What does it mean to self-recover? How do we decolonize our bodies?
Where do we turn for spiritual guidance? When is it right to fight for what you believe in? From whom do we learn how to love?
How do we hold ourselves accountable for the harm we cause?
Is it our responsibility to create new systems of emancipation as we tear down old oppressive ones?
d’bi.young asks us to consider these urgent questions in her new book dubbin poetry: the collected poems of d’bi.young anitafrika; continuing Dub poetry’s legacy of connecting the dots between self-development, artistic activism and social change. The first of three volumes focused on the theme of dub, the collection features three of her previously published books: art on black (Women’s Press, 2005), rivers & other blackness between us (Women’s Press, 2007) and OYA (Spolrusie, 2015). It also includes a new title, black love matters, (only available in this collection), featuring dub poems, monologues and scenes from her most celebrated theatrical productions. David Austin - independent scholar and author of the recently published Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution (Pluto, 2018) - authors the Foreword. Other volumes in the dub series include: dubbin monodrama: solo performance works by artists from the african diaspora (fall 2019), dubbin theatre: the collected plays of d’bi.young anitafrika (spring 2020) and dubbin praxis: the anitafrika method (summer 2020).
As a queer Black feminist performance artist, educator, and mother, d’bi.young possesses a unique voice that crosses cultural boundaries and transcends artistic disciplines. Her work fiercely and compassionately navigates the personal within the political; the micro within the macro. Her poetry, theatre and Anitafrika Method have been challenging and inspiring global audiences for over two decades. d’bi.young’s new volume of collected dub poems chronicles the continued evolution of her Dub poetics.
d’bi.young’s poems propose words... raucous, reverberating as both weapons and redeeming instruments… Pamela Mordecai
d’bi’s poetry courses along its own path…delightful and disturbing...raw power and boundless revelation…Blakka Ellis
d’bi.young is the first true child of Dub poetry... Lillian Allen
d’bi is an electric wire and a grounded soul...Sheri-D Wilson
d’bi is the Dub Schola…Motion
d’bi.young anitafrika’s performances and writings remember, celebrate, and interrogate enduring and plural Black and Caribbean radical traditions, while also dramatising a quest for courage and the strength to survive, love, struggle, and hold space in the midst of extraordinary violence. Her work seeks out what is incomplete in past emancipation projects and rehearses ways of extending these - telling stories, amending experiences and inserting questions into the gaps and fissures of past struggles.
Honor Ford Smith PhD. (2018). ‘Performing Queer Marronage: The Work of d’bi.young anitafrika’, in Gatchalian, C.E. et al (eds). Q2Q: Queer Canadian Performance Texts. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, pp. 239-243.
The collection broaches a wide range of themes and theories including Anti-Black Racism, Biomythography, Black Feminist Thought, Childhood Sexual Trauma, Critical Race Theory, Depression, Dub Theatre, Emancipation, Gender and Sexuality, Homophobia, Jamaican Diaspora Experience, Love, the Maroons, Motherhood, Misogyny, Pan Africanism, Post-Colonial Theory, Post-Traumatic Stress, Queer Theory, Social Change, Revolution, Self-Love, Self-Recovery, Spirituality, and Suicide.