The Fifth Figure

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 m...