Sounding Home: Notes Before Registers

"Home is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination."¹

"'Home' can be made and experienced through particular acoustic environments."²

"If one is going to understand 'home', it has to be seen as a lived relationship, a process of identification and practice, rather than as a simple static location or boundary."³

Resonant Reflections

1990s. That was the decade of my first trip to Ethiopia with my parents, when I went to visit part of my dad's family. What remains from that trip is not a precise catalogue of images but a collection of sensory impressions: the shape of the house, the unfamiliar aromas of spices, the layered sounds drifting in from the street—tin roofs, cars, footsteps echoing in the quiet. And most vivid in my memory is the old grey telephone resting in the hallway. This phone held the significance of distance. I remember calling from Switzerland to "take some news." Each conversation carried a delay: words hung in the air, stretching out across continents before landing on the other end. The hollow pauses were not just technical; they made separation audible, defining home as something felt across space and time. I could physically see the object that connected us through sound. The telephone call became a space where diaspora was acutely experienced.

There were also the intricate, almost labyrinthine family connections: the cousin of a cousin whose aunt once lived next door, who is now in Sweden, whose son had moved to Washington, D.C., whose wife works in Switzerland. They would come by to say hello, to drink coffee, or jebena,⁴ to eat with us. These gestures connected stories across the diaspora, stitching people together through memory lanes.

Words of greeting—"Welcome home," "Welcome here," "Welcome back"—filled the air and made us feel at home. But they also blurred direction and origin. Were we returning, arriving for the first time, or simply passing through? Each welcome was both a gesture of hospitality and a sign of uncertain belonging. They gave to the word "home" in this foreign setting a provisional shape: a space we inhabited but never quite claimed as fully ours. Although the notion of temporality can be quite abstract as a child, I knew that our presence was circumscribed by the rhythm of school holidays. When the summer ended, another cycle of "welcome back" awaited us in Switzerland. And so, I was left with cyclic questions: Do guests ever truly arrive, or do we move perpetually between cycles of homecoming, departure, and arrival one holiday after another?

This, I understood, was my story, but also the story of many people shaped by migration, whose personal histories echo with the ambivalence of departure and return, homecoming and estrangement.

It was during this first visit that my cousin played a cassette tape. The cover struck me—the image of raised arms, dreadlocks, and a burning sun behind them. It was Bob Marley's Uprising (1980). I was immediately drawn to its sound, although I had no understanding of English at the time. What I perceived, more than the actual lyrics, was a sense of connection between the dreadlocked singer and Ethiopia, established through the naming of Emperor Haile Selassie I.

What surprised me most was how this cassette had arrived—in a family whose devotion leaned toward religious life, quite far away from music, and even further from rebellious, revolutionary, "rootsical" music. I sensed a mismatch: the family's conservative practices alongside Marley's revolutionary spirit, his dreadlocked defiance and prophetic energy. My cousin, with his tie and pressed shirt for the church meetings, seemed an unlikely host for this music. Somehow there was a discrepancy between the conservative home I had stepped into and the revolutionary fervor that Marley's voice carried across the speakers. Still, the cassette was present in his room.

Marley's call for Ethiopia, and more largely Africa, as the land of roots confused me: why was he singing with such fervor for a place he had never lived? His voice seemed to ask for a response from me, one that came only years later as I began to think seriously about what "home" might mean in a diasporic context.

This inquiry around home has shaped both my personal journey and my non-academic professional life. I have been involved in various cultural projects with migrants and refugees that aimed at facilitating the process of integration, public engagement work that has profoundly informed my understanding of belonging. What motivated these projects was my conviction that for a person to feel at home—in other words, to make an environment livable as home, even if only for the present moment—one must participate in shaping it as "home." The feeling of being at home requires an active co-creation of culture, of neighborhood, of shared life. For me, this has meant using cultural practice both as a lens and as a tool, a way of building spaces that allow others to locate themselves in a specific environment. I am, of course, well aware that homemaking is a complex phenomenon that does not depend on the self alone. As Avtar Brah reminds us, "The question of home, therefore, is intrinsically linked with the way in which processes of inclusion or exclusion operate and are subjectively experienced under given circumstances. It is centrally about our political and personal struggles over the social regulation of 'belonging.'"⁵

Drawing from this experience, I now look at literary work as an active participation in the construction of home. In this essay, I am interested in how poetic work—and here, in the case of Jean "Binta" Breeze's poem "Tweet Tweet"—can be seen as an active participation in the construction of home. Moreover, remembering my sonic encounter, I am further interested in how the poem uses sonic imaginary in this process.

