Rachel Bolle-Debessay

Rachel
Bolle-Debessay ︙

I publish peer-reviewed articles and contribute to scholarly volumes on poetry, performance, and diasporic literature. I received the 2022 Wasafiri Essay Prize for my essay on the theatre-driven aesthetics of Mikey Smith’s poetry.
Alongside my academic publications, I record interviews and podcasts for wider audiences.

Peer-reviewed

 Music and Literary Imagination: The Creative Impulse of Sonic Vibrations in Dub Poetry

In Poetry, Music, and Sound Art: Recent Medial Correlations, edited by Rebecka Dürr, Kira Henkel & Vadim Keylin - De Gruyter | December 2025

This chapter explores the creative force of sonic vibration in Caribbean dub poetry, examining how sound operates not simply as ornament or performance, but as a mode of knowledge. Bringing into dialogue poets Linton Kwesi Johnson and Roger Robinson, it reads their work as part of a shared constellation of vibration-based poetics.

Through close readings of poems including Street 66 and Wheel and Come Again, the publication argues that sound is not secondary to meaning, but rather a lived form of recognition, an embodied knowledge shaped by diasporic histories and everyday experience. Recording, repetition and performance reveal how poetic voice evolves across time, transforming each version into a distinct historical moment.

By foregrounding vibration as a connective force, the chapter proposes a way of reading that moves beyond rigid frameworks of nationality, class or genre. It advances the idea that listening with the body opens alternative vocabularies for literary criticism, thereby repositioning sound as a cultural and diasporic archive.
Read the publication here ↪︎
Dub Poetry and Theatre in Conversation: The Development of a Caribbean Performance Poetics

Wasafiri, vol. 113, pp. 69–81 | Spring 2022, Wasafiri Essay Prize winner

This article reconsiders dub poetry through the lens of theatre. Focusing on Mikey Smith’s “Trainer”, it argues that the poem was composed with performance in mind, revealing a dramaturgical structure embedded within the poetic form itself.

Smith’s poem stages multiple voices and shifting personas, creating a layered narrative that unfolds with a clear dramatic progression. While dub poetry is often discussed primarily in relation to rhythm and musicality, this article foregrounds its theatrical architecture: the entanglement of page and stage, voice and embodiment. The text itself contains the blueprint of performance: through changes in tone, perspective and address, it invites the reader to envision the staging of the poem.

By tracing this entanglement between aural and written dimensions, the article develops a framework for Caribbean performance poetics, reading the two dimensions as mutually constitutive.
In doing so, it contributes to broader debates in Caribbean and postcolonial literary studies by legitimising the aural dimension as a formal innovation and a deliberate aesthetic choice. It also opens a dialogue between theatre studies and dub poetry, expanding the critical vocabulary available for analysing Afro-diasporic literary traditions.  
Read the publication here ↪︎
Low Frequencies and Poetic Innovations: Revisiting Dub Poetry’s Aesthetic

Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 68, n° 2, pp. 251–267 | June 2022

This peer-reviewed article revisits the aesthetic foundations of dub poetry by focusing on an often overlooked element: bass and low frequencies. Through a close reading of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Street 66, this analysis explores how vocal variation interacts with bass patterns to produce what is described as a “talking bass”.

Rather than treating music as background influence or cultural context, the article argues that bass functions as a structuring force within the poem’s aesthetic. Variations in the poet’s voice, shifts in tone, pace and emphasis, work in counterpoint with different bass patterns. The voice does not merely accompany rhythm; it enters into an intimate relation with it.
By comparing written and recorded versions, this publication demonstrates how musical presence is crafted both through stylistic choices on the page and through performative modulation in sound. This approach challenges the tendency to reduce dub poetry to sociological or political readings, foregrounding its formal and aesthetic innovations.

Moving beyond dub poetry alone, the article suggests that bass culture reshapes how literary form can be understood, offering fresh perspectives on the ways music and literature co-produce aesthetic meaning.   Read the publication here ↪︎

Author & co-author

 Poetry Off the Page, Around the Globe (PoPAG)

Conference Report | Vienna, June 2025

I contributed to Poetry Off the Page, Around the Globe, a conference dedicated to the growing field of poetry performance studies. The event brought together scholars, practitioners, and performers, with an open mic fostering a live network of exchange across international poetry scenes and engaging dialogues between research, performance, and community.  
Read the report here ↪︎
Jebena, déplacements des manières de faire et dire le musée ?

