The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah

by Benjamin Zephaniah

  There were rumours that the British Council spied for the British government, and I personally thought that was highly likely, or at least the local knowledge the staff had of a country could be utilised in times of war, or even in times of peace. I have noticed that the British government always seems to think of peace as a space in between wars . . . still, what I really loved about working with the Council was that they would send me to places that weren’t on the standard touring map.

  Most European countries were easy to tour, as was the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. These countries had promoters who could fly you there and pay you, so it was easy to tour them independently. Where the British Council really came into its own was in sending me to countries that normally couldn’t afford to get me there – places like Papua New Guinea or the Seychelles, or locations where political communication wasn’t good but being worked on. So I would go into countries like Libya and begin to build cultural ties with likeminded people.

  Travel has always been key to what I do. Not having had a good formal education meant I worked hard to make up for it by meeting people and learning from them. I love reading books about how people live around the world, but I prefer to go and meet the people myself.

  Soon after I started travelling the world to perform, I had a conversation with my mum and we realised I was the most travelled person in the entire history of our family. She kept asking where I got the money to afford it, and I kept telling her that my flights and hotels were paid for. She found it very hard to believe and, at first, so did I. But for me it wasn’t about flights, hotels, or even fees. What I found amazing was the fact that I would turn up at a venue in India, Colombia, Zimbabwe or Fiji, and it would be full of people who had read my books or listened to my music. I was always very humbled by this and so, whether I was at home or abroad, I never took a single member of my audience for granted.

  There is a common idea that when you go to a new country you can get a good feel for the place from taxi drivers, but I disagree; you get something from them, but it’s usually a very male-centric view. If I want to understand a country I talk to the women. Better still get to know the women. I have been to so many countries where the taxi drivers say, ‘Yeah, it’s great here, we’ve got freedom, we can do what we like’, and then you talk to the women and they tell you the truth: ‘Oh no, we’re not allowed to do this, we’re not allowed to do that, and we have no freedom.’ So I always say, talk to the women. In fact, I think you never really know a country until you’ve had sex in it and got arrested in it. If you’re on a quick visit, you could always have sex with the person who’s arresting you. But what do I know? This is only a theory, of course.

  Travelling is how I got my education, but more importantly it’s how I got my compassion. As well as being able to speak to prime ministers and presidents, I’ve also spent time with homeless people and drug addicts in places like the streets of Johannesburg. In India, I spent a day with the deputy prime minister, then later that night I was on the streets of Calcutta talking to the poorest people I have ever seen about their dreams and nightmares. I always felt I had the ability to move in and out of different worlds.

  If I was minister for education I’d make it mandatory that children have to travel at least once as part of their education, either paid for or highly subsidised. And I’m not talking about trips to France or Germany; they should go to Africa or Asia or to a completely different culture, where they eat differently, where they go to the toilet differently, where their houses are built differently. They should go somewhere their ‘normal’ will be challenged; somewhere they can really see and learn how different people function, and how much different people are the same.

  34

  DREAD POETS’ SOCIETY

  In the late 1980s a number of British universities began to get interested in me. At first they wanted me to talk or do interviews in student magazines, and there were always university gigs, of course. But then I had a visit from a group of people with connections at Cambridge University, who wanted to talk to me about standing for the post of Fellow at Trinity College. Apparently some bigwigs in the university had found out that a story was going to break in the press about how the post (like the university) was regarded as elitist. Since Henry VIII’s time, it had gone to Professor So-and-So’s daughter, or the son of a friend of a friend, and it had never really been used for its true purpose.

  The original idea was to reach out and allow somebody who didn’t have a university education to use the premises. It was for people who wouldn’t normally mix in those circles but who could benefit from raising the profile of themselves or their art. My initial response was that I would go for it. I went to Trinity to speak to the powers that were, and they explained that the idea of being a fellow was to add life to the college, to use their rooms and encourage students to engage in creative work.

  I spoke to the college at length and was open and honest with them, saying I could definitely assist in initiating creativity. Everyone was sworn to secrecy in that meeting, but someone was talking. I left Cambridge and by the time I reached London it was in the evening paper. Then the Daily Mail printed a cartoon of me on stage surrounded by spliffs on the floor, with some hanging from my mouth. A don leans across to the students, and in the speech bubble it says: ‘If you hear any rumblings, it’s Keats, Shelley and Byron turning in their graves.’ The Sun then ran a headline on 23 April 1987 saying: ‘Would you let this man near your daughter?’, as if I was some kind of rapist.

  Certain elements of the press began hanging around outside our house in East Ham, trampling over the garden and trying to get stories. I was confronted by one hack who said she’d spoken to a woman I’d supposedly been at school with in London, who said I’d got her pregnant. I told her truthfully that I’d only been to school for one day in London, at an all-boys school. It was nonsense. They were using provocation to try to scrape up all kinds of dirt. And all because the most shocking thing for their readers was the idea that a black man with dreadlocks might be allowed a position in some hallowed part of the educational establishment.