For lives shaped by diasporic movement, the familiar questions persist: "Where are you from?" "Where is home?" Each answer is contingent, shifting with context, shaped both by how we position ourselves and by how others position us. It is in light of these different experiences, from intellectual and intimate reflections, that I turn to this essay. This task—what Kevin Quashie might call the negotiation between inwardness and public encounter—moves between registers and becomes a blend of autobiographical reflection and literary analysis.⁶

In this kind of auto-theory, where I make sense of listening in personal lived experience alongside academic literature, I do not attempt to smooth over contradictions; rather, I allow moments of uncertainty and complexity to remain, turning them into points of entry for interpreting poetry and understanding the shifting, unfinished reality of home.

The array of writing on home and sound, as seen in the works of Mark V. Campbell, Tina K. Ramnarine, Martin Stokes, Fred Moten, Alexander G. Weheliye, and Alessandra Ferrarini, alongside scholars such as Louis Chude-Sokei, Paul Gilroy, Katherine McKittrick, Hortense Spillers, and Michelle M. Wright, has fundamentally shaped the way I understand home in relation to sound and music. Naming these thinkers not only acknowledges the intellectual debts within my own work but also actively situates my framework in the ongoing, vibrant discourse of sound, space, and Black belonging. My understanding of home thus moves between lived, everyday experience and the conceptual terrain charted by these theorists. It is within these intertextual crossings and the intermedial dialogue between sound and written words, between experience and theory, that I contemplate the productive in-betweenness of home.

A Sound of Belonging

Bob Marley offered a way of understanding belonging that was not rooted in the nation-state paradigm, opening up the possibility of anchoring home in something beyond birthplace or current residence. In Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic in Caribbean Writing, Kwame Dawes reflects on the global reach of Bob Marley by drawing on his own experiences.⁷ Dawes describes reggae as "a passage home," a sonic medium that connects traveling bodies to the imagination of Jamaica without confining "home" to a single geographic point, thus moving the local within the transnational.⁸ For Dawes, reggae crystallizes an assemblage of "roots," the cultural legacies of origin, and "routes," the trajectories of migration, enabling listeners to construct and inhabit complex and layered homes.

In my research on contemporary poetry performances of the African diaspora, and more particularly within the poetic practice of dub poetry, the sound of reggae functioned as a mechanism of attunement and affirmation. In the 1970s and early 1980s, reggae's prophetic, Rastafarian-inflected voice found resonance among Jamaican youth in diasporic locales outside the Caribbean. For Anglo-Jamaican musicians and their audiences, reggae provided a crucial platform for articulating community concerns. Racism, police brutality, exploitative labor conditions, and substandard housing—mirroring injustices back in the Caribbean—were not only recognized but also voiced across the Atlantic through music. The poet Linton Kwesi Johnson's reflections echo this view. He recalls feeling that, even in London, "we were still waging anticolonial struggles," battling marginalization by police, schools, employers, and racist street gangs, "and we could identify with all the sentiments being expressed about oppression in Jamaica."⁹ Reggae, then, provided not only a soundtrack to their artistic practice but also a powerful ideological and spiritual frame for expression. It offered both a vocabulary of resistance and a lexicon of survival to make "Babylon"¹⁰ a place of home.

I relate deeply to this attunement and attachment to sound. Listening to reggae helped me make sense of the fragmented identities and layered histories that diasporic families carry within their genealogy. To hear Ethiopia invoked from Jamaican soil opened the possibilities that home could be imagined and reconfigured. Home became less of a fixed location and more a concept that could be shaped by a sound we tune into to decide where and how we belong.

A Poetics of Dwelling

From the vast body of literature on home that diasporic writers offer, I have chosen to focus on the work of Jean "Binta" Breeze, often regarded as the first woman to gain international recognition in the genre of dub poetry.

Dub poetry emerged in the early 1970s as a distinctive Afro-Caribbean poetic form that foregrounds performance without excluding print. In its most familiar form, a dub poem is voiced over a reggae soundtrack, sometimes with live accompaniment, sometimes recorded in a studio. It can also stand on the page or be recorded without any musical backing. Even when reggae music is not literally audible behind the poem, it remains central to its aesthetic. Echoing the rebellious ethos of reggae, dub poetry is a similarly highly political art form. It "talks back" to Babylon, denouncing the many forms of structural discrimination that the history of the transatlantic slave trade has inscribed onto contemporary societies fractured by racial hierarchies. Emerging within Afro-Caribbean communities both in the Caribbean and abroad, dub poetry carries with it the memory and themes of rupture. It embodies a history of migration and displacement that the indelible traces of slavery and the Middle Passage have initiated.