Nouveaux récits des écomusées et musées de société, pp. 80–86 | December 2024

Co-authored with Julie Dorner, this article reflects on the Jebena project at the MEG. It examines how participatory artistic practices with young migrants can reshape the sharing of knowledge in museum contexts. By detailing practical and methodological choices, it contributes to discussions on intercultural participation and inclusive museum practice.  
Read the publication here ↪︎
Bilan post-covid : les adolescents, seuls face à l’école en ligne durant le confinement

A publication on asile.ch | September 2020

This article explores the difficulties adolescents faced during online schooling in the Covid‑19 lockdown. I highlighted overlooked challenges, including the disappearance of peer support. She showed how targeted interventions can mitigate educational inequalities, stressing the importance of attentive, community-focused solutions in times of disruption.  
Read the full article here ↪︎

Interviews

 Interview with Debris Stevenson

A Poetry Off The Page project | February 2026

Photo credit: Debris Stevenson
 Forthcoming Listen to the interview here ↪︎
Interview with Peter Johnson

A Poetry Off The Page project | August 2025

Photo credit: Peter deGraft-Johnson
 “After starting there, I began thinking about where I want my work to go, what I want it to say, and how I want it to influence the world. I found myself drawn to history, how much I love writing about it and using poetry not only as an archive but also as a method of outreach.”
In this interview, British-born Ghanaian poet, writer, broadcaster, and researcher Peter Johnson reflects on poetry as a living archive and tool for liberation, its power to foreground voices and histories often erased from official records, and the creative possibilities of blending verse with music and embodied performance. He also discusses musicking, his Ghanaian heritage, the rich multiplicities of the Black diasporic tradition, as well as the over-policing of Black bodies in Western public spaces.   Listen to the interview here ↪︎
Interview with Sue Brown

A Poetry Off The Page project | August 2025

Photo credit: Sue Brown
“We Africans of the diaspora, no matter where we are in the world and what generation, it's about preserving our legacy, preserving the now, the yesterday, the before, and to be ready for tomorrow and the future.”
Birmingham-based Black British performance poet and writer Sue Brown reflects on her journey as a poet and performer. She discusses how dub poetry and reggae rhythms shaped her creative voice, the role of ancestral memory in her work, the challenges of embracing performance after early experiences of trauma and self-doubt, and the creative possibilities opened by performance. Brown also shares insights into her teaching practice and her synesthetic approach to creative work.   Listen to the interview here ↪︎
Interview with Martin Glynn

A Poetry Off The Page project | August 2025

Photo credit: Martin Glynn
“I embrace the African oral tradition and I used every bit of it, from storytelling to singing. So what I'm doing with it, for me, I love language and therefore the language like food that you have to understand who you're cooking for. So I can DJ, Rap, perform, I can speak Shakespeare. To be or not to be, that is the question. It makes no difference to me. What it's about is saying that I am multilingual.”
In an interview, Martin Glynn reflects on his creative practice, exploring how he negotiates the aesthetics of jazz and reggae while composing his work, and engages with different debates within the Black literary scene and dub poetry. He speaks candidly about how his creative practice is shaped by personal experiences of loss, anger, and adversity, and how he channels these experiences into his dual life as an academic and performer.   Listen to the interview here ↪︎
Interview with Roger Robinson

A Poetry Off The Page project | September 2024

Photo credit : rogerrobinsononline.com
In the reggae tradition, bass is the heartbeat… DJs know it, the people in the dance know it, but it is rarely framed in academic terms. The thing about the bass is that, at a certain frequency, it can invade the body in a way that you are no longer listening to it; you can actually feel it inside your body.
T. S. Eliot Prize-winning poet, writer, musician and performer Roger Robinson discusses dub poetry and Black urban working-class artistic traditions in England, with a focus on the significance of bass in his poetic practice. He reflects on bass as a therapeutic space for himself and other artists, and Rachel and he discuss practices such as sound baths and the embodied experience of sound. Listen to the interview here ↪︎
’Human curiosity has a revolutionary power’

An interview with Paul Gilroy | September 2018

Photo credit: Mjgw at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
More than that, to do critical, intellectual and political work in this area one must be acquainted first and foremost with the history of struggles, both here and in the colonial spaces of the British Empire.
This interview with Professor Paul Gilroy was conducted by in September 2018. A Professor of American and English Literature at King’s College London, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April 2018 in recognition of his work as a cultural historian and critical race theorist, whose scholarship has been formative in Rachel’s own research journey. Read the full interview here ↪︎

Podcasts

 Dub Poetry & the Power of Bass

A Poetry Off the Page podcast edited by Marie Krebs, episode 4 | June 2025

In this episode, I reflected on how bass acts as more than a musical element in dub poetry. I explored how the choice of sound is never neutral since it signals an alignment, a relation to memory and/or political discourse.

I considered how bass can convey meanings that exceed words by engaging temporalities and collective resonances that extend beyond the moment of recitation. The episode argues that the poem's sociopolitical engagement lives not only in what is said, but in the collective resonances and temporalities carried by the sonic soundscape itself.  
Entre texte et musique : le cas de la Dub Poetry

An RTS audio podcast | December 2018

In this RTS audio podcast, I joined Monica Schütz to explore the historical and creative origins of dub poetry. Emerging in 1970s Britain, dub poetry is closely associated with reggae  and grew out of the cultural conversation between Caribbean migrant communities and British society.

Drawing on my doctoral research, I reflected on how the genre forged its own musical poetics through the dynamic interplay of voice, rhythm and text, revealing a form that is in constant movement between literary composition and sonic performance.