Jean 'Binta' Breeze was a popular Jamaican Dub poet and storyteller
whose performances were so powerful she has been called a 'one-woman
festival'. The Fifth Figure is a book-length sequence mixing
poetry and prose which chronicles the lives of five generations of
Caribbean and Black British women of mixed ancestry.
Part novel, part poem, part family memoir, its structure is based on
the Jamaican quadrille, a hybrid version of the dance brought from
Europe by the island's former colonial masters. Beginning in the late
19th century with her great-great grandmother's first quadrille,
Breeze
tells a many-layered tale of love and betrayal, innocence and
suffering,
hardship and joy over a hundred years as each mother sees her daughter
join a dance that shapes her life.
The Fifth Figure was her sixth book, and saw Breeze breathing
new life into the dramatic monologue. Steeped in the history of
Jamaica,
the book develops the possibilities of narrative, voice and rhythm,
offering an eloquent and empowering vision of Caribbean lives and
culture.
In 2011 Bloodaxe published Jean 'Binta' Breeze's Third World Girl:
Selected Poems, a DVD-book selection of new and previously published
work with live performances on the accompanying DVD. This does include
work from The Fifth Figure, which remains available as a separate
edition, nor the later collection, The Verandah Poems (2016).