As Caribbean migration reshaped cities in the UK and Canada after World War II, dub poetry followed, taking root in neighborhoods where racism, policing, and housing precarity were everyday realities. Across the diaspora, poets reimagined the practice of the Jamaican deejay or "toaster," transforming that improvisatory, rhythmically charged mode of speech into a literary and political medium grounded in the textures of local life. Long before dub poetry was named as such, deejays were already voicing political commentary and intimate observation over stripped-back dub versions of popular songs. Building from this lineage, dub poets draw on vernacular speech to chronicle life under pressure: the fight for secure housing, the watchful presence of police, the grind of unemployment, the overlapping demands of race, class, and survival in late-capitalist and neo-imperial environments. It is a form insistently rooted in place, attuned to the timbre of a particular street, the acoustics of high-rise estates, the rumors and news that travel on the current of a sound system.

Yet the genre is never only local. In its various manifestations across diasporic space—each attuned to the lived experience of a particular community—we also hear the echo of a shared, transnational discourse of resistance. Dub poetry participates in a wider narrative in which recurrent patterns of discrimination, state surveillance, and economic exclusion are recognized as structurally linked, even when they unfold in different cities and under different regimes. The form moves between the intensely situated and the globally resonant, its soundings of injustice borne by a collective memory of rupture and endurance that makes distant places feel close, almost adjacent.

With this dual orientation, I think of dub poetry as a particularly compelling form through which to think about home. Its aesthetic signatures—reggae's bass-driven pulse, the influence of deejay performance, the use of Nation Language (as coined by Kamau Brathwaite), and a poetics drawn from everyday speech—create a familiar acoustic texture that evokes belonging and cultural continuity across the diaspora. At the same time, the form is shaped by the immediate politics of daily life. Dub poetry asks its listeners to pay attention: to the hum of the street, the shifts in neighborhood atmosphere, the stories circulating through community networks. It creates a sonic space where home is both remembered and constantly recreated—a dwelling that is always under construction and continually being reimagined.

It is within this context that I read Breeze's later poem "Tweet Tweet." The poem offers a quieter meditation on the complex and often paradoxical ways in which home may be claimed and constructed. Breeze's earlier poems, such as "Aid Travels with a Bomb," are strikingly direct, weaving biting social critique into the cadences of reggae. "Tweet Tweet," by contrast, adopts a different register, one that leans into stillness and verandah-like reflection.¹¹ Here, the making of home is figured not as an act of loud resistance—listen to poems such as Mutabaruka's "White Man Country" or Linton Kwesi Johnson's "It Dread inna England," which offer good examples of this loudness and overt political stance—but as a process of quiet attunement.

Returning to Kevin Quashie, I am reminded of his concept of "quiet," a mode of Black expressiveness that privileges stillness, intimacy, and contemplation over loudness and overt display.¹² Quashie's work has profoundly shaped my reading of literature, prompting a renewed sensitivity to Black diasporic voices, one attuned not only to intimacy and subtlety but also to the possibilities that exist beyond overt gestures of protest. Drawing on Quashie's notion of the "quiet," I perceive a distinctive approach to the idea of home in "Tweet Tweet."

Birdsong as Groundation

Jean "Binta" Breeze (1956-2021) was born in Jamaica and moved to London in the 1980s. A pioneering dub poet and performer, she combined writing, performance, and theater with raising her daughters in the UK. Later in life, she divided her time between Jamaica and Britain, her movements between the two shaping the rhythm of her life and work. In the introduction to one of her performances available in Apples and Snakes' Spoken Word Archive, she mentions her story of displacement and migration. Addressing the audience, she explains that she has lived in England since 1985 and that "as a poet, you have to know the land that your feet are walking. Otherwise, you stay forever, either in transit or in exile. And I don't consider, if I am in any land in the world, that I am in exile. As long as I've got two feet on the ground, then I have landed somewhere, and it's Britain."¹³

"Tweet Tweet" is a deceptively simple and powerfully layered meditation on the relationship between sound, memory, and place. Breeze's poems bring to the tradition a distinctly intimate, domestic, female voice: "I was a member of that scene; there was me, Linton, Oku Onoura, Mutabaruka, Mikey Smith, seriously chanting political poetry in effort to change things, in an effort to speak out for voices that were not being given an ear to."¹⁴ Her poetry, while fully engaged with the realities and tensions of Black diasporic life, often turns toward the interior, the domestic, the quietly reflective. "Tweet Tweet" exemplifies this turn inward: it is a poem that, while it hums rather than shouts, carries within its spareness a profound and quiet statement around home and belonging through the sonic textures of the blackbirds.