  Mum and me were in the process of moving to another house in East Ham when a young, upper-middle-class female journalist for one of the broadsheets found out where I was moving. She turned up looking what she thought would be the part to lure me into an interview. Her blonde hair was braided in red, gold and green beads and she was driving an MG sports car. She asked me for an interview and I declined, saying I wanted to wait for the college decision, but the car caught my eye and I asked her for a drive. She agreed. When I looked in the glove compartment, to put on a cassette, the reggae ones were in the front – Bob Marley, naturally – but hidden behind them was the Dire Straits, U2 and Rolling Stones.

  I told her that before she wrote her piece, and while I was waiting for Trinity’s decision, she should come to the spoken word gig I was doing in Brixton that weekend. To be fair to her she did come along, and later said she’d had her mind opened by the power of performance poetry. She hadn’t known what to expect but was really glad she came, as she had been moved by it. In the end I gave her the interview and she gave the gig a rave review. She’d been under a tough deadline. She told me that if she hadn’t persuaded me to speak, the newspaper would have run a piece she’d already drafted before she’d ever spoken to me – with little regard to its accuracy.

  In the end, the negative campaign by the tabloid press made the clever folk at Cambridge back down. The dons had felt that if they appointed me, they could never be accused of being elitist. I was interested in the appointment because I felt passionately about education, and I also knew it would have been easy for me to add to the life of the university. The college had wanted to get a ‘normal’ person in, which is why they approached me, but it turned out I wasn’t so normal after all, and they didn’t want a fuss made. It wasn’t to be; the tabloids had won the day. One unnamed member of the university staff said, ‘I like the idea of Benjamin Zephaniah comi
ng to Cambridge. Every time he comes here a buzz of excitement goes around the university . . . but I want him to go home at night.’

  That wasn’t the end. I had the last laugh. Based on an idea by an independent producer called Rodger Laing and myself, me and the writer David Stafford wrote a screenplay called Dread Poets’ Society, where I meet Shelley, Byron and Keats on a train, en route to Cambridge. On this journey we exchange notes, read poetry and have a go at the establishment in an old Romantic poets kind of way. It was made into a short film for Channel 4 in 1992, starring me (as myself) with numerous actors, including Timothy Spall, in costume. It was a big hit, and people talked about it for years afterwards.

  Intellectual and cultural theorist the late Stuart Hall used the film to illustrate to his students how racist the establishment can be in tandem with the media. Those newspaper cartoons were used all over the world to illustrate the same issue, and although the film was only shown on TV once, it has been shown at festivals all over the world.

  35

  THE LIVERPOOL YEARS

  When the Sun slandered me in 1987, people all over the country complained, but people in Liverpool complained more. The people in Liverpool got really angry; many wrote letters to newspapers and to the media watchdog, but one group got so angry they lobbied their local arts council demanding that I do a residency there. It was agreed and, as a guest of the city, I took up residency managed by the Africa Arts Collective.

  When Liverpool University heard of the residency they offered sponsorship but I declined – there were now so many universities trying to claim me that I wanted to stay clear of them all. I worked in Liverpool for two years but stayed for three. While there, I did performances, visited schools and kept an open house so that writers could see me at (almost) any time of the day. I also published a (very) small book called Inna Liverpool to celebrate my time there.

  Liverpool at that time was like no other city in Britain. When you heard the term ‘Liverpool politics’, it meant a different kind of politics to what was happening in the rest of the country. The poverty in Liverpool was like nothing I had seen in the UK, and when someone described themselves as a ‘Liverpool black’ it could get confusing. They could be Irish, they could be Scottish, they could be white and dating a black person, or they could be black – they just had to be an outsider. To add to your oppression, if you lived in Toxteth (L8) you were probably unemployed and your every move was being watched by the police. Police vans in Liverpool were like armoured tanks, and this was the first place in mainland Britain (not Northern Ireland), to have a helicopter that didn’t just chase cars around but would hover over you as you walked home, shining its spotlight on you to see what you were smoking or reading.

  Liverpool 8, or L8, as it’s known, is right next to the city centre, and is full of black people. When I first arrived I was told to walk from L8 to the city centre. I did, and I noticed how the black people magically disappeared. The dividing lines were clearly defined. Liverpool city centre had very few black people in it, by day or by night, but there was still something about that city that I loved. There’s just no one like a Scouser if you want a laugh; no one like a Scouser if you need a hand; no one like a Scouser if you want a drink, and no one like a Scouser if you want a fight. They are amazingly loyal, but if you cross them they’ll kill you.

  Many theorised about the struggle, but the people of Liverpool lived the struggle. I connected with them, and they with me. The establishment in Cambridge (and London) were having meetings and posing questions on TV to work out if the poetry of Benjamin Zephaniah had any merits; the people in Liverpool didn’t need to ask. I had written a lot about the place and defended the people who lived there a long time before I took up residency. I felt a strong affinity with the city, and when I came under attack from the right-wing press, the people of Liverpool stood up for me.

