Third World Girl
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€18.50
Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze was a popular Jamaican Dub poet and storyteller whose performances were so powerful she was called a ‘one-woman festival’. Her poems are Caribbean songs of innocence and experience, of love and conflict. They use personal stories and historical narratives to explore social injustice and the psychological dimensions of black women’s experience. Striking evocations of childhood in the hills of Jamaica give way to explorations of the perils and delights of growth and change – through sex, emigration, motherhood and age.
Introduced by renowned critic Colin MacCabe, the book brings together new poems with poetry and reggae chants from four previous collections: Riddym Ravings, Spring Cleaning, On the Edge of an Island and The Arrival of Brighteye. Many of the poems were included in two performances by Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce at Leicester’s Y Theatre available by scanning QR codes printed in the book, along with an interview with Jane Dowson.
Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze (1956-2021) was an internationally-renowned poet. Born in Hanover, Jamaica, she first visited London in 1985 to take part in the International Book Fair of Radical and Third World Books, and she continued to write, perform and teach until a collapsed lung resulted in early retirement to Jamaica. She published eight books of poetry and stories. Answers (Jamaica, 1982), Riddym Ravings (Race Today, UK, 1988), Spring Cleaning (Virago, 1992) were followed by On the Edge of an Island (1997), The Arrival of Brighteye (2000), The Fifth Figure (2006), Third World Girl: Selected Poems (2011, with DVD) and The Verandah Poems (2016) from Bloodaxe. She also released several records, cassettes and CDs, including Tracks and Eena Me Corner with the Dennis Bovell Dub Band and Riding On De Riddym: selected spoken works (57 Productions). She performed her work throughout the world, including tours of the Caribbean, Britain, North America, Europe, South East Asia and Africa, and latterly divided her time between Jamaica and England. She received a NESTA Award in 2003, and an MBE in 2012 for services to literature.