Catching Bullets with Her Ass: Matrilineality and the Canadian Dub Poetry Tradition in the Work of d’bi.young anitafrika

Abstract

This article engages in depth with the poetics of Jamaican Canadian dub poet, playwright and performer d’bi young anitafrika. Focusing primarily on anitafrika’s one-woman play blood.claat, it argues that her aesthetic is both powerfully unique and distinctively Canadian, negotiating her twin heritages as daughter of a celebrated Canadian dub poet and inheritor of a broader dub tradition through its meditations on black women’s bodies, motherhood, matrilineality, resistance and voice.