The poem offers a window into the speaker's reflection. Recalling journeys in search of Zion and arriving at a moment of present peace, birdsongs root home in a space of acceptance and ease: "There's a blackbird / In my mango tree." At first, the presence of the blackbird in the mango tree may seem simply pastoral, a fragment of nature overheard. But Breeze uses it to open a deeper reflection on how sound carries memory and assembles place.

"Tweet Tweet" is not just scene-setting; it is also an invocation, a summoning of the poem's rhythm. Breeze lets the blackbird's song act as the opening chant, the chant that will undergird the entire piece. In Jamaican musical culture, a riddim is the shared instrumental track that multiple artists voice over, each creating their own "version" of the song. Breeze's blackbird is such a track: a repeating motif, a grounding sound that allows the poet's meditative versions of home to unfold. The bird's call becomes more than just ambient noise; it is the thread that ties the speaker to a network of associations, triggering a sensory construction of "home." Sound becomes generative and constitutive.

The blackbird chosen as the poem's central figure deepens the ways in which "blackbird" threads together variations of home. The Jamaican blackbird (Nesopsar nigerrimus) is both endangered and endemic to Jamaica; its presence is distinctly local, as it does not migrate.¹⁵ In this way, its song grounds the poem's reflection in Jamaica, affirming a sense of belonging that is rooted in the land itself. Yet the blackbird's name also resonates with the Eurasian blackbird (Turdus merula), a common species in England and across Europe. This double resonance of "blackbird" activates a transatlantic awareness: the Caribbean and Britain, Jamaica and England, are held in poetic dialogue. The bird, therefore, becomes a bridge, a creature whose call enables the poet to inhabit both spaces simultaneously.

There is another intertextual resonance. The blackbird also calls us toward Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds," one of reggae's most enduring hymns of reassurance and return. Marley's birds are messengers of hope, a sonic mantra promising that "every little thing is gonna be alright."¹⁶ I listen to the poem's blackbird from the same symbolic lineage. In both cases, the birds are not only natural but prophetic, singing a possibility of peace and alignment in the making of home, in the process of "groundation." Sound becomes a compass, a spiritual orientation device that helps the diasporic subject locate themselves in the world.

The mango tree further roots this sonic moment in a Caribbean landscape. TThe tree's presence brings to mind a material and tactile dimension; when reading it, I feel that through a transfer of senses, I have been invited to feel the tree's shade on my skin on a hot afternoon, smell its fruit, and hear the rustle of its leaves. This semantic and somatic anchoring suggests that home is not simply imagined but also embodied and sensed. In this sense of belonging, sound, smell, and touch converge. The poem then shifts to a more explicitly migratory meditation:

I have followed birds
from hills
to home
and back
wondering where was Zion

Here, the blackbirds become a figure of the diasporic journey. Birds cross borders with ease, indifferent to the human demarcations that make migration fraught. The speaker's movement "from hills / to home / and back" is not linear but circular, suggesting that belonging is not a one-way trip but an ongoing negotiation. The repetition of movement mirrors the diasporic experience of departure and return, of visiting and leaving, of never fully arriving at the destination.

The question "where was Zion" is one of the poem's most striking moments. In Rastafarian and biblical traditions, Zion represents the ultimate homecoming: a spiritual homeland, a place of redemption. It is the anti-Babylon. To wonder "where was Zion" is to articulate the diasporic dilemma: where, after displacement, after colonial histories, after economic migration, is one's true place of belonging? The question remains unanswered, leaving the reader in a space of unresolved wonder. Yet within this uncertainty Breeze offers a pivot, a moment of repose: "but now I am content / on this verandah." The verandah is a symbolic element in this poem. It acts as a liminal, threshold space between indoors and outdoors, mediating the movement between private and public realms. In Caribbean architecture and poetics, the verandah serves as a hub of social life, storytelling, resting, and observing. It is also a space of waiting, watching the road, and anticipating arrivals. To be "content on this verandah" is to find peace in liminality. It means accepting that home may never be a perfect destination but can still be a sanctuary of rest.

The poem closes on a reflection: "home is always / where it's meant to be." This is a radical redefinition. Rather than cast home as a fixed location or a distant utopia, the speaker reframes it as a state of being, something that arises wherever one finds alignment and presence. The search for Zion transforms from a quest for elsewhere to a recognition that home can be claimed in the here and now.

