ideological debates surrounding literacy and literature in Creole. Eventually, the paper attempts to bring to light the specific contents and forms of poetry in Creole and establish a notion of Creole poetics as based on the juxtaposition and/or combination of several language varieties and the interplay between oral and scribal codes and media