  I was called a ‘writer in residence’, but I was effectively a guest of the city and was able to work for whichever organisation needed me. I would work at the university, in schools or for other grassroots initiatives. My expenses were covered by the city, so I was able to perform free of charge for schools, community centres, at carnivals and (when necessary) at demonstrations and rallies. I built my first small home studio there and began to record some of the local poets and singers and my friends’ children. But my work extended far beyond that.

  Maybe it was because I was an outsider that people would come to me and ask me for advice. I worked as a quasi-marriage counsellor. I helped people find somewhere to live. I gave drug counselling to people who needed it. I helped the prostitutes when they had no one else to confide in, and I was also there when people needed someone to talk to. At times it seemed that this type of work kept me more occupied than my poetry. If there were any political issues, I’d speak out. If gangs were at war with each other, I would be a mediator; if prostitutes were being blackmailed or hassled by the police or pimps, they knew they could come and speak to me in confidence. When I started the job, my contact person, Vivek Malhotra, told me it wouldn’t be a normal type of residency; the main point was that I would be there for people, whatever the people wanted of me.

  Not long before I arrived they’d had all sorts of controversy with a Labour Party splinter group called Militant. I went to some of their meetings. I also went to Labour Party meetings, Communist Party meetings, Black Panther and other groups’ meetings, and I can honestly say I had absolutely no problem with any of them; they all welcomed me. The fact that I had never joined any of them and was seen as an observer who would report on proceedings poetically meant they all hoped that some of what they stood for would rub off on me, or at least that I would find some inspiration from them. I never went to a meeting with the police; I didn’t need to. They would come to me.

  One night after leaving a meeting of political activists, I was followed home by helicopter. It was just before 1am on a Sunday morning and I was about two kilometres from my home in Princess Avenue. I heard the helicopter but I’d heard it many times, so took no notice of it, until it put its light on me. This light was so bright and so accurate that the small area I moved in was suddenly like daylight; the police up above could see every move I made. I wasn’t worried about it; I knew that you didn’t have to do anything to get arrested, but I also knew this was happening to other people all the time without any major outcry. If they came near me there would be an outcry, and I would be crying out the loudest. They followed me home. I went in, and they hovered over my house for five minutes and twenty-four seconds. I counted. Then they went to shine their light on someone else.

  But the strangest stop I ever had happened while I was jogging. It was pouring with rain, and I hate jogging when it’s pouring with rain, but I was persevering. I was about halfway through my run when a male police officer stood in front of me with his arms spread open. He more or less blocked the pavement, but I genuinely thought he was joking. People do those kinds of things when you’re jogging. But he wasn’t joking. When he saw that I didn’t intend to slow down, he shouted, ‘Stop!’ at me. I stopped. Remember, it’s pouring with rain, and I’m not in the mood for any chit-chat.

  ‘Where are you coming from?’ he asked.

  ‘Home,’ I said.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Home,’ I said.

  ‘What do you have on you?’

  ‘Keys,’ I said.

  He was getting as wet as me, so I thought he would think it was time to go, but no, he wanted more.

  ‘I need to search you,’ he said.

  ‘Come off it,’ I said, laughing at him. ‘I’m jogging. I’ve come from home, and I’m going home, and all I have is a key, because when I get home I need to open the door. Does that make sense to you?’

  ‘I’m not sure what you’re finding so funny, young man,’ he said, seemingly unaware that I was much older than him. ‘But you fit the description of a wanted burglar and I would be neglecting my duties if failed to question you.’
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  There were so many times in my life when I fitted the description of a burglar, and I had been stopped and questioned many times, but this was one of the strangest. He searched me, and all he found was a key, but even as I jogged away I was looking for the TV cameras. I was so sure this was a prank. It wasn’t. It was Liverpool.

  36

  WORKERS’ PLAYTIME

  In 1988 I won the BBC Young Playwright of the Year Award. One year later I would have been too old, but what I had written was finished when I was still under thirty. I had been writing plays for a couple of years by then, although it wasn’t something I’d actively set out to achieve; it had happened organically, like many of the best things. A guy called Derek Brown, who was active in youth and street theatre in east London, had seen me perform many times and approached me in 1985, suggesting I bring all my skills together to write a play.

  As a kid I’d seen Armchair Theatre on TV and I remember thinking, Why don’t they just make a film? I didn’t understand why the sets were so minimal. Mum told me stories about message plays touring in Jamaica when she was young, as part of a government promotion advertising the fact that education had become free and that children should ‘Go to school, learn the golden rule’ and all that, but to our minds, theatre in the UK was for white middle-class audiences.

  I never set foot in a theatre until I came to London, but when I saw Welcome Home Jacko at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1979 my mind was changed about it being the preserve of the middle classes. It was written by Trinidadian playwright Mustapha Matura, with whom I would later become friends, and was directed by Charlie Hanson. The story was about young people like me, growing up in Britain and wanting to be different from our parents but struggling to express ourselves. To see a play with young black people in it was inspiring, and I realised theatre could be about raising consciousness and bringing a message to people.