The poem closes by circling back to birdsong, creating a sonic loop. This return is not redundant but ritualistic: like the repetition of a chorus, it insists that home is not a one-time event but a recurring process. The "tweet tweet" becomes both code and chorus, a reminder that belonging is not a fixed state but is in a continuous state of renewal. If dub poetry often unfolds over reggae rhythm, here Breeze gives us an "unplugged" dub poem, where the soundscape is not a bassline but the call of a bird: "I am sure / that's what blackbirds sing." In these lines, the poet registers a moment of recognition, an attunement to the soundscape of the surroundings. Breeze's response is not just to hear but to interpret that sound. Like a recognized "version," the sound of the bird has a recognized signifier of belonging, a marker of home.

As I finish reading the poem, I am left with a reminder that listening is an active process with agency. The poem is about listening to the world, and in doing so, it teaches us to listen in return. In the recurring act of tuning and re-tuning to the soundscape of everyday life, Jean Binta Breeze's "Tweet Tweet"—as well as my own personal memories—suggests that home is sustained not only by inhabiting a place but also through dwelling in sound. Extending this insight back across the tradition from which Breeze writes, I think of dub poetry itself as a form of sonic homemaking within the wider Afro-Caribbean diaspora. For many poets, the reggae rhythms that subtend their work act as a kind of homecoming, a return not to a fixed geography but to a shared cultural space. The sound of dub poetry becomes a durable architecture of memory. Across the diaspora, dub poets have used this rhythmic grammar to anchor themselves in unfamiliar terrain, crafting spaces of identification and overcoming the disorientation of migration. Reggae's cosmopolitan spirituality—its invocation of roots and its affirmation of routes—offers ways to locate the self across multiple, sometimes competing attachments. Its poetics open ways of sounding the complexity of home.

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Dr. Rachel Bolle-Debassay holds an MA in English Literature and an MA in Music from the Conservatorium of Geneva. In 2020, she completed her PhD at King's College London under the supervision of Paul Gilroy. Bringing together her background as both a scholar and a musician, her research investigates poetic works that operate in the proximity of the literate frame provided by the words and the non-verbal space created by music, with a particular focus on Afro-diasporic traditions. Alongside her academic work, she has been involved in socially engaged cultural projects that promote diversity and intercultural dialogue within cultural institutions. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna.

Funding Statement

This article is part of the "Poetry Off the Page" project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement Number 01002816).

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References

1. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (Routledge, 1996), 192. ↩︎
2. Lorenzo Ferrarini, Sonic Ethnography (Manchester University Press, 2020), 25-26. ↩︎
3. Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 167. ↩︎
4. "Jebena" is also the name of a collaborative and co-constructed project that sought to challenge invisibility within museum spaces and to reconsider the role these institutions play in making cultural environments feel like "home." For more, see the promotional video, "Jebena," YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Bzsqnygl5PM. ↩︎
5. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 192. ↩︎
6. Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2012), 3. ↩︎
7. Kwame Dawes, Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic (Peepal Tree Press, 1999). ↩︎
8. John McLeod, "Wheel and Come Again: Transnational Aesthetics beyond the Postcolonial," Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 7 (2001): 95. ↩︎
9. Caspar Melville, "Bass Culture Research Project: Linton Kwesi Johnson Interviewed by Caspar Melville," project funded by the AHRC, unpublished transcript, used with permission. ↩︎
10. Rastafarian term for oppressive systems of colonial and neo-colonial power; a sound that affirmed community and history, countering centuries of colonial brainwashing. ↩︎
11. Emily Zobel Marshall, "Writing the Woman's Voice: On the Verandah with Jean 'Binta' Breeze," Contemporary Women's Writing 12, no. 1 (2018): 6, https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpx006. ↩︎
12. Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet, 25. ↩︎
13. Jean "Binta" Breeze, performance recording, Apples and Snakes Spoken Word Archive, 1992. ↩︎
14. Emily Zobel Marshall, introduction to The Verandah Poems, by Jean "Binta" Breeze (Peepal Tree Press, 2017), 6. ↩︎
15. BirdLife International, "Jamaican Blackbird Nesopsar nigerrimus," accessed September 22, 2025, https://datazone.birdlife.org/species/factsheet/jamaican-blackbird-nesopsar-nigerrimus. ↩︎
16. Bob Marley and the Wailers, "Three Little Birds," track 4 on Exodus, Island Records, 1977. ↩︎