IT HAPPENED SHORTLY after her first attack of schizophrenia, when Jean Breese, as she then was, was listening to the radio. The radio was one of many voices in her head that told her what to do, sometimes fiercely, sometimes kindly. This voice was swaying and alluring, Otis Redding singing “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay”. So she did what he said. She took the bus from Patty Hill, her village in north-west Jamaica, to the only bay she knew, Montego Bay, and sat by the seaside scribbling as if to save her life.

She seldom found meaning in these orders from the voices, but this time a Rasta man walked up to her. His hair was tangled long like hers, and he asked: “Daughter, you is a poet?” When she said yes, he asked her to recite a poem in a show. The guest artist was Mutabaruka, then one of the slickest men in Jamaica at putting lines of poetry over a reggae beat—dub poetry, of which she became the first and one of the few female performers in the world.

What she carried in her head from then on was the cacophony of the whole island, from the rowdy streets of Kingston, where she went to drama school, to the humid, ferny, itchy bush and the cascading rivers, from the blackbird singing of home in the mango tree, to shouts of “Whore!” in a fight at a rum bar. She held her mother’s voice, reciting poems to her as they rested on her bed in the sun-trap afternoons. She channelled the preacher announcing the day of tribulation, the chained slave on the Middle Passage “squeezed into a deep well of darkness”, the young blood swaggering down the road (“a litre in mi pocket/an a whistle in mi teet”) and her grandmother, who largely brought her up on her farm in the hills, recommending “de simple tings of life, mi dear”:

ah hoe mi corn/an de backache gone
plant mi peas/arthritis ease

One by one she wrote them down and spoke them out, hectoring or wistful or wild, hungry to make music from those words.

The poem that brought her to people’s attention, “Riddym Ravings” in 1988, was written out of her schizophrenia, as she begged the doctors in the hospital to “tek de radio outa mi head” while also wanting to push it up into her belly and let her unborn child listen. In “Red Rebel Song” she admitted to “raw fire madness”. Yet this madness also spread to the voice of the field slave, forced to lie down on “Massa bed”, and to the resulting half-breed, a brown-skin rebel like herself, fed up with “de black white question” and emphatic that “I nah/tek no abuse fram eida direction”. She found her own voice also in the wind, the Trades that blew ancestral echoes and slave cries from Africa, and she kept the name Breeze, only altering the spelling, even after that first marriage ended. “Binta” she adopted, in the Rasta years of her early 20s, as a west African name meaning “daughter of”. Daughter of the wind. That was where she belonged after death, not with roots and worms.

From 1985 she divided her life between England, world-touring, and Jamaica, between patwa (just Jamaican, as she thought of it) and the standardised English she had spoken in her middle-class family. Yet English voices rarely came through, only those of home, and the women of home. It felt like an obligation to record them, as the lone female in a strikingly macho world. At first she toned her femininity down, wearing military khakis to perform, but not for long. Dub was going to have to adjust to her, not vice versa. She loved that fierce, funky reggae beat, along with Rastafarian chanting and African drums—adored Bob Marley, and all he had meant for Jamaican self-confidence and independence—but women’s lives were too subtle and complex for all that masculine swagger. Reggae could feel as rigid as iambic pentameter, so she mixed in rhythms from jazz and mento, Jamaican folk music, and, for quieter offerings, took blues out of her sleeve.

Thus she spoke out for all the working-class women inhabiting her head. The housekeeper, her apron “all de greases from...cooking plenty greens”, who smells it before rolling it up for the laundry; the wife on an “ordinary mawning” who, having sent the children off to school (“wish me never did breed but Lawd/mi love dem”), and pondered what to cook for dinner, suddenly bursts out bawling at the sight of her own frock pinned on the line; the general lament over men who pass through, but not to stay. The voices spread further, until the whole female third world clamoured in her too. One of her collections, “Third World Girl”, had on its cover a defiant black teenager showing her new young breasts. In the title poem this girl watched through the bushes as the rich-world tourist bronzed on his fenced-off beach, reminding him that he did not know her, that he had no right to assume he could touch her, and that “the rape’s been done”.

Life was burdensome to these women, as it often was to her. She had six or seven breakdowns, during which she would put herself into hospital and consign the child care to her mother. Yet in good times she could hardly have been happier, full of pealing laughter, sitting blissfully on her verandah and going with the neighbours to drink beer. The women of her poems, too, had compensations. The housewife in “Spring Cleaning”, for example, soothed by the 23rd Psalm:

surely goodness and mercy/shall follow me
she pick up de broom/an she sweeping
all de days of my life/an she sweeping…

As for her Caribbean sisters in general, she saw them walking proudly, “shaping mountain/wid we foot”, swaying their hips, carrying on their heads what looked like a burden but was freedom water, life-giving and life-saving. “Chile, don’t yuh ever forget de vision”, her grandmother had told her: a vision that brightened her eye and washed her through like cooling springs. She would not forget. She might be mad, but she wasn’t going to stay like Bertha Mason in “Jane Eyre”, sitting in the attic, “my song lock up tight/eena mi troat”, until she set the place on fire. She was going to sing long, loud and now, her voices. Her song. ■